Wiring Birmingham: Cultural Studies, Romanticism, and the New Media

J. David Black

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in partial f'hlfilment ofthe requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought York University North York, Ontario

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by John David Black

a dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of York University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

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Abstract

Romanticism, a literary and philosophical tradition developed primarily in Germany and

England at the turn of the nineteenth century, has recently been the subject of scholarly

attention aimed at restoring its contemporary relevance to media and cultural criticism.

Cultural studies, an interdisciplinary intellectual movement with singular Romantic origins,

is adapted as a vehicle for making this inchoate effort at "using" Romanticism

comprehensive. Arguing that cultural studies has overidentified with Enlightenment or rationalist sources in social theory at the risk of reification, and that competing post- industrial and post-structuralist critical traditions have preempted cultural studies in the study of important subject areas, this adaptation has two principal aims.

First, it demonstrates how Romanticism has been generally suppressed or appropriated by rival theoretical traditions, and how Romanticism as a form of %on-reifjling modernism" can be of general benefit to cultural studies. Romanticism, that is, offers cultural studies a theoretical language that is modem, yet sensitive to the conditions and phenomena such as the image, subjectivity and the "information society" which theory identified with postmodernity has claimed for its own. Returned to its Romantic origins, cultural studies is reconnected with modem intellectual history so as to greatly expand its theoretical range beyond the terms established by Enlightenment rationalism.

Second, to ground the argument for romantic renewal in actual criticism, a platform v for the more systematic use of Romanticism is provided, using Romantic concepts relating to language, the body, the nature of community, the sublime and social totality, among others, as the basis. These Romantic concepts are then applied to enduring and related issues in cultural studies, including the nature of the aesthetic, ideology and discourse, then digital media and political economy. Taken together, this romantic criticism is organized in what amounts to a prototype for a romantic theory of media and culture.

The argument concludes by offering that cultural studies, its authenticity and relevance challenged by critics both inside and outside the project, finds in a newly adapted romanticism a vocabulary and sensibility necessary to understanding conditions that are not intelligible on rational terms alone. Acknowledgments

There is a romantic in all of us. Those who supported this project, and like it or not, had to embrace the redeeming power of Romanticism in their lives, are to be commended for their forbearance and good humour. The roIl of honourary Romantics is long, but this present list is of necessity a short one. To anyone who contributed to the cause and is not thanked here, my deepest gratitude.

First, my committee members, and notably my supervisor, Dr. Ioan Davies, who introduced me to Birmingham long ago. Then Dr. Brian Singer and Dr. Ian Balfour, whose professionalism in the face of an unusually interdisciplinary project was remarkable. Alan O'Comor, Janine Marchessault, and Ted Window provided me with a defense worthy of the name. Judith Hawley, administrative assistant in the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought, managed small bureaucratic miracles that made this project so much more humane.

Next, my immediate family, namely my mother Edna Magee and brother Darren Black for volunteering both economic support and unconditional love during these long years of apprenticeship, and my extended family in Cardinal. Special thanks to Peggy for being there first.

Third, fiends and former teachers who simultaneously demonstrated the point about Romantic genius and the exotic nature of the real: Drs. Hamet and Andrew Lyons; Dr. John Chamberlin; Dr. Iwona Irwin-Zarecka; and Michelle, Elizabeth, Hanna, Theresa, Valerie, Rob and Christina.

And last, to my students these past seven years in the Communication Studies Program at Wilfiid Laurier University.

This dissertation is dedicated to the Iate John Henry Black. vii Table of Contents Abstract Acknowledgments Table of Contents iv-vii

Introduction Wiring Birmingham 1-18

Chapter One The Education of Desire: Romanticizing Cultural Studies 19-54

Chapter Two Key Concepts in Cultural Studies and Media Theory: A Romantic Reconsideration 55-109

Chapter Three The Powers of Mind: Post-industrial and Post-structuraIist Theories of New Media 110-156

Chapter Four The Politics of Enchantment: Misusing Romanticism 157-184

Chapter Five The Ghost in the Machine: Some Problems in Media Research 185-217

Chapter Six "Information Wants to Be Free": A Romantic Approach to New Media 2 18-263

Chapter Seven The Corporate Sublime: Toward a Cultural Studies of Political Economy 264-30 1

Conclusion Wrestling with the Angels 302-305

References 306-3 19 Introduction Wiring Birmingham

"England's second largest city may fairly lay claim as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. James Watt first hatched in Birmingham the profitable application of the steam engine to mine the country's Black Country. Watt and other famous 18th century members of the Lunar Society regularly met under a fill moon in the nearby Soho mansion of manufacturer Matthew Boulton. Together-Watt, Boulton, and other 'lunatics' such as Joseph Priestly, Charles Darwin and Josiah Wedgewood cheefilly called themselves-- launched the revolution that thrust not only England but the world into our modem technological era."

Frommer 's England From $60 a Day, page 5 14

Binningham, home to the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies since its founding at

the city's university in 1964, must have seemed a strange place to imagine the fbture of

media and culturai criticism. Workshop to the world in the nineteenth century,

Birmingham was a rusting hulk in the post-World War 11 period, a showcase of post-

industrial malaise that recommended the traveller look backward if at all. The project of making the media and cultural theory developed by E.P.Thompson, Raymond Williams,

Stuart Hall and other naturalized "Brumrnies" relevant to the so-called "new" or digital media, such as personal computers and the Internet, sympathizes with an anachronism so characteristically British.' Just as they brought a critical sensibility more comfortable with ruined castles than office towers to bear on twentieth century culture, so does this project look to rethink cultural studies by reference to its own intellectual past, and by rethinking, to prepare it for the technology and culture of the next millennium. In other words, it seems necessary to borrow fiom the current technophilic jargon and "wire" Birmingham. 2

The need to make media and cultural theory inspired by work at the Centre address

contemporary digital media culture was prompted by a personal observation several years

before beginning this study that much of the popular writing on new media borrows fiom

a post-industrial (and often neo-conservative) perspective, and that the larger share of

academic literature on new media is post-structuralist in origin. While post-industrid and

post-structuralist writings on what both characterize as the "information society" have

contributed much of value, they lead to unproductive and sometimes reactionary readings

of issues as various as the relationship of technology to culture, the nature of the self, and

media's role in cultural and political change.

The central problem these positions pose is that they demand a break with modernity as the condition of making critical sense of new media and contemporary culture, a break for which these technologies and their moment are believed to offer both a material and an epistemological basis. Identifying this problem is not to imply that modernity is defensible for its own sake, and the reader should appreciate that this project is not meant as another retrenchment of rationalism against the postmodern scourge. Such defences, while fashionable in some quarters, actually weaken modernity's case by identimng it too squarely with the rational, ignoring that there is more to modem thought and culture than positivism and good sanitation. The case for modernity is made because the particular object of analysis here, the new media, are continuous with the "old" media of print, radio and television, and to separate them categorically risks artificially isolating them fiom media history, leaving them susceptible to agendas that have little to do with media 3

criticism. The popularity of Bell, Toffler, Gilder, Baudrillard and Foucault among

academics and the readers of Wired and Slate then calls for a historically sensitive,

arguably Left or neo-Mancist position on new media, that is unaccountably lacking thus

far. Bowie (1991 :36) writes of the larger lacunae in Left analysis, and of the elaborate

attempts to bring new phenomena within range of sympathetic theory: "One suspects that

some of the appeal of the more bizarre left-Heideggerian and post-structuralist attempts to

construct a 'new politics' lies in their, albeit incoherent, recognition of the need to take

into account forms of articulation which are not amenable to analysis in the concepts of

most existing left-wing discourse."

There is, nonetheless, a small literature on new media from a political economy of

culture and a cultural studies position, a more materialist corpus including work by

Mosco and Wasko, Fejes and Slacks, Ross, Penley, Webster, Morley and Robins2Much of this work is of recent vintage, and none has the influence or the sense of project found in Bell's essays on post-industrialism or Baudrillard's endIess variations on simuiacrurn, a fact which reflects less on the latter positions's evident superiority and more on the compatibility of neo-conservative and post-structuratist theories with power. Important critics of new media, among them Poster, Turkle, Haraway, Lyon and Zuboff, also prefer to develop concepts by Foucault, Lyotard, and Baudrillard without due regard for the intellectual and political compromise entailed, and the loss of a materialist alternative. At bottom, there is little evidence of a comprehensive platform or "problematicyyon which a 4

critical alternative to these dominant anti-modem and anti-materialist positions could be

built.

Indeed, in the early stages of this analysis, it became apparent that the obstacle to a

more materialist criticism sensitive to the special conditions of new media and culture

might be a matter of the epistemological foundation itself, insofar as the relationship of

neo-Mancist media and cultural theory to modem social thought imposed severe

limitations on analysis. Modem social theory typically identifies its genealogy with the

Enlightenment, flattering the rationalist elements in the Enlightenment philosophes,

sociology's classical trio of Marx, Durkheim and Weber, or where cultural studies is

concerned, structuralism against culturalism. Media theory, whether deriving fiom the

American "effects" model, or borrowing eclectically from semiotics, psychoanalysis, or the Franffirt, Toronto and Birmingham traditions, likewise favours concepts and positions that favour a realist epistemology or, where nominalist positions such as structuralism forbid that, rather conservative applications of structuralism such as Stuart

Hall's Althusser-accented "Encoding/Decoding" model.

This is not to discount the advances which the Williams of Communications and

Television: Technology and Cultural Form or the Hall of "The Rediscovery of

'Ideology"' made, nor their influence on a second generation of media scholars such as

Dick Hebdige, Paul Willis, Charlotte Brunsdon, Angela McRobbie or David Morley.

Rather, it is to argue that theories and concepts indebted to the rationalist and realist dimension of modem social theory, such as ideology, are not by themselves adequate to the complex cultural conditions of a wired world.3 ~hesenew media are not reducible to

rationalist epistemology, but their elusiveness is no reason to therefore consign them to

postmodernity and theories comfortable with the episternic break. There are ways of

imagining modernity, as will be seen, which are patient with the plasticity of language,

identity and community on-line. Birmingham may be home to much of the technological

basis to modernity, but the Centre's work in theorizing a highly mediated world must

answer to modernisms not represented by the Lunar Society's passionate empiricism.

The importance of reconstructing media theory's relationship to the modern has not

gone unnoticed by media schoIarship. It is apparent that the media object has not passed

on to a new postmodem era, but that the conventional modernist terns by which media

and other cultural phenomena are theoretically represented are inadequate:

If the debates sparked off by postmodernism have taught us anything, it is not that the developmental processes characteristic of modem societies have propelled us beyond modernity to some new and as yet undefined age, but rather that our traditional theoretical frameworks for understanding these processes are, in many ways, woefilly inadequate. What we need today is not a theory of a new age, but rather a new theory of an age whose broad contours were laid down some while ago, and whose consequences we have yet to filly ascertain. (Thompson 1995:9)

The task for theory is thus perhaps to find within modem social thought itself a new intellectual source by which to organize its analysis of, among other things, media culture at the millennium. That source, as will be argued here and demonstrated throughout these pages, is the long-neglected intellectual tradition of Romanticism, particularly the work of 6 early German and English Romantic artist-philosophers dating from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

Believing that the work of Friedrich and August Schlegel or Blake and Shelley is somehow relevant to the study of media and cultural theory and, by way of a case study, to digital or so-called "new" media, might seem an anachronistic article of faith. Yet, an argument is building now in otherwise unrelated literatures within the social sciences and humanities in support of returning romantic ideas to the theoretical agenda, an analysis which this writer proposes to make more formal and comprehensive than has thus far been articulated. To use Raymond Williams's own words, there is a "structure of feeling" now in "solution" in intellectual discourse. The authors making this case, whether Milner,

Surin and Prendergast in cultural studies, Saiedi, Gouldner and Kurnar in sociology,

Christensen in literary criticism, or Bowie in philosophy, may be largely unknown to each other. But they share a charter statement in Surin's comment on Williams, the latter widely acknowledged as the romantic conscience of cultural studies (Prendergast

If, as Williams contends [in Mdern Tragedy], the romantics failed because they were not able to develop an adequate social theory, then it may be that the subsequent development of such a theory will make possible a rereading of romanticism, and not only that, but also reactivation of its 'deepest impulses', impulses, which as Williams himself points out, have as their 'object' an indubitably revolutionary politics.

If the "subsequent development" and "re-readingy' of Romanticism is to be accomplished, and the "reactivation" of those revolutionary principles pursued, what then 7

is meant by Romanticism and, as the substance of the historical period bearing that name is

applied to the contemporary, romanticism? If we can follow Kumar (1995:67) in

defining modernity as a "comprehensive designation of all the changes--intellectual, social

and political-that brought into being the modem world," Romanticism can be seen as the

poor cousin of the pair of original sources for modernity at its inception in the eighteenth

century, and represents a dissident and often disparaged tradition in modem social and political thought.' It is presented here not as a substitute but as a supplement to

Enlightenment influence, particularly in curbing the dominance of the ideology concept in cultural studies and its related media literature. Juxtaposing Enlightenment and Romantic qualities, Kumar (1995 :86) writes, "Reason was opposed by the imagination, artifice by the natural, objectivity by subjectivity, the mundane by the visionary, the world-view of science by the appeal to the uncanny and the supernatural," qualifjling eighteenth century

Romanticism for him as the most uniquely modem of philosophies.

The general features of early German and (to a lesser extent) English Romanticism are richly suggestive for romantically enriching a new modernism in media and cultural theorys Early German Romanticism recognized the centrality of the aesthetic and the discursive, without begging the problem of meaning (as does structuralism) or surrendering the modem (as do post-industrialism and post-structuralism). Early German

Romantic thought, of greater value to this project than the more conservative strains of

Iater Romantic philosophy, regarded language as something actively constructive of reality, not a transparent medium for an empirically given referent. Poetry was not a genre 8 but the very model of life itself; and life was understood as the dynamic play of discourse on a reality which, though never denied its material nature, was believed to derive fiom the work of the subject upon it. In this, early Romanticism is taken to embody a non- reifying and non-realist position which "provides leverage for the great breakthrough into a Subject-sensitive modernism, as distinct fiom the Objectivistic modernism of the

Enlightenment which sought to free reason fiom superstition that it might better 'mirror' the world" (Gouldner 1973:332).

Romanticism valued the non-rational, the exotic and the grotesque, believing that difference was that element of social reality most truly human. Knowledge was not characterized by the hermetic categories of Enlightenment scholarship, but by paradox, irony and contradiction. "Living in a world where received cultural categories and conventionat social identities no longer made social reality meaningful," Gouldner

(1973 :328) writes, "[the Romantics] came to see reality as possessed of intrinsic vagueness. They saw objects as blending into one another, rather than as well-demarcated by clear-cut boundaries." Romantic epistemology, contrary to empiricism, respected that there were both limits on rational knowledge and that knowledge about reality could be gained through non-rational and hermeneutic means. Romantic ontology likewise imagined the subject as an agent in history, but one intimately connected with the object or period acted upon, and one for whom language was the axis mundi. Lastly, they believed in social totality, but saw totality not as a smooth and organic whole, but rather as an incongruous thing manifesting a complex if non-dialectical relationship among its parts. 9

The need for a romantic revival in media and cultural theory is made conspicuous as

cultural studies confionts phenomena such as digital media which do not conform readily

to a rationalist epistemology. The tendency of such media (and arguably, many other

contemporary cultural phenomena) to confound epistemological and ontological

categories, to challenge empiricism and realism with simulation, and to destabilize identity

and referentiality, has not yet been met with an adequate theoretical language in cultural studies. Confronted as it is by what Webster (1995) calls the "informatisation" of society, cultural studies finds in romanticism a conceptual language and sensitivity to the prominence of discourse and non-rational phenomena today for which the new media are but one exemplary case. In these features can be traced a nan-rational epistemology and ontology on which a newly romantic modernism, sensitive to the unique characteristics of both new media and contemporary media culture, can be built.

Digital media culture is merely one phenomenon that may be read on romantic terms-- think of popular music, soap operas, romance novels-- but it is an especially persuasive case, Like the Romantic model of poesis, on-line discourse offers a concentrated and conspicuous example of the otherwise ordinary linguistic construction of reality as it is married to the material world. Indeed, as reality is increasingly mediated digitally, language's participation in determining the shape of that reality, and its more and more complex imbrication with the material, will only become more apparent. Early Romantic paradox, irony, and inversion rule in on-line discourse, while selves can be seen as multiple and mutable without disregard for the body's materiality. Simulation, rather than 10

representation and realism, is the norm, and categories are constantly in play. Moreover,

the new media's place in the social totality is as source and model of a heterogeneous

whole populated by monstrous subjects and paranoid mythologies spun fiom silicon, such

as is spectacularly drawn in the novels of cyberpunk author William Gibson. A romantic

analysis of new media is recommended finally because, as a few hours spent in a chat room

with other avatars or randomly surfing web sites suggest, these media themselves "feet"

romantic in nature, and point to the romantic qualities of the larger culture in which these

technologies manifest growing influence.

Romanticism has possibilities beyond underwriting a modem and neo-Marxist means

to address the new technologies, and the romantic critique of new media should be

regarded as a case study by which a wholesale neo-modern romantic theory of media and

culture is partially demonstrated and outlined. Indeed, three of the seven chapters

address the general theoretical value of Romanticism, a romantic critique of key concepts

in media and cultural studies, and political economy respectively. The reader should also

appreciate what Romanticism is not in this argument. The Romantic period identified here, and the romanticism adapted for media and cultural theoretical purposes, is neither specifically literary, philosophical or political, but an expedient compound of the three.

The Blake or Shelley specialist may not recognize the poets, nor the intellectual historian the lives and works of the Berlin circle. Primary texts are cited, particularly those of the

German Romantics, but the larger debt is to secondary texts and scholars who share this author's interest in a romantic renaissance in social and political thought. The romanticism 11

here is therefore highly synthesized, filtered through contemporary themes and theoretical

preoccupations, and is in every sense of the word used. In short, it is not "Romanticism"

but "romanticism."6

It must be appreciated that there are as many romanticisms as there are students of the

poetry, politics, and philosophy crafted in romanticism's name. Romanticism's particular

genius may well be its stubborn resistance to a single or unifjling interpretation, an

intentional ambiguity that makes any definition at best a characterization, a partial and often partisan reading of a problematic that is itself sublime. Critical traditions as diverse as phenomenology, New Criticism, and deconstruction, and personalities as diverse as conservative philosopher Carl Schmitt and New Historicist literary critic Jerome McGann, have all claimed romanticism for themselves. This endless difference of opinion reflects not only the refiactory nature of romanticism as such, but as this project presupposes, the fact that it may and can be reinvented as the times demand.

If a characterization is to be ventured, the romanticism invoked here is one that balances a radical view of subjectivity with a sort of poetic sociology which anticipates contemporary ideas as to the linguistic basis of reality. After all, it is arguably on the foundation of a rich conception of human potential and dignity that a society worth having is built, and this is more than usually true in the case of Romanticism. Romanticism at its best was neither pure nor doctrinaire, and was as much a matter of spirit as of letter -- spirit being precisely the point in the Romantic movement. This project is conducted in the grand tradition of that romanticism, while respecting that even a philosophy committed to 12

a cyclical model of history allows that with every return, ideas meet with different

conditions and issues and must mutate accordingly.

A brief chapter-by-chapter outline may allow the reader a better understanding of this

argument's more wiId-eyed and, let it be said this once, romantic ambitions.

In chapter one, "The Education of Desire: Romanticizing Cultural Studies," a case is

made for "using Romanticism." Here this project pays tribute to Jerome Christensen's

pioneering work of applying romantic concepts to the critique of contemporary culture by

extending the scope of an essay like his "The Romantic Movement at the End of History"

to the task of beginning to build a newly modem and romantic cultural studies.

"~Jomanticismis not an object of study--neither the glorious expression nor the

deplorable symptom of a distant epoch and peculiar mentality--but a problem in identification and practice" (Christensen 1994:453)."' Enlightenment and Romantic ideas are outlined and compared, that literature arguing for a revival of Romanticism as a contemporary critical source canvassed, and a survey of Left opinion opposed to

Romanticism made. The chapter closes with a refbtation of Left critics who characterize

Romanticism as either obsolete or too conservative for analytical purposes, and some ideas as to the redemption of the aesthetic category.

In chapter two, "Key Concepts in Cultural Studies and Media Theory: A Romantic

Reconsideration," important works by major figures in cultural studies and that media theory under its influence are examined, and then subjected to romantic criticism.

Raymond WiIliams on modernity and modernism, Terry Eagleton on ideology and 13

discourse, and Stuart Hall on media theory's responsibility to these concepts are examined

in detail. David Sholle, a Foucauldean student of media, is also addressed as a

representative of problems in post-structuralism open to romantic critique. In each case,

Romanticism is shown to be of use in both criticizing these figures and adapting their work

to the cause of a more systematic and romantic criticism of new media. More to the point,

Romanticism is shown to help correct the tendency toward reification in these authors and concepts, insofar as it constitutes an "anti-reifLing modernism."

In chapter three, "The Powers of Mind: Post-industrial and Post-structuralist Theories of New Media," post-industrial and post-structuralist literature on the "information society" is reviewed, with particular attention to Daniel Bell (as the most influential of the post-industrial theorists) and Mark Poster (as the most systematic of the post-structuralist theorists of new media). Bell is read against the large literature critical of the "information society" concept, including works by Kumar, Leiss, Webster, and Schiller, while Poster is read against literature critical of the post-structuralist position, including writing by

Calhoun, Schiller and Webster again. The inadequacy of conventional "rationalist" critiques of the post-industrial and post-structuralist literatures, particularly as they concentrate on the problem of the "break" with the modem and technological determinism, is demonstrated.

In chapter four, "The Politics of Enchantment: Misusing Romanticism," the appropriation of Romanticism by both post-industrial and post-structuralist theories of new media is discussed by way of developing an alternative to the standard rationalist 14 critique explained in the previous chapter three. Romanticism, it is argued, is used by both to circumvent the problem of instrumental rationality and reification in these theories's respective utopias. The result of this misuse of Romanticism is the creation of a false utopia, an enchanted "second nature7' where instrumental rationality and reification are not resolved but merely obscured, and a deterministic and anti-modem view of history sustained beyond the reach of criticism.

In chapter five, "The Ghost in the Machine: Some Problems in Media Research," the romantic precedent in interwar media research is juxtaposed with the erratic history of media research at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. In preparation for the romantic theory of new media to follow in chapter six, a critique of American and British cultural studies media research (with particular attention to Williams and Hall) is mounted.

This critique is organized around the ways in which certain conceptions of bLcommunication"and "culture" undermined media research in both traditions. Where both traditions deemed authentic communication incompatible with the highly mediated conditions of late modernity, the romantic precedent is invoked to demonstrate how communication is genuine and soulfbl where bodies are absent and technologies abundant.

In chapter six, "'Infonnation Wants to be Free': A Romantic Approach to New

Media," a romantic theory of new media is developed. This will borrow fiom and comment upon recent literature in new media research, including writing by Stone, Peters,

Ross, Haraway, and Turkle. Outlined here is an alternative to post-industrial and post- structuralist new media theory as well to the Luddite position favoured by Kirkpatrick 15

Sale and certain other Left critics, an alternative which might be cohered and amplified by Romanticism. This positive romantic alternative in new media theory is organized around three issues: the possibility of authentic communication, the nature of identity on- line, and technology as it is separated from the longstanding critique of instrumental reason.

In chapter seven, "The Corporate Sublime: Towards a Cultural Studies of Political

Economy," the contribution that Romanticism might make to that holy grail of cultural criticism--a cultural studies of political economy--is elaborated. SubstantiaI reference is made to debates among orthodox Marxists and cultural Marxists regarding the relationship of economy and culture, and a partial solution demonstrated in a romantic reevaluation of Williams's cultural materialism concept. Romanticism, as the home of a materially-sensitive aesthetic criticism, is offered as a platform for cultural studies's critique of political economy as discourse, revitalizing the moribund debate around cultural materialism by romanticizing it. Romantic concepts of the "sublime" and heterogeneous totality are shown to be of value in making sense of political economy in the "information age, " and a strategy for an effective means of representing the complexity of a globalizing world outlined.

The result of this joint exercise in bringing romanticism back into media and cultural theory, where it has long been latent in culturalism and related ideologies, and in developing a romantic critique of media by way of proving its value and discovering something new about the culture, is at best a prologue to the development and application 16 of a full-fledged romantic theory of media. This project can be justly criticized, in other words, for not doing romantic criticism, but merely demonstrating that it can and should be done. However, given the precedent Goethe's romantic hero Faustus set in spectacularly overextending himself in the pursuit of knowledge and spending eternity in hell for his pains, it seemed enough to set a modest goal of undoing several centuries of error and establish some guidelines and signposts for romantic criticism, leaving a wholesale critique of media and culture for another project. Notes

1. The use of the term "new media" is increasingly popular as a means to characterize digital media of all kinds. While this implies that print and electronic mass media such as radio and television are "old media, the latter term is rarely used.

2.Arnong these works can be included: Vincent Mosco's The Pay-Per Society and co-edited (with Janet Wasko) The Political Economy of Information, Andrew Ross' Strange Weather and co-edited (with Constance Penley) Technoculture, Stanley Aronowitz's and Michael Menser's Technoscience and Cyberculture, Jennifer Slacks and Fred Fejes's collect ion of essays, David Morley and Kevin Robbins7Spaces of Identity, and Frank Webster's Theories of the Information Society. This is by no means intended as a definitive list.

3. By "rationalism" here and throughout I mean that philosophical tendency which supposes that "reason is the foundation of certainty in knowledge," and excludes phenomena such as emotion, imagination, and other intangibles that are irreducible to logical premises. By "realism" I mean those theories of Ianguage and aesthetics which assume that words and images "depict or portray a physical, social or moral universe which is held to exist objectively beyond its representation by such means, and which is thus the arbiter of truth of the representation." (O'Sullivan et a], 1994: 257).

4. Modernity's periodization is a sometimes contentious issue, but most accounts date it as that moment in history falling between the French Enlightenment of the early eighteenth century and the present day. Depending on one's definition of and theoretical and/or political attitude toward modemity, the modem era may start in the Renaissance (fourteenth to sixteenth centuries) or even be present as a sensibility in ancient Greece (O'Brien 1994); conversely, for many, modernity may have ended in the late 1960s or early 1970s, when the postmodern era and its corollary postmodernisms in architecture, art, pop and other areas are said to have begun. This essay prefers the reading that suggests the persistence of modernity into the present day, as it has picked a quarrel with those positions in cultural and media theory that insist on a categorical break with modernity. Modernism is just as contentious a category, and is defined here as political and cultural movement that occurred in the west at the end of the nineteenth century and represented in some respects a description and critique of modernity. Critical reflection on modernity, however, pre-dates the aesthetic and political movements that start with Baudelaire in the 1860s and end with surrealism, Dada and others in the interwar period, those movements normally designated by the term "modernism." Rather, reflection on the mass media, rationalization, liberalism, capitalism and other phenomena significant to the modem experience is coincident with the eighteenth century origins of the modem itself, taking the form of the rival traditions of Enlightenment and Romantic thought. Insofar as Enlightenment and Romantic thought are also critical reactions to modernity, these traditions may therefore perhaps be thought of as modernisms too, which like the aesthetic and political movements of the late 19th and earIy 20th centuries communicate themselves through artistic, philosophical and political media alike--be they Voltaire's Candide or Blake's Jerusalem.

5. Given that German Romanticism is the original and most philosophically comprehensive of the romanticisms, German sources in translation are used primarily in this argument. The influence of German on English and other national traditions in Romanticism is discussed later in the present argument. AIthough English Romantic sources are used, the measure of English Romanticism is taken primarily in the tradition of English culturalism in its several manifestations, notably as these appear within the work of Matthew Arnold, William Morris, F.R.Leavis, and Raymond Williams. The English sources, being primarily poetic, lack the explicit theoretical attention given to concepts and themes in the German writings. Moreover, the early German Romantic period is the ultimate source of much of the theoretical infrastructure within cultural studies, despite the intervention of English texts, and also represents the densest and purest expression of the very romanticism cultural studies may be productively made accountable to.

6.. A point about usage: when referring to Romanticism as a particular period, whether as a general tradition in intellectual history or in its several national versions (German, English, French or American), the term will be capitalized. However, the lower case will be used when referring to a romantic attribute or concept, such as "romantic machines" or the "romantic concept of the sublime," or to the romantic sensibility or position as a general principle. The lower case testifies to the adaptation of ideas from a philosophy with its origins in a unique historical context, i.e., the French Revolution, to contemporary problems in cultural and media theory.

7. I am indebted to Christensen's work for this phrase, and more importantly, for the idea of adapting Romanticism to the cause of both renovating media and cultural criticism fiom the inside, and using it as a source of vocabulary to describe and criticize new media and cultural forms. Chapter One The Education of Desire: Romanticizing Cultural Studies

"He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence."

From "Proverbs of Hell" by William Blake

Romantic Machines

Romanticism, true to its reputation for eccentricity, presents media and cultural criticism

with an odd and ambivalent legacy. In this chapter, Romanticism is introduced, evidence

for a romantic revival in social and political thought tabled, and criticism of Romanticism

by usually sympathetic figures refuted, all to prepare the reader for the more

comprehensive criticism and applications ahead. Given that the work of using

Romanticism may be unsettling for those who identify it with visionary poetry or political

reaction, the theme throughout is the timely and critical nature of these ideas. The

contemporary relevance of Romanticism is demonstrated by just how contested this legacy

is, a point best captured in two vignettes from a pair of theorists a generation, if not

worlds, apart.

Raymond Williams remains the principal source within cultural studies, after tracing a

circuitous route through the English Romantic poets, then Arnold, Ruskin, Moms and

Leavis, of ideas characteristic of German Romanticism. In his essay "The Romantic Artist" fiom Culture and Society, Williams argues that the popular view of the English Romantic poets as dreamers too busy celebrating daffodils to notice that the meadow had been 20

enclosed overlooks the radical philosophy and daring activism of the Shelley who wrote

political pamphlets, the Byron who died as a volunteer in the Greek war of independence,

or the Blake who brought the wrath of heaven down upon the "Satanic Mills." Important

objects of the English poets' critical ire were Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism and David

Ricardo's political economy, which championed the ideology and structure necessary to

elevating the market to the centre of English society. In Williams's opinion, English

Romanticism, heir to the critical heresies of the Berlin circle, was both early and original in

opposing imagination, aesthetic principles, even love to the cold rationality of liberal

capitalism.

A century and a half after English Romanticism's radical turn and forty years since

Williams's tribute, Sherry Turkle, a Lacanian post-structuralist turned new media

specialist, signals an unusual application of the Romantic and the symbolic transformation

of its meaning. In the mid-1980s there was registered what she characterizes as a

passionate "romantic" response to the development of computer technology explicitly

modelled on human features, such as artificial intelligence (AI). This protest was

"romantic" in that critics of A1 and similar projects asserted the singularity of the human fact, offering serious philosophical resistance to research attempts to duplicate human features on terns no doubt familiar to the torch-bearing peasants at Dr. Frankenstein's gates-that people "have to be something very different from mere calculating machines"

(1995:24). To this Keats and Coleridge wodd agree, and Turkle credits Romanticism for having developed the original defense of human uniqueness relative to technology. However, she argues that such claims must now reckon with technological advances

that compel adoption of our silicon siblings into the human family, notably as computer

research has progressed fiom A1 to the creation of organic, biological computers that

mimic not merely human intelligence, but life itself Romantic resistance has been made

obsolete by the very technology it had long opposed. From being a byword for the

assertion of human inviolability, the romantic is now paradoxically the prefix computer

science assigns to those technologies which actively aspire to imitate human traits, and

collapse any ready distinction between machine and humankind:

These machines were touted not as logical but as biological, not as programmed but as able to learn fiom experience. The researchers who worked on them said they sought a species of machine that would prove as unpredictable and undetermined as the human mind itself The cultural presence of these romantic machines encouraged a new discourse; both persons and objects were reconfigured, machines as psychological objects, people as living machines (Turkle 1995:24; emphasis not in original).

The appropriation of the romantic represents a etymological twist that might have

interested the author of Keywords. The migration of the tern's meaning, as with

Williams's keywords themselves, has more than pedantic interest: it points to a romantic undercurrent in intellectual history that continues to trickle through social and political thought as well as cultural studies without general awareness or acknowledgement of its presence. The relevance of Romanticism to social theory at large, and to cultural studies in particular, is the issue to which this chapter now turns. 22

The Relevance of Romanticism

While there have been several cultural studies texts, namely Janice Radway's classic

Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and.Poplar Culture and Eva Illouz7srecent

Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,

which attend to the problem of the romantic, this work has taken the form of criticism of

the popular genres of romance fiction and soap opera, and of romantic love in the culture

at large. Romance qua Romanticism has received conspicuously little attention in cultural

studies, with the exception of E.P. Thompson's early William Morris: Romantic to

Revolutionary, sections of Williams's Culture and Society and Modern Tragedy, and a

generation later, recent retrospective essays by Surin, Prendergast and Milner that chasten

cultural studies for its indifference to the romantic.

The inattention to Romanticism is conspicuous because German and English

Romanticisms are the primary source of culturalism. Traced to the bourgeois public sphere

of the eighteenth century, and the liberal intellectual opinion which the journals of Defoe,

Addison and Steele then fostered, this distinctly British sensibility had its first formal

incarnation in the "culture and civilization" position articulated by Matthew Arnold and

F.R. Leavis, its second in the left-culturalism (or left-Leavisism) of Williams, Hoggart and

Thompson in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and its third in the Centre for Contemporary

Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1964.' Culturalism constituted both

the ethical core and the philosophical distinctiveness of British cultural studies, the parent tradition in cultural studies. The neglect of so influential and home-grown a tradition is not 23 surprising, however, given that culturalism's influence has waned as structuralism and its endless variations in Althusser, Bourdieu, Lacan and later poststmcturalists expanded their influence at the older, somewhat fbsty tradition's expense. In the long-documented tension between culturalism and structuralism in British cultural studies, structuralism has prevailed over its humanist rival. "If some have more recently sought to 'consign the culturalism-structuralist split to the past' ... then they have done so nonetheless in terms which privilege the lattery'(Milner 1994a:44).

Williams and Thompson established a strong romantic precedent in British cultural studies this century, both in the "left-culturalismyyof their early works, and in less polemic form in their mature writings. Although British cultural studies began in culturalism,

Williams's and Thompson's awkward synthesis of the conservative literary critic F.R.

Leavis's "practical criticism" and Marxist humanism waned, transforming into the characteristic Birmingham interest in the experiential and the ethnographic, and best demonstrated in the textured nuances of subculture research. Revitalizing the largely dormant culturalist tradition in British cultural studies by connecting it with its Romantic roots and thereby "romanticizing" cultural studies is not an exercise in nostalgia. It is rather a contribution to a romantic revival that is registered currently across a number of disciplines, a revival stimulated by a continuing crisis in theory in which cultural studies is deeply implicated. As is documented later in this argument, Left critics have had to concede to post-industrial and post-structuralist positions issues characteristic of contemporary culture, such as simulation, identity, and the new media, because these latter anti- or post-modem positions despite their sometimes parlous politics have conceptual

resources more sensitive to the times. Romanticism offers cultural studies a means of

remaining modem, yet speaking fieshly to phenomena as different as rave and goth

subculture, or the rich feminist presence on the Internet, phenomena that lie

contemporary culture at large seem suggestively romantic in character. At a time when

neo-liberals, like spoiled schoolchildren, have declared the end of history just as they had

begun to win at it, the contemporary romantic tendency urges that the game be renewed

according to rules different fiom those established long ago by Marxism:

In Arnold's time the notion of romantic expectancy was a sentimental idealism; in the 1960s it sounded revolutionary; in the 1970s and 1980s things soured as stem-lipped academics, fortified for history's long haul by strong doses of Marx, denounced romantic hope as an ideological refbge embraced by apostates to the true cause. Now that the long haul has been aborted and Mads beautifil theory withers, the romantic movement marks time as the reviving possibility of change that is not merely normal, its historicity the wilffil commission of anachronism after anachronism linked by bold analogy. By promiscuously replicating stereotypes that resist recognition and transfer, the romantic movement rejects the imperial epochalism of the posthistorical as the sign of the naturalization of injustice (Christensen 1994:476).

Deliberate reflection in British cultural studies on the critical relevance of Romanticism finds in E.P. Thompson's intellectual biography of nineteenth century artist and socialist intellectual William Morris the distance cu1turaI criticism need travel before the utopian desire for a better world can be properly educated, to play a variatian on Blake's phrase.

In Thompson's original dissertation published in 1955, he makes a familiar case that

Morris, under the influence of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, erred on the side of aestheticism. Met with a ugly capitalist reality, the young Moms is held to have initially retreated under the influence of Gabriel Rossetti to a realm of art for art's sake purity that had to be abandoned before Moms's mature identity as a Marxist was achieved. His socialism, as Thompson originally argued, was the consummation of his Romanticism.

This characterization of Morris's progress fiom romantic to revolutionary, as indicated in

Thompson's subtitle, can be contrasted with the Thompson of his postscript to the 1976 second edition in a way that is instructive. Here, twenty years later the historian modifies the earlier emphasis on Morris's evolution from aesthete to firebrand, arguing that it is

Marxism which disappointed Romanticism. Marxism, in abandoning Romanticism for the certainties of orthodoxy, lost its credibility as a moral philosophy and its credentials as a source of utopian possibility. Thompson, offering the Cold War culture as cause for his vulgarity and "too tidy" equation of Morris and Marx, grants to Moms's Romanticism an autonomy and integrity much greater than his original thesis allowed:

First, it is more important to understand woms] as a (transformed) Romantic than as a (conforming) Marxist. Second, his importance within the Marxist tradition may be seen, today, less in the fact of his adhesion to it than in the Mamist 'absences' or failures to meet that adhesion half-way. Morris's 'conversion' to Marxism offered a juncture which Marxism failed to reciprocate, and this failure-which is in some sense a continuing failure, and not only within the majority Communist tradition-has more to teach us than have homilies as to Morris's great-hearted commitment.(l977:786)

This "continuing failure" may only now be near remedy. It remains that a sincere response to Thompson's plea for a reconciliation between Romanticism and Marxism has developed largely outside cultural studies, with the obvious exception of Williams (whose own relationship to Romanticism is not without problems, as will be seen in chapter two). 26

The recent publication of essays by Jerome Christensen, a film and English Romantic literature specialist, and Andrew Bowie, a philosopher and student of German

Romanticism, both of whom address cultural studies specifically in their writing with regard to the uses of romantic theory, demonstrate that the renewed interest in

Romanticism and cultural studies is at least as lively outside the charmed circle of cultural studies specialists. In cultural studies itself, only essays by Surin and Prendergast in

Prendergast's recent volume on Williams, and an essay by Andrew Milner, take up the cause of romanticism identified by Williams and Thompson. But where Christensen and

Bowie are programmatic on behalf of a neo-modern romantic criticism, the latter three authors set themselves to a gentle backward correction of British cultural studies.

This lack of direct engagement with German and English Romanticism in cultural studies means that the sources here derive significantly from outside the cultural studies literature, since the revival of interest in things romantic is most apparent in literary theory, philosophy, and if works by Nader Saiedi, Krishan Kumar, and Alvin Gouldner are included, in intellectual history and sociology. However, cultural studies is nothing if not the home of divergent intellectual themes and transdisciplinary debates, and stands to benefit enormously by the critical potential of romantic concepts and categories such as the aesthetic model of representation, the sublime, heterogeneous models of social totality, and others for study of contemporary media and culture.

Early German Romanticism may be the theoretical prototype of cultural studies, as it is the first critical position in modern social theory to define its object as the study of culture. 27

Its influence on contemporary theory has not gone unacknowledged among critics.

Christensen believes "in the spirit of Williams, that in the long view cultural populism is

romanticism" (1 994:47O, n. 35). Gouldner, an advocate of romantic renewal in the social

sciences, argues that early German Romanticism pointedly rejected the French

Enlightenment identification of modernity with reason, science and technology, preferring

to read modernity off of cultural issues: "In the Romantic view ... the 'modern' was not

marked by the eruption of science and rationalism but, rather, by certain innovations in

the arts and especially in literary culture" (1973:325). Bowie credits early German

Romanticism as the source of many debates in literary theory and philosophy as regards

representation and the nature of truth, suggesting that it made a "descent into discourse"

(to borrow Bryan Palmer's phrase) well before the contemporary obsession with language

attributed to postmodern and poststructuralist positions. "The 'linguistic turn,' the turn

towards language, rather than the mind, as the primary object of philosophical

investigation, which is usually seen as the product of the twentieth century, is a

consequence of central aspects of Romantic philosophy" (Bowie l997:22).

Elsewhere a critic of Romanticism, Eagleton (199 1b:3 8) acknowledges that "many of

the notions thought to be peculiar to pdst-structura~ism--discursiveindeterminacy, the

play of difference, the subject as non-self-identical, an infinity of signification and the rest-

-are the common currency of Novalis, Schelling and Schleirmacher." Eagleton credits this theoretical anachronism with the fact that "the French don't read the Geman

Romantics, or indeed very much at all but themselves" (1991b:38). Whimsical as that 28 explanation is, Eagleton's quip doesn't do justice to what seem strong parallels between economic and cultural developments at the end of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.

A case can be made for what appear to be "significant and determining continuities" between the Romantic period and contemporary debates among modem and postmodern positions, appreciating that "[tlhe debate of the 1790s, in other words, does not give us all the terms required for an understanding of the 1980s, but it remains relevant to its composition and articulation" (Simpson 1993: 15-16).

Both periods were witness to the rise of crudely effective arguments in favour of liberal economics--in the first case, David Ricardo's classical political economy, and in the second, the neo-liberal economics (coupled with "authoritarian populism," the greater presence of technology and media, and globalization) that cuItural studies has christened

"New Times." Both gave form to strong countervailing movements dedicated to ending the hegemony of these economistic discourses--early German Romanticism and its sympathizers among the English and other Romantics, and of course, cultural studies today in its likewise several national variants. And both these movements themselves demonstrated early commitment to criticizing the reifjing power of the philosophical positions dominant in their respective eras, namely utilitarianism in the first case and structural fbnctionalism in the second, as well as their consequences for science, the public sphere, and the subject among other topics.

Yet, early German Romanticism and its lovechild, English Romanticism, are generally neglected in the socia1 sciences. "what is usually ignored ... is the profound impact 29

Romanticism had on the categories, concepts, and methodology of sociohistorical studies"

(Saiedi 199359). Romanticism is responsible for many of the most important concepts in sociology. "[Tlhe categories of history, social totality, community, tradition, meaning, hermeneutics, and alienation which made sociology possible are all Romantic concepts," as are "concepts of agency, the unity of culture, social totality, historical reason, normative orientation, the moral foundation of social order, the autonomy of language, and interpretation" (Saiedi 199359, 107). Perversely, despite the fact that many of the major concepts in social theory have a Romantic provenance, within the sociological literature

"there is a virtual absence of substantive analysis of Romanticism" (Saiedi 1993: 61).~

Romanticism's ill-deserved obscurity is not for lack of self-promotion or scandal, as the many bold manifestos and love affairs among the German and English Romantics demonstrate, not least to their outraged contemporaries. Rather, the marginalization of

Romanticism in social theory and, culturaIism apart, in cultural studies, may well have to do with the unpalatable conservatism of both late German and much English Romantic thought; the romantic habit of expressing philosophical concepts in poetry, fiction, aphorism and irony "hardly compatible with the conceptual and systematic language of social theory" (Saiedi 1993:107); and the strong identification of the social sciences qua science with the Enlightenment project. Some explanation of Enlightenment and, primarily, early German and English Romantic thought is now in order, so that the value of Romanticism to rethinking cultural studies might be appreciated. 30

Enlightenment and Romantic Thought in Perspective

While the historical specificity of the Enlightenment and Romantic traditions is important

to understanding them--the conditions in Europe during the French Revolution being

hardly replicable-the working premise here is the persistence of Enlightenment and

Romantic influence and, more specifically, the application of Romantic concepts to

contemporary issues in media and cultural theory. "One reason for the inescapable

presence of both the Enlightenment and Romanticism in classical and contemporary social

theory is the fact that the categories developed by the Enlightenment and Romanticism

remain the background and underlying binary structures of sociopolitical thought to the

present day" (Saiedi 1993 : 3). Though Romanticism is of primary concern here, the

Enlightenment is its great foil and fixation, and is considered first.

By "Enlightenment" is meant principally the French Enlightenment, that remarkable

period dating roughly fiom the 1710s to the revolutionary year of 1789, when the

acknowledged philosophical tenets of the social sciences were founded.' Strongly

influenced by Greek and Roman texts discovered in the preceding Renaissance period

(roughly spanning the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries), Frenchphilosophes like

Rousseau, Voltaire and Diderot renewed the assault on the redoubtable feudal and traditionalist institutions and ideas. Their beautifid weapons were many and powefil:

reason, above all; the formal equality of individuals and the rule of law, both indebted to an emergent liberalism traceable to Locke; the intellectual and political priority of order, consensus and progress; a utopian belief in the possibility of social reform against the 31 pessimistic anti-humanism of the medieval Church; and lastly, among other features, the power of both naturd and social science to provide the intelligence necessary to rational social development. The social sciences are so identified with Enlightenment values that

"[a]ccording to the conventional view, sociology was born when the scientific method and the rationalistic categories of the Enlightenment were applied to the realm of social and cultural studies" (Saiedi 1993: 107). This, as has been already stated, dramatically underplays the influence of Romanticism upon social, cultural and media theory, since

"such a genealogy of sociological theory is one-sided" (Saiedi 1993 : 107).

Romanticism, like the Enlightenment, manifested differently within France, Great

Britain, Germany and the United States. However, as the French Enlightenment tradition might be thought parent to British Enlightenment figures like Adam Smith and David

Hume or the American revolutionaries, "Romanticism was a predominantly German phenomenon" (Saiedi: 1993: 65). Romanticism owes its radioactive core to the cadre of radicalized artists and philosophers who congregated in Jena and then Berlin between

1797 and 1801, the early Romantic period. The late Romantic period, as conservative as the early period was radical, lasted from the turn of the century until the late 1820s.' But among the German Romantics, notably in their turn-of-the- century prime, rank some of the spectacular sensibilities of the age.

Chief among these radical aesthetes were the SchIegel brothers, Friedrich and August, co-editors of the early German Romantic house organ, Athenaeum, the theologian

Friedrich Schleirmacher, Friedrich Hardenburg (better known by his pen name, Novatis), 32

and the poet Friedrich Holderlin. Key transitional personalities were Kant, for his

devastating critique of empiricism; Herder, for his original definition of culture in its

ethnographic sense as a complex "way of life" of which all humans were capable, the

philosophical basis for cultural relativism; and Goethe, whose enormous influence over

the German imagination through Faust and other romantic themes provided the necessary

"structure of feeling7'for Romanticism's emergence. Lacking in late eighteenth-century

Germany the capitaf st economic development which had given rise to a politically powefil and self-conscious bourgeoisie in England, the early Romantics sought revolution in the only sector permitted by Germany's Prussian feudalism: culture. On terms not dissimilar fiom British cultural studies's own politicization of an emergent popular culture in the late 1950s and early 196Os, the Berlin circle "turned therefore to the sphere of culture, to the achievements of intellect and art that were more individually controllable: they fostered a movement for cultural revitdintion instead of a political revolution" (Gouldner 1973: 324).

What were the main themes of early German Romanticism, no doubt written on the hearts of these philosopher kings? While particuIars of both early and late German

Romantic thought will make an appearance in later chapters, the seven theses of the 1796

Romantic manifesto "The System Program of German Idealism" (Surin in Prendergast

1995: 153-54) provides an outline of early Romantic principles. These might be unpacked and supplemented with materials from other commentators as well as the Romantics themselves, with due Romantic liberties taken in interpretati~n.~ 33

1. The highest form of reason is the aesthetic, and truth and gooriness are united in

beauty. Philosophy must perforce become an aesthetic philosophy.

Not unlike cultural studies, early German Romanticism defined language and culture as

active and dynamic phenomena, capable of shaping material reality without, it is important

to qualifl, reducing or subjecting it to determination by language and culture. Romantic

poetry, synonymous with language itself in the Romantic perspective, "should mix and hse poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature; and make poetry lively and sociable, and life and society poetical.. .." writes Friedrich

Schlegel in the Athenaeum Fragments (Simpson 1988: 192). In their acknowledgement of a material world resistant to and massirnilable to culture or epistemological categories they differed importantly fiom their philosophical compatriots in Germany, the idealists

Hegel, Fichte, Schelling and Kant.

Kant's formative influence on early German Romanticism is universally acknowledged.

It was Kant who mitigated the prior influence of Locke's empiricist epistemology, particularly the latter's model of the mind as a thing passively impressed upon by objectively available stimulus in reality. Against the Lockean "tabula rasa," Kant proposed a theory of knowledge whereby the mind actively generates its own categories, which are

(to reverse the Lockean associationist sequence) then used to mold the raw data of the senses. The world for Kant was something we might only know subjectively, since there existed a permanent gap between the world as it appeared to the mind (phenomena) and the objective world of things-in-themselves (noumena). Objective knowledge of the 34 noumenal realm was thus not possible, since the phenomenal world of experience was the product of the categorizing work of the mind. Hence the tremendous importance of the aesthetic for Kant and the Romantics, since our images of the world are our best guesses as to its nature. Kant's vision of reality as contingent and encultured made him the point of transition fiom the Enlightenment to Romanticism, though the early Romantics would reject his idealist belief in the dualistic separation of consciousness and reality.

Romanticism preferred a monistic worldview, where subjectivity encompassed social totality, and physical objects were thought to incarnate aspects of consciousness, emotion and spirit, a process which effectively romanticized the world.

The rejection of Kant's dualism did not imply wholesale rejection of Kant's epistemological revolution. Rather, the early Romantics recognized a perpetually contingent relationship between mind and matter, a relationship captured in their delight in irony and disorder. The relationship between agency and structure was one fraught with ambiguity, and action itself was consequently characterized as a form of play. Late

Romanticism would overturn the Kantian break with empiricism, after the Tenor and the

Napoleonic wars had caused them to regret their previous enthusiasm for the French

Revolution, and develop a more medieval epistemology where language was immediately and mystically bound to the real, a determinacy made conveniently possible by God.

The aesthetic function of communication, i.e., the ability to create words and pictures that represent the mind's own subjective experience of reality, rather than seeking a mere mimetic duplicate of that reality as empiricism preferred, was thought to be the highest 35

human faculty. In an empirically unknowable world, all discourse assumed the condition of

art, and it was the aesthetic that offered the only hope of reconciling a subject with an

objective world riven by modernity. "Truth" was therefore not the product of discursive

reason or dialectical process; rather, truth was both real and yet existed outside of

discourse in the indeterminate noumenal realm of the "not yet said," where it might be

revealed (though not captured) on aesthetic terms. The form of truth we normally ascribe

to art--the capacity to disclose hitherto unknown glimpses of reality-was the condition of all truth as far as the early Romantics were concerned. The belief that life cannot be adequately understood through rational means led them to greatly prize and to seek knowledge through the non-rational, including as their subject matter such human intangibles as the imagination, spirituality, and play. Friedrich Schlegel gives voice to this in his meditation, "On Incomprehensibility," arguing that much of the substance of humanity must be left, as far as rational apprehension is concermed, in the dark for fear that rationdity would bleed it of life-giving power. ''[Ilit would fare badly with you if, as you demand, the whole world were ever to become wholly comprehensible in earnest.

