Cultural Logic of the United States in the Globalization Era

CULTURAL LOGIC OF THE UNITED STATES IN THE GLOBALIZATION ERA

PATRICIA VENTURA

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2003

Patricia Ventura

This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Carlo Ventura and the late Maria de Lourdes Moraes Ventura (1938-1984).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the many important people in my life roughly in the order in

which I met them. First, of course, is my family: my parents, Carlo and Maria de

Lourdes; my sisters, Maria Filomena, Maria Angela, Silvana, and Christina; and finally

their husbands and children. They have been the guiding influence in my life and I thank them for their love, their belief in me, and mostly, for just being themselves. Not officially a member of the family but as close to me as any sister could ever be is my best friend Beth Mauldin. For better or for worse, I would not be the person I am today without her.

Next in my chronological list of thanks and love is my family by marriage. My in- laws (parents, grandparents, and sister) have been wonderfully loving and supportive in so many ways, and I thank them them for everything they have done for me, the greatest of which has been to make my husband, Glenn Zelniker, the man he is today. There are not sufficient words to acknowledge my appreciation for his everyday acts of support, his constant love, and his relentless humor. I cannot say whether I would have gotten this degree if he were not in my life, but I can say I would not have been able to format this dissertation.

I want next to thank the people of the English Department: the staff, especially

Carla Blount; fellow graduate students, too numerous to name but instrumental in my growth as a scholar; and my professors and committee members, all of whom have directly or indirectly made this dissertation possible. I especially thank Sid Dobrin for

iv employing me, Phil Wegner for challenging me, and Susan Hegeman for mentoring me.

I must add another note of gratitude here to Susan Hegeman for serving as a role model and inspiration. I unqualifiedly thank her for her guidance, patience, and friendship through the painful process of writing this dissertation. I want to add here a special acknowledgement to the late Dr. Pythagoras Mycat.

Finally, I want to thank my friends, without whom I would have finished this dissertation much sooner.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iv

ABSTRACT...... viii

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION: GLOBALIZATION’S NEW WORLD ORDER...... 1

Periodizing the ‘90s ...... 6 Globalization: A Particular Introduction ...... 13 Global Economies...... 15 New World Order ...... 21 “Post-Cold War” v. “Globalization”...... 26

2 AFTER POSTMODERNISM: GLOBALIZATION, AN EMERGENT CULTURAL FORMATION...... 29

Postmodernism: Metanarrative of Skepticism...... 30 The Sixties Intersection ...... 34 Imperialism and the ‘60s—Today ...... 42 Cultural Logics in/of the Globalization Era...... 47 Hybrid Subjectivity ...... 48 Society of Control...... 48 Biopower ...... 49 Ontology...... 50 The Multitude ...... 50 Summaries and Implications ...... 53 Cultural Critique in Postmodernity and in Globalization...... 55 Cultural Criticism in the Postmodern Mode...... 55 Summary Conclusions for Globalization Critique ...... 59

3 A NEW “MARSHALL” PLAN: TERRORISM, GLOBALIZATION, BLOCKBUSTERS, AND AIR FORCE ONE ...... 62

Hollywood High Concept...... 63 Empire and the New World Order...... 66 The Persian Gulf War: Vanquishing the Ghost of Vietnam...... 71

vi “A State of Permanent Exception and Police Action”...... 77 Hollywood and History...... 88

4 LEARNING FROM NEW WORLD ORDER LAS VEGAS: THE SOUTH AND POST-REGIONALISM, POSTMODERNISM AND GLOBALIZATION ...... 95

Introducing the New Vegas ...... 98 Learning more from Las Vegas ...... 100 Living outside the Strip ...... 105 Outside in the Gaming Machine...... 109 An Evolving City, an Evolving Strip...... 114 The Other Side of Paradise...... 118

5 HOME IS WHERE THE MARKET IS: WAL-MART, OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB, AND BILLIE LETTS’S WHERE THE HEART IS...... 122

In the Club ...... 128 Wal-Mart Is Where the Heart Is ...... 134 Opening Up Wal-Mart...... 137 Home Is Where the Wal-Mart Is ...... 141 Coda: Lexie and the Olive Tree...... 148

6 WELFARE REFORM, FAMILY VALUES, AND NEO-LIBERALISM’S NEO- ENCLOSURE...... 155

Deforming Welfare...... 155 How a Widow Becomes a Welfare Queen ...... 156 Family Values...... 158 Taking the Public out of Public Assistance ...... 163 Reforming More Than Welfare ...... 167 The (Safety) Net Effect...... 168

7 CONCLUSIONS AND SPECULATIONS ON THE NEW WORLD ORDER ...... 173

Periodizing the ‘90s: Redux...... 173 Globalizing the Discourses...... 176 Sweatshops and Citizens...... 178

LIST OF REFERENCES...... 182

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 190

vii

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

CULTURAL LOGIC OF THE UNITED STATES IN THE GLOBALIZATION ERA

Patricia Ventura

May, 2003

Chair: Susan Hegeman Major Department: English

This dissertation posits that globalization is more than an economic development or cultural trend. Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, globalization has been emerging as the new cultural dominant. That is to say, it is increasingly the atmosphere, the “force field,” in which life is lived, and it is quickly replacing the old cultural dominant— postmodernism.

While globalization is, as its name suggests, a worldwide development, this study focuses specifically on how it manifests in the United States. Each chapter explores a phenomenon that has played a significant role in US cultural life in this incipient globalization era in order to theorize the characteristics of the new zeitgeist. These objects include academia, Hollywood blockbuster film, Las Vegas architecture, labor unions, Oprah’s Book Club, Wal-Mart, family life, and welfare reform.

The goal of this dissertation is nothing less than to encourage all readers to rethink the global, economic, and political significance of the seemingly mundane or innocuous items of contemporary American culture.

viii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: GLOBALIZATION’S NEW WORLD ORDER

This is a dissertation about the culture of globalization in the United States in the

1990s—a period that in my reckoning begins in November 1989 with the fall of the

Berlin Wall and ends in September 2001 with the fall of the World Trade Center’s twin towers. In between those world-changing events contemporary globalization took shape.

This dissertation argues for a conception of globalization as a cultural formation by studying the 1990s, the first decade in which the culture of globalization emerges and takes on its character. Admittedly, globalization can be an exceedingly nebulous concept, but here I am positing a specific perspective on globalization. More than just an economic trend, a capitalist characteristic or a homogenizing agent, I propose that it is a structure of feeling. That is, in Raymond Williams’s terms, “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt,” “a social experience still in process, often indeed not yet recognizable as social,” and “a set with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension” (132). Fredric Jameson uses the term “cultural logic,” which he connects to Williams’s structure of feeling to describe the coordination of “new forms of practice and social and mental habits with the new forms of economic production”

(Postmodernism xiv). But regardless of the term, we are left with the question, how do we understand the infinite variety of experiences as actually cohering into a structure?

Prevailing critical opinion argues that we live in the structure of feeling termed postmodernity which means, depending on who is being asked, a world after Fordism,

1 2

after Truth, after grand narrative, after the author, after the self. We can summarize the

major features of postmodernity from a variety of perspectives:

• in production, the shift from a Fordist to a post-Fordist economy,

• in policy, an assault on Keynesianism,

• in architecture and planning, the view of space as something to be shaped according to aesthetic aims or consumer needs rather than mastered by social objectives or pure principles,

• in employment, adoption of flexible and casual labor and the subversion of unions,

• in art, the effacement of the distinction between high culture and mass or commercial culture,

• in “cartography,” the compression of time and space so that we have the notion of living in a global village without a sense of history.

These features could be said to fairly define the landscape of late capitalism, until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War enabled capitalist cultural and economic forces to push beyond their old borders. It was the Cold War that resulted from, and led to, a world of seeming intractable division. And it was the end of the Cold

War that opened up the world to a new kind of multinational, transnational, and post- national interaction, that is the process of contemporary globalization. Those shifts in both global and domestic cultures could not have been anticipated in the 1980s and early

‘90s when many of the major texts of postmodern theory were written. Theorists of postmodernism who have tried to account for globalization, most notably Fredric

Jameson, usually count it as part of postmodernity. 1

1 Interestingly, in his earlier work Postmodernism (1990) Jameson offers the following, very portentous, conclusion in which he considers that the postmodern “may well be little more than a transitional period between two stages of capitalism, in which the earlier forms of the economic are in the process of being restructured on a global scale, including the older forms of labor and its traditional organization institutions and concepts. That a new international proletariat (taking forms we cannot yet imagine) will reemerge from the convulsive upheaval it needs no prophet to predict: we ourselves are still in the trough, however, and no one can say how long we will stay there” (417).

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire offers the to-date preeminent theoretical examination of globalization, positing the existence of a new post-national sovereignty—the eponymous Empire—that has dominated global relations since the end of the Cold War. But even this text, which sits at the heart of my dissertation, continues to periodize globalization as postmodern. Thus, I take Empire’s thesis one step further: that Empire and globalizing capitalism have instituted a new cultural formation, a new way in which meanings are lived and felt. This dissertation, then, works to fill out some of the cultural content of Empire.

In this work I am focusing only on American phenomena—a parameter that would seem to make a study of globalization oddly incomplete and anachronistically attached to the nation-state. And while many future studies of globalization and Empire will have to fill out the content on a global and supranational level, the cultural logic of globalization can very logically begin with the United States. The US is not just one nation among others; it holds a unique place within global culture, politics, economics, and military concerns. Its culture—especially, US mass culture—is not just one culture among others.

Many people around the world see American culture as a locust-like force co-opting, transforming, or eliminating local traditions. For their part, Hardt and Negri see Empire’s power structure as consisting of a confluence of governments, corporate interests, and nongovernmental organizations with the US maintaining the dominant influence over global sovereignty—just as it has since the post-WWII era. Of course, the sovereignty arrangements were quite different during that era—the time of the Cold War, full

Fordism, and the New Deal welfare state when the US shared the role of global powerhouse with the USSR in a bi-polar world. Indeed, it was the Cold War struggles

that enabled Empire. For as Hardt and Negri put it, “The most important effect of the cold war was to reorganize the lines of hegemony within the imperialist world, accelerating the decline of the old powers and raising up the US initiative of the constitution of an imperial order” (170).

Note the word choice, imperial not imperialist. One of the key elements of their work is the understanding that the US works in imperial interest—that is in the interests of Empire. Indeed, they contend the US Constitution sets the country up for this role.

We should emphasize once again that this Constitution is imperial and not imperialist. It is imperial because in contrast to imperialism’s project always to spread its power linearly in closed spaces and invade, destroy, and subsume subject countries within its sovereignty the US constitutional project is constructed on the model of rearticulating an open space and reinventing incessantly diverse and singular relations in networks across an open terrain. (182)

The tendency to expand until a world market develops (and redevelops) lies inherent in the concept of capital itself. By violently conscripting so many of the world’s people for their labor power but not really drafting them into the population of consumers of capitalist products, the colonial powers compromised their positions in the capitalist constellation by unwittingly sacrificing their own market growth. The resistance of these populations to their conscription in this abusive regime led to the decline of imperialism, a decline that left the imperial force of the United States in position to be the new world hegemon.

What are the characteristics of US hegemony? How does the world market link to the US? What is the US’s role in shaping that market? These are some of the questions this dissertation will address, but what is important to understand first is that globalization is no Americanization. As Vilashini Cooppan argues, “the triumphal story of world-wide Americanization itself depends on the simultaneous denial and

5 exploitation of racial, ethnic, and class differentiations that structure United States society internally and the division of labor globally” (39). Americanization implies a neo- imperialist relation that requires movement originating from the US as colonial center and radiating out to the colonized territory. Global circulations cannot be so linear. The model of sovereignty by which the US is organized lends itself to imperial power and explicitly away from imperialist power. It is that constitutional design that puts the US in its privileged position in Empire and neo-liberal capitalism.

US sovereignty “poses an idea of the immanence of power in opposition to the transcendent character of modern European [imperialist] sovereignty” (Hardt and Negri

Empire 164). This sovereignty tends toward an inclusive expansion that “does not annex or destroy the other powers it faces but on the contrary opens itself to them, including them in the network” (166). The sovereign is thereby reformed by the entrance of new powers.

This expansion moves beyond borders, then, to erode the separations between inside and outside. The implications of this erosion are felt not only at the public national level but at the private, personal level. These different levels begin in fact to run together. As Hardt and Negri put it, “The old feminist slogan ‘The personal is the political’ has been reversed in such a way that the boundaries between public and private have fractured, unleashing circuits of control throughout the ‘intimate public sphere’”

(Empire 197). Thus, we find that talking about the nation leads us directly into a discussion of the family. Of course, this is not a stretch; there is a long tradition of representing the nation in terms of the family. As Anne McClintock, among others, has convincingly argued, the nation has historically been figured in familial terms. Certainly,

the nation’s etymologic roots in the Latin natio, to be born, place it within a familial, domestic sphere. In the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the family trope gained a new importance as European cultures grew increasingly affiliative, as opposed to filliative. In subsequent decades and centuries, nations continued to be seen in familial, domestic terms. They are “motherlands” or “fatherlands.” Immigrants who “adopt” other homelands are “naturalized” into the national family. In Britain, the department of government that handles immigrants is even called the Home Office (McClintock “Future

Heaven” 90-1).

If the nation is tied to the family and globalization challenges many of the assumptions of national sovereignty, then by extension, Empire may challenge the family as well. Thus, our project here will also involve examining what becomes of the family in the new cultural formation.

Periodizing the ‘90s

This dissertation has several goals. As discussed above, it uses Empire to explore globalization as an emergent cultural formation and a new era. It also aims to periodize the 1990s, the first decade of this new era. It was the 1990s that developed a

Washington-Wall Street brand of globalization (also commonly known as the

Washington Consensus) that has initiated a new era in the US’s relations with the world and within itself. In many respects, then, this project is a history of the 1990s, but its story cannot be told without projecting forward to the calamitous events of September 11,

2001. For al Qaeda’s targets were the centers of that Washington-Wall Street matrix: the

World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Indeed, I argue that those events mark the end of the ‘90s as a distinct period and set a new stage for subsequent global relations. While spelling the end of the decade, those events solidified the cultural logic of globalization

7 that was emerging through the ‘90s. Ultimately, it is this new logic that increasingly structures our present moment. But how do we know when the present starts?

Exploring what makes up our present moment while exploring the decade that has passed is the goal—paradoxical as it may be—of this dissertation. Here, each chapter examines one major development of the globalization era as enunciated by Empire, while focusing on a particular phenomenon that has been central to globalization culture in the

US, especially in the 1990s, the decade that shaped that culture. In other words, each chapter explains and elaborates a key aspect of Empire’s new sovereignty arrangements by focusing on the cultural phenomena that both exemplify and help shape them. As for the remainder of this introduction, it will offer a chapter-by-chapter breakdown and then introduce some of the debates about globalization while offering context and background on the development of the new cultural formation in the US.

The key term in Chapter 2 is Empire itself. I argue that Hardt and Negri’s text offers the preeminent philosophical model upon which to develop an analysis of globalization. I contrast Empire as a cultural logic with postmodernism positing that the older logic has lost some of its applicability in the post-Cold War years. Of course, in its best theorizations postmodernism remains a hugely useful heuristic. However, if globalization is more than just an effect or symptom of postmodernity, then we can see it as its own “force field,” to use Fredric Jameson’s term. What is at stake in adopting globalization as a rubric and framework for study? Why should cultural theorists not continue to view the post-Cold War years simply as postmodern? Chapter 1 takes up these questions by introducing some of the key themes of Empire via a discussion of the decade that served as the crucible of both postmodernity and globalization: that is, the

1960s. According to Jameson, the sense that life could be lived utterly differently—what he labels an historical imagination—died in the 1960s with the final flourishing of modernity. It is that passing of the historical imagination that cleared the way for postmodernity. But Empire offers a different account of that era in which the worldwide protests of that decade resulted in the creation of new subjectivities and new modes of life. These changes altered the structures of sovereignty, and with the cave-in of Soviet barriers to capitalist world markets, we have witnessed “an irresistible and irreversible globalization of economic and cultural exchanges. Along with the global market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new logic and structure of rule—in short, a new form of sovereignty.” This is Empire: “the political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world.” (Hardt and Negri, Empire xi). Chapter 2 also introduces the subjectivity that arises to meet Empire—the multitude—the subject whose collective opposition to modernist sovereignty led the world’s sovereign forces to regroup in the form of Empire.

The multitude is unbounded by both geographic and ethnographic parameters and by the modern sovereignty of the nation-state.

Chapter 3 explores just what has happened to that older sovereign power of the nation-state, especially in the case of the state we are studying here, that is, the US. From

Empire’s perspective, the US sits at the top of a worldwide pyramid-shaped power structure. From its perch it has assumed a pivotal role in shaping global economics, politics, and culture. At the large base of the pyramid structure stands the multitude. In between, the great variety of other kinds of formations operate; that is, other nation- states, supranational policy groups, corporations, NGOs, multi- and transnational

corporations, and the like. The interactions between these levels as well as the struggles

for power among the levels, are truly at play when we consider this chapter’s object of

analysis: global Hollywood in general and the 1997 motion picture Air Force One in particular.

The chapter begins with the premise that since blockbuster movies are the most global of film forms in terms of box office, rental numbers, and content, they play a unique role in helping us understand the nation, nationalism, and the place of the United

States in the globalization era. These topics are highlighted in Air Force One, among the highest grossing movies of the 1990s. This film’s theme of hijacking and terrorism gives us a distinct vantage from which to understand the events of September 11, 2001 and their relationship to nationalism and globalization.

Chapter 4 grounds the speculations of the first chapters in a site where North and

South cross-cut each other and thereby challenge the coherence of regional divisions such as North-South, First World-Third World, center-and-periphery. It is not, of course, that these terms no longer make sense, for certainly we understand these regional classifications when we read them; they remain meaningful ways to illustrate historical and long-lasting patterns. It is just that, in Hardt and Negri’s terms, “today they clearly infuse one another, distributing inequalities and barriers along multiple and fractured lines” (335). Thus, the “Third World” exists in the “First World” just as surely as “the

North” exists in “the South.”

The differences between these “worlds” tend increasingly to be quantitative rather than qualitative. Of course, we can say that on balance the erstwhile First World is more privileged than the Third, but even then the disparities that exist do not fall simply along

borders of region or nation, but along protean lines that cross-cut the old divisions. The

migration of the world’s people brings the so-called Third World into the First, as surely

as capital flow brings the so-called first world into the third. And as boundaries become

unstable and even fluid, “the entire world market tends to be the only coherent domain

for the effective application of capitalist management and command” (Empire 254).

Jane Jacobs has quipped, “A Region, someone has wryly observed, is an area safely

larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution” (410). If this is so, then

Empire’s unblocked regional rigidity produces and is produced by changing political,

economic, and cultural needs. I would argue that these new needs arise from the

migrancy of the world’s populations which creates new demographics in cities

throughout the world. We will examine one city that will serve as an object lesson of

globalization and how people live within its structures. Where most urban-focused

studies center on the global cities, here we will examine a city not commonly classified as

a key site for globalization studies. A metro that embodies globalization economics and

entertainment, it was the object of one of the seminal studies of postmodernity. This key

city is Las Vegas.

If Las Vegas’s casino economy is a metonymy for the US as a whole—gambling is the fastest-growing industry in the US (Comaroff and Comaroff 297)—Las Vegas’s workers and residents personify globalization’s cultural border crossing, which is itself caricatured in the over-the-top architecture of the city’s famous gambling Strip. The

Strip’s casinos render the world’s historical monuments themes for casino games, stage acts, and shopping mall architecture while the city’s suburbs borrow similar themes for its ubiquitous master-planned communities. It is the cross-cutting of these various

cultural impetuses that hints at the literal challenges to regionalism posed by the flows of

populations across old borders. This chapter studies both the architectural representations

and the demographic amalgamations.

Chapter 5 examines the production of a sense of locality (as opposed to globality)

by examining Where the Heart Is, a novel about a backwater town in rural Oklahoma. As

one of the biggest-selling selections of Oprah’s Book Club, which is itself perhaps the

most important single influence on reading practices of the 1990s, Where the Heart Is has

its proverbial finger on at least part of the New World Order pulse. Indeed, even in this

novel that is so focused on a small town we find that neo-liberal capitalism cannot be escaped; here it appears in the form of Wal-Mart, one of the novel’s most memorable settings and the location Winfrey chose to film the episode of her show devoted to the book. Of course, Wal-Mart’s great achievement has been to market itself as the embodiment of small-town America, so the choice of Wal-Mart is deeply meaningful in

the text and truly worth the effort of analyzing in any attempt to understand the

production of the local—even in the face of the undeniability of the global. Many have

responded to globalization’s deterritorialization by embracing the local. Empire’s authors contend in response that localism can sometimes serve as a distraction from the more fundamental issue: the production of locality. Localization, like globalization, should be understood “as a regime of the production of identity and differences” (45). Of course, we have to consider the affective implications of locality—a sense of home and belonging. Where the Heart Is takes this questioning one step further defining home as the place where an individual’s history begins. If home is where your history begins,

12 what is the history that begins as the world’s migrants search for their homes? We will use Where the Heart Is as a stepping stone toward an answer.

Chapter 6 synthesizes the other chapters’ lessons by shifting from what are usually considered cultural objects to an area that is expressly political. Ultimately, I challenge the separation between the political and the cultural by focusing on the movement to eliminate welfare. The goal is not to relegate one realm to the other but to see them as imbricated in and by the structures of globalization.

The choice to study welfare reform is not just a random selection. Welfare reform may well have been the most important legislative act in the 1990s because it destroys one of the key elements of the modern welfare state: that is, welfare itself. The chapter asks if welfare reform actually operates even beyond eroding the modern state to actually refiguring capitalism, operating as a kind of (pardon the oxymoron) advanced primitive accumulation. Primitive accumulation of capital completely reorganizes social relations of production such that previously self-sufficient producers become property-less wage earners while labor power and the means of production are transformed into capital.

Marx’s famous example of this process centers on the private enclosure of land. Some dispossessed peasants remained on farms as laborers; most of the others were forced into wage work in urban industry. But both groups were compelled to purchase the food they would have otherwise grown. Thus, production was no longer for direct use but for sale.

Today’s primitive accumulation involves welfare reform and immaterial labor.

Welfare reform changes the relationship of workers to capital by removing the safety net and thus removing that sense, however small, that people are not bound to the ties of necessity. The lifetime limit on public assistance ensures that today’s “peasants” are

available for wage labor. Thus, primitive accumulation created, and in its own way

welfare reform recreates, a proletariat.

The short final chapter looks at the logic behind periodizing gestures like the ones

in this dissertation. I speculate a bit on the character of the period after the New World

Order, but my speculations are extremely brief because this dissertation is trying to do

something very different than report on events as they develop: it is attempting to

speculate on the cultural logic of the globalization era as it manifested in the New World

Order years of the 1990s.

Globalization: A Particular Introduction

Before I can even begin to analyze the phenomena that make up the chapters of this

dissertation, I need to lay down much groundwork: I have to establish what I mean by

globalization in order to layout my understanding of Empire and the cultural logic that it

has helped launch in the globalization era. Globalization is not a synonym for

interdependence or internationalism. It is not a precursor to a single-world society or a

one-world government. It presumes neither broad homogeneity nor universal harmony.

Neither is the idea of globalization an entirely new issue. Words like globalization,

globalize, and globalizing came into usage in the 1960s. In the 1980s the words made

their way into academic circles. But it was in the 1990s that globalization became an

important object for analysis and study. By 2000, there were close to 300 publications with globalization in their titles; before 1987, there were precisely none (Waters 2).

What happened to start the avalanche of interest? The 1989 collapse of Eastern European communism ended the Cold War. The US-led multinational intervention in Iraq signaled the development of a New World Order. “A truly globally integrated capitalism was now possible” (Antonio and Bonanno 45). And the opening of that possibility served as a

14 reminder of capitalism’s inherent need to expand throughout the entire globe in a process we can call globalization.

I am not arguing that everything called globalization happened after 1989; after all, the patterns commonly associated with it—interconnection and expansion of networks of production and consumption, movement of populations across traditional divides—inhere in capitalism itself and thus are centuries rather than decades old. But globalization, as a cultural logic, has developed since 1989. Of course, it did not spring up like Athena, whole and mature. At the very least, it results in part from events of the years before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, including the end of Fordism as the dominant production model and the end of the Bretton Woods system financial system based on the dollar-gold standard. In my particular usage of the term globalization, these events helped create an environment conducive to its development, but if we use the word generically, these events more than forerun contemporary globalization; they are themselves part of it. For example, Anthony Giddens uses the term to designate “the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa” (64). This process affects all major aspects of life. It is anthropological, ecological, military, political, religious, mass cultural, artistic, medical, and I could keep listing because it touches every field of endeavor. For Giddens as for many others, globalization is about interaction across distances. But this kind of generic use of the term does not allow us to understand what is specific about globalization today, in the period I here call the globalization era and date from 1989.

The kind of confusion generated by globalization, especially since its use can be so generic and has been so widespread, may seem to argue against employing the term to refer to so specific an era as the post-Cold War. But globalization has become so ubiquitous because it reflects the spirit of these times, the crossing and elimination of borders that shape the events of the present. In that regard, globalization is more than a particular state of affairs; it is a collection of practices and events that involve the organization of power relations. Globalization both replicates established patterns of inequality and generates new inequalities. Thus, its consequences are unevenly experienced. It creates new victors and new victims and hinges on the expansion of power—especially power operating from both tremendous distance and locations more intimate than previously imagined. Much of this dissertation directly or indirectly tries to uncover the implications of both kinds of power in themselves and in the ways they interact. But in this introduction, we look at the macro-level, the distanced power that can more easily be understood in terms of economic, social, and political activities as they extend across the globe, and detach from traditional territorial bounds, as people, goods, and ideas become ever increasingly mobile.

Global Economies

One key method of cutting through and across territories has been trade. In the post-Cold War, globalization era, about two-thirds of the world’s economies (measured by gross domestic product or GDP) broadly operate along open trade principles; in the late 1980s less than half did (Held et. al. 165). In the industrialized nations, trade as a proportion of GDP is higher in the current era than it has ever been. Activity in and between these states accounts for much of the world’s trade traffic. Nevertheless, global

16 trade patterns have evolved such that “North and South, in this context, are becoming increasingly empty categories” (Held et. al. 177).

We can see the process behind the emptying of these categories when we look at the havoc visited upon economies of both hemispheres with the growth of finance and foreign exchange speculation—one of the key developments of contemporary economic globalization. Consider the currency speculation that caused the collapse of the currencies in Eastern Europe, 1992 and ’93; Mexico, ’94; East Asia, ’97; and Russia, ’98.

In this often brutal process, foreign exchange markets became the largest international market of any sort with annual turnover growing from $17.5 trillion in 1979 to over $300 trillion around century’s end (Held et. al. 208). Finance allows multiple transactions in a short period of time allowing for super profits as when debts are bundled and sold and then re-sold (see Sassen, “Economic Globalization”). Global economic-political priorities and the tremendous advances in technology and communications have enabled the world’s major markets to interconnect so that London, New York, and Tokyo function as a single market operating around the clock and instantaneously. The speed and sheer volume of financial transactions—much of them speculative—constitute the most profound economic development of the globalization era. The authors of Global

Transformations find the distinctiveness of contemporary financial globalization in the magnitude, complexity and speed of this market.

More currencies, more diverse and complex financial assets are traded more frequently at greater speed, and in substantially greater volumes than in any previous historical epoch. . . .Contemporary financial globalization represents a distinctive new stage in the organization and management of credit and money in the world economy; it is transforming the conditions under which the immediate and long-term prosperity of states and peoples across the globe is determined. (235)

If finance moves the globalized economy, the multinational corporations (MNCs)

can be said to root it. Fifty-three thousand MNCs account for 20-30 percent of world

output and up to 70 percent of world trade . As of 1997, MNCs controlled about 20

percent of global foreign assets, employed six million workers, and accounted for almost

30 percent of world sales (Held et. al. 282). But the growing globalization of production

stretches beyond MNCs; small, specialized manufacturing enterprises have also seen

considerable international expansion enabled by the rapid dissemination and relative

affordability of technology. This expansion of MNCs and smaller enterprises has itself

accelerated the global shift from in-kind exchange to wage labor. The number of wage

workers has doubled since the 1970s due to the commodification of peasant life which

has built or expanded the industrial labor force for Third World industrialization while

simultaneously creating new consumers. As economists Robert J. Antonio and

Alessandro Bonanno explain,

The process also facilitates a new international division of labor that accelerates a shift in rich nations from manufacturing to information and service production. Further it provides a flexible pool of immigrant labor often employed in the First World as domestics for the ‘busy’ professional middle-class and as disposable, low-cost casual workers in very low pay, hazardous jobs. This ongoing proletarianization process is reminiscent of early capitalism rather than a postindustrial economy. (53)

Thus, contemporary globalization comes full circle, in a way, to the enclosure process that started capitalism in the first place. But of course, this all is very different in the era of globalization. Indeed, Paul Smith dubs the contemporary economy millennial capitalism—a “purer,” more fundamental kind of capitalism that has come after “the liberal-productivist political economy” (14). Smith establishes the following as the central characteristics of millennial capitalism, here paraphrased as

• the question of economic competition

• shift to so-called service industry • finance capital’s domination over productivist capital and the role of debt • emergence of the ‘“stateless corporation’” and the overshadowing of the nation- state • nation-states’ reorganization of production and consumption parameters These characteristics have, of course, been used in other contexts to describe the

late capitalist economy in general, but if we look at them in the context of globalization

and ask different questions than those asked by the current common frameworks (say,

through the lens of post-Fordism or traditional liberal economicse), the characteristics

take on a different cast. For instance, we see that the question of economic competition

revolves centrally around the rhetoric of competition. The push has not been to protect

competition—a force capitalism ostensibly values—but for major corporations to

eliminate competition through elaborate networks of subsidiaries, consortia, and strategic

alliances that tend to obfuscate the lack of competition. Thus, it seems we are seeing

something that is not quite the old Fordist vertical orientation but not quite the decentered

and fragmented manufacturing so widely touted as a crucial late-twentieth century

development. In short, critics need to adopt a degree of skepticism toward many of the

discourses we have come to take for granted.

As Smith’s work reminds us, we need to heed Marx’s crucial warning: we cannot assume as fact the phenomenon we need to explain. Globalization is not a foregone conclusion. It is a plot to be explicated. To interpret this plot, we need, on the one hand, to avoid overstating the claims about the changes it has wrought, but we need, on the other hand, to avoid underestimating the impact of the transformations that have taken place.

In that first category of overestimated claims Smith includes the celebrated growth of service labor and the predominance of the so-called knowledge worker. The shift to

service industry has involved a certain rhetorical flourish. For it ignores the very real

labor that tends to be obscured in the discourse of service as knowledge work.

Knowledge work not only requires significant support staff of traditional laborers but is

itself a kind of labor that needs to be regarded as such. But the hype surrounding so

called knowledge work has given birth to a sense of techno-cosmopolitanism springing

from communications technology.

These kinds of shifting parameters have spawned a discourse of the under-theorized

and overstated demise of the nation-state at the hands of the stateless corporation (in the

name of both globalization and postmodernism). Smith argues that most corporations are

actually international or multinational and not transnational—with transnationality

implying that research and development would be undertaken anywhere, that

management would be hired and promoted without regard for national origin. Indeed,

even corporations that claim to be global nevertheless maintain cultural ties to nations.

Ultimately, nation-states are intimately tied to globalized capitalism. They have

benefited from capital’s shifts in the wake of globalization and they protect global capital

from forces looking to block its movement.

On the other side of the overestimated claims are the critics who characterize globalization as nothing more than an ideological fiction. David Harvey emblematizes this skepticism when he confesses, “I find myself thinking that it was the financial press that conned us all (myself included) into believing in ‘globalization’ as something new when it was nothing more than a promotional gimmick to make the best of a necessary adjustment in the system of international finance.”

For Giovanni Arrighi, what I am here calling the globalization era is really nothing but the “autumn” of the US’s position as world hegemon. He argues that if we take a longer-term view we see that “systemic cycles of accumulation” characterize world capitalism’s history from its beginning. These cycles are periods marked by “a rapid and stable expansion of world trade and production invariably ended in a crisis of over- accumulation that ushered in a period of heightened competition, financial expansion, and eventual breakdown of the organizational structures on which the preceding expansion of trade and production had been based.” However, in an attempt to systematize history, this perspective ignores and homogenizes unique historical conditions. Now, he does acknowledge that there are some differences between the contemporary economic structures and past ones; for instance, he sees the strongest evidence for change in the growth of world financial markets. However, he maintains that this market’s growth shows that the present transformations are not novel “except for their scale, scope, and complexity.” But it is precisely this scale, scope, and complexity that make finance such an important feature of the global economy and that indicate that a change has occurred! As Saskia Sassen concludes, “There has been a world economy for several centuries. But its geography, composition, and institutional framework have changed over time. The ‘world economy’ never included the entire planet” (“Global

Visions” 61). In the end, theories of cyclical capitalism may note these differences but can ultimately only discount their significance.

From an even more skeptical perspective, Hirst and Thompson argue that globalization is a myth and an ideological fabrication. They maintain that much globalization theory underestimates the enduring power of the nation concluding that the

21 evidence can at best point to exceptional levels of internationalism—and perhaps the evidence cannot even prove that. They argue that globalization really requires that national power to regulate economic flows be all but erased in the face of supranational governing bodies and transnational corporations with no national connections. These conditions clearly have not been reached, and Hirst and Thompson doubt they ever will be. Thus, they think globalization is nothing but ideology.

The previous pages have offered an argument, albeit tremendously truncated, that globalization is an utterly present phenomenon, but even if Hirst and Thompson are right—even if globalization is nothing but hype—then the fact that such an ideological phenomenon was constructed and so widely accepted indicates at the very least that there is a kind of power operating that needs to challenge the foundational capitalist structures, especially the sovereignty of the nation state in the face of trans- and multinational corporations. In other words, even if globalization were nothing more than a widely disseminated myth, the presence and popularity of this myth demonstrates that at the very least there exists a cultural ground tone that either requires such a myth or enables it to attain tremendous resonance. This project aims to explore that ground tone as it manifested itself in the United States in the 1990s.