And isn't this entire, unending world constructed by the understanding out of incomprehensibility and chaos?'(Simpson 1988: 185).

2. All metaphysics win eventually be replaced by ethics. Xhe ruling idea of this ethics is "the representation of myseljas an absoZufeZyfi.ee being. " 3. A nav "physics"will 36 have to be devised to &a1 with the question: How must a worldfor moral being be comtiluted?

The Romantics rejected metaphysics on the grounds of language's, and fiequently, the world's own indeterminacy. Novalis writes in the L'Monologue" (Simpson 1988: 274) that

"it is the same with language as it is with mathematical formulae--they constitute a world in itself--their play is self-sufficient, they express nothing but their own marvellous nature, and this is the very reason why they are so expressive, why they are the mirror to the strange play of relationships among things." In the absence of an epistemological bottom line, the Romantics turned to their favourite trope, the subject, and the moral dimension in which that subject lives, ethics and praxis. Such a position requires a high degree of tolerance for difference, insofar as experience is radically relativized, and the search for meaning made the individual's responsibility. This required a concept of totality generous enough to accommodate such a world of difference, and the Romantics delivered.

The Romantic definition of social totality was not dialectical in nature, insofar as they rejected the idea that discrete elements in the social totality, e.g., base and superstructure, related objectively and externally with each other, that difference was subject to some superordinate unifjhg logic, or that social process tended toward ever more homogeneous synthesis. The Romantics, notably Holderlin in his essay "On the Operations of the Poetic Spirit," reconciled totality and difference, arguing that any vision of totality must be heterogeneous and incongruous enough to be adequate to the palpable fact of difference and the discursive limits of human understanding. Totality, moreover, is not 37

merely a given or an apriori phenomenon, mystically invested in nature or God, but rather

must be constantly reinvented by the subject in everyday practice. The result is a

materialism that respects the interpenetration of the ideal and the material without granting

the material an all-too great determinative power. "Holderlin is the proponent of a

dynamic and liberating materialism, even as he invokes the transcendental imagination as

the 'essential7 source of the constructiveness of being: indeed, the very existence of this

imagination is taken by him to be the complement of any materialism, since it is the

imagination that enables materialism to retain its constructive power in the very moment that materialism has lost its hope" (Surin in Prendergast 1995: 158).

Enlightenment thought sought the creation of universal categories for the subject, culture and humanity generally, valuing generality, uniformity and homogeneity as necessq to realizing a common human community. Romantic thought, to contrast, revelled in the grotesque, the absurd and the exotic. Resembling both Foucault and

Bakhtin in their love of the irregular, this theme made possible a degree of theoretical regard for "difference7' that would not be repeated until the 1960s. In his Lectures on

Dramatic Art and Literature August Schlegel, with a critical eye onto Enlightenment impulses toward classification and order, commits Romanticism to the cause of difference

(Simpson 1988:256): "The groundwork of human nature is no doubt everywhere the same; but in all our investigations, we may observe that, throughout the whole range of nature, there is no elementary power so simple, but that it is capable of dividing and 38

diverging into opposite directions. The whole play of vital motion hinges on harmony and

contrast."

4. The state has to be destroyed because it cannot be what it is without curtailing the freedom of human beings. 5. Neither God nor immortality must be sought outside of

humanity.

Romanticism is well-known for its cultish acclaim of the subject, as evidenced in the

Byronic or Faustian hero. However, the positive side of its individualism is its impressive

confidence in human agency vis a vis structure, and of practice as the source of culture (a

point which explains Romanticism's appeal to Pragmatism). Of equal value is

Romanticism's fidelity with parts of the human repertoire that go unsung in the rationalism

of the social sciences; these include emotion, the body, imagination and experience.

Romanticism resisted mightily the tendency of Enlightenment thought, particularly the ideology concept, to reifjl its object. However, Romanticism did so not by asserting some mere essentialist humanism, for the Romantic subject is constituted in interaction with others. Most important among these forms of interaction were play and art, given that for the Romantics aesthetic behaviour was the gold standard and model for other forms of practice. The Enlightenment subject, described as "quantitative" for its crediting every subject with a legal and political equality, is met with Romanticism's advocacy of the unique and original "qualitative" individual. 39

The Romantic revolution in culture was not a species of mere artistic self-indulgence.

Art was life, insofar as culture was the means onto directly fashioning a conscious world within which one lived. The Romantic ontology was therefore a "poetic" one (Surin in

Prendergast 1995: 163), as the Romantics believed life to take the form of language, the conspicuously creative Romantic subject often represented as a poet conjuring new realities through discourse. Madness and genius were thought by them to be social confirmation of the necessary creative tension between subject and object, consciousness and the unconscious, individual and society, the insane and the brilliant bringing to reality's surface a tension all were a part of Social action, moreover, was understood to be symbolic in nature, and thus interpretable as a text is interpretable.

Early Romantic politics were revolutionary, and the protagonists identified themselves with the French Revolution's goals. As proto-hippies, they believed a spiritual and cultural revolution as important as political change, and favoured cornmunitarian political models as opposed to the liberal investment of sovereignty largely in the individual. Their theology was similarly human and flexible. Though God's existence could not be empirically proven, the Romantic concept of divinity assumed the reality of God, as well as other intangibles, e.g., good and evil, because those imponderables could be imagined and equally convincing proofs of their existence and non-existence offered in logic. In other words, because God had already been imagined and made an appearance in the history of human thought, following their aesthetic logic God must be. The Romantics also attributed God-like features to humanity, since it was the unique responsibility of 40

human beings to create reality, and their image of the human being was that of a creative

divinity shaping the world in its image.

6.A "religion of the senses" is needed by "the masses" and the philosopher alike. 7.

A "new mythology, " one that is a "mythology of reason" at the service of '*theideas, " will also be needed.

The anti-foundationalist temper of Romantic epistemology was discussed in point one.

However, a byproduct of that position is the Romantic disavowal of the bounded nature of phenomena, such as thought to separate human from non-human, organic from inorganic, etc. This could amount to a kind of animism: the belief that all elements in the totality

(including natural phenomena) are mystically connected and alive. This Romantic "religion of the senses" may seem at first too vaporous to be of value to theory. Yet, considered as a critique of dualism, Romantic spirituality offers a powerful hedge against the habit in post-structuralism to identify the modem with a dispassionate dualism. This represented a critique of dualism which was compatible with and was resident in modem social thought well before the emergence of French theories critical of structuralism. The critique of dualism, indeed, is a romantic speciality, and germane to understanding a media culture where what categories are tenable are still more permeable and in play. Living through the final days of the feudal order, the early Romantics saw themselves as witnesses to a world where "received cultural categories and conventional social identities no longer made social reality meaningfbl" (Gouldner 328). 41

Given their anti-empiricism, the Romantics were also already at odds with the use of

"metanarratives," another concept post-structuralism has claimed as its own in the work of

Jean-Francois Lyotard. The Romantic critique of metanarrative, however, did not then resign itselfto the local and the personal, as does Lyotard, but made the search for metanarratives contingent by assuming fiom the outset both their fictional nature and the necessary limits on their explanatory power. To live as a modem was to be forever reinventing these narratives with the aim of creating a new modem mythology, and to dedicate the theoretical imagination to this task without reducing reality to a single narrative or teleological pattern. A modem mythology is necessary because conventional religion and mythology are no longer adequate, and a new narrative sensitive to modern conditions is lacking (captured in a newly romanticized modernism, perhaps) (Saiedi

1993: 136-37).

The theoretical interest and potential of early German Romanticism notwithstanding,

Romanticism has met with fierce resistance fiom scholars across the ideological spectrum.

Wrestling with the aesthetic angel, Marxist and liberal theorists have either believed

Romanticism a conservative philosophy, or worse, a postmodern one. In the following section, the ideological and political reaction to Romanticism and aesthetic questions will be explored in the name of romanticizing cultural studies. 42

The Politics of the Aesthetic

The category of human experience known as the "aesthetic" has a chequered history in

cultural studies. The conventional history of this faculty, one dedicated to the imaginary

representation of the world in art and culture at large, argues that this image-making

power was once an integral part of a human sensibihty which featured moral judgement

and logical-scientific reason as its second and third parts. This is very much a Romantic

version of the history of consciousness and one with broad influence in the humanities.

Schiller, in his essay On the Aesthetic Education ofMan speaks of an Edenic unified

sensibility shattered by a "civilization. .. which inflicted this wound upon modern man," one

where "the inner unity of human nature was severed too, and a disastrous conflict set its

harmonious powers at variance" (Simpson 1988:130). Modernity is alleged to have

brought about the breakdown in this model of consciousness, sundering the aesthetic,

moral and logical faculties, and meaning that beauty, goodness and truth no longer found their harmonious balance. According to this mythology of mind, once the aesthetic became a separate category, it came readily to be understood as the most powerfid and distrusted of the three faculties. The reunion of the rational, the moral and sensuous awaited the

"aesthetic state," or the consummation of the aestheticization of the world, which the

Romantics greatly anticipated and worked for.

Long cast as the id to the modem ego, in contact with dark and turbulent parts of human experience as are invoked in emotion, imagination, the unconscious, and the problem of evil, the fortunes of the aesthetic category rose as modernity's "creative 43

destruction" changed the face of Europe and the New World. The elevation of the

aesthetic occurred in order, first, that people might come to terms with the tremendous

expansion in cultural production and the bewildering variety of cultural products that

followed on the Industrial Revolution and the development of a public sphere; and second,

because of the sheer difficulty of translating Enlightenment principles of rationality into

practical codes of human behaviour in light of the disaster of utilitarianism, all which left a

large loophole in the integration of rationality and ethics that made more room for the

aesthetic (Harvey 1989:19). Confronted by an emergent society of the spectacle, where

images proliferated in vast numbers and outside of conventional contexts affording moral

and rational control, cultural workers and critics alike began a retreat fiom experience that

culminated in austere high modernist movements like abstract expressionism and authors

such as Pound, Beckett and Pinter. Persuaded of the unrepresentability of experience, the

avant-garde laid down its pens and paint brushes and surrendered its vanguard

responsibilities.

Once hlly disengaged and abandoned by the modem project, the aesthetic category

then became the special preserve of the postmodern position. Celebrating a world of

simulacra and promiscuous signifiers no longer burdened with the work of representation,

postmodernism then effected the utter reduction of aesthetic objects to amoral and irrational spectacle, and the abandonment of the critical prerogative to the point where

"postmodernism can judge the spectacle only in terms of how spectacular it is" (Harvey

1989: 56). Images became the new and perfect commodities, and the circulation of value 44

was placed on a ethereal plane we11 above boring material compulsion. The conventional

history usually ends with the absorption of the aesthetic into the postmodern project, and

hand-wringing speculation by modems on the fbture of the avant-garde in a culture where

the special effects team has eclipsed the artist.

But the history of the aesthetic as a paradise lost has proven an obstacle to the

development of a more constructive relationship between cultural studies and the

aesthetic, and consigned the category to the postmodern. Out of concern to salvage this

most romantic of concepts and invest it again with critical potential, it is necessary to

examine arguments opposed to Romanticism and the aesthetic, and recommend changes to

the received version of the category's own narrative. This is because the fates of both

Romanticism and the aesthetic are significantly intertwined, and because criticisms of one

are often displaced antagonisms toward the other. The most intellectually honest, and

indeed the most romantic thing to do, is to examine and perhaps even reconcile the two in

light of their most able critics and in the context of the aesthetic category's politicization.

Cultural criticism's political reading of Romanticism, whether German or English, tends to be two-fold: either it is an antiquated and reactionary movement rooted in medieval values and mystifling rhetoric, a rearguard action against the Enlightenment tangentially responsible for the Nazis; or it is the precursor to postmodemism, the latter read as a form of romanticism redux, and for that no less problematic. Nietzsche can figure as the spoiler in both accounts, or neither, depending on the critic's whim, and both

German and English Romanticism come under fire in the better-known critiques.' 45

Karl Mannheim's is the classic liberal indictment of Gennan Romanticism's reactionary tendencies, and an often-cited argument in his sociology of culture essays. His premise is simple enough: the early radical energies of the Berlin circle are transmuted into conservatism due to the Prussian hegemony around them. Where Enlightenment philosophes wrote in the context of a bourgeois revolution and an emergent scientific and industrial complex, German Romantics had no such home for their more progressive side.

The homeless nature of these intellectuals, Mannheim claims in an analysis directed largely to the social structural location of Schlegel and company, made their convergence with

Catholic conservatism inevitable. "Just as romantic thought failed to find its political aims within itself, so it took over, at a certain stage of its development, certain findamental ideas opposed to the Enlightenment from the inventory of ideas from feudalistic conservatism" (Mannheim 1953 :1 3 0). But Mannheim's analysis does not take the

Romantics' radicalism on its own terns, overpowered as it is by his thesis regarding their rootlessness. Their consenratism cancels the value of their early writings in Mannheim's view, and in what seems almost an instance of fbnctionalist pique, the conservative trajectory which Mannheim depicts stands in for his final judgement as to their contribution to the history of social and political thought.

Marxist literary theorist Temy Eagleton (1983: 21) is equally condemning of the

English Romantics, writing that they saw the symbol as "the panacea for all problems," part of a conservative fbnction which had them offering fancifil symbolic resolution of real social problems. The symbol or literary artefact was an ideological tool promoting the 46

specious unity of diverse interests, class and otherwise; "If only the lower orders were to

forget their grievances and pull together for the good of all, much tedious turmoil could be

avoided" (Eagleton 1983:22). But again, more so than Mannheim, Eagleton overlooks the

radical content of English Romantic thought, a radicalism which Williams did not hesitate

to recognize.

Eagleton's particular interest as a critic of the Romantic is in his charges against the

aesthetic. He argues that it has been incorporated into ideology, its image-making powers

stripped of any autonomy and subordinated to power's dictate. Where this is a potential

recognized famously in Marcuse's work on Marxist aesthetics, it is regarded as a process

of corruption much more advanced in Eagleton's work. Though Eagleton (1990:9) is

conscientious in granting the aesthetic category its political promise--"it offers a generous

utopian image of reconciliation between men and women at present divided fiom one

another7'--the aesthetic is similarly that which "blocks and mystifies the real political

movement towards such historical community." Yet, as Andrew Bowie, a fiequent

debating partner of Eagleton's in the periodical literature argues, Eagleton's magisterial

i%e Ideology of the Aesthetic is a11 too typical in this narrative of ideology's reduction.

Rather than giving the aesthetic its due, Eagleton is too hasty in defining it as an ideological problem. "In some ways Eagleton repeats, in relation to philosophy, the major fault of his earlier work on literature, which too hastily reduced it to the ideological circumstances of its production, without being able to account for its specific power or its radical potential" (Bowie 1991 :37). The problem remains that "Eagleton is too concerned 47

with the unmasking of the ideology of the aesthetic really to understand the philosophical

actuality of the aesthetic" (Bowie 1991 :37), at obvious cost to our appreciation of the

Romantics.

The critique of Romanticism by Left theorists writing on the postmodern is no more

satisfjing, implying as it does a ready continuity between Romanticism and the worst

excesses of the postmodern. David Harvey (1989:44) offhandedly associates (without

actually naming) the Romantic with nihilism, speculating that postmodernism's secret

history is probabIy a Romantic one: "To the degree that it does try to legitimate itself by

reference to the past, therefore, postmodernism typically harks back to that wing of

thought, Nietzsche in particular, that emphasizes the deep chaos of modem life and its

intractability toward rational thought." Frederic Jarneson's response is still more curious,

acknowledging the importance of Romanticism to the modern/postmodern issue while

relegating the point to a casual aside. "I must here omit yet another series of debates,

largely academic, in which the very continuity of modernism as it is here reaffirmed is itself

called into question by some vaster sense of the profound continuity of romanticism, fkom

the late eighteenth century on, of which both the modem and the postmodern will be seen

as mere organic stages" (Jameson 199 1:59).

These dismissals and oversights ignore attempts, albeit by admitted partisans of the

romantic in social theory, to demonstrate the credibility of the romantic position. There is the argument that Mm's emphasis on praxis (reason or theory alone cannot emancipate), the impulse to end alienation and restore species being, his stress on the concrete 48

circumstances of material life (defLing Enlightenment abstraction), his love of the

grotesque as represented in contradiction, and his arguments against capitalism's reifjing

powers, have Romantic origins (Gouldner 1973: 336). Moreover, Left critics often

confuse Romanticism's refid of a stolid foundationalism, but allowance for the

possibility of truth through hermeneutic disclosure, with postmodernism's rejection of

truth in any form. The Romantic aesthetic "might seem to correspond, via its insistence on

the lack of a final groundable truth, to the celebration of diversity for its own sake which

links post-modern theory to 'late capitalism'. .. . The Romantic conception does not,

though, entail accepting merely relational values, even though it no longer admits the

possibility of a grounding which would enable a philosophical account of truth to be

definitively legitimated" (Bowie 1997:87). All things considered, the too categorical judgement of Romanticism and the aesthetic suggests a longstanding "tendency of the Left

to hand over cultural resources to the enemy without a fight," and an unwise aversion to

the aesthetic which leaves many Left critics to feel it "too dangerous to be let filly into

'real politics"' (Bowie 1991 :36).

The German Romantics, following Novalis's lead, considered the act of

"romanticizing" to be the radical defamiliarization of the commonplace, giving it mystery, intrigue, nobility, a touch of infinity. This author believes the aesthetic and Romanticism's attachment to it are owed no less. How does this gracious gesture relate in any way to cultural studies? Where Romanticism (before its conservative decline) retains an edgy vision of modernity sensitive to discourse, indeterminacy, totality and, most importantly, the aesthetic, cultural studies largely does not. Driven by endless micro-analyses without a

satisfjlng alternative to the defhct base-superstructure model and means to articulate

culture to the material, cultural studies surrenders the aesthetic all too fieely. Yet the very

aesthetic category that liberal critics like Mannheim and Left critics like Eagleton, Jameson

and Harvey reject or seem indifferent to may offer a new foundation for cultural studies:

The cultural turn in Marxism, shorn of a politico-social foundation, was therefore bound to become yet one more manifestation of the avant-garde, a glittery gad-fly on the wall of history. Its success (or its doom--depending on how we read our place in history) is therefore, up to now, largely aesthetic. But that aesthetic, pace Marcuse, might yet be the moment on which a new political economy will be built. ( Davies 1991:34 1; Davies's emphasis)

The nostalgia for the lost holism of Schiller's, or as it is more commonly phrased in

Williams, the "common culture," has worked a powerful magic upon cultural studies.

Cultural critics from Right to Left--fkom Arnold, Leavis and Eliot to Thompson and

Williams--have founded their theoretical and political hopes on this romantic vision, and just as surely been disappointed in their ambitions.' What is genuinely ironic, and instructive as far as utopian longing is in any way educable, is that the aestheticization of totality has indeed arrived, but on capitalism's gaudy terms. This is all the more reason why cultural studies should reclaim the category, and thereby, the romantic as its own.

"[Tlhe reappraisal of political and intellectual priorities which has been forced upon us by a whole series of cultural, political and epistemological crises" has fostered "a renewal of interest in the origin and meaning of the aesthetic experience" (Hebdige 1996:66). 50

Rather, what should be abandoned is this particular mythology of a lost holism, which

has been more than anything an easy target for its critics and obscured Romanticism's

value. An alternate perspective that separates the aesthetic from this narrative, and asserts

its timely and critical nature, is evident in the work of Ian Hunter. In his essay

"Aesthetics and CulturaI Studies" (Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler 1992), Hunter argues that the aesthetic dimension is both more continuous (it did not disappear with modernity) and more contingent (it will not summarily resolve a shattered world). The fbnction of the aesthetic is to be found "not in the structural relations that divide society into incomplete fragments, but in the entirely contingent and circumstantial relations through which an ethic has been incorporated in the social sphere" (Hunter in Grossberg et al 1992: 364).9

Arguing that cultural studies retains the nostalgic vision of the aesthetic at its critical peril,

Hunter suggests that the aesthetic is very much more with us than the precedent of

Schiller and the "culture and civilization" tradition provides.

What is necessary is a view of the aesthetic that rightly rejects the nostalgia for a lost holism and the presumptive role of the aesthetic in recovering it, while making room for just the contingent, 'irruptive relationship between the aesthetic and the rest of reality that Hunter calls for. Beauty, in other words, happens, but when and where we cannot expect. The solution may well then lie in reclaiming rather than reifying, as is normally the case, the aesthetic category by giving it a "politico-social foundation" predicated on a refbrbished Romanticism. A Romanticism rid of the mythology of unified sensibility, or of Williams's translation of it in the "common culture" concept, is a 51

Romanticism better adapted to use in contemporary reality. Located between the tragic

narrative and the ideological tool is a conception of the aesthetic as a form of knowledge

that persists in a society and sensibilities that never knew life before the Fall. This

aesthetic manifests itself in apparently random acts of beauty which model ways to live

and undreamt of analytical connections. And if the aesthetic can be be seen as both more

positive and persistent than the postlapsarian version favoured by the original Romantics

and made doctrinal by such as T.S.Eliot, then the romantic might also be regarded as

somethingjust as contemporary. As will be discussed in chapter two in light of the

"aesthetic model of representation," we have here an aesthetic as materialist and committed as the Romantics' own, but necessarily minus the mysticism. Notes

1. Surveys of the British tradition in cultural analysis differ in their definition of when and what was "culturalism." Some define it as a persistent argument about the nature of culture beginning in the 18th century public sphere (Milner); others (Turner) lodieit in the work of Williams, Thompson and Hoggart which immediately preceded the founding of the Centre at Birmingham, and would thus make it synonymous with left-Leavisism (and far less awkward a phrase). The latter reckoning distinguishes it fiom the "culture and civilization" or "culture and society" positions assumed by much of the English intelligentsia, and as chronicled in Williams's book Culture and Society. Given my interest in reaffirming an already acknowledged continuity between Romanticism and cultural studies at Birmingham, and more importantly, refbrbishing Romanticism so as to argue for and make it adaptable for contemporary critical purposes, I borrow here fiom Andrew Milner's 1994 book Contemporary Cultural Theory: An Introduction, in which the former long view is taken. That is, something recognizable as culturalism--asserting the organic character of culture, and its oppositional value vis a vis utilitarian, industrial capitalism--begins in the eighteenth century, and despite philosophical adjustments and the change of political stripe in passing fiom the reactionary "culture and civilization" tradition to left-culturaIism, remains recognizable today. I also follow Milner's usage as far as the meaning of "British cultural studies" is concerned. British cultural studies here refers specifically to cultural analysis centred in Britain after the founding of the Centre. Thus "British cultural studies" and "Birmingham" are synonymous in my account here. Such a distinction is necessary because other usage (Turner, among others) allows British cultural studies to stand in for the several centuries of cultural analysis in Britain. But projecting the contemporary cultural studies movement back to Arnold, or even to the public sphere, as reference to British cultural studies in this way tends to do, credits cultural criticism with intellectual and methodological features that are not due it.

2. Given that the various national homes of cultural studies--British, American, even Canadian and Australian--are located on the same street, the reader may safely assume that these several versions are being addressed when the general reference is made to cultural studies. However, when specific reference is necessary, such as is the case American and British cultural studies are compared in chapter five, specific reference to these traditions will be made for the sake of maintaining intellectual genealogy and differentiation in what is a whole yet internally complex philosophical position.

3. Saiedi does identie several sources in sociology and social thought that have addressed Romanticism in some way. But to acknowledge its contributions to social theory is not to appreciate its contemporary relevance, and the latter is conspicuously rare in the literature. Among the sources that refer to Romanticism and the social sciences (but not its contemporary relevance), Saiedi cites the following sources: Robert Nisbet, me Sociological Tradirion (New York: Basic Books, 1966); Steven Seidman, Liberalism and the Origins of European Social meory (Berkeley: University of CaIifomia, 1983), and Irving Zeitlin, Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1968). From personal observation, the following also qualifjl as having some reference to romanticism in social thought: Jacques Barzun, author of CIassic, Romantic, andModern (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1961) and Romanticism and the Modem Ego (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943); Karl Mannheim' s writing, particularly his Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology; Marshall Berman's All That's SolidMelts into Air: The Fxperience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982); and of course, Alvin Gouldner himself, in the essay, "Romanticism and Classicism: Deep Structures in Social Science."

4. I follow the periodization offered by Norman Hampson's 171e Enlightenment: An Evaluation Of its Assumptions, Attitudes and Values (London: Penguin, 1968). He divides the period into two parts: the first phase or "early" Enlightenment dating from 1715 to 1740, a period when the Enlightenment was at its most optimistic about the human prospect; and a second or mature phase, dating ftom 1740 to the revolutionary year of 1789, a period when most of the canonical works of the Enlightenment were published, e.g., Rousseau's Social Contract, Voltaire's Candide, Montesquieu' s The Spirit of laws, Diderot 's Encyclopedia, etc. Hampson acknowledges a pattern of cultural pessimism emerging in Europe in the 1760s, as the political and economic stasis of the early Enlightenment gave way to political wars and proto-capitalism. So-called "pre-Romanticism" finds its basis in this disquiet. Conor Cruise O'Brien rather tendentiously distinguishes the early fiom the later Enlightenment in terms of the former's greater respect and compatibility with religion and tradition, and the latter's cynicism. Note that all foreign language titles are provided in their conventional English translations.

5.The dichotomy of early and late Romanticism reflects primarily on its development in Germany, since radical and conservative strains of romantic thought were jointly present throughout the history of English Romanticism. In other words, the German periodization does not apply when cultural radicals like Blake (respecting that he was a generation older than the others), Shelley and Byron, and conservatives like Coleridge (whose knowledge of German Romantic literature was much superior to that of the other English Romantics), exerted influence over English Romanticism at roughly the same time. Keats, the precocious nightingale, did not exhibit the same degree of political intention in his work, but could be classified among the more liberal of his peers.

6.They appear here unchanged from the authoritative translation taken fiom Surin, though the order of their appearance in the list has been rearranged to better suit exposition. Original text of the System Program is placed in italics for ease of reference.

7. An accounting of how postmodern theorists reconcile Romanticism and postmodernism will be considered in a later chapter. The current section is reserved for critics of such a position fiom a Mancist and liberal perspective.

8. Jay argues that most partisans of the romantic, "genetic" model of totality in England have been right wing where totality was favoured at all. England, spiritual home to utilitarianism and other forms of individualist and liberal thought, didn't suffer holisms gladly. This makes Williams all the more unusual--as a socialist and a holist--although his being Welsh probably had something to do with it. Jay writes of Williams's unusual stance:

Even in England, which, for most continental thinkers and Manrists in particular, was the bastion of individualism in thought and politics, a counter-trend can be observed.. .. The tradition of seeking soIace for the disintegrative effects of individualism in the realm of culture, which Raymond Williams trenchantly followed in Culture and Society, was often the repository of more holistic hopes. (1984:68)

9. Although Hunter takes a Foucauldean direction that this author can't ultimately follow, his definition of aesthetics as a technology of ethics-as a model for better living through beauty--is attractive. Chapter Two Key Concepts in Cultural Studies and Media Theory: A Romantic Reconsideration

"We've got an entire academic pedagogy devoted to the notion that symbolic dissent- imagining, say, that the secret police don't want us to go to the disco, but that we're doing it anyway--is as real and as meaningfid, or, better yet, more red and more meaninghl than the humdrum business of organizing and movement-building."

Tom Frank, "When Class Disappears,'' neBafler, p. 7

Having demonstrated the contemporaneity of Romanticism, explained various of its

features, and examined some of the political readings of Romantic theory, it is instructive

to turn to Romanticism's value in rethinking what may be (after "culture") the two

cardinal concepts in media and cultural criticism: modernity (including modernism) and

ideology. This exercise in "romanticizing" fundamental concepts in media and cultural

criticism, notably as reflected in culturd studies literature on the topics, appropriately centers on several personalities whose work symbolizes the schizoid personaIity of the field: Raymond Williams on the problem of modernity and modernism, and Terry

Eagleton and Stuart Hall on ideology. (Comparative reference is also made to David

Sholle's argument for a Foucauldean alternative to the ideology concept.) The purpose here is to "use Romanticism" on these key concepts prior to taking on larger areas of interest, such as the relationship between post-industrialism and post-structuralism to romanticism, new media and political economy. An updated Romanticism offers, first, a perspective on the modem that may improve on Williams's influential and idiosyncratic reading of modernity and modemism; and second, an aesthetic mode of representation 56

superior in some ways to both ideology and the competing Foucauldean notion of

"discourse." The particular value of Romanticism lies in its anti-reifjting powers, notable

due to the fact that reification is an attribute of and a problem in both Williams's and the

ideology theorists' contributions. As modemity and ideology are highly productive

intellectual properties and prior to media and cultural criticism in general, it seemed

appropriate to begin the work of romanticizing theory here.

Romanticism as Non-Reifying Modernism

As outlined in his 1922 essay, "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat," by

"reification" Georg Lukacs meant the suppression of the social and relational nature of any

phenomenon, and the subsequent abstraction to which that object or entity was exposed as

its sensuous nature was erased. In reification, the familiar process in capitalism whereby

use values are transformed into exchange values, i.e., goods are produced for sale and

transfer into capital as prices, wages and profit, begins to register certain strange effects

on social reality. As the commodity relation insinuates itself deeply into society, human

subjects become objectified through the sale of their labour, i.e., alienation, and objects

acquire human characteristics, i.e., commodity fetishism. So far, so classically Marxist.

But Lukacs's innovation, and the signature feature of reification (which thus

distinguishes it from mere commodity fetishism), was to theorize the general consequences

of the erasure of the social and the sensuous. The vital core of reality is etherealized as it is filtered through the logic of commodity exchange, resulting in a social moonscape of pronounced psychological and political pathology. "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," but also

"stamps its imprint on the whole consciousness of man" (Lukacs 1971:100). Thus

"disenchanted" fiom the sensuously human and "re-enchanted" on capital's nightmarish terms, the present is profoundly naturalized, as relations within social totality and history are subsumed in the now frozen and self-perpetuating relations of commodity exchange.

This tendency of capitalism to relentlessly isolate and abstract elements within social totality, subjecting these isolates (e.g., subjects, culture, labour) to even more arbitrary regulation, Lukacs also believed to apply to theory. All theories are socially generated and organized bodies of knowledge, of course, and necessarily bear significant traces of their time and place of origin. Williams's reading of modernity and modernism and Eagleton and Hall's thinking about ideology (Sholle's Foucauldean model is considered more incidentally) are no different. The reification of "science" or theory compounds the problems under analysis through this higher-order and largely unintended form of abstraction, as theory turns on and becomes a power unto itself, masking evidence of its origins in society and history:

the more intricate a modem science becomes and the better it understands itself methodologically, the more resolutely it will turn its back on the ontological problems of its own sphere of influence and eliminate them fiom the realm where it has achieved some insight. The more highly developed it becomes and the more scientific, the more it will become a formally closed system of partial laws. It will then find that the world lying beyond its confines, and in particular the material base which it is its task to understand, its own concrete underlying reality, lies, methodologically and in principle, beyond its grasp. (Lukacs 197 1: 104; Lukacs's emphasis)

This same plague of reification applies to several of the most important figures and the

conceptual contributions under their influence in cultural studies, namely Williams's idea

of the modern, and Eagleton's and Hall's separate reflections on ideology. Where

Williams is concerned, this has corresponding disastrous effects for his thinking about

modernism, particularly as far as accommodating anti-realist modernisms (e-g., surrealism,

Dada) and the emergence of eIectronic media in the early twentieth century are

concerned. Eagleton and Hall, on the other hand, commit themselves to strong theories of

ideology that override other elements, such as discourse, with a more vital romantic

tradition. Both parties, as the reader may expect, inadvertently reify the concepts they

have helped shape due to the nature of their relationship to intellectual history and

therein, the anti-reifying nature of Romanticism. More to the point, Williams conceives of

Romanticism on terms that suppress its anti-reif'ying powers; while Eagleton and Hall, in their more straightforward commitment to an ideology critique invested heavily in rationalist, Enlightenment-based theory, effect the same outcome.' Albeit theorists with very different and even competing relationships to cultural studies, Williams, Eagleton and

Hall are alike in adding to the very problems they would find answers for, making for a vicious and self-defeating circularity that is captured in Lukacs's warning about the ways in which thoughts become things. 59

As a body of cultural theory committed to reenchanting the world on modem terms,

Romanticism brings its anti-reifying powers to bear on a world that sinks daily deeper into

abstraction. This process of enveloping abstraction is greatly accelerated by digital media,

as will be seen in a later chapter, and is not about to go away, as our dependence on

computer-mediated communications and cyberspace is only likely to grow. The anti- reifjling power of Romanticism lies in its early critique of reason, particularly as this is deformed into the instrumental rationality which Max Weber, the FraMrt School,

Habermas and others have identified as a core problem in modernity. "Insofar as

Romanticism rejects a reification of men and provides a basis for a critique of reification, insofar as it expresses a resistance to historically obsolescent and unnecessary rules or limits, then Romanticism is indeed an emunciptory standpoint" (Gouldner 1973:332;

Gouldner's emphasis). Lukacs felt Romanticism redeemed modemity by identifjring it with values and powers other than reason, breaking with the tragic formula by offering a very different vision of what it means to be a modern subject:

Above all, Romanticism rejected bourgeois, vulgar materialism's tendency to "deaden" the universe and men with it. In the words of Georg Lukacs, Romanticism was a rejection of "reification" and, we might add, it expressed a refusal to equate modernity with reification. Romanticism sought a path to a non-reifling modernism (Gouldmer 1973 : 3 1; Gouldner's emphasis).

Closer examination of Williams and the modern, then Eagleton and Hall and that most modern of concepts, ideology, reveals in a more intimate scale just how romanticism can rid them of their reification, and provide a model of modernity and of representation 60

adequate to the condition of "being digital." The secret police may never care whether we

take to the dance floor or not, but the work of romanticizing these concepts may go some

way toward helping cultural studies meet Frank's high standard.

Cultural Studies and Cultural History

Williams and modernity

Williams, the amanuensis of British cultural history, had special responsibility for

formulating the reading of modernity and modernism most influential in cultural studies.'

From the early cultural histories to the millennium-minded me Year 2000, Williams

represented (with historian E.P.Thompson's help) the historical conscience of an

intellectual project all too willing at times to forget the Chartists for the sake of the Spice

Girls. Characteristic of Williams's outlook, as was proper to the author of the "long

revolution" concept, was an abiding patience and critical reserve in evaluating historical

process? "At one point in his writings on ideology and literature, Raymond Williams

wisely warns against what he calls premature historicization. Until there is justice, all

historicization is premature" (Christensen 1994:476).

Unfortunately, in the case of his reading of modernity and modernism, he may have

unwittingly historicized too soon, an injustice to complex phenomena that has not gone unnoticed in recent writing on Williams. The "extremely weighty matter of Williams's attitude to the famous 'project of modernity"' has been noted, as has his "barely concealed hostility, informed by what, at its worst, we have to call prejudice" as regards 61

modemism (Prendergast 1995: 17). As will be seen, Wilfiams's view of the modem is too

much indebted to organicism and realism and too discomfited by contradiction to be compatible with a lived modernity marked by differentiation and crisis. In contrast, the romantic defines the challenge of modernity as the task of living meaningfblty within just such a crisis-ridden modern culture. "Modernity gave to its denizens the task of reimagining the infinite, the illimitable, and through this reimagining to traverse the schisms (between subject and object, sensuousness and intelligibility, history and nature, etc.) that constitute its crisis7'(Surin in Prendergast 1995: 156). Williams's reductive reading of modernity might be seen to stem fiom his dilute relationship, as genealogically filtered through the "culture and civilization" tradition of Arnold and Leavis and his own

Left-culturalism, with the ultimate origins of that culturalism in German oma antic ism.^

Divorced fiom Romanticism's more sophisticated comprehension of modernity, Williams is left without the theoretical resources necessary to theorize modernity and modernism satisfactorily--a decision with costs both intellectual and political.

Consideration of Williams's relationship to Romanticism might begin with the anti- theoreticism of English intellectual culture as the context for "culture and civilizationyyand culturalism's development. The early Williams shared the general disregard of the English intelligentsia for theory, notably their "monotonous contempt for 'Grand Theory', for a model that is seen (unconvincingly) as trying to 'swallow reality in one gulpm'--a phrase coined by Thompson in his attack on Althusserianism, me Poverq of Theory (Simpson

1993: 176). His inclusion of conservatives like Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlyle as 62

honourable members of the British intellectual pantheon in Culture and Society because of

their nationalism warranted Williams's later recantation in Politics and Letters (collected

interviews with Williams by members of the Niw Left Review), attributing "such

oversights, or incomplete accounts, to the 'general condition of thought in this country"'

(Simpson 1993 : 175). Though the same interview in Politics and Letters records his

decision to having "got into theory" later in his career, his relationship to Romanticism

would have been made in an context unreceptive to theory--whether German, English or

other.

Though Williams was certainly aware of German Romanticism (as evident from his

discussion in Modem Tragedy, the book in which he directly considers it), his

"treatment of romanticism, as a general movement, is highly problematic and even

inadequate" (Surin in Prendergast 1995: 149-50). Williams conflated the various

romanticisms into the subjectivist and sentimental form of English Romanticism, eliminating much of the German theoretical sophistication, a pattern which would act

"to assimilate the several (some would say the many) romanticisms to one particular manifestation--the English--of this always quite diverse movementn (Surin in

Prendergast 1995: 152). The unfortunate result is that the very tradition which moved

Weber (and in some ways, Marx) to prodigiously explore the relationship between self and shattered world was effectively absent Erom Williams's work:

Williams insisted that we are today still confronted.. . by the question, the question posed quintessentially for tragedy, of the necessity and possibility of reconciling freedom and nature (or necessity). And it is precisely this question that was central for German idealism and theoretical romanticism; it was this question that this movement addressed so uncompromisingly under the rubric of tragedy. Williams, however, gave no indication in Modern Tragedy that romanticism, and especially German romanticism, addressed this question more powerfully and productively than any other intellectual movement. (Surin in Prendergast 1995: 15 1)

Confronted by this question of culture's relationship to social and natural constraint,

Williams grants culture undue power by opting for an organic model of totality, one

where culture has unearned deterministic tendencies. Just how he comes by this decision can be illustrated by some speculative intellectual history. The probability of anti-theoreticism aside, how did English Romanticism relate to the German? The fact that the British and French Romantics were strongly influenced by their Romantic counterparts in Germany is universally acknowledged; the poet-philosophers Samuel

Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth visited Germany, and the conservative

Coleridge and later Thomas Carlyle both published works devoted to systematically introducing German Romantic thought in England; and last, in revolt against their own indigenous experience of the Enlightenment, French and British Romantics were

"receptive to German ideas of life, society and religionn5 (Saiedi 1993: 65).

What is likely, however, given Williams's relationship to Arnold and Leavis, is that the conservative late rather than the radical early German Romanticism was the more influential on him. The possibility of this particular lineage is strengthened not only by the conservative nature of Coleridge's and Carlyle's work and the equally conservative inclinations of Arnold and Leavis. Rather, Williams's view of culture's organic nature 64

and its relationship to social structure, apart from being deeply indebted to Arnold and

Leavis, also strongly resembles late German Romantic opinions as to the same issues.

This may be seen in a brief comparision of "culture and civilization," Left-culturalism

and late German Romantic conservative ideas.

Arnold, the late Victorian author of Culture and Anarchy, and F.R. Leavis, his

twentieth century champion, believed a permanent contradiction to obtain between (to

use Lewis's famous epithet) "mass civilization and minority culture." Culture, argued

Arnold (1869: 49), "is at variance with the mechanical and material civilization in esteem with us," and according to his supremely confident definition of culture as the best that has been thought and said, was to offer a high-minded palliative to those suffering through the wrenching social transformation of the Industrial Revolution.

Culture was identified as the deeply naturalized and idealized integration of morality and meaning, preserving through time the essential features of national character. This

"organic" view of culture, so-called because it suggests a complex, non-dialecticat and almost ecological relationship between elements in a culture, adding up to a highly naturalized, animated and genetic whole, was set against "civilization," meaning here modem, urban industrial society. Civilization or society in turn, was the source of change, contradiction and chaotic energies that culture would check and direct. Rather than draw our attention to contradiction as a precursor to political solutions, then, culture was to magically resolve it by pointing to a transcendent set of values, texts and experiences safely above the factory apprentice's pain and the choking air of London.

The most immediate sources for Williams's allegiance to organicism, and his principled if problematic "obstinate.. . resistance to the categories of separation and specialization" (Prendergast 1995: 15), are Amold and Leavis, themselves deeply representative of certain aspects of English Romanticism."In this context, the emphasis on wholeness, continuous connected practice, and so forth reveals. .. the continuing and probably unexpungeable traces in Williams's own thought of the tradition explored in

Culture and Society, in particular the paradoxical Arnoldian-Leavisite view of culture as distinct @om 'society') but whose distinctness consists in making whole what has been divided and atomized)" (Prendergast 1995: 15). Where the problem of contradiction is concerned, Williams never left the Arnoldian "culture and civilization" tradition for which

Culture and Society was ostensibly to offer some closure. Williams's reluctance to breach the culture and society dichotomy persisted through his long and productive career:

For those authors Williams located in the "culture and society tradition," the separation is taken for granted; culture is simply appropriated and transformed into a position fiom which that very separation can be described and judged. But Williams refused such a separation. Cultural studies had to reinsert culture into the practical everyday life of people, into the totality of a whole way of life. Yet Williams was never able to actually escape this separation--both in his privileging of certain forms of culture (literature) and in his desire to equate culture with some sort of totality and/or ethical standard. (Grossberg 1997:16)

Where for Arnold and Leavis an organic vision of social order required a backward glance toward a conservative cultural authority invested in canonical hierarchy, self- 66 evident values and elite cultural leadership, Williams believed organicism to be viable on socialist terms. And it is because of these politics that the difference between these two pillais of "culture and civilization" and Williams can be appreciated. Williams has an irreproachable fidelity to human praxis, to righting economic injustice, and to a socialist fbture which accepts the presence and even goodness of technology and mass-produced popular culture. Not for him Arnold's wish for a culture beyond machinery or Lewis's apocalyptic view of mass culture as a place where "the landmarks have shifted, multiplied and crowded upon one another, the distinctions and dividing lines... blurred away"

(1930: 19). Yet Williams's culturalism has serious problems that might be seen to at least resemble, if not derive fiom, late Romantic sources.

Culturalism, to reprise Hall's slightly embarrassed account in "Cultural Studies: Two

Paradigms," is a form of socialist humanism which concedes to culture considerable determinant power, grounding cultural production in "sensuous human praxis, the activity through which men and women make history" (Hall 1980a:39). Credited with breaking fiom economically deterministic base/superstructure models of totality by dint of what

Williams called "cultural materialism," culturalism values experience and agency as against their orthodox Marxist devaluation as forms of false consciousness and structurally determined behaviour respectively. Yet Williams's definition of culture is troubled by contradiction. Culture is defined both as the reflexive and indeterminate product of communication ("understandings") between people, and more problematically, as the 67

"lived traditions and practices through which those 'understandings' are expressed and in

which they are embodied" (1980a:39).

The problem is not that Williams values tradition: it is that culture in this sense is

defined as an essential property, prior to experience, which binds a11 practices through a

form of "radical interactionism" into Williams's famous "structure of feeling." By the

"structure of feeling," WilIiams meant the phenomenon whereby culture (as expressed in forms, practices, artefacts, etc.) in a given historical period assumes an aggregate character or signature which could then be read to reveal themes unique to that moment in time. This deep structure bound and made distinctive the diffise experience of living at a given time and place, binding by a radical, non-dialectical interactionism a cognitive and affective whole. "All that is lived and made by a given community in a given period, we now commonly believe, essentially related, although in practice, and in detail, this is not always easy to see" (Williams 1968: 17).

Hall writes that given the tendency of culturalists like Richard Hoggart, Thompson and

Williams to find underlying patterns and unities underlying the most disparate of phenomena, the culturalist position is "essentializing" (1980a:39). Such organicism and essentialism is captured in the "structure of feeling" concept. The two definitions of culture Hall identified--as indeterminate experience and determinant totality-are never entirely reconciled in Williams's work, moving Hall to argue that the balance is decidedly tipped in favour of totality. "This sense of cultural totality-of the whole historical process-

-overrides any effort to keep the instances and elements intacty'(1980a: 39). With 68

concepts such as "structure of feeling" Williams tilts away from agency and the early

German premises comfortable with contradiction, and toward the totalizing and mystifying

definition favoured by both Arnold, Leavis and late German Romanticism. Culturalism as thus constituted therefore limits cultural studies's effectiveness in analysis of phenomena-

as novel as new media and as pressing as the fbture of modernity in light of the postmodern critique--that would benefit fiom "romanticizing."

The tension between subject-centered and production-oriented as compared to essentialist and organic conceptions of culture lies at the generous heart of German

Romanticism, separating early fiom late variants. Romanticism "is simultaneously the most radical theory of individual uniqueness, freedom and subjectivity," where the subject's creative practice is the very centre of cultural production, and "at the same time, an extreme theory of cultural unity, sociological realism, and historical reason" (Saiedi 1993 :

107). Late German Romanticism also subscribes to an organicism that is conspicuously essentializing. The problem is not necessarily an organic conception of social totalityper se, but the kind of organicism favoured.

Where in early German Romanticism, nature is invoked as an antidote to the

Enlightenment preference for mechanistic metaphors and models, in the later phase "the same metaphor implies the idea of totality, functional interdependence, priority of the whole to the parts, structural unity and order" (Saiedi 1993: 157). Clearly then there are organicisms such as that favoured by the early German Romantics which, although eschewing a dialectical conception of social process, maintain a dynamic and progressive 69 outlook. But later German Romanticism's organicism is a much more petrified form, suggesting an unreal coherence and equilibrium typical of later sociological fhnctionalism and, sadly, Williams's own work. The late Romantic view of organicism is, arguably, the same that manifests in Arnold and Leavis, and thereby, in Williams's culturalism.

Williams can be criticized for both positing a wholeness thought to exist prior to the differentiation imposed by modernity-an awkward socialist version of the Eden myth--and for identifjmg that wholeness with a set of values which, however admirable in themselves, make Williams's correlation of culture and morality all too self-legitimizing

(and, perhaps, Victorian). Whatever threatens that wholeness is denied status as

"culture," consigned to the large and amorphous category that is the "social," an analytical separation that acts ultimately to reifL Williams's model of totality by simultaneously naturalizing culture (as organic) and isolating the social. The peculiar fate of Williams's view of modernism--the term commonly designating the aesthetic-political movements that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century to make sense of modernity- is just such an example of the tendency of organic models of totality to reify themselves as well as the phenomena under study.

m/illiams 's modernism

The modem aesthetic and political movements col~ectivelyknown as "modernism" that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century with Impressionism, causing riots and consternation everywhere, have always provoked (and indeed, encouraged) strong 70 reactions fiorn the general public and intellectuals dike. The Nazis burned it, the Italian fascists and Stalinist communists made it into propaganda, and even more democratically minded societies and citizens had to make peace with these dangerous visions in art, architecture, literature and theatre, and many other forms. Modernism would have it no other way, the politicization of our aesthetic response being very much the point.

Williams's own response to modernism, given his vast interpretive gifts and political sophistication, is therefore instructive in thinking about his relationship to romanticism and the modern.

Williams believed in modernism, but of a particular kind and only to a point--that is, the point of the late nineteenth century. The modernism of this period, he argues in his essay "When was Modernism?' (Williams 1989), citing social realists like Dickens, Gogol and Flaubert, and the aesthetic movement known as Impressionism, retained its critical edge as regards bourgeois aesthetics. But the modernism of the 1890s-1920s period, a period coincident with both anti-realist modernisms such as Dada, surrealism, and futurism, and the emergence of electric and electronic media like radio, film and television, does not qualify as having the same critical, anti-bourgeois content? Arguing that the antinomian energy of these later modernisms was spent as they split between progressive

(he names Picasso and Brecht) and reactionary (he names Pound, Lewis and Mannetti) factions, Williams proposes that the modernism of the fin de siecle was deeply compromised. "What has quite rapidly happened is that Modernism quickly lost its anti- bourgeois stance, and achieved comfortable integration into the new international 71

capitalism. Its attempt at a universal market, transfiontier and transclass, turned out to be

spurious. Its forms lent themselves to cultural competition and the commercial interplay of

obsolescence, with its shifts of schools, styles and fashion so essential to the market"

(Williams 1985:35).

Even a sympathetic account of Williams's modernism (Pinkney in Eagleton 1989)

allows that the Welsh academic and novelist was notably inconsistent in his reckoning of

modernism. Williams unaccountably passed from the above-noted recognition of modernism's radicalism (one tragically neutralized by the assimilation of modernist forms into the design of consumer goods, advertising, etc.) to a position where twentieth- century, anti-realist modernism itself is written off as a complicit, counterrevolutionary and bourgeois phenomenon with no radical past. Referring to The Year 2000, Pinkney writes (Eagleton 198924) "Yet this most recent account tends to neglect the role of

'consumer modernism' and to paint the modernisms of the turn of the century as homogeneously doom-laden and angst-ridden." While successfilly demonstrating that

Williams was no bumpkin with artistic pretensions--a "British Lukacs" clinging to realism due to an allergy to experiment-Pinkney admits that modernism and traditionalism are at war for Williams's soul. "The modernism that is Williams's almost by instinct is locked in combat, in one phase of his work, with a politico-intellectual decision in favour of a realism that thwarts many of his own deepest political energies7' (Eagleton 1989:28).

The implication here is that modernity as a bonaflde structure of feeling, i. e., as an authentic form of experience and culture, ended with the introduction of the new 72

modernisms. Modernity ceases to qualifjr as a legitimate and resistant "structure of feeling" at the moment that it passes through modernisms, firrtherrnore, that don't respect the organic conception of culture. The market economy, achieving its most global and liberal phase in the period before and after World War I, had grown so robust and extensive as to have swallowed modernism whole, in his view. Modernity and modernism alike are thereby denied any autonomy, a fact Williams underlines when he writes in The

Country and fhe City (I 973:295) that, like the country and the city themselves, "the total character of what we know as modem society has been similarly determined" by capitalism. Indeed, cuIture itself in the early 20th century modem is made to seem what the Williams of his early work, Communications, called "anti-culture," defined as culture "alien to almost everybody, persistently hostile to art and intellectual activity," the culture not of the "ordinary man" but of the "disinherited" (1962: 115). Twentieth- century modernity is therefore defined by the absence of culture, at least as culture is defined in its organic form.'

In Williams's opinion, twentieth-century modernists had also wrought an inauthentic culture best rendered in terms of the "global village" concept he so bated, a Potemkin village where this rootless intelligentsia had honourary citizenship. Against the settled and self-perpetuating organic conception of culture, the modem was accordingly demonized as mobility--memorably in Williams's concept of "mobile privatization."' Such a definition of modernity as mobility is a staple of cultural studies's analysis of the modem: "Unlike many other theories of the emergence of the modem (including the 'culture and society 73

tradition'), cultural studies is driven less by a vision of a total qualitative transformation of

society (e-g., fiom the traditional to the modem or fiom community to mass society)--

cultural studies was never about the destruction of community--than by a concern for the

consequences of new forms and degrees of mobility" (Grossberg 1997: 16). As such,

Williams's conception of modernism is of a cultural sensibility and practice uncomfortable with aesthetics apart fiom realism, and slow to accommodate change.

All this is to say that whatever one might think of the cultural or political desirability of an organic notion of culture, twentieth century modernity and its modernisms should be allowed some measure of autonomy respectively as a form of structure of feeling and an informed response to that structure. If that is allowed, it may be seen that a non-organic

(or better, a variation reflecting a more sophisticated incorporation of nature) conception of culture might properly be a product of social choices appropriate to a given moment in time, such as in the period culminating in the horrors of the Great War and the concomitant death of late-nineteenth century liberal ideals, and not some abomination born of a monstrous capitalism. The fact that the twentienth-century modernist attack on realism, cultural hierarchy and tradition could be co-opted by advertisers building a consumer culture, however, does not take away fiom the truth-telling power of Woolf,

Joyce or Brecht. Early German Romanticism supports a realistic and necessary reading of modernity as compatible with contradiction; late German Romanticism, closer in spirit and substance to Williams's more immediate sources in Arnold and Leavis, does not. 74

If Williams's goal of developing something other than "a narrowly urban-industrial

imagination of modernity" (Pinkney l989:31) is to be achieved, then Romanticism needs

to be revisited. There is enormous value in arguing for a totality that respects complex

connections, whether as an antidote to the niche markets into which theory has too often

located itself, or as a basis for defense against capital. But Williams's prejudice against a

complexity which is incompatible with a rather conservative variant of the organic

conception of culture is not the best means to revive the hopes of an unashamedly modem

cultural theory. Williams's views are reifjling to the extent that the age-old separation of

culture and society is maintained in his work, a separation enforced by Williams's

identification of the social with contradiction, change and false community.

Representation, Ideology and Discourse

Williams's was in some measure a subject-sensitive modernism, but one that proves self-

defeating and inflexible insofar as it ultimately tilts toward a deterministic model of culture

as totality, one maintained against all logic and history. A similar reifying outcome developed in the more formally Marxist and structuralist side of British cultural studies's split personality, with crucial reference to the problem of how reality--modernity included-

-was to be represented. Here again, it will be demonstrated that the reintroduction of

Romanticism might offer a "non-reifjling" alternative to both the strong ideology concept propounded by Eagleton and Hall, and for comparative purposes, the equally strong discourse concept outlined by the Foucauldean media theorist David Sholle. Romanticism 75

offers a model of representation which refuses reification by finding a happy medium

between ideology and discourse, thereby remaining sensitive to the real, if relative,

indeterminacy of the contemporary world.

Ideology and Enlightenment

The concept of ideology, after culture, may be the most important concept in cultural studies, and is almost certainly the supreme category in critical media studies. From

Frenchphilosophe Destutt de Tracy's original 1796 definition of ideology as the

"systematic study of ideas and sensations" to the familiar Marxist and semiotic exegesis as socially produced and politically motivated representations of the world (a form of what

Eagleton coyly calls "false consciousness" (1991a: 13)), ideology comes down to cultural studies and media theory freighted with Enlightenment values. As will be seen, ideology's

Enlightenment past represents a liability, and Romanticism a means to correct, redefine and save this most valuable of intellectual properties fiom over-extension.

Whether in its classic or contemporary form, the concept of ideology is ifised with rationalism, retaining to this day a residue of Enlightenment confidence in the sheer transparency of reality. "However far the concept of ideology has travelled since the days of the Institut National, however varied its uses have become, it remains tied to the ideals of the Enlightenment, in particular to the ideals of the rational understanding of the world ... and of the rational self-determination of human beings" (Thompson 1990:32).

While recent work by John Thompson and Terry Eagleton is self-conscious of ideology's 76

overweening identification with rationality--Eagleton calling for a theory of ideology that

welcomes "the affective, unconscious, mythical or symbolic dimensions" (Eagleton 1991a:

22 1)--neither theorist seriously questions the legitimacy of the term itself

The acknowledged challenge to the ideology concept's validity and, by extension,

ideology critique's practical efficacy, has come fiom post-structuralism and its contention that the "real" or referent has disappeared beyond the limits of discourse. Hence the real is unreachable, and the "truth" merely a rhetorical construct--the invention of whom or whatever controls discourse at a particular time. But the more serious if less explicit challenge to ideology comes from inside its own conceptual universe, whereby it may be seen as the victim of its own success. The problem is that ideology critique's own ideology, the Enlightenment values of which it was made, have disposed it to a self- defeating process of reification.

Even critics sympathetic to a modernist criticism--editors of a book optimistically subtitled "reconstructing ideology critique7'--haverecently raised similar concerns.

Canvassing the various ways in which radical criticism has confronted the Enlightenment heritage, fiom the FrankfUrt School's charge that reason was hijacked by instrumental rationality under capitalism, to feminist and post-structuralist arguments that ideology critique appeals to masculine forms of reason or an untenable foundationalism, Billig and

Simons (1994:2) state that "the suspicion is raised that Manc and Engels's project of

'enlightenment' was itself in the grip of an ideology, one which put an innocent trust in the power of reason and an optimistic faith in modernity." Although theory has time and again had to reinvent itself to answer to post-colonial studies, queer theory and other arguments

for reality's stubborn refbsal to fit into models prepared for it, ideology critique boldly

assumes that ideology can ultimately be traced fiom its origins in social structure to the

text where it's manifested (or vice versa). Such overreaching can ironically itself invite

despair, as confident theory meets with a reality that seems daily more complex and intractable, forcing criticism either to grand Althusserian vagaries or the smallness of vision which generates endless analyses of Madonna or X-Files:

The growth of cultural studies also expresses, often indirectly, an increasing political pessimism, at least as compared with the bright optimism of the early pages of Xhe German Ideology. No longer do cuItural critics believe that a sudden ray of illumination will, like a laser beam, remove the cancer of ideological illusion. Each work of cultural analysis emphasizes the depth and breadth of the ideological processes in the age of the mass media. In so doing, each reveals the enormity of the task of emancipation.@illig and Simons 1994: 4)

Eagleton, Volosinov and the indeterminate sign

The concept of ideology currently favoured by cultural studies, and influential in neo-

Marxist media theory, is one disposed to reification due to its reliance on a model of discourse--"discourse7' here defined as language in its normal, socially constituted form-- that denies to language any meaningful determinant proper tie^.^ Language, in other words, is not allowed to "mean" very much, insofar as it is allowed very little influence on the nature and direction of meaning or its social implications. This denial is made possible due to the power and presence of the Enlightenment heritage in social theory, which prefers the rationalist and empirical values supported by ideology to the indeterminate properties 78

of language better appreciated by Romanticism. Marxist-semiotic ideology critique thus

relies on a model of discourse, imported fiorn Volosinov's Mamism and the Philosophy of

Language, and acknowledged as a primary source for thinking about language's

relationship to ideology in works by Eagleton and Hall, which reduces language to a

transparent and neutral medium or carrier, rather than a significant condensation of the

social itself1"Discourse is therefore reified at the source, its social content and character

suppressed in favour of a model of language that assumes language's transparency, thus

making ideology critique's claims to peer deeply into reality possible. Overcome, the

prevalent theory of representation in cultural studies is defined almost exclusively on

ideological terms, an uncomfortable choice for an intellectual project dedicated to the

study of culture.

How does Volosinov's influential model underwrite the self-reifying nature of

ideology critique? By defining the sign as the sum total of meanings imparted to it by

social interests contending for its control in society. Eagleton (199 la: 195)' deriving

much of his essay on "Ideology and Discourse" in Ideology: An Iwroduction fiom

Volosinov's book, approvingly characterizes the Russian theorist's view of this competition: "A particular social sign is pulled this way and that by competing social interests, inscribed from within by a multiplicity of ideological 'accents'; and it is in this way that it sustains its dynamism and vitality." The work of giving ideology a meaningful. social and material context, of course, is recognized as Volosinov's great contribution; but it represents also a problem insofar as discourse is concerned. In 79

being reduced to ideological contestation, discourse is forbidden its autonomy, a

decision with dire consequences for Eagleton and Hall.

Volosinov's great achievement was to break with psychological theories of ideology

that--not unlike the near mystical concept of "ether," which pre-atomic physics thought to

be the medium connecting matter and energy in the universe--made ideology into an

invisible, if insidious, process magically capable of clouding the minds of millions.

Volosinov defined ideology as a phenomenon bound up with language, bumping the

metaphysics fiom the concept and replacing it with a thoroughly materialist interpretation

of how ideology works. The material nature of the sign, he argued, was invested in the

actual physical form or manifestation it took, e.g., the chalk dust on the blackboard, the

fleshy fact of the hand waving "hello." By dint of the physical identity of its signifier, the

sign was thereby located within the mode of production at large. "Every ideological sign is

not only a reflection, a shadow, of reality, but is also itself a material segment of that very

reality. Every phenomenon hnctioning as an ideological sign has some kind of material

embodiment, whether in sound, physical mass, color, movement of the body, or the like"

(Volosinov 1929:1 1).

However, this ideological sign, though defined against a simple notion of the sign as merely reflective of consciousness, remains reflective in nature. That is, though Volosinov acknowledges the sign's autonomy--its "refracting" power--this autonomy is merely the dynamism imputed to it by social struggle. The sign in and of itself is denied the capacity to resist its determination due to the fact that its material and social identity is defined on 80

terms that favour Volosinov's model of ideology. The sign is material, but Volosinov concedes these fonnal properties (championed by the Russian formalists) the better to bury it in dialectical process all the more securely; the sign is social, but only insofar as it is the object and instrument of social contest. What is denied here in Volosinov, and in important writings on ideology and discourse by Eagleton and Hall, is that the material and social nature of language makes it irreducible even to something as potent as ideology. "In apprehending, comprehending and representing the world we inevitably draw upon linguistic formulations... . In this sense, representation is always interested: the words chosen are selected fiom a determinate set for the situation at hand and have been previously shaped by the community, or by those parts of it, to which the speaker belongs"

(Montgomery 1995:228).

This is not to say that the sign is not in relationship with the dialectic, nor at play in social struggle, of course. But its material nature also brings, as Romanticism will recognize below, a certain amount of mediation and indeterminacy with regard to its contexts. Moreover, its social nature allows that the sign has a history, where it is shaped and selected by processes other than exclusively ideological ones, and its meanings multiplied through use to the point of (at least potential) indeterminacy, before its appearance in a given ideological contest. The loss of its material and social identity on these terms erases its indeterminacy, and replaces it with a thoroughgoing "fusion" with those social interests and their location(s) in social structure. In creditably separating himself and improving upon (founder of structural linguistics) Ferdinand de Saussure's formalism, and thereby giving the sign a material identity and a social context, Volosinov ironically acted to deny the social origins and significance of form.

"Language," writes Volosinov (1929: 99,"acquires life and historically evolves precisely here, in concrete verbal communication, and not in the abstract linguistic system of language forms, nor in the individual psyche of speakers." Yet, there is no such thing as mere "form": the formal properties of language are necessarily themselves social in nature, and in their discursive guise contain meaningful possibilities--even new worlds--that are neither captured nor exhausted by ideological contest. Williams, in an otherwise approving review of Volosinov's breakthrough, allows that the Russian scholar (believed by many to have been Bakhtin wearing a Stalin-era pseudonym) may have obscured the internal dynamic between form and content in the sign itself:

Volosinov, even after these hndamental restatements, continues to speak of the 'sign - system': the formulation that had been decisively made in Saussurean linguistics. But if we follow his arguments we find how difficult and misleading this formulation can be. 'Sign' itself--the mark or token; the formal element--has to be revalued to emphasize its variability and internally active elements, indicating not only an internal structure but an internal dynamic. (1 977:42)

Eagleton (1991a: 195) admits that Volosinov overplays the role of ideology in the sign's constitution--"language and ideology are in one sense identical to Volosinov, they are not in another"--but argues (again, following Volosinov's lead) that the fact that social interests struggle over the sign defines its relative autonomy. But though the sound and fury of ideological combat certainly bring signs new life, as we have seen in debates around Benetton ads and Oliver Stone's "JFK," the signs are only valuable to those 82 interests because they have a past that can be exploited and one which is not exhausted in

the moment of use. The "dumbing down" of the sign is evident in Eagleton's account of

ideology, which acts to intens@ Volosinov's conflation of ideology and sign (no mention

is made in Eagleton's chapter, for example, of the role Volosinov grants to consciousness

and the phenomenon of "inner speech"):

If ideology cannot be divorced fiom the sign, then neither can the sign be isolated fiom concrete forms of social intercourse. It is within these alone that the sign 'lives'; and these forms of intercourse must in turn be related to the material basis of social lie. The sign and its social situation are inextricably fbsed together, and this situation determines fiom within the form and stnrcture of an utterance. (199la:195)

It is one thing to acknowledge that the sign cannot be isolated fkom context, and quite

another to argue that the sign is "inextricably fused" to social structure. This reductive

definition of the sign is made all the more complete by Eagleton's treatment of the

problem of indeterminacy-the empirically unknowable and uncontrollable nature of

language and reality. He is correct to argue that "Textuality, ambiguity, indeterminacy lie

often enough on the sign of dominant ideological discourses themselves" (1 99 1a: l98), but

instead of recovering these things on behalf of a critical perspective, he concedes the

point by consigning them to post-structuralism. "Post-structuralist thought often enough

sets up ideology in this 'straw target' style, only to go on to confront it with the creative

ambiguities of 'textuality' or the sliding of the signifier.. .. " (199 1a: 198). With

indeterminacy safely out of the way, then ideology, sign and structure may by all rights be

"fbsed." But Eagleton's consistency, as noted in a review of his Z%e Ideology of the 83

Aesthetic, has historically come at the expense of the aesthetic, a fact which will return to

haunt his analysis. "@2agleton] reads the philosophicd tradition of modernity in such a way

that he takes too little account of the fact that there always has been, especially in relation

to the aesthetic, a vital subversive element in that tradition's conception of subjectivity, which resists assimilation into conceptuality and forces philosophy to admit its own failure to achieve full transparency" (Bowie 199 1 :37).

The pertinent sociolinguistic fact is thereby ignored by Eagleton, via Volosinov: language's formal properties do impress themselves on conununication in ways that are not reducible to the material location nor strategic ploys of its users. Though ideology itself plays a part in the historical sifting and selection of linguistic resources, so do then the everyday exigencies of communicative practice, habit, accident, and innovation, as well as the formal and material existence of language. Much of the collective memory of a culture lies precisely in its stock of verbal and non-verbal elements. Given a weak theory of discourse, ideology critique's is flattered and inflated beyond its means, but at the expense of denying the material form and social content of discourse. The consequences of this weak concept of discourse, and hence the potential for a romantic revision of stock concepts of ideology and discourse in cultural studies, also register in instructive ways in the media theory of Stuart Hall. 84

Hall and ideology in media criticism

Hall's media theoretical tour de force is "EncodingIDecoding in Television Discourse,"

originally published as a stencil through the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies,

then anthologized. In "EncodingIDecoding,"Hall broke the monopoly of the long-

dominant 'media effects" school on the study of audience, and offered a platform for

much subsequent work in media reception and cultural practice generally within

cultural studies. The influence of Hall's 'EncodingIDecoding" essay on subsequent

work in both media research and other cultural theory in cultural studies is large, as is

the shadow cast by Hall on media work at the Centre. Hall had primary responsibility

for formulating the Centre's theoretical positions as regards media, though the research

itself (as on subculture) was collective in nature @workin 1997:169). During the late

1970s and early 1980s, the semiotics/structuralist tradition of textual analysis which

Hall himself brought into British cultural studies became institutionalized in media

studies and communications courses in secondary and university education in Britain

(Turner 1990). Given Hall's influence in opening cultural studies to the work of

Saussure, Barthes and Althusser, the encoding/dding model must be reckoned his most influential contribution to media studies.

Xn this essay, a characteristic Hall blend of Volosinov, Althussser, and Gramsci,

Hall provides not only an alternate model of reception as filtered through the usual structuralist premises as to how meaning is socially produced, but an influential 85 metaphor for agency in cultural studies. Hall's genius was to use structuralism to break down the mediation process into distinct moments, and then to privilege those moments when the ideological content of a given message was most in flux. For Hall, the meaning of a particular media message was most open to negotiation at the point where it was, first, encoded by media workers in a TV production unit, for example; and second, when it was decoded by the people viewing the program. Once the referent or real world event being mediated at the sending end, e.g., a news story about a catastrophic fire, had passed under the sign of discourse, it was largely free of determination until it had been consumed and reproduced in the minds and lives of the viewers. For a message to have any consequence in Hall's opinion, rational meaning had to be taken from it. Slyly appropriating the effects model's language for the occasion, particularly notions of "effect" and the "uses and gratifications" that supposedly compelled viewers to watch in the first place, Hall (1980b: 130) wrote

"Before this message can have an 'effect' (however defined), satisfy a 'need' or be put to a 'use,' it must first be appropriated as a meaningful discourse and be meaningfully decoded. It is this set of decoded meanings which 'have an effect,' influence, entertain, instruct or persuade, with very complex perceptual, cognitive, emotional, ideological or behavioural consequences. "

Audience members then, according to their own relationship to the program's messages, either irresistibly believed the ideological content of the message (what Hall 86

called a dominant or hegemonic reading), generally believed the message but thought it

didn't necessarily apply to their own personal or local circumstances (negotiated

reading), or interpreted the message as ideological and resisted it (oppositional

reading). So much is now legendary in cultural studies-influenced media research

generally. However, Hall's ending/model, and general advocacy of the 'return of the

repressed" concept of ideology in media studies, invites a romantic indictment on

several counts: the weakness of discourse in his analysis relative to ideology, the

related problem of his inattention to affect and, ultimately, structuralism 's responsibility to the problem of meaning.

In *Encoding/Decoding,"Hall defines discourse in such a way as to reduce discourse to just another synonym for ideology. Though there is token acknowledgement of the fact that other discourses, e.g., professional and technical communications among media workers producing a given show, have some influence on the content of a given message, Hall's sensitivity to issues of discourse, as opposed to ideology, ends there.

This would be but an isolated problem, a blemish on an otherwise exemplary body of work, except for the fact of Hall's influence on major audience studies such as David

Morley 's "Nationwide" project, Sut Jhally's research on viewers of the Cosby Show, and Ien Ang's Foucauldean work. Missing in Hall's analysis is recognition of the fact that the conditions of discourse extend well beyond the particular moments of encoding and decoding he has outlined. That is, both media producers and consumers are 87

themselves implicated in discourses of various kinds, e.g., gender, class, race and

ethnicity, religion, taste, understandings of particular issues derived from education,

life experience, etc., which do not reduce to a simple notion of ideology. The

contingency, the relative autonomy, and lack of necessary symmetry between encoding

and decoding moments Hall argues are found in the interval between encoding and

decoding are also found outside the mere parameters of mediation, in the strictest

sense.

The message does not simply enter its discursive form once it's been encoded, as

Hall's model suggests: it is never ourside of discourse. Hall's use of interpellation in

"Encoding/Decodingn--theAlthusserian concept of mediation whereby language constructs a subject's location in structure--dematerializes Hall's idea of audience to the point where the threepart interpretive schema is cast into doubt. There really is no existential purchase, and therefore no guarantee of contradiction, from which his decoders might challenge the ideology in a given message. The result is that HaLlts presumably "active" model of audience is made into an ironically passive construct of how audiences operate. "Surprisingly, in the end, this seems to leave no space for the power of either the text itself or the historical actor to excite and incite historical struggles around particular discourses. While Hall argues that the audience cannot be seen as passive cultural dopes, he cannot elaborate its positivity. Neither aspect of the relation [i.e., the encoding and decoding moments] can be understood as merely a 88

matter of tendential structures that have, historically, already articulated a particular

discourse or subject into powerful ideological positions" (Grossberg in Morley and

Kuan-Hsing Chen 1996: 167).

Fiske, in his friendly critique of Hall's model, attempts to much more fully socialize

encoding and decoding, allowing the people at either end alI the texture and

contradiction that life inside multiple, intersecting discourses allows. Citing Morley's

ethnographic audience studies as an exemplary correction of Hall, Fiske argues that

accounting for the discourse in which (particularly) the decoding party is situated means

that the critical moment for analysis is not when the viewer interprets the text, but

when her or his discourses meet the discourses in which the text is located. "Fleading

becomes a negotiation between the social sense inscribed in the program and the

meanings of social experience made by its wide variety of viewers; this negotiation is a discursive one" (Fiske 1987:269). The media text, rather than possessing a single ideological point by which the receiver's critical powers are tried and tested, is then realized no longer as a delimited and homogeneous thing, as the formalism of New

Criticism and semiotics has tended to configure it, but a site for the production of meaning.

These criticisms of Hall's media theory aside, his more recent work on "articulation" evinces the same reification seen in "Encoding/Decoding." By "articulation," Hall describes how the structural relationship of larger moments, e.g., the appearance of a vanguard at a revolutionarily propitious time, can unfold. "Articulation" is a means to imagine how contradictions and political opportunities may occur outside of some notion of necessary or determined historical change. "[Aln articulation is thus the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements," "under certain conditions," and according to a dialectical relationship which is "not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time'' (Hall in Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen 1996: 141; Hall's emphasis). This grants an elective and contingent quality to historical change. It explains why and why not certain changes may occur, e-g., the "stalled dialectic" in the Western working class, how particular relations endure over time to the point where they are deeply naturalized and exert a powefil "tendential" force on other structures, e.g., the

Roman Catholic Church's hegemony in medieval Europe, and how human agents can take advantage of moments of structural contingency to make constructive changes. Criticism of "articulation" acknowledges Hall's failure to effectively distinguish ideology fiom discourse, suggesting a single-mindedness that limits much of Hall's analysis largely to the level of individual acts of signification:

the failure of cultural studies is not that it continues to hold to the importance of signieing and ideological practices but rather, that it always limits its sense of discursive effectivity to this plane. It fails to recognize that discourses may not only have contradictory effects within the ideological, but that those ideological effects may themselves be placed within complex networks of other sorts of effects. Consequently, the particular model of articulation falls back into a structuralism of empty spaces in which every place in the ideological web is equally weighted, equally charged so to speak. The cultural field remains a product of oddly autonomous, indeterminate struggles, an amorphous field of equal differences and hence of equivalences. (Grossberg in Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen 1996: 197) Even after Hall's break with Althusserianism, signalled in his "The Rediscovery of

'Ideology': Return of the Repressed in Media Studies," Hall never successfully

recovered a working and effective concept of discourse. "Yet, although Hall also

cautiously suggests that ideology and language should not be treated as identical, and

even concluded in 1980 that there existed an 'immensely powerful pull towards

idealism in Cultural Studies,' the hold exercised over theory by structuralist

conceptions of language was such that Hall could arrive at no thoroughgoing

alternative formulationn(Schiller 1996: 154). The galloping reification of

"wmmunicationn--particularly its separation from labour--in most traditions of

communication, media and cultural criticism manifests in cultural studies in an

abstraction as much theoretical as it is institutional (Schiller 1996). "What, we may then

ask, created the conditioning architecture of this curious space, in which theory

becomes free to enact, almost as a matter of instinct, the separating-out from society and, in particular, from a reciprocally reified 'economic' instance of a putatively independent and self-generating realm, variously fashioned 'signification' or 'ideology' or 'language' or, indeed, 'culture.' The pull in this direction may be associated with cultural studies's defensive reinstitutionalization within a primary site of 'intellectual' labor--the universityn (Schiller 1996: 157).

Affect--the emotional, sensory and experiential fact of human life--is also unhappily affected by the strong ideology concept in Hall's work. The ideology concept on 91

which Hall depends is thoroughly rationalist in nature, depicting the moment of

reception as a matter of good or bad interpretive choices made in relation to a media

text. But rational comprehension and choice are but a small part of reception, as

emotions, the unconscious mind, and even the body are also directIy addressed by

media messages. All these elements are registered on Romanticism's more sensitive

filters, yet are largely absent in ideological analysis. No one examining a music video,

an infomercial, or even a lot of ordinary contemporary programming (given action

sequences, representation of sexuality, etc.) should assume that media can alone be critically defined as messages rationally decoded by the receiver. The result is a textualism that locates excessive determining power in the media text (not unlike the media effects model), even as it argues for the relative autonomy of encoding and decoding. The ultimate irony is that Hall is not really able to transcend the passivity of the behaviouristic effects model nor its view of media reception as rational in nature, though he certainly allowed audience research after him a weIcome new direction.

Hall's structuralism is also womed by the "pessimism" that follows on cultural theory which is insensitive to affect, such as those structuralisms conceptually incapable of deahg well with history and the subject. Pessimism follows on a depiction of the human subject essentially overruled by the power of ideology. Hall himself has spoken to the need to address the "sensibility of mass culture" but just what this sensibility is and on what terms it is recognizably human are unexplained (Grossberg in Morley and Kuan-Hsing 92

Chen 1996:168). It remains that the overuse of ideology and the absence of affect leads to a kind of despair about the human prospect, a efficient rninimalization of the subject which leaves the critic wondering just who she or he is concerned to defend. "When ideology becomes a term to describe an entire way of life or just another name for what is going on, then the rich phenomenological diversity of modem societies becomes reduced to a flattened analysis of conflict between classes and factions. Economics may have been the original dismal science; culturaVideologica1 studies now threaten to displace it" (Carey

1988: 105).

The last romantic problem with Hall's work addresses its theoretical debt to structural linguistics, and structuralism's Enlightenment bias: the problem of meaning. Structuralism can act to compress the various elements of a given text to the point where its complexity is reduced to an orderly system that quite belies its eccentricity, dimension and context

(McRobbie 1994: 14). In this pursuit of a certain epistemological purity, structuralism signals its intention to leave issues of content behind in favour of underlying form. For

Hall (1982:71) "This move from content to structure or from manifest meaning to the level of code is an absolutely characteristic one in the critical approach." This is fine for the analyst, but leaves wide open serious questions for the layperson who must inhabit a reality which, as Hall puts it in his own "Return of the Repressed" essay, is really but a

"reality effectw--adeeply naturalized complex of representations.

It is one thing to plead for a hermeneutic solution to structuralism's formality, and that is a direction that leads to different and deeper problems. But it is another to ask for some 93

semblance of human verisimiltude in light of the structuralist preference for elegant, orderly objects of analysis, and this is a self-critical and unconventional humanism which

Romanticism delivers. Denied such a capacity for texture and depth, structuralism exposed itself to reification, as did other objectivist conceptions of language such as Russian formalism--the work of Saussure representing "the major theoretical expression of this reified understanding of language" (Williams 1977:27). Structuralism's inability to sincerely address the problem of meaning thereby left it at competitive disadvantage to the euphoric celebration of meaninglessness such as is expressed by the more extreme post- structuralisms.

Romanticism offers a critique of structuralism's lack of responsibility to the problem of meaning, and a possible solution. Let us first consider an analogy between the metaphysics developed by seventeenth century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza and structuralism

(Bowie 1995:10). In Spinoza's thought, no single premise is meaningful, except as it relates to another premise. That is, there is no premise which is not "conditioned," which is to say that nothing is meaningfbl in itself outside a rather circular stmcture of relationships or chain of signifiers. (The referent, i.e., the thing to which the sign refers is, of course, understood to be silent and lacking in inherent meaning.) As structuralism puts this model of meaning, meaning is "negative," i.e., a sign is identified by what it is not

(e.g., I know a dog is a dog because it is not a cat, a bird, an iguana) because meaning does not inhere in the object referred to (the referent), but instead derives fiom the structure of relations between signs themselves. In such a system, Spinozist or 94

structuralist, meaning is thus held to be "transparent" to itself Moreover, the subject as

imagined by both Spinozism and structuralism is held to be capable of complete self-

knowledge--of ail objectivity as to knowledge such as is commonly assumed in the natural

sciences. Without such perfect self-knowledge, the subject could hardly be sure of the

order inherent in the chain of signifiers, or of the non-correspondence with the referent in

reality. The very symmetry of the signs--the smooth fbnctioning of the Spinozist and structuralist language machine--comes to represent a kind of implicit and unacknowledged foxy of truth. One may not know what is true; but one knows that this system is as described, a function of the perfect self-knowledge volunteered fieely to the subject.

The Romantic--or in this case, more accurately, the German idealist--critique of

Spinzoism, and by implication, the structuralism which post-dates Romanticism, comes fiom the philosopher Jacobi. Jacobi, whose work anticipated the German Romantics, suggests that this theory of knowledge deflects the problem of truth. "The problem Jacobi reveals is that we have no ultimate way of philosophically explaining either what we think truth is, or of explaining our very awareness of a world which gives rise to questions of truth. If each particular belief we hold true is dependent upon other beliefs, none of these

'conditioned' beliefs can ever show why anything is held true at all, nor can it explain how it is we are aware of the world of conditions that constitutes what we claim to know''

(Bowie 1995: 8-9). There is, in other words, no way of breaking into the perfect symmetry of signification and proving or disproving its case. In the circularity of the semiotic system, a pattern beyond proof and presuming a perfectly informed subject, a position 95

outside that reduction is very difficult to come by. Moreover, in such a system the risk of

conflating ideology and language is all the greater, since there is nothing to appeal to but

the system's own logic. This is an order that may, given that structuralism is a brainchild

of the Enlightenment's own wilI to rationality, be as ideological as the most appallingly

manipulative media text.

The romantic self, moreover, is one that cannot ever know itself ultimately, and

therefore make a claim to objectivity or point to transparent meaning. The subject's

reflexivity-our ability to reflect on the meaning of our own words and actions via

consciousness--continually intempts the production of meaning, shifting signs in ways not

predicted by the perrnut at ions of codes themselves. The self represents an unconditioned

premise, if you will, in the chain of logical operations, and the romantic search for a

metaphysical basis for meaning, even if this search must be ultimately fruitless, is the only

way knowledge is advanced. "The need for the assumption of what is 'unconditioned'

seems therefore inescapable if there is to be a philosophically groundable account of truth,

but the unconditioned itself seems philosophically inarticulable" (Bowie 1995:9).

Romanticism thus proceeds from glorious failure to glorious failure, learns from its

lacunae, and has an imaginary reach always greater than its empirical grasp. The aesthetic

model of representation that results, as outlined in the final section of this chapter, provides a hller explanation of the romantic alternative to the structuralist endgame.

Sholle and discourse 96

The obvious alternative to the model of representation developed by Volosinov and influential in cultural studies is the one adapted fiom Foucault's work, and best demonstrated in Discipline and Punish. David ShoIle's article, "Critical Studies: From the

Theory of Ideology to Power/Knowledge" is an exemplary representative of the genre.

Sholle's analysis is as valuable for its criticism of the ideology concept as it is illustrative of the shortcomings of a strong "discourse" position.

Following Foucault, Sholle argues that "ideology" represents a misunderstanding of social totality, in that the concept assumes a separation between discursive practices (e.g., media, writing, speaking) and non-discursive or material practices (e.g., labour) that does not exist in reality. Acknowledging Raymond Williams's own discomfort with "ideology"-

-it serves as a stopgap or analytical alibi when the work of tracing determination falters, the theorist condemning as "ideoIogy" that which she or he cannot discern as taking the form of determination (Sholle 1988:29; see Williams 1980:245)--Sholle argues that the ideology concept does not respect the autonomy of discourse. Citing Foucault's objection, Sholle notes that "discourses are already powers and do not need to find their material force somewhere else, as in the mode of production" (Sholle 1988:28). The ideology concept, in the last instance and after whatever protocols and permutations

Mamist cultural theory requires, returns to the economic base as means to explanation.

In adhering to a theory of ideology that yokes base to superstructure--or non- discursive to discursive, to use the Foucauldean lexicon--Sholle argues that Manrism avoids confronting the "double problematic" at its core. That is, Manrisrn claims empirical 97

knowledge of the conditions under which consciousness is produced, cinching this claim

by use of the ideology concept. Yet, Marxism's hubris is necessarily qualified by the fact

that language interposes itself between student and studied. Marxism cannot make claims

in the name of ideology critique without acknowledging the fact that "the continual

presence of conditions of language, communication and signification, conditions that act

as limits on knowledge, forces Mancism to recognize the tenuous nature of its project to find the instance of determination" (Sholle 1988: 25). Sholle's solution to the "double problematic" is to collapse the distinction between "phenomena" and "noumena" (to borrow Kantyscategories), and argue that "discursive and non-discursive practices should be examined at the same level, as material practicesyy(Sholle 1988: 29). Although this

Foucauldean solution raises as many problems at it solves, as will be seen, Sholle poses a question by which the Romantic alternative might also be judged:

At the theoretical level, the concept of ideology, as tied in with the double problematic of the human sciences, inevitably duplicates that dichotomy. The concept of ideology is found wanting if it is inserted into a totalizing discourse, a discourse that attempts to show how objects are determined .... But can this area of ideology critique be articulated in another discursive space, one that does not separate discourse and practice, one that reconceptualizes discourse as itself a material practice? (1988: 29-30)

Sholle's answer to the rhetorical question he poses--can the concept of ideology find a new epistemological home where it doesn't definitively separate the discursive and non- discursive and thus, it might be said, end up reifjing the object of analysis--bears examining. First, just as the ideology concept pretends to an overweening rationalism, the powerknowledge theme on which Foucault's alternative rests makes no more room for 98

affect, experience, and imagination, especially since knowledge is narrowly defined as

cognitive in nature. Reason may play the villain in the Foucauldean model as much as it

retains heroic stature in ideology critique; but reason remains the central character in both

dramatizations of the real.

Moreover, as in the strong ideology thesis, indeterminacy is aIso suppressed in Sholle's

argument, being subject to the totalizing panoptic power of discourse. But this is a model

of discourse which, like Eagleton's Volosinovian model, depends on a simple and

unresistant theory of language, and therefore makes indeterminacy a theoretical straw

target. Discourse may be granted equal status with non-discursive practices, insofar as

both are recognized for their material effects on the world. But the source of discourse's

new power derives fiom sources external to itself Its materiality has nothing to do with the instrinsic properties of language in its pure or applied discursive form, but rather has

everything to do with the "will to power" motivating language to obscure and dangerous

ends.

This suggests a resemblance between ShoUeYsdiscourse concept and ideology, one borne out by his ready appropriation of ideology within a Foucauldean fiamework.

"'Ideology' becomes the means to name the presence of power in discourse. No longer is ideology a fdse consciousness or a reflection of class interests or an imaginary relation or a production of obhscating ideas. Rather, ideology is that condition of all discourse that is present as the embodiment or articulation of power, as the maintenance of control over definition itself' (Sholle 1988: 37). The reifjing nature of Sholle's model of (non)- 99

representation is still more profound than Eagleton's, and just as self-serving. While

scolding Mamists for their determinism, Sholle's FoucauIdean model just as crudely

appropriates the material to itself through an intellectual sleight of hand. Denying that the referent is in any way meaninghlly discernible due to the "double problematic," Sholle assimilates the material into the condition of discourse by crediting discourse with status as "material practice." Discourse therefore enjoys the benefits of having direct effect upon reality, without having to actually answer to that reality. Unchecked and unaccountable, discourse's over-extension is parallel to that suffered by ideology. "The category of discourse is inflated to the point where it imperializes the whole world, eliding the distinction between thought and material reality" (Eagleton 1991 a: 2 19).

With the social and material world thus conveniently dissolved into discourse, neither it nor the forms in which it resides, such as language,'can offer any point of resistance.

Ironically, then, a theory that seeks to restore to discourse a power lost to it in ideology critique persists in a reifjling, reflective form of intellectua1 practice. The major difference is that where the ideological sign reflects the sum total of social interests contending for it, the "discursive sign" (to coin an oxymoronic phrase) endlessly reflects the play of power and knowledge internal to itself--a one-way mirror, if you like. The relational nature of reality is mocked then with the endless play of signification within discourse itself Where ideology critique reifies by isolating textual meaning fiom context (followed by equally implausible claims to connection between text and social structure), post-structuralism 100

presupposes the largely pointless relationship of signs within discourse and undisciplined

by the material world.

Because the Foucauldean model replaces the baselsuperstructure model with one which assumes a categorical separation between the discursive and that which lies outside in the realm of the ineffable and unstatable, discourse's determinism is chronically directed to the work of "exclusion." The "ineffable" is an analytical convenience for post-structuralism, a memory hole where things that might conflict with the Foucauldean narrative can be disposed of through "exclusion" (a similarity to Williams's use of the social might be noted). Sholle writes: "The media create a way of seeing, a method of ordering and judging, or a means of selection and preference that constitutes the domain of that which is discussable (statable)" (1988: 34-5). But discourse can act to include as well, a relative autonomy that is not supported by Sholle's position. The truth may not be "out there7' in the uncomplicated way that ideology critique often implies, but neither is it merely an effect of language. Rather, as will be seen in discussion of the romantic "aesthetic" theory of representation, truth can both have an existence outside of discourse in the realm of the

"to be said," yet not be humbly reduced to something that can be rationally captured.

Sholle's question is worth repeating. Can ideology critique find a place where, although discursive and non-discursive practices, and for that matter, culture and economy as well as word and world are not categorically separable, neither are they merely reducible to one another? Romanticism represents an intermediate position between the strong ideology thesis of Eagleton and Hall, and the strong discourse position taken by Sholle. 101

The "aesthetic" model of representation it favours is at once more sensitive to the

indeterminate reality in which we live (and one more indeterminate still due to the

presence of new media), while inspiring confidence that meaningfir1 and multi-dimensional

things might be said of it.

Romanticizing Representation: Between Ideology and Discourse

Many current debates about the status of truth and the politics of representation have their

origins in Romantic thought. Of equal contemporary consideration here is the Romantic

interest in the irreducible nature of the aesthetic, relative to its ready convertability to

ideology in ideology critique as well as to discourse in Foucauldean terms, and the

particular and timely approach it takes to the problem of truth. In discussing the Romantic

"aesthetic" model of representation in light of these criteria, some constructive way out of

the unproductive dualism of ideology versus discourse might be found. Once out of this

impasse, what becomes apparent is that some fiesh insight into the utopian function of

culture--a bit of daylight through the cracks in these monolithic concepts--becomes

possible.

For the Romantic, the irreducibility of discourse is a finction of its separate identity in

nature; that is, language is an "other" to the speaker, and exists apart fiom direct control

by self, structure, power or what have you--a fact which does not escape writers of

dissertations. For the Romantic, the materiality of the sign derives fiom the fact that

"language is, in one sense, manifested like any other thing in the world" (Bowie 1997:73). 102

It has an ontological independence fiom its users, a social nature that cannot be merely co-opted or denied, as it is in both ideology critique inspired by Volosinov's linguistic theory, and in work motivated by Foucault's "discourse" concept. Language is "both determinable as a material phenomenon and beyond such law-bound determination when the resources it offers are recombined to remake our ways of understanding the world"

(Bowie 1997:73).

Romanticism believed in the autonomy of the aesthetic, insofar as it refbed in its fbsion of linguistic and imaginary properties easy reduction into ideology, "meaning" or some other alien value (Bowie 1997:25). Rather, as much as ideology and discourse seek to convert culture into themselves, the Romantic aesthetic model of representation constantly reminds us of the unimpeachability of word and world, self and other, even as it celebrates our efforts to cross it. In this doomed effort to cross the divide we are, in the

Romantic perspective, at our most human, taking advantage of the power of the imagination to generate new worlds.

Given its irreducibility, what then does an aesthetically-defined sign do about truth?

The aesthetic sign opts for a middle way between ideology critique's insistence on the correspondence of sign and referent, and post-structuralism's preference for non- correspondence. Romanticism favoured what has come to be familiarly defined as a

"hemeneutic" reading of the relationship between word and world. Knowledge consists in the disclosure or revelation of what was, prior to utterance, not yet said, the defamiliarization of a hitherto unknown or ineffable reality. By contrast, ideology critique allows little surprise or discovery in its epistemology, since new information is firther

evidence of the conspiracy (or resistance thereto), while post-structuralism writes off the

unrepresented as a permanent unknown excluded fiom the sealed envelope of discourse.

Ideology critique, in limiting meaning to the scope of elements in reality thought to pre-

exist our knowing, contributes to the same disenchantment that it would, aiming at technocratic and rationalistic liberal capitalism, otherwise criticize.

In the modem period the world becomes more and more knowable, and more and more meaningtess .... Although they do not regressively reject advances in scientific knowledge. .. the Romantics look for a conception of truth which does not simply equate truth with conceptual determination, at the same time as regarding the natural sciences as a vital part of the new picture of the world. The crucial aim was a new integration of the elements of the world: hence the idea that aesthetic forms give a higher kind of meaning than assertions of a determinate nature, whose meaning is anyway dependent upon their contexts. (Bowie 1997: 80; Bowie's emphasis)

Romanticism doesn't dismiss the stability of the everyday signs and statements on which life and sanity depend. We can still order an egg salad sandwich at a lunch counter, and expect to be understood. But the metaphoric or allegorical character of the aesthetic or romantic sign--the fact that, given the limitations of language, signs can only approximate their referents in reality by drawing analogies--means that the most conventional of signs is vulnerable to change. Given the relational nature of Romantic epistemology and ontology, context is always changing, as relations that draw into question previous models of reality are discovered and incorporated into knowledge.

Where for ideology critique context is an ultimately knowable and rather homogeneous totality, and where for poststructuralism context is irrelevant due to the unbounded 104 textuality of experience, romanticism supports a continuous process of reinvention

through contextual redefinition. We then must take action without knowing for certain

what the consequences will be; but as the Romantic social universe depends on just such

action taking place, inaction is unthinkable.

Romanticism seeks to salvage the ideology concept by limiting its application, notably

by making it answer to the indeterminate and reflexive nature of discourse honoured by

the aesthetic. To this end, Romantic theory defines ideology as a particular function of the

sign or text alone, and not something which consummately traces the whole of social totality from superstructural text to economic base, and back again. "In the Romantic conception, art can be regarded as reconciling in the realm of appearance what is unreconciled in reality, and thus as a form of ideology" (Bowie 1997: 14). Such a conception, fblfilling a "utopian" role for culture, would not be out of place in the

FrankfUrt School's musings. But with the exception of Williams's call for a "systematic" utopian vision in The Year 2000 (1983a: 12-15), the utopian (along with other Romantic concepts) has largely been embarrassed into silence in cultural studies. The Romantic tradition's deep feeling for the power of appearance redeems the utopian function of culture by engineering the relationship between appearance and the real on novel terms.

These terms are best appreciated in comparison with the Mamist and post-structuralist alternatives. Marxists have often preferred to define the aesthetic as one more instance of ideology's ubiquity, a beautifid lie that culture tells with devastating consequences. Any aspiration to close the gap between appearance and reality is suspected as an ideologicat 105

coup de grace and false utopia, since truth begins in an objective apprehension of the real.

Theorists in the Foucauldean tradition, on the other hand, believe the gap was never open

in the first place, as appearance is all we have. Romanticism, however, does not prejudge the attempt to reconcile the world as it is and as it might be, but argues we must continue to travel the distance between appearance and reality, and reserve our evaluation for the final product, if it should ever come.

What is exceptional about the Romantic aesthetic theory of representation here is its rehsal to accept the brute conversion of discourse, our primary cultural resource, into ideological values. Culture is aI1owed the latitude necessary to realize and work out its own potential in human praxis. In the best sense of Williams's impulse toward a "common culture," Romanticism's aesthetic view of language privileges the making of relationships in the spirit of Keats and his nightingale. The Romantic utopia is less prescriptive--a plot in the collective fmfor everybody, manna fkom the sky--and argues rather that the good society lies in revealing the relatedness of all things as these obtain between the aesthetically apparent realm of art, culture and discourse, and the real.

Romanticism is inherently non-reifjhg because it understands the making of utopia as the making of relationships, using the finite and recombinant elements of language to explore a near infinite social totality. 'Zanguage's internal relationships make an articulated world possible, but even if the world of things is also essentially a web of relations one cannot finally articulate a way of mapping, in language, one set of relations on to the other, because that would entail a fbrther web of relations, and so on7' (Bowie lo6

1997:69).The fate of many utopias to become self-parodies or worse once the dogma and the reality are fused and the new world reified is thus avoided by the Romantic. Utopia becomes a process, not a product, and each manifestation of the good points to another and another. As the old joke goes: when asked by the anthropologist what the turtle upon whose back the world rested itself stood on, the weqnative informant replied "It's turtles, a11 the way down." Romanticism thus offers an epistemology not unlike that implied by Williams's "structure of feeling" concept, with the important difference that the connectivity of elements in the romantic vision of totality is never given, but must always be worked for, since the context itself is ever changing. Romanticism, therefore, lives for the work of making connections in a world where phenomena are ideologically isolated beyond redemption or reduced to a homogeneous powerhowledge equation. Notes

1. Polemics aside, by no means is the Enlightenment legacy in social theory and, more germanely, cultural studies something to be wished away. The issue is one of balance and proportion. Theory has its own ecology, and the problem here is that in the absence of Romanticism, it has been starved of valuable food.

2. Stuart Hall's relationship to the modem is discussed later in this chapter in the context of his structuralism.

3. By the "long revolution" Williams meant the slow but gradual democratization of the West, a process precipitated by the growing presence of working class culture in public life through the modem period. This was intended as an alternative to the quick fix promised by the orthodox view of proletarian political revolution, and as a means of bringing democratic scruple and culture into socialist debates on historical change that often neglected these issues. See Williams 1961 volume, The Long Revolution.

4. The "culture and civilization" tradition, a name inspired by hold's usage and Leavis's manifesto, Minority Culture and Mass Civilization, is also known as the "culture and society" tradition, as captured in the title of Williams'st groundbreaking first book. "Civilization" better captures the disdain that Arnold and Leavis felt for modernity, however, and "society" is too generic a term to sustain that impossible hauteur today. Hence this author's preference for the former.

5. French Romanticism, as represented in the writing of Chateaubriand and Larnennais, lacked the political and temporal unity of Romanticism in Germany and England, and is not accounted for in this analysis.

6. An admittedly pedantic distinction between "electric" and "electronic" media is made here. As a process of shining a focussed bright light on photographic film strips, film technology resembles older image-making technologies in which the manipulation of electrons had no part. Hence its status as an electric, rather than electronic medium. Radio and television, however, in their use of the transistor and the iconoscope, are markedly different as technologies. This difference is reproduced in the division between film criticism -- which borrows from literary theory and defines the film text as something analogous to the book -- and media criticism, which borrows more extensively from theoretical traditions outside literature, and which rarely mistakes a radio or television program for one of Auden's poem or Iris Murdoch's novel.

7. In this view, Williams is regrettably consistent with the position taken by the neo-conservative critic Daniel Bell in his essay, "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism," with the difference that Bell identifies the loss of a traditional culture supportive of capitalism, rather than Williams's socialism. Bell's thesis in this founding document of the post-war New Right is that once upon a time, before the advent of avant-gardism, capitalism and culture enjoyed a harmonious, mutually beneficial relationship. The former generated wealth, and the latter generated the values necessary to ensuring that people kept to the Puritan work ethic and the f ilgrim pledge of self-denial. Twentieth-century avant-gardes, however, counselled ease, consumption and a breakdown of cultural authority, and their modernist values poisonously entered the mainstream culture where they today allegedly support a liberal bias in the media, and contrarian and consumerist values born of the 1960s. "The commonplace observation," Bell opined,

that today there is no longer a significant avant-garde--that there is no longer a radical tension between new art which shocks and a society that is shocked--merely signifies that the avant-garde has won its victory .... In effect, "culture" has been given a blank check, and its primacy in generating social change has been firmly acknowledged. (1976:35)

Ideological enemies though they may be, Williams and Bell shared organicism and a categorical separation of culture and society (Bell famously addresses the "disjuncture" between the two) as a central value in their work. Bell has been duly criticized for using his hndionalism to separate the market society fiom culture, and argue that the American Dream could be restored through a restoration of the lost moral order-as if somehow the market itself did not have a part in everything fiom consumerism to institutional decay, and culture separately determined economy. Bell's thesis has long given aid and comfort to neo-conservatives who would reconcile economic liberalism and social conservatism, largely by denying the economy--culture connection, at least insofar as the former affects the latter.

8. This concept, central to Williams's book Television: Technology arzd Cultural Form, will be discussed in detail in a later chapter. It is perhaps enough here to appreciate that it demonstrates the extension into his media criticism of Williams' identification of that phase of modernity he did not prefer with undue mobility and the loss of community through the privatization of experience.

9. Definitions of ideology and discourse abound, and any choice is bound to offend. I prefer the following definitions as benchmarks, making reference to variations in Marxist-semiotic and Foucauldean texts where appropriate.

From Mike Cormack, Ideology (1992: 13)

Ideology.. . is a process which links socio-economic reality to individual consciousness. It establishes a conceptual framework, which results in specific uses of mental concepts, and gives rise to our ideas of ourselves. In other words, the structure of our thinking about the social world, about ourselves, and about our role within that world, is related by ideology ultimately to socio-economic conditions.

From John Fiske' s essay, "British Cultural Studies and Television" in the book Channels of Discourse: Television and Contemporary Criticism (1987:168)

A discourse is a socially produced way of talking or thinking about a topic. It is defined by reference to the area of social experience that it makes sense of, to the social location from which that sense is made, and to the linguistic or signifying system by which that sense is both made and circulated.. .. A discourse is then a socially located way of making sense of an important area of social experience.

10. These works are Eagleton's chapter on "Ideology and Discourse" in his book, Ideology, which is a primary source in this chapter; Hall's essay "The Rediscovery of 'ideology': Return of the Repressed in Media Studies"; and Williams's chapter, entitled simply "Language," in Mumism and Literature.

11. Media effects, a blend of information theory, behaviourism and sociological fimctionalism, was the dominant tradition of media analysis in the 1940s and 1950s, and particularly identified with American media scholars such as Paul Lazarsfeld, Wilbur Schramm, Elihu Katz and others. Still a force to be reckoned with, it has since come under heavy criticism for, among other things, its complicity with the media industries' own conception of audience, infonnation, and technology, etc. Chapter Three The Powers of Mind: Post-industrial and Post-structuralist Theories of New Media

'The central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter. In technology, economics and the politics of nations, wealth--in the form of physical resources--has been losing value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things."