New World Order

To help in understanding that ground tone I employ the term New World Order

(NWO) to describe the logic of globalization in the US during the last decade of the twentieth century. Of course, the globalization era continues well after the end of the

1990s, but that decade shaped it and gave it a character that will mark the future evolution of globalization under Empire. In many occurrences, the term New World

Order is synonymous with globalization culture in general, but a term that specifically

refers to manifestations of globalization in the US or by actors considered American

helps stress the shaping role of the US in the new formation. Of course, the term is far

from a neutral descriptor of current events. It carries with it the ominous history of its use by George Bush (the Elder), who famously employed it in his 1991 “State of the

Union” address to describe an idealized version of the alliance between the world’s major powers in the Persian Gulf War. “What is at stake is more than one small country, it is a big idea—a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind: peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law.”

Certainly, Bush’s usage of the term drips with ideological conceptions that, in practice, define freedom and law, peace and security, by very neo-liberal standards. The history of US foreign relations since Bush invoked the NWO shows that too often freedom has become a code word for free trade, rule of law has stressed the protection of property and investment rights as much as citizens’ rights, and peace has been sought by

oppressing dissent.2 But the term “New World Order” was used before Bush made it his

own. Lester Brown, when president of the environmental think tank Worldwatch

Institute, utilized it to describe the global ecological agenda that he thought would

displace the Cold War’s realpolitik thinking. Brown’s more progressive usage, which

certainly has its own ideological resonance, stresses the possibilities opened up by

globalization in the generic sense of the intensification of social relations.

2 For a few short specific examples, consider the World Trade Organization rhetoric equating freedom with free trade; for rule of law as property rights consider the International Monetary Fund-adjustment plans instituted at the expense of citizens when countries cannot pay their debts; for peace as the squashing of dissent consider the complex alliances involved in Plan Columbia and the US alliance with the ruling monarchies of oppressive Arab states such as Saudi Arabia.

Today, the New World Order is very likely to be invoked by right-wing millenarian conspiracy theorists arguing that we live under a one-world government in the hands of

Masonic power elites who control the United Nations. Cosmopolitan thinkers on the left have invoked the term to designate a globalization that benefits the wealthy of the industrialized world at the expense of the poor everywhere. I would like to keep these multiple meanings in play as I theorize my understanding of the New World Order.

Though I use the term mostly to borrow imperialistic associations and conspiratorial connotations, I also invoke it to maintain the horizon of possibility implied by the idea of a new order for the world; that is, the idea that life can be lived in a different way. For now, however, the NWO refers to that world order that began with the fall of the Berlin

Wall and ended with the fall of the World Trade Center towers. In between, the period took shape with the victory of the multinational force amassed to fight the Persian Gulf

War. There in the deserts of Kuwait and Iraq, US ideological forces attempted to exorcise the ghost of imperialism’s last war, Vietnam, while launching the first war of the new sovereign formation, Empire. With its pronouncement of victory in the Persian Gulf

War, the US initiated a new era loosened from, if not exactly free of, the Cold War structures.

From the perspective of Empire, “The most important effect of the cold war was to reorganize the lines of hegemony within the imperialist world, accelerating the decline of the old powers and raising up the US initiative of the constitution of an imperial order”

(Hardt and Negri 170). The US exercised this power for the first time in the Gulf War: a momentous operation because it presented the US as “the only power able to manage international justice not as a function of its own national motives but in the name of

global right” (Hardt and Negri 180, emphasis in the original). Certainly other countries

had claimed that before, but the difference was in the contemporary world sovereignty.

The implication of powerful nations working in the name of global abstract principles argues for a post-national perspective. That moneyed interests are the main beneficiaries of actions taken in the name of global right has led some to believe that “the state has been defeated and corporations now rule the earth!” (Hardt and Negri Empire

306, authors’ emphasis). But in fact Empire’s brand of post-nationalism posits not that the state has been defeated but that “its powers have been displaced to other levels and domains….As the concept of national sovereignty is losing its effectiveness, so too is the so-called autonomy of the political” (307).

With the end of the Cold War, some argue that the tasks Bush the elder and especially Clinton faced were akin to Truman’s at the end of World War II. According to some writers, they had to create a regime for the next half century (76 in Gowan).3 But

Bush was not in office long enough to enact many of the policies which fall under the

New- World-Order rubric he created. The task for the development of this new economic

regime fell largely to Bill Clinton and the team he brought to the White House.

National, foreign, and military policy were more openly in the service of the economy.

3 A gloating sense of victory exists in the US among those on the neo-liberal economic right and the new- democrat “center” who see the US’s economic success and leadership in globalization as one of the great developments of American history. Here we can turn again to Thomas Friedman, who argues in a chapter of The Lexus and the Olive Tree meaningfully titled “Rational Exuberance” from that if a God-like character created an economic and financial system, he could do no better than US neo-liberalism. But surprisingly, from the moral right there is no corresponding sense of victory. The groups who would like to end the pesky separation between church and state are deeply disturbed by the movements on the cultural front: supportive representations of homosexuality on TV, legal domestic unions in Vermont; gay parents adopting children and straight parents bearing them outside of marriage. From a conservative perspective these developments are signs of degeneration but from a cultural-left perspective these are improvements. Can these developments translate into a broader left political agenda? For those who doubt that it can, perhaps the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle are often seen as pointing the way. While the protests were not exactly the beginning of the revolution, they were coalitional and diverse and critical to beginning to understand just what form anti-neo-liberal activism needs to take.

And there would rarely be economic conciliations as there were for allies in the Cold

War. As one State Department official put it, “For a while during the cold war period,

our support for American commercial interests diminished at the State Department. We

focused heavily on the political and ideological competition with the former Soviet

Union, often to the determent of American business. With the end of the cold war,

however, there has been a dramatic shift in the department’s emphasis to business”

(Snow 47). Indeed, National Security Strategy, the Clinton administration’s blueprint for

security policy, promises to “bolster America’s economic prosperity” as one of its top-

three core objectives.

The groundwork for this early phase of the post-Cold War order was certainly laid during the Cold War era. In fact, it was set down with the on set of late capitalism; that is, with the end of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s. When the Nixon administration shook off the institutionalized controls on the dollar, it enabled the US to attain what Peter Gowan calls “monocratic power over international monetary affairs”

(19). This control did not develop all at once, of course. But by the Cold War’s end, the groundwork was in place: the dollar set the standard for all other currency and the practices of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank had become extensions of American foreign policy. It was left only for Bill Clinton to declare economic policy to be a national security issue and to open the National Economic Council alongside the old National Security Council.

What are the implications of a US policymaking so unabashedly directed at neo- liberal capital gains? The implications for this analysis are numerous, not least of which

is in the seemingly irrelevant but, in fact, hugely important detail of how to even refer to

this emergent era.

“Post-Cold War” v. “Globalization”

Originally I conceived of this project under the rubric of post-Cold War Culture.

Eventually I came to see it in the shape it has taken here, as a study of globalization and the New World Order. This change signifies a direction which is both more specific— because it is not just anything that comes after the end of the end of the Cold War in

1989—and more general—in that globalization denotes a much more worldwide interaction which I look at here between the “New World Order” culture of the US and the rest of the globe. I am using the “New World Order” to label the US’s post-Cold War

relationship to the world and within itself in long decade of the 1990s. I am using it to

resonate the highly ideological meaning that Thomas Friedman, cheerleader for neo-

liberal globalization, invokes when he summarizes a very common view in the US:

“America’s victory in the cold war was a victory for a set of political and economic

principles: democracy and the free market. The free market is the wave of the future—a

future for which America is both the gatekeeper and the model” (Friedman in Snow 57).

I began with the “post-Cold War” rubric because it was clear that the destruction of

the Berlin Wall and everything that symbolized signaled the end of almost all actually

existing alternatives to capitalism. The US entered a time of tremendous change—not

only in the obvious ways of, say, national policy priorities or in the popular conception of

national adversaries, but in the less obvious ways: growth of Right-wing fears of US governmental conspiracy (with the waning of fears of a communist threat), US national policy of pushing for economic liberalization of the former Eastern Block. In short, post-

Cold War discourse centers on national formations which the term globalization does not

capture. For Cold War-era politics and social structures centered on the nation-state as its

organizational model.

The discourse of globalization moves away from that; indeed, much of it begins

from the assumption that the nation-state is on the way out. While these analyses can

look much like wishful thinking, the conclusions that a post-national premise allows are important ones. And they develop from many of the important developments of the

1990s

• in economics, with the spread of neo-liberal economic policy. • in technology, with the Internet and communication technology in general, increased accessibility to air travel, and international media proliferation. • in politics, with the proliferation of new sovereignty arrangements via trade policy. • in demographics, with population migrancy. All the usual suspects are here and they fuel an incipient post-national zeitgeist. Of course, certain qualities are lost from this post-national perspective, especially a complete picture of contemporary structures of feeling. For just as boundaries remain to demarcate states, the connection between the nation state and individuals’ (usually citizens’) senses of self also remains. What an analysis gains, however, finally outweighs the cost. That is, it gains a conception of the movements of contemporary capitalist culture itself.

Thus, it’s not a surprise that critical perspectives beginning with economics tend to adopt the globalization perspective. Thus, my switch to globalization from post-Cold War in this dissertation. However, I do not want to ignore the post-Cold War perspective and its advantages. To consider the present as the post-Cold War era offers a specificity that cannot be matched by globalization with its inherent controversies—including whether we are actually even in an era of globalization or if its not simply a tendency of capitalism and nothing more. Post-Cold War seems much more specific connecting not only to a more easily demarcated time but also connecting to a very tangible past (where

28 globalization especially as it relates to communication often seems quite ethereal). But make no mistake, it is a mystified past as well, wrapped tightly in the folds of questions of “America” and American identity. The question of national character, national purpose, are not so relevant in globalization discourse. Or better, the question of national purpose is already answered: the US works to create wealth and security for some of its citizens facilitates the exploitation of much of the rest of the world. Inasmuch as the ideological state apparatuses work from this nationalist perspective, teach this perspective, and take for granted this perspective, engaging it is utterly appropriate.

Helping us bridge the gap between the post-Cold War nationalist perspective and globalization’s post-nationalism is the concept of Empire, which accounts for contemporary post-national sovereignty arrangements while also accounting for the US’s global leadership role.

CHAPTER 2 AFTER POSTMODERNISM: GLOBALIZATION, AN EMERGENT CULTURAL FORMATION

In this project, I argue for a conception of globalization as more than an economic condition or cultural trend. I argue that globalization is more than just an effect or

symptom of postmodernity. I argue that globalization constitutes its own “force field,” to

use Fredric Jameson’s term for postmodernity. Globalization is commonly thought of as

an economic regime, and it certainly is that. But an economic system is thoroughly

imbricated in a regime of power. Thus, we have also to explore questions of sovereignty.

And questions of sovereignty also entail questioning just who is the subject of this

sovereignty. Of course, questions of subjectivity bring with them a whole host of other

issues, so ultimately, it becomes clear that we are talking about an emergent cultural

formation, a regime of interconnectedness within the key domains of social activity. My

goal in this chapter is to sketch out the context for the emergence of this force field for

social activity and to understand what is at stake in adopting globalization instead of

postmodernism as a rubric and framework for cultural analysis. Note, I am not arguing

that postmodern is an inapplicable designation in the post-Cold War years. In its best

theorizations, it has been and remains a useful heuristic. But here I am positing that the

dominance of postmodernism as a cultural logic is eroding. This does not mean that

theories categorized as postmodern are somehow immediately less valid. My analysis in

no way suggests that poststructuralism is suddenly outmoded, that Derrida is de mode,

Delueze and Guattari are defunct, or Butler is redundant. I am saying that globalization

29 30

is emerging as a cultural force field; therefore, whatever theoretical perspectives used to

analyze it need to be implemented with regard to changing historical conditions. Surely

some postmodern theories will appear ineffectual in light of changing historical

conditions, but my argument here is not a critique of postmodernity as much as an

assertion that a new era is emerging that cannot be adequately classified, represented, or

described in the terms we associate with postmodernism.

Postmodernism: Metanarrative of Skepticism

There are many histories of postmodernity and postmodernism, and they vary concerning the first appearance of the term.4 However, it is widely agreed that the concept began gathering momentum around the early 1970s when Leslie Fiedler, Susan

Sontag, and Ihab Hassan began writing of a new age of liberation from the ostensibly oppressive rationality of modernism. Later in that decade as the idea had taken off,

Charles Jencks provided influential celebrations of postmodernist architecture’s populism and its “double coding” of so-called “high” and “low” art forms, while Daniel Bell lamented what he saw as the hedonist, anti-traditionalist anti-rationalism of the new postmodern culture. But if we have to nail down a single, definitive impulse in theories of the postmodern it was in Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979).

His definition is probably the one that caught on most widely. As he states, “I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.” That definition could easily be fit into the earlier, anti-modernist celebrations of postmodernity by seeing the oppressiveness of

4 The earliest may well be English painter John Watkins Chapman who spoke of ‘“postmodern painting’” around 1870. There were succeeding uses of the idea of postmodernity later in the postwar years—most notably by Arnold Toynbee and C. Wright Mills ( 3).

modernity as tied to its metanarratives, while the definition also helped prove to those

decrying postmodernity that it is a culture without standards or principles.

In A Postmodern Reader, Linda Hutcheon and Joseph Natoli identify the most

sustained criticism of postmodernism in Marxist theories, maintaining that Marxist critics

have “good reason” to attack postmodernity because it “has called into question, and thus

threatened, the very grounds of Marxist analysis: externality of perspective, binary

oppositions (and thus dialectic), totalizing narratives, even Utopian projections” (302).5

Hutcheon and Natoli argue that Marxism by its “very nature requires a superior, transcendental space outside of the totality it describes.” For these critics, the need for an outside stance is precisely the problem because it is the sign of working within a modernist perspective that is “precisely what is being called into question by the postmodern” (300).

However, with the end of the Cold War and the expansion of liberal capitalism into all regions of the globe, the continued denial of the possibility of totality might well be confused for a blind faith.6 Indeed, it would be a mistake to assume we can theorize or

understand only that which is in our immediate, local experience. Capitalism has become

a total formation, structuring to a greater or lesser extent depending on social and

5 Other critiques of postmodernity identified it as the rather shallow invention of critics searching for provocative new critical material. Still others argued early that is was just a fad. However, both types of critique have shown themselves to be facile dismissals given the tremendous impact made by theories of the postmodern.

6 From another perspective, Steven Best offers an argument against postmodernist anti-totalization showing that its practitioners proffer a perspective that, in its own way, totalizes as much as the Marxist postmodernisms. Best argues that those theorists who posit a radical break between modernity and postmodernity are totalizing too, but they are doing so in a simplified way, turning postmodernism into a monolith—one that is ostensibly utterly different than modernism. Both Jameson and radical postmodernists understand postmodernism as “a historical ‘break’ but Jameson sees the transition as an ab utero shift within the general conditions of capitalism while they see it as a rupture that emerges in vacuo” (357).

geographical location, the possibilities for how life may be lived. However, we should in

no way confuse the totality of capitalism with epistemological certainty, linguistic

stability, psychoanalytic universality, or other such pre-post-structural perspectives. The

point is not to assume that metanarratives of capitalism are transcendent because they are

total; the point is not to allow skepticism of Truth or Universality to preclude our seeing

meta-structures of power.

Lyotard did try to retain a coherent position in the wake of capitalism’s ascendancy by arguing that capitalism was a figure or a décor, not a narrative. But it became clear that this perspective could not be logically maintained. The fall of the Berlin Wall signified the fall of any in-place alternative system to neoliberalism. Capitalism’s operations stretch into all facets of life, converging on us when we are born and inserting themselves into our death (in any number of ways, not least of which sometimes includes sticking relatives with a bill for both events). Certainly, it had previously achieved a broadly extensive reach, but now it is a truly global totality.7 As Perry Anderson explains

in The Origins of Postmodernity, “Far from grand narratives having disappeared, it looked as if for the first time in history the world was falling under the sway of the most grandiose of all—a single, universal story of liberty and prosperity, the global victory of the market” (32). The only broadly cultural and political, cross-disciplinary conception of postmodernism that Anderson sees as nimble enough to withstand the end of the Cold

War and the global dissemination of neo-liberal capitalism is that of Fredric Jameson.

7 Indeed, even the major theorists who argue against the concept of a globalization era, do not do so by denying the global and total reach of capitalism. They deny that this global reach constitutes a new development.

Jameson’s most famous single statement on postmodernity may well be his

“Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984). Indeed, in

Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique, Douglas Kellner maintains that this seminal postmodernism essay was “probably the most quoted, discussed, and debated article of the 1980s.” In the subsequent decades Jameson has produced an extensive collection of speculations on the period. These collective analyses of postmodernity represent the most relevant theorizations of the period. His perspective is so attractive in part because he demonstrated that postmodernism is not a style but a historical period. There is thus no essential opposition between postmodernity and Marxism—in contrast to the arguments of many critics in the 1980s who had been sporting the aegis of one or the other of those perspectives—because in fact the world exists in postmodernity; even if people reject being postmodern, postmodernity exists around them as a force field in which they live, as the cultural dominant which shapes so much of life around us. But even critics who disagree with the specifics of Jameson’s theorizations do not ultimately disagree that some cultural shift has developed. Indeed, the premise that we live in the era of postmodern cultural dominance is largely taken for granted now. It is precisely that premise that I want to challenge. Doing that will require us to look back at the last decades of the twentieth century moving back and forth from the 1960s—that crucible of postmodernity and globalization—to the years of the post-Cold War by crossing through the territory of the postmodern as Jameson has mapped it.

Jameson dates postmodernity’s inception broadly in the early 1970s, in the wake of the OPEC oil shocks, the worldwide recession, and the collapse of the Bretton Woods system that had acted as a stabilizing financial force and a protection for the welfare state.

Following Ernest Mandel, Jameson reads these qualities that developed into and

developed from late or third-stage capitalism as the foundation for postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism. He identifies the first stage, market capitalism, with the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries and characterizes it as a period of industrial growth within individual nations facilitated by the desacralization of nature and the world. The second stage, monopoly capitalism, dates roughly from around the mid- nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. This is the imperialist era in which European capitalism created foreign markets for consumption and production of goods through military colonization and frenzied exploitation of both nature and labor. The third stage of capitalism—variously known as multinational, post-industrial, consumer, or late capitalism—is for Jameson the stage that initiated postmodernity. Negotiating the challenges of postmodernity (re)affirmed popular faith in liberal capitalism while negating belief in historical transformation. According to Jameson, that sense that life could be lived utterly differently—what he labels the historical imagination—died in the final flourishing of modernity, that is the 1960s. It is that passing of history that cleared the way for postmodernity. Therefore, to understand his periodizing of postmodernity, we need to understand how he periodizes the ‘60s.

The Sixties Intersection

At a basic level, Jameson sees the ‘60s as a movement as much as a chronological decade, a period of historical transformation as much as a period in history. Its inaugural events were the worldwide decolonization movements and the related US domestic civil rights struggles. Enhancing these momentous liberation efforts, a growing Maoism broadened the spectrum of progressive possibilities, and with Althusser, this “Maoist

‘raw material’” expands into the “problems and slogan of the semi-autonomy of the levels of social life” (“Periodizing” 137).

The conception of semi-autonomous levels offers tremendous explanatory power: it explains the semi-autonomy of the cultural sphere in which art can be liberatory, instead of just the tool of the powers that be, while it accounts for the growth of an enormous state bureaucracy that works for more than the interests of big business. Althusser argued that within the mode of production there are various “semi-autonomous” levels, specifically the economic, political, juridical, cultural, ideological; and these do not reduce to one determining phenomenon that if acted upon would transform everything else.8 However, as Jameson insists, the notion of semi-autonomy “has to relate as much as it separates. Otherwise the levels will simply become autonomous tout court, and break into the reified space of the bourgeois disciplines” (Political Unconscious 41).

But these relational elements tend to be left behind as critics invoke the rhetoric of difference, which in effect reifies single levels or objects within the social structure. For his part, Jameson is clear; it is only appearance, only our “existential experience in late capitalism,” that suggests that phenomena are separate instead of “a seamless web, a single and inconceivable and transindividual process” (Political Unconscious 40):

Nonetheless, the attempt to open up a semi-autonomy of the levels in one hand while holding them altogether in the ultimate unity of some ‘structural totality’ (with its still classical Marxian ultimately determining instance of the economic) tends under its own momentum, in the centrifugal force of the critique of totality it had itself elaborated, to self-destruct. What will emerge is not merely a heterogeneity of levels—henceforth, semi-autonomy will relax into autonomy tout court, and it will be conceivable that in the decentered and ‘schizophrenic’ world of late capitalism the various instances may really have no organic relationship to one another at all—but, more important, the idea will emerge that the struggles appropriate to each of these levels (purely political struggles, purely economic

8 The mode of production then is the structure of the relationships among these various levels.

struggles, purely cultural struggles, purely ‘theoretical’ struggles) may have no necessary relationship to one another. (“Periodizing” 137-8)

The effect of all this decentering is to discredit totalizing theories and to initiate the world of micropolitics, which ostensibly repudiates (old-fashioned) totalizing class and party politics. This extensive diffusion opens the way for postmodernity’s entry which will actually emerge, for Jameson, when the dynamics of the post-war Mandelian “long wave” are spent; that is, with the economic developments of the early 1970s. Jameson sees the new period as a long-term global hangover from the dizzying possibilities of the

‘60s. Actually he uses another metaphor: the ‘60s were “an immense and inflationary issuing of superstructural credit; a universal abandonment of the referential gold standard” (“Periodizing” 151).9 He summarizes his understanding of the period in the following assessment:

The widely noted inapplicability of its forms of class analysis to the new social realities with which the 60s had to struggle confronted us: ‘traditional’ Marxism, if ‘untrue’ during this period of a proliferation of new subjects of history, must necessarily become true again when the dreary realities of exploitation, extraction of surplus value, proletarianization and the resistance to it in the form of class struggle, all slowly reassert themselves on a new and expanded world scale, as they seem currently in the process of doing. (“Periodizing” 152)

Thus, Jameson concludes that in a period of possibility, new subjects of history arise. But he maintains that we are not in such a period. We exist in a time of retrenchment. But what if instead of seeing the ‘60s as precipitating a generational setback, we see its results as opening the possibilities for these new subjects of history?

That is a question that we can turn to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire to tackle.

9 This metaphor resonates deeply here because, as the introduction argued, the end of the gold standard was not a sign of diminishing US powers, as many on the left and right saw it, but a sign of US flexibility and the coming globalization economy.

I turn to Empire (2000) because it arguably presents the most comprehensive and

significant progressive analysis of the globalization era’s political milieu.10 The text

offers a narrative tracing the development of the contemporary mode of sovereignty—

that is, the eponymous Empire—and argues that the current environment is not a product

of political failure but of 1960s political change. This position helps demonstrate then

that the developments of postmodernity that appear as setbacks from Jameson’s

perspective actually laid the groundwork for an even more expansive realm of political

possibility.

Hardt and Negri argue that the regime of Empire emerged in the aftermath of the

“factory society,” a US-born social regime that synthesized Taylorist labor, Fordist

wages, and Keynesian economic regulation—all operating outside an extensive colonial

system. The history they recount is familiar. The US emerged as capitalist hegemon

after WWII and imposed its brand of social organization on much of the world. This new

regime’s demands that the colonies be freed coincided with the movement of the

colonized populations to free themselves. With the imperial power gone, capitalist

enterprises moved in to exploit local labor—this time within the factory-based welfare-

state wage system rather than the sheer servitude of the imperial system. Eventually,

those former colonies would find themselves free from imperial rule but living in the

ghetto of this capitalist world market. Workers throughout the world had been presented

the prospect of high wages and centralized welfare as rewards for “accepting” global

factory discipline, but the high Fordist wages and the safety net of state protection would

never truly materialize in much of the former colonial world. Thus, while the factory

10 It is safe to say that Empire may well become to globalization theory what Jameson’s “Postmodernism” is to postmodern theory.

society replaced the imperial order, the former colonized nations saw one type of flagrant

exploitation replace another.

Hardt and Negri’s contribution to this historical narrative is to argue that the post-

colonial subjects pushed beyond the ideologies offered by the erstwhile First World,

ideologies that had been adapted for the planned economies of the late Second World as

well. The former colonies, what is usually called the Third World, moved beyond the

factory society to create a new kind of subjectivity whose primary task was “not getting

into but getting out of modernity” (251). For the continued development of the factory-

wage system created new desires and needs that enabled the rise of a new world market

even as it planted the seeds for growing opposition to that market because those needs

were not being met. Just as the system promised freedom from want with the onset of

wage labor, it also promised freedom from oppression as a utopian compensation for

accepting factory discipline. These dreams of freedom that enabled the rise of the global

factory also created the possibility for the destruction of that same global economy

through the desire of the world’s workers to be free (see Empire chapters 3.2 and 3.3).

Hardt and Negri see the movements of the ‘60s as the culmination of a worldwide

rejection of factory discipline.11 The struggles throughout that decade were part of a

cycle of various proletarian international insurgencies beginning with the Chinese

revolution and proceeding through African and Latin American liberation to the 1960s

resistance in the West.12 From this perspective, it is possible to truly see the post-sixties

11 Note, this was a rejection of factory discipline not of the factory; the widespread access to goods and rationalized production that “the factory” represents continues to play an important part in many narratives of material freedom.

12 This differs from Jameson’s argument that “the politics of the sixties, all over the world and specifically including the ‘wars of national liberation,’ was defined and constituted as an opposition to the American war in Vietnam” (“End of Art” 75).

not simply as fizzling out to a painful period of retrenchment but as an era that achieved

an important end. The worldwide protests resulted in the on going diminution of the

factory-discipline model. If people throughout the world had not staged a kind of mutiny

in the ‘60s, capital would not have had to change its power structures. Moreover, Hardt

and Negri argue,

The entire panoply of movements and the entire emerging counterculture highlighted the social value of cooperation and communication. This massive transvaluation of the values of social production and production of new subjectivities opened the way for a powerful transformation of labor power….The indexes of the values of the movements—mobility, flexibility, knowledge, communication, cooperation, the affective—would define the transformation of capitalist production in the subsequent decades. (Empire 275)

In short, Hardt and Negri are not claiming that the ‘60s protests ended factories or

exploitation. They argue, instead, that the protests created new subjectivities and new

modes of life. Even the Soviet Union was destroyed, Hardt and Negri say, by its people’s unwillingness—expressed analogously in the capitalist countries as well—to further submit to Taylorist and Fordist factory discipline. Their resistance efforts forced their nation into cycles of crisis, reform, and restructuring: “The Soviet bureaucracy was not able to construct the armory necessary for the postmodern mobilization of the new labor power. It was frightened by it, terrorized by the collapse of disciplinary regimes, by the transformations of the Taylorized and Fordist subjects that had previously animated production” (Empire 278-9).

This explanation differs tellingly from that of Jameson who speculates that the

demise of the USSR was actually caused by its economic inability to compete with

capitalism on capitalism’s terms. In other words, he explains it as a top-down

phenomenon (See “Actually Existing Marxism.”) Indeed, he makes this same kind of

top-down argument in discussing the impact of the ‘60s, claiming that the

transformations of “the 1960s swept so much of tradition away,” but adding “it being

understood that economic development does not then pause for that but very much

continues along its own level and according to its own logic” (Postmodernism xx).13

From Empire’s perspective, the disciplinary society did not decline because

hegemonic forces simply thought they could do better: the hulking ship of factory

production does not change courses easily. Indeed, the authors argue that capitalism

never abandons a regime of profit unless it is forced to. The Fordist system transformed because it was forced to by widespread rejection of the subjectivities it required. “The disciplinary regime clearly no longer succeeded in containing the needs and desires of young people. The prospect of getting a job that guarantees regular and stable work for eight hours a day, fifty weeks a year, for an entire working life, the prospect of entering the normalized regime of the social factory, which had been a dream for many of their parents, now appeared as a kind of death” (Empire 274).

Their rejection does not mean that the insurgents willed post-Fordism in the exact shape in which it emerged. However, the authors stress that “The proletariat actually invents the social and productive forms that capital will be forced to adopt in the future”

(their emphasis, 268). This system has not resulted in a life that is easier or longer; in fact, life conditions continue to deteriorate measurably for the world’s workers in both the wealthiest nations and the poorest. However, the worldwide refusal of the status quo does mean that the worldwide changes in production, politics, and power were inescapable and would lead to the steady erosion of modern structures and modern sovereignty, sovereignty rooted in the nation state.

13 We must note that from Jameson’s dialectical perspective, losses can be hugely productive.

With this erosion and with the decolonization and the continued

multinationalization of production, the interests of workers throughout the world began to

coincide more urgently than ever.14 These workers make up the force that rejected the factory society: the multitude. The multitude is that collective subjectivity that both willed Empire and resists it, that both propagates it and opposes it. We can draw an analogy between what is called “the people” in a nationalist situation and the multitude, except the multitude is not “the people” in a sense of a unified identity. It’s not a nation; it’s not sovereign; and it does not provide the foundation for any kind of sovereign formation. It is a plurally constituted subject that acts towards common ends. The hybridizing of populations across old borders, the new kinds of individuals and consciousnesses born from the mix of people and machines gave birth to the contemporary multitude.

The language of subjectivity serves to describe the multitude, for if the subject is the one who acts, we should ascribe subjectivity to that collective will constituted by the variety of forces acting toward the same progressive purpose.15 The multitude as a

subject embodies this accumulation of struggle (Hardt). The multitude, for instance, is

the subjectivity that rose up in 1968 and the causes of student activists linked up with the

efforts of anti-imperialist freedom fighters. Those diverse insurgents were not unified or

centralized, but they were acting broadly as a subject.

14“By virtue of this convergency, the worker struggles throughout the domain of international capital already decreed the end of the division between First and Third Worlds”(Hardt and Negri Empire 263).

15 The authors obviously invoke subject as the source of action rather than as the object of subjection.

Imperialism and the ‘60s—Today

Some thoughts here need to be added about postcolonial theory, the branch of theory that has sprung most directly from the anti-imperialist (and incipient anti- modernist) movements of the 1960s. Nicholas Brown has said that ‘“all theory is postcolonial theory: it owes its very existence to the struggle against colonial domination and its echo in the political urgency of the First-World 60s’” (845). This view coincides with that of Empire’s authors who argue that US capitalism had to reject imperialist—a course it followed because of its Fordist post-war economy (though it did stray from that course notably in Vietnam). Importantly, Hardt and Negri argue that the former First

World does not lead the former Third World but that the Third-World resistance shaped developments throughout the globe and initiated the conditions for the global capitalism we live under in the globalization era.

Thus, the 1960s represented a crucial intersection. We saw that for Jameson the

‘60s road wound down to the disorienting and insufficiently chartable terrain of postmodernity. Surprisingly, for much of postcolonial studies the road has also led to disappointment. The ‘60s (that is, a long version of the ‘60s that dates both a few years before and after) certainly were a time of tremendous struggle and significant victories for the Third World, and the First World academy began to pay attention to these struggles. Scholars critiqued and continue to critique concepts of race and nation in relation to imperialist capitalism to an unprecedented extent; this attention to imperialist concerns has only grown since then under the rubric of postcolonial studies.

Nevertheless, as O’Brien and Szeman argue, “postcolonial studies has become a melancholic practice. Its melancholia derives from a growing sense of the limits of its politics and its thorough incorporation into the Western academy—both arguably

symptomatic of postcolonialism’s failure to address the conditions of globalization that

simultaneously enable its production and erode its political purchase” (607).

That is, for all the power postcolonial theory has to analyze texts of all sorts, its

mainstream variety—that is, the works of the likes of Bhabha and Said—have not as

successfully dealt with the cultural implications of globalization’s on-the-ground

economic and political questions. Simon Gikandi argues that an optimistic view of

globalization, which appeals to advocates of hybridity by seemingly opening up “to a

multiplicity of cultural relationships unheard of in the age of empire” (629), is

haunted by another form of globalization, one defined by a sense of crisis within the postcolony itself. Unsure how to respond to the failure of the nationalist mandate, which promised modernization outside the tutelage of colonialism, citizens of the postcolony are more likely to seek their global identity by invoking the very logic of Enlightenment that postcolonial theory was supposed to deconstruct. (630)

What has been rejected by oppositional forces of all kinds, including postcolonial theory, is modernity in its disciplinary and imperialist sense, that is modern sovereignty.

However, those strands of postcolonial (and postmodern) theory that take modernity in general as their enemy, and not modern sovereignty and disciplinarity specifically, become susceptible to the disconnect between Gikandi’s “citizens of the postcolony” and

“advocates of hybridity.” That is to say, citizens of the postcolony have had to turn to the logic which postcolonial theory opposes and defines itself against.

What makes this opposition to modern sovereignty so difficult to understand is that the US, the global hegemon, also has largely rejected imperialism. This rejection does not deny that the US is the exploiter nation extraordinaire. However, “globalization” is not just a fancy name for twenty-first century imperialism enforced by American missiles instead of the British fleet. Exploitation today is very different than it was in the past

though the two bear a family resemblance as evidenced in the obvious (and confusing)

similarity between “Empire” and “imperialism” and in the confounding similarity

between the adjectival forms “imperial” and “imperialist(ic).” However, the differences

between the concepts arise from the different registers in which the two operate. The

older regime colonized and subjugated completely; Empire does not depend on

occupation of the land and conquest of the people; certainly the military power of the

likes of the US, NATO, and Russia and, in a different way, China are all quite visible and

menacing. But what is more visible is capitalism’s culture of consumption and the

meagerness of a wage system that cannot accommodate the needs of those who want to

consume imperial culture. More metaphorically visible than Queen Victoria’s warships or today’s fighter planes are the literally invisible digital and virtual elements of the information economy. The movements of currency, the traffic on the Internet, aren’t really there in a physical sense. Thus, the language of imperialism, of land grabs and slavery, is not adequate for capturing the dynamics of a system that encompasses imperialistic tendencies while adding many wholly unprecedented features. In Hardt and

Negri’s terms, the system rests on a foundation of “the bomb,” “money,” and “ether”

(Empire 137). The bomb represents the limiting of sovereignty of most of the countries

of the world. The bomb represents the absolute capacity for destruction and is the

ultimate form of biopower. Money too reduces sovereignty and represents the

deconstruction of national markets. Ether represents the management and construction of

communication, culture, and education systems.