Newt Gingrich, "Cyberspace and the American Dream," p. 1

Post-industrial and post-structuralist media theories enjoy an electrifjing influence among lay and academic readerships interested in new media. Despite several decades of critique, both positions in their different ways are united in their advocacy of an emergent

"information society," a vision of totality where information is the primary economic product, constituent social element, and collective representation all-in-one. Bestselling work by post-industrial authors like Nicholas Negroponte and Alvin Toffler, and influential post-structuralist writings by David Lyon, Arthur Kroker and Shoshana Zuboff suggest a continuing appeal for "information society" arguments and authors that would be the envy of any neo-Marxist. Nearly forty years since Daniel Bell's famous stage right exit fiom his peers at the Partisan Review, his original advocacy of an "information society" is powerfblly renewed in many of the analogous claims and arguments made by post-structuralist media critics:

Those [post-industrial] theories are still with us, but they have been joined by others with a more ambitious scope. In these newer theories we encounter claims that go beyond economics and politics to encompass western, and indeed, world civilization in their entirety. In the information and communication revolution, in the transformation of work and organization in the global economy, and in the crisis of political ideologies and cultural beliefs, these theories see the signs of a turning point in the evolution of modem societies. (Kumar 1995:vi)

That we are at a "turning point" is not in question. But it may not be a turn fiom

modernity to some brave new epoch, but rather a change in how we read and defend the persistence of the modem. Any attempt to redeem modernity must confiont the problem of instrumental reason, perhaps the modem period's characteristic problem, and one greatly intensified by new media. The greater proliferation and penetration of computer technologies has occasioned debates as to data privacy and surveillance, the lack of accountability of digital capital, and the commercialization of cyberspace, among the many others that feature in Wired, Mondo 2000, and other popular and academic journals. But the common denominator behind these and many other issues as to information technology and culture is digital media's radical extension of instrumental reason--the logic driving the relentless reification of reality, and one for which Romanticism is an acknowledged solution.

As Edward Tiryakian (1992:80), a neo-fbnctionalist who will later feature in discussion of post-industrialism, has put the problem: "In four decades the computer revolution has brought about changes as momentous as those of the industrial revolution two hundred years ago." He continues: "[Tlhis still-unfolding revolution is a radical extension of the process of rationalization and mastering the world through exact calculations." Lyon

(1988: 13 8) acknowledges that Western culture's "supposed dependence an rational forms of thought ... is intensified by reliance upon that acme of logical operations, the computer." 112

And Shailis (1 984: 172) writes more apocalyptically of the potential scope of this computer-assisted reification of reality: "The metaphor of the computer, the machine that

'thinks,' redefines the world in terms of 'information.' People are seen as 'information- processing systems'; the universe is interpreted as a vast 'information system'; all human and social interactions are analyzed or discussed or even just referred to in terms of information content."

However, the habitual representation of this conflict, whereby the priority of human rational intelligence is asserted over its manifestation in instrumental rationality, must reckon with the inherent limitations on reason, notably as this was earlier manifested in

Williams's views of modernity and Eagleton's and Hall's on ideology. If cultural studies's task given the "dialectic of Enlightenment" is to bring the power of culture forcefblIy to bear on reification-in other words, to reenchant the world--and to provide some basis for human reason as it rattles the iron cage, then establishing a right relationship with the romantic might be seen as offering a new epistemological platform for this important work. This is important also because Romanticism's value as an intellectual resource has not gone unrecognized in either post-industrial (and notably, neo-hnctionalist) or post- structuralist work, as evidence cited below will indicate, and it might be said that

Romanticism's legacy is the object of fierce theoretical competition. Nonetheless, bringing

Romanticism into the analysis of post-industrial and post-structuralist theory is a much larger task than reappropriating Romanticism from them. A positive romantic critique 113

must be established, one which goes firther than criticizing these theories's "misuse" of

Romanticism in outlining a superior romantic analysis of new media.

Some explanation of why Poster, and not Jean Baudrillard, is singled out for attention

here is warranted. Baudrillard is unquestionably the most cited and influential post-

structuralist theorist of new media. However, though his many books and articles refer to

new media, his work rarely addresses the specific character of new media technologies,

but rather works within a broad outIine of the ontology and epistemology of a world in

which such media are a central fixture. That is, rather than attend to the post-structuralist

implications of binary code or data bases, Baudrillard writes on the cultural consequences

of simulation at large. Poster is much more attentive to the technologies themselves, and

moreover, his work is a systematic and explicit synthesis not only of Baudrillard, but of

the ideas of Foucault, Demda and Lyotard as they relate to new media. While Baudrillard

is the more important as intellectualprovocateur, Poster is the more comprehensive,

having the advantage of hindsight and a formal and schematic academic approach to the

post-structuralist literature. Baudrillard is anything but formal, schematic or academic.

Toward the development of this positive critique then, chapter three documents the

basic premises of post-industrial and post-structuralist criticism of new media, with

particular attention to the work of Bell and Poster respectively, then provides an overview

and discussion of the conventional rationalist (or "Enlightenment," in the terms established

above) critique of these positions by the Left. Chapter four, intended to complement three, illustrates how romanticism is "misused" in the post-industrial and post-structuralist 114

theories, and by doing so seeks to extend and amplify the conventional critique. Chapters

five and six, also designed as a complementary pair, provide the positive "romantic7'

criticism of new media promised.

This chapter takes up then, first, the description of the basic premises of work by

Daniel Bell and Mark Poster, arguing that both need be seen as elements of a larger

project conditioned by their shared critique of modernity and of neo-Marxist positions.

These two theorists are permitted to stand in for post-industrial and post-structuralist new

media research because they generate interesting questions and contradictions, and are the

most systematic thinkers in their respective traditions, not because they are necessarily the

consummate representatives of the theory under analysis. Many post-industrial critics,

such as Alain Touraine, George Gilder and others, could be granted the same attention;

but Bell precedes these in having in large measure originated in his The Cultural

Contradictions of Capitalism and Die Coming of Post-Industrial Society the convergence

of anti-modernism, fbturism and neo-conservative politics that interest this analysis While

Poster is by no means the most representative of post-structuralist theorists, including here

Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Kristeva among others, he remains the most

systematic student of post-structuralism and post-modernism as far as media analysis is

concerned. Baudrillard's writing is better known, but Poster's is more synoptic and

comprehensive, and he includes in his several books on new media (The Mode of

Information, The Second Media Age) substantial reference to the major post- structuralists. 115

Second, a summary of the conventional Left "rationalist" critique of post-industrial

and post-structuralist new media theory is outlined. Particular emphasis is given to the

problem of the epochal "break" with modernity and technological determinism, common

tropes in new media theory discourse and themes which these two apparently dissimilar

writers have very much in common. The "break" and technological determinism are

interpreted not, as they are familiarly, merely as ideologically usefbl theories of history,

but also as a strategy deployed by post-industrialism and post-structuralism for the

transvaluation of instrumental reason and the strategic containment of romanticism. It is

argued that through "romanticizing" the stale information society discourse, Left theory

might transcend the standard terms of its critique organized around the "break" and

determinism, and renew itself for a debate which continues to recycle in a culture

fascinated by regular exponential increases in computer power. The remarkable

persistence of the romantic in theories as apparently dissimilar as post-industrialism and

post-structuralism demonstrates the relevance of the category again, and suggests

alignments between these theories not conventionally appreciated and which are discussed

at length below.

Post-industrial and Post-structuralist Perspectives on the "Information Society"

Explaining post-industrial new media theory

Daniel Bell's post-industrial utopia is memorably captured in his 23e Coming of Post-

Industrial Society. The book reads as a complex amalgam of fianctionalism, technocracy, 116 and 1950s-era science fiction, one aimed squarely at Marxist arguments as to the inherent, fatal nature of capitdism's contradictions. The good society is to be built by a technocratic elite whose fiee intellectual labour and knowledge make alienated physical labour and the commodity obsolete, closing the dialectical gap between base and superstructure and managing away the risk of revolution.

But in summarizing Bell's argument succinctly here, the inclusion of elements fiom his fie Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism is warranted. For Bell's Post-industrial

Society is also an argument about culture, offering a solution to the "cultural contradictions" he spells out in the eponymous essay fiom that other volume.' But less circumstantial evidence for reading Bell's work as a system lies in the way in which his several arguments mesh, and in the terms in which neohnctionalists like Jeffiey Alexander and Edward Tiryakian have taken up the cause with conspicuous reference to romanticism. For it may be seen that Bell's Cultural Contradictions establishes a problem in the present that the fiturological Post-industrial Society solves.

The thesis of Cultural Contradictions is a sociological commonplace. For Bell, early capitalism enjoyed a harmonious balance between social structure and culture: the former provided the technical and economic means by which capitalism had become prodigiously productive, and the latter the values--namely the Protestant work ethic and Puritan self- denial--by which this productivity was disciplined. Culture provided the moral discipline to ensure labour's productivity, and curbed its appetites sufficiently so that consumption did 117 not overtake the accumulation of capital necessary for reinvestment and improvement of the means of production.

Culture to this point in history is deemed inherently rational, motivated as it is by these

Protestant and Puritan values, and strangely for a careful student of Weber such as Bell, instrumental reason is otherwise thought to be contained within social structure. Bell

(1976a:52) writes that "[TJo assume, as some social critics do, that the technocratic mentality dominates the cultural order is to fly in the face of every bit of evidence at hand." Agger (1992:72), a Marxist critic closely identified with Frankfbrt School "critical theory," argues that contrary to Weber's more critical intentions, fbnctionalists like

Talcott Parsons and Bell reconstructed him as a consensus-theorist, making his work an unlikely platform for "an increasingly fashionable neoconservative critique of Marxism, grounded in the long end-of-ideology tradition that begins with Weber and Mannheim and extends through Daniel Bell ... and Lyotard." Bell's Weber is one very much at odds with the author of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, a "sunny Weber" that articulates all too well with Parson's ultra-firnctionalist "pattern variables" and overlooks the original critique of rationalization (Agger 1992: 58). The irony of using a premier theorist of industrial society to establish a pretext and account for the emergence of a post-industrial one has not gone unnoticed (Webster 1995:39).

This Jeffersonian vision of capitalism--where the machine and the garden coexist without contradiction--is, however, made the victim of its own success in Bell's view.

Capitalism under these conditions so thrives that the surplus makes it possible for a non- 118

producing class of artists and intellectuals to emerge. This modernist avant-garde, which

Bell identifies with the aesthetic-political movements like Impressionism, surrealism, Dada

and others that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, promote

decadent values of ease and consumption that are antithetical to the social structure,

leading to a "radical disjuncture" between the two erstwhile integrated spheres. Bell felt

that over time, this avant-garde's contrarian values are assimilated into mainstream

society, becoming the value basis for the emergent mass culture, and fixing culture's considerable and dangerous autonomy from structure. What is initially romantically interesting in Bell's attack on modernism's championing of culture's agency relative to structure is that the modernist movements he scorns represent to many scholars the epitome of twentieth century romanticism, personalities such as Baudelaire, Picasso and

Eisenstein being prefigured in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century German and

English Romantics. In criticizing culture's relative autonomy, Bell is criticizing perhaps the signature feature of Romanticism. Kumar (1995:94) remarks on modernism's romantic nature, and its powerful advocacy of culture's agency: "Modernism can... be seen as late

Romanticism. But it goes so much Fwther in its assault on modernity that we are entitled to regard it as something almost qualitatively different. There is a comprehensiveness in its sweeping rejection of all the idols of modernity that marks something new."

The radical experiments of the avant-garde are thus incorporated in the roiling nature of the endless novelty of commodity production. Classical aesthetic values of balance, mimesis, and the aesthetic distance allowed to the rational subject who reflects on the 119

cultural artefact, are abandoned in favour of the "repudiation of unbroken continuity," an

anti-realist refbsal of limits on representation, and a level of spatial and temporal

disorientation that makes rational aesthetic reception impossible. This irrational culture's

new supremacy thus overturns what had been the traditional authority of reason in

Western civilization. Yet, given his use of the Parsonian Weber, the classic Weberian

problem of instrumental reason is quietly ignored.

Yet the problem of rationalization has not gone away, though the aestheticization of reality holds momentary sway. In Post-industrial Society, technological rationality returns, transformed into the technological determinism on which Bell's information society depends2 It is important to realize that it is not just any technology that determines the totality in Bell's vision; rather, it is information technology, technology in which culture is by definition deeply implicated, whether culture's presence is defined as "knowledge,"

"information," "theory" or something simiIar. Culture's autonomy, which Bell so greatly feared in Cultural Contradictions, has been tamed in Post-Industrial Society. That same

"culturew--now transformed into "informationw--is then used to keep the tendency toward rationalization in check by giving that otherwise impersonal and automatic process of instrumental reason a specific set of social objectives, leading directly to the creation of the information society. This is best appreciated in the context of the principal features of the information society discourse.

Leiss (1990: 129) cites five defining elements of Bell's program, which provide a template for most of the information utopians who would follow him. These are (a) the 120

shift fiom goods to services production; (b) the bureaucratic management of society by a

technocratic "new class" of engineers, information specialists and intellectuals, which

replaces industrial age socio-economic classes, and substitutes competition between

institutions and professional or occupational castes ("situses") for class struggle; (c) the

creation of new technology; and (d) institutional application and assessment of that

technology. Key to the argument here, however, is the feature Bell himself thought most

important: (e) the central role of knowledge and information technology in extending

rational administration to the whole of society. "The concept 'post-industrial society'

emphasizes the centrality of theoretical knowledge as the axis around which new

technology, economic growth, and the stratification of society will be organized" (Bell

1W6b: 1 12).

Culture, once tom fiom its embedded role in early capitalism and run amuck in

twentieth century mass culture, is returned to structure in the post-industrial fiture, a

return made possible by its repackaging as emphatically rational "knowledge" or, as it is

more typically characterized, "information." Culture, as demonstrated by the emergence

of cu1tural studies, was too loaded a term, too fill of potential contradiction as regards

capitalist social structure. This repackaging of culture as "information" empties the latter

of history and value, leaving it open to commercial and ideological exploitation in a

manner that follows on the "sender-message-receiver" or "transmission7' model of

communication developed by information theory (Roszak 1986:14). Information is therefore the emasculated form that culture takes once the latter is identified thoroughly 121

with capitaIism, and stripped of its resistant and indeterminate properties. Cultural studies

is consequently denied access to culture as a basis for intellectual and politid action on

capitalism, since "information' could be defended... against any fbll-scale engagement with

the radical heterodoxy whose fblcrum was 'culture"' (Schiller 1996: 169-70). Thus, it

might be appreciated that the transformation of "culture" into "infonnation" is more than

an internal intellectual strategy in Bell's work, but also an attack on the eponymous centre

of the cultural studies project.

If we might accept that the anti-structural function of culture--its capacity to revise and

retool the patterns by which our lives are organized--is ultimately romantic in origin, then

Bel17sand, indeed, the post-industrial project at large might be seen to depend on the use

of the radical possibilities present in Romanticism and enduring throughout (and

especially during late) modernity. Of particular value are Romanticism's anti-reifjlng

properties, and we may recall Gouldner's point that "to 'romanticize' was thus to endow

those parts of the world that had been exposed to a deadening reification with new life by

insisting that "all things were loci of self-movement, of potency, and of value" (1973:

33 1). Bell can't forego the romantic, for it offers the only means by which the tendency of

structure toward reification can be checked, and the post-industrial paradise built.

However, it must be made to serve structure, not dissolve it, and hence the transformation

of "culture" into "information." These permutations may not seem immediately evident fiom Bell's writings themselves, particularly given the novelty of reading Post-Industrial

Society and Cultural Contradictions as a system. But the matter of the repressed 122

romantic returns in discussion of the origins of fbnctionalism in late German Romanticism,

in the location of the post-industrial thesis in the "machine in the garden" tradition in

American intellectual history, and in the works of the self-described neo-fbnctionalists

who align themselves with Bell's sociology, all of which warrant consideration later in this

argument.

Explaining post-structuralist new media theory

Post-structuralism's obvious affinity for media systems that are themselves as language- intensive as computers and computer-mediated communications has attracted several premier post-structuralists to the study of new media, the most comprehensive and schematic of which is arguably Mark Poster. Drawing on classic post-structuralist sources such as Foucault, Demda, Lyotard and Baudrillard, Poster argues that digital media are embIematic of a new and decidedly postmodern "secondn media age, where the conventions of both modernity and modem media theory are irrevocably overturned. "Electronic communications systematically removes the fixed points, the grounds, the foundations that were essential to modem theoryn (Poster 1995:50).

Modernity and modem theory are therefore both no longer able to contain and explain the media or the social relations instantiated by them. In their place, postmodernity and post-structuralism are alone sensitive to the consequences which follow on a wired planet. 123

In Poster's view, the familiar commonplaces of modernity and modem theory then

disappear: the humanist subject is destabilized, revealing a self that is reconstituted

endlessly, and which is merging with technology to create a "cyborgn; the play of

signifiers displaces dialectical patterns of articulation; epistemological categories

collapse, allowing the convergence of phenomena thought irreconcilable; representation

is foregone in favour of a rhetorical and performative model of language, one

concerned for the positioning of the subject rather than reference to an indiscernible

world; time and space are miniaturized; metanarratives break down in favour of what

Lyotard terms "little stories," and cultural difference is allowed full expression once

free of such grand explanatory frameworks; and the mode of production is displaced in

favour of Poster's signature concept, the 'mode of information." The magnitude of

these changes is such that the coming world will be unrecognizable, and at great cost

to a modern utopian ideal of culture such as the Habermasian community of rational

communicating subjects:

The mode of information betokens a restructuring of language so drastic that the figure of the subject that it will constitute cannot readily be discerned. Relations of mind to body, person to person, humanity to nature are undergoing such profound reconfiguration that images of community are presented if at all only in science fiction books and films (Poster 1995:52).

By the term "mode of information," Poster offers a means of characterizing historical process by the medium of communication that has dominated at a given time, 124

demarcating cultural history according to successive oral, print and electronic phases.

Obviously, Poster here displaces the Marxist 'mode of production" concept, recasting

history as the march not of millions of proletarians, but of several primary media.

Every medium structures certain kinds of relationships between subject, medium,

message, and the world outside; and in this light Poster is not terribly different from

Harold Innis or Marshall McLuhan (notably since Poster cites Innis's influence on

Poster himself). Poster's signature concept highlights the fact that each phase "may be periodized by variations in the structure.. . of symbolic exchange," represents "an analytically autonomous realm of experience," and denotes the fetishistic attention granted information in contemporary culture (Poster 1990:6,8).

What is exceptional about digital media in Poster's view (as compared to radio and television of the first media age) is the fact that language is no longer a medium or even a structure within which other more material entities, i.e., subjects, technologies and referents, are located. Rather, digital media, in constituting virtual worlds, feature language as their social totality, achieving what Poster calls the "wrapping of languagew which creates "an unavoidable context of discursive totalization" (1990:6). Language is no longer a means to representation but, according to the self-referential logic of simulation, so saturates the world that the real is no longer mediated. Mediation, therefore, is the reality. Media theory in this recognizably post-structuralist mode must then dedicate itself to tracing the new patterns that obtain between audience, medium, 125 message and world within the liquid perimeters of discourse alone, patterns that obtain

exclusively in language because the material world is now rendered inaccessible and

meaningless. "In the mode of information it becomes increasingly difficult, or even

pointless, for the subject to distinguish a 'real' existing 'behind' the flow of signifiers,

and as a consequence social life in part becomes a practice of positioning subjects to

receive and interpret messages" (Poster 1990: 15).

As Poster sees it, modernists like Adorno and Marcuse were mistaken in their

assumption that the subject, living under the sheer weight of technological rationality,

could no longer be regarded as a subject because s/he had lost their autonomy. This

made for a static, ahistorical, and highly vulnerable self. Poster rejects what he believes to be Frankfurt's binary model of the human (i.e., either rational and whole, or abjectly subordinated) for one that allows, under the influence of digital mediation and postmodern conditions generally, that the subject is still present though notably unstable, multiple and diffuse. In dropping the binary subject, the problem of instrumental reason is also made analytically redundant, since technology and the subject are no longer deemed in~ompatible.~

For too long, Poster suggests, modem media theory has been preoccupied with the problem of the "stalled dialecticndue to the intervention of technologically-mediated instrumental reason. This perspective depends, however, on a prior separation of technology and culture. In light of the linguistic dissolution of reality into one 126

nondialectical whole, technology, culture and other elements in social totality take up

highly mutable relations to each other of a kind not readily captured in the dialectic

model. This recalls Baudrillard 's (1983: 127) point as to the substitution of circulation

for production in "the narcissistic and protean era of connections, contact, contiguity,

feedback and generalized interface that goes with the universe of communication." The production metaphor so central to Marxist and neeMarxist thought must yield to one where the philosophical basis for materialism has disappeared, a world where the enchanting "powers of the mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things. "

A society defined by the circulation of information, though no post-industrial utopia, suggests an end to the authoritarian top-down politics of the broadcast model of mass media, in favour of a decentralized system of multiple producers, distributors and consumers--a "global villagen of greater moral complexity than McLuhan 's.

Domination now exists in a lack of information, insofar as Poster defines domination as that condition whereby we are denied knowledge of the terms by which self is constituted in a world of discourse. That is, domination is not exercised through the limits placed on a subject's autonomy from external sources, since nothing can be said to be "external" any longer. Rather, it is a function of the subject's failure to recognize the grounds of her or his social constitution as a subject, an ignorance enforced by power; emancipation is then tantamount to a process whereby "subjects recognize that 127

they are constituted and that they may, with the proper mediations of others,

reconstitute themselves and their world so that subject constitution becomes its

designated goal and social end" (Poster 1995: 11). Social change, in other words, is a

matter of better comm~nication.~

The post-structuralist affinity for new media begins with the later Barthes who, having concluded that texts draw not on reality but upon rnetalanguages such as Freudianism,

Mancism, structuralism and other human constructs for meaning, pointed to a world that is informational in character. Where modernist media critics such as Herbert Schiller and

Jurgen Habermas acknowledge the growing importance and presence of signification in contemporary culture without surrendering an intelligible empirical reality, post- structuralists deny the transparent text. "In sum, one relevance of postmodernism is the perception that we do not live in a world about which we have information. On the contrq, we inhabit a world that is infonnationaf' (Webster 1995: 176; Webster's emphasis). For Poster, the informational character of reality is the very condition of political good, in that an abundance of signs floating fiee of their referents means that people are released from the "tyranny of 'truth"' (Webster 199%183).

Post-industrialism and post-st?ucturalisrn as ajoint problem in media theory

New media theory begins deep in the era of "old" mass media, and is anticipated by authors as different as Teilhard de Chardin, Lewis Mumford, and Norbert Wiener. Almost since inception, new media theory has been at odds with modernity, and a significant 128

fiaction of this literature has been neoconservative (as with some key post-industrialists)

or apolitical (as with many post-structuralists) in outlook. Whether these positions are

avowedly anti-modern and neoconservative, such as Daniel Bell's post-industrialism, or

openly postmodern and problematically apolitical or subjectivist, such as the post-

structuralism of Mark Poster, the general alliance of backward-looking ideologies and

hturistic machines has made for a strange spectacle.The reader may well ask, the usual

objections as to neoconservative and, depending on one's taste, certain postmodern claims

aside, why a case for treating post-industrial and post-structuralist theories as a joint

problem in media theory? The symmetry between the two positions, notwithstanding the

apparent differences between post-industrial technological Babbitts and intensely cerebral

French post-structuralists, is suggested by commonalities as regards their opinions on modernity, politics, technology and history.

Both post-industrialism and post-structuralism can be classified as critical of modernity-

- the first on behalf of values attributed to a pre-modern past, the second on behalf of a postmodern fiture--because each problematizes modernity in such a way as to locate itself outside of modernist theoretical fiameworks5 Post-industrialism's anti-modernism is founded on its lack of appetite for liberalism and rationalism. Whether it is Bell's attack on the conuption of capitalism by late modern consumerist hedonism, a byproduct of the celebration of the senses and of the heterodox in modern art, or Toffler's identification of

"second wave" industrial society with homogeneity and conformity, the technological revolution each endorses is particularly useful for generating social conditions that eclipse 129

the modem. A post-industrial society of abundance banishes the problem of scarcity; the

state's redistributist role is now made obsolete, and a "culture of the individual" (as the

video version of Toffler's The Third Wme puts it breathlessly) is created. Post-

structuralism's postmodern affiliation is more evident, and a convention of its own self-

representation. Modernity insisted on discourses that made claims to referentiality that

post-structuralism cannot support. Once fiee of such a regime of signification, the

postmodern world tentatively promises a new world of fieedom and pleasure.

The politics of the two positions share if not an overt conservatism, then a degree of

discomfort with the modem definition of the political as (whether liberal or Manrist) a

place whereby rational action via representative institutions or on the actual structures of

economic power can lead to a greater social good. Post-industrial theory is significantly

identified with neoconservatism, defined conventionally as a position of post-WWII

origin which reconciles social conservative and economic liberal or "pro-market" opinions

(as opposed to the traditional scepticism toward laissez-faire capitalism favoured by

conservatives of old, since markets tended to level all-important cultural and social

distinction^).^ Bell, a Harvard sociologist, was one of neoconservatism's original

apologists and cultural theoreticians; indeed, the essays in his me Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism represent some of the earliest holy texts by which the "culture war" is currently waged. Moreover, Bell's theoretical affiliation with stnictural fbnctionalisrn and, as finctionalisrn manifested in media theory, information theory and the "effects"

school, cements his establishment credentials, as both these related literatures are deeply 130

invested in liberal capitalism (though not a liberal culture). Roszak (1986:27) traces the

origins of much neoconservative "info-populism" to the U.S. Sunbett states, and the

nexus there of southern conservatism, Pentagon contracts, and Republican-affiliated

fiturist projects such as the Conservative Opportunity Society, a "major political voice of

the Information Age."

Post-structuralism's political character is by no means as uncomplicated, since the

events of 1968, the date identified as the collapse of 1960s New Left politics, rightly

called for the kind of anti-foundationalist critique that the later Barthes, Derrida, Lyotard,

Foucault, BaudrilIard, Kristeva and others tendered. But the more severe forms of post-

structuralism, which beg the very possibility of meaning, Eagleton (1983: 143) contends

represent "a convenient way of evading such political questions altogether." Post-

structuralism "has been able with a good conscience to praise the Iranian mullahs,

celebrate the USA as the one remaining oasis of freedom and pluralism in a regimented

world, and recommend various forms of portentous mysticism as the solution to human ills" (Eagleton 1983: 147). Baudrillard's notorious thesis that the media-saturated 199I

Persian Gulf War was a simulated event with no basis in the real (i.e., a simulacrum), drew charges that post-structuralism evidences an "ideological complicity that exists between such forms of anti-realist and irrationalist doctrine and the crisis of moral and political nerve among those whose voices should have been raised against the actions committed in their name" (Noms l992:27). 13 1

These urgent criticisms from known partisans aside, simply characterizing post-

structuralism as a bastion of reaction is to reduce its complex and often constructive

critique to an absurd cipher. It is better to characterize post-structuralism as often apolitical, and in places potentially conservative. But its withdrawal fiom rational engagement with institutions or structures, its postmodern anti-modernism, and its affinity for information technology suggests certain parallels with post-industrial theory that warrant examination.

That said, it may be appreciated that the new media offer post-industrid and post- structuralist positions a remarkable political opportunity. The sheer novelty of digital media provides these positions with apparent proof of the end of a late modernity that, with its welfare state, its radical youth culture, and its felt animus toward Western culture, has proved so troublesome. Something so undeniably novel to the world as virtual reality or microchips seems to portend that a new world itself is upon us, and that the burden of history might be safely shirked. There are also certain historical and technological coincidences that draw these theories's attention. Information theory, as represented in the wartime computer research of Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, was deeply positivist in nature, reflecting its conservative social origins in Pentagon finding and Bell

Telephone's corporate labs. Post-structuralism, on the other hand, cannot help but be intrigued by the fluid meaning structures and the floating signification inherent in computer systems. Also, the conventional rationalist critique of technology and instrumental reason makes for a theoretical fatalism and political pessimism that leaves 132

ample room for the neoconservative and the postmodern positions. Furthermore, at the

level of practical politics, there is an appeal and analogue for both positions in the

stateless, ungovernable, and market-fiiendly nature of the Internet and the promiscuous play of signs therein.

Cyberspace, it seems, has tilted quite heavily to the right .... In a McLuhanesque way, it makes perfect sense. The Net is a classic case of the medium being loaded with a message--it's custom-built for a fiercely fiee-market outlook. Multinational, anarchically free, and laughably beyond the grasp of any government, cyberspace is an elegant metaphor for the new right's way of doing business. And for the resurgent conservative movement that was searching for a way to outflank squishy-liberal mainstream media, the Net was an answer in search of a question. (Thompson 1995: 14)

Lastly, post-industrial and post-stnrcturalist theory share similar premises as regards history, technology and certain related issues First, both positions trade strongly on a similar claim as to an epochal "break" and to technology as a theory of history, vitiating modernity and modem positions alike. In their mutual call for an "end to ideology"--post- industrialism arguing its demise given the collapse of major alternatives to capitalism, and post-structuralism positing its bankruptcy due to the unrepresentability of the real-- historical process is shaped so as to be amenable to determinism. History, spared the second opinions and nagging questions generated by ideology, is reformulated on unilinear terms that welcome a simple, monocausal notion of process like technological determinism, one made all the more convenient by the ahistorical representation of technology in their narratives. Second, both retain complex relationships to romanticism, relationships that turn on the control and containment of romance, an argument developed in chapter four. Third, each in a complementary way asserts control of the theoretical 133 representation of new media: post-industrial theory addressing by and large the institutional and political economic aspect, and post-structuralism questions of language, identity and culture.

Alf this is not to suggest that overt cooperation or conspiracy is happening, as two more unlikely allies are difficult to imagine. Nor, as stated above, is it to argue that Bell and Poster are the ideal representatives of the traditions of analysis with which they're associated; they are merely interesting ones. Rather, the new media have drawn out a certain convergence between these two theories which, though unintended, has the seeming effect of developing a discourse around the new media's development that serves neoconservative and postmodern ends, and displaces a progressive and modern critical perspective. In summary, then, we might appreciate that though the intellectual origins, style and institutional affliations of post-industrialism (with its many fiends in high places) and post-structuralism (with its almost self-parodying academicism) are different, they share enough to warrant consideration as a joint problem for critical reflection.

Deus Ex Machina: Rationalist Critiques of New Media

Though the "dialectic of Enlightenment" may have less currency in a period where much contemporary theory refbtes the value of reason altogether, even neo-Parsonians such as

Alexander and Tiryakian (as shall be seen) are compelled to resolve the issue. Modernity may bepasse, but its most famous problem is not, a fact which recommends that the persistence of modernity be given a second look. The solution advanced by both post- 134

industrial and post-structuralist authors, however, is as problematic as instrumental reason

itself: declare modernity over and rewrite the rules governing the relationship of

technology to society on terms that favour a perspective both philosophically and

politically problematic, banishing instrumental reason fiom the analysis without actually

solving it.

In their accounts, the characteristic curse of modernity, instrumental or technologicd reason, is transformed into technological determinism, the very means by which the supposed reality of what follows modernity is explained and legitimated. Such a determinism, moreover, by its very nature eschews the problem of dialectic altogether, since historical process is conveniently thought to follow fiom a single, technological source located outside of history--a non-dialectical deus ex machina. Technological determinism represents an ironic reversal and re-evaluation by the Right of conventional

Left concerns regarding technological or instrumental rationality, and must be understood not only as a theory of history but a strategy for the co-optation and containment of romanticism, as will be discussed in chapter four.

Having outlined basic premises of the post-industrial and post-structuralist theories of new media in the first section, and then demonstrated their convergence in a project with terribly expensive philosophical and political costs, the argument turns to the conventional critique of these positions. The conventional critique, typically defined in terms of the epochal "break" and technological determinism, has been productive. But such a critique remains captive to the reifjing tendencies of Enlightenment-derived rationalist premises, 135

and ultimately aids and abets the very theories it would criticize. By characterizing the

conventional criticism of post-industrial and post-structuralist theory as "rationalist" in

nature, Lee theory's reliance on ideology critique, the possibility of empirical reference,

and an epistemology and ontology which presupposes the categorical separation of

phenomena, is made visible and problematic. Once the limitations of the rationalist critique

of post-industrialism and post-structuralism are demonstrated, then cause for a romantic

alternative to this conventional Left response might be had.

A rationalist reading of post-industrialism

The conventional rationalist critique of the neoconservative variant of post-industrialism

has taken two fonns: criticism of the specifics of Bell's vision (or by extension, Toffler

most often among the other post-industrid theorists) and the general ideological

implications of the information society argument.

The sociological particulars of Bell's analysis are classically criticized by Kumar,

though his analysis has been extended by Webster, Lyon, Leiss, Schiller and others. "That

many of the changes alleged by Bell and others are occumng, and are important, need not

be denied," Kumar (1978: 194) writes. "What needs scrutiny is the central claim that all

these changes add up to a new social order." For the author of Prophecy andprogress,

the social changes that Bell chronicles, such as the increase in the volume of information, the bureaucratization of society, and the larger role of science and knowledge "are 136

extrapolations, intensifications, and clarifications of tendencies which are apparent fiom

the very birth of industrialism" (1978: 232).

Kumar's argument that post-industrialism is merely another word for "business as

usual" is then capably filled in by other critics. Contrary to Bell's assertion that service

production expands at the expense of industrial employment and is parasitic on the wealth

produced in the primary and secondary production sectors, the level of industrial

employment has remained stable for decades (agricultural employment, however, has

correspondingly fallen), and services actually add value to manufactured goods (Webster

1995:42). The supposed "new class" ascendant in the information society is undermined

by a decline in literacy levels (Leiss 1990:13 6); moreover, any assessment of the general

quality of work in the white-collar world must appreciate that the vast majority of white-

collar workers are unskilled handlers of data and servers of food (Kumar 1978:209). More

problematic than even Bell's determinism is the fact that he acts to isolate technology

fiom the social, economic and political dimensions of technological innovation, relegating

the latter to a subordinate role that deforms understanding of the precise terms on which

all the factors actually relate (Webster 1995 :10).

What is a real quantitative increase in the amount of infomation in the culture does

not in itself add up to a qualitative change in the form of society we have (Webster

1995:23). What are undeniably real quantitative changes-more services production, more white-collar employment, more information in the culture--are repeatedly offered as evidence of epochal qualitative change, an analytical error that underwrites many of the 137 particular features identified by information society enthusiasts. It is more appropriate to characterize the actual changes that Bell creditably documents, if tendentiously interprets, as evidence of an "infonnatisation" of life, a process that dates to the early modem period but that has accelerated with information technology, globalization and the spread of transnational organizations \Webster 1995). This profound penetration of experience by information technologies, however, is best accounted for within a theoretical fiamework that, confirming Kumar's point, emphasizes the continuity of modern industrial capitalism.

While there is more information in society, what critics of the information society model object to is the idea that "the 'information revolution' has overturned everything that went before, that it signals a radically other sort of social order than we have hitherto experienced" (Webster 1995 :21 8).

Ideological critique of the post-industrial society (or its later manifestation as

"information society") is a frequent companion of the more detail-driven empirical analysis. Lyon (1988: 148-49) cites three major ideological implications to the information society position: (a) the reification of inforrnation technology, as this takes the form of technological determinism, tends to obscure the vested governmental and private interests involved in shaping the technology's social development; (b) the panglossian disregard of the technology's negative consequences, e.g., loss of privacy, control of labour, vulnerability of data to theft and misuse; and (c) the naturalization of the information society, enhanced as it is by the evolutionism evident in Bell's stages and Toffler's famous

"waves" of development. The strong teleological thrust of the post-industrial thesis 138 persuades that "people do not have to do anything, or even worry much about, the problems they encounter in their own societies... because the logic of history ensures that they move inexorably onwards and upwards towards a better and more desirable order"

(Webster l995:32).

The ideological origins of the information society are perhaps captured in the concept of the "technological sublime," the conflation of technology and religious ideology that provides an acknowledged myth of origin for the digital utopia. The New World of the

Americas was believed to be a place which, innocent of history, would accommodate the

Industrial Revolution so as eliminate its contradictions and avoid the mistakes that caused so much human and environmental tragedy in Europe. "This was a unique American idea of a new dimension in social existence through which people might return to an Edenic estate through a harmonious blending of nature and manufacture" (Quirk and Carey

1989: 118). First mechanical technology, then electric, was thought the panacea for the social ills facing an industrializing America. Where mechanical civilization had failed to bring paradise, electricity was believed to be the failsde means to deliver abundant and clean production, decentralized communities, and an improved social order (Quirk and

Carey 1989: 123). But the Innisian spatial bias of electronic media (i.e., its capacity to sustain empire through quick and extensive communication networks, its brief cultural memory, its support of the development of both market economies and democratic polities) acts to destroy culture through an excess of communication. That is, culture's role as a site of significant human agency is neutralized through dilution and dispersal, and 139

its capacity to critique ideology turned over to the work of housing the machine in the

garden. The death of culture can only be effectively countered by art, ethics and politics, a

humanistic check against the dehumanizing thrust of techne (Quirk and Carey 1989: 138).

Thus, the substitution of information for culture can be seen as a strategy with origins

in an anti-dialectical project with a long history, a technocratic dream which information

society critics date to Saint-Simonian positivism. In the "romantic" alternative critique of

post-industrialism and post-structuralism to follow in chapter four, it may be seen that the

work of controlling culture by subjecting it to ever more penetrative, and typicaIIy

technological, rationalization is overtly concerned with the control of the romantic. For it

is in the romantic that is found the natural home of sustained critique of rationalization, as

is, moreover, the strong advocacy of culture's antinomian, agentive and resistant

properties.

A rationalist reading ofpost-structuralism

Rationdist criticism of post-structuralist media theory is, from the start, at a permanent

disadvantage, since post-structuralism can readily claim that any position cleaving

ultimately to Enlightenment modernity is an unfit judge of its non-rational character.

The claim is not without merit, and the result of rationalist criticism of post-

structuralist media theory is the repetition of various cliches, ritual mom1 revulsion, and a weak defense of inerrant truth that together suggest a kind of intellectual fundamentalism. Norris's argument against Baudrillard's judgement on the Persian

Gulf War as simulacrum is a case in point:

During a long period--more than two millennia--the idea prevailed among philosophers, moralists, social theorists and others that truth could indeed be arrived at through an effort of disciplined critical thought, a process that would finally enable the thinker to distinguish veridical propositions (or authentic values) from the various kinds of illusion, false consciousness, ideological misrecognition , and so forth.. .. But it has now become obsolete, Baudrillard thinks, in so far as we have lost all sense of the difference--the ontological or epistemological difference-- between truth and the various true-seeming images, analogues and fantasy substitutes which currently claim that title. (1992: 15)

Norris, in attributing to Baudrillard the power to reverse two thousand years of thought, concedes him the point--as if centuries of mystics, gnostics, romantics and other patrons of non-rational thought had not already anticipated Baudrillard's argument. While Norris's jeremiad is exceptional for its zeal, it sets a certain hysterical tone for theoretical modernists. A far calmer critic, Frank Webster (1995: 188), though agreeing with the post-structuralists that the exponential increase in the number and malleability of signs in culture does make intepretation more difficult, argues that

"complexity is no grounds for asserting that, with intepretation being variable, interpretation itself is lost. "

The obvious stated, those critics on the modernist side of the "breaknoffer a shortlist of concerns. Poster is first unfavourably compared with Baudrillard. "Mark Poster echoes a good deal of Baudrillard's assertions, and much the same objections to his work are pertinent," given their shared epistemological relativism, disregard for the 141

real, and rejection of a representational role for language in preference for simulation

(Webster 1995: 188). Poster is also accused of technological determinism, given the

tripartite media history he outlines in which the medium itself plays a large structuring

role (Webster 1995: 188). Poster, eschewing the material world as something outside of

discourse's responsibility, is relieved of having to deal with political economy,

institutions, and other denizens of that world. More specifically, and like Bell, Poster

dematerializes the work of science, though the former does so in the name of

technocracy, and the latter in the criticism of the legitimizing role of science as discourse in neo-Marxist thought. "Whether couched in the language of post-industrial theory or of a seemingly disparate post-structuralism, this embrace of Bell's claim that, after all, science is not labour, led only to still another invalid reification. As such, it brings us back to the need to insist that, even as 'brainwork' cannot be understood absent the sensuous body, so too does all human activity contain its quotient of thoughtn

(Schiller 1996: 184).

Schiller's criticism of the absent body and the admixture of sensuous life and labour marks a point of departure for a romantic criticism of post-structumlist media theory, even as it limns the furthest reaches of a rationalist position. A romantic criticism must respect the contributions made by post-structuralism, given that post-structuralism brought to theory's attention issues that Romanticism shares regarding the importance of discourse relative to ideology, the contingency of sign and referent, and the limits of 142

rationalist criticism. But this post-structuralism gives voice to issues that might be

better addressed by a position identified with modernity, and in this sense post-

structuralism displaces and pre-empts a contemporary roman ticism out of proportion to

the former's value. Through consideration of the core elements in the rationalist and

Enlightenment-born critique of the break with modernity, and the fateful combination

of instrumental reason and technologid determinism, the potential contribution of

Romanticism to improving the Left critique of these two variants on the "information society" argument and, consequently, to a better analysis of new media, might be made clear.

Instrumentul reason, the "break," and techr~oZogicuZdeterminism

The separate and particular critique of post-industrial and past-structuralist new media theory notwithstanding, both Bell and Poster are united in their alignment with a position advocating an epochal break with the past, and a corollary deterministic theory of history.

The Left's critique of both the break and determinism are best represented within the context of the particular rationalist theory of history that motivates it: the FranlcfUrt

School's narrative of the "dialectic of Enlightenment,"

Even as human subjects have increasingly brought reason to bear on their experience since the sharp advocacy of the Enlightenment philosophes for freedom of thought, educational reforms, and general emancipation, the subsequent creation of rational intellectual, practical and institutional phenomena has made for progressively more 143

oppressive structures that limit and deceive that self-same reason. Human reason thus

dialectically produces its own opposite, leading to a most unwelcome and false

synthesis under domination. "The transformation of what was once liberating reason

into a repressive orthodoxy, of the Enlightenment into totalitarianism, can be

understood as a result of elements integral to this very form of enlightenment itself"

(Held 1980: 152). Instrumental reason, as Weber classically phrased it, is then the

triumph of means-oriented calculation without regard to the ends to which such

processes might tend--the stuff of which Kaflca's novels and Monty Python's best skits

were made.

Nature's place in this theoretical setpiece is central. Instrumental reason is generated as subjects, singly and collectively, use their reason to control nature for human

welfare. This behaviour follows from an impulse to control built upon the presumption that human beings and nature are categorically separated and that nature, being apart, is ultimately and objectively knowable, facilitating its control. If such separation offers the epistemological prerequisite for domination, the psychological motive is naked fear.

"Fear of the unknown in an environment which threatens survival is, to Horkheimer and Adorno, the root of the desire to dominate nature and the basis of both ancient and modern systems of thought" (Held 1980: 155).

The fearful exercise of this domination over the 'Othern that is nature has the unintended effect of doubling back on the subject. This domination both abstracts 144

external "ecological" nature within social totality, and subsumes inner human nature--as

expressed in identity and in labour--under its control. Though the injunction to exert

human mastery over nature is as ancient as the Old Testament call for stewardship over

the birds and the beasts, scientific and technical advance in modernity amplifies the

scope of this domination enormously. The result is that Enlightenment rationality is

inherently disposed, when not circumscribed, to reify nature. "Enlightenment

consciousness.. . objectifies the world. It sees as an 'absolute reality' of 'pure and

simple' things--a world of 'material things', which are given to the senses with no

'further determination of any sort'. Nature is perceived as neutral, disenchanted. Matter has no intrinsic significance. It is, therefore, open to manipulation and alteration" (Held

1980: 15 1-52).

Ironically, then, the subordination of discursive to instrumental reason leads to the creation of new mythologies, as the system's progressive subordination of the subject limits the use of reason and leads to irrational ideologies. As the Frankfurt School, the most careful students of this particular dialectic within the Marxist tradition argued, where medieval myth had been transformed into enlightenment in the historical era bearing that name, enlightenment has again become myth--the Marcusean affirmative culture or "happy consciousness" of people who cheerfully consent to their own subjugation. The Enlightenment separation of subject and object, as prescribed by rationalist epistemology, is overturned as both are reduced to an undifferentiated "one- 145

dimensionaln totality or 'false wholen that stifles dissent and alternatives. What Adorno

considered a "second naturen takes the form of a technologically engineered fantasy

world within which all particularity is homogenized, and history succumbs to a deep

and perhaps permanent naturalization of the status quo.

Technology represents the classic condensation of instrumental reason.' Technology

is defined by the Frankfurt School as "not just a collection of new devices but rather

something with an inner unityn (Leiss 1990:68). Technology's "unityn (which often

warrants the synonym "technological rationalityn for "instrumental reason") extends

itself through economic and cultural production and consumption (the latter captured in

the "culture industryn concept), conforming individual behaviour to the system's own imperatives. "A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself," wrote

Horkheimer and Adomo (1972: 121), and the eventual outcome of this domination in the cultural arena, for example, was the homogenization of critical elements in cultural texts via a technologically imposed unity that showed up in styles, genres, overwhelming special effects, and the consummate unity of the audience subject with the reality mediated by the culture industry.

But Frankfurt scholars were careful to argue that technology was not merely an innocent medium for power; rather, power was intrinsic to technology itself. "We are closer to the facts if we explain these phenomena as inherent in the technical and personnel apparatus which, down to its last cogs, itself forms part of the economic 146

mechanism of selection" (Horkheimer and Adorno 1971 :122).Technology was

understood as the principal means by which the materialist dialectic of history had

been stalled. While the stalled dialectic was held by Frankfurt to obviously benefit the

bourgeoisie, technological rationality exceeded any particular class's advantage

inasmuch as it was the modus operandi of modernity itself. Following closely on

Lukacs's "reification" concept, which describes a world rent asunder by objectifying

social relations, technological rationality was both cause and effect of such reification.

"Fjach successive step in industrialization pushed the natural condition of human

labour further into the past; each such step fostered the iron cage of rationalization and

reification more securely about humanity" (Leiss 1990:66).

The problems with the analysis of instrumental reason as part of the "dialectic of

Enlightenment," however, are both political and philosophical, and welcome a romantic

revision.

The political pessimism of both the Frankfurt School's analysis of the "dialectic of

Enlightenment" (and, though it is less influential in cultural studies, Ellul's la technique) is

well-established. But technology criticism has not advanced much further than this point,

and the very success of the Franffirt Iine has left the firther criticism of instrumental

reason and technology's role in it undeveloped. The FrankfUrt School "was excellent at tracing the lines of domination within media culture, but was less adept at ferreting out moments of resistance and opposition," given that they credited the co-opting power of the culture industries with extending even to "seemingly radical and subversive impulses" 147

(Kellner 1995:41). The fatalism of FrankfUrt's analysis has been an important factor in

allowing the post-industrial and post-structuralist positions their current popularity,

notably because they offer an optimistic analysis that compares favourably with its

pessimistic predecessors. Their particular advantage is that the post-industrial and post-

structuralists positions allow for the romantic, using it to solve the problem of the

didectic in ways impossible within the Franfirt narrative, since the romantic and its anti-

reifjhg powers are granted little role within the latter (save for the residual romantic

content in their ideas regarding the utopian fbnction of art). In other words, the post- industrial and post-structuralist positions "use" the romantic in quite a different way than advocated by the larger argument for its critical usefulness here and elsewhere: that is, the romantic is appropriated to contain and channel instrumental rationality into technological determinism, all the better to offer these positions a convenient theory of history.

This political: opening is only made wider by the philosophical limitations inherent in the chief conventional or rationalist charge against both post-industrial and post- structuralist new media theory: that of the epochal break with the modem past, and the technological determinism that is variously both symptom and cause of that "break."

Evidence for advocacy of the "break" and determinism is ample in the post-industrial and post-structuralist literature.

On behalf of post-industrialism, Bell (1976b) argues that the rise of a technocratic elite will allow potentially fatal contradictions in capitalism to be bypassed. Rationally administered technologies will be used to create surpluses and re-employ potentially revolutionary blue-collar labour in white-collar work, making possible a new society of leisure and abundance. Bell's work "posits a 'system break' in the transition to post- industrialism" (Kumar 1978 :232); Bell contends that "we are entering a new system, a post-industrial society, which.. . is characterized throughout by a heightened presence and significance of informationyy(Webster 1995:3 1). As for the post-structuralist case, the new media may be seen as creating "a major force that is uncontainable by modem positions" (Poster 1995: 18). The chief rationalist criticism of the "break" thesis is that it belies a believed actual historical continuity with the modern past, and irresponsibily separates society from unresolved probIems and intellectual resources of modern origin, thus sponsoring the adventuristic exploits of post-industrial and post-structuralist theory.

The opinion that there has or has not been a technologically caused or confirmed "break" with modernity is taken to be that which distinguishes modern from postmodern new media theory, making for a definitive division in the history and topography of media theory:

On the one hand there are those who subscribe to the notion that in recent times we have seen emerge 'information societies' which are marked by their differences from hitherto existing societies. Not all of these writers are altogether happy with the term "information society," but in so far as they argue that the present era marks a turning point in social development, they can be described as its endorsers. On the other hand there are scholars who, while happy to concede that information has taken on a special significance in the modem era, insist that the central feature of the present is its continuities with the past. (Webster 1995: 4-5)

Thus satisfactorily differentiated according to their relation to the "break," critical new media theorists turn to technological determinism. Three main premises characterize the 149 phenomenon: "that technology develops without conscious planning, that it is neutral, and that our thought processes and ideas must be adjusted to close the cultural lag"

(McCormack 1994:2 1). The reifjring nature of this or any determinism is apparent, as social and human factors are folded into a simple, monocausal explanation for historical change. Such a determinism invites and sponsors just the technocratic elite that Bell advocates, and the theoretical elite that post-structuralism implies: a class, that is, trained to manage the mighty engine of history. The post-industrial variation on technological determinism represents a "very weak kind of thinking to abstract the technical and technological changes and to explain the widespread social, economic and cultural changes as determined by them" (Williams 1983234). As for post-structuralism, "Poster's tripartite history--oralism, writing, electronic exchange-is deeply technological determinist and subject to the familiar objection that it is historically cavalier" (Webster 1995: 188).

Analysis of both positions typically ends here, with the unlikely nature of a break noted and the ideological agenda behind technological determinism (itself a Right equivalent to orthodox Mamist economic determinism) demonstrated. But it might be said that the limits of rationalist critique, as organized around technological rationality, the break, and determinism, mark the beginning of a romantic alternative.