It is Empire and its supports and scaffolding, not imperialism, that is today’s enemy of progressive politics. Yet postcolonial theory still functions in the mode of anti-

imperialism. “Its tendency to see globalization as little more than a form of intensified

neoimperialism headquartered in the United States is one reason why it has been possible

to see postcolonialism as the study of globalization avant la lettre” (O’Brien and Szeman

607). However, seeing globalization within these parameters constitutes the precise

problem. For one of the crucial lessons of Empire is that globalization is not propelled

from a center point which radiates out colonizing the periphery as in imperialism.

Globalization develops from a type of capitalist expansion that works to overcome (not

destroy) both the nation and imperialism in order to incessantly expand markets by

destroying barriers between inside and outside. Indeed, Hardt and Negri, citing Rosa

Luxemburg in arguing that “imperialism would have been the death of capital had it not been overcome. The full realization of the world market is necessarily the end of

imperialism” (333). But this realization of the world market came as a response to the

multitude’s rejection of their meta-ghettoization into First, Second and Third Worlds—

not simply as a way to resolve the contradictions of capital itself. Indeed, Empire claims:

The real heroes of the liberation of the Third World today may really have been the emigrants and the flows of population that have destroyed old and new boundaries. . . .The Third World, which was constructed by the colonialism and imperialism of nation-states and trapped in the cold war, is destroyed when the old rules of the political discipline of the modern state are smashed. It is destroyed when throughout the ontological terrain of globalization the most wretched of the earth becomes the most powerful being because its new nomad singularity is the most creative force and the omnilateral movement of its desire is itself the coming liberation. (363)

What we see then is a process by which imperialism was destroyed by the

movement of the multitude. Empire is born of those movements but develops as a

response to them. It is only the multitude then that wields the power of creativity. This is

the power that resulted in that flowering of political potential that we now call the 1960s.

For Hardt and Negri, the ‘60s were a crucial part of the effort in the on-going struggle to clear the path of human immanence that remains blocked by the transcendent conception of sovereignty. Like most other cultural theorists, they periodize the post-

‘60s as postmodern, but they take the further step of seeing the success of the ‘60s as eventually bringing about the end of the factory society and the Cold War regime that then enabled the introduction of a new element—the sovereignty they call Empire.

However, they do not specify the rise of this new sovereignty as part of a new cultural logic; Hardt and Negri assume the logics of the Marxist and Jamesonian conceptions of postmodernity. But I want to take their thesis of Empire one step further. If, as Jameson has posited, postmodernity was born from the world-wide dissemination of modernity, then globalization may well emerge as a new structure of feeling with the global dissemination of postmodernity. In other words, I am arguing here that Empire is a component in the formation of globalization as a regime of production, and the developments of the globalization era constitute a new cultural logic emerging as the next cultural dominant.16

16 Of course, we still have to question the trajectories at work here. On the one hand, Hardt and Negri build from Jameson’s theorizations of postmodernity, but on the other hand, they draw a very different conclusion about the ‘60s. Does this different conclusion render Jameson’s theorizations of postmodernity finally incommensurable with Hardt and Negri? Answering this question requires us to consider the time in which Jameson developed his theories about the postmodern. The 1984 “Postmodernism” essay is obviously critical here, but the Postmodernism (1991) book as well as the Political Unconscious (1981) are also keys to understanding his periodizing schema. What’s important about these texts in this context is the time in which they were written: the Reagan-Bush years. From the perspective of the Reagan era, the interpretation of the ‘60s as ending with the defeat of progressive forces and the idea that oppositional consciousness had become a dream from the past or a hope for the future seemed perfectly reasonable. The imagination to see the ‘60s as resulting in success really began to emerge with the developments of the ‘90s: the end of what at times seemed an intractable bi-polar superpower structure; the rapid absorption of the market of/by the countries of the former second world thus opening possibilities for unification of the opposition to those global forces; the increasing development and accessibility of communication technology; the intensity and extensity of human movement across old borders—all combined with the changes in the Fordist mode of production (which theorists of postmodernity have explained very well). Certainly these historical changes can be viewed as further signs of defeat (some people certainly do see them that way, and perhaps history will later show them to be just that). But they can also open new possibilities for collectivity of the world’s people.

Cultural Logics in/of the Globalization Era

If Empire’s authors are correct about the fundamental changes the ‘60s initiated,

then we need to understand just what those changes enable fundamentally because it is by

reconsidering the 1960s that we will be able to see globalization as post-postmodern.

Certainly, there is no going back to modern politics because the passage through the

1960s intersection changed social structures and the operations of power.

The worldwide expansion of finance capitalism of a specifically American kind has

seemed from postmodernist perspectives to solidify the failure of radicalism and thus to

demonstrate the direness of the current era. That is to say that postmodern capitalism’s

spread into all sectors of the world—what Jameson describes as the closing of the global

frontier (“End of Art”)—has been thought to cause the closing of the popular historical

and political imagination as well. Of course, from another perspective the prevailing

extension of capitalism, even the cultural annexation of the territory where socialism

once actually existed, moves the world in the right direction, for it actually enables

opposition to capitalism to unite across old boundaries as well. This is not to argue that

today’s capitalism exploits people less, offers greater fairness, or even treats people with

dignity. But this is to argue that capitalism’s modus operandi is to expand; thus,

opposition needs to expand as well, for struggles to reign it in at the level of the local or the national will serve only to push exploitation elsewhere. In this light, the five days in

1999 of protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle stand as a first hope for future actions by which the multitude can express its varied though collective will.

Hybrid Subjectivity

Indeed, what is becoming increasingly true in the globalization age is that a “hybrid

subjectivity” is emerging. Previously, individuals carried different identities in the

different aspects of their lives.

One was mother or father at home, worker in the factory, student at school, inmate in prison, and mental patient in the asylum. In the society of control it is precisely these places, these discrete sites of applicability, that end to lose their definition and delimitations. A hybrid subjectivity produced in the society of control may not carry the identity of a prison inmate or a mental patient or a factory worker, but may still be constituted simultaneously by all their logics. (Empire 331)

If the resulting hybrid subjectivity is shaped by the logics of all the institutions simultaneously,17 the multitude faces unprecedented possibility for new kinds of collectivity, but it needs to communicate its struggles so that each local confrontation is also seen through its collective impact.

Society of Control

Before the WTO protests in Seattle, the previous flash points of protest such as Los

Angeles, Chiapas, Tiannenmen did not seem obviously connected. But as the globalization era continues, it is becoming clearer that such confrontations “destroy traditional distinctions between economic and political struggles. The struggles are at once economic, political, and cultural…struggles over the form of life” (Empire 56).

There no longer exists any “external point where the articulations of global power are

vulnerable. To achieve significance, every struggle must attack at the heart of Empire.”

But this omnipresence means that “the virtual center of Empire can be attacked from any

point” (Empire 58-59).

17 This hybrid identity is not hybridity. See Empire p.143

This omnipresence of Empire is enabled by what Foucault called the “society of control.” This new mode developed in response to workers’ repudiation of the disciplinary society with its strict factory discipline and rationalization of every aspect of life. In the society of control, power regulates social life from within the consciousness of each individual—a location more potent if less heavy-handed (in fact, more potent because less heavy-handed) than those of disciplinary society . Hardt and Negri draw on

Foucault’s concept of biopower to describe the force that produces the subjects of Empire in the society of control.

Biopower

Biopower “regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it” (24). For power achieves effective command over the life of a population when it becomes disciplinary; that is, when people embrace it of their own accord or do not even realize they are embracing it, so indistinguishable is it from their own will. This is a more immanent form of Foucauldian disciplinary society, though it is also a more insidious form because it is more popular, more hybrid, more affective, and more total. For power can achieve an effective command over the entire life of the population (that is, body and soul) when it becomes an integral, vital function that every individual embraces, that every individual is shaped by. And while the operations of biopower are insidious, they also keep human energies directed toward life and earth-bound production instead of outward toward the transcendent. In other words, biopower, despite its sinister implementations, also enables a Nietzschean humanism.18

18 I think here of The Gay Science aphorism 285: “There is a lake that one day ceased to permit itself to flow off; it formed a dam where it had hitherto flown off; and ever since this lake is rising higher and higher. Perhaps this very renunciation will also lend us the strength needed to bear this renunciation; perhaps man will rise ever higher as soon as he ceases to flow out into a god.”

Indeed, this embrace of the creative potential of pure immanence leads to Hardt and

Negri’s call for an ontological approach to the politics of the globalization era.

Ontology

Hardt and Negri propose a Spinozist ontology where, in the words of Timothy S.

Murphy, “thought and materiality are not coded as representations that render transcendent one or the other term as in traditional idealism and materialism, but rather they intensify and displace each other immanently to form new temporary subjective constellations and apparatuses of power” (20). Here we see a significant development.

The authors work against postmodernist practice in calling for an ontological approach to politics in the globalization era. But they should not be understood as rejecting outright the critiques of ontology offered by theorists from Derrida to Jameson. Hardt and

Negri’s is a post-deconstructive perspective working from the tradition of poststructuralism and yet ontological nonetheless, ontological because the multitude’s power lies in its productive and creative capacities.

Imperial command produces nothing vital and nothing ontological. From the ontological perspective, imperial command is purely negative and passive. Certainly power is everywhere, but it is everywhere because everywhere is in play the nexus between virtuality and possibility, a nexus that is the sole province of the multitude. Imperial power is the negative residue….[I]t is a parasite that draws its vitality from the multitude’s capacity to create ever new sources of energy and value. (Empire 361).

Though Empire and the multitude are wholly immanent, it is only the multitude that neutralizes the transcendental to enable creativity for itself.

The Multitude

It is important to distinguish the multitude from other formations like the people.

Empire quotes Hobbes to help make the distinction clear:

‘The people is…one, having one will and to whom one action may be attributed, none of these can be properly said of the multitude. The people rules in all governments. For even in monarchies the people commands; for the people wills by the will of one man…(however it seem a paradox) the king is the people.’ (103)

For Hardt and Negri, “The multitude will not be made into a people”

(“Adventures” 240). The multitude is the proletariat. However—and this is crucial—it

“is not a class properly speaking, despite the fact that it does contain, within its

multiplicity, all the characteristics of the working class, the stigmata of exploitation,

misery, and alienation” (“Adventures” 240). As capital continues to globalize

production, increasingly more forms of labor become proletarianized. Thus, as “the

concept of labor is being marginalized, it reasserts itself” (Hardt and Negri, Labor of

Dionysus 10). Even though the ideological transformation of labor’s place—especially

in the American social and political imaginary—diminishes labor’s centrality this

marginalization has enabled the expansion of the category of labor. That is, all kinds of

work that went unacknowledged in previous eras is now, or is in a position to be, widely

recognized as labor.19 And this broader category of labor necessitates a broader category of proletariat. This is where the multitude finds its central role. These expanded classifications leave capital and labor opposed in a directly antagonistic form. Thus, the embodiment of labor today is not the male factory worker of the Fordist economy: the multitude cannot really be embodied in one figure at all because the category of

19 By the same token, antagonism to exploitative relations circulates in new kinds of expressions of antagonism: “As the specifically capitalist form of exploitation moves outside the factory and invests all forms of social production, the refusal of this exploitation is equally generalized across the social terrain” (Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus 16).

proletariat, in fact, includes “all those exploited by and subject to capitalist domination”

(Empire 53).20

This broad category is critical in constructing a figure that is diverse and whose identity is not forced into a singular figure. At this point, I need to note the language of the preceding sentence. The figure of the multitude is constructed; it’s under construction and has been constructed. It is the force that has eroded the foundations of modern sovereignty and has done so to a certain extent since modernity’s inception, and it is a force that according to Hardt and Negri threatens Empire. But despite its existence, it nevertheless remains a force that must be called into existence, a force that must be made into a force. Indeed, with the rise of Empire, it becomes uniquely imperative to conceptualize the multitude and to do so in a way quite different than in the past, in the era of the unquestioned dominance of the nation-state. Hardt and Negri argue that today the past power of the nation is now invested in the multitude, with the added benefit that the multitude cannot organize itself into a nation-state with its oppressions and exclusions.

The broad category of the multitude undermines the ease with which class figures as if it were an identity category like gender or race, while simultaneously refusing the move that relegates those identities to some position secondary to class and thus less important or even invalid in political action. (The personal remains the political even as

politics remains collective!)

20 Hardt and Negri do position the postmodern economy as the key figure that structures production and shapes operations in all industries, including pre-information age industries. For their point is not that other modes of production become irrelevant but that the newer mode changes operations in the old.

Summaries and Implications

With this description lies the key to understanding the insufficiency of the concept

of postmodernity to account for the cultural climate of the NWO. It is not by any means

that theorizations of the postmodern are inapplicable but that they are decreasingly

applicable because historical conditions have changed since the formation of this cultural

“force field”; new cultural formations develop with changing times and milieus. The

postmodern permeates the post-Cold War landscape, but theories of the postmodern were

created in the wake of a perceived failure of 1960’s radicalism,21 not in advance of a

biopolitical world in which Empire and the multitude face each other directly.

If theories of the postmodern are less applicable today, it is not due to a failure of

Jameson or other theorists’ to understand the postmodern or to find a method by which to

think the postmodern. It is due to the less-ready applicability of the “postmodern” as a

cultural logic by which to represent and map the world after 1989. For the changes

brought on by the end of the Cold War and the rise of the NWO and the globalization

regime have led to a new present which in turn refigures the old past.

As Hardt and Negri put it, “Having achieved the global level, capitalist development is faced directly with the multitude, without mediation.”22 Furthermore, if

“Capital and labor are opposed in a directly antagonistic form,” “the situation of struggle

is completely open” (Empire 237). This situation of struggle characterizes politics as

well as culture, and both reflect globalization’s sovereignty: thus, if transnational

21 Indeed, Jameson proposes that postmodernism may well be “the substitute for the sixties and the compensation for their political failure”(Postmodernism xvi).

22 Note, the problems of postmodernity do not just disappear because we choose simply to look at them differently. The point is to see what strategies (or tactics—in a completely open situation, the distinction between the two terms is no longer valid) most effectively allow us to make this new situation evident.

corporate capitalism is everywhere, opposition—at whatever level—may strike

anywhere. This is not to imply that all strikes will be equally effective or make an equal

impact, but all strikes do confront Empire itself.

The immanence of Empire is matched by the immanence of the multitude, a

position which manifests in a bias against representation. This bias discounts the

importance of representative institutions which they see as outside the primary site of

struggle: “the terrain of the production and regulation of subjectivity” (321). Thus, Hardt

and Negri conclude, “Today the militant cannot even pretend to be a representative, even

of the fundamental human needs of the exploited. Revolutionary political militancy

today, on the contrary, must rediscover what has always been its proper form: not

representational but constituent activity. Militancy today is a positive, constructive, and

innovative activity” (emphasis in original, Empire 413). This statement adds a new twist

to Gil Scott Heron’s motto, “the revolution will not be televised.”

Finally then, we have to consider the implications for cultural critique of imperial

sovereignty and globalization as a cultural structure. If working-class power does not

reside in representation at all, what then are the implications for critique? What kinds of interventions are possible? It seems there are several issues at play here. To start we have to counterpoise this anti-representational position with another critical point of

Empire: the sheer immanence of imperial sovereignty that makes incursions against any

aspect of Empire into incursions against the whole regime of Empire. This opposition

leads to two critical questions: Is representation an incursion? And is there a way to

reconcile the vulnerability of Empire with representation?

The answer resides with the multitude. The multitude requires a language with

which to speak itself so that it knows and can actively mobilize its own existence. But

unlike the multitude which exists despite its apparent lack of awareness of itself, this

language does not exist and must be invented by the multitude. That work of

conceptualizing the multitude and developing a language does not need to exclude

representation or mediation; it must only refuse to stop there. In other words, the

productive capacity of the multitude must be seen along side, and in, reproduced culture.

The strength of Empire lies in its argument that the multitude’s productive capacity has

never stopped. That is why the ‘60s can so movingly and convincingly be re-

conceptualized as a decade that actually achieved an enormous victory for progressive

politics. Indeed, in its positivity, the multitude renders the 1980s—the decade that

represents, on one level, the verso of the 1960s, an utter rejection of the possibility of historical transformation—a period of significant historical transformation that helped bring about the regime of globalization.

One of Empire’s weaknesses lies in its denunciation of representation. And here, we come full circle back to Fredric Jameson. In The Political Unconscious he argues that narrative is a political act. Of course, the most famous lesson of that text is his axiom

“Always historicize!” Especially key is Jameson’s understanding that history is not a text but is accessible only through the textual form. Thus, we can conclude that reproduction and production are both key domains of political activity.

Cultural Critique in Postmodernity and in Globalization

Cultural Criticism in the Postmodern Mode

Criticism labeling itself postmodernist, and the texts chosen for such analyses, tend to be very conscious of generic impurities and temporal instabilities. So too, self-

reflexivity tends to be an important aspect of texts considered postmodern. Selecting

American examples—since the US is the purview of my project—we could certainly

point to novelists such as Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, and Don DeLillo. What

their texts distrust, and what the postmodernist criticism of their texts points out, is the question of Truth itself, the problem of what can be known and what we can never know because of the limitations imposed by perspective. What postmodern criticism affirms in the end is the instability of truth claims and the impossibility of certainty and purity.

Postmodern political and organizational strategies embrace temporary coalitions and hybridity while epistemological questions refuse completeness. We can look to the rise of cyborg feminism, most notably connected to Donna Haraway, as an example par excellence of theorizing in this vein, while the cyborg science fiction of writers such as

Octavia Butler narrates the destabilized binaries of machine/human, self/other, man/woman. In light of this destabilized identity, technological possibility, and mechanical reproducibility, questions of the status of authorship, the possibilities of creativity, and the definition of art itself become the subject of the appropriated art of

Sherrie Levine and, on another register, Cindy Sherman.

In postmodern criticism, the historiographic metafiction of the likes of E.L.

Doctorow develops as a privileged genre that questions the idea of historical facticity, of belief in a past that is over and done with. Generically “impure” texts like those of

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Art Spiegelman re-present history as they push the limits between diverse genres—visual art, poetry, performance, prose, theory, and historical texts. Theory and literature that combine Western and non-Western traditions arise as some of the major sites for questioning canonical history especially in relation to the

ostensible naturalness of the nation and of national culture; here we can include

practitioners such as Gloria Anzaldua and Maxine Hong Kingston.23

This eclectic list represents in its own way a central driving force of criticism

labeling itself postmodern, that is its focus on texts, in the broadest sense of the term as

objects of cultural analysis, that bridge the gap between popular and high cultures.

Postmodern criticism advances a vocabulary of contingency and contradiction, fluidity and fragmentation. At bottom, it values heterogeneity against a modernism that is said to seek homogeneity.24 The consequences for critique are significant because though

postmodern theory encompasses a broad variety of subjects, the lit-crit apparatus often tends to be one of “deep surfaces” (to borrow the title of a book by Philip E. Simmons).

Criticism in this mode explores the depth of history or subjectivity as shaped by the

ostensibly superficial consumer, pop, or mass culture or media. Here criticism inevitably

includes at least one mention of the following: pastiche, parody, disruption of

representational convention, mixing of high and popular (low) cultures, anti-

foundationalism, intertextuality, and disruption of official history. Given that so many

texts in this mode are already in print, it should be truly surprising that such criticism

continues to be published, but then perhaps new texts in this mode are not interesting

enough to rouse any reaction at all—even surprise. Nevertheless, in 2002, John Duvall’s

23 This list of authors is not random; each of these authors is represented in the reader Postmodern American Fiction along with almost sixty other writers. Only the two photographers, Levine and Sherman, are not included in the collection.

24 That modernism has too often been presented in caricatured terms as only a strictly elitist, utterly oppressive regime has led to much theorizing of postmodernism as a populist reaction. To whatever extent this characterization rings true or false, it is important that we not confuse modernism—referring to the cultural period dating roughly from around the turn of the twentieth century through the 1950s (give or take)—with Hardt and Negri’s use of modern, which we can take to mean that larger project of modernity which starts with the Enlightenment and ends with globalization.

collection Productive Postmodernism: Consuming Histories and Cultural Studies (with

an afterword by Linda Hutcheon) presented essays on such topics as postmodern

canonical literature, architecture, and Las Vegas that feature at least one or more of the

postmodern terms in the context of addressing “the differing accounts of postmodernism

found in the work of Fredric Jameson and Linda Hutcheon, a debate that centers around

the two theorists’ senses of pastiche and parody” (reverse cover).

That my dissertation works some of this same territory requires me to sketch out, at

least briefly, some of the differences in my project. To take Las Vegas as a case in point,

Shelton Waldrep’s “Postmodern Casinos” in Productive Postmodernism discusses Vegas

as “a postmodern playground for architecture” that has “outstripped the prevailing

theories that we have for analyzing postmodern architecture….[It] resists both the

theories of ‘contradiction,’ on which postmodern architectural theory is largely based,

and the analysis of themed environments coming out of cultural studies” (137-8).

Waldrep describes the evolution of Vegas into a themed environment demonstrating that

“it is only since the 1980s that Vegas designers have lavished so much care on the themes

they choose and the elaborateness with which they carry them out” (144). Ultimately, he

concludes, “Vegas is a sign that consists of such a jumble of referents (extreme pastiche),

that they don’t relate to anything real, but then they don’t relate to anything simulated (or representational at all). To do either thing would be to communicate something to the viewer. Vegas prefers to remain silent” (161).

We see in this essay, the old faithful theme of pastiche and even a harkening to the

really old saw from Ihab Hassan of postmodernism as the culture of silence and

exhaustion. Waldrep compares and contrasts it to Disney and speaks of “Vegas-style

simulacra” that “presents the spectacle of its own always recurring discovery” (163). But

what Waldrep does not present is a connection between Disney and Las Vegas that makes

the comparison and contrast meaningful and applicable beyond the scope of the essay,

that makes the “recurring discovery” of Vegas a discovery of knowledge outside these

tourist traps and of structures larger than them. What Waldrep’s argument does not offer

is an analysis of why the Strip changed since the 1980s. I would argue that he does not

produce such an analysis because postmodern theory really does not provide one. To

make fresh hay out of the Vegas grass,25 we need the framework of globalization.

I think it is very difficult to practice cultural studies and theory today without discussing globalization, which is why practitioners like Jameson have incorporated globalization into their critical apparatuses. The problem is that these critics do not take the further step of considering globalization as post-postmodern, as a structure of feeling with its own cultural logic.26 The central theoretical influence on this dissertation, Hardt

and Negri, do not even make that leap. My project aims to trace out what making that

leap might involve and imply.

Summary Conclusions for Globalization Critique

Neo-liberal capitalism makes totalizing critical perspectives valuable. Neo-liberal

capitalism constitutes the world economic system. It is the content and the form of

globalization. Taking no account of the totality of its scope will hamper understanding of

the climate that conditions cultural productions. This accounting involves

25 Though explaining a joke usually kills the humor in it, here goes: Las Vegas means the meadow in Spanish. The city was so named because it used to be a grassy little oasis in the Nevada desert, so the line about making hay out of the Vegas grass is a pun.

26 Furthermore, globalization critique has the added advantage of not being tied to a style the way postmodernism is. There is no need then to combat the perception of globalization as an aesthetic instead of a period that engendered certain aesthetics.

conceptualizing the structure not as levels of production that finally reduce to one

instance; nor does it imply the radical partitioning of levels so that they are completely

separate. Instead, it suggests the imbrication of levels. Criticism operating under the

rubric of globalization or the New World Order begins with this total perspective.

Globalization and the NWO really are as much economic as they are political and cultural

phenomena. Starting at one of these levels ends up taking the analysis to the other levels.

The regime operates on the plane of immanence. The regime reduces all relations to that most immanent construction, the cash nexus. Thus, the regime is both total and immanent. It may be easy to confuse totality with transcendence so that the regime’s immanent totality may seem paradoxical. But this totality exists very much in the world and not beyond it in transcendent, timeless categories. Immanent criticism continues the practices of cultural studies by searching for such qualities as the ways texts are used by their “readers,” how their users see them operating within the global system, and/or how these texts were produced and who benefits from their production. The questions center

on production and use rather than creation and revelation.

This regime is propelled by biopower. Biopower works through, with, and on

bodies as well as minds. That is to say, the biopolitical nature of the regime restructures

relations in the material world as well as in the realm of ideas. In principle, radical

separations between the body and the intellect are eroding as surely as the radical

separations between regions, worlds, or inside and outside. Biopower controls social life

from within by determining its meanings and contextualizing them, and that is what

criticism may look for and implement for its own ends. Criticism may aim both to

uncover where the multitude are being framed into a people: that is, where general

61 desires for life, freedom, community are being routed into specific—usually consumerist or nationalist—desires by Empire.

There is no privileged cultural medium. We can credit postmodern perspectives and cultural studies practice with broadening the range of objects open for analysis to those in the literary critical disciplines. Globalization criticism’s immanent perspective implies that there is no need to prioritize genres or find a privileged category of expression.

However, the need remains for mediation.

That much globalization-culture criticism focuses on the mass strains of media, as opposed to the literary, is not due to some kind of shortcoming in literature to represent the formation. Of course, such forms as TV, film, music, the Internet, and fashion all are distributed worldwide in undeniably greater numbers than, say, fine art or literature, but popularity does not in itself equate to more applicability in analyses of the cultural milieu; just as obscurity does not necessarily indicate irrelevance. We can attribute the wealth of non-literary object analyses, in part, to an understanding of globalization as that which is transnational, while literature has traditionally been viewed within other rubrics, especially the national. Indeed, culture itself, along with common evaluative criteria and critical apparatuses, have traditionally been posed within national frameworks so that forms often considered “un-cultured,” such as the mass-mediated genres, may seem more amenable to globalization-focused exegesis. The trick then will be for interested literary critics to rethink the rubrics for their studies.27 Undertaking this kind of rethinking is the goal of the chapters ahead.

27 Caren Irr’s “Literature as Proleptic Globalization” offers one model.

CHAPTER 3 A NEW “MARSHALL” PLAN: TERRORISM, GLOBALIZATION, BLOCKBUSTERS, AND AIR FORCE ONE

This paper begins with the premise that the Hollywood blockbuster, that most

global and most lucrative of all film forms thus far in terms of box office and rental

numbers, can help us understand the nation, nationalism, and the political role of the

United States in the globalization era. The form presents, as much as it helps to initiate, a post-national US nationalism that is very much focused on the US as a world police force. Why do US-centered themes sell and what are “US-centered themes” anyway?

What can Hollywood teach us about national feeling?

Studying blockbusters makes it clear that in the New World Order, US nationalism looks a lot like Hollywood’s globalized post-nationalism, especially in gargantuan- grossing films of the post-Gulf War ‘90s including Forrest Gump (1994’s top-grossing film), Independence Day (1996’s top box-office movie); Armageddon and Deep Impact

(two of 1998’s biggest); and the film at the center of this paper, one of 1997’s top- grossing films and one of the top-100 box office draws of all time, Air Force One. So we concentrate here on the 1990s—the first decade of the post-Cold War globalization era— and specifically on the late ‘90s, a time when world-wide box office was bigger than ever, when the “new economy” was in high gear, and when the character of the New

World Order had really taken shape. Determining what that character entails while using it to understand the globalized world as represented by one of Hollywood’s top grossing films (and by extension the blockbuster medium itself) is the purpose of this paper. To

62 63

that end, we cover territory that ranges the landscapes of the New World Order:

Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Iraq, Russia, Afghanistan, and the USA. These sites enable us to

directly focus on (post-)nationalism and militarism in Air Force One and in the

globalization era. And though it was made before the attacks of September 11, 2001, Air

Force One frames those events as well.

Hollywood High Concept

Here a blockbuster, what some call the high-concept movie,28 refers to a style of filmmaking involving hefty special-effects budgets, sweeping promotional campaigns, consecutive release on thousands of screens, and worldwide distribution. For our purposes, the term does not refer to the actual box office success of a film. Thus, 1995's

Waterworld, the most expensive film ever made to that time, qualifies as a blockbuster

even though it has become a metonym for over-budget film disasters. (For the record, it

did recoup its costs after international release.)29 Because of its immense marketing and

distribution scale, I argue that the Hollywood blockbuster is the privileged film genre of

globalization.

A corollary of this opening premise is that Hollywood is the center of global cinema as measured in worldwide fiscal terms of box office, sales, production expense, and distribution. Indeed, Hollywood has held this position at least since end of the World

28 In 1978, Steven Spielberg defined “high concept” as ultimately idea driven: “If someone can tell me the idea in twenty-five words or less it’s going to be a good movie” (quoted in Schatz 201).

29 Thomas Elsaesser quotes Tino Balio’s “If you’re a big corporation you can never not make money with movies.” Comparing contemporary Hollywood’s “integration/synergy model” with a pinball machine, Elsaesser explains, “The principle behind it would be something like this: you launch with great force the little steel ball, shoot it to the top, and then you watch it bounce off the different contacts, pass through the different gates, and whenever it touches a contact, your winning figures go up” (18). The contact points are the world-wide cinema screens, video stores and arcades, bookstores, CD/DVD sales points, the Internet, and every cross-marketing possibility.

War I (Wagnleitner), but the blockbuster form is utterly different from classic

Hollywood’s product.30 Nevertheless, one aspect that remains the same: the US government’s economic interest in opening the world’s markets for US motion pictures.

After all, with entertainment as one of the few US-based industries consistently running a trade surplus, in the interest of economic strength the US government has taken seriously the export issues surrounding global media such as film. Thus, the struggle to export legally American movies into increasingly more corners of the world has been one that

Hollywood and Washington openly wage together. Today, their joint efforts center on attempts to promote and enforce protections of intellectual property; in the Cold War-era their efforts involved removing barriers to distribution of American pictures—an effort seen by policy makers and movie moguls as one of the best strategies for fighting the cultural Cold War. Indeed, even distribution and promotion costs of Hollywood films in

Europe were covered by Marshall Plan funds. Arguably the global center of image production and distribution, Hollywood and the US government make up what Reinhold

Wagnleitner calls “the greatest information agency of the twentieth century.” Both the studios and post-war administrations saw motion pictures as playing a unique roll in promoting what is euphemistically called “the American way of life,” an effort which finally boils down to promoting consumerism. This facility with image creation and promotion, then, has been key to the Hollywood motion picture’s centrality in propaganda and policy.

30 Some difference between the blockbuster form and the classic studio-era’s product include the blockbuster’s reliance on special effects; its targeting of a younger demographic; the generally short life of production companies; the relationship of actors, directors, and writers to the studios, and innumerable more ways than I can hardly mention here.

The claims of centrality I make here are not measured in terms of any claims to

“quality.”31 A discussion of quality would take us well beyond the scope of this work, especially when we focus on blockbusters and the claims of many critics that these movies trade “quality” for simplified characters and narratives or that the films are mostly preoccupied with creating opportunities for tie-ins and spin-offs (see Maltby’s discussion of critical reading practices). While such critical judgments are not untrue,

they are incomplete. These movies offer much when read allegorically and as cultural

documents—even if they offer little from a traditional film-critical perspective that seeks

“quality.” When we talk in those terms the parameters of the discussion change because

we have to consider the presence of a variety of film production models. For example,

state sponsored cinemas are generally very different from Hollywood’s product. Many of

these alternatives, tied to national governments and their desire to protect what is seen as

their national cultural heritage, are created as direct responses to the dominance of

Hollywood, and by extension that of the USA as a whole. Whether, in an era of

globalization, this goal is anachronistic or vital and encouraging (or perhaps both), it is

certain that film remains a central cultural form today both because of its importance in

national cultures and in spite of them.32 Indeed, the numerous protectionist exemptions

31 Because of the tremendous expense involved in making and marketing high concept, film theorists for some time have predicted that the blockbuster focus would be ending; see Schatz in Film Cultures Reader. That the genre continues to drive major studio production speaks to both the tremendous profit potential and the manageability of the risk. It is this final aspect that was perhaps most surprising to film scholars. Where the risks were tremendous even at the beginning of the ‘90s, by decade’s end the growth of international ancillary markets like video and pay TV, not to mention the growing “verticalization” of media industries, has continued to lessen the risk of loss.

32Critics have noted that non-Hollywood films that have followed the action formula have actually enjoyed great success in their native countries and abroad. Luc Besson’s films, e.g., La Femme Nikita and Leon (released in the US as The Professional), would offer some obvious examples. Many films use the violence and super-action tropes without the extensive and expensive special effects. One particularly brilliant example would be the Mexican film Amores Perros which works in the tradition of independent-style films

66 of films from international and regional free-trade agreements speak to film’s unique importance in and for national cultures (Forbes 260-1).

For their part, high-concept movies tackle a variety of themes, but to narratively justify the intensity of action they offer—not to mention the need to offer easily translatable themes to the worldwide audience—their narratives generally center on broad themes. Thus, blockbusters usually feature travel between far-flung lands, encounters with alien others, or battles against entities of tremendous power including nature and the celestial sphere. Such large motifs are most easily represented in narratives assuming grand, often global, implications. And yet despite an ostensible “human race” or global focus, many of the films centrally involve the US. Considering that it is not unusual for a

Hollywood film to make as much as 90 percent of its profits overseas (Maltby 36), it is certainly noteworthy that conflicts involving US national issues would play throughout the world. This popularity then leads us to question the place of non-Hollywood cinema

(think of French cinema, which has a rich tradition of being set as the anti-Hollywood) in relation to the New World Order, a question to which we will return at the end of the paper. Indeed, it sets up the framework in which blockbusters can be read as allegories for the political and cultural formations of the New World Order and forums for confronting post-nationalism, terrorism, and the changing role of the US.