The fact that the "dialectic of Enlightenment" formula makes no room for Romanticism leaves this teleological version of history acutely vulnerable to such claims, since they depend on just such a prior linear model of history in order, indeed, to "break" it and assert a new, deterministic beginning. The "break" with modernity, that is, follows fiom a 150

teleological and linear definition of historical time, wherein events and phenomena are

deemed unrepeatably unique, and a rationalist epistemology that becomes the Left's

albatross. Such teleological models are uniquely vulnerable to the assertion of a "break"--

to the arbitrary statement of a mythical point of origin for postmodernism--since they

themselves depend on an evolutionary understanding of social process which registers

change through periodization. Enlightenment thought proposed such a vision--the philosophe Condorcet expounded a model of "linear progress towards a future that would be morally better in proportion to its technological improvement" (Harnpson 1968: 232)- one which became a commonplace of liberal and Marxist theories of history. It is much more difficult to assume a "break" and pretend an "end to ideology" (or anything else) when the preferred model of history is cyclical, rather than teleological, as is the case with

Romanticism.

The "break" indeed is the very condition of this reevaluation of technological rationality, since it allows these post-industrial and post-structuralist theories to avoid having to answer to modern society's ambivalent past as regards that technology. The

"break" thereby acts to isolate a century of criticism aimed at technological rationality which culminated in the 1960s youth culture, providing the means by which that era's critique of rationalization--be it Weber's "iron cage" or Marcuse's "one-dimensionality"-- might be transformed into a celebration of technological rationality itself "[TJhe apocalyptic breaks and ruptures postulated in the 1960s as the goal of political struggle are now being described in some postmodern theory as breaks occumng as the result of 151

new technologies, without the effort of revolutionary struggle, thus replicating, in effect,

the old discourses of technological determinism" (Kellner 1995:23). Technology's moral

polarity is then reversed: once the epitome of instrumental reason, now it is the means to a

good, technocratic society.

Though the critique of technological determinism is more widely used with reference

to post-industrialism, and though Poster has no appetite for technocracy, the post-

structuralist's disregard for the material world begs a question of determinism larger

than the scope typically captured in the conventional charge. Because the material cannot be reduced to a problem of language, it becomes a sort of theoretical eminence grise, exerting influence through technology, the audience's location in social structure, and the larger politico-economic surround, e.g. ownership, even as its presence is denied analytically. Discounting all but discourse, Poster is freed from having to account for the material, and thus it is allowed the freedom to exert itself in its conspicuous absence throughout his analysis. The typical charge of technological determinism is, in this sense, but a partial reading of the more profound determinism that is uncovered by a romantic criticism of Nietzsche's place in post-structuralism's geneaology, and his exploitative relationship to Romanticism.

By bringing romanticism into the analysis and reIeasing it fiom its long suppression in post-industrial and post-structuralist argument, the limitations of the "rational" conventional criticism of these theories as applied to new media are exposed, and the 152 analysis carried firther. It is to this romantic reading of the post-industrial and post- structuralist theories that the argument now turns. Romanticism is appropriated by these positions to stage an "enchantment7'of a world otherwise deracinated by instrumental rationality and reificiation, but one where these latter are mystified rather than addressed. Notes

1. Given that Bell's futurist tract was published some years before his neo-conservative analysis of capitalism, it may be justly said that the solution here precedes the problem. However, including his early The End of Ideology here, Bell's works together assume a systemic nature, outlining a research program that still stimulates neo-conservative authors, e.g., Francis Fukuyarna's lhe End of History and the Last Man. The fact that both The Coming of Post-Industrial Society and The Cultural Contradictions of CapitaIism were published in 1976 (though the former was a new edition, with a new foreword written by Bell) incidentally welcomes a holistic approach.

2. To be fair to Bell, a considerable thinker in his own right, he does disavow technological determinism in the foreword to the 1976 edition. He writes:

But such emphasis does not mean that technology is the primary determinant of all other societal changes. No conceptual scheme ever exhausts a social reality. Each conceptual scheme is a prism which selects some features, rather than others, in order to highlight historical change or, more specifically, to answer certain questions .(1976b: x)

This disclaimer aside, Bell's analysis still reads as a veritable case study in technological determinism. To be sure, every conceptual scheme must select some features. But every conceptual scheme must also account for its ideological and structural consequences (whether imagined or real), and Bell does not satisfactorily explain the implications of his having highlighted technology as he has.

3. In a noteworthy digression, Poster here editorializes on the possibility of co-operation between cultural studies and post-structuralism once the modem subject is abandoned:

If one works outside the binary autonorny/heteronomy, bypassing technological determinism, an alternative is still open of an analytic of technologies of power: this brings into relief the discourse/practices which etch contours of identity versus an analytic of modes of appropriation/resistance which highlight the agency of reception. The former is characteristic of post-structuralist strategies, the latter of the Birmingham school of cultural studies. I regard the two as complementary. (1995:22)

Among many other problems that might beset wholesale co-operation between cultural studies and post-structuralism (though American cultural studies is conducting an ongoing experiment in this vein), is the future of the culture^' concept. Poster, though believing that the relative optimism about the subject both cultural studies and post-structuralism share offers common ground, decidedly prefers "information" to "culture." 4. To his credit, Poster is sensitive to post-structuralism's faults, particularly that of linguistic reductionism, i.e., viewing reality exclusively as a matter of language. 'While the practice of some post-structuralists may lend itself to this accusation" he writes (Poster 1995:75), 'my effort, in theorizing the mode of information, has been to counteract the textualist tendency by linking post-structuralist theory with social change, by connecting it with electronic communications technology, by 'applying' its methods to the arena of everyday life, by insisting on communication as a historical context which justifies the move to an emphasis on language. "

5. Post-structuralism's postmodern pedigree is obvious enough. However, suggesting a relationship between Bell and postmodern positions may come as a surprise, particularly given the inclusion of postmodernism among his many targets in the essay, "The Culturd Contradictions of Capitalism." Postmodernism, Bell writes there (1976a: 52; cf 1976b: 53), is the mature and exaggerated form of late modernism, and likewise "tears down the boundaries and insists that acting out, rather than making distinctions, is the way to gain knowledge." Yet, following Kumar (1995), Calhoun (1995) and Alexander (1994), we can mark a transition fiom high modernist to someone wanting to put modernity behind him (one echoing his famous passage fiom Trotskyist to neoconservative). The technocratic high modernism of ne Coming of Post-industrial Society, a work re-issued with a new foreword in 1976, is directly contradicted by the argument in the "Cultural Contradictions" essay (published in me Culiural Confradictiom of Capitalism in the same year) whereby high modernism is held to have betrayed capitalism by domesticating avant-garde values in the form of consumer culture. Bell's appeal to nostalgia as a means to knit the disjunction of culture and society is, as neo-finctionalist Alexander notes, a keynote of postmodernism:

What is so striking about this phase of Bell's career, however, is how rapidly the modernist notion of post-industrial society gave way to postmodernism, in content if not in explicit form. For Bell, of course, it was not disappointed radicalism that produced this shift but his disappointments with what he came to call late modernism. When Bell turned away fi-om the degenerate modernism in The Cultural Contradictions of Late Cqitalim, his story had changed. Post-industrial society, once the epitome of modernism, now produced, not reason and progress, but emotionalism and irrationalism, categories alarmingly embodied in sixties youth culture. Bell's solution to this imminent self- destruction of Western society was to advocate the return of the sacred (1977), a solution that exhibited the nostalgia for the past that Jameson would later diagnose as a certain sign of the coming of the postmodern age. (1 994: 18 1- 182)

But Bell's protestations to the contrary, Calhoun confirms the inclusion of post-industrial theory within the canon of postmodern works, underlining how both post-industrial and more patently postmodern arguments, such as post-structuralist media theory, agree as to there being a definitive "break" with the modem past, to the postmodern centrality of media or knowledge in lieu of a modern emphasis on production, and again, to the obsolescence of modernity itseK Calhoun writes:

.. .postmodemism includes sociological and political economic claims to identity as a basic transition fiom 'modernity' to a new stage of (or beyond) history. These variously emphasize 'post-industrial', information or knowledge society as the new societal formation. A new centrality is posited for media, information technology and the production of signification (for example, cultural industry) as an end in itself Key figures in this line of argument (notably Bell and Touraine, and popularizers like Toffler and Naisbitt) are not directly a part of the postmodernist movement, but their arguments have influenced it substantially. (1 995 : 78)

However, defining Bell as a "postmodernist" may cordhe the issue more than is usehl, and crudely include him among post-structuralists with whom he may share a certain resemblance in some ways, but with whom he is clearly not a blood relative. It may be sufficient to say that in his resolute opposition to modem culture (but not, of course, to technology or capitalism, which in his analysis are separable fiom modern values), and in his ambition to propel society beyond modernity, Bell's analysis bears comparison with expressly postmodern arguments. While he is no postmodernist, neither is he a merely reactive traditionalist, and it is his identification with the "break" with modernity and technological determinism which suggests the analogy with Poster and certain aspects of post-structuralist new media theory.

6. "Neoconservative" is a term originally used to refer to those left-liberal Jewish and American intellectuals, including Bell, Horowitz, Kristol, novelist Saul Bellow, and others, who made a spectacular turn to the political right in light of revelations of Stalin's atrocities, as well as tension between the Jewish and Afiican-American cornmunities. They and their children (Adam Bellow at the Free Press, publisher of ?he Bell Curve; William Kristol, chief advisor to former U.S.Vice- President Dan Quayle) subsequently took up leadership roles in the post-war Right, and provided the ideological braintrust for Nixon and, most importantly, Reagan. However, the term is more generally used today to refer to the movement they fostered, again, reconciling social conservative and liberal economic positions--as evidenced so instructiveiy in Bell's Cultural Contradictiom. Williams offers the following reflection on neoconservatism's paradoxical combination of economic liberalism and social conservatism, a position wilfully indifferent to the traditional "old" conservative critique of markets:

For what is quite clear in the new conservatism... is that a genuine theoretical objection to the principle and the effects of an 'atomized,' individualist society is combined, and has to be combined with, adherence to the principles of an economic system which is based on just this 'atomized,' individualized view. (1983:242)

Neo-liberalism is a related though different ideology. While sharing a similar faith in market fieedom and aversion to state regulation, neo-liberalism is not conspicuously conservative where social policy is concerned. It is a liberalism fkeed of that ideology's post-WWII adherence to a Keynesian welfare state, but equally unencumbered by pro-life, pro-gun, anti-crime or anti- homosexual politics. Neo-conservatism, at its acme of influence in the 1980s, arguably made possible the separation of liberalism fiom its affiliation with statism, and thus the 'mew Democrat" and 'mew Labour" politics in the U.S. Clinton and U.K. Blair governments. What the promise of a "compassionate conservatism" recently espoused by Texas governor George Bush, Jr., and more recently, elements of the Progressive Conservative party in Canada might mean is not clear yet, though more ideological shape-shifting among the various parties and ideologies is inevitable.

Note that post-industrial theory does have adherents who articulate a decidedly radical position; these are often identified as post-Fordist in nature, and generally don't anticipate a paradise that follows on the end of industrial society.

7. Technology here can mean machines and hardware, but also, borrowing from Jacques Ellul's concept of "technique," "the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity" (Ellul 1964: xxv). Chapter 4 The Politics of Enchantment: Misusing Romanticism

"The only cure for postmodernism is the incurable illness of romanticism."

Richard Appignanesi and Chris Ganatt, Posmodernism for Beginners, p. 173

Romantic Readings of Post-industrialism and Post-structuralism fie case for a romantic reading of post-industrialism andpost-structuralism

Romanticism may in fact be the oldest and most powehl tool we have to criticize instrumental reason, even as we analytically remove technology fiom the suffocating fatalism of the Fradcfbrt School's analysis. Here the critique of the technocratic society and of the separation of technology fiom ethical and aesthetic controls began (Gouldner

1976:263;cE Bowie 1995:15). Using Romanticism, instrumental reason can therefore be aggressively engaged without giving up a critical and humane perspective on our coexistence with machines. Given its value, Romanticism is ripe for poaching by post- industrialism and post-structuralism in order that it might be used for ideological ends, and thereby harnessed to an anti-modem and politically problematic enterprise of technological enchantment very much against romanticism's radical grain.

Therefore, it is not surprising that the Left-Right debate over technology is at this deeper level one about the fate of the romantic legacy. Technology, afier all, is that which negotiates the Kantian gap between the separate realms of consciousness and things-in- themselves, and it is this gap toward which Romanticism communicates its moral force 158

and fiom which it derives its razson d'etre. Control over Romanticism is tantamount to

control over the discourse regarding technology and society and, crucially, the most

humane means to live meaningfilly within (or in defiance of) the dialectic of

Enlightenment. The appropriation of Romanticism by post-industrial and post-structuralist

theories might be seen as an important contributor to their contemporary success.

Their response, that is, to reification and rationalization is to "re-enchant" the world on

terms that give to technology the means to create the lost enchantment which technology,

after all, ironically helped to cause. The solution is therefore a false one, given that neither

post-industrialism nor post-structuralism, in their determinism, actually reconnect

technology to critical reason and human agency. Both theories offer an unsatisfactory

option in what might be termed the "politics of enchantment." It is unsatisfactory insofar

as the age-old problem of instrumental reason, and its deep complicity with Iiberal

capitalism, are masked, and a world of infinite possibility--whether Bell's technocratic

solution to scarcity or Poster's perfect freedom for the individual--proposed. Such theories offer "an enchantment by which, through the power of technology, the world is made to appear animated and magical. The world was disenchanted by the same processes that have given rise to the technology that parodies that lost enchantment" (Shallis

1984: 176).

It is important to appreciate that enchantment is itself not the problem, since it is but the means by which we give value to a world which remains indifferent to our need for meaning. Rather, what is crucial is the particular nature of the spell that is cast, whether 159

it comes fiom Disney and Industrial Light and Magic or fiom the lyricism of Williams's

prose and punk discourse on the street, and what relationship to material reality is then

constructed. It might be ventured that cultural studies's task since its inception has been

to reenchant the world on terms that do not betray us, to sprinkle fairy dust in those places

where less benign magic reigns. Cultural studies, in short, offers a better alternative within

the politics of enchantment in its particular use of Romanticism.

Post-industrialism's and post-structuralism's self-serving re-enchantment of a modem

world without meaning or magic--or to put that more pointedly, this misuse of

Romanticism--follows on postmodernism's claimed monopoly of Romanticism. Given the

disavowal of Romanticism by Left critics like Eagleton, Harvey and Jameson, postmodern

critics have been quick to capitalize on this and claim Romanticism as their own. For

literary critic Diane Elam, romance is postmodemism, and therefore postmodernism can

be said to have always been present in modern history as a counterpoint to modernity in

this romantic form. "It is in this context that romance, as a signature of the possibility of

postmodernism, is always present to modernist discourse. Postmodernism, that is, does

not simply come after modernism but is a counter-discourse on history and the real which modernism must repress in order to establish itself as the statement of the real" (Elm

l992:3).'

But the modernity of Romanticism is not so easily disputed, and claims by postmodernists to the contrary must be seen as strategic in nature. The post-industrial and post-structuralist positions are only too glad to accept the characterization of Enlightenment as synonymous with modernity, the better to demarcate the "break" and

claim the rest of cultural history for themselves. The romanticism that postmodern

theorists would locate on the other side of this break can, and must if the modem is to be

properly accounted for, be recognized as a part of a dynamic which is inextricably part of

modernity. Otherwise it is this very Left convergence with the Right as to the

identification of modernity with reason and rationalization--where "the Enlightenment is

evoked as though it were the archetype of a unidimensional and uncontested modernity"

(Calhoun 1993:75)--that makes the postmodern claim as to a "break" possible in the first

place:

The postmodernist critique... tends to equate modernity with the rationalist Enlightenment. But the Romantics were as modem and as new as the rationalists. Characters crucial to modernity--most notably Rousseau--but also Goethe and some of the English Romantic poets--combined elements of both rationalism and romanticism in their writing and their lives.... There may be an important battle between rationalist universalism and attention to the irrational, between the value of the particular and the repressive, disempowering and deceptive side of individualism. But to equate that with a battle between modernity and its putative successor is to fail to recognize how deeply a part of modernity that whole battle, that whole fiarne of reference is. (Calhoun 1993: 75)

Without the aid of Romanticism, however, Left criticism of technology has been unduely vulnerable because it is resigned to occupy the very rationalist epistemology the

Right has identified as a problem, thereby acting to reproduce the conditions under which technological rationality flourishes. Technologi~ddeterminism is then not merely an arbitrary point of departure for the post-industrialism and post-structuralism: it is the very sign of the Left's failure to shift the basis of critique outside the grounds of technological 161

rationality's constitution. In other words, the Left's attack on technological determinism in

fact describes the limits on Left critique. Recalling the point made in chapter one in

reference to Lukacs, the Left's neglect of the epistemological origins of its theoretical

tools, primarily ideology critique, means that it ironically contributes to the very reification

it would oppose. Without Romanticism, Left thought is prone to a circularity--affirming

reification even as it criticizes technological rationality and determinism--which leaves it

largely ineffective as far as new media criticism is concerned.

In order that the self-limiting nature of the conventional critique of post-industrial and

post-structuralist theories of new media might be overcome, a romantic reading of each of

these positions is called for. That is, in particular how and to what effect is Romanticism

appropriated by post-industrialism and post-structuralism, and what critical openings for a

Left position are possible in light of this alleged "misuse" of Romanticism?

A romantic reading of post-industrialism

The relationship of post-industrialism to Romanticism is registered on three different, and

related, levels: finctionalism's origins in late German Romanticism; the relationship to

nature imputed by the tradition of the "technological sublime" in American cultural

history; and the cause celebre that romanticism has become in the writings of

contemporary followers of Be11 and Parsons, the so-caIled "neofbnctionalists." Though these elements might appear incongruous, the romantic narrative is the patron saint of 162

loose ends in cultural history, and the relationship between late Romanticism, nature's role

in the "technological sublime," and neofhctionalism is no exception.

American "structural-finctionalisq" of course, is Bell's primary theoretical affiliation,

his post-industrialism being a futurist byproduct of the Durkheim-derived American school

of sociological thought which, under Parsons, Bell, Robert Merton and others, dominated

sociology at mid-century. This much is obvious: but what is less well-known is the fact

that key elements of late German Romanticism anticipate functionalism. "In fact it is

plausible to say that early Romantic thought anticipates 20th century existentialism, while the later Romanticism agrees with fbnctionalist sociological theory" (Saiedi 1993:65). The tenets of late German Romanticism, which went unreported in chapter one given the primary emphasis on early German Romanticism, bear some comparison with fimctionalism, especially as these relate to ideas about nature and the "technological sublime."

The end of the radical, experimental phase in Romantic thought and the beginning of the conservative one begins in 180 1, after it had become evident to fiends of the French

Revolution that things had gone badly wrong. The Terror, Themidor, and the imperial adventures of a certain Corsican artillery officer all would dismay France's allies among the romantic German intellectuals and English poets alike. "There is no doubt that the dominance of conservative thought and politics in the later stages of Romanticism was primarily caused by the Napoleonic invasion of European countries and the resulting ascendance of nationalistic and traditionalistic thinking" (Saiedi 1993:66). Conservative I63

reaction to the Napoleonic Wars and the disappointment of radical hopes can be read in

late Romantic thought, especially as these manifest in ideas as to language and culture,

epistemology and agency.

Language's hermeneutic nature and aesthetic fbnction, as defined by the early German

Romantics, is lost in late German Romanticism. Deeply Christian in character, the later

works of Friedrich Schlegel propose a deterministic view of language. Language no longer

simply aids in the creation of reality, but rather reflects God-given truths that are gradually

revealed to humankind as the universal Christian history thought to underlie experience

unfolded. Language served as the symbolic embodiment of a people's history and culture

(not dissimilar fiom Williams's view), but in a decidedly static way, not merely offering

the cultural basis for the social totality, but binding it fast and irrevocably to an anti-

humanist model of history. Where the early Romantics, following Herder, had

championed cultural relativism, rejecting "the possibility of a universal definition of

progress and evolution across cultures," the late Romantic idea of universal history

"relates all different cultural forms as successive and related states of a common teleology" (Saiedi 1993: 9 1).

Epistemologically, the early Romantic love of irony, chaos, exoticism and the particular is thrown over for "a dogmatic belief in historical religion, revelation, established traditions and authority, and individual's submission to the rules and laws of society"

(Saiedi 1993: 90). The non-rationalism remains, but it is no longer a quioxtic challenge to reason on behalf of emotion and the imagination, but rather a mystifjlng endorsement of authority and status quo. Romanticism's unique brand of materialism, whereby the relative autonomy of culture to shape nature is acknowledged, is foregone in favour of an idealism rejecting the value and presence of the material world. Morever, the early Romantic extrapolation of particularity into a model of heterogenous totality is succeeded by an

"organically and necessarily interrelated" fbnctionalist whole, where the particular exists only to glorifjl the Christian universal history, and social practice to affirm the binding power of institutions. Obsessed with the problem of order in Napoleonic Europe, the

Germans developed a view of society as a "moral community" where, among other things, authority should be based not on law or abstract principles, but rather the love of the people for that person or persons at the acme of the power structure.

Predictably, the license granted the subject by the early German Romantics is taken away by the late, given their tendency to reduce individuals to the social totaIity and affirm a fbnctionalist and organic theory and society (Saiedi 1993: 127). But common to both

Romanticisms was a commitment to an organic model of social reality, a reaction to the mechanistic view of nature supported by the Enlightenment, as filtered through the latter's taxonomic impulse, its science and the reifLing power of its abstraction. The Romantic and

Enlightenment concepts of nature are thus compared:

Romanticism.. . based its theories of knowledge, action and politics on a radically different definition of nature. It is particularly important to note that contrary to the Enlightenment's notion of the natural thinghood of being, for Romanticism the concept of nature was defined in terms of the notions of life and organism. It was now trees and living organisms, rather than physical objects, that became the model and embodiment of nature. This silent transformation of the dominant metaphor in the Romantic perspective was probably the most hndamental revolution in theoretical discourse of the time. In a word, a new pattern of epistemology, theory of action, and political philosophy was built on this new metaphor of nature. (Saiedi 1993: 156)

A simple summary of functionalist premises confirms the parallels between late German

Romanticism and fbnctionalism. Following neofinctionalist JefEey Alexander's own list

(Alexander and Turner: 1985) of fbnctionalist premises, its salient features are as follows:

society is viewed as a symbiotic constellation of parts, its energy deriving fiom the open

and pluralistic dynamics of interrelationship, rather than some apriori element, e.g.,

economy; the equilibrium between its parts is taken to be a hypothetical value, though not

practically realizable goal, a position that separates functionalism fiom "conflict" models

of society; personality, culture and social structure are treated as distinct and separable

planes; and social progress follows a pattern of ever-increasing differentiation, societies

registering this complexity in the division of labour, social stratification, multiplying

institutional affiliations, and so on. What we have here, as in late German Romanticism, is

a powerfbl and lasting organicism, a model of reality that borrows heavily fiom nature so

as to find appropriate language for the description and analysis of cultural phenomena.

Their common interest in organic or natural metaphor apart, early and late German

Romanticism model very different values as regards nature. The metaphor of nature was associated with quite progressive ideas in early Romantic thought. The early Romantics opposed the Enlightenment static, universalistic and mechanistic conception of nature with a metaphor of a vital organicism denoting life, growth, history, uniqueness, process, activity, fieedom, hnctional interrelations, and totality. By contrast, late Romanticism 166

replaced this dynamic organicism with one much more familiar to us as functionalism. In

late Romanticism the same metaphor implies the idea of totaIity, fimctional

interdependence, priority of the whole to the parts, structural unity and order. Although

neither supports a dialectical conception of social reality, the early Romantic organicism

allowed an undeniable dynamism and direction-permission for nature to be nature, if you will--that is not present in the later Romantic purview. These different organicisms are instructively present in the debate as to the information society and the "technological sublime," and suggest the persistence of romanticism in that peculiar American idiom also.

Motivating debates as to the articulation of technology and society is a particular and profound site of ambivalence toward modernity, captured in the very characterization of the post-industrial and post-structuralist positions as variously anti-modem: the cultural space between the garden and the machine. "[WJe bring to this Information Age a set of attitudes toward technology that reflect our ambivalence toward it, pro and con, attract and repel, and this in turn rests on a deeper conflict inherent in modernity between the world of organic harmony and the world of differentiation and constant change. We may feel more comfortable with one, but never forget the other; we may be more competent in one, but belong emotionally to the otheryy(McCormack 1994:13). The different forms of organicism model different responses to the characteristically modem problem of

b instrumental reason, which must monopolize nature in its various forms--be it the material world, labour or human subjectivity. Nature, therefore, provides a point of analytical access. 167

In the post-industrial and functionalist model of organicism, its origins in late

Romanticism, nature is that which purifies modernity of its contradictions, so that nature

and culture are seamlessly compatible and without contradiction. This picture of harmony

between nature and industrial society, designated the "middle landscape" in Leo Marx's

classic work on pastoralism and technology, meMachine and the Garden, would become

"the dominant theme in the ideology of American industrialism" (Marx 1964: 158), and as

might be seen, a charter to post-industrial theories of new media. Bell's post-industrial

utopia posits the same absence of contradiction, but this time with resort not to nature in

its raw, primal, and green glory--but to Adorno's "second nature9'--a virtual reality of technological enchantment. Technology, defined as the deterministic source for, rather than social product in and of, history, is thus treated in suitably religious tones--it is the deus ex machina, the sublime power which, recalling the argument fiom Cultural

Contradictions, Bell appealed to to relieve a broken modem culture fiom the burden of history. In a technocratic society of total administration, technology is the only nature that we can know. And for this reason, then, instrumental reason might be seen to have won out in Bell's utopia.

However, the organicism more typical of early Romanticism lends us a more humane vision of a world with--not apart fiom--technology. The English Romantic period speaks

"the green language," a way of articulating the human relationship to nature that broke fiom earlier eighteenth century neo-classical definitions of nature as property, as something that can be separated, ordered and reified. The "green language9' instead 168 addressed nature as "a principle of creation, of which the creative mind is a part, and fiom which we may learn the truths of our own sympathetic nature" (Williams 1973:127). Just as Europe was entering into its industrial capitalist phase, Romanticism propounded a trenchant critique of this development, one aimed squarely at the mutual alienation of physical and human nature by industry, technology and capitalist social relations.

However, the "green language7' spoke for something other than mere reactionary opposition to technology--the latter which Wordsworth called "the fever of the worldn--as that led all too readily to the conservatism of the later German and English Romantics.

The early Romantic period, whether in Germany or England, did not sentimentalize the rural idyll as an escape fkom civilization, pointing to a reactionary "primitivism." Rather, the early Romantics preferred a sense of contradiction, a feature of the more sophisticated forms of pastoral reflection that could "manage to call into question, or bring irony to bear against the illusion of peace and harmony in a green pasture" (Marx 1964: 25). This complex response, it must be emphasized, does not begin nor end with Romanticism; rather, in Leo Marx's view, it is as old as Virgil's Eclogues and as young as Fitzgerald's i%e Great Gatsby.

Romanticism is modernity's particular expression of the theme of the complex compatibility of technology with human and external nature, though the theme itself is not exclusively modem in origin. Romanticism, like other historical expressions of this "root metaphor," promises a way of making life whole within, rather than despite, the necessary contradictions that follow on human society. The depth to which this commitment to conceiving reality on non-reified terms is evident in the Romantic position

on nature. No prior separation of subject from object is assumed, and therefore to this

extent "we cannot draw a line between nature and consciousness" (Bowie 1995:12).

Human and machine, therefore, share the same nature, a fact which disciplines romantic analysis. The core of Romantic philosophy is that the analysis of any single phenomenon, including that of subjectivity, must acknowledge that all phenomena are potentially answerable to that analysis, insofar as all phenomena share a similar nature. The subject, for example, enjoys no special dispensation fiom scientific laws it attributes to physics or biology, nor can we define the subject as either coolly apart from (or for that matter, wholly subjugated to) the world we create. In a phrase, though it is in human nature to share a world with technology, that technology is not the sum of our nature. This fact compels cultural and theoretical narratives sensitive to the actual tension between nature and the counterf force'^ of technological civilization, a tension that can be consigned neither to a reactionary pastoralism nor a "machine in the garden" notion that admits no contradiction between technology and nature:

The power of these fables to move us derives fiom the magnitude of the protean conflict figured by the machine's increasing domination of the visible world. This recurrent metaphor of contradiction makes vivid, as no other figure does, the bearing of public events upon private lives. It discloses that our inherited symbols of order and beauty have been divested of meaning.. .. To change the situation we require new symbols of possibility, and although the creation of those symbols is in some measure the responsibility of artists, it is in greater measure the responsibility of society. The machine's sudden entrance into the garden presents a problem that ultimately belongs not to art but to politics. (Manc 1964: 364-65) 170

The latest incarnation of the fbnctionalist appropriation of romance is that of

neofinctionalism, a recent attempt by sociologists such as Roland Robertson, JefEey

Alexander and Edward Tiryakian, among others, to revise and update the work of Bell,

Parsons and Merton. Alexander (1985) represents neofhctionalism as the product of self-

conscious design on the part of contemporary sociologists, emulating work by Marxists to

rethink their theories as part of the neo-Marxist theoretical project. Neofbnctionalism,

heeding criticism of fimctionaIism's unreflective liberalism, its self-reifjling character, and

aversion to class and conflict, is a "family relation" of mid-century functionalism. Its

several features are apparent evidence of a theory that wants to learn from its mistakes.

Within a neo-fhctionalist framework, cultural and personality systems are made to

answer to materialism; the customary functionalist emphasis on social differentiation

accommodates ideology critique; contingency is related to systemic process; and lastly,

theories of integration and social solidarity share the historical stage with conflict models

(Alexander 1985: 16). In short, "The Parsonian legacy--if not Parson's original theory- has begun to be reconstructed" (AIexander 1985:8).

Mantist critics of neofinctionalism have been quick to respond, chief among them perhaps Ben Agger. "Calling functionalism neo-fhctionalism advances theory only neologistically" (Agger 1992:69). For Agger, neofinctionalism acts to reduce social complexity to the problem of "micro-macro" linkages, i.e., between subject and structure, eliminating the risk of contradiction and restoring the fbnctionalist status quo. The

Parsonian project lives on in the continued subordination of the individual to systemic 171

imperatives, while a neo-functionalist sociology formalizes this relationship in order to

implicate people indissolubly in the "patterned fabric of modernity" (Agger 1992: 69-70).

That theoretical entrapment, however, has another level in Romanticism. The

neohnctionalists are not alone in championing the return of Romanticism to the

theoretical agenda, as the work of Christensen, Bowie, Surin, and Prendergast suggests,

but they are probably the most organized. Recent articles by Tiryakian and Alexander

raise the profile of romanticism significantly, albeit with a neofhctionalist program

implied and predictable problems which folIow. Together, their work represents the

beginning of a more programmatic exploitation of Romanticism from the Right that bears

examining.

Citing Bell's ultimate rejection of the late modernism espoused in i%e Corning of Post-

Industriul Society, Alexander argues for a "neo-modernist" or post-postmodemist

theoretical project aimed at understanding modernization. For Alexander, the venerable

Durkheimian and Weberian problem of modernization never disappeared, a fact

demonstrated in his view by the collapse of the Soviet system and the uninhibited

extension of liberal capitalism worldwide. "I will propose that contemporary social theory must be much more sensitive to the apparent reconvergence of the world's regimes and that, as a result, we must try to incorporate some broad sense of the universal and shared elements of development into a critical, undogmatic, and reflective theory of social change" (Alexander 1994: 167). But modernization theory, as constructed under the auspices of post-war finctionalisrn, was positivist, culturaIly insensitive and neocolonialist, giving rise to "dependency" theory (Gunder Frank, Baran) and, later, postmodern theory justly critical ofjust such a model of modernization.*

The mistakes of the post-war fitnctionalists--Bell, Parsons, and their equivalents in anthropology and media theory, such as Robert Redfield, Daniel Lemer and Wilbur

Schramm--notwithstanding, the particular "romantic" personality of that research is for

Alexander something worth recovering. The 1930s and 40s had given voice to heroic theoretical Left and liberal projects of social reconstruction, e.g., the Popular Front, the

New Deal, while the 1960s would witness a revival of such themes in dependency theory,

Third World movements, and New Left theory and politics. The 1950s, however, despite a Cold War climate of political realism, supported a romantic culture in social theory, and one typical for him of the very spirit of finctionalism:

Yet, while realism was a significant mood in the postwar period, it was not the dominant narrative frame through which postwar social science intellectuals charted their times. Romanticism was. Relatively deflated in comparison with heroism, romanticism tells a story that is more positive in its evaluation of the world as it exists fiom today. In the postwar period it allowed intellectuals and their audiences to believe that progress would be more or less continuously achieved, that improvement was likely. This state of grace referred, however, more to individuals than to groups, and to incremental rather than revolutionary change. In the new world that emerged fiom the ashes of war, it had finally become possible to cultivate one's own garden. (Alexander 1994:173)

Thinking about the fate of modernity in an age of globalization requires, as part of this commitment to developing a conceptual basis for neomodernization in the context of a neomodern (i.e., neofbnctionalist) theory, a new model of the modern epoch. A "more adequate conception of modernity for modernisation analysis" is necessary on which to 173

rebuild functionalism for a new age (Tiryakian 1991:174). Where Alexander outlines the

rationale for the retrenchment of Romanticism in finctionalism, Tiryakian drafts a virtual

policy statement on behalf of a neofbnctionalist and, implicitly, neoconservative program.

For Tiryakian, Weber's account of modernization as a relentless process of structural

differentiation and rationalization was too pessimistic. Disenchantment is a reality, to be

sure; but modernity yields powerfbl "counterprocesses," such as youth movements,

nationalism and fhdamentalism, by which instrumental reason is curbed. Given these

examples, however, "romanticism is one of the most powerfbl instances of reenchantment

as a feature of modernity," and indeed, "perhaps the most important Western cultural

movement of the modem period" (Tiryakian 1992: 85, 84). Although some date its

demise to the middle of the nineteenth century, Tiryakian aligns himself with those that

take a "bolder stance and propose that romanticism has remained a powefil cultural

current since its emergence" (1992: 84). To this point, and where Tiryakian's desire to

draw Romanticism out from cliched versions of modernity as the exclusive property of the

Enlightenment is involved, this essay has no quarrel.

The neo-functionalists recognize Romanticism as the most significant of movements

with which the meaning of life is renewed, salvaging a social order characterized by

disenchantment with progress but enchanted with scientific and technological advances.

Yet the neo-functionalist version of Romanticism depicts it as the saviour, not the critic, of liberal capitalism, contrary to its original formulation. A technologically engineered enchantment, ideologically underwritten by a romanticism hnctionally incorporated as a 174

"counterprocess" of rationalization, is the basis for the neo-fbnctionalist politics of

enchantment. "~Jeenchantmentand dedifferentiation in their diverse manifestations, have

served to renew and regenerate the Western societal system whether by social movements

that challenge existing patterns of structural differentiation or by movements of the

imagination that challenge the finitude of material reality and have thereby contributed to

its ongoing reconstruction" (Tiryakian 1992: 92). Though they advocate a revival of

modernist social theory, and a romanticized model of modernity, the neo-functionalists

would use Romanticism to buoy the same Western societal system and the modernization

process which the early German and English Romantics were critical of. Machine and

garden are reunited in the "middle landscape" of American ideology, and Romanticism

reduced to making the end of history a better place to shop.

A romantic reading of post-structuralism

The romantic critique of Poster's post-structuralism begins on familiar terms: the "straw

person" of Enlightenment modernity. For Poster (citing Baudrillard here), the new media

produce a culture so identified with the instability ofthe signifier, the self, and of

fbndamental categories that they are outside the "Enlightenment opposition of reason and the irrational" (19% :16). This makes these phenomena all but inscrutable to modem critical theories, given their rationalism, since the contingency characteristic of new media systems simply ovenvhelms Truth-seeking intellectual projects. Poster (1995:73) addresses cultural studies directly: "The theoretical tendency of Western Marxism has 175

been to approach the question of a politically stabilized modernity fiom orientations

themselves far too rooted in modernity and its communication technologies. Like modem

thinkers since Descartes, they attempt to establish an atemporal or universal foundation

for theory which usually takes the form of some definition of the human."

It need not be repeated--recalling Calhoun's previous point--that post-structuralists

tend to identi@ modemity with Enlightenment, then ally themselves with the irrational and

the romantic. This cause is aided by the neo-Marxist habit of disavowing anything

romantic (with the obvious exceptions of Thompson and Williams here), or indeed,

broadly departing from rationalism. Again, Poster here confirms the persistence of this

stereotype, and the advantage and comfort post-structuralists find in such a

characterization. However, the relationship of post-structuralism to Romanticism goes

much fbrther than this, back to the very origins of the post-structuralist project in the

work of Friedrich Nietzsche. To understand how the romantic is appropriated by post-

structuralism, and thereby made available to media theorists in that tradition, comparison

of the standard post-structuralist incorporation of Nietzsche, the famous Habermasian

criticism of that incorporation, and a third "romantic" interpretation of Nietzsche's

intervention, is ~arranted.~

The standard account is adequately represented in the work of Azade Seyhan. For her,

Nietzsche is the source of many of the basic premises of post-structuraIism and

postmodernism generally: these include their anti- (or post) epistemological and foundationalist viewpoints, anti-essentialism, anti-realism, rejection of truth as something 176

which corresponds to reality, disbelief in metanarratives, etc. But Nietzsche is far more

than the author of these contrarian principles; rather, he is the ultimate broker for early

German Romanticism as it speaks to the twentieth century. "Nietzsche is an important

figure of transition, for he is a reluctant heir to Romantic idealism yet represents in fbll

measure the paradoxical and ironic vision of early Romanticism" (Seyhan 1992:136-37).

Nietzsche takes a number of defining early Romantic themes, including aestheticism, anti-

philistinism, the embrace of difference, the search for a new mythology, and the interest in

Greek ideas of art and culture, these being "broader conceptual concerns whose Romantic

traces Nietzsche develops into a preamble to post-structuralist criticism" (Seyhan 1992:

13 7).

Chief among his post-structuralist propositions is Nietzsche's belief that there is no

metaphysical basis to our epistemoIogies apart fiorn the simple brute assertion of the "will

to power." The romantic contribution to the "will to power" thesis is the former's

criticism of metaphysics as fiction. Metaphysics are evidence of the mind trying to cope

with the sheer uncertainty of existence by overlaying it with self-deceiving philosophical

premises, and building a culture--an Apollonian world of appearances and illusions--on the

quicksand of the Dionysian will and appetite. Reason, the crown of the Enlightenment, is just a sophisticated form of metaphysical violence. All language must be then considered

"aesthetic" in nature because, lacking any access to an empirical foundation, the world is

entirely in play. At best, we can draw ourselves pictures of the world, but these can make no claim to any kind of representational veracity, though we retain our sanity (unlike 177

Nietzsche) by collectively forgetting that knowledge is metaphorical and the world

unknowable. "The understanding that joins Nietzsche with his Romantic forebears is the

realization that there is no rninotaur of dictatorial truth at the center of the labyrinth, but

rather an energetic and restless inquiry consistent with the desire to face the flux of

becoming" (Seyhan 1992: 140).

Habermas's account of this incorporation, as recounted in his essay "The Entry into

Postmodernity: Nietzsche as a Turning Point," is as insightful as it is problematic for a

project (such as this current one) concerned to use Romanticism as a contemporary critical

tool. For Habermas, Nietzsche represents the first major philosopher to refhe to confiont

the dialectic of EnIightenment--the rationalizing disenchantment of the world effected by

bringing reason to bear on it. Beginning with Hegel, then the idealist Schelling and the

Romantic Friedrich Schlegel, a long line of German (and other) philosophers, social

theorists, and theologians sought to find some means to restore a modem culture, as

discussed in chapter one, riven in three parts by instrumental reason. Given the demands of

a post-Christian metaphysics-to restore meaning to a world where God was no longer

central--Hegel tries more reason, Schelling poetry as a means to shore up reason, and

Schlegel poetry alone, the latter having found reason unredeemable. With each attempt,

intellectual confidence at restoring wholeness to modernity ebbs, so that by the Romantic period Schlegel offers the aesthetic alone, tenuously, as a faculty that might create a new mythology for modem humankind. 178

Nietzsche, the ultimate contrarian, "renounces a renewed revision of the concept of

reason and bidsfarewell to the program of an intrinsic dialectic of Enlightenment"

(Habermas 1987236). Like the post-industrialists and post-structuralists who would follow him, Nietzsche's decision to drop out of the modem project means that modernity's singular nature must be reduced and subject to a "conspicuous leveling," and the epoch made to seem a passing phase in cultural history. Modernity is thus characterized as the last moment in "the far-reaching history of a rationalization initiated by the dissolution of archaic life and the collapse of myth," (Habermas 1987:87), and Nietzsche argues that a new mythology can only be created in a fbture after modernity. Modernity's progressive and linear sense of time forbids a return to the mythos of pre-rational humanity, and thus we must go "back to the hture7' in order that a new mythology be built. "Only the fbture constitutes the horizon for the arousal of mythical pasts," Habermas (1987:87) notes of

Nietzsche, a future where the will to power is taken as the only motive force once everyone has awakened fiom the sleep of reason.

The Romantic conception of language as aesthetic in nature--albeit an aesthetic hnction with some capacity to connect with the real--is the condition then of Nietzsche's categorical break with the real. Nietzsche's aesthetic, however, means the negation of the

Romantic heritage in Habermas's view, an observation that no doubt contributes to its poor reputation among Left theorists. Both Romanticism and Nietzsche embraced the trope of the Greek man-god Dionysus as the personification of non-rationality. However, argues Habemas, where Dionysus was for the Romantics a Christ-like figure whose non- 179

rationality would ultimately rejuvenate Western society, Nietzsche defined him as the

avatar of an anti-metaphysics which would guarantee the very impossibility of the "social"

in any meaningfbl form and the utter loss of self "This identification of the frenzied wine-

god with the Christian savior-god is only possible because Romantic messianism aimed at

a rejuvenation of, but not a departure &om, the West. The new mythology was supposed

to restore a lost solidarity but not reject the emancipation that the separation fiom the

primordial mythical forces also brought about for the individual as individuated in the

presence of the One God" (Habermas (1 987:gZ).

With that passage, Habermas not only identifies early German Romanticism as an

unwilling accomplice in post-structuralism's emergence (something which obviously buoys

the work of Elam and other advocates of romanticism as postmodernism), but also implies

that its political credentials are questionable insofar as the romantic isolates the aesthetic

sphere fiom reference to the moral and the rational. This opinion is made more explicit in

Habermas's essay, "Modernity: An Incomplete Project" (Docherty 1993), where

Romanticism's aesthetic project is held to lead to the aesthetic-political movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, e.g., futurism, expressionism, surrealism (a connection this essay endorses), and those movements to the postmodern (a connection it doesn't). Habermas writes (1993 : 99): "In the course of the nineteenth century, there emerged out of this romantic spirit that radicalized consciousness of modernity which fieed itself fiom all specific historical ties." Moreover, and pointedly, reification can only be solved, in his view, if the separate parts of the human sensibility are reunited, a solution 180 he shares with Williams. Habemas (1 993 :105) writes: "A reified everyday praxis can be cured only by creating unconstrained interaction of the cognitive with the moral-practical and the aesthetic-expressive elements. Reification cannot be overcome by forcing just one of those highly stylized cultural spheres to open up and become more accessible."

With all due respect to communicative rationality and the ideal speech situation in which this reunification of consciousness is to occur, Habermas's program would keep us waiting a very long time for resolution of the crisis in representation. A different perspective on Romanticism, as might be seen, yields a glimpse of a project at once more realistic and more attainable than Habermas's, if not perhaps quite so wholesome.

Early Romanticism is not intrinsically committed to the Western project, if we take its radicalism and present adaptability as given. True, its founders expressed revolutionary faith in the French Revolution, a supreme precedent in the development of Western politics and culture. However, the Western project is largely defined in neoconservative and neoliberal terms currently, and it is difficult in the face of criticisms fiom identity politics, postcolonial studies and queer theory to believe that such a project, pending its release from neoconservatives, would be recognizable to Habermas. It is similarly difficult to believe that critical reason can deliver us fiom the dialectic of Enlightenment, however digitally enhanced, given the permanent fact of uncertainty, of difference, and of a social totality that has perhaps become too large and complex to be apprehended on rationalist terms. 181

Rather than lump Romanticism with Nietzsche's awfbl fate, Bowie argues that a carefiil

distinction need be made between Nietzsche's rejection of metaphysics (substituting

power instead), and a Romantic epistemology (one hesitates to call it a metaphysic)

where, though foundations are logically impossible, the search for these foundations is

taken to be progressive and necessary. "As is well known, Nietzsche will later, not least

via the influence of Romanticism, ask what value truth possesses, thereby attempting to

undermine the idea that truth qua representation of a ready-made world could ever be

grounded. Nietzsche's questioning has had a decisive influence on subsequent discussions

of the 'end of metaphysics' in contemporary literary theory. The Romantic understanding

of truth both prefigures Nietzsche's question and implies that any determinate answer to it,

for example, in terms of power as the ground of truth, fails to understand the real nature

of truth" (Bowie 1997: 72).

The romantic "ground," as has been stated, is the one that is always shifting, refining

the infinite regress of trying to prove one's metaphysical origins by reference to those

same origins. Nietzsche, for all his philosophical bluster, is no different, since he is forced to argue for the validity of his own claims while denying that there is any ground for truth-

-another performative contradiction in Bowie's view (1993: 182). By positing a fiture where myth is to be made, outside modernity and outside history, Nietzsche allows those grand contemporary myth-making projects--post-industrialism and post-structuralism--just the room they need. No wonder that finctionalism and post-structuralism are so attracted to new media, since these media provide the very ideological conditions necessary to 182

follow Nietzsche into the future, as he defined it. Bowie (1993 :189) concludes: "The only

basis for a post-metaphysical conception of reason is the striving for truth, identity, that is

revealed in the very fact of communication, as opposed to the Nietzschean idea that

communication is the exercise of power over the Other. This means that truth is at least

potentially present in any kind of communicative act in relation to another person."

We may live in a world subject to digitally accelerated reification and instmmental

reason, but that fact does not require that we give up on the difficult work of finding

mutual accommodation for ourselves and our machines. However, the technological

pastoral of Bell (and the neofinctionalists) or Poster is a sophisticated "second nature,"

an unreal world of media-delivered enchantment that leaves us still more vulnerable to the

characteristic problem of modernity, notably by declaring it over (as with Bell and Poster)

or its contradictions romantically resolved (as with the neofimctionalists) and the battle

against instrumental reason finally won. Whether this vision of "technologized humanity"

takes the form of ads for cell phones celebrating our new mobility (while ignoring the

panoptic consequences of constantly being "in touch" with head office), or for video

games promising us ever greater mastery over virtual worlds (while neglecting the lessons

of simulacrum), the appropriation of romance by post-industrialism and post-structuralism

allows both positions fieedom fiom actually wresting the world fiom instrumental reason,

even as we try to live with its most poweifbl technoiogical agents. As Leo Marx indicated above, "new symbols of possibility" are needed, and the tenets of early German 183

Romanticism are a resource which warrants a little of what's left of our attention spans. In the next two paired chapters, a sketch of such symbols is offered. Notes

1.There is a complex and extensive debate in literary theory as to the relationship of postmodernism or -ity to romanticism, and Elam's point by no means exhausts it. Hers is used here because, among the three accounts examined (Wang and Livingston), it was the most dedicated to arguing that romanticism was postmodern in nature, and that it demonstrated the co- existence of postmodernism in modem cultural history. As such, she made an instructive foil as far as Calhoun's contrary assertion was concerned. A subtler argument is made by Wang, in which he states that "fantastic modernity3'--as he terms it--exists more as a trope than as a real cultural moment, and one with which both romanticism and postmodemism have to engage:

An intense dialectic informs the logic of modernity in Romanticism and postmodernity, in which the assertion of any founding origin of modernity is set against the ruthless dereatization of that claim. As often as not, then, Romanticism and postmodern theory more correctly structure themselves around the trope of 'fantastic modernity', in which the possibility of historical difference operates as an aporia of historical thought, a condition that testifies to the radical indeterminacy of historical difference as a stable form of human truth. (1 996:3)

2. Tiryakian, in another paper not discussed here ("Modernisation: Exhumetur in Pace: Rethinking Macrosociology in the 1990s)," characterizes neomodernization theory as follows. It respects that change is as much a function of external, historical changes as it is the product of a logic supposed internal to modernization; the subject is returned to the analysis; the civil society is recognized as a key means to mediating global change of this kind; and addressing some of Parson's particular ideas as to what Tiryakian terms "modernization I," modernization I1 accepts that the modernization process is not necessarily a smooth one.

3. So as to remain focussed on new media theory, and not digress into post-structuralism at impossible Iength, the deconstructionist wing of post-structuralism is not considered here, though reference is made to deconstructionist concepts in later chapters. Poster is not a deconstructionist, nor is much of that media theory inspired by post-structuralism--though Demda does appear in places. Moreover, deconstruction does not always share with other strains of post-structuralism their disregard for some metaphysical or epistemological bottom line, and thus deconstruction may in this sense be regarded as more romantic and less Nietzschean in character. Chapter Five The Ghost in the Machine: Some Problems in Media Resesrch

"As for romance, what does romance mean? I have heard people miscalled for being romantic, but what romance means is the capacity for a true conception of history, a power of making the past part of the present."

William Moms, letter to his daughter May

Media Theory and Romantic Modernity

Staking a claim in cyberspace

The cause of developing a theory of new media with progressive credentials might be made, strategically, by following Morris's advice to make "the past part of the present."

Instead of fbsing a fictive organic past and contemporary technology in an unlikely technological pastoral, and thereby wiping several hundred years of capitalism fiom collective memory through the epistemic violence of the "break" and the ahistorical nature of technological determinism, an alternative approach might view new media as part of a continuity in the modern history of media technology and ideology. Appreciating the modernity of technologies like digital television not only thwarts neoconservative or post- structuralist apocalypticism, but through the work of reading the immanence of the past in the present, offers a much more nuanced and historicized view of the future.

"Media" and "modernity" are frequently paired concepts in media and cultural criticism, since media's presence and power are such as to suggest that fiom the evidence of post-Gutenberg Europe and after, something revolutionary had entered the world. The medidmodernity relationship has been central to most twentieth-century traditions in media and cultural theory: American Pragmatism and its concern to recapture Jeffersonian

ideals against the hulking backdrop of mass society; the Frarkfiwt School and

technological rationality; the effects school and their use of high-modernist, quasi-

scientific method to take the measure of media's relationship to liberal democracy;

Habermas and his ambition to restore the "public sphere" findarnental to modernity's origins in the eighteenth century; McLuhan and the contradictions obtaining between modem print discourse and the holistic, "audile-tactile" electronic media; even the post- structuralists, if only to argue that the anival of digital media has been a terminal point for modernity.

Media criticism, indeed, might be understood as a "displaced critique of modem life," one where we address our unresolved concerns about modernity (Jentzen 1990:64). It may be ventured that this lack of resolution stems less fiom Enlightenment rationality, so visible in the history of social thought, than the displacement suffered due to the romantic.

Cultural studies in general too has betrayed a distinct aversion to thinking about the modem, with predictable consequences:

In spite of widespread disenchantment with the promise of progress and serious hatred in many quarters of modernity's features.. . there simply is no generally heeded and coherent critique of the present in circulation. Marxism offered one, and Marxism is bankrupt. The best that the traditions behind Cultural Studies have come up with has been Leavis's malediction spoken over 'technoIogico-Benthamite civilization', Raymond Williams's steadily conventional hatred of a rather undifferentiated capitalism, and Adomo's and Horkheimer's pessimism at the hypnotic trance induced by American consumerism after the Fascist hysteria had subsided in Europe. (Inglis 1993: 112) 187

Inglis's pessimism, not to mention his reading of Marxism and key figures identified

with the British culturd studies and Critical Theory traditions, is unwarranted.

Romanticism offers a modem theoretical position that is radical, forward-looking, and

sensitive to the "linguistic turn'' in cultural analysis without abandoning the subject,

politics or referentiality. Romanticism is a partner, moreover, to some of the most

interesting and productive tensions in Marxism and cultural studies. More to the point,

Romanticism has already expressed itself not merely in the history of social thought, but in twentieth century media theory, during the often neglected and misunderstood interwar period. Romanticism's relevance to media theory in the past, and more importantly, its value as a positive alternative both to Enlightenment-based rationalist criticism and the appropriations of the romantic in post-industrial and post-structuralist new media analysis, concern the following two paired chapters.

In the present chapter five, the argument takes up the work of answering John

Thompson's call for a rethinking of modem theory's relationship to media by first contrasting the romantic character of 1920s media research and intellectual culture to the chequered history of media theory identified with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural

Studies at Birmingham. Particular attention is then given to a problem that the American tradition (encompassing both the media effects school in the 1940s-80s and American cultural studies fiom the 1980s onward) and the British tradition (encompassing both Left- culturalism in the late 1950s-early 1960s and the Birmingham centre fiom 1964 onward) both share: the opinion that authentic communication is incompatible with and cannot 188

occur within mass media and the contextual modern "mass society." Then, in the context

of a review of past and present cultural studies literature on digital media, the following

chapter six develops a romantic perspective on those media and their consequences for

our conception of identity, technology and authentic communication, three issues of key

import to understanding what is new, and not so new, about "new" media. It is important to underline that new media represent but a case study in what is intended here as an invitation to a more thorough-going romanticization of theory, especially that within the cultural studies tradition.

Media Theory and Intellectual History

The interwar period as a romantic precedent in media theory

The conventional histories of media theory and research typically characterize the interwar period, marking the beginning of formal media research in the U.S., as a brave if benighted era. Confionted by the sheer novelty of radio and cinema at a time of great cultural experiment, economic uncertainty and political movements of the scale of communism, fascism and "New Deal" liberalism, media research in the 1920s and 30s is often depicted as crudely fascinated with the sheer power of media messages. Theorists of both a radical and a liberal temperament define this period as one preoccupied with the

"magic bullet7' theory, in which media impress naive publics with a brute force strongly reminiscent of World War 1 propaganda, directly influencing their consciousness and behaviour. Crisell(1986: 196) writes in his semiotic analysis of radio: "When the question 189

'What effect do the media have upon their audiences?' was first put during the interwar years it was assumed to be a simple one with an obvious answer: they exerted a persuasive and pervasive effect, transmitting simple and deliberate messages to which their audiences reacted in direct, predictable, uniform and often dramatic ways.. .." Lowery and De Flew, both prominent fbnctionalist media scholars, argue that the influence of the "magic bullet" thesis, defined as "the guiding perspective on the process and effects of mass communication prior to the beginnings of scientific research on the media" (1988:22), lingered for several decades.

However, a recent reinterpretation of the intellectual history of media theory suggests that both Left and fbnctionalist histories of the interwar period must answer to a new version, one identified with cultural studies and a very different understanding of the era of flappers, avant-gardisms and easy credit. The "culturalism" of the interwar media research is owed principally, argues Pietila and several U.S. scholars with interest in cultural studies such as Carey (1989) and Hardt (1992), to the Progressive movement synonymous with the work of Pragmatists like John Dewey and William James, and

Chicago School sociologists like Robert Park. ' The arrival of British cultural studies in the US, a trans-Atlantic transfirsion owed to American scholars like Carey and Grossberg, has motivated a return to these Pragmatist roots of American media and cultural theory predating structural-hnctionalism this century. Attractive to contemporary American cultural studies is the fact that both Dewey and Park believed in the persistence of interpersonal communication amidst the modern "mass society," the development of which 190

they documented and which they feared (Pietila 1994:353). The possibility of such

authentic communication is but one part of their appeal to scholars confionted with late

modem conditions.

Dewey's rejection of metaphysics, his belief in language's part in social construction, and the profoundly moral content of his analysis, all qualifL him and his fellow Pragmatists as part of a romantic continuum. Dewey was "steeped in romanticism," to the extent that his aesthetic essay, Art asEjrperience, "is as nearly a systematization of romantic insights into art and aesthetics as we have available... ." (Wheeler 1993: 147). But the romanticism of the period is larger than the Pragmatist influence on Park's studies of news-gathering or Dewey's musings on the fbture of democracy, contra Walter Lippman's technocratic pessimism. Insofar as this revival of Pragmatism expresses the limits of most critical revision of the interwar period, it may be seen that evidence of a romantic precedent in interwar media culture goes deeper than even a single great intellectual tradition suggests.

One such example, representing a much greater elaboration of romantic sensibility in this period as compared to neo-Pragmatist media scholars like Carey and Hardt (not to mention Richard Rorty and Jurgen Habermas), is the work of John Durham Peters. Peters, author of several noteworthy articles on interwar media research in the U. S., argues against the conventional image of a decade of "masses without conversation and messages without resistance", i.e., the "magic bullet77or, as it was also known, the

"hypodermic needle" the~is.~The romanticism of the period is not so much a matter of its 191 philosophical pursuits as it is the technological phenomena and cultural reception of changed conditions that mark the amval of this first "media age'' of cinema and radio.

Interwar research saw in radio a means to sustain communication of warmth and authenticity even in mass mediated conditions, a quality of connection usually reserved for direct interpersonal exchange. The research sensibility in the 1920s and 30s held authentic interpersonal communication and mass media conditions to be compatible, a direct contrast to mid-century fhctionalism and the dichotomy of the two established in the paranoid atmosphere of the hot and cold wars that then raged. "Many were fascinated and charmed by radio's apparent intimacy, its penetration of private spaces, and its ability to stage dialogues and personal relationships with listeners" (Peters 1996: 109). The question interwar media scholarship considered, contrary to the conventional history of the period as a theoretically naive one fearing mass manipulation of a passive public, was not so much how radio created mass audiences but rather how it made their members more individual and intimate. Yet, even period radio's homely rhetorical touches could not replace the missing bodies, making for an "uncanny surplus" that haunted radio listeners-- the sensation of being near and far, among fiends and alone at one's radio set, all at once.

This anxiety did not preclude the possibility of authentic communication among radio listeners, but it did give broadcaster and listener an ambiguity much richer than the determinism of the "magic bullet" model ever allowed.

The apparent intimacy and personalization of what others, pointing to the "mass society'' emergent at this time, would identie as alienated conditions had a still larger 192

context in the pre- and interwar critique of Cartesian and Newtonian conventions as to

subject, time and space. Einstein, Bergson as well as artist-activists from the

Impressionists through the Weimar period contributed to a new view of culture which

posited a greater fluidity, relativism, and multiplicity than had seemed possible in modem

intellectual history since the Romantic era. A series of sweeping changes in technology

and culture, including the invention of new media technologies such as radio, cinema and

the telephone, as well as the stream-of-consciousness novel, psychoanalysis and Cubism,

"created distinctive new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space" in the

1880- 19 18 period (Kern 1983 : 1). This much broader cultural and intellectual trend gave

form to a comprehensive anti-rationalist position celebrating emotion, imagination and

experience. "The romantic rebellion, which, with its distrust of mechanistic systems,

extended back over a century, coincided at thefin de siecle with the rapidly advancing

scientific demolition of the Newtonian universe" (Eksteins 1989:31).

PietiIa is generous in defining the recovery of interwar research and intellectual culture

as the special task of cultural studies. The romantic precedent in this period, however,

finds in the history of media theory at Birmingham an unprepared and unreceptive host. If,

as deconstruction has it, we can learn much about a given discourse by reading deeply into

the marked absences and silences (the "aporia") in its development, then the intellectual

genealogy of media and cultural theory within Birmingham is something of an open book. The evidence, the reader should be advised, is circumstantial; but the circumstances 193 of theory's development at the Centre, and the media group's own reception of those theories, are telIing enough.

Media studies at the Centre

Hall's canonical account of the history of the Centre, "Cultural Studies and the Centre:

Some Problematics and Problems," surprises by demonstrating how awkward and incompIete is the media group's response to post-structuralism, and how partial and inconclusive its relationship (in the context of the Centre's own intellectual history) to other major theoretical currents. The media group is on record as refusing serious engagement with post-structuralism, the latter's roster listed as including Jacques

Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, the "Tel Quel" group, and Jacques Lacan. As

Hall writes (1980a:37), "... the media group has been critical of the 'autonomy' it saw implied in those positions and the universalism entailed by the revisions of psychoanalysis advanced by Iacan." The media group's account of its engagement with post-structuralism effectively ends there, awaiting only John Fiske's quixotic turn toward an irresponsibly extreme post-structuralism.

The rather static and resistant nature of media research at the Centre, which might account for this antipathy to learning from post-structuralism, is confmed in

Dworkin's history of the Birmingham project. Dworkin offers an instructive comparison between the severe limitations on agency implicit in the Centre's media 194 research, as compared to the work on subculture as practiced by Willis, Hebdige,

McRobbie and others. The Centre's subcultural research stressed, in a noticeably romantic key, the relative fieedom of punks, working class kids, and others to creatively decode and defL their circumstances. In comparison, the Centre's media group stressed sthctural limits on communication. Audience behaviour was contained by ideology and structural relations, and the range of human agency generally conservatively drawn

@workin 1997:168).

Though successful in exploring and subsequently rejecting the effects model early in the Centre's development, parallel to the Centre's own refusal of structural- functionalism, the media group failed to come to terms with the theoretical tradition which now dominates the interpretation of new media. Much of post-structuralism's value has been in this decentering of the text, and the inclusion within a concept of discourse of whole parts of social reality and human experience neglected by the ideology concept. While post-structuralism is deserving of criticism on many counts, its view of meaning as intertextual, 'floating," and free of an immediate relationship to place and history is an appropriate challenge to British cultural studies's overidentification of communication, as will be seen, with a definition of culture antagonistic to mass and new media conditions.

The work of demonstrating the rather eccentric history of media theory at the Centre is strengthened by the infelicitous history of theory generally over and above media 195

questions there. Though Gramsci is the most influential of the long-lost relatives

restored to the cultural Marxist family tree, there have been numerous omissions in

Birmingham's past which only recently have been corrected--and which have obvious

bearing on the development of media theory there. Long after Williams and Hall wrote

their seminal works, forgotten authors were being added to the canon. "Certain theorists, until the late 1980s, were largely ignored (Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Bourdieu,

Alain Touraine, the Frankfurt School). .. .* (Davies 19953). Add to this the fact that most of the major primers written to explain cultural studies to undergraduate and graduate students (Davies, Brantlinger, Fiske, Inglis, Kellner, Turner, Storey, Milner) say very little about mass media directly (and almost nothing about new media), with the exception of a chapter on mass communications in Brantlinger's Crusoe 's

Footprints, a chapter on cyberpunk in Kellner's Media Culture, and a chapter on audience studies in Turner's British Cultural Studies: An Introduction, and the circumstantial evidence begins to be persuasive.' At bottom, cultural Marxisms have largely defined media and audience as secondary phenomena, vehicles for the superior power of ideology. "@]ven those theories that do address the role of media.. . also fail to do justice to the complexity of mass communication in modem societies" (Silverstone

1994: 133-34). Neo-Marxist theories like Birmingham's ignore the formative relationship of media to modem society, and also fail to respect the limits of ideology's power (Silverstone 1994: 137). 196

It is usefbl now to turn this revisionist overview of "romantic" interwar media research into a productive analogy for reconceptualizing new media today. "Historic ideas on radio's curious status between what a later generation would call mass and interpersonal communication may prove useful in our attempts to study a social order in which the personal and the politicd, the erotic and the social, and the dialogic and the broadcast are hopelessly intertwined" (Peters 1996: 121). The new media, notably the Net, represent just such a hybrid form generative of similar questions, however ofien these questions are obscured in the largely technical question of emergent "media convergence." For example, conventional distinctions between personal and political suffer when one's private e-mail is scrutinized by an employer or government, or a single message archived in a newsgroup or featured in a web page is hypertextually linked to a host of other messages, websites and databases. The erotic body and the discarnate mind are joined together as strangers tryst in Internet rooms dedicated to the purpose, or call 1-900 telephone sex lines, both parties loving exclusively through language. And media theoretical norms as to interpersonal and broadcast channels are rendered moot when the

Internet allows for near limitless variability between broadcast and narrowcast, or newspapers and television networks begin to emulate interactive elements thought unique to the Internet, such as sports and horoscope telephone lines or Web TV.

Amid the wreckage and tangled wires, a point can be made about the persistence of certain themes forgotten in the parallel rise after World War I1 of functionalist "media effects" research and British cultural studies's parallel assertion of cornmunitarian values 197

and "knowable community." "The postwar divorce between mass and interpersonal...

amounts to an evasion.. . of the more uncanny and difficult fact that our face-to-face relationships, no less than our media lives, are populated by imaginaly characters, fantasy projections, and voices and images fiom afary' (Peters 1996:110). It is to the nature of this post-war break with the romantic precedent in media theory, and with the compatibility between "communication" among people and the mass media conditions present there, that the argument now turns.

Mass Communication versus Mass Media

British cultural studies is by no means exciusively devoted to problems in mass media, taking the whole of culture--high, anthropological, popular, and historical--as its preserve.

Yet, much of the impetus for its development derives from its early productive antagonism with the variously labelled "effects," "administrative research" or "mass communications" model of media criticism identified with major fbnctionalist sociologists in the U.S., including Paul Lazarsfeld, Robert Merton and Wilbur Schramm. In relatively early key texts, such as Williams's Commrrnicaiions (1962) and Television, Technology and

Cultural Form (1974), and Hall's later "Encoding/Decoding" (1980) and "The

Rediscovery of Ideology" (1982) essays, Williams and Hall established what would escalate over time to be a definitive break, respectively, between culturalism and structuraIism and the "effects" tradition dominant in media criticism since World War IT. 198

Williams refutes the "effects" model of television, arguing that the isolation of effects

within the asocial vacuum implied by its component theories--information theory,

behaviourism and fbnctionalist sociology--obscured the actual "function" of television as a

means of sustaining social order through "mobile privatisation" (O'Connor 1989a:97).

"Fi]uch otherwise sophisticated work in idormation and communication theory rests on

and fiequently conceals this first, deeply bourgeois, ideological position"

(Williams1980:5 1). Hall illustrates how the genealogy of media studies within a British

cultural studies fiamework depends very much on the separation of British work fiom the

American model: "Media studies broke with the modefs of 'direct influence'--using a sort

of stimulus-response model with heavy behaviourist overtones, media content serving as a

trigger-into a fiamework which drew much more on what can broadly be defined as the

'ideological' role of the media. .. ." (198Oa: 11 7). Conventionally, then, the separation of

British media research from American "mass communications" is defined in terms of the

critique of "effects," the passive audience, and the fbnctionalist definition of media as

means to social coordination, and the substitution of ideology, an active audience and

media's role as means to sustaining hegemony.

Yet, respecting the importance of the critique of the effects school fiom within British

cultural studies as the latter moved fiom "left-culturalism" to its mature phase, the positions arguably share as much as they disagree upon where the possibility of

~~rnrn~ni~ati~nin modern, "mass" society is concerned. Both British cultural studies and the "effects" positions isolated and insulated their models of communication in highly 199 delimited forms, be it Williams's "knowable community" within the "common culture," or

Lazarsfeld's vision of the audience as one whose primary protection fiom media influence lay in the JeKersonian confines of their local democratic traditions of debate and consensus. Once these audiences were snugly located in their various interpersonal and particularistic contexts, the social totality surrounding them would appear huge, incomprehensible and threatening. Communication, in other words, was seen as incompatible with mass media and mass society, and the mass media defined as the agent of an unfriendly totality. Real communication happened despite, rather than within "mass" conditions, whether the emphasis was on media or society at large. The work of Williams and Lazarsfeld, in regarding authentic communication and mass media as incompatible and antagonistic, represent a theoretical impasse with which media theory has had to contend since:

The defining project of media studies since, both in cultural studies following Raymond Williams and in empirical research following Lazarsfeld, has been to separate mass media fiom mass society. The task has been to show that people retained their dignity or their wits before a massive persuasion apparatus, and that despite the one-way, anonymous messages, people still conversed, took pleasure, or fought back. With all the emphasis on complicating the social, the idea of mass communication has been left largely unexamined. (Peters 1996: 109)

The alienation of communication fiom a society dependent on indirect social relationships as conducted through media and other institutions in modem society did not stop with Williams or Lazarsfeld. It continues into the present in the form of recent cultural studies research on both sides of the Atlantic, a time when the hitherto largely 200

separate development of British cultural studies and American media effects has been

eased by the emergence of an American cultural studies tradition, and some convergence

between British and American approaches to media set in.' In the American case, this

isolation of communication can be defined, using Grossberg's pregnant phrase, as the

problem of "communicational cultural studies." In the British case, this might be captured

conversely as the problem of "cultural communication studies," if the neologism can be

pardoned for the sake of highlighting the complementary British error.

American "communicationalcultzrral studies"

The terms of such an examination of the fate of "communication" in British and American

cultural studies media research are best appreciated in the context of their shared and

incongruent history. Until the mid-1980s, British cultural studies largely favoured textual

analysis centred on the analysis and criticism of all forms of communication as cultural

artifacts, while American mass communications research preferred empirical studies and largely ignored the problem of culture (Kellner 1995:30).' The dichotomy of British and

American research during the effects hegemony in the 1940s-early 1980s period was followed by a rapprochement in the mid-1980s as reveaIing as the original split. For even as the effects hegemony passed, the renascent American cultural studies tradition of the mid- 198Os, borrowing heartily fiom 1920s Pragmatism and Chicago School sociology to return "culturey7to the centre of analysis, failed to learn fiom the effects school's mistakes. The unfortunate result was that the American cultural studies tradition, just as 201

media functionalism before it, isolated communication fiom the social conditions in which

media and their audiences actually operated.

Even as American scholars began to read Williams and Hall in the hopes of bringing

culture back into American media analysis, they tended to incorporate the British project

in such a way as to enshrine "communication" as the primary principle, conflating communication and culture in the making of a model of communication as idealized as the previous effects model was positivist (Grossberg 1997). The result in the U.S was the deracination of Williams's model of communications as culture, its radical content replaced with a neo-Pragmatist emphasis on symbolic interaction and values at the expense of a theory of ideology and attention to political economy (Hardt 1992:184).

Furthermore, the Americans overextended Hall's "encoding/decoding" model to the point where "what was originally offered as a theoretical-semiotic solution to a particular contextually defined set of empirical problems has become instead the general model of cultural studies" (Grossberg lgW283). American cultural studies also borrows fiom a unrepresentative small selection of influential British writings--the early Williams, Hall's

"encoding/decoding" model, and Hebdige's Subculture--to create a scholarship where "the sense of culture as practice, form and institution has been lost" (O'Connor 1989b:408).

The absorption and neutralization of Williams and Hall by American communication studies has made for a "cornmunicational cultural studies," an analysis which reifies communication and culture to the point where "cornmunicational cultural studies cannot actually confront the question of effects, because it cannot theorize the relationship of 202

meaning to anything else7' (Grossberg 1997:285). Though this "communicational cultural

studies" project was intended to replace the "passive audience" model with which the

effects tradition had long dominated American debates about culture, the greater activity

and improved theory of culture which neo-Pragmatism allows tends to reduce culture to

what can be communicated in symbolic interaction. This acts to dehistoricize cultural

production, and to define it as individual practice rather than a collective phenomenon coextensive with the social structures it informs, criticizes and revises. Organized this way,

American cultural studies reproduces the same social vacuum that enveloped older effects-driven theories of meaning while only nominally concerning itself with matters of power in communication. Questions therefore as to the nature, form and shape of power, and how domination and subordination are actually experienced, go unanswered in the idealized American research (Grossberg 1997:285).

British "cultural communication studies"

The British experience of communications, of course, cannot pretend to the same isolation and belated discovery of "culture" as American "communicational cultural studies." British cultural studies was aware of American functionalist media criticism almost fiom the former's inception, and after some early and eclectic borrowing fiom their colonial cousins, sharply diverged fiom hnctionalist models and methods alike. However, the idiosyncratic character of media studies stemming from the Centre does go some way to explain how British cultural studies has failed to develop the theoretical articulation of 203 models of communication with complex social totality. Notwithstanding their very different theoretical projects, Williams and Hall both develop their media theory in such a way as to limit its value in a media culture where communication is increasingly not face to face nor identified with any conventional sense of the local. This might be regarded as a problem of (to invert the phrase heuristically) "cultural communication studies" insofar as, where the American absorption of culture into communication idealizes culture on terms strongly resembling Chicago School symbolic interactionism, British cultural studies identifies communication with the maintenance of a grounded, interpersonally articulated and historically and geographically specific concept of culture!

That is, where American cultural studies posits a model of communication "relatively autonomous of the real material and economic conditions of the world and people's lives"

(Grossberg 1997:284), British cultural studies conversely identifies communication so strongly with a fixed sense of space and place that Birmingham's theoretical relevance is inhibited. This is not to say that there is not value in what O'Connor (1989b:408) terms, speaking of Hall, Birmingham's "sense of the rootedness of communication processes in social reproduction and politics." However, where the Americans reifjl culture within a too idealist view of communication, Williams and Hall overly privilege the local and the concrete, materializing culn~reall too much. This limits the utility of the concept

"communication" by making it an orphan when contexts change, particularly as these changes involve increasingly dense and numerous indirect social relationships far removed . 204 fiom the intense, almost worshipfid localism of Left-culturalism and early British cultural studies.

a. Williams and "knowable community"

Williams and Hall delimit the range and value of communication in different ways through their localism. Williams, in his oddly neglected Television: Technology and Cultural

Form,takes as his thesis that television was developed as a means by which capitalism might maintain the minimal amount of social integration necessary to sustain a consumer culture and a power structure, particularly as the influence of traditional institutions like church, school and neighbourhood had faded.' Television for Williams is the medium of modernity, and given the ambivalance with which he approaches the modem, the book sets out to kill the messenger as well as those theorists, notably the "effects" tradition and

Marshall McLuhan, who seem to uncritically endorse television's presence. The character of this technologically mediated form of social order, one that Williams argues is strategically implemented by elites at the point where it becomes socially necessary, is

"mobile privatization."

"Mobile privatization" meant that the public was simultaneously resigned to the private consumption of events and personalities produced for television, while this lack of local connection made these populations more amenable to the rapid mobility of labour

(and the need to purchase a ready-made, homogeneous culture that could not be had in one's backyard) required by capital. "Socially, this complex is characterized by the two 205

apparently paradoxical yet deeply connected tendencies of modem urban industrial living:

on the one hand mobility, on the other hand the more apparently self-sufficient family

home" (Williams 1974:26). The success of "mobile privatization" in Williams's mind may

account for the pessimism in his Television book (and that pessimism for the book's

neglect in media theory), as Williams no more than gestures to the resistant possibilities in television reception, and at that consigns this resistance to avant-garde production techniques rather than to mundane viewing practices.'

Local and direct relations were therefore displaced by media fonns, and a pseudo- culture of indirect relations held to suffer in comparison with what Williams would define in his devoutly culturalist Culture andSocie@ as the "common culture." Deriving fiom the opposition of "culture" and "society" or "civilization" in Arnold and Leavis, Williams's version of the "common culture" would, of course, not share in his predecessors' elitism.

Departing fiom their literary humanist model of "common culture" as the canonical riches shared and defended by an elite "remnant," Williams expanded the "common culture" to encompass working class culture and institutions, though retaining the normative residue inherited fiom Arnold and Leavis. "We need a common culture not for the sake of an abstraction, but because we shall not survive without it" (Williams 1958:304; see aIso

Milner 1994: 47). Elastic as this definition was, Williams's definition of "common culture'' assumes a shared history, geography and, above all, experience--"the actual living sense, the deep community that makes the communication possible"-- not readily compatible with late modernity (Williams 1965:65). "Common culture" was, however, the product of 206

relationships within groups of people brought together by class, proximity and historical

accident, a social ecology famously characterized as "knowable communities" in

Williams's me Country and the City.

Williams was by no means concerned to construct some rural idyll of dense and

genuine face-to-face interactions, a culture of "I and Thou" opposed to the anomic city.

Although "the problem of the knowable community is ... a problem of language" (Williams

1973: l7l), Williams recognized that those to whom we talked, those whom one truly knew, were often of the same social class. Compared to the tightly choreographed social relations in the country scenes drawn by Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte, the working classes were "knowable" only in the most general, impersonal and often panoptic sense of the word. The class basis to "knowable community" aside, those to whom one talked were also by no means necessarily one's lifelong neighbours. Williams argued that genuine community might be recreated in the metropolis if the structure of sensibility found in the country, and captured in images of the rural idyll, were recreated. "It is not so much the old village or the old backstreet that is significant. It is the perception and affirmation of a world in which one is not necessarily a stranger and an agent, but can be a member, a discoverer, in a shared source of life" (Williams 1973:298). But Williams's extension of the knowable community to the city is a backhanded compliment, since within the structure of his own thinking the metropolis must exist without mass media in order to meet his conditions for authentic communication. 207

In Williams's view, mass media gave social form to an urban mode of consciousness,

one saturated with the social relations of capitalism itself, a state of mind which took its

shape not fiom words and deeds internal to interpersonal contact, but fiom arbitrary

sources of authority: media, the state, organized religion, capital. To borrow from David

Riesman's terminology, knowable community was inner-directed, but urban life built of external and outer-directed sources. "This paradoxical set of one-way relationships is then a specific form of consciousness which is inherent in the dominant mode of production ... in which.. . our perceptions of the shape of a lifetime, are to a critical extent defined and determined by external formulations of a necessary reality.. .." (Williams l973:296). At another level, Williams's opinion that communication is incompatible with mass media can be read through Jantzen's earlier point regarding media criticism as a displaced form of critical anxiety about modernity. Here media for Williams might be defined as another instance of the classic separation of "culture" and "society," with media and late modernity consigned to the latter. However refkacted, media represents in Williams's work a form of false community, wherein authentic communications such as occasioned by the "knowabie community" are not possible. The false community of media culture and, arguably, of late modernity, is one most offensively condensed in McLuhan's "global village" concept, but generalized throughout all modem media culture:

Much of the content of modem communications is this kind of substitute for directly discoverable and transitive relations to the world .... It is a form of shared consciousness rather than merely a set of techniques. And as a form of consciousness it is not to be understood by rhetorical analogies like the 'global village.' Nothing could be less like the experience of any kind of village or settled active community. For in its main uses it is a form of unevenly shared consciousness of persistently external events. It is what appears to happen, in these powefilly transmitted and mediated ways, in a world with which we have no perceptible connections but which we feel is at once central and marginal to our lives. (Williams 1973:295-296)

b. Hall and "encoding/decoding"

Hall, given his theoreticism, hardly seems a candidate for delimiting communication

within the cultural context where "directly discoverable and transitive relations to the

world" are the standard by which mass media must be judged and, necessarily, fail. A

Jamaican expatriate and more definitive about his break fiom Leavisism than Williams,

Hall's sense of place is at the very least necessarily more complex. Yet, where the model

of audience crystallized in the "Encoding/Decoding" article that represents his theoretical

contribution of greatest influence in media studies is regarded, a remarkably similar

identification of communication with the local and interpersonal--with the fiame of

reference in which Williams believed culture was appropriately produced--is evident.

Though Hall's structuralism forbids his rhapsodizing about the content of local and direct

experience, as Hoggart might, the commitment to a formal sense of locale is just as strong.

The "Encoding/DecodingY'model represents British cultural studies's formal alternative

to the long-dominant "effects" model of mediation. The model represented a vast

improvement, using elements of Althusserian-accented structuralism and Gramsci to

construct a model of "active audience" that credited television viewers with relative

interpretive autonomy, and found a happy medium between models of raw media manipulation (current fiom the "strong" effects position of the 1920s to Herbert Schiller) 209

and the all too easy populist resistance personified by Fiske (see Kellner 1995:40). Hall

imagined audiences to take their part in hegemonic negotiation at the moment that the

message was decoded at reception, and what was discourse was then turned into structure

and ideology. "[Wle must recognize that the discursive form of the message has a

privileged position in the communicative exchange (fiom the viewpoint of circulation), and

that the moments of 'encoding' and 'decoding,' though only 'relatively' autonomous in

relation to the communication process as a whole, are determinate moments" (Hdl

1980a: 129). Hall's "Encoding/Decoding" model marked the decisive break with

"mediation" models of audience emphasizing the power of the medium as a technological,

ideological or textual artefact, and the gradual shift to "reception" models that emphasized

audience agency and control over interpretation (Silverstone 1994). That much was

revolutionary.

However, these audiences, clustered at the imagined decoding places, their subjectivity

opaque and their class, gender or ethnic characteristics muted (in fairness to Hall, in what

was intended as a generic and highly theoretical model to be given flesh later by Fiske,

Morley, Ang and others), are made coherent through no effort of their own, but rather

through the determining power of structure. Their agency is confined to the "knowable

community'' available in their living rooms, and in which they are to summon up what

counterhegemonic energy they can to interpret the ideology present in television discourse. Their relationship to discourse is purely instrumental, and they decode according to their lights; but no matter how radical the interpretation, the meanings have 210

no social afterlife, notably because the audience is defined as stranded in some theoretical

no-person's land outside language, culture and history. Indeed, though the very

"encoding/decoding" model is committed to the ideological alchemy possible as discourse

turns into structure, i.e., where viewers turn what they watch into action on the world,

discourse is not given its due and its "privilege" extends no fbrther than the time that

passes between reception and execution. Decoding may go on, but communication does

not happen where it matters most: between the isolated clusters of viewers. It is as if

Williams's "mobile privatization" thesis had not been read and absorbed as an object

lesson in British media studies.

Discourse, that is to say, is not shared with viewers in other living rooms, and is not

sustained much beyond the moment of watching or listening and the brief projection of

discourse to others decoding with one and perhaps those in the immediate locale. Hall is

not clear as to where discourse goes once decoding happens; but it is highly uncertain just

what fonn of politics could ensue. The problem with Hall's and similar models of active

reception is that the sphere of media consumption is allowed to define the limits of the

social, dramatically limiting the latter's scope and emancipatory potential. "As the

production of meaning is located in the activities and agencies of audiences, the

topography of consumption is increasingly idertt~pedas (and thus expanded to stand in for) the map of the sociaP7(Berland in Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler 1992:42;

Berland's emphasis). The "knowable community," as was seen in Williams, is therefore 211

restricted to a context incompatible with the real mobility and dispersal of people in late modem society.

The power to encode is granted exclusively to the production specialists at the source of transmission, and denied to those being interviewed, or more importantly, those whose words and lives contributed to the world encoded in the first place. The contributions of the latter represent a code that was in fact not developed in isolation, but derives from many sources including their own and others' viewing experiences. What "goes round" in television discourse, in other words, "comes round" in a constructive circularity that the

"encoding/decoding" model does not encompass. That the moment of "decoding" is also one of "encoding" is not countenanced by Hall. Indeed, recalling Grossberg's criticism of

Hall's failure to develop the positive nature of the audience, it is difficult to imagine how active audiences build any kind of solidarity or potitics beyond that of the living room.

Grossberg says as much when he argues that "Hall has already opened up these spaces by giving a central role to questions about the relations between the media and the masses ... and between leadership and the popular.. .." "But", continues Grossberg, "they remain underdeveloped and one must assume that is due, in part, to the difficulty of accounting for their effectivity within the traditional marxist categories of power" (1996: 170).

Although the audience studies inspired by Hall would stretch the limits of the encoding/decoding model by incorporating ethnography and some post-structuralist literature (e.g., Ang uses Foucault in Desperutely Seeking the Audience), this later research did not accept that audiences might have relatively more power over 212

interpretation than the Leavisian and semiotic models predicted. Many accounts of

audience favouring an active audience approach accept the implicit authority of the text

by first interpreting its meaning, then asking how and whether the audience matches or

varies within that interpretation (Turner 1990: 127). Alternately and more

pessimistically, the very category of 'active audience," given its initial impetus by the

encoding/decoding model, is open to criticism. The mere fact that audiences generate

multiple responses to a given media text, irrespective of their relationship to its

ideological content, does not answer the nagging question of whether this activity is

significant. Many television researchers "have concluded rather more ambiguously that all the television-related activity in the world does not necessarily lead to greater liberation, and may indeed.. . only serve to provide private compensations for pubIic hurt.. .." (Silverstone 1994: 153-54).

Media theory at Birmingham arguably remains trapped by models overly dependent on ideas about language that presumed a good deal of meaning was immanent in the

"common culture" or the viewing situation, and on a "line of sight" view of media's relationship with audience which could not really account for the invisible bodies and virtual communities whose identities exceeded the immediate act of media consumption. This leaves British cultural studies media theory with little room to discuss the relationship of media to society outside the reliable push and pull of hegemonic struggle, or to define meaningful communication beyond what, in an era of 213

distributed computer-mediated communications, are very limited instances of stable and

knowable interpretive communities. The consensus organized around the problematics

of "common culturenand the "encoding/decodingwmodel, which motivated so much

media analysis at the Centre and elsewhere, was not evident once the debate turned to

the larger question of just what (beyond the white noise of mobile privatization and the

earnest appeals to counterhegemony) all this communication was about. "Much of the debate was around the status of 'text' in the analysis, its relation to the context of both production and consumption, and to the analysis of audiences.. ..The problem of what the media are for, however, produced as many responses as there were writersn (Davies

1995: 122; Davies's emphasis).

Having documented something of the romantic precedent in media theory this century in contrast to media theory's history at Birmingham, and then demonstrated the limitations on the meaning of "communicationnand "culturenin both American and

British cultural studies, the more pressing task remains to develop a romantic alternative for understanding new media. New media are in themselves a valuable object for theoretical reconstruction, to be sure; but they are at least as valuable as a case study and pretext for a more expansive consideration of the potential in

Romanticism for rethinking culturaI studies, particularly the future of the underdeveloped culturalist strain. Taking the problem of the limited nature of

"communicationnas defined above--Williams and Hall being perhaps the most 214 influential theorists in British cultural studies, and the scholars whose work defines the media theory project defined loosely under the British auspices--the next chapter is dedicated to some exploratory and speculative work as to building a romantic theory of new media. 215

Notes

1. Given the amount of co-operation and cross-fertilization among the Pragmatists and the Chicago School, there is no simple way of dividing the two. Park was a student of Dewey's, and pursued questions of language, media and culture at the University of Chicago. Mead, an American sociologist before the category had really been created in the U.S., is also an intermediate figure. It is probably best to see Pragmatism as an earlier and more formally philosophical tendency, and the Chicago School as a later social scientific byproduct of Pragmatism.

2. Though Peters never uses the "R" word in his several articles, he has confirmed in personal e- mail correspondence with the author the romantic character of media theory in the interwar period. The line fiom the text of his personal communication with the author (January 24, 1998) is: "I am persuaded of the importance of romanticism and I like the deep tracing of it." Peters is an assistant professor in the Communications program at the University of Iowa, one of the first such schools in the U.S. (and the home of Wilbur Schramm).

3. John Fiske's Understanding Popular Culture (and its companion volume of case studies, Reading the Populad is an important exception to the lack of attention to media among primers in cultural studies. However, what is notable about Fiske's extensive reading of various media-- fiom tabloids to TV wrestling--is that Fiske's analysis tends to be sufficiently post-structuralist in its theoretical origins, and so emphatically committed to the "active audience" at the expense of structure, that he has effectively been expelled fiom the ranks of Birmingham-affiliated authors. Whether the author ofMedia Matters is fairly shunned is outside this argument's mandate. Regardless, it is worth noting that again it is post-structuralism which is conspicuously invoked when the subject is mass media, and not other theoretical traditions.

4. By American cultural studies, I refer not to its antecedents in American "mass culture" criticism of the 1920s-50s, nor the largely non-theoretical work of the Popular Culture Association. Rather, I refer here to the work of James Carey, Lawrence Grossberg and others to create an American equivalent of the Birmingham project. Although there are as many differences in American cultural studies as there are in the British--Carey is very much a Williams-like romantic, seeking a revival of Pragmatism, and Grossberg is as intensely theoretical as Hall--this American cultural studies is worlds apart fiom earlier work in its sophistication and criticality.

5. Lest this dichotomy be overstated, it should be said that the Centre for Mass Communication Research at the University of Leicester undertook research in media effects during the period of Birmingham's growth and maturity. Moreover, in the U.S., scholars like George Gerbner and David Riesman, though part of the functionalist empire, sought to make room for culture quite early in the form of Gerbner's "Cultural Indicatorsn project and "cultivation" model of mediation, and Riesman's 'lonely crowd" metaphor.

6. This idealization of culture within a model of communication is demonstrated at its most sincere in the work of James Carey, notably his essays in Communications as Culture, and at its most worrisome in the work of anthropologist Clifford Geertz.

7. WilIiarns 's Television: Technology and Cult~ualForm rates a single paragraph in Politics and Letters, a series of interviews by the editors ofNew Left Review with Williams which represents one of the best secondary sources on Williams's work. Alan 07Connor's book, Raymond William Writing, Culture, Politics, for years the major systematic review of Williams by a single author, doesn't offer much more on William's media analysis than Politics and letters. So conspicuous was the absence of the television book that an interview was conducted by Stephen Heath and Gillian Skirrow, and later published in Tania Modleski's edited Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, to rectify the minimal coverage in Politics andLetters. The result is disappointing.

8. Williams (1974: 133) writes in the Television study: "In the young radical underground and even more in the young cultural underground, there is a familiarity with media, and an eager sense of experiment and practice, which is as much an effect as the more widely publicized and predicted passivity." Williams throws a crumb to the resistant possibilities in media reception, but it is a meagre one. The mass audience at large is consigned to that same passivity, captive to the television "flow," and there is no discussion of how these notes from underground might circulate back to the mobilized and privatized mainstream.

9. Williams's deep ambivalence toward modernity in the more contradictory form it takes after the late nineteenth century, a period convergent with the emergence of electronic media, has already been cited as evidence of this persistent dislike of refractory social phenomena. Yet, the thesis identifjling the lingering effects of the "culture and civilization7' tradition is not without its critics. For example, O'Connor (1989b) reproves Grossberg for failing to appreciate that Williams transcended the culturalism of his early career enough that the opposition of culture and structure was relaxed. Citing Grossberg's reference to "structure of feeling" particularly, O'Connor asserts that Grossberg's "partial and reductionistic7' reading of Williams overlooks that this concept had only a residual role in Williams's work after the mid-1970s. O'Connor's review article in Critical Studies in Mas Communication is conspicuous in arguing that Williams had dropped the particular formulation of the "culture and society" tradition, i.e., the "structure of feeling" concept, by the mid-point of his career. O'Connor (1989b:408), however, does not actually disprove Grossberg's claim that Williams remains loyal to "culture and society," only that Williams's use of "structure of feeling7' "is actually a contradictory and ad hoe formulation and has only a residual role in William's work after the rnid- 1970s." Fair enough. But why O'Comor cannot bring himself to say that Williams actually drops the "culture and society" tradition altogether is unclear, unless as commentators like Prendergast (1995) and Grossberg (1997) indicate, Williams never did. Arguing that Williams dropped this particular usage, "structure of feeling," rather than directly addressing Williams's allegiance to the tradition, is not persuasive. Out of fairness to Williams, there is evidence of a certain relaxation of his definition of common culture later in his work. Morley and Robins (40) cite Williams in The Year 2000 for encouraging the reimagining of community so as to "explore new forms of variable societies and variabIe identities." But given that his "When Was Modernism?" and "Culture and Technology" essays were published very late, essays that evidenced an impatience with contradiction and phenomena like technology that did not reduce easily to his model of social totality, I have reservations about how new and variable these societies and identities were to be. What is apparent fiom Williams's essays published at the end of his career, in me Year 2000 and The Politics ofModrnism, is that the priority of culture over society is not a residue but a recurrent and enduring theme in his work The point here is not to genuflect to WiIliams, but to pay the enormous honour due to him by being respectfilly critical. I believe he would understand. Chapter Six "Information Wants to be Free": A Romantic Approach to New Media

'Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.. .. A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.. .. "

William Gibson, Neuromancer, p. 51

The present chapter takes as its point of departure the argument that, once communication is extended beyond the bounds of knowable community or the immediate viewing situation to make contact with new media and a society that takes its shape increasingly from those media, cultural studies might be compelled to "get wired." That is, in redefining communication and culture so as to accommodate without prejudice the contemporary media conditions in which we And ourselves, cultural studies might make itself newly relevant as it competes for the public's attention.

Instead of authentic corn munication and mass media (and society, by implication) being mutually exclusive, insofar as those media violate the sanctity of the local or estrange the subject from communication, a romantic analysis of new media will demonstrate that authenticity and media modernity were compatible all along--as indeed they were seen to be in the interwar period. Acknowledging the possibility of authentic communications in new media conditions means that many of the conventional 219

assumptions about subjectivity, technology, authentic communications, the nature of

totality, what might be included in definitions of culture, and so on are subject to

revision, particularly given the fact that these variables are so tightly woven in

Williams and Hall already. For the sake of economy and focus, three issues from the

large inventory available to cultural studies are given particular attention below: the

nature of identity on-line; ideas about technology and its relationship to culture; and,

by way of returning to the point of departure, the meaning of "authenticityn in virtual

conditions.

The Net was first realized in the 1970s as an exclusive computer network for military

scientists working on U.S. Department of Defense projects, and called ARPANet after its

Department institutional sponsor, the Advanced Research Projects Administration.

Conceived by a Defense Department-spawned research institute, the RAND Corporation,

as a communications system which could survive a nuclear attack (through the Net's

capacity to reroute data "packets" around damaged or absent nodes in the computer

network, as these were obliterated by enemy missiles), the Net's origins are Strangelovian,

steeped in Cold War panic culture and technological overkill. Over time, as the various

components of the personal computer were built at Xerox PARC and in the garages of

digital bricoleurs such as Apple's Steve Jobs, the technology began to exit the controlled

mainEiame networks of the military scientists and gradually enter the public sphere. This first took the form of Fidonet, the WELL, and other prototype computer communities roughly analogous to ham radio in the mid-1980s, then to universities and homes in the 220 early 1990s as user-frendly World Wide Web interfaces were developed.' In this digital form of "long revolution," the new media technology followed an old pattern of significant state and, particularly, military investment in the technological development of electronic media since the late nineteenth century on the one hand, and popular resistance, appropriation and innovation on the other.

The argument that these "new media7' should be interpreted in the context of earlier electronic media and within modern cultural history should not detract fiom the compelling novel features of computers, the Net, virtual reality and the like. Among these features are: the exponential growth of computer data transmission speed and the miniaturization of components; the cybernetic hnction, whereby computers (unique arnong other technologies) can adapt to their environments through feedback; the interactive capacity, turning consumers into producers in ways not captured by

Birmingham's preference to view media consumption as a productive activity; the radical decentralization of media power possible, though not inevitable, as computer networks replace the rigidly hierarchical broadcast model; and the Net's arguably "natural" resistance to ready absorption within state regulation and market structures. As the convention has it, the Net recognizes censorship of the political or commercial variety as damage, and routes around these powers just as it would a nuclear attack. As the cyberpunk credo has it, "information wants to be free."

Yet, freeing infomation for theoretical, let alone political and cultural purposes, has proved difficult for media critics aligned with progressive positions. Compared to the 221

post-industrial and post-structuralist positions, an identifiably neo-Marxist or cultural

studies hework for studying new media has been absent. To be sure, there have been

tentative and speculative pieces by such as Andrew Ross, Constance Penley, Donna

Haraway, Vincent Mosco, Herbert Schiller, David Morley, Frank Webster, Kevin Robins

and others, but none with the sure sense of project and self-consciousness of a Bell or a

Poster. This is not to suggest that a cultural studies position on new media should be

definitively developed, of course, insofar as any body of theory should attempt to create a

unified analysis analogous to the scientistic post-industrial position. Rather, it is to argue that contemporary culture increasingly takes its shape fiom these "new" media, and issues

of theoretical competition and ideological cost aside, the study of culture pace cultural

studies is undone without revision of staple elements of cultural and media the~ry.~In the following, various contemporary works of cultural theory committed to or frequently borrowed for the purposes of analyzing new media are examined, and revision of these texts made toward the creation of a romantic criticism of new media. In the words of

Allucquere Rosanne Stone, the remainder of this essay is curious to see how people without bodies make love.

New media and the subject

As we have seen already from Poster, the post-structuralist reading of the self in a new media environment is one given to electronic solipsism, the modem self written off as

Adorno's binary subject trapped between the improbable poles of complete autonomy 222

and one-dimensionality. But Poster is by no means the worst offender where the post-

structuralist fate of the body is concerned. Sherry Turkle (1995:265) writes that "when

reduced to our most basic elements, we are made up, mind and body, of information."

Jean Baudrillard (1985: 133) reduces the body to a fleshy afterthought, left within a

television environment where "as soon as behaviour is crystallized on certain screens and

operational terminals, what's left appears only as a large useless body, deserted and

condemned," and the body's materiality is displaced by simulacrum. Kroker (1987: iii ;

cited in Probyn 1987:351) goes firther, eliminating the body altogether: "Indeed, why the

concern over the body today if not to emphasize the fact that the (natural) body in the

postmodern condition has already disappeared, and what we experience today as the body

is only a fantastic simulacrum of body rhetorics." The informational nature of the body,

and thereby its ready susceptibility to dematerialization in light of post-structuralist

demolition of epistemological and ontological categories, has inspired a small industry of

works like David Lyon's meElecironic Eye, Shoshana Zuboff s In the Age of the Smart

Machine, and Poster's The Mode of Information, which apply templates derived fiom

Foucault, Baudrillard and Lyotard to the study of new media. Though these works are valuable, they tend to accept without question the dissolution of the body defined as

information, a premise that worries feminists like Probyn.

For Probyn, feminism has only just recently reclaimed the body. For post-structuralists to declare the body purely informational, vestigial or absent in the context of new information technologies is to raise the question as to whether postmodernism, like 223 modernism before it, must be built on the backs (disembodied or not) of women. Recalling a point made by Grossberg that "the postmodern may be too real and too important to be left to postmodernists," Probyn argues that the body is more--not less--central to these admittedly new conditions. "If the postmodern shows us anything, it is that we now have more subjectivities than ever, that our bodies are more acutely articuIated, and that a surface is only one way of reading" (Probyn 1989:357).

Donna Haraway's celebrated essay, "A Cyborg Manifesto," is the most influential work of a progressive cast on the future of human subjectivity. The cyborg, half-human and half-machine, represents to Haraway a post-structuralist role model, overcoming the binary oppositions on which modem subjectivity depends. In her model of the cyborg as a post-humanist (and, let it be said, not post-human) subject, Haraway finds a happy medium between the essentidist self and the purely informational body of

Turkle, Baudrillard and Kroker. While comfortable with post-structuralist categorical freaks and monsters, Haraway does not dissolve contradiction into the electric current as does Poster. Rather, the fundamental categories that Haraway believes are ruptured in contemporary culture, i-e., human/animal, organic/inorganic, and (a subset of the second) physicalhon-physical, e.g., consciousness and computer technology, do not surrender their dialectical tension. (This refusal to relax the dialectic into some

Hegelian, idealist synthesis is itself a romantic premise.) 224

Self-hood and societal self-realization in Haraway proceed together through contradiction, a contradiction realized as fully at the level of the ruptured self as it is in a society defined in informational terms. Hers is an informational subject well aware of the hazards of that state: error, deletion, the information rich and poor. "The home, workplace, market, public, arena, the body itself-all can be dispersed and interfaced in nearly infinite, polymorphous ways, with large consequences for women and others-- consequences that themselves are very different for different people, and which make potent oppositional and international movements difficult to imagine and essential for survivalJ' (Haraway 1991 : 163). The critical potential of Haraway 's cyborg, reclaimed from the ultra-masculine cyborg lore of Robocop and Terminator is, however, not without its problems. Though Haraway's cyborg depends on the structural analogy of her categories to those that organize political economy, Haraway's post-structuralism tends to overwhelm her good materialist intentions. Her materialism is largely gestural, and in the anti-climactic conclusion of the essay, Haraway counsels that cyborg politics are those dedicated to change in the discursive dimension, organized around "the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrisrn"

(1991: 176).

Critics of the cyborg subject have complained of her tenuous materialism, and a politics which are consequently vague. Probyn (1989: 355) writes that 'the 'historical 225

materialism' which she rightly emphasizes as inherent in a feminist critique is vaporized in her argument." There are "no strategies of how we get from here to there or there to heren (1989: 359, and therefore no tenable basis to her entire project for techno-emancipation. Dery (1996:246) charges the Manifesto for being "maddeningly short on practical politics for working-class cyborgs and disappointingly long on odes to 'partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity'. " Although Haraway 's essay is aimed squarely at those who would reduce the body to pure information (or, for that matter, mere matter), her post-structuralism weakens the articulation of body and material world. What is needed is a self neither reducible to information, nor vulnerable to essentialist definition--an indeterminate agent committed to saving the world from reification while keeping its feet on the ground.

The romantic conception of the self meets these criteria. The romantic self was located in a world, similar to the post-structuralist, where dualisms were deemed unworthy of the fluid nature of lived epistemology and ontology. Wheeler (1993:4-5) writes of the English Romantic poet and critic, Percy Bysshe Shelley: "Dualisms coIlapsed as Shelley conceived of mindlworld, subject/object, thoughtslthings as mere conventions, rather than independent existents passively perceived. " Metaphor, the rhetorical trope by which unlike categories of experience are conjoined for cultural and political purposes, was to the German and English romantics the primary vehicle for the active romantic mind. Shelley writes in his "A Defence of Poetry" (Baker 226

1961502) that poetry, the ultimate expression of the active mind and the world-

building poesis which that mind created, "enlarges the circumference of the imagination

by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight.. . which form new intervals and

interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food." Mind and reality were believed part

of a shared continuum, a Shelleyean "poetry of life." The reality thus formed was not

some transcendental absolute, but one that was "the result of the primary activity of the power of imaginativeness--within and without--creating metaphors and relations which themselves form the substance of experience" (Wheeler 1993: 10). If the original cyborg was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's monster, then the romantics might be seen as pioneers in the making of recombinant worlds.