Empire and the New World Order

To begin this exploration let us review the representation of the relations between globalization and the nation in Empire. There, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri theorize power in the current cultural and economic formation as circulating between two forces: such as Pulp Fiction and Run Lola Run. Obviously much more could be said, and has been said, about this action/indie-aesthetic style.

• the multitude—that collection that in the modern, nationalist era might have been called the people, though the multitude is unbounded by geographic and ethnographic perimeters. This concept evolves from an Enlightenment notion of humanity as master of its own fate instead of being powerless and subject to the whims of God • the sovereign—the transcendent force that reins in the freedom of the multitude and maintains boundaries between populations and social groupings. It is a form of rule inherited from the medieval tradition. Hardt and Negri use the term Empire to name the sovereign power governing the

world and regulating worldwide exchanges, in short, the form that sovereignty takes in

post-Cold War, globalized capitalism. This sovereignty developed a mixed constitution

which, like the ancient Roman empire from which it gets its name, is part monarchy, part

aristocracy, part democracy. But it has grown in the soil of what was in the old modern

regime the central political force; that is, the nation.

Hardt and Negri’s narrative of the birth of the nation sees it arising out of the power clash between the transcendent sovereign and the immanent multitude. At times, the nation served as a revolutionary weapon, especially for colonized populations in their struggles for liberation, but when the nation became attached to sovereignty it lost its revolutionary potential. It inherited the power struggle which is, in larger historical terms, the crisis of European modernity; that is, the pull between the transcendence of the sovereign and the immanence of the multitude. The nation developed as an ideological mediator between medieval sovereignty and modern humanism’s multitude but the inherent antagonism between them is irresolvable. Ultimately, the nation, that most modern of sovereign formations, emerged as just one attempt in a long series of attempts to rein in the multitude. Empire emerged as another. However, Empire also endangers the nation’s position of sovereignty. And it has left the institutions that shore up the nation—the school, the family, the factory, the apparatuses of civil society itself—in a

state of crisis. Or it is better to say that Empire developed as a resolution to the same

problems that endanger the national institutions; that is, the 1960s’ global resistance to

the old disciplinary, imperialist regime.

With the end of the Cold War those forces of the old capitalist regime re-formed

into Empire, a sovereignty whose effect is to wear away at divisions and borders and thus

closed-off markets. The domains are no longer clearly defined; indeed, the qualities we

commonly denote by the shorthand inside and outside are becoming indistinguishable.

This integration of social institutions reflects the integrations Hardt and Negri see

throughout Empire. Thus, the geo-political divisions between nation-states have

disintegrated such that they do not account for the processes of production, accumulation,

and social life that have rendered even the old first-, second-, and third-world divisions outdated. “Through the decentralization of production and the consolidation of the world market, the international divisions and flows of labor and capital have fractured and multiplied so that it is no longer possible to demarcate large geographical zones as center and periphery” (335).

Of course, we cannot ignore the privileged position of the United States in Hardt and Negri’s analysis. Indeed, they see Empire’s power structure in a pyramidal shape with the US in the position it held since World War II: at the top. From there it assumed a pivotal role in shaping globalization. At the large base of the pyramid structure stands the heroes of Empire’s narrative, the multitude. In between, the great variety of sovereign formations operate; that is, other nation-states, supranational policy groups, corporations, NGOs, multi- and transnational corporations, etc. All of these forces have taken juridico-economic power away from the nation-state causing a shift in its sovereign

position. Nevertheless, the result of the new arrangement has not been a simple decline

of the nation state; it has led in fact to the “full realization of the relationship between the

state and capital” (236). In other words, the political has no autonomy from the

economic. They intermix without mediation in a direct confrontation between the

multitude and capital. And out of all of this, Empire emerges. As such, it must work to

maintain its position; thus, “it deploys a powerful police function against the new

barbarians and the rebellious slaves who threaten its order” (20).

The old barbarians in the pre-Empire, Cold War configuration, that is the socialist

states of Eastern Europe, have largely been neutralized.33 This is not to deny the immense power still existing in the East in the form of nuclear weaponry, but it is to say that the Eastern countries no longer challenge liberal capitalist democracies by offering an actually existing socialist alternative. Yet despite the seeming acquiescence to the capitalist world, through the 1990s many of the nations of Eastern Europe continued to occupy the role of barbarians at the gate. Why?

The West had assumed that a desire for market capitalism and democracy was just lying in stasis in Eastern Europe, waiting for the end of communism. But what arose in many nations after the Berlin Wall’s fall was sheer ethnic terror, sprouting quickly as if it had been germinating beneath the Cold War surface. Slavoj Zizek posits several reasons for this outgrowth. Developed in part it in reaction to the totalitarian control these countries endured during the Cold War; ethnic identification provides a scapegoat for the past oppression. Of course, ethnic nationalism does not fit in Empire’s post-national

33 The position and international role of Cuba obviously bears study, but it does not really change the analysis here. We will discuss North Korea later in this paper.

formation, but Zizek argues that this ethnic attachment, which sprang up in reaction to

totalitarianism, grew into its menacingly prominent position because it acted as “a kind of

‘shock absorber’ against the sudden exposure to the capitalist openness and imbalance”

(210).34

Michael Mann constructs a different though reconcilable explanation of the ethnic

violence; he points to the global diffusion of the ideal of “rule by the people” in an

environment where “‘the people’ is prone to be defined in ethnic or religious terms” (62).

He argues that when ethnic/religious difference combines with economic failure brought

on by the growing economic dominance of the industrial countries, ethnic cleansing can

emerge as “the dark side of the democratization process” (62).

Regardless of explanation, it is certain that hopes originally ran high for the bright

future of the East; indeed, the changeover to liberal democracy was a process the West

watched in utter fascination. Zizek theorizes this interest as a kind of mirroring effect:

It is as if democracy, which in the West shows more and more signs of decay and crisis and is lost in bureaucratic routine and publicity-style campaigns, is being rediscovered in Eastern Europe in all freshness and novelty….The real object of fascination for the West is thus the gaze, namely the supposedly naïve gaze by means of which Eastern Europe stares back at the West, fascinated by its democracy. (200)

The emergence of ethnic violence breaks “the narcissistic spell of the West’s

complacent recognition of its own values in the East: Eastern Europe is returning to the

West the ‘repressed’ truth of its democratic desire” (Zizek 208). But in the case of both

34 Capitalism by its nature must produce excess. This excess that generates profits keeps the system in a state of imbalance in which conditions always change and relations can always become antagonistic. The nationalist solution to this imbalance is to blame some ethnic Other. Thus, the Kosovar in ‘90s Yugoslavia, like the Jew in Nazi Germany (or today in the former East Germany), becomes the target. “What one demands is the establishment of a stable and clearly defined social body which will restrain capitalism’s destructive potential by cutting off the ‘excessive’ element; and since this social body is experienced as that of a nation, the cause of any imbalance ‘spontaneously’ assumes the form of a ‘national enemy’” (Zizek 211).

the genocidal Eastern nationalist and the bemused Western liberal, the motivation for

each one’s reaction to the events of the post-Cold War years is similar. Zizek claims that

each looks to the other for what is missing in itself; quoting Hegel he concludes, ‘“it only

comes to be through being left behind’” (203).

From this perspective, Zizek can look back to the 1980s and early ‘90s and explain the US obsession with accounts of MIAs left behind in Vietnam. Films such as the blockbuster Rambo II and the lesser-budgeted Missing in Action films or the ubiquitous

POW-MIA flags and bumper stickers convey this MIA obsession which at its heart really expresses that missing part of America itself: “the essence of its potency.” “And because this loss became the ultimate cause of America’s decline and impotence in the post-

Vietnam Carter years, recapitulating this stolen, forgotten part became an element of the

Reaganesque reaffirmation of a strong America” (205).

The Persian Gulf War: Vanquishing the Ghost of Vietnam

It is from this perspective that we can say that the project of the Reagan-Bush years was, in significant measure, to make the US feel like its old 1950s self again—a project that culminated in the birth of Empire and the NWO. This effort culminated in the

Persian Gulf War, an event which among its other goals was to vanquish the ghost of

Vietnam—though in a real way every US armed intervention since Vietnam has been in some part a restaging of that war, an attempt to regain a sense of national military arrogance and feeling of entitlement. In the Gulf War, part of the strategy to rescue

Vietnam was to recreate WWII. The War reunited the WWII allies (even adding old enemies to the alliance). They were to stop Saddam Hussein, a new enemy whom the

White House represented as the embodiment of evil, thereby casting him in the role of the

Fuhrer in George Bush’s revival of WWII. That Saddam bore no real resemblance

72 militarily to Hitler didn’t matter; the Reagan-Bush impetus was to heal old sores and lay the groundwork for the next era; exorcising the ghost of ‘Nam by making the Gulf War seem noble was part of that mission. For part of the failing of Vietnam was that it wasn’t

WWII, and it would never be seen as a great and noble war. Vietnam was a generational turning point and a cultural divide. Recovering WWII in a post-Vietnam conflict ostensibly bridged that divide by allowing the US to make a claim that it could not make in the ‘60s: that the US always fights for what’s right. And of course, World War II was a singular event because it brought the US to the apex of economic, cultural, and military superiority. In the American political imaginary this superiority confirmed a sense of moral superiority as well, a sense that if the US embarks on a program, then it must be the best choice. Vietnam compromised that moral superiority along with the certainty of military superiority. The Persian Gulf War was an attempt to regain both. Inasmuch as the war was a resounding defeat of Saddam’s forces, at least the military aspect of the

Gulf War was a success.

Of course, the US entry into WWII tied US politics and policy to European imperialism in a way presaged by WWI and the subsequent though failed movement of internationalism (especially the League of Nations). The end of WWII, however, led to the creation of the United Nations, the installation of the Bretton Woods system, and the

“adhesion to the expansive model of disciplinary society according to the model constructed by the New Deal” (Hardt and Negri 244). This model dominated the world stage until Vietnam, a war which was both an actual site and a metonym for the worldwide resistance to imperialist, modernist, disciplinary society. These various resistance efforts led to a crisis in international capitalism as the citizens of wealthy

nations rejected the discipline of the post-war factory system while the world’s poor

rejected the colonial and post-colonial arrangements that kept them in a state of servility.

It was then “Vietnam,” in the broadest, metonymic sense of that term, that helped unleash the energy eventually leading to the creation of Empire at the end of the Cold War. Just as the US played the most important role in developing the post-WWII economic-military system, the US also played the most important role in developing the post-Cold War economic-military system that is Empire.

Yet despite the Persian Gulf War’s seemingly successful replay of WWII, the sense of moral certainty would not be the same. Partly, there remained a nagging doubt in the

American collective psyche; some call it the Vietnam Syndrome, but whatever label it wears, it is the anxiety that Vietnam was not something that happened to “us”; it is something “we” did to “them.” It is the sense that America is not uniquely moral or somehow God’s only elect. The Persian Gulf War tried to recover that lost sense in the

American imaginary, and perhaps for a brief period in the early ‘90s it did. But with

Saddam maintaining a secure grip on power through the ‘90s and the US’s Iraqi policy appearing to be more obsessive than rational as the decade progressed, perhaps it was not a coincidence that the Gulf War appeared as a reassuring theme replayed in 1996’s highest box office film Independence Day (see Wegner).35

Indeed, it is not a coincidence that the late ‘90s saw a rebirth of interest in WWII—

as if to unconsciously reinforce the message that the US is the good guy. Consider

35 In this light, it is not a coincidence that Saddam plays a reassuring enemy in the post-9/11 years. At a time of American vulnerability, beating up on Saddam—either physically or lexically—offers a sense of superiority. Because Saddam did not simply play villain in both Bushes’ presidential narrative but actually does happen to be a vicious dictator, the PR aim is to make the US look like the hero by extension. None of this commentary means to ignore the realpolitik reasons for war in Iraq, namely the institution of a US- toady state in the center of the world’s most important crude reserves.

Steven Spielberg’s schmaltzy Saving Private Ryan, followed just a few years later by

Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor extravaganza; a heavily promoted movement to fund a

WWII memorial to be built right in the middle of that historical center of protest, the mall

in Washington DC; and the most fawning tribute, Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest

Generation WWII even arises metaphorically in The Phantom Menace, the largest box

office film of ’99. Episode One of the Star Wars saga, it presents a racist restaging of

WWII with treacherous Asian-looking aliens; defenseless people of Queen Amadala’s territory whose capital looks much like Venice, Italy; an evil Fuhrer-like Emperor who apparently is manipulating the Queen; British-accented white knights of an older regime; and an adventurous American-accented boy who stumbles into the climactic battle after it

36 has started and wins it.

What these tributes gloss over is the fact that it was this “greatest generation” that

led the US into the war in Vietnam in which its children were forced to fight, and it was

the greatest generation that posed the greatest threat to the world by enabling the

proliferation of nuclear arsenals and supporting imperialist actions in both overt and covert operations before and after Vietnam, operations which armed Saddam Hussein and trained Osama bin Laden. Nevertheless, what these WWII-generation tributes highlight is the sense of American exceptionalism, a sense that got its greatest post-Gulf War boost with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

In this light, it should strikes us as no coincidence that the 9/11 attacks were frequently compared to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, a comparison that

36 Where the dim, Jamaican-accented, dread-locked Jar Jar Binks fits in is certainly debatable. Since the WWII years were among Classic Hollywood’s last, we might say he recaptures that era’s racist stereotype of the silly black man who provides comic relief through his ineptitude and fear.

75 ideologically reinforces the role of the US as innocent victim—if such reinforcement was even needed in the popular consciousness. But, of course, the differences between the events is key. Japan was a nation. Al Qaeda is obviously not; its identity is very much supranational. And though al Qaeda’s attack on the Pentagon may have resembled

Japan’s attack in that it was directed at a central and potentially crippling US military target, the planes crashing into the World Trade Center targeted much more than the

United States. Given that the WTC attacks that were the most fatal, the most dramatic, and represented unfinished business for al Qaeda terrorists (recalling the 1993 attempt connected to Omar Abdel-Rahman to take down the WTC), we have to see those attacks as particularly meaningful and emblematic. When the planes struck the towers, they were attacking more than the US; they attacked Western neo-liberal capitalism itself.

Which leads to the central question: what are the parameters of the relationship between

Western neo-liberal capitalism and the US state?

For Joseba Gabilondo, the attacks on the WTC have led to the articulation of a unique North American, neo-liberal hegemony. Indeed, he argues, “bin Laden has become the condition of possibility that holds the global capitalist system together to the point that as a result of his action, ‘we all now have become global capitalists.’ We are now ‘subjects’ of the new global symbolic order managed by North American politics”

(61).

In other words, the attack on the twin towers has opened up a new chapter of the neo-liberal hegemony of the US. Gabilondo argues that the terrorist attack of 9/11 initiates the US into a “New History” (69). Seeing the US in this way helps end the End- of-History rhetoric. And more importantly, it also challenges the postmodern discourse

of ahistoricity which connects to subject fragmentation and other postmodern syndromes.

And in this return to historical awareness, the US has interpellated the non-Muslim-

fundamentalist world. Within the Muslim fundamentalist sphere, Osama bin Laden has

assumed the interpellating position. And whereas in a national era, political formations

tend to follow the parameters of nation states—even when attempting to be super-

national like the United Nations—the global regimes of North American capitalism and

Muslim fundamentalism operate beyond the old borders. And any attempt to strongly

oppose those operations gets circumscribed in the discourse by one or the other

position—as if there were only two options.

In the post-9/11 ideologies, “political antagonism is regulated by global capitalism

through the referent/empty signifier of ‘The World’” (Gabilondo 62). Thus, some of

“The World’s” powers, especially Russia, India, Pakistan, and of course the US, are using

the label “Islamic fundamentalism” to justify quelling domestic or neighborhood

challenges to their hegemony. As Michael Mann points out, in Chechnya, for instance,

this tactic has turned what is actually a secular separatist movement into an Islamic one

(58).

This positioning takes an interesting twist when we return to the case of Saddam

Hussein and the noteworthy evolution of old Gulf War enemies into post-9/11 allies in an

Islamic unity rising out of the new, but in no way balanced, polarity. George W. Bush himself has articulated a version of this positioning when referring to an “Axis of Evil” that places Iraq, Iran, and (odd man out) North Korea in some kind of terror clique. This

Axis only remotely makes sense within the US’s post-9/11 ideological framework. In this ideology, Saddam Hussein, who was the enemy of both the US and bin Laden during

the Gulf War and who has been the enemy of Iran ever since he tried to invade it in the

1980s, becomes one of the symbols of an Arab unity, which is all the stranger because it includes Iran—a largely Persian rather than Arab country. None of this history seems to matter, as Saddam is positioned, and positions himself, as another line in the sand between the US hegemony and an Arab oppositionality. Like bin Laden, Saddam strengthens his strategic standing by embodying all resistance to the US, just as the US uses him as a means to shore up its self-appointed title as global “protector of freedom.”

These representations of the US and Saddam are mobilized by the film we are studying here. In Air Force One, Saddam rears his unpopular head, this time to challenge the US’s military blockade of Iraq. In response, the President directs a few barbs at his nemesis and then orders an aircraft carrier group into the region. The scene, placed in the beginning of the film to foreground the President’s decisiveness and authority, lasts all of three minutes, but it is a central strategy for establishing the film’s president as presidential. It reinforces the role of North American/global ideology constructed for/by the US. This is the position of world cop, a title which legitimates the US’s exercise of violence, which in turn re-authorizes its role as world cop, which in turn reauthorizes its use of violence. Many ‘90s Hollywood blockbusters took for granted that US role, but

Air Force One foregrounds it making it a central narrative point and one we will examine here.

“A State of Permanent Exception and Police Action”

Harrison Ford, the most successful actor in Hollywood history in terms of his films’ box office, stars as firm but caring president of the United States James Marshall who must save the passengers of Air Force One, especially his family, from hijackers who have commandeered the presidential plane. The hijackers, described as “Russian

ultra nationalists,” capture the first family and the president’s staff (they had hoped to

take the president, but he seems to have escaped from the plane). They aim to force the

US government to obtain the release of General Radek, the ruler of Kazakhstan who was

abducted and turned over to the Russian government by US special forces deployed by

President Marshall. What the hijackers do not know is that the president actually remains

on the plane and aided by his military training—he was a decorated Vietnam war vet—

kills the hijackers one by one until he secures the airplane, ends the threat from the

nationalist forces in Russia, and makes Eastern Europe safe for liberal-capitalist

democracy.

The enemies here are nationalists who oppose the forces of globalization. They are somehow involved in communist genocidal ethnic cleansing, though the details remain sketchy. But creating General Radek as an amalgam of genocidal Yugoslav Slobodan

Milosovic and post-Soviet Russian Communist presidential candidate Vladimir

Zhirinovsky enables the film to promote the ideal of a liberal democratic world united

under the leadership of a beneficent and interventionist United States.

The logic underlying the narrative is given in the President’s emotional opening speech at a Russian celebration honoring him for his action against Radek:

Radek’s regime murdered over 200,000 men, women, and children, and we watched it on TV. We let it happen. People were being slaughtered for over a year. We issued economic sanctions and hid behind the rhetoric of diplomacy. How dare we? The dead remember. Real peace is not just the absence of conflict; it is the presence of justice. Tonight, I come to you with a pledge to change America’s policy. Never again will I allow our political self interest to deter us from doing what we know to be morally right. Atrocity and terror are not political weapons. And to those who will use them, your day is over. We will never negotiate. We will no longer tolerate, and we will no longer be afraid. It’s your turn to be afraid.

Here the President outlines his political philosophy: self interest is positioned as a

binary opposite of morality, a traditional moral stance. However, where as in the

previous era the hegemonic understanding of nationalism saw it as a (moral) sign of

fellow-feeling and unselfish concern, the New World Order’s hegemonic understanding

of nationalism sees it as a kind of (immoral) self interest. It represents an unwillingness to cooperate in the global plan.

In order for globalization’s logic to work, we must begin to believe at some level that strict adherence to national sovereignty will lead to violence and privation—at least outside the US. Hence the President’s promise to militarily overturn any regime that uses terror to further its national interest. Empire has made the violation of state sovereignty under the banner of humanitarianism a standard practice.

Today, military and moral interventions are commonplace and frequently led by the

US with or without allied support, while any number of supranational subjects intervene under the banner of superior ethical human principles. Hardt and Negri explain that “a permanent state of emergency and exception justified by the appeal to essential values of justice” stand behind these interventions (18). Certainly, sheer power backs the right of police, but the US and company use universal values to legitimate the police function.37

In committing the US to the role of global judge, jury, and executioner, Air Force

One’s President Marshall represents contemporary international politics, whose guiding

principles are often enough “what we know to be morally right.” Who this “we” is and

what constitutes “moral rightness” are questions the powerful answer for both themselves

37 In a world of lawyers without borders, Belgium has outpaced all by passing a universal jurisdiction law allowing Belgian courts to prosecute crimes against humanity even if they were not committed in Belgium, on Belgians, or by Belgians.

80 and the world. The effect is to legitimate force based on “a state of permanent exception and police action” (Empire 38). Because of this rhetoric of “morality,” compromise and negotiation, the usual channels of politics, are increasingly seen as suspect and morally incoherent.

The death of the film’s National Security Advisor, Jack Dougherty, provides a case study of this new moral regime. We first meet him as he asks the Chief of Staff why the president is speaking off the cuff instead of sticking to the prescribed speech and the prescribed game plan. Later he scolds the president for this “Be Afraid” speech (as the film terms it); Dougherty worries that the US’s allies will not appreciate the president’s unilateral promise of invasion. In his last on-screen appearance Dougherty dies as the first hostage shot by the hijackers; he had offered himself as a mediator and received a bullet for his trouble. As chief hijacker Egor Korshunov (Gary Oldman) explains to the

White House as they are bargaining for the hostages’ release, “He was a very good negotiator. He bought you another half hour.” Of course, losing Dougherty is not such a great tragedy. He is presented as a creep from the beginning, and his final speech in which he denigrates the vice-president, played sympathetically by Glenn Close, does not endear him to anyone. Indeed, as the voice of political caution he also acts as a wet blanket on the President’s bold if autocratic initiative. But most damningly, as National

Security Advisor he is a Cold War holdover, his position a product of the Cold War mentality and its bi-polar politics. The irony of the current regime is that Empire’s new economic/political arrangements have led to decreasing national sovereignty and yet has also freed the US to act militarily in ways it was not always free to act during the Cold

War. The paradox here is that in a post-national time, the United States emerges as a

uniquely powerful national force.

The US carried into the globalization era a military advantage from its Cold War

days. It was the only Cold War superpower left. But Hardt and Negri point to a more

significant advantage the US enjoys. They cite Thomas Jefferson to support their claim

that the US Constitution is the one best suited for Empire: “the US Constitutional project

is constructed on the model of rearticulating an open space and reinventing incessantly

diverse and singular relations in networks across the unbounded terrain” (182). In other

words, the US’s Westward expansion modeled capitalism’s later global expansion. This

rule is not imperialistic; imperialism takes land to close it off from rival powers as much

as to exploit it and its people. Empire takes the land, opens it, and becomes part of it so

the differences between geographic areas begin to disappear.

Certainly, the call of “manifest destiny” was manifested in blood and horror; today’s globalized version of it is also. But Empire, following the US model, does not simply conquer land and subjugate people. ‘“Divide and conquer’ is thus not really the correct formulation of imperial [as opposed to imperialist] strategy. More often than not,

Empire does not create division but rather recognizes existing or potential differences, celebrates them, and manages them within a general economy of command” (Hardt and

Negri 201). Thus, nationalism and ethnic attachments do not easily fit into globalization’s celebration of difference.

Nevertheless, Empire’s new sovereignty arrangements have not been able to take the place of national feeling. Nationalism continues to define a people, even as it remains indefinable. As Renata Salecl explains, “The nation is an element in us that is ‘more than

ourselves.’” It is part of the fantasy structure that “gives consistency to what we call

‘reality,’” and thereby “conceals the ultimate inconsistency of society” (15). In short, it

attempts to fill the emptiness of that social reality.

But in Air Force One, as in the ruling ideology of globalization, nationalism is

presented as increasingly anachronistic. Instead, the film offers US-led interventionism

as compensation for the growing ideological illegitimacy of nationalism. Thus, as

Russian President Petrov introduces US President Marshall, the Russian describes his

American counterpart as “my friend” and claims that the raid on Radek’s headquarters

was conducted by US and Russian forces though we see no evidence of Russian

involvement at all. After Marshall’s motorcade speeds from the ceremony honoring him

toward the Moscow airport and the awaiting Air Force One, police hold back screaming

throngs of flag-waving Russian fans of the President. This display of adulation urges us

to see him as a new kind of “national” hero, one who protects other nations’ interests for the betterment of the global community, a kind of (post)nationalism that keeps with the dominant ideology of the New World Order.

Unlike the classic film theme of the reluctant leader who takes up the sheriff’s badge or gun after spending much of the film avoiding it (e.g. Destry, Tin Star, Key

Largo), President Marshall (arguably the personification of the US) willingly sports the global sheriff’s badge. The film entices its audience with a seductive and popularly satisfying vision of a resolute US guided by a firm, even inflexible commander-in-chief.38

38This trope of the benevolent dictator appears in other films as well. Gabriel Over the White House (1933) offers perhaps the oddest example of the theme. But unlike Gabriel’s steadfast leader who was literally the handmaid of God himself, President Marshall compromises all his single-minded idealism to save his daughter. For an interesting discussion of Hollywood’s depictions of presidents in the 1990s, see Thomas Dougherty’s “Movie Star Presidents.”

The popularity of the image of such a strong leader may well premise a fundamental skepticism about the chances of contemporary democracy to successfully operate in the expected channels of negotiation, compromise, and struggle; that is, of politics.

Certainly, the President’s opening speech reflects that skepticism as he promises never to negotiate and never to compromise when the stakes involve what he sees as intolerable infractions—even if it is not exactly in the national interest to do so. Such a promise certainly renders self-interest a binary opposite of morality (as mentioned above), but it also positions negotiation as a kind of antithesis of morality as well. Given this kind of attachment to such undemocratic, non-liberal rule, we may well conclude that the fantasy of the strong leader reflects some subterranean desire. The strong leader may, as Zizek posits, come to power with the promise of regulating the excess that is the core of capitalism. This desire then places the audience in a conflicted position, for the promise of a strong US leader taps into a desire to control capitalism’s excess, but the US is the embodiment of that excess. The President as the personification of the US is put in the highly untenable position as both the problem and the cure. The answer that globalization’s (and the film’s) logic provides is to position US nationalism as global post-nationalism.

Globalization’s “winners,” those people who benefit from the status quo, do not have to sacrifice much in sacrificing what nationalism offers—that “element in us that is more than ourselves.” This is especially true for two groups. Most obvious are the wealthy in the industrial countries who have benefited from their position at the top of

Empire’s power structure and globalized economic regime—even as that economic regime has moved much of its production outside their particular homelands. The less

84 obvious beneficiaries cannot really be considered globalization’s winners except that they have taken advantage of globalization’s opportunities for cross-border communication and action. These are neo-liberalism’s dissenters throughout the world, especially activist and religious groups including Islamic fundamentalists, who have used globalization’s technological advances to unite across old boundaries.

Recall Salecl’s argument—“It is precisely the homeland that fills out the empty place of the nation in the symbolic structure of society. The homeland is the fantasy structure, the scenario, through which society perceives itself as a homogeneous entity.”

If she is correct, then with a loosening economic or cultural tie to the homeland, many find a decreasing need to achieve self definition through the nation. But for globalization’s “losers” and their sympathizers both in the US and throughout the world, the new post-national arrangement may well require a real sacrifice of belief and identity structures. For these people the film offers another compensation—the family. Thus, we see that President Marshall sacrifices everything in his power—his new policy, US foreign policy in general, even, potentially, the lives of hundreds of thousands of

Russians, in order to save his wife and daughter. The family here is the source of fullness, the other element in us that is “more than ourselves,” that is positioned against the larger and presumably illegitimate solidarity of political-economic struggle represented by the hijackers. Indeed, from his first speech, the president consistently moves beyond class or national loyalty. The film offers us solidarity either in the nuclear family or in all humanity, under the direction of global capital. What is worth noting here is that the nation has traditionally been figured in terms of the family (see McClintock and Kadiyoti). Even the term “first family” to represent the US president’s spouse and

85 children reinforces the familial figuration. To now position the family against the national cause signals an important ideological shift.

For their part, the hijackers, as represented by Korshunov, use familial language to express desires invalidated by globalization’s logic—that is, for a sovereign and socialist homeland: “When Mother Russia becomes one great nation again, when the capitalists are dragged from the Kremlin and shot in the street, when our enemies run and hide in fear at the mention of our name and America begs our forgiveness, on that great day of deliverance, you will know what I want.” The hijackers voice their desires in familiar (in the senses of both “familial” and “common”) language; they want to restore “Mother

Russia.” But couched in hyperbolic and excessively violent rhetoric, their traditionally sympathetic message becomes lost. But when we consider these desires in light of the post-Cold War Russian political milieu (IMF-controlled economic policy, privatization without protections for consumers and pensioners, entrenchment of organized crime, elimination of protections for free speech and media, etc.) many in the Western audience might well sympathize with the objections to Russian status quo. However, with the hijackers serving as the film’s only representation of resistance to Russian oppression, objections to globalized liberal capitalism appear fanatical, not to mention hopelessly old- fashioned. And the film gives nationalism, perhaps the most threatening roadblock to globalization, equally harsh treatment. Introducing the ethnic cleansing element to

Radek’s regime compromises the sympathy the audience may have with the hijackers’ nationalist sentiment and by unconscious extension with nationalism itself. For the film metaphorically connects nationalism to genocide such that Empire emerges as the most humane and sensible form of sovereignty. And because the film offers only two

86 alternatives—either the hijackers’ nationalism or the president’s militaristic globalization—the audience is asked to believe those are the only two alternatives.

Given the film’s tremendous success domestically and abroad, may we assume people throughout the world enjoy watching the workings of Empire, under the guidance of the US, as personified by its strong leader, President Marshall? Or perhaps part of the appeal comes from just seeing people like the Russian nationalist terrorists who not only express desires that are so out-of-bounds but who act on these desires by capturing the

US ship of state in the figure of Air Force One. Indeed, the film indulges their forbidden perspectives by offering Korshunov the film’s most acutely trenchant lines. Thus, after he kills Deputy Press Secretary Melanie Mitchell and the First Lady admonishes him for shooting an unarmed woman, he retorts: “You who murdered 100,000 Iraqis to save a nickel on a gallon of gas are going to lecture me about the rules of war? Don’t!”

In such brief flashes, the film indulges the rebels’ new form of rule which is the fulfillment of the old dream to unite the nation in fraternity and equality. That this form of rule is represented as evil and terrorist, especially with the portrayal of the hijackers’ brutal murder of Melanie Mitchell, takes away most but perhaps not all the luster of this alternative regime—one that gives play to commonly held impulses for attachment to a cause, for feeling so deep-seated that one willingly risks and takes life for it.

But neo-liberal globalization requires an attitude as flexible as its production schemes. Indeed, according to Zizek, what emerges is a fear of ‘“excessive’ identification”: “[T]he enemy is the ‘fanatic’ who ‘over identifies’ instead of maintaining a proper distance toward the dispersed plurality of subject-positions” (216). Today, it seems as if

Good qua unyielding ethical attitude, the readiness to risk all rather than compromise one’s sense of justice, and of Evil qua opportunist giving way under the pressure of circumstances, is inverted and thus attains its hidden truth. Today, ‘fanaticism,’ any readiness to put everything at stake, is as such suspicious, which is why a proper ethical attitude survives only in the guise of ‘radical Evil.’ (Zizek 219)

It is in this light that the resistance of particular industries or governments to free trade, the unwillingness of some states to give up public ownership of industries or utilities, and the protection of national culture industries becomes figured as dangerous and fanatical by neo-liberal ideology. It is also in this light that we can return to the question of state-sponsored film and nationalist protection of film industries. From the

perspective of NWO ideology, France is to cultural free trade as the film’s Russian

terrorists are to globalization: both are represented as excessive and reactionary; most

importantly and paradoxically, both are figured as anti-American, which in the NWO

ideology means they are damaging to all—including the countries such protectionism

aims to—well—protect.

Of course, the President Marshall’s “Be Afraid” speech could itself constitute an

instance of fanaticism and terroristic doggedness. If the US will never negotiate, the US

is itself broaching upon a policy of excessive identification. Thus, when the terrorists

force the President to choose between compromise and the death of his daughter, he picks

his daughter’s life. To stick to his own policy would be fanatical. And as Korshunov

says, sacrificing his family for his beliefs “would be such bad politics.” Indeed, these

hijackers demonstrate repeatedly that it is they who will not negotiate, they who will not

be afraid. The film thus indulges its audience’s un-Empirial desire for principle and then

undermines it. The hijackers are left to serve as the repository for these excessive

feelings. Thus, the film transfers to these nationalists what nationalism transfers to the

ethnic other: excess.

Hollywood and History

Outside the scope of the diegesis but in between nationalism and globalization are

the victims of the Russians’ violence and the President’s effort to save his family. These

victims are not as lucky as the first family and especially the first daughter, Alice. In

fact, few people in the world are. After all, the President is willing to negotiate for her

life—even if it means risking the lives of hundreds of thousands of others who may die in

a Russian power struggle and utterly compromising his own uncompromising promise

never to negotiate with terrorists. Sweet-faced, innocent, and blossoming into

adolescence Alice Marshall may well be the most important character in the film when

read allegorically. For the activity of nation building has traditionally utilized the figure

of “Woman” as a trope for the nation. Indeed, the editors of Between Women and Nation

posit the relationship between “Woman” and nation in Foucauldian terms as a site of

biopower negating the historical and contingent qualities of both women and nations (see

Alarcon, et al). If we see the President as a personification of the US and captain of the ship of state (even to the point where he actually pilots Air Force One), then we can make the case that Alice as his only inheritor and as a woman (especially as a young one) may also be a figure for the US, or better, for the American people. From this perspective, then, we can see all the sacrifices made on her behalf as particularly meaningful. Indeed, it is a grim reminder of the tremendous advantages Americans as a whole enjoy over much of the world’s people. Given that the Russian president, Petrov, agrees to release

Radek for Alice (at the US President’s request, of course), we see the sacrifices the weak of the world are required to make in the interests of the powerful. From this allegorical

perspective, the extent to which the Marshalls try to protect their daughter by not

allowing her to visit the refugee camps teeming with escapees of Radek’s rein of

genocide is meaningful. Like many Americans, Alice’s exposure to the world is

limited—even though the fate of that world meshes directly with her own.39 And when

she is confronted with another perspective besides the pro-American, she retreats to the

shelter of comfortable ideologies. Thus, when she asks the hijacker, Korshunov, why he

killed Jack Dougherty, he explains his values to her:

Korshunov: [I kill] because I believe. And when I shoot this man, I know in that instant how deep was my belief. That I would turn my back on God Himself for Mother Russia. My doubts, my fears, my own private morality. It dissolve in this moment for this love. You know, your father, he has also killed. Is he a bad man?