But it is not enough to define the self as a relation or as something that teeters dangerously at the edge of categories. One cannot live on metaphor alone nor stare into the abyss before the morning's first cup of coffee. Kant's theory of the subject unknowable to itself--that is, having to square the classical imperative to "know thyself" with the fact that language necessarily mediates this knowing and thus profoundly qualifies what self-knowledge can be--launched the romantic pursuit of some more tenable model of subjectivity. The early Romantic solution was to compensate for this unpresentable ego with an action-oriented, ironical and playful subject, forever self and world-constituting. What made Romantic practice praxis was the aesthetic nature of this work; that is, the Romantics bridged the Kantian gap between noumena and phenomena by yoking the ideal and the material aesthetically. Schiller held that "this combination

of the formal and material aspects of human existence is precisely what constitutes

artistic practice and experience," play and art being "the essence of human nature and

the human condition" (Saiedi 1993: 117).

This, of course, is the optimistic interpretation of the romantic solution to the

Kantian problem. Freed from self-knowledge, we are liberated from solipsism to take action and to build a world where those parts of ourselves which we are denied direct intuitive knowledge of might be reflected in sublime nature, art, and more mundane human products. Where intuitive knowledge fails, therefore, aesthetic knowledge might indirectly yield human truths. Yet, the vacuum created in the Kantian self leads to a desperate lack of the predictability and coherence necessary to live a life:

Thus, in the absence of a subject whose self-presence is guaranteed by originary intuition and whose mathesis of this first evidence organizes the totality of knowledge and the world more geomerrico, the system as such, although it is deeply desired by Kant.. . is continually lacking precisely where it is in greatest demand. The hiatus introduced at the heart of the subject will vainly exacerbate the will to system.. ..Thus, the crisis inaugurated by the question of the subject will preoccupy Kant's successors, if indeed one can be 'successor' to a crisis. And romanticism, among others, will 'proceed' from it. (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988:32)

Denied intuition, the subject must create a system of knowledge in which to organize its experience of the world. The logical extension of one approach to the Kantian subject is, of course, the Frankfurt School's "one-dimensionalnor binary self, or later, the Althusserian "interpellated" subject or the Foucauldean self constituted by 228 externally imposed power/knowledge. The autonomous subject is bested by the system she or he creates. In the romantic alternative, however, the subject is defined as the author of a living system, and the subject's very identity is invested in the living and organic nature of the system. This notion of the living system is what for Lacoue-

Labarthe and Nancy separates Romanticism from various forms of idealism, the latter which might be held to include much of the Frankfurt School, and by definition both structuralism and post-structuraIisrn. "The 'philosophy of Spirit' is indeed the System- subject, but it assumes this status only insofar as it is alive, as it is the living Sysrem-- and as such, in keeping with the entire tradition of metaphysics, it is opposed to the philosophy of the letter alone (to dead philosophy) and to system as a simple 'pigeon- holing' by tables and registers" (1988:34).

What is also valuable in being "unpresentable" is that a subject who is, at some level, unknowable to her or himself is also unknowable and invisible to the system built on utter visibility. In other words, the romantic self is relatively immune to reification aimed at the subject because the indeterminacy granted to system is also present in the subject. This indeterminacy is not a clone of some essentialist or humanist model of the self (unless we ate contrary enough to say that indeterminacy is essential), but a model of self that appeals to logic, and not some vaporous appeal to the soul, the human spirit, or something equally without foundation. What for Descartes was an embarassment--a lovely rational mind haunted by an unlovely irrational body--is 229

returned as a proudly resistant, because unknowable, entity.' Lyon (1994: 79), in his

survey of post-structuralist tropes and their new media applications, argues for an ethical and religious way out of the "surveillance society," citing his own Christian humanist conviction that 'the philosophical and religious discourse obscured by theorists such as Foucault requires rediscovery and re-emphasis within contemporary social thought." Perhaps; but there is in the contemporary new media literature a more promising, because more romantic, choice apart from a humanist assertion of moral identity.

The one writer currently studying new media and the subject from what approximates a roman tic perspective is AIlucquere Rosanne Stone, a transgendered former male with an appropriately acute sense of identity. Stone explicitly identifies her work--most notably her essay "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?" (1993) and her book The War of Desire and Techdogy at the Close of the Mechanical Age (1995)-- with a cultural studies perspective4. For her, the new media don't reduce the body to binary code, nor force a retrenchment in some humanist project. Rather, in terms similar to those Probyn identified, they multiply, magnify and otherwise advert the importance of self and body, even as both are extended into cyberspace.

Moreover, rather than detaching self from body, Stone argues for a subtler reIationship between the two given the "technosocial" nature of new media. The discursive self and the physical body become complex halves of a new whole, a model 23 0 of the citizen as someone as much alive in cyberspace as she or he is IRL (in real life, in cyberculture parlance). The body acts to "warrant" the on-line self (whether this latter is in a multi-user dungeon on-line, captured in government or corporate demographic data, or writing e-mail), granting the discursive self a grounded and material nature. The physical and the discursive self are not symmetrical, as the first languishes at the keyboard while the other extends itself in the electronic ether. But a relationship built on mutual necessity remains, and the on-line Icarus is steadfastly rooted in physical presence, material need and political economy. "No matter how virtual the subject may become, there is always a body attached," affirming the value of

"keeping the discussion grounded in individual bodies" (Stone 1991: 111).

Forgetting the body, she writes, is "an old Cartesian trick," and the centrepiece of a project as old as modernity that over time has gradually isolated the body in labour and the mind in intellectual production, textuality and most recently, electronic culture.

And in spending more and more time in cyberspace (it might be argued that cyberspace is at least as old as the telegraph, and includes telephone, radio, television, as well as the more conventional computer space), we risk the temptation of "cyborg envy."

Recalling the criticisms of Haraway's vague materialism, Stone warns of the hatred of the body evidenced in those who would create a life of pure discourse (with a politics founded on writing, it might be added). Yet electronic culture is, ironically, undoing a dualism between body and mind that she dates to the mid-seventeenth century (Stone

1993 :99).

In a very romantic key, Stone argues that the "naturalnis to be recovered in the very heart of the technological matrix, nature defined here as "diversity, flexibility, irruptionn--as trickster values owed not merely to the play of discourse, but to the persistence of the physical body in this technosocial environment. If Romanticism forbids categorical separation of the real from the imagined, the material from the virtual, then Stone's analysis offers a theoretical solution to the absent materialism in

Haraway's work. That is because language is nature in the romantic universe:

"language.. . must be seen as another aspect of a nature which can only ever be understood by the recombination of its elementsn Wwie 1997:73). And yet unlike the more nihilistic post-structuralisms, language declares eternally open the matter of epistemological foundation. The cyborg, as argued by Probyn, points to no future that is not perpetually deconstructed; but the technosocial self, with a body to feed and shelter, must hope for foundation however vainly. Important for Stone, and for a romantic analysis, is the return of old Romantic structures of affect in a space where affect would otherwise be consigned to pre-virtual experience:

I see these identities engaged in a wonderful and awesome struggle, straining to make meaning and to make sense of the very idea of culture as they know it, swimming for their lives in the powerful currents of high technology, power structures, and market forces beyond their imagination. In this struggle I find certain older structures stubbornly trying to reassert themselves in a technosocial milieu that to them seems to have gone beserk. These are the structures of individual caring, love, and perhaps most poignant, of desire. (Stone 1995:36)

New media and technology

That it fell to Raymond Williams to do much of British cultural studies's thinking

about technology, particularly as refracted in the effects school's technological

determinism, was ironic."n Williams's work, from his mid-career Television:

Technology and Culrural Form to his posthumously published essays such as 'Industrial

and Post-industrial Societynand 'Culture and Technology," technology remains one of

the few social facts not numbered in Williams's famously inclusive definition of

culture. This academic elder statesman's policy as regards technology remained

remarkably consistent throughout his career, even as he began to soften and broaden his

preference for bounded, place-specific models of culture. Though the issue of

technology was important enough for him to devote some of his last essays to, the

Welshman was unwavering!

For Williams, technology was a secondary phenomenon, an instrument by which a

technocratic elite might better extend its will over modem society. In Walter Lippman's

famous phrase, elites engineered hegemonic consensus by bringing the ideologically correct "pictures in our head of the world outside," thereby compensating for the loss of organic culture that modernity's 'mobile privatization" had wrought. Yet for Williams, technology neither imparted anything to culture nor could itself be considered a cultural 233 form, a categorical distinction implied by the title of his book on television. Rather, technology was cynically inserted into culture where necessary and its articulation shaped by already existing ideologies and structures; in short, technology added nothing to the culture that was not already present. The following passage from "Culture and

Technology" (1989: 120) is a representative and late statement of Williams's position, and affirms the stand taken more definitively in Television: Technology and Cultural

Fom:

virtually all technical study and experiment are undertaken within already existing social relations and cultural forms, typically for purposes that are already in general foreseen. Moreover, a technical invention as such has comparatively little social significance. It is only when it is seIected for investment towards production, and when it is consciously developed for particular social uses--that is, when it moves from being a technical invention to what can be called an available technology--that the general significance begins.

The logic of Williams's organicism is such that it treats anything not assimilable into the non-dialectical pattern of relationship that makes the various elements in culture cohere as something potentially deterministic. There is really no distinguishing something that has determining properties, such as technology might, from something that monocausally constructs everything in its path. As Hall notes in his essay "Cultural

Studies: Two Paradigmsn (1980b:36), culturalism suffers from a kind of "radical interactionism," which he defines as "the interaction of all practices in and within one another, skirting the problem of determinacy." Moreover, Williams's analysis lends itself to an instrumentalism that credits agency with too much power relative to other 234

factors, such as technology. While Williams's challenge to technological determinism is

highly creditable, his view of technology's relationship to culture is such that culture's

victory is too complete and, perhaps, pyrrhic. This ready demonization means that

media scholarship in the British tradition tends to move facilely "from an

intention/needs analysis to an evil intention/artificial needs analysis, in studies of how a

class-based society allows media oligarchists to construct ideologies able to lock the

masses into hegemonic structures of domination" (Gronbeck 1990:4).

There is organicism of the settled and unadaptive variety such as Williams's, and

there is the more vital and inclusive form that does not reduce difference as defined by

his Romantic ancestors. In the Romantic conception of the organic there may be

modem means to formulate an alternative conception of culture that includes

technology within it rather than abandoning it to that which is not culture--a theory of

technoculture. As the editors of a volume on cultural studies, science and technology

argue, "perhaps the most effective category for problematizing culture--and for the

study of it--is technologyn (Aronowitz and Menser 1996:21). Though definitions are rare in the several references to technoculture in the cultural studies literature, "media culture is thus a form of technoculture that merges culture and technology in new forms and configurations, producing new types of societies in which media and technology become organizing principles" (Kellner 1995:2). 235

This is not to imply that the contemporary work on technocuIture issued out of the

foreheads of Andrew Ross, Douglas Kellner and Stanley Aronowitz fully formed. Early

concepts of 'technoculture" tended toward grand and often oppressive edicts as to the

"culture industryn and the 'medium is the message." While the Frankfurt or Toronto

schools might be reckoned, against Williams's isolation of technology from culture,

as prior variations on the technoculture theme, both posited an undialectical and

simplistic relationship between the two variables. In place of these early attempts that

stressed the formal properties of technology, and that metaphorically displaced the

"hardness" of the material form of the technology onto the alleged deterministic terms of that technology's mediation with individual and society, is a welcome if still underdeveloped working out of the meaningful content of technoculture.

The contemporary shift from defining technology's relationship to culture as one of content rather than form is in no small way assisted by the fact that the computer codes or software on which new media depend are both forms of language or cultural in character, and yet as intrinsically technological as the monitor, the chip or the wiring within. In his introduction to the co-edited (with Constance Penley) Technoculture, and in his own text Strange Weather, Ross breaks with the formal definitions of technoculture. Technologies are more than devices by which culture is filtered and pasteurized, or given a new scale: they are "intentional linguistic processesn (Ross

199 1: 3). Both Technoculture and Strange Weather are devoted to investigating 236

alternative techno-subcultures, such as teen-age hackers, cyberpunk afficionados, and

New Age devotees, in order to recover their dissident means of reading science and technology against the establishment tradition of Big Science. o ow ever remote, impersonal or alienating these processes are, technologies are also fully Iived and

experienced in our daily actions and practices, and that is why it is important to

understand technology not as a mechanical imposition on our lives but as a fully

cultural process, soaked through with social meaning that only makes sense in the

context of familiar kinds of behavior" (Ross 1991:3).

Aronowitz and Menser's introduction to the edited volume Technoscience and

Cyberculture provides a more programmatic analysis of cultural studies's

responsibilities to technology and culture. For them, a cultural studies of technology

has as its number one task the critique of technological determinism. The second task

of cultural studies is then to offer a theoretical alternative to determinism; and the authors oblige by outlining just what such an alternative might be, calling it the theory of "complexity." By ucomplexity,"Aronowitz and Menser mean (acknowledging their debt to Donna Haraway) the real permeability of fundamental cultural categories to each other--humadanimal, machine/human, culturehature--which cybernetic technologies underline and explode still further. Computer-mediated communications and other information technologies "employ and engage human beings and nature in such a manner that a continuity among the three arises that prevents any essentialist 237

isolation of one from the other" (Aronowitz and Menser lW6:2 1). The romantic

contribution to a theory of complexity must begin with a little demythologizing.

Romanticism and technology are customarily thought antithetical, and this opposition is frequently captured in the romantic character of ~uddisrn.' Visions of displaced workers breaking machines in Industrial Revolution England in the name of the apocryphal Ned Ludd, or contemporary activists going "back to the land" and espousing voluntary simplicity, are integral to the Left imaginary. Such Luddism has been both a conventional place of technological criticism for Left theorists and activists, as well as one of the few admitted romantic tendencies in Left theory and practice. "[A J mong conventional lefties, the Net revolution has provoked more fear and denial than anything else.. .. They're used to seeing technology as evil-destroying jobs, alienating women, and generally being a playground for young white boyz" (Thompson

1995:14).

Sale (1995: 17) makes the connection between romanticism and Luddism clear:

"Another expression of a Luddistic kind, also contemporary with the Luddites, was

Romanticism, beginning with Blake and Wordsworth and Byron particularly, who like the machine breakers were repulsed by the Satanic mills and the getting-and-spending of the present and like them were mindful of the ruined paradise of the past.. .." The neo-Luddites of today differ from the displaced weavers of the past in that they oppose the entire technological system, not merely isolated instances of it. The threat of 238

technology is the "instrinsic aspect" of technology that "affects what happens regardless of who uses them or with what benign purposes" (Sale 1995: 256). The ultimate effect of the "intrinsic aspect" of technology is that it embeds itself deeply into the soul of the user, and makes him or her insidiously part of ideology of the society which makes that technology.

The technophobic aspect of the cruder forms of Luddism, and the romantic associations therein, point to a deeper antinomy thought to obtain between romanticism and technology. The former seems to be concerned for nature, the irrational, and the exotic; the latter for the systematic expression of rationality and the domination of nature's particularity in the name of mundane control. "Romanticism and technology are often regarded as inherently at odds with each other, one supposedly relying upon a desire to get in touch with a nature in us and outside us which the modem

'technologized' world risks losing sight of altogether, the other upon the domination of external nature for human purposes" (Bowie 19955). Technology is depicted as singlemindedly rational; and romanticism arational if not altogether irrational in character (Ong 1974: 279).

But the antithesis of technology and Romanticism is illusory, and the assumption that this opposition exists is a conceit with dire consequences for the Left's critical effectiveness. The roman tic poetic "was the poetic of the technological age.. .. romanticism and technology can be seen to grow out of the same ground.. .." (Ong 23 9

1974: 279). The reader may well ask, given the reputation of romanticism for antitechnological bias, at least as expressed in Luddism, how are romanticism and technology compatible? What place, indeed, does nature--the site of domination--have in this romantic reappraisal? And is there a middle ground between Williams's dismissal of any "intrinsic aspect" to technology, and Sale's identification of this intrinsic aspect with the loss of one's soul?

Walter Ong argues in his essay "Romantic Difference and the Poetics of

Technologyn that the conventional opposition in cultural history between the neoclassical era of Pope, Johnson and Swift, a period exemplary of Enlightenment values, and the succeeding romantic era, is not that consequential. Much more significant is the opposition between thousands of years of oral culture, deeply invested in what he terms the ucommonplace" tradition in rhetoric, and the. Romantic movement.

Ong refers to the necessity, within preliterate oral culture, of developing verbal formulae, e.g., rhyme, fixed epithets, in order to preserve historical experience in the absence of a written literature; "commonpIaces" are these verbal formulae. Even with the advent of phonetic written languages, oral culture persisted in the self-conscious rhetorical character of Greek, Sanskrit and most importantly for the West, Latin. Until the advent of mechanical type press technology in the 1450s, the culturaI conservatism of oral culture remained at the core of medieval Latinate intellectual society. The result was relatively slow growth in the accumulation of knowledge, and a paraIyzing 240

inhibition as to learning more about the unknown world. Writers, for example, would

refer to Latin "commonplace" indexes and choose stock phrases endorsed by Greek and

Roman stylists, studding their texts with such boilerplate phrases rather than articulating their own experience.

Gutenberg's revolutionary technology, and the mass production of relatively inexpensive reading material in vernacular languages, would revolutionize society (a process, of course, best chronicled by Benedict Anderson). But Ong demonstrates that this revohtion was intimately involved with romanticism. Romanticism, coming some three centuries after the invention of the mechanical press, was the mature cultural expression of the cumulative effects of Gutenberg's breakthrough. "Technology uses the abundance [of new information stored efficiently in mass volume] for practical purposes. Romanticism uses it for assurance and as a springboard to another worldn

(Ong 1971:279). The Romantic movement's exoticism--its fascination with the novel and the particular--is therefore the sign of the intellectual confidence of a European intellectual culture newly able to confront the unknown directly. As Gutenberg's press radicalized the means by which knowledge was stored, Romanticism offered moral direction to this formerly conservative civilization, gesturing wildly to real and theoretical places formerly undreamt of:

Romanticism and technology.. . are mirror images of each other, both being products of man's dominance over nature and of the noetic [i.e., of or involving reason] abundance which has been created by chirographic and typographic techniques of storing and retrieving knowledge and which had made this dominance over nature possible. The atrophy of the commonplaces of discourse.. . is simply one of the more spectacular signs of the attenuation or etiolation of the massive and venerable old oral noetic economy in the face of technological development reflected and furthered by the evolution of communications media. (Ong 1971:264)

Romanticism's anti-foundationalist epistemology provides a basis for a very different definition of technology. Because no final metaphysical ground for truth is allowed in

Romantic philosophy, technology is not (as with Frankfurt School) necessarily the agent by which a fixed and determinate world is established. Technology is rather a matter of art, not empirical science. Certain hermeneutically-derived ideas as to the nature of reality are entertained, and technology--whether language, a hammer, or a mainframe computer--is used to act on reality while guided by these ideas. But the sheer tentativeness and contingency of this action recommends that technology be seen not as the medium for some anti-dialectical power, but rather as the extension of subjects creatively reworking the mental and material contexts of their lives. This is not to say that the problem of instrumental reason and its role in the dialectic of

Enlightenment is foregone, but rather that the conventional and fatalistic rendering of the dialectic typically ignores Romanticism's capacity to interrupt just this kind of narrative. Anti-teleological, anti-dialectical, and critical of the dualistic separation of subject and object that dogs EnIightenment epistemology, the Romantic theory of technology is a cause for optimism. 242

The extent of determinacy permitted by the Romantic theory of technology is

described by Kant's concept of "schematism." Following on Kant's argument that our

knowledge of reality-in-itself is necessarily circumscribed by the cognitive limits

inherent in consciousness, the limits of what we can know of reality are captured in

"schemata." These basic assumptions about the nature of the noumena, though not objectively valid, are as close to objectivity as Kant's philosophy allows. The schemata number three: that even as the appearance of a phenomenon changes, its essence remains; that cause and effect logic applies in reality; and that elements which co-exist in space take part in some form of reciprocal relationship. The alternative to "schemata" is a thoroughgoing Humean scepticism, where any attempt to conceptually transcend the bloom and buzz of experience is taken to belie that experience's empirical basis.'

Schematism is that aspect of judgement which is spared the infinite regress

Romanticism argues must follow on any attempt to construct a metaphysical foundation on which to define truth. Where each attempt to establish an unshakeable basis begs the eternal romantic question--how do you know this foundation to itself be true?--Kant recognizes that the subject can produce more lasting and definitive forms of knowledge by dint of special talent or effort on her or his part. The epistemological condition of any technological extension of ourselves, then, is this creative if exploratory intervention in material reality.' The basis for truth is therefore defined not as a matter 243

of rules, but in terms of a 'techne," an "art" which depends on the subject's judgement

(Bowie 1995: 13).

This, of course, places a considerable burden on the subject; but it is the subject's

self-reflexive nature--her or his ability to interact with the environment--that defines the

romantic view of things. This environmental epistemology has no definitive foundation

in either subject or object, however, but is the product of the interaction between them.

Mystery then enters into the most ordinary facts of everyday consciousness, and

technology's role is to probe the dark places that obtain between subject and object, humanizing this space through artful exploration, not empiricism. 'It is this aspect of

Romantic philosophy which is most relevant to the question of technology, not a vague aversion to the damage done by science to an innocent nature" (Bowie

1995: 12).Technology is thus defined as something that falls between technological determinism and Williams's characterization of it as anti-culture. Neither god nor devil, hero nor villain, it assumes a more substantial identity in "technoculture."

New media and %irtual community"

In chapter five, it was established that American and British cultural studies have historically seen authentic communication and mass media as incommensurable. Mass media, defined as the transgressive representative of late modernity, wmpelIed the idealization of communication (American "communicational cultural studies"); violated 244

the minimal conditions for creation of a common culture and knowable community

there (Williams); or did not provide a means by which the still more limited

membership of those decoding could address other equally isolated and non-

communicative, if "activenviewers (Hall). In this third and final romantic revision of

new media literature identified with cultural studies, an attempt is made to demonstrate

the plausibility of authentic discourse in media culture, particularly as this is reflected

in debates as to the nature of "virtual community."

The very phrase "virtual communityn seems an updated variant on McLuhan's

"global village," and undoubtedly would rankle Williams just as much. Virtual communities are defined as "social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace" (Rheingold 19935). A brief history of "virtual communitiesnorders them according to four different stages and on terms that exceed on-line discourse: (1) textual communities from the mid-1600s onwards, conceptually corresponding to Stanley Fish's "interpretive communitiesnand perhaps to Benedict Anderson's "imagined communitiesnof newspaper readers; (2) early electronic mass media, dating from the late nineteenth century telegraph to the radio and television viewing communities in the post-WWII period, roughly equivalent here to McLuhan's usage; (3) early interactive computer networks from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, featuring text-only interfaces in bulletin-board systems (BBS), e.g., 245

ARPANet, San Francisco's WELL community; and (4) those con temporary virtual

communities enabled by graphics, video, and virtual reality, and which date from the

conceptual foundation given three-dimensional cyberspace in William Gibson's 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (Stone 1993). But the question as to whether the communication that occurs between academics on a cultural theory mailing list, or among players of killing games in a MUD or MOO, is sufficiently dense and rich to constitute "knowable community" is a moot one.

Of the texts and arguments most often marshalled to understand the relationship of communication to place, Habermas's "public sphere" concept is probably the most influential. The public sphere, of course, is the social and communicative space which

Habermas argued was opened at the origins of modernity in the early eighteenth century, making possible through the (then new) newspapers and magazines, lending libraries and salons, the development of liberal public opinion. This space formally closed in the 1870s as commercial and state pressure commercialized and regulated it, and has become an ideal type against which contemporary media discourse and institutions are judged as to their capacity to sustain democratic discourse. lo Rheingold

(1983) cites Habermas, Foucault and Baudrillard as the three theorists most useful to interpreting virtual community, and the Frankfurt School scholar is invoked to test whether the Net qualifies as a "public sphere." Habermas's concept passes the test, but

Rheingold raises the familiar concerns as to the privatization of the Net. 246

Wabermas's signature concept (though it dates to early in his career) is commonly

invoked as an antidote to Foucault's equation of discourse with power. McGuigan

(1996: 177), for example, argues that after Habermas 'What is contentious.. . is the

claim that power and discourse are identical, of the very same coin." Discourse for

Habermas, under certain conditions, is inherently democratizing, taking advantage of the dialectical nature of discourse appreciated by the Greeks, and documented by Jack

Goody, Marshall McLuhan, and Walter Ong in their studies of pre-literate communities and orality. The public sphere is primarily characterized by rational discourse, and under media conditions that optimdly recreate the "ideal speech situation," the

Habermasian concept which upholds interpersonal communication as the highest, most genuine form of interaction. Insofar as public discourse is not faked, i.e., talk shows,

TV "citizen's panels," electronic town halls, a degenerative process tending to what

Habermas called "the refeudalization of the public sphere" and the celebration of the irrational, the emotional and the spectacular at the expense of rational debate, the

"public sphere" is recoverable. Given his origins in Critical Theory, Habermas believes the general problem afflicting public discourse to be instrumental rationality, which acts to "colonize the life worldn or naturally democratic and ideologically resistant space of interpersonal "communicative action."

Progressive media and cultural critics have frequently resorted to Habermas's public sphere concept as an analytical tool and moral object lesson. There is obvious, even 247

romantic, appeal for intellectuals in the 'public sphere" argument's advocacy of

vigorous rational debate and dialectic, and its spiritual ancestry in Socratic norms.

Stevenson (199550) is like many in decrying the privatization of media consumption

(cf. mobile privatization), and the alienation of the citizen from intersubjectively

mediated truth in a Habermasian key: 'The progressive institutional elimination of private communicative individuals coming into conversation in the public sphere emphasized a growing separation of public and private life. From this point on commercial culture was consumed in private, requiring no further debate or discussion.

Unlike the print culture of the discursive bourgeois salons, much of the new media

(television, film and radio) disallows the possibility of talking back and taking part."

The public sphere concept, contemporarily defined as a national community of discourse which provides the moral basis for public broadcast institutions and cultural policy, has proven to be the political horizon for much media scholarship as scholars and policy makers confront the globalization imperative. "The political and social concerns of the public service era--with democracy and public life, with national culture and identity--have come to be regarded as factors inhibiting the development of new media markets" (Morley and Robins 1995: 11). Market-seeking commercial media networks are no longer constrained by, or responsible to, a public philosophy and define their audiences as consumers, not citizens. 248

The public sphere concept organizes a number of values that underwrite much media

scholarship, and therein that scholarship's attitudes towards new media. The preference

for "placenover a perceived deracinated media "space," the ideal of emulating

interpersonal conversation in any medium so as to make a home for intersubjective

rationality, a loyalty to the local or the national as opposed to some flat and featureless

global mediascape: these values are common to Habermasian arguments generally.

Given these terms, application of the "public spherewconcept to new media that, among

other things, allow on-line subjects to alter their identities, support the blurring of

modem genres and rhetorical styles, encourage emotional display and non-rationality as readily as reasonable discourse, erase fixed notions of local and national place in favour of generic spaces (that may or may not offer the kinds of existential coordinates that make them seem like places), and simulate face-to-face conversation, often leads to a negative judgement of new media as supportive of genuine communication. This is particularly evident in more popular literature on new media, since the public sphere concept is so permeable to official liberal norms as to conversation, community and country, and not least to homely appeals to the natural and the real. One could list many such books, their theses evident from their titles: Clifford Stoll's Silicon

Snakeoil, Bill McKibben's 7he Age of Missing Infomation, Theodore Roszak's The

Cult of Information, and Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly, among a dozen others. 249

But Habermas's public sphere may be no more than a better theorized version of

Williams's "knowable community," and just as vexatious. Even if, in the best of all

possible worlds, electronic mass media were to be returned to majority public

ownership, and the rapid privatization of cyberspace somehow stopped, it is unlikely

that these media couId ever satisfy Habermas's criteria--if indeed they ever did. What is

necessary is a more realistic view of media experience that removes the privilege from

immediate interpersonal exchange, values indirect relationships and their normality in

new media contexts, and sees hope in the much-lamented "spatializationnof cultural

geography in late capitalism. This contrarian reading of the "virtual community," on

terms different than the prevailing public sphere metaphor, borrows from recent writing

by new media critics sensitive in different ways to romantic concepts, as well as

directly from the romantic literature.

The privilege granted to interpersonal over broadcast (radio, television) and

distributed (Net) forms of communication has its origins in classical Greek thought. l1

Plato's Socrates "privileges a private and esoteric mode of communication, in which the

audience is carefully selected by the speakern (Peters 1994: 124). This Socratic model

can be contrasted to the broadcast mode1 which Jesus advocates in the New

Testament, where Christ "sows seeds" of meaning to whomever is available in a

"radically public and exoteric moden and the audience "sorts itself out by its responsesn

(Peters 1994: 124). Authenticity in communication in Greek thought is restricted to a 250 few, whereas Jesus is portrayed as offering a kind of love that potentially embraces all humanity. These ancient antecedents aside, the priority of interpersonal over mass or distributed forms of communication has distorted communication studies since, and provided a unproductive moral structure to many traditions of media research organized around the problem of "mass society," 'mass culture" or "civilization."

We ordinarily think of the distance between sender and receiver as a "gap" which must be bridged in order that successful communication occur. But the "gapN-- philosophically sketched in Kant's distinction between noumena and phenomena, and further developed in Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics--in fact allows both interpersonal and mass (or distributed) forms of communication to be understood as similar, since both have the 'gap" in common. No matter how intimate or alienated an act of communication, be it a lover's whisper or a World Cup teIecast, the gap intrudes, making every message fraught with risk and intrigue. The gap's normality is the normality of misunderstanding, distance, and the awkward search for the right word or gesture. "The gaps at the heart of communication are not its ruin, but its distinctive feature" (Peters 1994: 130).

The "gap" therefore establishes a problem that the Romantics seek not so much to solve as to live with. The powers of imagination are to be marshalled so as to challenge the epistemological distance between self and world without, of course, assuming that that distance may be definitively breached. Deconstruction, given the place of 25 1

romanticism within its genealogy, is helpful here. The similarity of the Romantic

attitude toward the gap, and Derrida's concept of "differance," is not accidental.

Derrida's denial of dualism and the metaphysics of presence, all the while stopping

short of nihilism, also have an analogy in romanticism.12But what is especially

worthwhile is deconstruction's disinclination to rank speech over writing, a choice

supportive of removing the privilege of interpersonal speech over other forms of

communication. For Derrida, writing is the model of all language insofar as it makes

visible, with sincere visibility, the indeterminacy of the sign and the lie of presence.

"Writing, not speech, gives the logical model for all language, with its deferral,

dispersion, and dissemination of present meaning beyond the author's power to control

or even know.. .. 'Writing', newly conceived, undoes the illusion of self-presence fostered by speech and by the voice" (Wheeler 1993: 215).

What is necessary, however, is that the "gapn be operationalized, and seen to operate in the context of new media. The new media intensify a pattern already established within modernity, characterized by the greater frequency of indirect social relationships, the disarticulation of voice and body, and the asynchronous and dispersed nature of time and space. Like Peters, Calhoun (1992:206) disagrees with the priority given to face-to-face communication, writing "I contend that such [indirect] relational structures have been neglected compared to other aspects of integration and that they have been conceptualized in ways that focus on face-to-face interaction and obscure the 252

fact that mediated relationships are still social relationships." Both pre-modern and

modem societies were complicated by indirect socid relationships, a fact that belies

constructs like Redfield's "folk-urbann continuum, Tonnies's "gemeinschaft

/gesellschaft," and other ideal types of modernization.

The introduction of new media technologies therefore does not much alter the

tendency toward indirect relationships, nor represent a break with the modem. Rather,

they expand and intensify these relationships, a continuity crystallized in a "gap" which

has endured as along as human communication. "New technologies have extended the

most basic trends in social integration more often than they have countered them, and

this pattern will probably continue unless substantial social effort is invested to the

contraryn (Calhoun 1992:218). For good or ill, new media extend the pattern of

indirect social relationships which fascinated classical sociology, and confirm that new

media might be readily located in a modem episteme. Modernity, as captured in

"alienationnand "anomie," is synonymous with indirect social relationships, and

information technologies have greatly added to the number and presence of these

formations on terms that may not be as destructive or unnatural as Habermas's

metaphor suggests (Calhoun 1992: 2 11).

Once the "gap" is accepted as a convention of communications and the priority of speech over writing, broadcast and new media reversed, and once the "gap" is incarnated in indirect social relationships as extended in modern new media, then the work of circumscribing communication within the familiar confines of "placen is open to question. Physical proximity alone, or models like the "public sphere" that evaluate media cultures in terms of how close to face-to-face communication and "knowable community" they come, are no longer guarantees of authenticity, and the tendency to denigrate "space" in favour of deeply historicized and temporally accented "places" is constructively challenged. Interdisciplinary interest in space is relatively recent, as the contemporary popularity of the work of Edward Soja in theoretical geography,

McKenzie Wark and Manuel Castells in media studies, and Arjun Appadurai in cultural anthropology reveals:

m]oth positivist and Marxist historians and sociologists. .. have tended to privilege historical determinations in the interpretation of society and culture, and to render spatial determinants as both static and secondary. This historicism of the theoretical imagination has permeated accounts of every type of social and cultural phenomenon in the Anglo-American and European mainstreams of academic thought. For a number of reasons, which are both historical and geographic in scope, this 'bias' is now being challenged in social theory and contemporary theoretical geography. (Berland in Grossberg, Treichler and Nelson 19%: 39)

Though space is a theoretical variable that must be recovered from neglect, space is itself yet another instance of the insinuation of capital into the public sphere and civil society. Following on Harold Innis's marked preference for the "time bias" of oral culture and his identification of space with the extension of capitalism, electronic media, and bureaucratic power, cultural studies has hitherto not significantly incorporated space into its analyses dependent on semiotics and variations on 254

counterhegemony. While this author is not so pessimistic as Berland about the political potential of space as an alternative to time-biased notions of "place," her critique of the prevalence of the "encoding/decodingnmodel in light of space is worth noting

(Grossberg, Treichler and Nelson 1992: 42-43): "For the most part.. . cultural studies has not comprehended the spatio-temporal dimensionality of this [audience reception or cultural consumption] process." If we can accept that space has been neglected as a variable in both social theory and cultural studies, however, we might see in digital media something that defines the spatial metaphor positively. In other words, the point is not merely to recover "space" as an analytical category, but to redeem it as a potentially constructive tendency in the convergent geographies of global capitalism and digital media.

Romanticism, in its love of anachronism and hatred of teleology, is already spatially disposed. To be sure, pre-romantics Iike Herder are responsible for the place-specific definitions of culture that underwrote the development of cultural anthropology. And post-structuralists, committed to a depthless image-world of screens and floating signifiers, have earned space a poor reputation. But in the short analytic distance between . the enduring nature of the "gap" and the indirect, highly mediated, and unfamiliar social dimension of "space," there is potential for seeing spatialization not only as necessary to a society built upon mass and new media technologies, but as a good and valuable thing. That is, "community" might endure in a social world where 255

the spatial axis is dominant, though it might not be the bounded, knowable and time-

biased community of Williams and Habermas. The identification of space with the

erasure of difference, the sublimation of the subject, the loss of cultural memory, and

the logic of capital is therefore but one side of the story. The other, as may be seen, is

available to us on romantic terms.

Poster, identified in chapter three and four as an exemplary post-structuralist new

media critic, defines the problem of "gapnon terms that help the work of revaluing space. In his now familiar contrast of the "modem" binary self to the postmodern self,

Poster defines the "gapnas an artefact of print culture. The immersive nature of new media, and the utter loss of referentiality implied by simulation, mean that the "gap" is no longer tenable. Where the "gap" constructed the subject in print culture as distant and therefore potentially critical vis a vis the text, the "gap" is dissolved insofar as the self is defined as indissolubly part of discourse. "The combination of enormous distances with temporal immediacy produced by electronic communications both removes the speaker from the listener and brings them together againn (Poster 1995:

60). Social reality is thus rendered emphatically spatial, but this space is empty of promise, human traces, or contradiction. Without the "gap," reification rules, and post- structuralist spatialization is realized as the very cause and condition of this weightlessness. 256

The romantic solution to the "gap" and the widening and socialization of that "gap"

which might be called 'space," is to argue that the modem critical subject is not defined

by her or his distance from the text. This makes the modem subject into a straw person

which Poster can easily collapse, given the acceleration of categorical breakdown in

contemporary culture. Rather, the modem romantic subject is defined as one which is

not so much defined by the distance between subject and text, but rather as a subject

that lives inside the gap. The "gap," that is, is not a vacuum that seals the subject

hermetically from text, only to collapse explosively under alleged postmodem

conditions. Rather, the gap is itself a meaning-fill space. While the gap is categorically

unbreachable, given that definitive truth is impossible, the gap can expand and contract, can itself be represented in the critical imagination, and has a history and human character granted it by the innumerable crossings made by subjects. So too is space, as the social extension of the epistemological gap between mind and reality, also then deeply human for all its strangeness, terror and unbounded refusal to behave as

"place."

Romanticism's investment in the spatial is evident from the transcendental disposition of romantic conceptions of language and reality (or better, language as reality), typicaIly captured in the idea of "poesis." Meaning exceeds its particular location in a sign, as "every fact.. . is a sign whose meaning transcends the signifier"

(Saiedi 1993: 120), and signification proceeds through daisy chains of metaphors on 257 terms familiar to deconstruction. Language's intertextual ambition is such that, as

Friedrich Schlegel wrote in the Athenuurn Fragments (Simpson 1988: 193), "mt

embraces everything that is purely poetic, from the greatest systems of art.. . to the

sign, the kiss that the poetizing child breathes forth in artless song." Poetry can

moreover "hover at the midpoint ... on the wings of poetic reflection, and can raise that reflection again and again to a higher power, can multiply it in an endless succession of

mirrors" (Simpson 1988: 193). The wilfully excessive nature of meaning in the context of romantic philosophy, as does Demda's later theory of intertextuality, allows for the disembedding of meaning from the local without denying the possibility of meaning altogether. Nihilism, of course, always threatens. But the romantic and Derridean solution is to keep meaning (however qualified in the 'trace" and the priority given to signifier over signified) moving through space, to write as if one's very life depended on it--as it does.

The fullness of "spacen is evident from Demda's concept of "spacing." Spacing

"designates the divisive, traditionally obscured gaps between things, such as the writing within speech which makes writing not a supplement to speech, but the possibility of it as articulation" (Wheeler 1993: 215). Space is translated as an active phenomenon and the very possibility of differance, and Derrida presses his case by insisting that spacing exists even within entities thought whole and complete, e.g., not between words in a sentence, but within the various elements in words themselves. Spacing for him is the 258

means of undoing the metaphysics of presence and intention and, as stated, space is the

social elaboration of the epistemological uncertainty confirmed by the "gap." "This gap,

this otherness is Derrida's 'spacing' or articulation; it is the 'writing' inscribed in all

speech, writing being a non-concept, the tracing, differance, iteration.. .. " (Wheeler

1993: 230).

The road from "gapnto "space" spans the distance from the moment one recognizes

the necessity of indeterminancy, to the next where one finds the courage to make a

home there. Meaning doesn't end with the triumph of space over time, a future defined by "accentuating spatialityn(Soja 1985: 188; as quoted in Morley and Robins

1995:28) or "the formation of a new historical relationship between space and society"

(Castells 1983:3; as quoted in Morley and Robins 1995:29) on terms that favour capitalism. Rather, it begins with space. Without the redemption of space--on romantic terms or otherwise--there will be little for the Left to say to new media which are as spatial as the capital flows they parallel, serve and occasionally interrupt.

Morley and Robins are perhaps the most advanced new media critics, working within a cultural studies project, to rethink new media and space on positive terms. As they write in Spaces of Identity (1995:38): " Can we reposition ourself in local space without falling into nostalgic sentiments of community and Gerneinrchafi?"While short on solutions, Morley and Robins cite the neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty in arguing that we need move from Enlightenment "objectivitynto (what can only be described as a romantic) "solidaritynin developing some working model of articulation between local and global spaces. Objectivity demanded of the Enlightenment self that she or he create distance from other people and attach her or himself to something which can be described without reference to particular human beings. On sheer rational terms, it is difficult to imagine the terms of our relationship with others living far away, and refracted through the images presented in the evening news.

However, a romantic, critical imagination built upon a solidarity that projects outward from deep, textured and extensive relationships with real people, not distance and category, may be the only means by which the articulation of local and global (now a cliche in the media and development literature) might effectively be imagined.

Solidarity is 'referential and contextualised," yet not place-bound. The community to which one relates one's being can be "distant in time or place." The process of bonding

"can occur in the context of attachment to bounded territorial locations," but

"[SJolidarity and collectivity should also have aspirations directed beyond the localityn

(Morley and Robins 1995: 40). It is difficult not to see here the romantic call to a radical empathy, and their belief in a vital form of organicism:

But what, then, are the conditions and requirements for genuinely reimagined communities? .. . . It must be about positions and positioning in local and global space: about contexts of bodily existence and about existence in mediated space. At one level, it is about bounded and localised spatial arenas which bring individuals into direct social contact, about revaluing public spaces and recreating a civic culture. But it must be recognized, as Craig Calhoun.. . argues, that 'however desirable decentralized communities might be, they are at most complements to system integration and not alternatives to it.' It is necessary to improve the way large-scale systems work, and this means Iearning how to use the mass media and the new communications technologies to create 'a new forum for public discourse'. (Morley and Robins 1995: 40- 1) 26 1

Notes

1. Understanding the Net is a matter of finding the most precise metaphors to describe and analyze a system the internal complexity of which exceeds the technical knowledge of most media critics, including this one. The term Wet7' is a vernacular term used to refer to what are understood to be two separate layers or levels of fbnction in distributed computer networks. Though it has come to stand in as a synonym for the "Net," the term "Internet" essentially refers to the various information archival and retrieval fbnctions of the Net, such as Ap, teInet, Archie, WAIS, and other software elements that store data. "Usenet," on the other hand, refers to the layer or level of functions where communication occurs, such as e-mail, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), multi-user dimensions or dungeons (MUDS), and newsgroups. Chapter 4 ("Visionaries and Convergences: An Accidental History of the Net") of Howard Rheingold's book, Z?ze Virtual Comunity, provides an excellent abridged history of the Net's development.

2. On a similar note, it is worth reflection whether the "linguistic turn" would have been possible, particularly in its structuralist (not, for the moment, early romantic) phase without the coincidence of the early electronic media. In what sense did these media make possible a theory, albeit intensely and technically linguistic in nature, that pointed to the relative fluidity of meaning, language's part in social construction, and the contingency of the relation between signifer and referent?

3. Bahktin's influence over this paragraph is worth noting.

4. Stone (1995:21) writes of her relationship to cultural studies: "My chosen method of representation for this attempt--a kind of adventure narrative interspersed with forays into theory- -developed out of earlier work. .. . I feel that it is only through the process of trying out various forms of representation, some experimental and some not, that I can properly grapple with the formidable challenge of finding viable pathways into academic discourse in the time of cultural studies."

5. "Technology" might be defined as the system(s) which supports the achievement of practical tasks or "techniques" (Williams 1983b:315), and in this symbolizes that which most crystallizes the human relationship with the non-human, as technologies enable us to modifL our environments (however defined). Media technology symbolizes a still purer case, as it is the means by which we formally make coherent and meaningfbl that relationship between self and world, being and non- being, whether we are cyborgs or not. Irreducible to discourse and yet a channel for it in its media form, an inorganic entity and yet at times eeriely almost human, technology confirms that something alien has indeed landed on the planet. It forces on media analysis the issue of media's relationship to the material world, as the book or the television box are metonyrns both of the "hard" political-economic structure that made them, and of the ineffable materiality of the referent behind the sign. I cite Williams' preferred definition of technology here because it is not incompatible with my objectives; it is his articulation of technology with society that remains a problem.

6. With the qualified exception of elements of his 1962 book, C~mrnunic~om,which featured some Pragmatist content.

7. The reader is advised to refer to the discussion of Luddism as an ultimately unhelpfbl response to new technology--even when this Luddism is made philosophicalfy sophisticated.

8. Details as to Kant's concept of "schemata" are drawn from the entry for "Kant, ImmanueI" in 7?ze Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Robert Audi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

9. The similarity of this point to McLuhan7sargument in Understanding Media as to technology being an extension of our bodies and their senses, and the value of seeing the use of technology as something best guided by artists sensitive to the shifting "ground" of perception, is unintended but by no means regretted.

10. Habermas succinctly defines the public sphere in a encyclopedia article republished in Douglas Kellner and Stephen Bonner's edited volume, Critical Theory and Society: A Reader (1989:136):

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.. .. Citizens behave as a public body when they confer in an unrestricted fashion... about 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 television are the media of the public sphere.

11. Peters himself examines mass media forms only, e.g., radio and television. The Net is defined by many conventionally as a "distributed" medium because messages don't emanate fiom a single source (e.g., radio or television station transmitter) to a mass audience, but fiom an infinitely variable number of senders to an infintely variable number of receivers, As such, the medium is "distributed" because information is transmitted fiom any number of points in the Net, and the Net itself as a physical artefact is radically decentred among many web sites, institutional servers, Internet providers, and various nodes on backbones, etc. The Net, in contrast to the "mass" model of mediation characteristic of broadcast, is often regarded as a "many to many" model of mediation.

12. Wheeler views romanticism, pragmatism and deconstruction as kindred positions, taking up in their respective historical moments a sophisticated attack against excessive rationalism. She writes (1 993 : xiii) "... each could be described as a reaction against the hegemony of both reason (narrowly conceived) and science, as the highest form of truth, which repeatedly asserted itself in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries." Chapter 7 The Corporate Sublime: Toward a Cultural Studies of Political Economy

'If the doctrine of the Fall entangles humans in each other's errors, the doctrine of the Market disentangles each fumbled attempt toward a finally concatenated good. Modem capitalism lives by a counter-myth to the Fall of Man--one where benign nature makes everything go, miraculously, right.. .. Eden was lost by free choice in the Fall of Man. It rises again, unbidden, by the automatic engineerings of the Market."

Gary Wills, Reagan's America: Innocents At Home, p. 455

Cultural studies has often been charged with being "a glittery gadfly," ambitious in pursuit

of trendy exotica as various as dance club etiquette and Japanese comic books, but unable

to engage the larger ideological and structural realities of the contemporary world. To

borrow fiom the vocabulary of cultural studies's own historical narrative, there is a large

and growing gap between "New Times3'--the acknowledgement that the collapse of the

Soviet empire, Thatcher's and Reagan's "authoritarian populism," post-Fordism, new media technologies, postrnodernh, and other features of the 1980s had brought a novel set of conditions to society and to theory--and "cultural populism" or "new revisionism"-- the habit in cultural analysis of overemphasizing the revolutionary potential of cultural consumption at the expense of questions as to production, social totality, class, and the nature of economy in cultural theory.' In other words, critics both within cultural studies and fiom the rival and more conventionally Marxist political economy of culture tradition, have argued that once having separated itself fiom the base/superstructure model in the 265

late 1950s, cultural studies has grown narrowly focussed on identity politics and active

audiences while neo-liberalism and globalization change the world.* As the editors of a

recent collection of essays evaluating the cultural studies project argue in their

introduction, "The substantive issue was, and is, cultural studies's failure to deal

empirically with the deep structural changes in national and global political, economic and

media systems through its eschewing of economics, social or policy analysis" (Ferguson

and Golding 1997: xiii).

As the reader might expect, the rationale for a working relationship between the

political economy of culture and cultural studies can be found prospectively in

Romanticism. First, the debate between the political economy of culture position and

cultural studies is explained, with attention to the particular fate of things romantic therein.

Then, the efficacy of Romantic views on the sublime, social totality, and cultural materialism is discussed, all as partial steps toward the creation of a "cultural studies of political economy." In this extension of work in previous chapters toward the recovery and rehabilitation of Romantic concepts as regards media theory and, by way of case study, the new media, the understanding is that global society's hture is significantly co- dependent with that of media. Therefore, a romantic resolution to the endless debate between the political economy of culture and cultural studies is more than a technical solution, or a needless eIaboration of an argument already concluded. Rather, it is an answer to an unheeded call by Davies for an aesthetic and materialist criticism, as ready to parse global economic trends as it is the counterhegemonic potential of me Simpsons. 266

Cultural Studies versus Political Economy of Culture

7s anybody else bored with this debate .r'

The criticisms of cultural studies's difficulty with the dismal science come fiom inside and

outside the pr~ject.~Among those identifying with cultural studies: Gruneau (cited in Harp

1991:2 10 ) warns that "There is a significant danger that critical studies designed to seek

out and analyze the wide variety of apparently popular cultural forms of resistance to

hegemony will be drawn into a theoretical position that loses sight of the importance of

political economy and capitalism's powefiI forces of containment." Davies (1995: 121)

explains that both British and American cultural studies's difficulty with political economy

results fiom their overreaction to the crude nature of the base/superstructure model, which

conditioned cultural studies to neglect economics generally. Kellner (1995: 53) blames the

postmodern influence on cultural studies for the neglect of political economy, citing

Baudrillard's declaration of the end of political economy, as well as general discomfort

among cultural theorists with the "hard domains" of production and economics. And Inglis

(1993: 123) peevishly writes off the entire enterprise, complaining that "Cultural Studies, indeed, have made great play with their highly politicized and goofily partisan version of political economy, without ever showing any notable address at the subject."

The charges fiom the rival political economy of culture position are predictably more dichotomous and definitive. Golding and Murdock (1991), assuming what they deem a

"critical political economy" position, argue that cultural studies doesn't understand cultural industries qua industries nor audiences within the structures that bind them, and 267

thus fails to adequately balance ideology and agency against the forces of gravity at the

base. Moreover, against the fieedom that cultural studies sometimes grants to the play of

discourse, they warn about the power of institutions and structures to displace, rank or

otherwise shape languages. In the most balanced and generous review of cultural studies

by a political economy of culture scholar, Mosco credits cultural studies with usefidly

criticizing positivism and persuading political economy to consider gender, culture and

race. However, cultural studies defines power too generically, failing to identi@ it with

agents, institutions and structures (Mosco 1996:258). Garnham concurs, arguing that

cultural studies's conception of power and determination is too local and diffise to be

analytically productive, an indiscipline possible because neither concept is accountable

materially. Cultural production also serves the larger work of material production,

something not readily reflected by the considerable autonomy of culture and concentration

on text at expense of context favoured in cultural studies. Garnham also asserts the

necessity of epistemological realism against cultural studies's structuralism, insisting that

"discourse is capable of expressing a truth about a world external to that discourse, and

further, that discourse has a determinate relation to the actions of human agents, actions

about which it is possible to make normative judgements" (1990: 5). In a more recent

article (1995)' Garnham's polemicaf ire lists cultural studies's relative indifference to the priority of production; the fact that much cultural activity is not about resistance so much as coping with power; and the neglect of how control over the supply and marketing of cultural commodities allows producers unacknowledged influence over the terms of 268

audience reception. Lastly, McGuigan (1992: 244-45) argues that eliminating the

economic makes cultud criticism facile, insofar as material grounds for criticizing power

are abandoned, leaving cultural studies prone to a circularity that places it at risk with the

structures it would otherwise oppose.

Cultural studies, of course, has its own able defenders. Hall's essay, "Cultural Studies:

Two Paradigms," represents perhaps the sharpest polemic against the political economy of

culture. He argues that political economy theoretically fetishizes the cultural commodity,

and reduces it to a generic object that ignores the different properties and practices that

surround its use. The specificity of culture and ideology is abandoned to economic

reductionism, and a scale introduced whereby cultural production and consumption are

analyzed at so high a level of generalization that the analysis is easily tempted to a

deductive ''fbnctionalism of logic" where data are readily assimilated to an a priori and

highly refined intellectual model of totality (1986:47). Grossberg argues that the political

economic emphasis on production ignores the self-production of meaning undertaken by

consumers of popular texts. Moreover, cultural studies doesn't neglect political economy

but rather defines it differently, accenting those aspects of economy that escape the rigid

Marxist terminology of profit, surplus value, exchange relationships, commodity and

exploitation (1997:g).

Others cite a greater role for political economy found early in cultural studies literature.

Normally an unremitting critic of anything fiom Birmingham, Gamham (1995:62) warrants that early cultural studies as practised by Raymond Williams and Richard 269

Hoggart maintained fidelity with a comprehensive analysis of capitalism, an analysis taking

the form of "an oppositional, broadly socialist political movement which saw the cultural

struggle as part of a wider political struggle to change capitalist social relations in favour

of this working class." And Kellner (1997: 103) singles out Hall's "Encoding/Decoding"

as an exemplary case of political economic sensitivity, stating that "Some earlier

programmatic presentations of British Cultural Studies stressed the importance of a

transdisciplinary approach to the study of culture that analysed its political economy,

process of production and distribution, textual products, and reception by the audience."

But rearguard defenses and nostalgia for the allegedly more authentic and class-

conscious early literature in cultural studies apart, the project of developing what might be

called a "cultural studies of political economy" seems as far away as a tax on international

capital flow. Dialogue between champions of the respective sides--among the political

economists of culture principally Graham Murdock, Peter Golding, Nicholas Garnham,

and Vincent Mosco, and among cultural studies critics Stuart Hall, Lawrence Grossberg,

Douglas Kellner and James Carey--has been sufficiently unproductive as to lead Grossberg to title his contribution to a colIoquy on the issue, "Cultural Studies vs. Political Economy:

Is Anyone Else Bored with This Debate?". Over the several decades of polemic, the positions have only become entrenched and hostile, with the political economy of culture insisting on its variations on base/superstructure and Fraddkrt School culture industry models, and cultural studies on theories filtered through other western Marxisms, structuralisms and post-structuralisms, feminism, and generally less orthodox positions.' 270

Unique in this acrimonious literature, however, are two articles devoted to reconciling this pair of cultural Manrisms, Harp's "Political Economy/Cultural Studies: Exploring

Points of Convergence" (199 1) and Kellner's "Overcoming the Divide: Cultural Studies and Political Economy7' (Ferguson and Golding 1997). Although not definitive, Harp and

Kellner raise questions that any more comprehensive approach to reconciling cultural studies and political economy need answer.

Harp's largely unheralded work offers a Canadian perspective on the debate, invoking a national tradition of political economy that was precociously aware of culture. Citing

Harold Innis's work as a precedent, Harp argues that political economy and cultural studies can converge to mutual benefit in the study of community. In light of Innis's

"staples thesis" and its articulation of production and culturaI form in Canadian economic history, Harp suggests that "[tlhe encounter between the local and the particular experiences of actors/individuaIs/subjects and the universalizing institutional structures of society is mediated by community" (1 99 1: 2 16). Against the tendency of political economy to reduce experience to an effect of class, Harp argues that cultural studies confers on community studies its lack of theoretical dogmatism, and sensitivity to the grain of subjectivity and place. Peace-making and precedent-setting, Harp's analysis is however not easily generalized above the level of community to the national or global level where economic discourse is abundantly generated. Nor does it outline the terms by which political economy of culture and cultural studies might be negotiated intellectually, 27 1 prefemng to allow their potential contribution to community studies to speak for the value of convergence.

More intellectually pure and programmatic is Kellner's article. Echoing the argument in his 1995 book Media Culture, Kellner calls for a "multiperspectival" approach to cultural analysis. Kellner (Ferguson and Golding 1997: 1 17) writes: "To avoid the one-sidedness of reception studies, I am proposing therefore that cultural studies itself be multiperspectival, getting at culture fiom the perspectives of political economy, text analysis and audience reception." The dichotomy of political economy of culture and cultural studies is a false one in Kellner's view, reflecting a longstanding, unresolved tension between social science-driven models like "media effects" and textual forms of media analysis. His preferred means of organizing a multiperspectival analysis, and reconciling institutional and interpretive forms of critique in one transdisciplinary framework, is to use HaIl's

"articulation" concept. Familiar fkom chapter two, where it was criticized as something that neglected the properties of discourse at the expense of ideology, "articulation" is a concept more evocative than explanatory. For Kellner, "Perhaps the key concept of aniculation could be deployed to indicate how economics and culture can be combined in doing concrete analyses" (Ferguson and Golding 1992: 112). Media production is to be

"articulated" with audience reception and textual analysis in Kellner's view. The terms whereby a given media text is interpreted are better understood when related to the structures within which they're produced, e.g., the network or studio, with both linked by who and how the text is consumed, e.g., a family at home, a couple at a drive-in. Once 272

dissimilar phenomena are related conceptually through articulation, the new ensemble

invites the joint "multiperspectival" effort of the several disciplines.

While a welcome departure fiom determinism (and for that matter, overdetennination),

articulation remains a vague formalism. Downing (Ferguson and Golding 1997 19 I),

examining the concept's history and usage in the work of Grossberg and Jameson, argues

that no statement regarding articulation is provided "which is not immediately thrown

back into a set of unpredictably whirling conceptual dervishes, seemingly to ensure that no

reader may assume the analytical game is over." Recombinant and minimally materialist,

articulation is a well-intentioned but ultimately fiustrating concept in its current form.

Citing Grossberg's maddeningly generic definition of articulation as "a more active version

of the concept of determination" wherein "not only does the cause have effects, but the

effects themselves affect the cause, and both are themselves determined by a host of other

reIationsW(Grossberg 1992:56), Downing (Ferguson and Golding 1997: 191) believes that

much more specificity as regards articulation might offer release fiom what appears a

conceptual morass.

Kellner's use of "articulation" to bind the several perspectives into one multiple form,

albeit something of a theoretical stopgap, does lead inquiry into the relationship between

culture and economy in a promising direction. While begging many questions,

"articulation" and "multiperspectival" analysis beg very good questions that are not yet

satisfactorily answered or even articulated in this debate. Is there room for negotiation between the harder "Marxist" materialism favoured by political economy scholarship, and 273

the more qualified "cultural" materialisms adopted in different forms by cultural studies?

Is there some way to bridge the productivist orientation of political economy and the

devotion to agency, praxis and consumption in cultural studies, or for that matter, the

epistemological gap between structure and text? And finally, do post-Fordism, globalization and the interpenetration of culture and economy in information-based capitalism call for a rationale for the "articulation" of phenomena and perspectives more definitive than Harp's "community" or Kellner's "multiperspectivism~'?Romanticism will be later seen to offer a conceptual vocabulary suitable to the convergence not only of the political economy of culture and cultural studies, but of a political economy and a culture in which information has become the ultimate commodity. First, however, it is important to understand just how the critical potential of Romanticism has been diverted by the political economy of culture.

The political economy of romance

What is ironic about the "romantic" in the debate between political economists of culture and cultural studies critics is that McGuigan, Garnham and others frequently accuse either the cultural studies project or its signature positions of being "romantic" in nature. Ironic because after the culturalist epics of William Morris and Culture and Society,

Romanticism is scarcely mentioned in cultural studies literature, having been decanted into a faint, fond memory of a culturalism diffused within various ethnographic studies of 274

subculture and audience. The nature of these references by political economists or

sociologists of economy (in the case of Colin Campbell) is two-fold.

First, and most often, audience activity is defined as "romantic" insofar as it is

constructed by its scholarly patrons as recklessly subjective and unrnindfbl of structural

constraint. This is the standard critique of cultural populism up to a point: the symbolic

victories that cultural consumers achieve to their material problems are condemned as

pyrrhic. The politicization of cultural consumption thus rewards in theory what the

political economists believe is practically a passive and ideologically impressionable form of cultural practice far removed fiom actual sources of power in production. McGuigan

(1992: 65), in a catalogue of definitions of popular culture, identifies the romantic with the

"popular culture perspective fiom below, of which radical populism against mass culture is an instance." Garnham (1990: 1) disapprovingly cites the "bacillus of romanticism" as that impelling cultural studies to pursue floating signifiers and other ephemera in an guiltless escape fiom the grim world of structure and alienation. The link between cultural production and the wider system of material production is neglected, a neglect which stems fiom "that romantic tradition of analysis" which persists in cultural studies and isolates cultural practice in the secondary sphere of leisure and the private (Garnham

1990: 13).

In a later essay, McGuigan (Ferguson and Golding 1997) argues that the radicalization of cultural consumption is the result of the repression of economics in cultural studies.

Abandoning base/superstructure, cultural studies reconstituted the economic as entirely 275

cultural and symbolic in nature. This cultural economy, though having no evident

relationship to the economic and eschewing determination of any kind, in fact borrows

from neo-conservative ideology's celebration of consumer sovereignty such as found in

rational choice theory. Cultural studies thus unwittingly advances the cause of neo-

conservative ideology by recasting rational choice theory in cultural form. McGuigan

(Ferguson and Golding 140) writes: "So, we have the idea of a 'cultural' or 'symbolic'

economy which consists of exchange relationships and significatory flows but with little

discernible relationship to something like a 'real' economy that may have a measure of

deterrninancy, however mediated, upon these exchanges and flows."

But the romanticism under scrutiny is not merely a synonym for escapist subjectivism,

but Romanticism. Combined with the charges against the romantic representation of

audience activity is a resolute defense of an Enlightenment heritage by political economy

of culture scholars, critics who believe that legacy intellectually besieged by Nietzschean

post-modernists, and politically attacked by neo-conservatives (Garnharn 1990:2). That

cultural studies is included in the Nietzschean geneaology is confirmed later when

Garnham (1990:23) stresses that the Enlightenment project cannot be salvaged unless the

"idealizing tendency of most cultural analysis" is stopped, and economics is given its

rightfbl place at the centre of cultural criticism. McGuigan, though less adversarial than

Garnharn, makes a similar negative association between cultural studies and Romanticism, allowing that "[iln terms of aesthetics, the discovery of popular culture is related to the

Romantic reaction to Classicism.. .." (McGuigan 1992: 10)' 276

The conjunction of cultural studies and Romanticism through the mediation of a

"romantic" cultural populism represents a misreading of Romanticism. Romanticism is a

primary source for cultural studies; but Romanticism is not unconcerned with the world of

production, structure and social responsibility. In identiQing cultural studies with a two-

dimensional version of Romanticism, the political economy of culture is affirmed in its

base determinism rather than addressing the changing nature of political economy in an

age of information. "Cultural populism" does not represent Romanticism any more than it

summarizes the culturaI studies project. Thus, to charge that cultural studies is haplessly

"romantic," and to suggest in that that cultural studies is blithely heedless of economics, is

to misrepresent the Romantic tradition and the romantic potential in cultural studies today.

Cultural studies has not successfblly addressed economics, but far fiom being the problem,

Romanticism may in fact offer a partial solution to the impasse.

The second charge against Romanticism is more revealing of the rationaIe for identieing cultural consumption with the romantic. Colin Campbell (1987; see also Lury

1996: 72-77) argues that Romanticism was to the creation of consumer culture what the

Protestant work ethic was to the organization of production under capitalism.

Romanticism detached the experience of pleasure fiorn the consumption of food, shelter and other necessities, and turned it into a form of hedonism. Separated fiom physical need, pleasure was increasingly projected onto imaginary experiences, images, and dreams, which in themselves could not be adequate to this appetite. This hedonism thus became chronic and pathological, and was organized as a kind of "consumer ethic" in the context 277

of a endless cycle of consumption within modem consumer culture. In legitimizing

pleasure as a good in itself, stimulating production by valuing and demanding novelty, and

liberating the subject from traditional constraints on desire and self-fashioning,

"Romanticism has served to provide ethical support for that restless and continuous

pattern of consumption which so distinguishes the behaviour of modern man [sic]"

(Campbell 1987: 201).

Though crediting the Romantics with good political intentions, Campbell argues that

their revolution was aesthetic, and in his opinion, therefore compatible with their

contributions to a consumer ethic. Campbell's Romanticism is in the end no more than an ideology which, combined with the Puritan ethos, constitutes a modernity indispensable to capitalism. Campbell's analysis might be read as providing the articulate rationale for the more casual relationship between Romanticism and consumption drawn by the political economists, though his argument is not normally cited by the latter. Cultural consumption as it is celebrated in cultural studies literature is characterized as "romantic" because consumption activities are, as read against the history of modernity and capitalism, given their psychological and social form through the intercession of the Romantic movement. In this Romanticism is no more or less than an ideology, its capacity for resistance outmatched by its contribution to capitalism. This would not be the oddly one-sided contest that it is if there were contemporary cultural studies scholars actively defending the Romantic legacy and its critical potential. But there are not, and thus the fighting 278

words are evidence of contradictions resident in the political economy of culture more

than they are of a crypto-capitalist content to cultural studies argument.

The political economy of Smith, Malthus, Ricardo and (later) John Stuart Mill,

borrowing heavily fiom Enlightenment liberalism, was long opposed by English

Romanticism. What seems apparent in the frequent references to the romantic nature of

cultural populism or of consumer culture is that political economists and sociologists of

culture, largely Mancist, are as much contradicted by Romanticism as their Ricardian ancestors long ago. This is paididly ironic, since Romanticism was the original critique of capitalism and, specifically, of Ricardian political economy as the latter consolidated in the early nineteenth century and drew on Enlightenment rationalism to create positivist laws.

Moreover, it demonstrated an awareness of its own contradictions suppressed by

Ricardian and contemporary Marxist political economists of culture. "Romanticism, was, after all, the first critique of critique as a practice implicated in the political economy it attacked: the first discourse to try to step outside its own shadow, all the while protesting through its textuality the hopelessness of the endeavour" (Levinson 1994:271). While the popular conception of Romanticism is of a movement unconcerned with the world, apparently preferring the comforts of a purely aesthetic plane, the Romantic use of imagination, emotion and nature has no less a radical edge than the angry slogans ofthe

Jacobins:

The emphasis on a general common humanity was evidently necessary in a period in which a new kind of society was coming to think of man as merely a specialized instrument of production. The emphasis on love and relationship was necessary not only within the immediate suffering but against the aggressive individualism and the primarily economic relationships which the new society embodied. Emphasis on the creative imagination, similarly, may be seen as an alternative construction of human motive and energy, in contrast with the assumptions of the prevailing political economy. (Williams 1958:42)

If we can accept the legitimate nature of Romanticism's criticism of political economy

in the nineteenth century, what then its contemporary relevance? There are obvious

parallels: the revival of laissez-faire doctrine under neo-conservatism suggests Ricardo, even as the erosion of post-World War I1 welfare liberalism reminds us daily of Malthus's harsh prescriptions. Enlightenment rationalism was and is adequate to the critique of neo- liberal economics, insofar as principles and policy are concerned. Where the wisdom of the philosophes is less helpfbl is in the interrogation of the power of economic ideology over the social imagination. This was arguabfy the special expertise of the Romantics then, and potentially, now. At a time when in the absence or failure of other universalizing projects the market has become the dominant means by which social totality is imagined nationally and globally--when "... the rhetoric of the market has been a fbndarnental and central component of... this struggle for the legitimation or delegitimation of left discourse"

(Jameson 199 1:263)--Romanticism's sensitivity to the subtler shadings of the dialectic compels. Harriet Martineau, the designated "national instructor" and propagandist who dedicated herself to conveying Ricardian tenets in popular narratives the better (in the words of a factory owner character in her me Rioters) to "preach patience to starving peopley7has her counterpart in Francis Fukuyama and the "end of history" thesis. Citing 280

Romanticism's anti-econornism at a time of cornmercialist hegemony, Christensen

(1994:456) writes that "if we want to discover what possibilities for change remain open

now, we might inquire into the untimely back at the beginning of the nineteenth century,

when history first ended." Against Campbell's transformation of Romanticism into mere

ideology, and his reluctance to credit it with critical potential against capitalism, key

Romantic concepts can be shown to offer cultural studies not only a way out of its boring

debate with the political economy of culture, but more importantly, the means to recover

its relevance.

Romanticism and a Cultural Studies of Political Economy

I;he corporcue and the romantic sublime

Cultural theory is confronted by the sheer complexity of late twentieth century society,

and the difficulty of finding appropriate images to encompass that complexity. Twentieth

century tropes have drawn fiom nineteenth century sources of inspiration, namely in the

natural sciences, philosophy and art, and stressed order, epistemological realism, and

comprehensibility. But the hyperreal conditions of contemporary capitalist culture suggest

to various critics the need for new images of totality. "Cultural studies must confiont the

globalization of culture not merely in terms of the proliferation and mobility of texts and

audiences, but also in terms of the movement of culture outside the spaces of any

(specific) language" (Grossberg 1997:17). The problem of representation can no longer presume to some discursive linguafranca, some epistemological bottom line by which 28 1

different phenomena might be commonly interpreted (Dienst 1996:68). And for Williams,

early in his "Images of Society" chapter fiom The Long Revolution, the success of the

gradual extension of democracy to politics, economics and culture is based on bringing

our images of society closer to actual social conditions. "Such changes, difficult enough in

themselves, derive meaning and direction, finally, fiom new conceptions of man and

society which many have worked to describe and interpret" (Williams 1961 :141).

The problem visited on theory today, however, may not be Williams's task of fitting the image to society, but in acknowledging that the image more and more is the society. This is not to say Baudrillard's simulacrum is upon us or that we are doomed to Althusser's imaginary relationship to the real conditions of existence. The material world is no less with us today than in the Industrial Revolution or a bucolic pre-modern idyll. Moreover, there is nothing unreal or ahistorical about the images we live inside, and no margin in granting priority or privilege to the real. What may be new is that the real and the material are deeply interpenetrated by and with media technology, and this is perhaps totality's true complexity-beyond global markets, polymorphous culture, and a McDonald's fi-anchise in Red Square. Image and reality were, as romantically understood, always inseparable.

But media's presence has amplified this interpenetration of ideal and real to an unprecedented degree, and with consequences difficult still unfolding. "For populations transfixed on images which are themselves a reality, there is no return to a mode of representation which politicizes in a kind of straightforward 'worthwhile' way"

(McRobbie 1994: 17,22-23). 282

McRobbie acts on this observation by choosing a postmodern direction in her book,

Posnnodemism and Popular Culture. The feeling that there is "no going back" is to her best answered by adopting a theoretical disposition comfortable with cutting such losses.

Others, on the modernist side of the critical divide, identi@ the postmodern with this ineffability, and invoke the Romantic concept of the "sublime" as symptomatic of all that is wrong with the unspeakable. Dienst warns against the seductions of the sublime, noting

"[Tlo 'figure out' the contemporary situation without resorting either to the tropes of sublimity or to the schematic shorthand of economics, theoretical work will have to cultivate its own powers of imagination and transmission" (1 996:68).Jameson more squarely associates the sublime with the postmodern condition, identi@ing the latter with a guiltless pleasure at abandoning the hard work of representation. Jameson identifies the postmodern "hysterical sublime" with a depthless, space-biased vista born "in the limits of figuration and the incapacity of the human mind to give representation to such enormous forces" (Jameson 1984: 77). For Dienst and moreso for Jameson, a key source in Dienst's essay, the sublime is synonymous with paralysis and postmodernity.

Yet it may be the "sublimeyythat salvages the possibility of meaningfbl image-making, and makes a virtue of totality's opacity. While ineffability is an issue certain to worry

Enlightenment rationalism, the Romantics were comfortable and able to act in a reality so mediated. Some clarification of the meaning of the "sublime" confirms its modernity, its romanticism, and its value for analysis. 283

Lyotard writes that it is in the name of the sublime "that aesthetics asserted its critical

rights over art, and that romanticism- in other words, modernity--triumphedm(1993:246).

In "The Sublime and the Avant-Gardey' he dates the first modern reference to the sublime

to a translation of the work of the cIassical author Longinus, whose thought the French

philosopher Boileu introduced in his 1674 Art Poetique and his Du Sublime. The

conventional genealogy usually begins with Edmund Burke, the English philosopher and enemy of the French Revolution, who defined the "sublime" as the awesome power of nature realized as an immovable force larger than the powers of representation. As discussed in his 1759 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the

Sublime and Beaut~~l,the sublime was so powerful as to threaten to stop representation altogether--and thereby, to end time. Kant, in his 1790 me Critique of Judgement, takes a less antagonistic perspective on the sublime. Where the beautifid, i.e., that which could be represented by the imagination, calls on our "understandingyyor sympathy to provide a mimetic match between image or word and the beautifid object, the sublime presents a higher challenge. Unlike Burke, who attributes the sublime to an external natural power,

Kant believed the sublime an intrinsic characteristic of the human mind and one, most importantly, compatible and necessary to reason.

Rather than paralyzing reason, as Jameson would have it, the sublime provoked our rational powers to higher and higher levels of finction in Kant's view, manifesting in what

Kant called our "Ideas of Reason." In other words, where the imagination fails to provide us mimetic pictures, because the object at hand is far too imponderable to be captured in 284

representation, the mind grows from this "outrage on the imagination," as Kant termed it,

challenged by the sublime to more strenuous and imaginative activity. Ironically, it is only

in abandoning mere representation that the mind can productively engage imponderables,

and presumably then act on the knowledge acquired through ever more refined and

sophisticated reasoning and imagination. Kant (Simpson 1988: 109) writes in l?ze Cn'tique

of Judgemenr that "For though the imagination, no doubt, finds nothing beyond the

sensible world to which it can lay hold, still this thrusting aside of the sensible barriers

gives it a feeling of being unbounded; and that removal is thus a presentation of the

infinite." Though Schiller would later prioritize the beautiful over the sublime, and

Friedrich Schlegel rhapsodize about the sublime in "On Incomprehensibility" without

really adding to its meaning, Kant's commitment is clear. The sublime "can never be

anything more than a negative presentation," but the gain in the enlargement of our

faculties means that "still it expands the soul" (Simpson 1988: 109-1 10).

Where neo-Mancists such as Jameson and Dienst eschew the sublime, control of this

particular romantic discourse is of strategic importance to post-structuralist positions,

represented in this essay as a worthy nemesis and usurper of a potential romantic revival.

The neutralization of the sublime's political potential is evident in Lyotard's "The Sublime

and the Avant-Garde," whereby he argues that the meaning of the Romantic sublime has

shifted register in light of twentieth century modem art and aesthetics. The Romantic

sublime signalled the possibility of another and better worId, or at the very least, a momentous human connection; the modernist sublime, to his reckoning, gestures to an 285

inexpressible "now" devoid of social or utopian content. "The inexpressible does not

reside in an over there, in another world, or another time, but in this: in that (something)

happens" (Lyotard 1993 W6).This contradicts Kant's reading of the sublime, so

influential on the Romantics, insofar as the social and the sublime were compatible.

Lyotard's sublime gives comfort to a capitalist world that would identie the sublime with

its own dehistoricized commercial imagery--a corporate sublime in which the market is the

Absolute. Far fiom being a licence for political quietism and despair, as post-

structuraIism's anti-aesthetic would have it, Kant's sublime by its very transcendental

nature "acquires an interest in society" (Simpson 1988: 1 1 As a universal property of

aesthetic experience, the sublime cannot afford to reject human society, but prefers instead

a complex mixture of solitude and sociability. That is, we are alone because reference is

ultimately impossible, yet because solidarity and other forms of human connection are not

themselves reducible to the representable, the potential for connection remains.

In his "The Impossible Object: Towards a Sociology of the Sublime," Hebdige argues that the sublime is in fact a stimulus toward better representation, and suggests that this trope might provide a cynosure to future work in cultural analysis. In his analysis, post- structuralists have represented the sublime almost on Burkean terms as that which provides a permanent and ineradicable obstacle to analysis. Theirs is the "asocial sublime," a cynical celebration of the impotence of theory relative to its object whereby not only the possibility of representation but even of aesthetic form is abandoned. Whether it manifests in Derrida's "aporia," Kristeva's "signifiance," Lacan's "real," Foucault's "panopticon," 286

or Lyotard's "now," the sublime is an object of terror, the depthless mass that exists

behind the spatialized and seamIesdy intertextual network of representations. Post-

structuralism--to which Dienst and Jarneson seem too keen to yield the sublime--defines

the limits of representation as the limits also of an emancipatory project of any kind.

Denying the fact that utterance implies a position and a materiality of a kind, post-

structuralism parodies itself, creating a facsimile of the very sublime it lacks the resources

to contest. The open question that poststructuralism declines to answer is that, given the

difficulty of representation, just what is the nature of position? What is meaningfblly

material after we have admitted that discourse is embedded in the real? As Comor

(1997:247)writes: "A self-legitimating sublime that denies its positioning by the

exigencies of its own material production becomes a mere subIime simulation, a cool

professional fiction of subversion which paradoxically brings into being the very effects of

simulation, unreality and deterrence which its discourse evokes, but in the passive or

negative mode of routine and rationalization." Connor documents Hebdige's critique of

post-structuralism's appropriation of the sublime, but fails to appreciate the subversive

potential of Hebdige's point, suggesting that the value of the essay is Hebdige's critique of the aesthetics of the sublime in contemporary theory (1997:237).While an antidote to

Lyotard, Hebdige's "The Impossible Object" is more valuable still as a means to recovering the sublime for cultural theory.

Ma jorie Levinson, in a recent review of Romantic criticism in the humanities, underlines the romantic content of this optimistic conception of the sublime. Just as the 287

loving relationship Hebdige describes between his neighbour Mr. H. and his fabulous

1950s Thunderbird suggests that the sublime is not necessarily some implacable poststructuralist terror, but the presence of the transcendent in ordinary objects and everyday phenomena in our lives, Levinson believes the romantic sublime to have subversive potential in the here and now. For her, romanticism's "counter-epistemology" depends on a pair of metaphysical premises, nature and mind, and the way these are mutually implicated in the sublime (1994:273). In the sublime, mind and matter are mixed on terms that will not be measured, rehsing the imposition of value, resisting circulation, and generally not playing the game. The sublime is a trope for phenomena too refiactory and complex for mere rational comprehension--but a trope that is "also real, also an action in the world" (Levinson 1994: 273). In this, the romantic sublime seems the desired basis for a new aesthetic which is social, which refuses to step back fiom the abyss between subject and object, and which is committed to practice despite the sheer and daunting unrepresentability of contemporary culture.

The romantic sublime believes reason compatible with incomprehension, and supports the retooling of reason rather than paralysis when met with the Absolute. Given this character, the concept is suggestive where the interpenetration of media and reality is such that some part of the real must remain ineffable--a kind of sociological dark matter-- since the real is already thereby implicated in every act and instance of representation. Yet the vaIue of the sublime so constructed is little more than a methodological abstraction.

Romanticism's relevance to contemporary cultural analysis is better demonstrated by 288

scrutiny of the point where the recovery of the sublime meets society-that is, in the

market-centered nature of social totality today.

Social totality and globalization

The global market is the most powerful model of totality popularly available today, and

exerts enormous influence as the leitmotif of capitalist globalization."The force, then, of the concept of the market lies in its 'totalizing' structure, as they say nowadays; that is, in its capacity to afford a model of a social totality" (Jameson 1991:272). Jameson argues that Marx realized that the market as a model of social totality was instrumental to defining value as a fbnction of circulation, rather than production. All other models of totality in capitalism are mapped onto this early model of totality and value, one which generalized the experience of alienation tremendously by effacing the human subject from a meaninghl relationship to value and then socializing this alienation on a systemic scale.

The convergence of market forces and media technology today--information technologies being the crucial infrastructure necessary to coordinating global capital flows and transnational production--magnifies the power of circulation over both mind and matter enormously.

For Jameson, the dissolution of market and media in an information-based capitalism is a fatalistic three-part process, and the primary instance of the conflation of media and society discussed above. Stage one is the identification of the commodity with its image as represented in advertising and in television programs and film layered with consumerist 289

messages. Stage two is the loss of any distinction between the physical commodity and its

media representation, signalling "an indifferentiation of levels [which] gradually takes the

place of an older separation between thing and concept" (Jameson 1991:275). In the third

stage, the images of the products replace the products themselves in the manner of floating

signifiers, as part of a larger process of commodification that transforms media and

cultural forms into commodities, e.g., the mass-produced serial nature of much television

programming such as soaps, nighttime dramas, even the structure of TV news. The circle

is closed in Jameson's view once commodity images, e.g., Coca-Cola, Nike, substitute

definitively for the real thing, and the media is so deeply commodified as to indicate its

identity with the market. "Here, then, the media, as which the market was itself fantasized,

now returns into the market and by becoming a part of it seals and certifies the formerly

metaphorical or analogical identification as a 'literaly reality" (Jameson 1991:277). '

By consigning the sublime to the postmodern, however, Jameson surrenders its power

to break this vicious circle of media and market. The sublime acts to refbse equivalence,

destabilizing the easy relationship of images or other signs to referents, and insisting that

despite a "five hundred channel universe" there are things beyond facile representation. In

a period when a revolutionary project seems vague and otherworldly, not knowing

something seems the more radicd act. The relevance of the sublime, and of aesthetic

criticism generally, is often ignored by Marxists for whom the prevalence of imagery was

often read as the product of the "camera obscura" effect of ideology which inverted the relative determinative power of the material and the cultural. For Christensen, the 290 determinative power of imagery--however inverted that imagery--is thus historically denied in much cultural criticism. Images are objective, in Christensen's view, in that they are endlessly stamped onto physical commodities via advertisii~g,consumer cutture and, more insidiously, the work of fetishism contained therein.

Where Jameson would wait for demystification and the reversal of the camera obscura effect in favour of the material, Christensen relates the Romantic project to the priority of imagery. Christensen (1994:459) writes that "once the fantastic has been reinscribed in the Marxian mechanism ... it is difficult to see how Coleridge's 'gothic' use of the camera obscura differs fiom the 'mentat operation of materialist reversal and demystification,' which, according to Jameson, is 'alone the feature by which 'materialism' as such can be identified"' (Jameson 1991:358). Christensen (1994: 459) adds: "That may be because the image of the camera obscura works as a camera obscura, turning upside down reality and dream, idealist and materialist, Coleridge and Marx, Jameson and Fukuyama." Dreams, in other words, have a material force which the prejudice of the camera obscura model of ideology denies.

Lyotard reintroduces sublimity by allowing that in information-based capitalism, the nature of information is that which murders the sublime. Information, once produced, passes quickly fiom sustaining the sublime tension--the deliciously terrifjing gap between knowledge and the object--to breaking it, as the information is added to the accumulated environmental background of the already known. Capitalist markets, and notably those information-driven and convergent with media systems, iron out the wrinkle in time by 291

tying the image to commodity, and the commodity to circulation, a process described by

Jameson above. The convergence of media and market promises that everything that can

be known is known, and everything that is known is for sale. The sublime interrupts the

process by reminding us of the de fwto cleavage that capitalism would obscure, an

absence, lack and rehsal of value where anything- including the end of capitalism--might

happen. "The sublime feeling is the name of this privation" (Lyotard 1993: 256).

Once the strategic value of the sublime against market hegemony is admitted, a

different model of social totality is begged--a romantic totality as radically open as the

prevailing market model is closed, and where the sublime represents the impossibility of its

closure. This romantic model of social totality is identified as "expressive" or, alternately,

"genetic" totality. Martin Jay dates this aesthetic version of totality to Jean-Jacques

Rousseau's work. For the pre-Romantic Rousseau, totality was not a given, a kind of

organic unity always already present in nature, but one which had to be fashioned through

the creative work of the individual subject (Jay 1984).

Holderlin's model of totality is representative of this genetic alternative. The author of

the "System Program" cited in chapter one, he visualized an open, non-dialectical and

materialist totality tolerant of difference and non-teleological in nature. For Holderlin, the unrepresentability of the sublime forced a different appreciation of the conceptual

horizons that defined modernity. Once defined as a project possessed by the dream of representation, modernity's ambitions toward capturing the real are met with the stubborn fact of a world that will not finally yield its meaning. The sublime is therefore no longer, as 292

demanded by a metaphysics of tragedy, located in divinity or fate, but brought inside the

human secular world---a fact requiring what Surin terms Holderlin's "cartography of the

sublime." The appropriate theoretical response to this new uncertain space was for

HoIderlin a "poetic ontology," whereby the material nature of language was recognized

and, contrary to a tragic Faustian view of the modem, the power to shape self and society

recognized. Surin Prendergast 1995: 163) compares Holderlin7spoetic ontology to

Williams's "long revolution," allowing that they resemble each other in imagining culture

to have the capacity for determination on par with more conventionally economic sources

of production.

Culturul materialism and infomananoncapitalism

The romantic part in a reconsideration of Williams is deeper still if Holderlin's prototype

for Williams's cultural materialism is appreciated. Surin (Prendergast 1995:158) credits

Holderlin with a sophisticated materialism in which the imagination is the essential

component "since it is the imagination that enables materialism to retain its constructive

power in the very moment that materialism has lost its hope." What is important to the

narrative here is that recent scholarship has discovered that the continuity between

Romanticism and Williams includes cultural materialism. Milner (1994a:63) writes that

"the whole tradition of Romantic and post-Romantic anti-utilitarianism which we have

designated as culturalism," more evidently present in Williams's overtly Leavisian 293

"structure of feeling" concept, "remains much more actively present in the later cultural

materialism that is often supposed."

Williams's cultural materialism is British cultural studies's most valuable contribution

to the totality debate. Hall, among others, regards the pursuit of a theory of totality as the

"core problem of Cultural Studies" (1986:45). Hall's enthusiasm for the project has not

spared cultural studies criticism for largely neglecting totality after Williams. Mosco, for

example, has argued that "Cultural studies is considerably less certain about the value of

pursuing the social totality, because it doubts the empirical reality and theoretical

usehlness of the concept" (1996:267). He cites its preference for the particular rather than

the systemic, a "romanticism of difference" that makes cultural studies averse to drawing

relationships between the scattered moments of difference and identity for fear of creating

a system by default. Though cultural materialism dates to Williams's mid-career, recent

commentary has argued for its revival on a romantic warrant.

By cultural materialism, Williams argued that theory should regard the means of

cultural production, e.g., media, language, art, as social forces comparable in their power

to determine causality with more sober forms of economic production. That is, we

should understand that signieing practices are not dissimilar fkom factories, resource

extraction or technology in determining the shape of the larger society. In essays like

"Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory" and "Means of Communication as

Means of Production," Williams made room for culture's more subtle causal power by

softening the orthodox model of economic determinism into a "determination" that set 294

limits on social form, and even arguing in Politics and Letters for a model of social

process that dissolved culture, economy and politics into one another (1979:35 1). Cultural

materialism was intended to separate Williams from the harder versions of determination

favoured by the British Communist party and from the idealism of Leavis. While in early

versions thought to be too close to Leavis's moral and mystical literary humanism, by the

time Culture was published in 198 1 cultural materialism had developed a sensitivity to the

less than whole or homogeneous nature of contemporary existence. Dropping its

insistence on a prior organicism violated by capitalism, and the tendency to overlook difference in the name of a binding "structure of feeling," this much-improved cultural materialism was left unfinished at the time of Williams's death.g Williams had perhaps thus begun to abandon the pious form of holism identified with Schiller and more conservative strains of Idealism and Romanticism, in preference for an open model of totality that had to be endlessly worked through human labour of a practical or communicative kind, and in which the sublime potentially had a role.

Contemporary criticism has sought to finish what Williams began, ironically drawing upon the romantic content in cultural materialism Milner identified by way of developing the new aesthetic Davies also called for. Against the false unity of commodity and whole, a unity consolidated through the relentless aestheticidon of the market in advertising and other forms of promotion, Williams's alternate model of totality is both sceptical of the victory over matter that post-industrial and post-structuralist critics claim, while sensitive to the acute form that the relationship between word and world, 295

spirit and flesh, idea and matter takes in a society and a capitalism bound up with

media.

Kellner (1995: 43), for example, recommends that cultural materialism grow beyond

Williams's emphasis on means, and appreciate that discourse itself has material effects.

Others, such as Dan Schiller, take cultural materialism much further, building on

Wifliams's later formu1ation of the "structure of feeling" as a "metaphor of solution"

(Williams 1977). Rather than signitjring activities merely being parallel with non-signifllng

activities in determination, culture was dissolved into economic practices (and vice versa)

while effort was made to specifjr the particular effects which given elements had on social

determination. Williams wrote (1977: 133) that "[Structures of feeling] can be defined as

social experiences in solution, as distinct fiom other social semantic formations which

have been precipitafed and are more evidently and more immediately available."

Signifjring activities are thus held to be "deeply present" in economic and other practices,

an opinion strikingly similar to Holderlin's that imagination is implicated in the material itself. Schiller (1996: 193) argues that this more liquid formulation of cultural materialism means that signification "exists not as a separate and autonomous practice, nor even as half of a composite construct which also encompasses activity; it is, rather, again an organic dimension of an ontologically prior category of social labor." Defining signification as a material practice with material effects, cultural materialism has the romantic benefit of undoing what Schiller believes to have been the endless reification of 296

communication within the history of communications research. Communication, as the

romantics had also defined it, is made again into a sensuous and material form of labour.

Raymond Williams's more dissoluble form of "cultural materialism" allows cultural

studies to more productively address the problem of political economy in an information- based capitalism. The opportunity for cultural studies to make itself as current as the communications technologies it needs analyze is present in the fact that, in the information society, the base is becoming a part of the superstructure. That is, more and more of what we have considered to be the economy in the past is now "culture," if we think about the nature of information, service and cultural products to which

Western economies now devote themselves. Reality, in other words, has caught up with

Williams's thesis, meaning that cultural studies scholars now have a means to address economy without having to do calculus. As Hall himself has said, " it's possible to get a long way by talking about what is sometimes called the 'economic' as operating discursively" (1 996: 145).

In the place where dialectical tensions used to reveal themselves, therefore, a new and arguably non-dialectical kind of space has emerged where base and superstructure used to be. Romanticism offers a non-dialectical model of the real appropriate to "a situation where ideology duplicates or simulates rather than inverts the real, and where production turns around and mirrors ideology.. .." (Levinson l994:28O). The space of information capitalism is part ideology and part discourse, part technology and part 297

culture, and very closely approximates the "metaphor of solution" the later Williams

brought to cultural analysis:

There is an important social space that is invisible to any simple base/superstructure conception of society, a space hardly ever explored in British media theory. This is a space in which capital seeks to influence, not ideas or profits, but the very rhythms, patterns, pace, texture and disciplines of everyday life. And crucially important here is a consideration of how technologies invest and inform the patterns of culture, of the whole way of life (Robins and Webster 1983:46).

The interpenetration of base and superstructure in the information society takes the form of a metaphorical and, arguably, more and more "real" conflation of culture and market, the convergence made possible by what Webster terms in a later book as the process of "informatization" (1995). In such a society, where social process is increasingly articulated on-line through private and public networks that span the globe, society is increasingly subject to cybernetic management. Human communication and the exchange of digital cash are made almost identical, appearing as mere bits in convergent data flows. The dialectic gone digital, as it were, means that culture and economy "are identified in such a way as to allow the libidinal energies of the one to suffuse the others without, however (as in older models of our cultural and intellectual history), producing a synthesis, a new combination, a new combined language, or whatever" (Jameson l992:275).

As nature is overtaken by technology, our sense of the real hopelessly implicated in simulation, and the circuIation of commodified information allowed to pass dbr all that can 298 be known, it is more important than ever not to give up on the real--as post-structuralism would have it. But a new language is needed to account for the material's more oblique and intimate relationship to culture, and the constant and immediate presence of the unrepresentable sublime. Such a language may be possible in a newly romanticized

Williams, given that information-based capitalism has essentially caught up with and materialized the direction of Williams's thought regarding cultural materialism.

Romanticism may not alone offer an answer, but it does offer means to better questions in an often surrealistic world that resembles the dreams of the poet much more than the designs of the social scientist. Notes

1. McGuigan (1992:4) defines "cultural populism" in his book of the same name as follows: "CulturaI populism is the intellectual assumption, made by some students of popular culture, that the symbolic experiences and practices of ordinary people are more important analytically and politically than Culture with a capital C." Kellner (Ferguson and Golding 1997: 104), more sympathetic to cultural studies, writes:

During the past decade, however, there has been a resolute turning away fiom political economy within cultural studies, though there has been intense focus on the audience and consumption. This is partly due to a postmodern turn in cultural studies whereby economics, history, and politics are decentered in favor of emphasis on local pleasures, consumption, and the construction of hybrid identities fiom the material of the popular. This cultural populism replicates the turn in postmodern theory away fiom Marxism and its alleged reductionism, master narratives of liberation and domination, and statist politics.

2. Globalization may be defined as "the growth and acceleration of economic and cultural networks which operate on a worldwide scale and basis" (0'Sullivan et al 1994:130). It is synonymous with the tilt toward transnational corporations, world-wide media networks, a "casino capitalist" tilt away fiom manufacturing and toward finance capital, and "postmodem" culture. A regrettable fact in the literature on globalization is that the most comprehensive study is that of the neo-fbnctionalist Roland Robertson's book, Globalization: Social 27zeor-y and Global Culture. Other worthy texts are Tomlinson (199 1) and Featherstone (ed.) (1990).

3. Kellner offers a usefLl working definition of political economy (Ferguson and Golding 1997: 104):

The reference to the terms 'political' and 'economy' call attention to the fact that the production and distribution of culture takes place within a specific economic system, constituted by relations between the state, the economy, social institutions and practices, culture, and organizations like the media. Political economy thus encompasses economics and politics and the relations between them and the other central dimensions of society and culture.

4. The author attended a day of panels and papers hosted by the International Communication Association at Carleton University Friday May 29, 1998. The ICq largely composed of scholars identified with a political economy of culture position-Hamid Mowlana, Janet Wasko, Graham Murdock, Jeremy Tunstall and Vincent Mosco being in attendance at this particular conference-- seemed more receptive to cultural theory than the angry posturing of a Nicholas Garnharn would suggest. Mowlana gave the keynote address on the topic of how Islamic culture is largely unintelligible to Western cultural analysts, and there were occasional remarks fiom the floor about the importance of understanding culture on other than reflectionist terms. This suggests that there may be counterparts to Harp and Kellner emerging fiom political economy's side of the polemical divide, although this is not yet reflected in much of the published literature.

5. The fill quote indicates the degree of McGuigan's correlation of Romanticism and Cultural Studies:

In terns of aesthetics, the discovery of popular culture is related to the Romantic reaction to Classicism, the attempt to break with excessively formalistic, dry and unemotional art. To recover something of the vital impulses of ordinary people, their apparent spontaneity and disregard for propriety, their 'naturalness', are amongst the themes which cut both ways: back to a myth of an 'organic' past in contrast to a 'mechanical' present, or forward to a Utopian future of popular emancipation. It is no accident that the great Welsh cultural theorist Raymond Williams should most famously have opened his account of 'culture' with a book on English Romanticism and its conservative and radical strands: Culture and Society, published in 1958. (McGuigan 1992: 10)

6. Connor prefers to read Kant as the originator of the "asocial" sublime, and therefore the precursor to Nietzsche and the poststructuralist abdication of representation. However, Kant does not seem to abandon the social so much as to aestheticize it. Connor (1997:237) writes that the asocial sublime is the "apocalyptic inheritance from Nietzsche and more obviously fiom Kant, which suggests that the only form of value is to be found in the embrace of theoretical extremity." But Kant's own words seem to imply a much more romantic, rather than poststructuralist, direction, and places Connor among those who would identi@ romanticism as a poststructuralism ahead of its time. In the interest of defining the romanticism of Kant's views, and more importantly, the complex social commitment of romanticism, I quote Kant (Simpson 1988: 1 11; italics in the original):

The delight in the sublime, no less than in the beautiful, by reason of its universal communicability not only is plainly distinguished fi-om other aesthetic judgements, but also fiom this same property acquires an interest in society (in which it admits of such communication). Yet, despite this, we have to note the fact that isolation from all sociery is looked upon as something sublime, provided it rests upon ideas which disregard all sensible interest. To be self-sufficing, and so not to stand in need of society, yet without being unsociable, i.e., without shunning it, is something approaching the sublime--a remark applicable to all superiority to wants.

7. Baudrillard, of course, develops a similar schema in Simulations. Trans. P. Foss and P. Patton. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. 8. Williams defined cultural materialism in ''Notes on Mantism in Britain since 1945," New Ley? Review, 100, (November 1976-January 1977), p. 88, and quoted in Schiller (1996: 187):

What I would now cIaim to have reached ... is a theory of culture as a (social and material) productive process and of specific practices, of 'arts', as social uses of material means of production (fiom language as material 'practical consciousness' to the specific technologies of writing and forms of writing, through to mechanical and electronic communicative systems).

9. Prendergast (1995: 16) documents the growing sophistication of cultural materialism, by way of Gramsci's influence on Williams, Williams's exposure to 1960s social movements that celebrated difference rather than a class consensus, and the complexity of an information-based transnational capitalism:

At the level of general theory, one possibility might be to retain the indispensable emphasis on connection while detaching it fiom the more holistic and value-laden notion of wholeness, thus permitting a way of thinking the social that is more compatible with a sense of the fluid, heterogeneous, and fragmentary character of social formations. The later work, notably the book Culture... moves toward just this view; by consistently approaching 'totality' ('the whole social order') fiom the notion of 'complex real processes', the argument both demands and engenders as crucial to the actual analytical programme of a 'sociology of culture' a strongly maintained attention, alongside the continuing stress on the connected, to the concrete and differential specificity of cultural practices. Conclusion Wrestling with the Angels

"I want to suggest a different metaphor for theoretical work: the metaphor of struggle, of wrestling with the angels. The only theory worth having is that which you have to fight off, not that which you speak with profound fluency."

Stuart Hall, "Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies," p. 280

The angels of Romanticism, if t hese dark and dangerous creatures really are fiom heaven,

hardly fight fair. Just at the point where you believe you understand a point, they break

into iambic pentameter or begin speaking in tongues. Take what on its own terns would

be difficult German philosophy, read it in the German and English poetic idioms in which

it is commonly expressed, transport it fiom its original context to the present day, argue

for its contemporary relevance in light of technologies that even the Romantics didn't

dream of, and there is a risk of clipping a few wings.

All this is to say that this project has been experimental in nature. And to be surprised that, given the difficulty, the Romantics weren't humbler. It remains that for all the many miracles, Romanticism--or romanticism--will not solve all of cultural studies's problems.

But where new media and political economy are concerned, and a good number of other issues besides, there is clearly a need to witness what makes cultural studies special, and remember why the project seemed so necessary and timely in 1964. A pair of retrospective essays by Williams and Hall, both of whom have featured centrally in the present argument, might prepare the reader for fbrther consideration of Romanticism's value as a 303

contemporary "romantic" criticism sensitive to the cultural conditions of the new

millennium.

Williams, in his essay entitled "The Future of Cultural Studies," earnestly appeals to us

to remember that cultural studies was initially an intervention as political as it was

intellectual, one built on the militant genius of Leavisism and Marxism, and on the small

victories won on behalf of the long revolution in adult education classes in Britain. Its

recent institutionalization womed him, and suggested that cultural studies was

increasingly isolated fiom the social formation which had inspired it originally. There is in

this late essay by Williams, given as a lecture several years before his death, strong echoes

of the culturalism of his early career. The romantic Williams is eminently intelligible in his

caution that "you cannot understand an intellectual or artistic project without also

understanding that the relation between a project and a formation is always decisive; and

that the emphasis of Cultural Studies is precisely that it engages with both, rather than

specializing itself to one or the other" (1989: 15 1; Williams's emphasis). If cultural studies

has been about "taking the best we can in intellectual work and going with it in this very open way to contiont people for whom it is not a way of life," then cultural studies's fbture is secure (Williams 1989: 161-62). But there is the evident fear that cultural studies, for Williams, is becoming an arcane version of Tn'viaI Pursuit, and it may not be imposing on this text to read here a subtle invocation of Romanticism's anti-reifling powers. 304

Hall, in "Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies," repeats some of Williams's

own concerns, a surprising gesture for the person responsible for the "idealist"

structuralism Williams believed had made cultural studies all too predictably academic.

Like Williams, Hall warns of the importance of worldliness, of articulating text to context

relentlessly, of keeping intellect alive and true to social formations. The realness of power

had succumbed to endless theoreticism, cultural studies had been overprofessionalized,

and the project's interdisciplinarity and eclecticism threatened to lapse into mere pluralism.

But even Hall sounds romantic in the last several pages of the essay, as he recalls the

maddeningly elusive nature of culture, and the fact that the best that theory can hope for is

a beautifid, dare it be said romantic, failure:

unless and until one respects the necessary displacements of culture, and yet is always irritated by its failure to reconcile with other questions that matter, with other questions that cannot and can never be hlly covered by critical textuality in its elaborations, cultural studies as a project, an intervention, remains incomplete.... I think that, overall, is what defines cultural studies as a project. (Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler 1992: 284)

Romanticism is the one theoretical tradition which cultural studies, unique among the

other metanarratives on which it draws, can claim as its own, mediated as this eighteenth

century philosophy is through English culturalism. This present argument is at best merely

a prologue for another and more comprehensive application of romantic ideas to contemporary culture, and one in the spirit of the radical empathy and anachronism which the Romantics practiced. The best that can be hoped for here is that the contemporary relevance of Romanticism has been demonstrated, and some directions for actual romantic 305 criticism outlined. Many of the topics that post-structuralism now claims for itself- issues as trivial as music videos, or as epic as subjectivity, textuality and epistemology--can and should also be rendered in romantic terms. In a world of images and shadows, where modernity is the condition for making existence amid these things tolerable, cultural studies's privileged relationship with Romanticism suggests that restoring and adapting key Romantic concepts for contemporary cultural analysis might mean that Birmingham, a hundred and fifty years later, can still carry the burden of understanding "the revolution that thrust not only England but the world into our modern technological era." References

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