Alice: That’s not true.

Korshunov: Why? Because he does it in a tuxedo with a telephone call and a smart bomb?

Alice: You are a monster. And my father is a great man. You’re nothing like my father.

Little Alice cannot answer his argument; she can only retreat into platitudes. But

considering the special place she enjoys in the first family, it is not in her best interest to

question status quo. In the end, her survival depends on everyone’s valuing her life over

the existence of all Russians whose lives may be ended or turned upside down by

Radek’s release. And for the President to remain a New World Order hero, he has to

place more value on her life as well. He cannot be true to the very policy that made him

seem so heroic in the first place.

The reasoning behind President Marshall’s “Be Afraid” speech follows the logic of

Empire; it justifies breaches of national sovereignty under the banner of human rights.

39 Tellingly, the first time George W. Bush visited Europe was as president of the US.

However, in the end, we find that the human rights of some are violated for those of

others to be upheld. But whose rights are violable and what determines who will be

saved and who will be sacrificed? The film tells us the answer. The further away one is

from the US—personified in the film by the President—the more expendable one

becomes. For the very valuable, the US willingly uses its considerable influence. But to

be worth the effort requires either a lot of luck or a lot of struggle. Thus, in the film’s

final action sequence—the fight to get off Air Force One before it crashes into the sea—

we see the film and Empire’s ideological priorities. Alice leaves the plane first; as the

President’s daughter and the embodiment of the American people, she enjoys a special

position that she just happened to be born into. The Chief of Staff is allowed to leave

because he took a bullet for the president. But in the end when time runs out and only

one more person may get off Air Force One, that is when the tough decision needs to be

made because people who played by the rules and made the right sacrifices for the

president nevertheless will have to go down with the ship if the president is going to

make it off Air Force One.

In the end, the President just barely makes it off the plane, and when he abandons the crashing Air Force One, the rescue plane changes its call sign; it declares itself the new Air Force One. This change functions like the proclamation upon the death of a monarch: “The King is dead. Long live the King.” Changing the rescue plane’s name signifies the perpetuation of power: what used to be the ship of state may be at the bottom of the ocean, but the power that ship represented remains securely in the air for it is adaptable to all conditions. Indeed, the US must be as flexible as the post-Fordist global economic regime that it has embraced. But like Alice, many Americans do not fully

91 understand what enables this flexibility: fear. That is flexibility’s other side: fear of joblessness, fear of poverty, fear of abandonment. Indeed, the history of capitalism has always included people too afraid to challenge the structure because they worry about the deliriousness of living in freedom from necessity. From this perspective, the President’s

“Be Afraid” speech seems doubly meaningful. He explicitly addresses it to criminals against humanity, but it may be implicitly directed toward anyone who opposes liberal capitalism’s globalized governance. It’s a warning to the subjects of Empire that the alternatives to the delicate status quo will be much worse, and it’s an admonition that the

US is the final arbiter of who is entitled to exercise violence.

Post-9/11, this attitude towards violence becomes even more explicit, so that any political violence is equated with terrorism and thus allied with Islamic fundamentalism.

What is interesting here is that in second Persian Gulf War, polls showed that supporters of the US attack thought there was some connection between Saddam and Osama, even though the two, in fact, have almost no connection and support very different regimes.

For its part, Air Force One was made before 9/11, before terrorism became synonymous with Islamic fundamentalism in the North American/global ideology

(though it is worth noting that both the media and authorities initially suspected Islamic terrorists were responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing). Indeed, in selecting Russian nationalists, the film got the object of its audiences’ fear of terrorism completely wrong.

But from the global ideological perspective, in fact, the film got it exactly right. For bin

Laden may be the big Other of North American hegemony (which includes

Hollywood)—just as the US is the sworn enemy of al Qaeda—but from a meta-

92 perspective, nationalism is the big Other of both US dominated globalization and al

Qaeda. Both structurally require a supranational context to operate.

Aligning Hollywood (through US hegemony) with Islamic fundamentalism makes for an ironic twist for many reasons including Hollywood’s active participation in the war effort. Indeed, in a November 11, 2001 meeting that senior Bush advisor Karl Rove held with high-level Hollywood executives, Rove offered several points that the White House would like stressed in films and TV shows such as, the war is against terrorism and evil, not Islam; Americans should heed the call to national service and support the troops; and the war is a global undertaking. The collaboration between government and cultural producers conjured up images of Hollywood propaganda films of WWII, but Rove reassured his audience that instead of propaganda, the Bush administration only wants the narrative of the war effort to be told with “accuracy and honesty.”

Entertainment Weekly covered the event proclaiming “Hollywood Marches Toward a New Patriotism.” In another article, the magazine asked Hollywood’s elite to weigh in on the effects of September 11, 2001 on the industry. Randall Wallace, the writer and director of We Were Soldiers, stated: “Immediately afterwards a lot of people were scared. But that time has passed. I don’t think there’ll be a long-drawn-out period of mourning in movies. Americans will be Americans.”

What does this mean: “Americans will be Americans”? Does it mean that

Americans are resilient people who will rebound from the terrorist strikes? Or does it mean that Americans suffer from such cultural amnesia that the shock of the events will soon be or already is forgotten? To frame this question in its largest terms, what is the relationship between the cinematic image and historical consciousness?

Bill Nichols argues that historical consciousness requires the spectator’s

recognition of the double status of moving images that are present referring to events

which are past. He argues, “This formulation involves viewing the present moment of a

film as we relate to past moments such that our present becomes past, or prologue, to a common future which through this very process we may bring into being.” So what has been brought into being by watching terrorist violence?

The repeated presentation of the Twin Towers collapsing made the North American individual the “ideological subject of globalization and late capitalism.” Though

Gabilondo sees this entry into history as a result of 9/11, I have to ask if in fact the cinematic representation of what we can call national violence—such as the hijacking of the presidential airplane—had already begun the work of creating the North American ideological subject of globalization.

Watching violence as it happens creates a unique kind of trauma both in viewers qua individuals and in the collective US consciousness; certainly 9/11 is an example of that. But was the violence of 9/11 a truly unprecedented event? Did watching al Qaeda’s attack on the US really make the American individual the subject of history and object of interpellation by the media? Or had the cinematic representation of national begun the work of creating the North American ideological subject of globalization? If we take seriously this suggestion, then we may reconsider the common reaction to the footage of the crashes into and the collapse of the twin towers: “It seemed like a movie.” On a basic level, that reaction expresses a feeling of unreality. But on another level perhaps that

“it’s-like-a-movie reaction” demonstrates that the North-American subject has felt the eyes of the world for sometime, has some familiarity with being the object of violence

and the interpellated subject of the media—even if both come in the form of blockbuster

film. In short, Hollywood has prepared the way for the American subject’s entry into

history.

From another perspective, perhaps the victimization that Hollywood films depicted in the first decade of the globalization era found its opposition in Hollywood-Washington political-economic practice. Consider Thomas Elsaesser’s observation that “the only other kind of product that costs as much—and on the scale of basic human necessities is as frivolous as a [blockbuster]—is an assault helicopter” (17). This comparison suggests a key point; for Elsaesser this is a statement of US economic priorities and excesses, but for us, the comparison gets at another conclusion: blockbusters are part of the US national defense. To borrow a phrase from that drolly conspiratorial commentator on US culture, The X-Files, we are dealing with the “military-industrial-entertainment complex.”

Finally, what’s important to note here is that the events of 9/11 not only brought death and destruction to the US but also let the US be a superpower again by its bringing death and destruction to others. This is not to say that US was less than a superpower before. But being selected to receive such horror and then later embracing the role of furious post-9/11 avenger (even bringing that vengeance to people like Saddam who had nothing to do with 9/11), re-certified its superpower status. In this light, we can consider

Air Force One’s conclusion. As the sun rises over the ocean in the film’s final shot, we are told that it’s Reagan’s morning in America again, and the US will maintain its hold on power.

CHAPTER 4 LEARNING FROM NEW WORLD ORDER LAS VEGAS: THE SOUTH AND POST- REGIONALISM, POSTMODERNISM AND GLOBALIZATION

Oscar Goodman, a former lawyer to such mob clients as Meyer Lansky and

Anthony Spilotro and current mayor of Las Vegas has said of his city, “Las Vegas is either the most unreal place in the world or the most real place.” Trite as the statement is—maybe because it is so trite—the mayor’s description captures one of the many paradoxes of Las Vegas.

Considering these paradoxes in the context of this dissertation, the most important one centers on the very legitimacy of the goal of this chapter: that is, to test the erosion of both regionalism and the postmodern by studying a seminal site for postmodern theory,

Las Vegas, and looking at it within a wholly new regional perspective, as a Southern city.

I posit Las Vegas as a focal point of a new kind of South—one that embodies the South in both its U.S. framework and in the global context—while also arguing that the separations between the South and the North are evaporating in the wake of globalization.

Thus, “the South” exists in “the North” just as surely as “the North” exists in “the South.”

As Hardt and Negri argue it “is not that there are no longer dominant and subordinate regions of the world but rather that their spatial relation has changed, that they are now one within the other; and they continue to become more so. The internalization of the

‘outside’ seems to us the fundamental characteristic of the becoming of imperial globalization” (Hardt and Negri “Adventures” 241). Differences which seemed so

95 96 intractable in earlier times are proving no longer to be so. For both in the national and the global contexts, the differences between regions are ones of quantity, not of kind.

Putting it differently, the disparities that exist do not fall along borders of region or nation, but along protean lines that cross-cut the old divisions. The decline of nation- state sovereignty and the dissolution of the Cold War international arrangements in the wake of what George Bush called the New World Order, bring with them the end of the division of the globe into a First World of liberal capitalism, a Second World of socialist economies closed off to capitalism, and a Third World that the other two Worlds saw as the frontier. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire summarizes this contemporary situation:

If the First World and the Third World, center and periphery, North and South were ever really separated along national lines, today they clearly infuse one another, distributing inequalities and barriers along multiple and fractured lines. This is not to say that the United States and Brazil, Britain and India are now identical territories in terms of capitalist production and circulation, but rather that between them are no differences of nature, only differences of degree. The various nations and regions contain different proportions of what was thought of as First World and Third, center and periphery, North and South. (335)

It is not that these divisions and vast inequalities have been eliminated; it is that these vast inequalities do not fall along the codified lines. We can see these inequalities by tracing the well-worn trails marked by the movements of the world’s people. And those, more often than not, shift with the movements of global economics.40

Yet, having said all this, we still speak meaningfully of “the South”: we often take the term for granted because it remains hugely useful and descriptive. Indeed, we speak

40 As these lines prove increasingly fluid—disconcertingly so to those whose economic position is threatened by the shifting borders—we see the growth of structures aiming to solidify the borders, especially the rise of surveillance and the growth of what Mike Davis has famously called fortress architecture. Both of these trends are hugely present in Las Vegas as we see in both the “eye-in-sky” panoptic surveillance for which Vegas’s casinos are legend and in the unmatched growth of gated communities in the city’s suburbs.

97 meaningfully of regions in general. In Susan Hegeman’s terms, they have traditionally

“served multiple political and ideological ends” by offering “’folk’ roots to complex social issues and indeed to social-scientific inquiry itself” (Patterns 130). The advantage of regionalism is in its closing off of total perspectives thus enabling a very close and often populist look at a limited area; its disadvantage of course is in its closing off of total perspectives thus enabling only a very close and often populist look at a limited area.

When we consider the US South, we are bringing in a region with very identifiable traditions: agrarianism and idealized gentility indelibly marked by a legacy of slavery and racism, scarred by entrenched poverty. When we consider the Global South, we engage a discussion of a larger region, of course, but one circumscribed in its own way by the same forces: poverty, imperialism, and racism. Trying to negotiate the idea and ideology of “the South” within a variety of circulating discourses—including one that maintains there is no more “South”—becomes a tremendous challenge. It is one that this paper works to meet by exploring Las Vegas in relation to its population, labor history and practices, and architecture. The goals are to understand just what the South is becoming in a globalized world that challenges the whole notion of regionalism itself and, then, to make this tension between regionalism and globalization productive.41

41 A note needs to be added here about global cities since that seems to be the dominant model by which to understand the effects of globalization on urban space. The global-city concept was developed by Saskia Sassen to describe a network of cities characterized by their orientation in the world market. These cities house many company headquarters and firms specializing in corporate and financial services. They attract an abundance of professionals who are drawn to the urban, corporate energy and the excess of nightlife activities for entertainment or for out-of-office work. All together, these cities provide the management and services that coordinate the movement of capital and goods worldwide. The strongest domestic example of the global city is a financial center and media metropolis like New York, not a tourist trap like Las Vegas—despite the presence of impressive copies of New York’s skyscrapers on the Strip. However, some of the features of global cities are present in Sin City, especially the manual-labor infrastructure composed disproportionately of immigrants. Sassen sees the presence of this immigrant workforce as a key factor in the erosion of the traditional North-South global divide. As a result, the professional elite in New York may have more in common with their counterparts in Sao Paolo or Seoul than with the working class

Introducing the New Vegas

Sitting unassumingly in a desert valley in the Southwest USA, Las Vegas has become the heart of what some demographers are calling the New Sunbelt as retirees fleeing the colder climes of the North or the hotter housing markets of the West mix with down and out workers hoping to escape the economic stagnation that pervades service employment in high-cost-of-living regions such as the Northeast and California. These migrants are joined by the surging population of Latino immigrants who have played a key role in turning the region into what many demographers are calling the “New

Detroit”—that is, they have helped make the region an organized labor stronghold. Just as (Old) Detroit—the archetypal Rust Belt metropolis—lost significant numbers of its population in the last decades of the twentieth-century to the (Old) Sunbelt districts of

Texas, Florida, and California, the Old Sunbelt is actually losing some of its population to the New Detroit. Thus, in the twenty-first century, Vegas has become the synthesis of two seeming antitheses: it is the New Sunbelt and the New Detroit.

Making such a synthesis possible are the casinos of Las Vegas Boulevard, otherwise known as the Strip. The story of Las Vegas is inextricably bound to the story of the Strip. Its casinos spur the area’s unprecedented growth by providing jobs for working people while creating a backdrop of activity for the retired and others who relocate to Las Vegas Valley as a lifestyle choice. The Strip casts its long shadow across the Valley, and since 70 percent of Nevadans live in the region, the Strip dominates the entire state’s concerns.

in the South Bronx. Obviously, this chapter very much agrees with Sassen’s conclusion, but studying Las Vegas means we come to that conclusion via a different route.

But let us be precise: when we talk of the Strip we are discussing a resource located not in the city of Las Vegas but in Paradise—an unincorporated township (in other words, a tax dodge) that also houses the international airport, the convention center, and the University. Thus, Las Vegas’s most important fiscal assets are neither in Las Vegas nor subject to municipal taxation. And their development tells the story of post-Fordist globalization itself—a narrative focusing in large part on the corrosion of the Keynesian welfare state (as illustrated by the undermining of Las Vegas’s local tax base with the creation of Paradise), the rise of the service economy, and the world-wide growth in the tourism industry. Indeed, speaking very loosely, Nevada has been “post-Fordist” for years: its economy has revolved around tourism since the 1930s. Never having developed a significant manufacturing base, Nevada never directly suffered deindustrialization’s effects. Today, Nevada leads the nation in service employment, service work accounting for 44 percent of all jobs versus the national average of 28 percent (Nassir). This high percentage means that work is easy to find in boom times (as few special skills are required for most service work), but that there is more economic insecurity and significant rises in poverty when the boom goes bust.42

Considering their economic profile, Nevada and Las Vegas may well provide a window onto the nation’s demographic and employment future. And whatever this social and economic future is going to look like, in Nevada it revolves—both directly and indirectly—around the Strip and its mythically proportioned casinos. While Vegas’s casino economy is a very loose metonymy of post-Fordism, we will see that Vegas’s casino architecture is a similarly loose metonymy of globalization’s post-regionalism.

42 The 1990-92 recession demonstrated that Nevada was vulnerable to such economic instability as it was only one of four states to actually suffer a significant increase in poverty (Nassir).

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Learning more from Las Vegas

In 1968, architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steve Izenour took thirteen students to Las Vegas to learn about architecture in the capital of commercial- strip culture. The resulting book project, Learning from Las Vegas, became one of the seminal texts of postmodern studies. There the authors posited that Vegas was an object lesson and a model for the future of architecture.

The authors concluded that Modern architecture failed because its focus on form produced buildings that the so-called “middle-middle class” did not like, wasted creative energy, and most tragically, cost precious dollars that could have been spent on solving social problems. They called for the implementation of “ugly and ordinary” architecture whose aesthetic appeal was not rooted in the claims to formal purity but in decoration applied to basic construction, what they called the decorated shed. That is the formula for the old Strip hotels with their excess of lights and kitschy ornaments and signs. Thus, the lesson they learned from Las Vegas was “We architects who hope for a reallocation of national resources toward social purposes must take care to lay emphasis on the purposes and their promotion rather than on the architecture that shelters them. This reorientation will call for ordinary architecture” (155).

That this reorientation would lead not to the resolution of social problems but to a postmodern shift away from social and political concerns altogether became brutally apparent in the 1980s’ abandonment of social reform and its consequent explosion of homelessness. But in those pre-Reagan-era days, Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour actually posited Vegas as a land of populist possibility, “the victory of symbols-in-space over forms-in-space in the brutal automobile landscape of great distances and high speed where the subtleties of pure architectural space can no longer be savored” (119).

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Ultimately, the authors concluded, “It is all right to decorate construction but never

construct decoration” (163).

Visiting the Las Vegas Strip today provides a provocative postscript to their architectural manifesto. Where it was once an eclectic mix of wedding chapels, gas stations with big signs, and hotels weighed down with neon, the Strip is now dominated by realistic imitation skyscrapers and live-action pirate shows; in other words, constructed decoration. Upon returning to Vegas in the ‘90s, Venturi and Scott Brown concluded with tremendous disappointment that the Strip has been “Disneyfied” (Venturi and Scott Brown 126).

Unlike the old Vegas casinos, today’s resorts no longer merely reference distant places and times; abandoning “ugly and ordinary” architecture, the new hotels literalize those places. But unlike modern architecture’s monuments, these buildings do not aspire to pure architectural form. They are gaudy and excessive and richly decorated. Indeed, they demonstrate that today’s Vegas initiates an approach that fuses the modernist focus on form with the postmodern preference for decoration thereby eliminating the dichotomy between the two. I call this fusion architecture architainment, and it centers mostly on the themed, round-the-clock concept-spaces with symbols that can, as the marketers put it, be synergistically marketed to extend the entertainment experience.

What architainment construction leaves out is regard for societal concerns. There is, of course, the ubiquitous rhetoric of job creation, but that talk is usually suspect given the kind of irresponsible use of resources, both natural and economic, that exclusive focus on job creation brings. When cities like Las Vegas focus on architainment, they usually sacrifice considerations such as environmental carrying capacity or the problems

102 associated with diverting public funds to infrastructural support and joint public-private projects. Nevertheless, many urban centers have prioritized precisely this kind of architainment development. In Vegas, we can see it in the 1990s evolution of the Strip.

Nine out of the world’s ten largest hotels are in Las Vegas, but even the “smaller”

Strip hotels tend towards the monumental, and most remain near capacity throughout the year. Called super casinos (Early), these massive hotels contradict the principles that the

Learning from Las Vegas architects found in the glitzy neon-centric Strip architecture with its “pretty”—if excessive—ornamental neon decorating basic hotel structures.

Today, the monolithic structures of the hotels themselves attract the tourists similarly to the country pavilions in EPCOT’s World Showcase.

The Venetian hotel features full-size models of the Campanile and the Doge’s

Palace, disregarding the obvious limitations of its desert location, includes a Venetian canal brimming with precious water. The Excalibur does not just hearken back to medieval Europe (say with sexed-up Maid Marion costumes for the waitresses), the casino itself is a huge castle. The New York, New York’s wings are models of the

City’s skyscrapers including the Empire State and Chrysler buildings. The Statue of

Liberty welcomes the huddled masses who can ride a Coney Island-style roller coaster— the epitome of the new, family-values orientation of many of the latest Vegas resorts.

Indeed, contemporary Las Vegas’s most celebrated developer, Steve Wynn, maintains that the new Vegas is not really about gaming but about entertainment.

Wynn has been uniquely responsible for the conversion of Las Vegas into a resort town as much as a gambling hub. In fact, the story of New World Order Vegas can be told by tracing the development of Wynn’s major properties. He developed the very first

103 super casino, the Mirage, which features a simulated rainforest environment highlighted by a massive outdoor water fountain resembling a flowing volcano that even erupts several times nightly. But Wynn’s first hotel was the Golden Nugget, a classic Fremont

Street casino originally built in 1905. The Learning from Las Vegas authors saw the

Golden Nugget as the embodiment of Vegas’s glory. If the old-style neon facades had made Vegas the apotheosis of the decorated shed, the Golden Nugget was the most decorated shed of all. But at the time Wynn bought the old casino, kitschy neon no longer lured the crowds; thus, he turned the Golden Nugget into a deluxe four-star hotel and spa with minimal outdoor lighting—in relative terms, of course. Wynn learned that attracting customers in the new era requires the promise of packaged elegance and trendy entertainment.

For Venturi and Scott Brown, the new Vegas is a rejection of the populist possibility it once represented. Instead, it is “large and mass-produced, and thought through to the last inch” to provide “a three-dimensional, theater-like experience for the pedestrian, with evocative imagery for role playing….This is a total departure from the car-oriented iconography of the Canonized Strip” (126).

Today’s visitors are not just couples looking for good odds and swell shows; they are also families hoping to entertain the kids who are legally prohibited from even entering the casinos. These families mark the central difference in today’s Las Vegas.

And the super casinos cater to them by providing outdoor shows, video arcades, IMAX movies, thrill rides, museums, and—most important among all the family entertainment activities—shopping. This new orientation points to the key factor rooting the success of architainment in general and of the new Strip in particular. It is the promise of

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fulfillment created by the easy availability of anything: in the typical super casinos drinks

are free, food is cheap, the doors never close, and no one need ever be alone (which does

not mean that no one is lonely). In the end, they offer the seduction of camaraderie; for

architainment promises affective compensation for the isolating loss of public space that

characterizes neo-liberal capitalism (see Hannigan 74-76).43 Las Vegas is, in short, the

apotheosis of neo-liberal globalization itself.

We can use the city to explore the effects of the process, enabled by the end of the

Cold War, by which capitalism manages economic relations throughout the entire globe so that worldwide social relations link in ever-more inextricable ways. This process is what many scholars call globalization, and its effect is to weaken or diminish traditional regional and national boundaries. My argument here is that the Strip’s architecture is a cartoonish de-historicized tribute to that process of de-regionalization, that process of bringing together and merging “the South” and “the North.” The Strip’s structures are monuments to a caricatured globality, one that develops exotic, fantasy notions of foreign lands out of a set of what have become rigid requirements created to induce visitors to turnover as much money as possible.44

43 In global cities, extremes of wealth and poverty have increased while the physical distance between rich and poor has decreased. This closeness, which is certainly not new, is met by a decline of public space, what Hardt and Negri call “the end of the outside” and the closing off of space that had “allowed for open and unprogrammed social interaction” (337). As explained in an earlier footnote, Las Vegas is not a global city; however, it does share some features with the global city and this shrinking public space, with a concomitant growth of architainment is a note-worthy one.

44 Almost all the hotels follow the same formula. The casino floor opens up to visitors as soon as they step through a hotel’s doors; the ubiquitous hotel towers opening space for thousands more rooms without disrupting the hotel theme too much; and the all-you-can-eat buffets and the all-you-can-stand entertainment have become as essential to the hotel experience as gambling itself.

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Living outside the Strip

The impact of the 1990s growth of Vegas’s gaming industry cannot be overstated.

This growth has provided more new job openings than any other region in the country and has led to Vegas’s becoming the fastest growing metro in the fastest growing state in the US. In the 1990s, Nevada ballooned to nearly two million people. The vast majority of those people, 1.4 million actually, live in the Las Vegas metro area, and 4000-6000 more move in every month. And within this massive expansion, Henderson, ten miles southeast of Vegas, is the fastest growing city both in the area and in the US. Increasing from 69,000 in 1990 to 202,000 at the end of 2000, the area is expected to reach what developers call “full build out” of 560,000 residents within a generation (Egan).

Henderson has been called the capital of what demographer William Frey has labeled the New Sunbelt, which includes states such as Georgia, the Carolinas, Arizona,

Colorado and of course, Nevada, as expatriates of the Old Sunbelt, mostly Californians, come to Henderson looking for relative housing bargains in the town’s many gated developments and master-planned communities (MPCs). Though the communities of

Henderson and the rest of metro Vegas are removed from the Strip’s action, they reflect the same impetus as the tourist center: the names and themes of these communities are as suggestive of some place else as are the super casinos’. The most popular themes seem to be Mediterranean or aquatic. (The unlikely confluence of desert and shores doesn’t seem to inhibit housing starts in that popular community.) Indeed, these communities actually exceed the Strip’s obsessive-compulsive use of water; we need only consider

Henderson’s Lake Las Vegas resort community which combines the Mediterranean theme with the aquatic focus all centered around a man-made 320-acre lake. But perhaps

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the region’s greatest extravagance is the omnipresent grass lawn, which accounts for the

greatest amount of water waste.

Ironically, Las Vegas was once actually associated with grass; its name is Spanish

for the meadows because the Las Vegas Valley actually was filled with trees and saltgrass

all irrigated by artesian springs. Some of that spring water once flowed at about three to

four thousand gallons a minute, but it was pumped so dry by citizens’ water-gluttony that

the ground has actually deflated where the springs once were (Ward 136). If residents

had been unable to pump water from the Colorado River, there would be no Las Vegas as

we know it today. All told, the residents of Tucson, a climatically similar city, use 160

gallons of water per day per person compared to 360 gallons in Las Vegas (Davis); that’s

more per capita than any other city in the country (Ward 133). This profligacy evinces a

population in compulsive denial of the fact that it lives in a desert!

Environmental impact has never been a prevailing concern in Las Vegas

development. In 1998 alone, some 32,000 permits were issued for new residential

housing (Moskowitz 149). Such free-wheeling growth is enabled by the ideological

banner of libertarianism by which Nevadans like to identify themselves—in explicit

denial of local economy’s decades-long dependence on federally funded Nellis Air Force

Base and the Nevada Test Site, not to mention the nearby, top secret Area 51, and public

works, especially Hoover Dam and Lake Mead.45 Typical of the regional ideology is the

45 Nevada’s connections to “big government” are long-lived and profound. The state has more land under military control than any other state in the US. Area 51, about ninety miles outside of Las Vegas, is the most notorious. That is the site for so-called “skunk works,” where top-secret aircraft have been tested since the ‘40s. These experimental machines are likely the UFOs that have made the area notorious among conspiracy theorists as much as new-age enthusiasts. In a policy in keeping with the spirit of the development of Las Vegas itself, the top-secret testing going on in this area has kept the land off-limits to any environmental oversight. On a related note, some Vegas’s hotels of the 1950s actually advertised their views of the atom-bomb tests being held in the desert as a lure to draw in tourists. Surely this short-lived nuclear tourism was a precursor of the military-industrial-entertainment complex of the globalization era.

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philosophy behind Clark County’s growth plan as explained by Jeff Harris, its director of

long-range planning: “The planning is market-driven. It hasn’t been advanced planning

for years” (quoted in Moskowitz 161).

At a practical level, this no-range planning means that development is less

concerned with environmental or traffic issues or even with the quality of the houses

themselves and primarily with what sells, and in the Vegas Valley what sells is the

assurance of safety and a sense of community. Some have speculated that this region has

more gated communities per capita than any other large urban area in the country

(Littlejohn 285).

The walls, guards, and elaborate security systems that are now a standard feature in most new Las Vegas subdivisions help persuade newcomers not only that they are safer inside an MPC but also that it’s dangerous to be on the other side. In addition to the all-important sense of security, MPCs offer ready-made pop-up communities. . . Since Las Vegas has no urban center to focus on or build out from, places like Green Valley and Summerlin [the two most important master planned communities] have created their own town centers within exclusive boundaries. (Moskowitz 160)

For its part, the city of Henderson reportedly offers more parks and recreation facilities per capita than any other city in Nevada (650 acres) while Las Vegas, with more than double Henderson’s population, actually offers fifty acres less. Such promises of old-fashioned community concern—even if they are built on a foundation of environmental disregard—are the stock in trade of the planned communities of

Henderson and the Las Vegas Valley: the land of promise for early-retiree baby boomers and young families.

It is fascinating to speculate on the reasons new residents come to “Sin City” to look for security, safety, and society. Of course, as we have seen, this fusing of qualities that once seemed oppositional has become common practice in Vegas. The residents do

108 seem possessed of a schizophrenic impulse to be near the excess embodied by the Strip, but also to be utterly safe and sheltered from it. Of course, the undertone of danger embodied in gambling makes the Strip exciting. And though the planned communities are removed from the Strip, their proximity allows them to share that air of excitement.

In essence, these residents are lured by the same qualities the super casinos use to draw visitors: communal experience in a sheltered if utterly “unnatural” environment. It is worth noting that the Las Vegas housing boom started at the very end of the 1980s, at the dawn of the super casino era on the Strip. And just as California supplies the most visitors to the Strip’s casinos, so too California has provided most of the new population, thereby working in reverse of what had been a trend throughout US history to move from the East to the West.

Typically, Vegas’s new-home buyers sold their homes for a tidy profit in the

Golden State’s hot real estate market and used the returns to buy more home for less money in one of the Valley’s many planned communities. The large scale of growth keeps prices relatively low with median housing costs by the end of the ‘90s running at

$158,000, extremely inexpensive compared to much of Southern California (Egan).

What makes this movement particularly noteworthy is that it is part of a trend most pronounced in the states of the Southwest and the Southeast and warrants the grouping of these areas under the rubric of the New Sunbelt.

What characterizes the New Sunbelt is the accelerated rate of migration this region experienced in the 1990s as new residents relocated mostly from what demographer Frey calls the Melting Pot states—New York, New Jersey, Florida, California, Texas (the last three he also labels “the Old Sunbelt”). The Southeastern New Sunbelt states attained

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most of their new residents from the Northeast, while the Southwestern New Sunbelt

drew mostly from California. But despite their different origins, these new residents are

very similar. They tend to be mostly affluent whites and younger, middle-class

suburbanites. Frey characterizes these new residents as sharing “middle-of-the-road

values with the home-grown whites” (Frey). In other words, he posits a commonality

bred through migration in the character of the Southeast and Southwest US. In the

Melting Pot states the migrants leave behind, we also find some commonalities, most

importantly the growth of the populations of Latinos and Asians. Despite the out-

migration from these states to the New Sunbelt, the Melting Pot continues to experience

net population growth because of international immigration. But as is the case with the

other features we’ve examined, in demographics too Las Vegas unites apparent

oppositions. While Henderson is the capital of the New Sunbelt, a case can be made for

North Las Vegas’s holding an equivalent position in the Melting Pot.

Outside in the Gaming Machine

The Census Bureau reports that the “Hispanic” population nationwide has grown by over 60 percent to 35.3 million; in Nevada it grew 900 percent between 1980 and

2000 to somewhere between 350,000-400,000 people. That makes up about 20 percent of the state’s total population. The epicenters of growth are the cities of Las Vegas where nearly one in four of the 478,000 residents is Latino and North Las Vegas where it is more than one in three.46 In Clark County as a whole Latinos make up 22 percent of the population. Until the 2000 census figures were released, their presence in Vegas came as a complete surprise to most everyone not connected with the city, including the US’s

46 Note, in Henderson it is one in ten.

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most important Latino-rights organizations like La Raza, which did not direct any

resources to the area until after the census data became public (Pratt).

Most of the area’s Latino residents come from Mexico either directly or indirectly

after finding border states such as California and Texas economically inhospitable.47 The

Census Bureau reports that Nevada employs more Latinos in service industries than any

other state. In general, those not working in service industries work in construction. In

Greater Las Vegas, they remain the poorest ethnic group just as they are in the country as

a whole (Dauber 100). But workers on the Strip, where the jobs are unionized, live in the

ranks of the middle class. By the end of the ‘90s, Vegas’s unionized maids earned $400

weekly, twice the salaries of maids in non-union towns and enough to live squarely in the metro’s middle class (Greenhouse).

At 40 percent, Latinos comprise the largest racial group in the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (a.k.a. HERE). Latino unionists are one of the key reasons many demographers call Vegas the “New Detroit.” The Strip’s super casinos employ 55,000 cooks, bartenders, waitresses, maids, and other service personnel who have joined HERE’s famous affiliate Culinary Workers Local 226. The Local represents fully one-third of all Vegas casino and hotel employees.48 The Culinary Workers’ strong

commitment to labor activism has in turn encouraged membership in other non-service-

47 According to the Census Bureau, Mexico is the by far the greatest source of US immigrants. Of the thirty million immigrants in the US in 2000, 7.8 million were from Mexico.

48 Surprisingly, when a group of card-game dealers asked the local to represent them, they were turned down flat—as they were when they approached the Teamsters. Since the Strip’s earliest days casino management has declared the dealers hands off, and since dealers are not really in either union’s purview, the unions felt potential benefits were not worth the risks. Finally, the only organization who would represent the dealers is the little known Transport Workers Union of America. Traditionally on the side of management during strikes, dealers have, to date, rejected the union in seven casinos and accepted it only in three (Binkley).

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sector locals such as the Carpenters Union. All told Vegas has the highest per-capita

union membership in the US. But these members aren’t necessarily simply dues payers.

The locals maintain a broad activist base, which readily mobilizes during organizing

struggles.49 Since Nevada is a right-to-work state, organization efforts are vital.50 Thus,

the rank-and-file routinely spend off-duty hours recruiting their fellow workers.

Members even voted to raise their dues by 40 percent to help pay for strike benefits

during the 1991-98 Frontier Hotel strike. That strike was a trial by fire for the union

whose numbers had been steadily diminishing through the ‘80s. Members’

perseverance—not one of the 550 strikers crossed the picket line—gained a critical

victory for the union (not to mention labor in general), providing the foundation upon

which it has built itself into the largest private-sector local in the US. Today, the Union

represents workers in 90 percent of the hotels on the Strip.

Since the 1990s, a key element in successful service union organizing drives is the

commitment of Latino members, some of whom have experienced much more bitter,

mortally dangerous organizing efforts in other countries. For their part, many (though not all) unions are rejecting the xenophobia characterizing organized labor of the recent past. US-based unions are increasingly energized by immigrant members. In the manufacturing trades where so many jobs have moved to Mexico, organized labor has determined that its efforts will be more successful if it takes it takes unionism south of the border. In this way, labor is attempting to acquire the same flexibility as the post-Fordist

49 Indeed, the hotel employees’ local has prioritized organizing, spending 42 percent of its budget on recruiting and hiring twenty-one full-time organizers compared to the national average of 3 percent spending and no full-time organizers (Greenhouse).

50 “Right to work” laws mandate if a workplace has authorized union representation the union must collectively bargain for all workers whether they are dues-paying members or not. Allowing, even encouraging, such free-ridership can obviously devastate a local.

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mode of production by crossing, and with time weakening, the borders the transnational

corporations have long since gone over.

Back in Vegas, the organizing success of Local 226 certainly can be attributed to

acts of commitment like the Frontier strike but also to the union’s rejection of old

organization methods.51 Because the town has become a kind of showplace for labor, the

parent organization AFL-CIO is spending richly in the New Detroit to fund more new

organizing efforts. And while labor’s momentum has led to some notable successes, the

fact remains that most of the other employment centers of town are not unionized. The

non-Strip hotels, with the exception of a few Downtown locations, are not union. Neither

is home construction, the region’s second-largest industry.

Thus, at sunrise on every work morning, men gather anxiously at informally

designated spots looking for day labor but hoping for the opportunity to land a permanent

job. When hired by the day, these workers—mostly Mexican men—earn about $25-30

for eight to twelve hours of work (Dauber 100). Chicanos build an estimated 90 percent

of the 20,000 new homes erected each year in Southern Nevada; many are day laborers.

This industry provides perhaps the best job prospect for illegal or newly arrived

immigrant men who cannot speak English.

51 The traditional method calls for workers to vote on whether or not to accept membership. The newer methods rely on card drives in which organizers go directly to employees asking them to sign cards supporting union representation. When a significant majority of employees at a site signs, the unions take the cards to management and request recognition. This strategy depends on management accepting the card-check recognition and organizers’ willingness to fight a multi-front battle to win recognition if recalcitrant employers refuse. When the MGM Grand resisted union organizing and refused card-check recognition, members of the locals engaged in civil disobedience, used PR tactics to drive up the borrowing costs for finishing the hotel (under construction at the time), and lobbied heavily to halt casino expansion into Detroit, Chicago, and Windsor Locks, Canada. This kind of union pressure led to bottom-line deficits causing a shake-up that resulted in new management and union recognition(Greenhouse).

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Foremen have come to depend on these workers not only because they are a willing

workforce but also because they are considered meticulous and exploitable. As Peter

Nelson, a Las Vegas construction supervisor explains it, ‘“You can bring in a Mexican

who’s a skilled craftsman and pay him three dollars an hour and he’s perfectly happy.’”

The Mexican workers had certainly better be happy because as Nelson adds, ‘“If they

don’t bust ass for fifteen hours without sniveling, then they’re out of here.’” But in

general he believes that most will exhibit the attitude he wants. ‘“You bring in any other

race and cuss him out for doing a poor job and they’ll get up and leave….But the

Mexicans will get it right’” (Dauber 105).

In contrast to the Chicano men who fill most of these non-union jobs in residential construction many of the Strip hotels’ construction workers are members of the fifteen building-trade locals. As has traditionally been the case with trade unions, they tend to be “white men with exclusionist attitudes” who obtained their building-trade apprenticeships and entry into the locals through personal connections; it has been difficult for union leadership to persuade them to welcome the immigrant workers

(Lampros 192). After all, any new worker is job competition, and with current workers obtaining as much overtime as they want, they are pulling in $80,000-100,000 annually, according to the AFL-CIO. Of course, this exclusionist attitude disregards the crucial factor that construction is being undertaken by non-union labor anyway. So union organizers, feeling the ripples of HERE’s wave of success, embarked on a major campaign in the late ‘90s to organize all segments of the building trades. The effort met with some success, but with current union workers losing job opportunities from competition with fellow workers not to mention fierce contractor opposition, the

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program’s success was limited to 7000 new enrollees, a significant number but one that

does not really dent the profession in the area.52

An Evolving City, an Evolving Strip

Construction is a fitting focus when considering Las Vegas. In a near-constant

state of renovation, the Strip’s architecture has presaged post-Fordist manufacturing: it’s

impermanent and flexible.

The town became a tourist draw during the depression-era construction of the

Hoover Dam when its work crews would bring their precious paychecks into Vegas’s small casinos and brothels. At that time, the casino themes and architectural styles were very different than they are now: they invoked the Wild West—even though Las Vegas had never been a cowboy or mining town. The very first casino development Downtown basked in the reflected glory of the old West region with names like the Pioneer Club, the

Horseshoe, the Golden Nugget. These early landmarks were constructed when the so-

called closing of the frontier was a relatively recent memory, when that past was still

shrouded in a romantic aura, and when the film cowboy was a cultural icon.

But unlike this Wild West theme, the new themes are not obviously congruous.

Even the Strip’s mid-century Arab desert motif embodied in the Sands, Dunes, Sahara, and Aladdin seems reasonable in a desert climate. But with a few exceptions, today’s

52 The union wave has also splashed onto other local sites, most notably rocking the nation’s largest private employer, Wal-Mart. Labor has worked with Clark County commissioners to enact a zoning ordinance that in effect outlawed Wal-Mart’s so-called super-centers which sell groceries in addition to the usual dry goods. The action has made Las Vegas a key battleground in an interstate war on the discount chain which has been targeted because of its notorious anti-union, anti-worker practices. Wal-Mart, which has strongly resisted labor attempts to organize workers, charges workers for health benefits which most union grocers provide free and pays significantly less than unionized grocery stores. And in Las Vegas, all the major grocery stores are unionized. Nevertheless, Wal-Mart was blind-sided by the action; after all, Vegas is notorious for being a city with seemingly no restriction, zoning or otherwise. Then again, in Las Vegas, labor has clout.

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themes make almost no sense at all—unless we look at Vegas as a globalization city,

which hopes to invoke the aura surrounding the idea of globality itself.

There is an important lesson to be learned here in tracing these themes

chronologically. The 1930s was a time of strong regional identification in the US

(Hegeman, Patterns 129). Casinos thus adopted a regional theme that made sense given

its location and its powerful resonance in the popular culture. In the 1950s and ‘60s, as

the great anti-colonial struggles that spelled the end of the imperialism era were waged,

casinos adopted an orientalist Middle- Eastern-desert theme. Finally, in the late ’80 and

through the ‘90s the Strip’s super casinos developed their global theme. Of course, there

is a key difference here between the contemporary development and that of the past. The

structure of Vegas and its casinos don’t merely resemble the world’s wonders. The hours

of operation, the developmental priorities, the relationship to government, the mode of

production all reflect the ideal NWO profit model. If the global theme provides the obvious connection to globalization, the underlying structure cements the connection.

That underlying super-casino structure has not been static during the ‘90s, however.

Typically, Steve Wynn’s most ambitious project in the 1990s, the Bellagio, re-set the

standard for the super casino. Named for an Italian resort village near Lake Como, the

Bellagio bills itself as an elegant resort, spa, casino, and shopping complex featuring

designer boutiques (with names such as Prada, Chanel, Armani), an art gallery with

impressionist masterworks, an outdoor water fountain extravaganza, and a restaurant that

displays actual Picasso paintings. These new features are revealing. The lessons Venturi,

Scott Brown, and Izenour learned from Las Vegas in the ‘60s was that the “middle-

middle class” (to use their term) like decorated sheds, and so architects should design

116 decorated sheds. If Vegas remains an index of popular taste, then the implications of a hotel like the Bellagio are frightening. Today’s tourists obviously require more excess and more expense. Instead of the kitschy neon of the old Golden Nugget, we have

Picassos with dinner in a verisimilar Italian villa. And it’s significant that the Bellagio displays artists like Picasso and Van Gogh because those artists have come to personify high culture with a price tag. Indeed, we can say that the Bellagio is not really displaying the art at all—just the luxurious excess that the new Vegas tries to represent. Tellingly, the Bellagio was built on the grounds of the imploded Sands Hotel, one of the hallmarks of the old Rat Pack organized-crime-controlled Las Vegas.

Discussing the Sands implosion that was billed as the largest non-nuclear blast in

Nevada history, Mike Davis was reminded of Fredrick Jackson Turner’s legendary “end of the frontier” address. “Turner questioned the survival of frontier democracy in the coming age of giant cities and monopoly capital and wondered what the West would be like a century hence. Steve Wynn has the depressing answer: Las Vegas is the terminus of western history, the end of the trail.”

Today, it’s not the Western frontier that has closed; it is what Fredric Jameson has called “the global frontier of capitalism” (92) that has closed. Capitalism has stretched its arms into all parts of the world, and its space for expansion has ended. It is the closing of the global frontier that characterizes globalization’s New World Order. Without irony, the Strip celebrates capitalism’s global saturation by decontextualizing and dehistoricizing the world’s historical landmarks for entertainment purposes. Indeed, it offers the verisimilitude of these monuments as compensation for the contemporary loss of historicity. Here the Sands implosion emblematizes the development of architainment.

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It disregards whatever elements of the past cannot be marketed; that which remains, it

reifies. What emerges is a Vegas Strip without the postmodern irony that could be read

into the old Strip’s ticky-tacky hotels, wedding chapels, and gas stations that stood in

sharp contrast to the apparent solidity of organized crime’s major casinos. With the mob

swept out by a combination of the federal government and corporate capital, the old

casinos have been demolished or completely revamped. Of course, the mob has very

much become an archetype of an earlier moment of capitalism. But making Vegas

ostensibly safe for family “consumption”—in many senses of the term—required

replacing the old-style family ownership and local production with corporate values. For example, Caesars Palace, built in the ‘60s with private funding and Teamster loans, has been sold, remodeled, expanded, and has added a mall and entertainment complex designed to look like Roman streets including a fake sky that becomes dark at fake dusk and bright during fake daytime. Caesars’ development is typical of the Strip casinos we see in the globalization era. Nearly gone are the days of the Strip’s decorated sheds whose gaudy neon represented “the forgotten symbolism of architectural form.” As the new Vegas marries the garish symbol to the gaudy form creating architainment, what is forgotten today is history itself.

History is the force that defines a piece of land or a part of the world as a region, but the Strip’s monuments to monuments shed almost no light on the history of their decontextualized referents. On the Las Vegas Strip as surely as in the planned communities of the suburbs, the histories and traditions of actual regions are merely a design theme.

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The Other Side of Paradise

This chapter is premised on the proposition that Las Vegas provides a kind of test case, a laboratory for analyzing the conditions of globalization-era living, working, and playing. From one perspective, we see a kind of xenophobic sentiment that has marked life in the US South. It inhabits the gated communities and walled developments of the suburbs and is utterly harmonious with the sentiment on the Vegas Strip—or to be precise on the Paradise Strip.

Just outside of Paradise are the areas not privileged enough to have a theme evoking some exotic locale: the cities of Las Vegas and North Las Vegas, which are left to bear the brunt of the social problems associated with rapid growth in communities of the poor and working classes. But perhaps the only reality harder to deal with than the rapid urban growth is the absolute lack of growth in the west side of Las Vegas, where the population is 78 percent African American. As the metropolitan area grows by thousands of residents per month, West Las Vegas has maintained the same population of about 15,000 since 1960. Laid waste by the three R’s of racism, redlining, and riots, we see an exclusionism at work that has marked the city’s treatment of African Americans at least since the town became a tourist attraction and segregated its casinos in the 1930s to appeal to white tourists and Hoover Dam workers.

Interestingly, Las Vegas is the only Southwest Sunbelt area to experience a trend that is dramatically shaping the Southeast Sunbelt: there has been a marked reversal of the historic African-American migration north. For the first time in a century, the

South—most drastically Georgia—actually saw a net gain of black residents, many of whom are middle class or retirees (Frey). Las Vegas too has experienced this influx with

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an almost 100 percent growth in the area’s black population.53 As in the Southeast, many of Vegas’s new black residents are joining the new white migrants in the suburbs.

Despite the surprising homogeneity and provincialism of the New Sunbelt, there is a certain cosmopolitanism in the Vegas case resulting from the character of the Strip.

Granted, the Strip casinos are caricatures of what Americans see when looking at the world outside its borders. But an actual infrastructure of people who have come from outside those borders actually does undergird those casinos, and their often unnoticed labor keeps the casinos open. In Vegas, as in many parts of the United States, those workers are often Latino/a immigrants.

Saskia Sassen points to this kind of job-growth as a product of globalization.

Studying the case of women, she concludes that the conditions promoting the formation of a supply of migrant women into industrial jobs in the nations of the South are part of the same complex that creates a supply of immigrant women for service jobs in the

North. Both are expressions of “the broader process of economic restructuring occurring at the global level” (130). Ironically, immigrants generally come from countries that have attracted significant numbers of manufacturing jobs from the industrialized nations.

In a sense, their movement is the opposite of patterns in the US where workers move from deindustrialized urban areas to the Sun Belt states of the South. “There is, then, a correspondence between the kinds of jobs that are growing in the economy generally, and in major cities particularly, and the composition of immigration—largely from low-wage countries and with a majority of women” (Sassen 129). Sassen concludes “the feminization of the job supply in conjunction with the growing politicization of native

53 The 2000 Census puts the metro area black population at 133,000.

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women [in the US] may well create a growing demand for immigrant women” (Sassen

121).

Indeed, the American Hotel and Lodging Association is lobbying Congress to

allow more immigrant “essential workers” into the US. In that industry, the essential

workers are the crews that staff the hotels. As a lobbyist for the Association explains,

‘“There are places in this country that wouldn’t survive without immigrants’” (Parker).

Las Vegas has become one of those places. Yet unlike most of those places, in Las

Vegas, immigrant service work actually can lead to middle-income status. But generally

that status accompanies only those jobs where the unions hold sway; that is, on the Strip.

So we see here a noteworthy dynamic. That part of Las Vegas embodying the

global impetus behind the contemporary culture and economy is actually the part of Las

Vegas where service work—the kind of employment that marks the post-Fordist

economies of the erstwhile North—actually provides a living wage. The apparent

paradox is that globalization has generally led to decreased living standards—for workers in “the North” and “the South.”

When we think about what we can learn from today’s Las Vegas, the most important lesson may well be that organized labor can still be a powerful force and can still produce high wages. But on a metaphorical level, perhaps Las Vegas teaches another lesson. If the Strip is a kind of simplified metaphor for globalization, then we can see that globalization is not inherently the enemy of labor. The breakdown of national divisions enacted both figuratively in the case of the Strip’s worldwide themes and literally in the composition of its union workforce can be a positive step forward for

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those who care about economic fairness—if its people join together across the old

boundaries.

This is not to be sanguine about the present or the future of globalization, but it is to acknowledge that we cannot return to the Cold War-era nation-state sovereignty and its separations between the North and the South or the First, Second, and Third Worlds. It is not that globalization as it has developed has reduced inequity; it is that capital is inextricably linked beyond the old boundaries. If workers are to achieve advances in the current system they will need to approach capital at its level. The massive disparity we see between the middle-class workers on the Strip and those making just a few dollars a day working off of it symbolize a disparity characterizing all regions of the world. The efforts of Vegas unions like Culinary Workers Local 226 to reach across the divides represent the first steps toward reducing this inequality. Indeed, if Las Vegas is the epitome of architainment, and thus an archetypal NWO city, the presence of this broad union base is one way in which it glaringly defies NWO type. This note-worthy position suggests many possible conclusions: that labor is not a stumbling block to the NWO’s development is one conclusion; that labor can grow and be a force for workers, even in the anti-labor NWO era, is another. Which, if either one, of these scenarios applies will determine if Las Vegas truly represents a new Detroit—that is a place full of possibilities for the multitude of workers to actively involve themselves in setting the conditions of their labor—or if it is just a transplanted version of the old Detroit.

CHAPTER 5 HOME IS WHERE THE MARKET IS: WAL-MART, OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB, AND BILLIE LETTS’S WHERE THE HEART IS

“Home is where your history begins.” So Sister Husband, “the little woman with

blue-hair,” (357) tells Novalee Nation, the heroine of Billie Letts’s 1995 novel Where the

Heart Is. Seven-months pregnant, seventeen, and abandoned by her no-account

boyfriend in a Wal-Mart in Sequoyah, Oklahoma, Novalee is utterly alone—which is not

to say that she meets no one. After Sister Husband, she runs across Moses Whitecotton, a

portrait photographer and “the blackest man Novalee had ever seen” (22). He advises

Novalee to pick a “strong name” for her baby, a name “that will withstand a lot of bad

times. . . [because] that name has a history” (23-24).

These two caricatured characters will eventually become part of the family Novalee never had before but that would not happen until after the birth of her daughter. In the

meantime, she would be homeless, and not knowing what else to do, would move into the

Wal-Mart, living there by night and making herself scarce during the day by going to

such places as the town library. She carries on this routine for about two months until

one lonely night she goes into labor by herself at the Wal-Mart. Fortunately, the town

librarian, a reclusive man who had been secretly following her, breaks into the store to

birth her child. The rest of the novel follows Novalee and her baby, who is given the

“strong name” Americus, as they interact with the characters Novalee met on that first

day as well as other characters including Forney, the librarian, “a man in a stocking cap

who would teach her about love” (358); Lexie, a single mom and “a woman too full of

122 123 life to say no” (357) and thus keeps getting pregnant by men who desert her; and, most spectrally, the owner of the Wal-Mart chain, Sam Walton.

Interwoven with Novalee’s narrative is the story of her baby’s daddy, Willy Jack, who suffers terribly after abandoning Novalee. Through Novalee’s triumphs and Willy

Jack’s abysmal failures, the reader is led to life lessons such as “don’t judge a book by its cover,” “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and “a friend in need is a friend indeed,” as well as other lessons that have not been made into clichés, especially, all people are valuable regardless of their backgrounds.

With a colossal two million paperback copies sold, the lessons of this

Bildungsroman have been told to untold millions of readers (presumably many more than two million considering the uncharted readings from library usage, individual sharing, and used-book sales). Of course, the way readers receive these themes is influenced in no small part by the novel’s being selected for Oprah’s Book Club, a phenomenon at the center of fiction’s reception and distribution in the United States of the 1990s. This chapter explores the intersection where Oprah’s Book Club, Novalee Nation, and Wal-

Mart meet in order to discuss home and family, reading and retailing in the New World

Order. In short, I am attempting to leap back and forth from fiction to actual working conditions. Avoiding the club practice of treating fictional works as “Things that Really

Happen” (Rooney 58), I nevertheless want to bridge the distance between academic, materialist criticism and the reading practice employed by Oprah’s Book Club, which takes the texts as sites for understanding people’s behaviors and motivations within their

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various contexts.54 I am asking then what are the reading practices that lend themselves to globalization studies?

In exploring this question, I am emphasizing a central theme of this dissertation: globalization is not just a force operating in some mysterious “out-there,” in the world exterior to the US. Globalization “happens” in the small towns of the USA’s storied heartland as surely as it “happens” anywhere. Indeed, as Hardt and Negri argue, there is a false dichotomy between the local and the global. Cultural critics often assume local differences existed before the incursion of global development and the best way to resist neoliberalism is to defend the local and resist globalization tout court. Empire’s authors contend instead that localism can sometimes serve as a distraction; they reason the issue really is “the production of locality, that is the social machines that create and recreate the identities and differences that are understood as the local. The differences of locality are neither preexisting nor natural but rather effects of a regime of production” (45). Where the Heart Is produces locality through its representation of the small-town life of its protagonist. Oprah’s Book Club echoes this production in its discussion of the novel.

Wal-Mart serves as a metonym for the regime of production itself. This matrix is itself a crystallization of much larger issues. It evinces the conclusion Susan Hegeman reaches about culture in general, “If culture is the site of the production of particularities, those

54 For example, on the program, Letts shares a reader’s letter that claimed Where the Heart Is was important because it taught that we have to be kind in dealing with others because all people are fighting their own private battles.

125 particularities themselves are not necessarily sites of resistance to globalization, but rather complexly, dialectically intrinsic to it.”55

In the heroine’s search for the elements that symbolize particularity and locality— security, friendship, and a sense of belonging—we can come to understand some of the ways the forces of globalization drive the movements of people around the world. At a time when 185 million people live in a country other than the one of their birth (the greatest number since the United Nations began tracking such figures) and at least as many Americans live in locations distant from their birthplaces, Novalee’s quest for home and belonging illustrates on a very small scale what neo-liberal globalization brutally necessitates on a very large scale.

But just what are home and belonging in the globalization era? If “home is where your history begins,” how do we characterize the history that begins as the world’s migrants search for their homes? And how do we characterize their individual histories before they made their new lives? We will use Where the Heart Is as a stepping stone toward some answers. Indeed, we can begin by considering Novalee and Americus

Nation’s very conspicuous names.56 Reading them allegorically (they could translate as something like “new American nation”) leads us to consider what the novel teaches about

55 Indeed, discussions of globalization center on a dialectic between particularity and difference, culture and not culture—which depending on who is discussing it is mass culture, popular culture, even globalization itself. Hegeman’s claims about culture come in a paper defending the use of the concept of culture against theorists who recommend walking away from the term and its passé associations with modernity (read the nation) (Hegeman). But if we can see culture as both global and particular then we have to consider that it is not culture that is dated but the dialectic between local and global that is dated. If the global is both particular and homogenous, then so too is culture. These are both in both.

56 The novel and this chapter focus on Novalee, so in the interest of completeness, I will just mention here the little information readers learn about Americus. She is an empathic girl who pretends to be a doctor if she sees people in distress and takes in every stray animal she comes across. It is fairly simple to read her character allegorically as an idealistic representation of the give-us-your-huddled-masses United States.

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the place of the nation in the creation of people’s histories and sense of home in the

NWO’s regime of production.

In his introduction to the collection Nation and Narration, Homi Bhabha traces out what he claims is a consistent “ambivalent tension that defines the ‘society’ of the nation” from left, right, and liberal perspectives. In this regard, he cites Hannah Arendt, one of the theorists he finds “most interesting” on the subject, because she represents the nation

as a ‘“curiously hybrid realm where private interests assume public significance’”

(Bhabha, Nation 2). If the processes of globalization erode the divide between public and

private (as we learned in the chapter on welfare reform), then we have to consider that the character of the nation’s “ambivalent tension” must be changing as well.

On the one hand, the nation is to greater and lesser degrees evolving into a site of

particularity—a kind of grand-scale version of a family trait—and decreasingly the

foundational unit of politics, economics, and sovereignty. In a sense then, the forces of

globalization are pushing the nation into what we can call the private sphere. On the

other hand, “nation” would become an almost meaningless term if we define it as private.

If the nation is anything it is necessarily more than individual or personal and cannot be

understood outside of a conception of commonality with others. How then do we

conceptualize this contemporary version of the “ambivalent tension”?

In the discussion of Air Force One, I argued that Hollywood renders nationalism

for states other than the US illegitimate and offers the world’s people US-national post-

nationalism as an anemic substitute. Now we need to understand what post-national

nationalism looks like in the US. But here the task is very difficult, for that kind of post-

national nationalism is never really presented directly in the texts of dominant culture.

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We can conceptualize the post-nation in relation to questions of sovereignty and policy and economics, but what is more difficult is understanding post-national attachments.

What will take the place of “that element in us that is ‘more than ourselves’” to return to

Renatta Salecl’s description of the nation?

Even Hollywood’s post-national US nationalism portrayed in its blockbuster films can only go so far; it can present an alternative to the nation but it cannot offer a way for cultural critics to understand the effect of the post-national re-routing of affect, of the element that is “more than ourselves.” We need a figure to help us understand how globalization is redefining the ambivalence that is a “structural fact” of the nation (Nairn in Bhabha 2). For that we need a stand-in, a new figure that we can identify with the energies that are traditionally associated with the nation because it is not possible to conceptualize the affective qualities of the post-nation. As a representational issue the question is doubly vexed. For not only do we confront the actual shifts in the status of the nation, but we also confront the questions of how the changes are being represented.

I turn then to another figure that stands as a rich site of cultural meaning equivalent to the nation, but that is more graspable than the post-nation. A specific figure whose changes we can more easily chart because they are centralized in a few embodied sites. That figure is the family, specifically the family as represented via Oprah’s Book Club’s discussion of Where the Heart Is. As discussed in the introduction, the family and the domestic sphere are by tradition metaphorically linked to the nation. When we speak of the domestic sphere we enter the realm traditionally linked to women. In this regard too we see the allegorical connection between Novalee and Americus Nation, the larger

128 question of the nation today, and that institution connected inseparably to women: Oprah

Winfrey and her Book Club.

In the Club

Literature has historically served as a site for measuring change in cultural

institutions such as the family and the nation. As one of the biggest-selling selections of

Oprah’s Book Club, which is itself the most important single force in reading practices of the 1990s, Where the Heart Is has its proverbial finger on at least part of the New World

Order pulse. To begin measuring that pulse here, let us start with some background.

Oprah’s Book Club was a reading group event that aired monthly or bi-monthly for

six years on the Oprah Winfrey show.57 Oprah’s Book Club was also a publishing

juggernaut generating tens of millions of dollars for major publishers Random House,

Penguin, Simon and Schuster, and Harper Collins (Zeitchik 20). In 1999, the Book Club

alone accounted for one-third of total profits for Little, Brown publishers (Max 40). Each

selection became an instant best-seller with average sales of 600,000 to 800,000 copies

after selection (Tawa).58 And these sales were often for books that pre-Oprah were printed in runs of 10,000 to 20,000. Not only did the Book Club lead to radically

57 Each episode actually began well in advance of the show with Winfrey selecting a novel that made an impact on her and personally calling the author and inviting her or him to discuss the book on the program. After selection, the publishing houses ordered large print runs of the text and restyled the covers to make room for an Oprah logo; some of the Oprah versions of the texts even included sample reading group questions and a “Q and A with the Author” section to facilitate group discussion. Publishers were required to donate 500 copies to Winfrey’s studio audience and 10,000 to public libraries; reduced pricing was arranged for special Oprah editions of the selected text. (Winfrey’s show did not sell the text or see any direct profits from it.) As part of the arrangement, the identity of the book was kept under the strictest confidence until Winfrey announced the title on her show. Taking a leap of faith, book stores ordered huge numbers of copies before they even knew what the latest Oprah book was; shipments could not even be opened until after the show aired.

58 To get some perspective on the success of this reading group, The Book of The Month Club (BOMC), the next most popular club, considers sales of 100,000 hardbacks of its main selection to be a tremendous success. Fifty-thousand copies has been the most books have sold in the Quality Paperback Club, a subsidiary of the BOMC whose selections tend towards what pre-Oprah would be called “literary” as opposed to “mass-market” novels (Spillman).

129 increased sales of the selected text, some speculate it led to an increase in reading in general (Rooney 58). Certainly, it led to the spread of small book clubs around the US: by 2000 there were 500,000 such groups in the US—double the 1994 totals. The majority of these reading groups across the country are composed of college-educated, middle-class women, with 85 percent of American book groups comprised solely of women (Blewster). The groups do not necessarily read Oprah books, but they usually read Oprah-type books: not typical genre novels (such as romances, Westerns, and so forth) but the kinds of novels publishers call quality fiction and print in small runs because they are expected to sell few copies. In the case of most book groups, the selected novels, usually written by women, are stories of growth through painful human experiences, especially in relation to women’s love of self, of children, of men.59

While the average reading group usually has fewer than ten members, membership in Oprah’s Book Club numbers in the tens of millions. After all, anyone who has read the text at Winfrey’s suggestion is a member. To be more publicly active in the Club,

59 At this point, it certainly is necessary to theorize some connections between the Book of the Month Club (BOMC) and Oprah’s Book Club. Following Janice Radway’s important study of the BOMC the most important similarities lie in the kind of cultural capital provided by reading the recommended books. When it comes to fiction, intellectual capital is directly correlated to distance from typical genre novels: the further away, the more intellectual capital reading carries. Both clubs hoped to provide their readers a measure of quality and intellectual merit that was higher than the generic paperback novel but in selections that are not generally too difficult or too high-brow. Thus, many critics and intellectuals have dismissed both clubs as middle-brow, though with regard to the later club the critique is generally inferred (e.g., Max, Skinner). After postmodernism, explicitly using such characterizations is considered impolitic, hopelessly closed-minded, or even middle-brow itself.

Some of the key differences between the two book clubs lie in the character of Oprah’s club which was lent to it by Oprah Winfrey herself. The later club was personalized, not only because there was a known person, as opposed to an organization, standing behind the recommendations, but because it was a reading group as much as a book club (though in the early BOMC, a group of public intellectuals did make the selections). That is to say, Oprah’s Book Club acted as more than an arbiter of fiction; it took the usually solitary activity of reading and made it actually collective, as opposed to the abstractly collective experience of a large group simply buying the same book. Part of this collective experience came in discussing the book on-line at Oprah.com or in local reading groups which formed because of Winfrey’s inspiration. However, for most people the collective experience came in watching the show and thinking about the book’s lessons with Winfrey and her audience.

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readers could discuss the books on-line at Oprah.com or could try to be on the show by

writing letters explaining how the books impacted them and how they identified with or

were driven mad by the characters. The show regularly received 10,000 such letters

(Max 36). Staffers would then choose a few readers from among those letters to be flown

to the location selected for the Book Club gathering—most often a studio made to look

like a dining room/library—and along with Oprah and the author, and under the

camera’s soft-focus eye, they would all discuss the novel, usually over a nice meal or

snack.60

What made the Book Club a success was that all final selections were made by

Winfrey herself.61 Winfrey stood behind these books; if viewers liked, trusted, or wanted to feel closer to her they would put the effort into reading a novel she recommended. Her recommendation turned obscure writers into recognized authors and recognized authors into celebrities. Among the most famous were Maya Angelou, Isabel Allende, Joyce

Carol Oates, and four-time selectee Toni Morrison, whose Nobel prize pales in commercial terms when compared to the sales generated by Oprah. Among the previously lesser-known writers is Billie Letts. Yet Letts’s text has been particularly

60 The discussion questions provided in the Oprah edition of Letts’s text indicate the kind of issues of importance to book club readers and include the following: “In the beginning of the novel, Novalee is a poor, uneducated teenage mother whose own mother abandoned her at a young age. Novalee, however, seems to be remarkably maternal and responsible in her parental role. Do you think this is a believable portrayal of teenage motherhood?” “Despite his cruelty, women are attracted to Willy Jack and are willing to take care of him. What is the attraction of cruel men to needy women?” “What do each of the children…teach us about love and loss of innocence?” “There are no traditional families in this novel. Why do you think the author chose to write a book about home and family yet disregard established notions of what constitutes each?”

61 As far-fetched as the concept of a TV book club sounded before it was tried, it became so successful that publishers clamored to get books they considered Oprah-quality into Oprah’s hands. Though no book could ever be sent to Winfrey directly, some were passed to her by staffers who had read through selections sent by presses. On occasion, friends pointed Winfrey to a particular book. Reportedly, however, the books were usually her own finds.

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popular. Not just a hit with Winfrey’s demographic of middle-aged women, it has found

an audience among young adults for whom Where the Heart Is appears on many

recommended-reading lists. It was even the first Oprah book to be made into a film.62

This popularity renders it a worthwhile object for critical examination, for it does serve as

a cultural touchstone of the 1990s.

Of course, Letts’s novel would not qualify for critical notice based on standard measures of canonical literary quality such as complex psychological explorations, deeply multifaceted characters, innovative exposition techniques and the like. Its simple, readerly style, to use a Barthesian phrase, does not lend it the qualities to win canon- making honors such as, say, the National Book Award—unlike other National Book

Award winning Oprah books including Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Ernest Gaines’s A

Lesson Before Dying, or Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.63 The very public

controversy surrounding The Corrections may have contributed to Winfrey’s decision to announce the end the Club in May 2002, though her stated reason was “It has become harder and harder to find books on a monthly basis that I feel absolutely compelled to share” (Kinsella).

So we return, then, to the height of the Book Club years, to January, 1999 when the

Book Club show for Where the Heart Is aired. It is in this story of Novalee’s development into a competent and loved human being who reaches self-fulfillment through raising her daughter, developing friendships, working at Wal-Mart, and pursuing

62 Winfrey herself brought Toni Morrison’s Beloved to the screen in 1998, but it was never a Book Club selection.

63 The Corrections became a center of controversy after the author publicly expressed concern over Winfrey’s selection thereby prompting her to withdraw the invitation.

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photography and reading, that we find the secret to this novel’s success; this is a narrative

of self-actualization and thus a perfect selection for Oprah’s Book Club.

Critics of the Book Club caricature the selections as women-good/men-bad novels

(see David Skinner), but that does not get at the commonality the selections share. The emphasis in the Book Club discussion is not condemnation of others but growth of self.

Like the Oprah Winfrey show, these books illustrate problems mostly experienced by women with the aim of enabling readers to feel what others feel, to learn from others’ adversities and to grow from others’ growth. In other words, these novels are read as object lessons—and that is as true for the canonical texts as for the pop ones.

On the program featuring Toni Morrison’s Paradise, Winfrey explains the lesson she learned from the club episode with the author. “First of all, you have to open yourself up. You don’t read this book just with your head. You have to open your whole self up.

It’s a whole new way of experiencing reading and life” (“Book Club—Toni Morrison” 4, my emphasis). Later, Morrison herself explains, “You have to be open to this—yeah it’s not just black or white, living, dead, down, in, out. It’s being open to all these paths and connections and [the places] between” (Book Club—Toni Morrison” 17, my emphasis).

On the program featuring her novel, Billie Letts explains a lesson she hopes readers will take from her novel: “We have a God’s plenty of dark days to go through. I wanted

[readers] to think that there are some good people out there, and if we’ll just open up and give them the chance, they’ll help us in some way” (“Oprah’s Book Club Goes to Wal-

Mart” 13 my emphasis).

So here in these Club episodes for two very different texts, we see a similar message, which in fact is central to understanding many of the Book Club texts. From

133 the perspective of globalization studies, however, there is much more going on in this and the other Club selections than a collective struggle for self improvement through a willingness to be open. To get at that we need to ask just what is the connection between self-improvement and globalization, and what is the connection between the Book Club,

Where the Heart Is, and globalization? We can begin answering these questions by exploring the implications of the opening up that is for Winfrey “a whole new way of experiencing reading and life.” I argue that this “opening up” reflects larger affective experiences of globalization and Empire.

In Where the Heart Is, Novalee’s opening up meant that she would trust the people of Sequoya and the people of Wal-Mart. Sam Walton, after all, visits her in the hospital where she is taken after the birth, promises her a job, forgives her debt to the store (for all the items she used while living there), and even gives her $500 in cash. In the kindest single act of charity, Sister Husband just shows up at the hospital where Novalee and

Americus were brought after the Wal-Mart birth and takes them to live in her home.

When Novalee begins work at Wal-Mart, Sister is conveniently available to provide child care, and when she is not, the neighbor or Forney is. It just all works out. There were no struggles and no questions once she found her “family of friends” as the text calls them.64

It is important to notice that public institutions and welfare programs play no visible role in Novalee’s life. The novel never suggests she receives public assistance. In Novalee’s opening up, the novel reflects the neo-liberal globalized capital which is eroding the modern welfare state and redefining the nation. In light of the NWO’s regime of production, it is worth noting that Novalee even refers to the town’s public library as

64 It as if this book is a kind of compromise response to the question referred to in the chapter on welfare reform, of whether it really takes a village or a family to raise a child.

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Forney’s library, and it is actually located in his family’s home. Similarly, private-but-

public-minded institutions like churches and charities occupy no place in her life either.

In this regard it is telling that whereas in the past, a young woman in her circumstances

might have been forced to turn to the Church for assistance, in the contemporary era the

lost, pregnant orphan turns to Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart Is Where the Heart Is

It must have seemed a natural for the Book Club to discuss Where the Heart Is at a

Wal-Mart. After all, the store plays such a central and unforgettable part in the text; and

because Wal-Marts generally have cafés, the group had a place to sit and talk and, of

course, eat. (On this show they noshed on cheese fries and hot dogs.) In an opening

segment, Winfrey herself got to play store manager and reduce some merchandise to

1950s prices. Later in the show, the Wal-Mart Foundation demonstrated its largesse by

putting up the money to build a house that Winfrey’s charity, the Angel Network, was

trying to provide for a needy family in Oklahoma City. They even arranged for

employees to volunteer to do the labor. As the Foundation spokesman explained,

‘“Where the Heart Is’…is describing the folks at Wal-Mart. We got a big heart”

(“Oprah’s Book Club Goes to Wal-Mart” 15).

Certainly, the book makes the chain seem big-hearted and almost old-fashioned, especially through its representation of the man who personified the store: Wal-Mart’s namesake, Sam Walton. The text represents “Mr. Sam” as a quiet, giving man who cared enough to visit Novalee at the hospital after Americus’s birth and who forgives her debts and even gave her $500 cash. Elsewhere, the book nearly sanctifies Walton in a passage worth quoting here. In this oddly written passage, a woman tries to return a sweater at the same time that the local Wal-Mart is commemorating Walton’s death over the store’s

135 public address system. Though Novalee is respectfully bowing her head in prayer, she must deal with the insistent woman’s request to return merchandise.

‘Attention Wal-Mart customers and employees…

The woman leaning over the service counter smelled of horseradish and wore a fake fur coat that was buttoned crooked. She pulled a cotton sweater from a paper sack and shoved it across the counter to Novalee.

‘I ain’t never had it on ’cause it’s too small.’

The sweater might have once been white, but it had grayed with age. Stains circled the underarms and the neck was stretched and misshapen.

‘. . .because Sam Walton gained the respect of. . .

‘It might fit a small-chested woman, but that ain’t me.’

Novalee turned the sweater inside out looking for a code tag, but it had been cut away.

‘I’ll just take the refund ‘cause I got too many sweaters now. My boyfriend says I take up the whole damned closet ’cause I got so many clothes.’

‘. . . for a moment of silence in memory of Mr. Sam.’

‘I paid nineteen ninety-five, plus tax.’

Novalee bowed her head and closed her eyes.

‘Listen, I got my kids in the car. I gotta take them by my sister’s place and get to work by two.’

‘. . . the valley of the shadow of death . . .’ Novalee mouthed the words.

‘Hey. Did you hear me? I’m in a hurry.’

‘. . . goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.’ (268-269, ellipses and italics in original)

Given the novel’s defense-of-the-everywoman agenda, the inclusion of a passage that demonizes this hapless customer would not seem to fit at all. But the passage creates a contrast between the scheming sweater-returner and the gentlemanly man-of-the-people

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storeowner dwelling in the house of the Lord and thus affirms the image of Walton

created by Wal-Mart lore.

Indeed, the image has been so indelibly ingrained that United Food and

Commercial Workers (UFCW), the union trying to organize Wal-Mart workers, has actually co-opted “Mr. Sam” as an ally, arguing he would be against the unfriendly work conditions that prevail at Wal-Marts today (Dicker 16).

The irony of Walton’s being used to promote labor organizing is truly rich because

Walton bitterly despised unions and worked to create an environment where organized labor would be nearly powerless to gain a foothold. As the Wal-Mart employee manual declared, ‘“There is no need for a union at Wal-Mart!’” (Ortega 210). Since his death the chain has kept Walton’s vehement anti-unonism alive with manuals such as “A

Manager’s Toolbox to Remaining Union-free” (Dicker 16). The chain has a notorious record of union busting. In probably the most infamous instance, when meat cutters in a

Jacksonville, Texas Wal-Mart voted for union representation, management responded by eliminating meat-cutting operations at 180 stores. This slash-and-burn technique is paralleled in another union-busting tactic: employing security guards in stores with union activity to enforce a no-solicitation policy that not only keeps labor organizers off Wal-

Mart property but also keeps the Girl Scouts from selling cookies and the Salvation Army from ringing its Christmas bells (Dicker 17). Regardless of the marketing claims

UFCW has been forced to resort to, these tactics merely reflect the priorities of the chain’s patron saint which are evinced in Walton’s management history; before he founded Wal-Mart, Inc., Walton was actually sued by the government to force him to stop paying his employees below minimum wage. But the point here is not to ask if

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Walton really cared for the people; the real question here is why does “Mr. Sam” show

up in this novel at all? I would argue that his inclusion illustrates a unique feature of the

globalization era: the increasing difficulty and consequent urgency to distinguish and

separate the various spheres of class or life.

Opening Up Wal-Mart

Hardt and Negri argue, “Empire is characterized by the close proximity of

extremely unequal populations, which creates a situation of permanent social danger”

(336-7). In an obvious case, say of Mike Davis’s fortress architecture, the “social danger” is managed through radical privatization of public space (See Davis City of

Quartz). In the case of Sam Walton and his Wal-Mart empire, the “social danger” is managed not through closing out but by opening up and letting in. It is that opening up that Where the Heart Is captures.

Of course, the actual Sam Walton opened himself up in a way very different from

Mr. Sam of the novel, it being highly unlikely that the actual Sam Walton would so easily part with $500 of his own money or forgive Novalee’s large debt to the store. The actual

Sam Walton took great pride in being an inveterate cheapskate. He regularly “borrowed” quarters from Wal-Mart managers to buy drinks from Coke machines, bragged about buying cheap shoes at Wal-Mart, drove a beaten-up pickup truck, required all managers including himself to stay in cheap hotels and share rooms on Wal-Mart business trips, and never, ever tipped his five-dollars-a-haircut barber—all while he was at the top of

Forbes list of the wealthiest people in the United States (See Ortega).65

65 As frugal as he was with himself with his suppliers Walton and his Wal-Mart managers spared no trick including delaying payment and then strong-arming them into accepting less payment than they invoiced, making false damage-claim reports, and even calling vendors collect (Quinn 47-51).

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So how did such a notoriously closed-fisted man like Walton “open up” and where did the legend of “Mr. Sam” as saintly figure arise? Taking the second part of the question first, the legend results from Wal-Mart’s method for giving which was (and still is) to encourage employees to hold bake sales, car washes, and other homespun fundraisers at the stores with the Wal-Mart foundation chipping in matching funds. Thus, the chain’s philanthropic style promoted its small-town image and generated good will with the customers who could see the charity being done right on store grounds—all while keeping expenses low. (This technique was in evidence with the Angel Network house Wal-Mart sponsored that was to be built by employee volunteers.)

When it came to charity, “Mr. Sam” was as tight-fisted as Mr. Scrooge; the company ranked last among major retailers in percentage of earnings donated when he was in charge (Ortega 195).66 As Walton maintains in his autobiography, “Wal-Mart really is not, and should not be, in the charity business” (Walton 240). However, in

Where the Heart Is neither Walton’s nor the chain’s miserly side is anywhere in sight.

What we see is the “Mr. Sam” of company lore, the Walton who not only lived by the stereotypically small-town values of charity, friendliness, and unpretentiousness but who encouraged all his workers to do so as well.

This image of small-town values was carefully molded in Wal-Mart employees

(“associates” in the corporation’s argot). During Walton’s lifetime, associates were asked to raise their right hands and pledge: “From this day forward, I solemnly promise

66 Even in one of its most highly touted charitable efforts—providing a reported $1.1 million in goods to victims of Hurricane Hugo—was actually more public relations than actual donations. The $1.1 million reflected the retail price not the actual cost of donated goods, which in any case was not really born by Wal-Mart but by the manufacturers. Wal-Mart mostly donated the trucks to drive the goods, with drivers and warehouse workers personally donating their own time (Ortega 195-96).

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and declare that [for] every customer that comes within ten feet of me, I will smile, look

them in the eye, and greet them, so help me Sam” (Vance and Scott 107, my emphasis).

That promise was just part of the so-called “Wal-Martizing” process. Other parts of the

training called for reading an employee manual that advised, “Look for the good in

others. Avoid idle gossip.”

Such advice helped Walton project an image of Wal-Mart as family-oriented social

center, an image he embodied in his constant store visits.67 A man who actively solicited

his employees’ opinions about how to improve operations, Walton spent much of each

week visiting his stores and warehouses. And as the chain grew he instituted policies so

that his network of managers regularly visited the stores as well; managers were on the

road four days a week. Key to these sessions was Walton’s insistence that all managers

be addressed by their first names and that employees’ suggestions be listened to

seriously. At Wal-Mart, retail innovation was absolutely encouraged at all levels. Walton

even kept his phone number listed in the Bentonville, Arkansas phonebook so that

employees could call him at home to report problems and suggestions; from all reports

they did in fact do that.

Of course, this unique employee-management relationship achieved two very

important effects: happy customers and employees unlikely to organize. Walton himself

was so obsessed with keeping unions away that after defeating some early organizing

drives, a union-busting lawyer taught him how to open up to reach out to workers in ways

67 Sam Walton became wealthy because he understood that country people were as excited about consumerism as big city folk. He became obscenely wealthy when he developed and enacted the strategy of saturating rural America with his discount chain and warehouses stores that could beat the prices of any competition. By the 1985, Walton’s wealth was estimated by Forbes at $2.8 billion making him the richest person in the US and the second richest individual in the world, his wealth only exceeded by the other-worldly affluence of the Sultan of Brunei. Within a few years, he lost his rank at the top of the Forbes list when he split his money up among his children. He is dead, but they remain on the list today.

140 not done with hourly employees in retail. Walton extended profit sharing to them; created bonus programs to reward stores that reduced customer theft (called shrinkage); gave them the option to buy company stock at a discount through payroll deduction (of which fifty-five percent of workers took advantage) (see Ortega). To make the programs work, he took a step unprecedented in mass retail and opened the books to all employees so they could see the sales and shrinkage figures. These “rewards programs” continue to generate enough good will to make the already difficult task of labor organizing even more difficult.

If these policies do not reduce organizing, the startling 70 percent annual employee turnover rate—no small figure in a workforce that numbers over one million—does the job. Since high turnover leads to low unionization and keeps management from actually having to make good on many of its incentive programs, the turnover rate suits the suits at corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas just fine. In any case, they would rather pay the lower entry-level wages than the higher ones experienced employees earn

(Dicker 16). And this discussion of labor conditions at the chain brings us back to

Novalee Nation, a character so preternaturally loyal to Wal-Mart that she actually commutes 110 miles per day to continue working there after the Sequoya store is destroyed in a tornado.

Keeping in mind one of this chapter’s goals of bridging the gap between Book Club practice and academic critique, let us return to the case of Novalee. What do we make of her in relation to the realities of working life at Wal-Mart? The answer lies, in part, in returning to the Book Club’s visit to the store.

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Home Is Where the Wal-Mart Is

I want to start by presenting the opinions of Oprah Winfrey and her guest Book

Club readers in the Where the Heart Is Book Club episode when the group was discussing the Wal-Mart stores.

Winfrey: “And the thing is that’s great about ‘em, they’re the same wherever you go.”

Guest: “Family—such a sense of family.”

Winfrey: “Family. Yeah it’s a sense of connection wherever you go—Mississippi, Oklahoma, wherever.”

Guest: “That’s what important about them. . . .When I’m really homesick, I go to Wal-Mart, because they’re all exactly the same. . . . I’m from Mississippi originally. So I just go down to the Wal-Mart and go inside, and if I just close my eyes for about ten seconds, then I’m just right back.” (“Oprah’s Book Club Goes to Wal-Mart” 11)

While it is certainly possible these lines are advertorial or paid advertisements made to seem like spontaneous opinion, judging from Winfrey’s reputation, it is highly unlikely Winfrey and her guests are offering anything other than their actual feelings, as

Wal-Martized as they seem to be. Of course, these feelings are rather counter-intuitive given that the quality making these stores seem like family is their similarity because in practice families are in fact quite amazingly different.

Drawing a parallel between family and small-town life, we can consider Billie

Letts’s statement made on Oprah’s Book Club, “Small towns in Oklahoma and probably across the—the country have changed dramatically because of Wal-Mart. It’s become a—a social center, if you will” (“Oprah’s Book Club Goes to Wal-Mart” 8). This contemporary social center contrasts sharply with the downtowns and family businesses that were small-town America’s social centers before Wal-Mart moved in. Each of those old downtowns was different, if not utterly unique at least as distinctive as the population

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of each town. What is left in many cases are the shells of the old downtowns and the

sprawl of the big-box stores like Wal-Mart (and power-retail chains imitating its formula

like Home Depot) on the edge of town where land is cheap and acres of parking lots can

be set down on now-forgotten farmland or forests. Of course, the downtowns did not

possess the quality that the Book Club readers found comforting and family-oriented

about Wal-Marts—that they are all alike, and in being alike are familiar: that is, they take

on the qualities of family and home. The Book Club is presenting the view that countless

millions in the US share: home is where the Wal-Mart is.

How does a multinational chain become home and family? It takes on the family role by being familiar. Customers who have memorized the layout of a local Wal-Mart can go to any other similarly sized store in the chain and know the layout, the merchandise, and the prices; theoretically, they should even know the stores’ temperature since that too is centrally regulated from Bentonville. This kind of familial familiarity is supported by corporate policies that attach many customers to the chain. From the associates whose job it is to greet customers as they enter, to the store’s public commitment not to sell supposedly offensive merchandise such as “obscene” music or magazines, to the presence of associates fundraising outside, Wal-Mart has done all the right things to connect it to the heart of rural Americana. By the end of the Walton era,

many felt “the firm had evolved into more than just a job or a store. In the eyes of its

growing legion of admirers, Wal-Mart had become a cultural phenomenon” (Vance and

Scott 112). Perhaps it just doesn’t matter to these customers that the greeters are also

there to monitor possible thievery of exiting customers, or that the removal of offensive

merchandise includes mainstream material like Rolling Stone magazine, or that the

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employee fundraising actually allows the company to spend less on philanthropy than its

competitors; Wal-Mart was able to maintain a small town feel in a very large,

standardized operation. Indeed, many customers see a day at Wal-Mart as an excursion

more than a chore. In Where the Heart Is, this perspective is represented by Novalee’s

friend, Lexie.

Lexie brought her children to Wal-Mart two or three times a week; cheaper entertainment, she declared, than miniature golf or the video arcade. At Wal-Mart she could load them in a shopping cart, then wander the aisles for as long as she wanted. They never demanded toy guns or Barbie dolls, never cried to get out of the cart or whined because they felt crowded. Their bodies soft and sticky, malleable as warm cookie dough, pillowed together free of sharp elbows and bony knees. (135)

This description of four children crammed in a cart as their mother wanders the

aisles of the discount store provides a Frankfurt School-nightmare vision of

consumerism. Their “sticky” and “soft” bodies never reaching out, never complaining,

disagreeing, or demanding, just sitting there like “dough.” Ideally for the store, the cart

would be loaded with merchandise instead of children (though the text does clarify that

Lexie dropped a little money on these excursions), but the point is that the act of browsing is entertainment. Just being in the store surrounded on all sides by aisles and ceiling-high piles of sheer stuff is entertainment.

This contemporary version of small-town-American flanerie is very different than

that possible before Wal-Mart: that is, wandering in the public spaces and local shops of

down-home downtowns. This is also a very different kind of experience than the

Baudellairian kind of flanerie described by Walter Benjamin. “The street is a dwelling

for the flaneur” of nineteenth century Paris (Benjamin 32). He made Paris his living

room, and the people of the street were simply the furniture. The Baudrillardian flaneur

roamed the arcades not to shop but to watch people; the “shopping center” was just a

144 meeting place. It was a social center in the original sense of the word social as socialis, of companionship.

Lexie’s flaneur experience centered on immersing herself not in the crowd but in the commodity. Though no less for the Parisian flaneur than for the Wal-Mart wanderer, the space outside became every bit as homey, if not more, than home itself. The flaneur finds the end to isolation among the crowd. But Benjamin is clear on the subject, “The flaneur seems to break through this ‘unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest’ [to quote Engels] by filling the hollow space created in him with the borrowed and fictitious isolations of strangers.” Benjamin argues that to enjoy the crowd is to ignore the thousand miseries of the people one sees. To further quote his citation of Engels: ‘“And still they crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do, with one another and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing stream of the crowd” (58).

Benjamin concluded that the logic allowing the flaneur to exist in this isolation and not feel alone could only make sense in the context of commodity empathy—that is, identification with commodities. This empathy was a sure sign that flaneurs were not conscious of the mode of existence imposed upon them by the system of production (58).

The more aware they became, the less inclined they were to empathize with commodities, especially as they realized they held the same position in the economy as commodities did. But until that awakening, “If [the class of bourgeois flaneurs] wanted to achieve virtuosity in this kind of enjoyment, it could not spurn empathizing with commodities. . .

.[I]t had to approach this destiny with a sensitivity that perceives charm even in damaged and decaying goods” (59).

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In this regard Benjamin makes a clarifying distinction between the flaneur and the badaud. ‘“The simple flaneur is always in full possession of his individuality, whereas the individuality of the badaud disappears. It is absorbed by the outside world…which intoxicates him to the point where he forgets himself. Under the influence of the spectacle which presents itself to him, the baudaud becomes an impersonal creature; he is no longer a human being, he is part of the public, of the crowd’” (fn Fournel in Benjamin

69). Combining the badaud’s intoxication with the flaneur’s empathy for commodities, we find Lexie with her “cookie dough” children folded in the shopping cart like store items. Given the family status Oprah’s Book Club and the book itself give to Wal-Mart, I would conclude that today it is the goods that are actually alive and it is the people who have become commodities. Globalization reverses the impact of reification; people do not become goods; goods become people. But unlike commodity fetishization where the history of an object is erased, here the history of the person begins with her encounter with objects, even if the objects themselves remain at the same time reified and fetishized.

It is from this perspective that we see the other side of Novalee’s being abandoned.

For as terrifying as it was, Novalee also finds her abandonment by Willy Jack to be liberating. Here is how the text describes her first night in Sequoya: “Then Novalee

Nation, seventeen, seven months pregnant, thirty-seven pounds overweight, slipped off her [sandals] and there, in the middle of the Wal-Mart, she began to turn. . .faster and faster. . . spinning and whirling…free…waiting for her history to begin” (33).

For Novalee to enter this aspect of life, to experience living in history, another history had to end. The history that ended for Novalee was one of boundaries and

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separations. As Hardt and Negri explain about the end-of-history discourse. “History has ended precisely and only to the extent that it is conceived in Hegelian terms—as the play of a dialectic of contradictions, a play of absolute negations and subsumption. The binaries that defined modern conflict have become blurred. The other that might delimit a modern sovereign Self has become fractured and indistinct and there is no longer an outside that can bound the place of sovereignty” (Empire 189).

Novalee’ experience at Wal-Mart is her “unhomely moment,” to use Bhabha’s term; it is the “dialectical image” to use Benjamin’s. Regardless of the term used, it is a flash that relates “the traumatic ambivalences of personal, psychic history to the wider disjunctions of political existence” (Bhabha, “Unhomely” 448). But instead of this moment being the acme of the narrative, it is only the beginning. The novel builds to a sense of “homeliness”; its goal is familiarity. That familiarity is Empire. Novalee’s history begins at Wal-Mart because there she is part of something. Indeed, she is a part of everything. That is, she is part of the circulatory system of globalization itself and thus connected to very real people who are also brought together by Wal-Mart as Empire.

In this way, the fictional character, Novalee, connects to real-life people like

Wendy Diaz, a fifteen-year-old girl from Honduras brought to the US in 1995 by anti- sweatshop activists to expose the truth about where and how Wal-Mart’s Kathy Lee

Gifford-line of clothing was made. Since the age of thirteen, Diaz had been making $22 a week for seventy or more hours of work in a factory run by brutally abusive managers

(Ortega 334). These realities contrasted sharply with Gifford’s life as she represented it at the time on her nationally televised talk show, that is of parties with the glitterati or family nights at the mansion with her little Gifford spawn. That Gifford’s life contrasts

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sharply with the sweatshop factory girl’s needs hardly to be mentioned. But the life

awaiting the average sweatshop girl stitching Wal-Mart clothing for pennies an hour also

contrasts with the future Novalee built for herself.

In the early ‘90s when a real-life Novalee would have worked at Wal-Mart, pay stated at $5.50 an hour with step raises of at most $0.35 for a pre-tax yearly salary of $12-

20,000. How did Wal-Mart workers feel about these conditions at that time? According to one report of the “Mr. Sam” era, ‘“associates continued to ‘feel as if they are part of

Sam Walton’s extended family.’…Undergirding this sense of family was the gratitude of many associates, especially those in poorer states like Arkansas and Mississippi, who were thankful to the firm for providing them with a higher income than they otherwise might have achieved” (Vance and Scott 107).

What do we make of all these clashing realities? Is the point that a real-life

Novalee should be grateful that at least she is working on the sales rather than the production end of the business? No, the point is that in Empire all these clashing realities come together. The story of Wendy Diaz is the story of Novalee and Kathy Lee. This is not to say that the life of a girl toiling in a factory is the same as that of a famous woman

living in a mansion is the same as that of a sales clerk. The spaces they occupy could

hardly be any more different, and yet their lives are wholly connected; they more than

implicate each other, they are imbedded in each other.

There is one other figure who needs to be added to this equation, and that is Oprah

Winfrey. She too occupies an integral part in the NWO matrix. If Walton used family

sentiment and an old-fashioned thrifty lifestyle to sell product, Winfrey’s product is

sentiment and lifestyle. While the lifestyle she proffers differs from the one Wal-Mart

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taps into—hers is more new-agey, self-actualization focused—it is her realistic

presentation of herself as being accepting and honest like a family member that put

Winfrey on the same Forbes list of wealthiest Americans as Walton’s heirs.68

What implications can we draw from the collection of people drawn together here

through one seemingly innocuous novel? We see the integration of different spheres as

Empire “opens up” to the world’s people. And that is how a television figure can become

one’s family and a multinational chain can become one’s home. In the passage to

imperial society, subjectivities continue to be produced in the “social factory,” but the social factory is not what it once was. Inside and outside are becoming indistinguishable so that “the boundaries between public and private have fractured, unleashing circuits of control throughout the ‘intimate public sphere.’…One is always still in the family, always still in school, always still in prison” (196-7). In other words, the social factory is more intensive and more extensive. It is both in the personal interior family world and in the public and social outside world because the separations between the worlds have broken down.

Coda: Lexie and the Olive Tree

In the same way that Wal-Marts are like home to Oprah’s audience and a literal home to Novalee, another chain, McDonald’s, is like home to Lexie as we see in the following passage:

Americus struck a trail from the front door of McDonald’s straight through to Playland where [Lexie’s kids] were taking turns at the slide. Lexie was wedged into a booth sipping a cup of coffee. She was forty pounds and six months into a pregnancy that had thinned her hair and sapped her energy.

68 At the end of the ‘90s, Winfrey’s $725 million net worth put her at 348th on the “Forbes 400” list of the wealthiest people in the US. By 2002, Winfrey’s wealth topped at $975 million and she moved up to 229th place. The Walton family occupies fourth place as a whole with a combined $18.8 billion (“Forbes 400”).

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‘“You been here long?’”

‘“Oh, that depends on how you look at it,’ Lexie said. ‘We came this morning at nine, for breakfast. . .and here we are, back in time for lunch.’”

‘“You all are good customers.’” “Customers? Novalee, we’re family. We spend so much time here that Baby Ruth [her child] calls Ronald McDonald ‘brother’” (246).

Here McDonald’s is more than a place to eat. It is a way of life: a nanny and companion for kids, a lounge for mom, and a social center for people to meet. Of course, it is also a symbol of globalization itself. From anti-neo-liberalism activist Jose Bové’s destruction of a McDonald’s in France to Benjamin Barber’s seminal globalization text,

Jihad v. McWorld, McDonald’s has become a symbol of the forces operating in contemporary capitalism. But here I want us to consider another noted discussion of

McDonald’s in the context of globalization, a text that will situate our discussion here in a broader perspective: Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree.

The book’s title refers to a confluence Friedman found incredibly meaningful. The journalist had just visited the Lexus car factory south of Tokyo, which produced 300 sedans a day while employing only sixty-six workers, the bulk of the work being done by robots. Riding on a bullet train after visiting the ultra-high-tech factory he read a newspaper story about Arabs and Israelis fighting over an interpretation of the 1948

United Nations resolution relating to a right of return for Palestinian refugees to Israel.

This juxtaposition of modern factory with disputes over ancient territory—symbolized by the olive tree—seemed to him the most accurate representation of the contemporary milieu. The challenge in this era of globalization—for countries and individuals—is to find a healthy balance between preserving a sense of identity, home, and community and doing what it takes to survive within the globalization system; that is, to balance their

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Lexuses with their olive trees. Friedman himself does not put much effort into keeping

the two in balance and the book really is paean to the information economy and neo-

liberalism. But he does at times express fear that there is less and less room for olive

trees as the market foists more Lexus factories on the world. One of Friedman’s most

interesting chapters in this regard is “Demolition Man” in which the author tries to deal

with the contradictions of globalization.

McDonald’s Japan has been so successful at integrating itself into Japan that the story is told of a little Japanese girl who arrives in Los Angeles, looks around, sees a few McDonald’s, tugs her mother’s sleeve and says to her: ‘Look, Mom, they have McDonald’s in this country too.’ . . .I’m glad that a little Japanese girl likes McDonald’s; just as I am glad my girls like sushi. But it is important that this Japanese girl liked it because it is different, not because she is fooled into thinking that it is actually Japanese. When that happens, homogenization is just around the corner. When that happens, there is every chance this Japanese girl will eventually lose touch with what is really Japanese, and one day she will wake up like that cell [fooled by cancer] and discover that she has been invaded and there’s nothing left of her original self and culture. (296-97)

This passage is very strange coming as it does in a book actually arguing that God himself could not create a much better financial system than the contemporary information economy. Nevertheless, Friedman expresses real concern about the problems of global integration. He seems to be worried about Japanese girls losing touch

with traditional Japanese culture. But why does Friedman not express any concern about

his daughters losing touch with traditional American culture? Is he so apparently

unconcerned about his own daughters’ cultural understanding because American culture

is not in danger of being lost? Do they understand that sushi is foreign so there is no

identification problem? Or are his concerns so seemingly one-sided because in fact he

cannot consistently make the argument that McDonald’s is American as well as he can

make the argument that McDonald’s is not Japanese? In other words, his discussion

cannot come to grips with what American culture is in a time when American-based

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companies make themselves part of the fabric of culture throughout the world. From this

perspective, we can conclude his anxiety is not really for the little Japanese girl or for the

loss of cultural traditions at all, but for the loss of US culture itself. In effect, he is

anxious that his daughters will have no culture—no olive trees in his terms—of their

own, even though he drops his daughters out of the discussion. It is they, and not the

Japanese girl, who are losing a culture, if McDonald’s is their cultural inheritance, as

Friedman implies. McDonald’s is a capitalist enterprise and as such will do what is

necessary to integrate itself into any local culture. But, of course, there is a vast

difference between “McDonald’s,” which is a brand name, and “sushi,” which is a

cuisine and not able to be patented, incorporated, copyrighted, or protected as intellectual

property.69 So while the Japanese girl has both McDonald’s—because it is part of

Japanese life—and sushi because it is a cuisine and a tradition that originates in her country, Friedman’s daughters have neither, since they are stuck with the foreignness of sushi but without claims to McDonald’s as a specifically American cultural institution.70

Where the Heart Is does not share his anxiety; indeed, NWO culture as a whole

does not share Friedman’s concern. It makes a home out of what is transnational culture.

But I would argue that Friedman’s anxiety stems from his understanding that the US is

losing its claims on a sense of the local. So if Taco Bell is willing to close six times a day

69 Of course, a word should be added here about the unmitigatedly despicable practice of the agri-business giants patenting traditional crops. In the most notorious (and kind of weird) case, the RiceTec Group, which is chaired by the prince of Liechtenstein, Hans Adam II, owns the company that in 1997 was awarded aUS patent on basmati rice grown in the Western Hemisphere or basmati grown anywhere which is crossed with the company’s rice lines. India successfully appealed, but in the process RiceTec was able to argue that “basmati” is a generic name for aromatic rice. Therefore, it can continue to produce a rice that it can claim to be a “basmati-type rice” (Acharya).

70 Phillip E. Wegner’s “The Pretty Woman Goes Global” cites the same McDonald’s passage from The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Wegner concludes that Friedman’s anxiety is for the Japanese child’s apparent loss of culture but that the concern is unnecessary because “the current forces of globalization requires both universal commodification and local culture.”

152 for prayer in its Middle Eastern restaurants does it remain American? Well, yes in light of Empire’s observations of Americanism as a culture that joins with other cultures, blends and becomes part of them. But no in the sense that America is the culture of the

US. The situation becomes even more confusing when we consider Taco Bell and Pizza

Hut—two other examples he cites as being quintessentially American. Does the fact that they sell fast food versions of Mexican and Italian food not put a hiccup in his analysis?

Or is the fact that these chains are made in the USA enough to make them American?

Friedman spills much rhetorical seed worrying about a loss of cultural heritage and specificity when he cites the incongruity of a Taco Bell springing up in the tiny Persian

Gulf emirate of Qatar, but if pre-packaged chains are by definition American, and seem in Friedman’s writing to be Americana itself, by virtue of their omnipresence they are becoming less American.71 After all, as Friedman explains, they adapt to local expectations; thus the Qatari Taco Bell closes throughout the day for prayer. What is lost finally is the American-ness of the chain since it can make itself over to adapt to local conditions.

In the end, then, the one who loses on the culture front is the US; its American-ness is much more loyal to the principles of capitalism than the traditions of American life.

But we have begged a central question here: are businesses like Taco Bell and Wal-Mart the essence of American culture? I would argue that question is dated. It is dated not

71 It is actually interesting that Friedman mentions Qatar because its importance to the US as a strategic ally became pronounced during the preparations for the Gulf War redux of the younger Bush’s administration. Indeed, the WTO selected Doha, Qatar as the site for its 2001 meeting because there would be little opportunity for the protest that had dogged previous meetings since Seattle. Indeed, Qatar is also noteworthy as the home of al-Jazeera, the Arab equivalent of CNN. Al-Jazeera has emerged as such a powerful voice in the Muslim world that the Bush administration actually approached the Qatari government to exercise a little censorship on the Arab media juggernaut because the administration felt the network was endorsing an anti-American and pro-al Qaeda stance (Koppel and Labott). This confluence of events suggests a new centrality for the tiny nation, especially in the post-9/11 years.

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because the concept of culture is dated but because the concept of culture as

unequivocally bound by nation is dated. Indeed, when we consider the question that way,

then we have to realize another fact: globalization is not US or American imperialism.

Inasmuch as fast-food and large discount variety stores with centralized warehousing,

store design, etc. were created in the USA we can understand why they are called

American. But inasmuch as they catch on all over the world and firms based in other

countries take the idea for use in their own countries selling their own products, the idea

has moved well beyond American-ness. That is the phenomenon behind Empire; it is not

that globalization is Americanization but that Americana is subsumed internationally.

For Empire blends with whatever culture it comes into contact with; that is the crucial

distinction between it and imperialism, even though both are products of capitalism. But

for Friedman (and the many other jingoistic globalists he represents) who is still hanging on to a proprietary American-ness, America then would have to be just the process rather than the product. By an extension that Friedman does not seem to want make, America is a way of being as opposed to a place to be. And all this leads back to the Wal-Mart

“family.”

In a very real way the death of Mr. Sam is the expression of the death of a patriarchal and proprietary nationalist American-ness. After all, Walton was the embodiment of old-fashioned America. It is not a coincidence that he could plausibly title his autobiography Made in the USA; he was firmly connected to that identity in the public eye.72 If home and family—figures for the nation—are represented and embodied

72 Indeed, in the late 1980s and early ‘90s when this book was set, Wal-Mart was completely identifiable with the “Made in the USA” campaign to promote domestic products. The chain latched on to that movement and built a very public identity around it. The store’s all-American identity only disintegrated

154 in Wal-Mart, the death of the patriarch signals the beginning of a new era. His death marks the on set of Empire (though certainly Walton himself did his part to put the economy on that course). The novel both commemorates the death of Walton and stages the birth of Americus (nicknamed the Wal-Mart Baby) at Wal-Mart. Both events demonstrate that in the New World Order life begins and ends in the world of consumer goods because home and history are where the market is.

after Walton’s death when the chain was taken to task for both stocking a preponderance of foreign-made goods and selling items made by children in foreign sweatshops.

CHAPTER 6 WELFARE REFORM, FAMILY VALUES, AND NEO-LIBERALISM’S NEO- ENCLOSURE

Perhaps the critical implications that I am drawing from Empire are challenged most in dealing with issues beyond culture, reaching into politics and policy. Certainly one of the major critiques of Empire is directed toward the authors’ vague prescriptions at the end of the text for moving the world in more progressive directions. The authors propose such policies as global citizenship, global rights, and a social wage. That these recommendations are hardly momentous is not in doubt; that Empire really is more a book of philosophy rather than a political program also should also not be in doubt. But

Hardt and Negri’s vague prescriptions should not cause the text’s very salient analyses of sovereignty and subjectivity in globalization to be ignored. Of course, the desire remains to make Empire apply to on-the-ground political situations even as we challenge the traditional separations between culture and politics. In this dissertation I am using

Empire as a Rosetta Stone of globalization culture, so here I want to find a way to take its lessons to the political issue that perhaps best characterizes the changes the New World

Order has brought: the end of New Deal welfare. Of course, questions remain. Can policy be interpreted the way texts are interpreted? What violence is there in such readings? What can we gain from such readings?

Deforming Welfare

In 1996 President Bill Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and

Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. This event is significant because that law, better

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known by its ideologically charged nickname welfare reform, dismantled the American

system of public assistance. As the apotheosis of neo-liberal public policy, understanding

welfare reform is key to understanding neo-liberalism’s economic logic. Understanding

its ideological and practical implications is critical in any effort to resist the near-

Darwinian excesses of neo-liberal social policy.

Of course, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act

(PRWORA) is not simply a product of globalization’s economic forces. Though it represents one future with which welfare states around the world may have to contend, it is distinctively American, born out of a US narrative of race, class, and gender as it interacts with a culturally dominant ideal of family life. Indeed, welfare reform stands at a particularly thorny location at the intersection of the idealized American family and neo-liberal economics and politics. This chapter explores these forces of family and neo- liberalism to understand how they shape US welfare law and to provide a vision of what neo-liberal social policy can become throughout the globe.

How a Widow Becomes a Welfare Queen

To begin this exploration, we should briefly consider the old system in relation to the new. When the US’s first cash-assistance program, Aid to Dependent Children

(ADC, which later included families to become AFDC) was created in 1935,73 the face of

poverty was that of a white child; poverty was a rural tragedy, say of hill people of

Appalachia who actually presented a convenient image because they were supposed to be

much too proud to take assistance anyway. The presumed recipient of ADC then was a

tragically helpless white widow who would otherwise be forced to abandon her children

73 When the program was initiated it was actually Aid to Dependent Children. Families were added later.

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to enter the world of wage labor. When the new “reformed” welfare, Temporary

Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), was created in 1996, the presumed recipient was a

greedily helpless black or Latina woman who would use her children to deliberately

avoid work if allowed. The new dole aims to close off the supposed loophole that allows

these women to avoid the labor market.

Such efforts to conscript minority women for ideological ends are not new in entitlement policy. Indeed, African-American women were regularly deemed ineligible for AFDC until the mid-1960s. State administrators of these federal funds, especially in the Southern US, often assumed that black women were more suited to working motherhood than were white women. Among excuses at their disposal, if excuses were needed, were “suitable home” provisions—such as requiring children to be born to married parents—to largely disqualify otherwise eligible black women who then commonly entered the domestic servant workforce. But with Lyndon Johnson’s Great

Society programs and the 1960’s civil rights struggles opening the way for challenges to discriminatory welfare policies, more eligible women were able to receive assistance.74

Time that policy shift with the loss of over 30 million manufacturing jobs in the 1970s, and we see welfare rolls that grew from 3.1 million in 1961 to 10.8 million by 1974. As the US moved into the ‘80s, its economic problems got worse: from 1979 to 1984 poverty rose 23 percent (Marchevsky and Theoharis 240-41). White workers facing industrial job losses accepted the Nixon-Reagan message that their problems were caused by the lazy poor (read African-Americans). From the Reagan imaginary came the archetype of the

74 In his unsuccessful presidential bid in 1964, Barry Goldwater used welfare as a national issue in his presidential campaign. We know what happened there. The country had not yet come to associate welfare with black women trying to avoid work.

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“welfare queen,” a woman of color too promiscuous to get married and too lazy to do any

labor that did not involve bearing children.

In the welfare queen we see the multiplicity of forces constructing the discourse of welfare reform. We will see that the Personal Responsibility Act is not simply a transformation of public assistance; it is an attempt to institute a particular moral vision upon the poor. It is, in short, an attempt to install what conservatives call “family values.”

Family Values

To begin our inquiry into family values, I offer a passage from presidential would- be Bob Dole’s nomination acceptance speech at the 1996 Republican national convention. Responding to then First Lady Hillary Clinton’s best-seller, It Takes a

Village [to Raise a Child], Dole argued:

And after the virtual devastation of the American family, the rock upon…which this country was founded, we are told that it takes a village, that is, the collective, and thus, the state, to raise a child. The state is now more involved than it has ever been in the raising of children, and children are now more neglected, abused, and more mistreated than they have been in our time. This is not a coincidence. This is not a coincidence, and, with all due respect, I am here to tell you, it does not take a village to raise a child. It takes a family to raise a child.

More than anything this quotation shows that the story of welfare reform cannot be

told apart from the story of the American family as it has come to be represented

ideologically. Given the shape of that ideology, few will be surprised that Dole’s

crowing would rouse an enthusiastic response. Of course, the notions of community and

family are in no way mutually exclusive or even opposed. But the reaction Dole received

speaks volumes about the political climate in what we can now call the Clinton era. It

tells us, primarily, that the scant political differences between the candidates offered little

of political or economic substance about which to argue; after all, the Clinton

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administration’s most lasting achievements—the passages of NAFTA and welfare

reform—fulfilled the goals of the Reagan-Bush years. Mostly, all that remained for

discussion were vague sentiments about family values. In other words, family values

feels like a nationwide changing-of-the-subject by politicians who would rather not

discuss their economic policies. But that conclusion is too simple, for neo-liberal

economics and family values are not really separate agendas at all.75

In an age of neo-liberal globalization and finance capitalism, national governments,

regardless of political orientation, have had to prioritize reducing public-service

expenditure. But for the average American, the intricacies of global finance are not really

a deciding factor in political decisions. What has motivated the upending of welfare and

public assistance at the popular level seems to be a vague but very visceral sense of

resentment. I would argue that this resentment is motivated by a combination of anger

over the perception of changing gender roles and sexual norms, naked racism, sexism,

and homophobia, and class and economic insecurity.

Realize that in both the Reagan-Bush and the Clinton eras, the 90/50 gap grew; that is, the ratio between wages of those at the top 90 percent of earners and those in the middle 50 percent increased. College-educated, white-collar, blue-collar, knowledge workers—almost all of them faced stagnant or diminished earnings. Indeed, the 50/10 ratio (with the ten representing the earners at the bottom ten percent) shrank. Family

75 In larger terms, the prime directives of US conservatism since WWII have been to erode progressive political structures and to promote the interests of private business. So-called “culture wars” have often accompanied these efforts—McCarthyism in the ‘50s, Reaganism in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. While these cultural movements were often undertaken in sincerity, they also accompanied the anti-Keynesianism, anti- welfare politics that have remained to greater or lesser degrees at the heart of Republicanism, if not all conservatism.

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values then appears as a way to reassert differences between various groups. It

establishes a sense of supposed middle-class identity apart from that of the poor whom dominant cultures construct as “different”: that is, as not American, not white, not married.

Indeed, this sense of an alternative America is reflected by US journalistic representations of poverty. When media coverage presents poverty sympathetically, news stories usually focus on white people; when stories take a hard line on poverty and welfare or when the economy is strong, the stories focus nearly exclusively on Afro-

Americans who are figured as shiftless and promiscuous (see Gilens). Such representations send a clear message: poverty is no longer assumed to be a menacing threat to the life of the “good family” (as social policy considered it to be when the poor were figured as tragic white widows and their helpless children); now, social policy presumes that the “bad family” causes poverty. And these “bad families” are consistently represented as single-parent and non-white.

Out of this environment arose neo-liberal welfare reform. Its popular rationale is simple: if poverty is the fault of families, and if the globalized economy has reduced the economic differences between the ranks of the poor and the middle income, then it is more important than ever—within this framework—to create separations between the middle class family and the poor one. In this way, economic insecurity breeds resentment of the poor among many sectors of the population. Growing with this generalized insecurity is a vague sense of despair over the fate of the family and of the soundness of institutions like the government in general. But this distrust of institutions is itself anxiety provoking. Lawmakers have responded to this environment not simply

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by retooling public assistance. The welfare reform law implicitly blames the poor for

their own poverty. As a result, welfare rolls dropped from an all-time high of over 14

million in 1993 and ’94 to around 7 million by 1999 (Green Book),76 but the system does

not focus on solving the problems of poverty, simply on getting people off welfare—

which is not always the same thing. Furthermore, there is little incentive to actively seek

eligible TANF recipients and get them into the program; as a result, many needy people

never receive public assistance at all. And while AFDC was designed to keep mothers at

home with their children (indeed, that was a requirement), TANF forces recipients into

the labor force with little regard for childcare concerns.

Presented as a way out of poverty, the work requirement acts more like a

punishment for the presumed larceny of public assistance. This “punishment” is enforced

by the centerpiece of the Act: a five-year lifetime limit on eligibility.77 Beyond reducing

governmental expenditure, the purpose of this lifetime limit is implied by the law’s name,

“Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation,” that is, to use the

authority of government to undermine governmental authority and instill a sense of so-

called “personal responsibility.” To that end, the law includes a litany of neo-Puritan

rules and sanctions on family and sexual life designed to regulate morality on a

population deemed deviant.

While the Act’s first stated goal is to “Provide assistance to needy families…” it

also seeks to

76 The 2000 Green Book Overview of Entitlement Programs provides official background material and data on programs within the jurisdiction of the Committee on Ways and Means of the US House of Representatives.

77 Furthermore, welfare funds can be counted as income and thus may render a recipient ineligible for other need-based entitlements like Medicare.

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“2. End the dependence of needy parents on government benefits by promoting job preparation, work, and marriage;

3. Prevent and reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies and establish annual numerical goals for preventing and reducing the incidence of these pregnancies; and

4. Encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families” (Green Book).

To serve those ends, PRWORA includes provisions that any mother under eighteen must live with an adult and that parents convicted of fraud or drug possession (any drug at any amount) may face a lifetime ban on benefits. It even allows states to give cash bonuses to single parents who get married.78 Its dogmatic eligibility requirements penalize or threaten especially vulnerable populations: teenage mothers, children, convicted felons, the disabled, those suffering domestic abuse, and immigrants.

During a time when the disintegration of communities is blamed on the deterioration of the family, the law offers a vision of social reintegration via a melancholic wish to reclaim a familial plentitude which may never have existed in the first place. Bob Dole’s speech posits the family as containing all that is required to raise a child. But the implication of the Personal Responsibility Act is that family is not really enough or if it is then “family” means something much more expansive than the stereotypical nuclear unit: it is grandparents when parents are under eighteen. It is the government mandating that parents should be married. And so it is civil institutions and often the church. It is the police who make sure parents stay off drugs and help collect unpaid child support payments. It is the schools too who receive federal funds to teach

78 Pollitt reports that conservative Republicans and Democrats are calling for the new welfare-reform law to set aside 10 percent of TANF funds for efforts to promote marriage, including faith-based marriage preparation courses and classes instructing single moms on the benefits of marriage. At best, such efforts are naïve—as if the decision to marry were strictly up to the single woman and as if she did not know she would probably be better off with another person to help with the rent and the parenting duties. At worst such efforts are harmful—as when they encourage abused women to stay with their abusers.

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and preach abstinence. In short, it is a collective effort and as a collective is really an

object of Utopian longing.

So how can collectivity, which so many on the Right see as the problem, also be

the solution? We could write off the conservative vision as a simple disconnect or a

hypocritical inconsistency, but I would say it is something else. It symptomizes the

transition the US is undergoing. It’s part of the crisis of the public sphere that seeks to

redefine the public and the private in a time of biopolitical self-disciplining. The recent

obsession with family values shows us that in an age of neo-liberal capitalism the old

boundaries between the private and public spheres do not hold.

Taking the Public out of Public Assistance

The differences between the public and private disintegrate each year as private

corporations insinuate themselves increasingly into public functions. That move marks

the history of capitalism; that is, “to set in motion the continuous cycle of private

reappropriation of public goods: the expropriation of what is common” (Empire 301).

Promising to cut costs through greater efficiency and higher technology than government, welfare privatizers have won contracts at state and city levels to administer such vital

programs as TANF, child-support-payment collections, and child-protective services.

For example, Lockheed Martin—one of the US’s largest defense contractors—has

entered headfirst into the newly booming privatization industry. Since the end of the

Cold War, Lockheed’s government-services division, which includes welfare

management, has become the fastest-growing segment of the company (Cohen). But the

leading welfare privatizer is the rapidly expanding Maximus, Inc. Created by a Nixon-

administration official, Maximus holds 30 percent of the privatization market (Woellert )

with sales of $319.5 million in 1999 (Berkowitz). Of course, the problem with this

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privatization boom is that the companies’ incentives are not to serve the populations of

needy families but to make money. That these goals often contradict is embarrassingly

obvious.

Other trends do not involve official contracts and functions but nevertheless erode

the boundaries between public and private functions. In welfare reform we see one

example in an organization called the Welfare to Work Partnership. Founded in 1997,

the Partnership is an organization endorsed by the White House and funded by

corporations to promote the hiring of welfare recipients. As the Partnership’s

promotional material explains: “The business community recognized that the private

sector must take a leading role in moving people from welfare to work.”

Beginning with five companies—Burger King, Monsanto, Sprint, United Airlines and UPS—the Partnership now has over 15,000 members. Why do companies join?

They have learned that there are huge advantages to hiring people off the dole.

Employers hiring applicants from welfare-to-work programs receive more information about program participants than they learn from regular job applicants, and hiring participants entitles private-sector employers to tax deductions of up to 50 percent of their workfare employees’ wages. Plus, as The Parternship’s website explains, the retention rates are quite high (once employees’ transportation problems are solved and they can actually get to work) because this population really wants to keep its jobs. But there are also subtler, long-term advantages for corporate America in general. We can discover these advantages when we ask why those five particular corporations started the

Partnership.

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Certainly, Burger King is a natural: its low-wage, low-skill work is typical of the

kind of employment available to entry-level workers including many (especially younger)

welfare recipients. Access to welfare-to-work clients offers Burger King’s management a

pool of hirees among which to selectively choose; management gets more applicant

information, and, of course, receives tax breaks. But perhaps most importantly, in the

fast-food industry where employers struggle with high employee turnover, welfare

leavers may be more stable because they have serious incentive to keep their jobs.

But why the other four employers? What do they have in common? It may not be surprising to learn that UPS, Monsanto, Sprint, and United Airlines all experienced very public disputes with organized labor, many in 1997, the year they formed the Partnership.

UPS’s record with unions is well-known in the US. In 1997, it was crippled by a popularly supported and very successful Teamster-organized strike of UPS drivers over the company’s use of part-time workers.

Monsanto, today a notorious name in environmentalist circles for creating genetically modified agricultural products, was in 1997 the target of a very public campaign launched by the umbrella union AFL-CIO on behalf of the workers of

Monsanto’s then subsidiary Garguilo, Inc.—one of the largest strawberry companies in

California. Garguilo had been a key organizing target for the United Farmworkers and a site for union busting by management, who fired farmworkers who had tried to organize.

United Airlines may be the most surprising member of the Partnership. After all, in

1994 union pilots and machinists along with non-union workers obtained 55 percent of company stock. United management’s traditionally hostile attitude toward workers partly motivated labor’s support of ownership, but what has become clear in subsequent years is

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that employee-ownership has not changed management culture at the airline. To acquire

the ownership stake, employees signed on to contract sacrifices including pay cuts,

employee contributions to insurance, lowered pay for entry-level workers, and a two-tier

wage plan in which United Shuttle pilots are paid less than United pilots (Kochan). But

they made all of these sacrifices in exchange for only three seats on the twelve-member

board of directors and non-voting stock. As a result, the employee-owners have little say in company operations (Miah and Sheppard). (The flight attendants’ union did not sign

on to the deal because these sacrifices were too high.) Thus, United mechanics were

among the lowest paid in the industry when The Welfare to Work Partnership was

formed (Arndt and Bernstein). According to activists in the International Association of

Machinists, wages declined by as much as 30 percent for United’s unionized employee-

owners in the ‘90s.

Finally, we come to Sprint whose history with unions is perhaps most notorious of

all. It has been subject to US Labor Department censure and a judgment against it by the

National Labor Relations Board for firing hundreds of workers in its Latin-oriented, US-

based subsidiary, La Conexion Familiar, just days before the workers were to vote on

joining the Communications Workers of America. Mexico’s Union of Telephone

Workers accused Sprint of implementing a ‘“vicious anti-union policy.’” This sentiment

is not surprising given that the company distributes a “Union-free Management Guide”

identifying ‘“the threat of union intervention in our business’” as one of the greatest

challenges the company faces (Mesler 20-24).

Thus Welfare to Work, like the Personal Responsibility Act, is a metonym for the

larger market itself. Corporations enjoy tax benefits and increased profits by reducing

167 employees’ compensation while undermining organized labor and moving jobs to desperate workers who will settle for low wages and no benefits because they believe they have no other options. Yet, if we accept the premise that the PRWORA is a crystallization of neo-liberal social policy, then we need to explain a certain xenophobic impulse in the law that directs energy away from what would seem to be the goal of contemporary globalization; that is, of erasing national and cultural borders.

Reforming More Than Welfare

In their analysis of the PRWORA, Alejandra Marchevsky and Jeanne Theoharis argue that welfare reform has served as “a ‘back door’ to immigration reform” widening the legal gap between citizens and legal immigrants, creating entirely new immigrant categories, and opening up new channels of surveillance and information sharing between federal and local social service agencies and the US Immigration and Naturalization

Service (237). The law instituted a five-year waiting period before legal immigrants who arrived in the US after 1996 could qualify for means-tested assistance such as subsidized housing and TANF. States and territories may even choose to permanently bar legal immigrant residents from TANF even after the five-year period. (So far Alabama and

Guam have decided to make legal residents ineligible.) Furthermore, legal residents never become eligible for Supplemental Security Income and food stamps—with exceptions for veterans, asylum seekers, and the Right’s favorite immigrants, Cubans

(Green Book). In short, an official policy of eliminating international trade barriers rules the day, and yet the PRWORA’s immigration guidelines bring a return to old-fashioned nativism.

We thus have to explain an apparent incongruity. It seems clear that while incompatible with the nominally multicultural zeitgeist, US welfare guidelines are utterly

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compatible with the belt-tightening austerity that rules social policymaking. Nativism then becomes a means for exclusion—just as suitable home standards were used in the old AFDC days to disqualify black women from federal funds. The effect then as now was and is to keep a population available for low-wage labor—especially domestic and agricultural work. Indeed this backdoor immigration reform may actually depress wages further than welfare reform for it forces aliens (both legal and illegal) into underpaid work.

This anti-immigrant policy illustrates the larger tendency in contemporary globalization. Here outside of whatever public eye may be fixed on welfare, a swollen population of people ambitious or desperate enough to move to the USA is made available for the lowest-paying jobs, including sweatshop work. Of course, by extension, the ready availability of low-wage workers suppresses wages for most all workers— which leads us to consider just what the net effect of this anti-welfare, anti-worker politics is.

The (Safety) Net Effect

I would argue that the drive to eliminate welfare actually operates as a kind of modern-day enclosure movement. Marx’s famous discussion centers on English peasants forced off land that their families had worked for generations. They were kicked out because that land had become privatized. Some of these dispossessed peasants remained to farm the land as wage laborers; most of the others were forced into wage work in urban industry. But ultimately all were proletarianized.

Certainly, the contemporary situation is not primitive accumulation in the sense

Marx used to describe English enclosure. But then, as Hardt and Negri remind us,

“Primitive accumulation is not a process that happens once and then is done with; rather

169 capitalist relations of production and social classes have to be reproduced continually”

(Empire 258). But what is interesting is that the idea of the multitude arises at the same moment of primitive accumulation, “at a moment of historic mutation, a process of generalized social and violent dispossession and capitalist recomposition” ( Kraniauskas

22).

As for welfare reform, it is not the case that AFDC recipients were outside the capitalist system. However, they did challenge the central characteristic of capitalism— the wage relation. To view welfare reform in light of enclosure helps us to understand the way in which the PRWORA redefines the relationship of workers to capital.

Imposing a lifetime limit on welfare works analogously to removing the peasants from the land. It forces all into wage labor.

While in theory, the focus on employment could be a positive experience that helps people find fulfilling careers, the track records of the major employers involved in

Welfare to Work programs make the chances of finding fulfilling, living-wage-paying employment slim. Indeed, studies tracking families who have left welfare and taken full- time jobs show that work has not paid enough to meet all their basic needs.79 As the

Economic Policy Institute found, “In 1999, 47 percent of families that recently left welfare for full-time, full-year employment experienced one or more critical hardship, such as going without food, shelter, or necessary medical care” (Boushey 1).

Given the direction job growth is taking, work is not going to be a stepping-stone to financial security. It is likely that the numbers of working poor will grow. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ occupational projections, more than half (54 percent)

79 Nearly half of all parents who recently left welfare have been unable to pay housing or utility bills. Evidence increasingly shows that homelessness is on the rise in some localities. See Boushey.

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of the new jobs created between 1996 and 2006 will be in occupations that pay below the

median earning rate. Worse yet, 40 percent of these new jobs are projected to be in

occupations in the lowest-earnings quartile. Of these jobs, cashier is the fastest-growing

profession.

While there is a work requirement in the PRWORA, there is no corresponding requirement for job training. And while some states have taken on that task of training, most have not. Thus, a significant population finds itself available for low-wage work.

Recipients who cannot engage in government-defined “work activity” are placed in governmental assignments and do not have the labor protections of other workers. That welfare reform then diminishes the bargaining power and undermines the gains of public- sector unions seems obvious. While the PRWORA specifically restricts TANF recipients from being assigned to positions from which workers have been laid off, according to one report New York City cut 22,000 municipal employees between 1995 and 2000 and replaced them largely with workfare recipients. After federal contributions to their salaries, these new employees cost the city $1.80 an hour for a twenty-hour week and earn no benefits—as compared to the average city clerical worker whose hourly wage is

$12.32, not including benefits (Marchevsky and Theoharis 251).

Of course, after decades of demonization, convincing employers to hire welfare

recipients can be a PR challenge. For those who have not been able to be hired, these

workfare assignments are all that are available. But even these jobs are unstable and

workers are subject to layoffs. The painful irony here is that workfare counts as welfare

and so is subject to the five-year lifetime eligibility limit. Indeed, it is this regressive and

punitive five-year limit on welfare benefits that redefines the relationship between

171 workers and capital. For there is not even a pretense that all workers are offered some minimal protection from economic uncertainties. Welfare reform then binds all workers by the shackles of necessity. Indeed, it initiates a new kind of imperialism with a domestic, neo-liberal objective.

Historically, anti-imperialism was a centerpiece of post-World War II politics and

Fordist economics. The Fordist factory economy needed workers throughout the world, including the European colonies. Thus, after WWII, when the US inherited the mantle of world hegemon, it set about promoting anti-imperialism and Fordism. It sold Fordism as the system that could free people from the vagaries of life through economic prosperity that would in turn support social welfare programs when the economy took a downturn.

The post-WWII era was also defined by the Cold War when US policy required a kind of humanization of capitalism, a sense that capitalism provided for social welfare as well as, or better than, communism did. Here again the welfare safety-net comes into play. It was a part of US policy—foreign and domestic as well as economic and political—until the end of the Cold War. However, in the age of globalization when there are few actually existing alternatives to neo-liberalism, US capital’s more pressing need is for cheap labor and the reduction of public expenditure. Thus, we arrive at one of the tragic results of neoliberalism; it produces desire and expectation on a global scale, yet decreases the certainty of work and security. As Comaroff and Comaroff argue,

“Everywhere there is evidence of an uneasy fusion of enfranchisement and exclusion. . .

.Gone is any official-speak of egalitarian futures, work for all, or the paternal government envisioned by the various freedom movements. These ideals have given way to a spirit of deregulation, with its taunting mix of emancipation and limitation” (299).

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In the globalization era, the world’s poor face a reversal of Fordist and early post-

Fordist policies featuring great public expenditure. The degradation of the safety net has

narrowed the gap between the nations of the South and those of the North. The number

of working poor further helps to shrink the differences. In the post-World War II era, that

narrowing was supposed to come when industrialization raised the living standards of the

post-colonial nations of the South to meet those of the colonial North. However, in the

post-Cold War era, it has become clear that if any leveling is to come, it is from the

working people of the most developed nations, who will see diminished standards of

living. For in all parts of the world, work is decreasingly a marker of self-sufficiency and increasingly a symptom of poverty.

CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSIONS AND SPECULATIONS ON THE NEW WORLD ORDER

Periodizing the ‘90s: Redux

Finally, The Cultural Logic of Globalization in the United States shows itself to be a work of periodization and speculation about what comes after postmodernity. I have tried to make a case that the 1990s was more than just ten years at the end of the twentieth-century. It was the first decade of the globalization era; as such it was a period of historical change that stretched beyond the ten years that, technically speaking, make up the decade. Seeing the period in this larger sense, I have argued the ‘90s began

November 9, 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and ended September 11, 2001 with the fall of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers. In between these two world-changing events was the decade shaped in part by the cultural signposts I have studied here.

What should be suspicious in my periodizing gesture is the perspective from which

the chronology emerges: that is, from the US. Actually, to date the 1990s from the fall of

the Berlin Wall is more than reasonable globally; that event was momentous for the entire

world (to greater or lesser degrees, of course). But to date the end of the ‘90s on

September 11, 2001 seems a particularly American hallmark. However, recalling

Chapter Three’s arguments about post-nationalism and 9/11, that date restructured

relationships of people around the world to neoliberal capital and to Empire itself.

Actually, what should be more suspicious than the dates I picked for this period is

that I demarcate these days as a period at all. Why these dates? I’ll not rehash Chapter

One and Two’s argument for seeing the post-Cold War years as post-postmodern or

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Chapter Three’s argument for the significance of the events of September 11. I will just add that we can see the US’s 2002 attack on Afghanistan and its 2003 attack on Iraq as the first hot zones in the next phase of the globalization era. For when Bush the Younger declared his War on Terror he effectively ended Bush the Elder’s New World Order by changing the way the US deals with the rest of the world. And in so doing he laid the groundwork for a new era of constant war. With its rejection of the Gulf War’s Powell

Doctrine which insisted on clearly defined objectives and an exit strategy, this War on

Terror is something very different from New World Order international and global relations. After all, how will we know when a war on terror is over? The answer will be nebulous for there is no wall that can come down, no country that can surrender and end terrorism for good. So if it turns out that this post-NWO period is shaped by the War on

Terror, we cannot really look forward to an endpoint. All it seems we can pinpoint is the beginning of the new era. Or can we? To answer this question I need to theorize my gestures towards breaks and periodizations in the first place.

So given that I began this project arguing that the 1990s is a new period, I want to end the project arguing for the need to posit such breaks at all. Fortunately, Fredric

Jameson’s A Singular Modernity has done that theoretical work for me, and so I cite here the first of what he calls the “four maxims of modernity”: “We cannot not periodize”

(29). That is, we have to draw connections among events; if we do not we will face just an endless series of factoids.

In drawing these connections, we tell stories about events. Or to cite Jameson’s second maxim, which is framed in relation to modernity but is apropos nevertheless:

“Modernity is not a concept, philosophical or otherwise, but a narrative category” (40).

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That is to say that all the theorizing about any period does not change the fact that the

rubric that structures the period will be of necessity a narrative about the events that make up the period.

What I have tried to offer here is a narrative of the ‘90s. My story can in no way make claims at completeness (What narrative can?), but I have explored sites that I argue are key to understanding the New World Order. And I hope it is clear that the New

World Order is important to study because it is the formative decade of the globalization era. What has come, and continues to come after the NWO, remains fuzzy. Will it turn out that the War on Terror is shorthand for an even newer world order? Are the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq the opening salvos in a new period of permanent—if not total— war much like the Cold War? What is clear is that the narratives we assemble about the period after the New World Order will be shaped by how we define the New World

Order itself. For it is in defining a past that we create a particular present. As Jameson puts it:

It is the vital energy of the present and its violent self-creation that not only overcomes the stagnant melancholies of the epigones, it also assigns a mission to a temporal and historical period which ought not yet to have the right to be one. For the present is not yet a historical period: it ought not to be able to name itself and characterize its own originality. Yet it is precisely this unauthorized self- affirmation that will finally shape that new thing we call actuality. (25).

But my goal here is not to directly define this new present, but to look at the events that have shaped and defined it. I have argued that 9/11 is one of the two central events that demarcates the 1990s. But is it? We can rightly object that September 11, deeply meaningful as it seems now, may in fact prove not to be so significant later. Today, we know the destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon as a date—that is 9/11—which tells us that for now these events do mark a significant

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historical break not in the globalization era as a whole but in the first years of that era,

that is a kind of “long” 1990s.80 But as Bruce Robbins has argued, events—even

atrocities as unspeakably horrific as the Holocaust—do not escape history’s changing

judgments (Robbins). Meanings cannot remain permanently fixed to an event. For now,

the key difference between the Holocaust and 9/11 regarding periodization is that the

Holocaust is not remembered as a date because it has not been taken to mark an essential

break. Indeed, the banality of evil thesis (Arendt) may well be said to be embodied in the way the holocaust has been absorbed by history as part of modernity—though certainly one of its lowest moments.

Globalizing the Discourses

Some theorists, most notably Anthony Giddens, have tried to undetstand the

changes of recent years by turning back to modernity; it is this move that prompted

Jameson to develop his theses about modernity and history. By adopting the rhetoric of

modernity, these theorists hope to reawaken the promises of the modern cultural

formation, especially the promise of the New and the deeply meaningful, which if not

removed by postmodernism was moved to a hard-to-reach place. Jameson argues that

this harkening back is in fact motivated by very specific desires to step back from the

challenges that postmodernity presents—“a retheorization of late capitalism, feminism,

coming to terms with ‘relativism’ and the constructedness of social reality”(Singular 7).

He argues that the move back to the rhetoric of the modern serves a very specific

ideological—even public relations—purpose of promoting the achievements of the West

80 We recognize no such break for the Oklahoma City bombing, which was in its day the most deadly act of terrorism in the US. Obviously, the nationality of the perpetrator marks a central difference between the two terrorist events—Timothy McVeigh was an American; Osama bin Laden and company are not. The scale of the attacks was certainly different. The fact that the towers collapsed on live television made it horribly real.

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to the “rest.” And the greatest of these achievements from this neo-modern perspective is

modernity itself.

That the Giddens view of modernity is deeply ideological and ultimately serves

reactionary ends seems certain, but perhaps the desire to move back to the modern does evince a sense of the inadequacy of postmodernity to characterize the contemporary cultural formation. And here globalization begins to look more attractive. I made my case in Chapter Two for why globalization is more helpful than postmodernism for theorizing the contemporary cultural formation; however, in considering that shift, let’s not position globalization as an easy answer to the common critiques of globalization. As

Lawrence Grossberg cautions, globalization cannot be presented as an easy fix to the ostensibly Euro- or ethno-centrism of postmodernity. Such a move misses the point that no framework can ever be essentially free of ethnocentrism, even one that takes the entire world as its area of study. And in any case, the need and desire to conceptualize the formation in the wake of multinational capitalism has always been part of leftist postmodernism from the likes of Jameson.

Another theoretical perspective, postcolonialism, has also seen a move toward using globalization as a rubric for study. But here the term “globalization” is folded into postcolonial theory as if to constitute a modish redecoration on imperialism and an update of concepts applicable to postcolonial history. My objection to this approach is simple: globalization is not imperialism, therefore it cannot just step in to update a history connected to a time that has passed. The imperial regimes of, say, the nineteenth century, colonized and subjugated completely. The globalization regime does not depend on occupation of the land and conquest of the people. Certainly the military power of the

178 likes of the US remains quite visible and menacing, especially today in the wake of the

Iraq War, but what is more visible is capitalism’s culture of consumption and the meagerness of a wage system that cannot accommodate the needs of those who want to share in globalization’s culture of consumption. More omnipresent than Queen

Victoria’s warships or today’s fighter planes and carrier fleets are the information and finance economy’s digital and virtual operations that aren’t really present in a physical sense but which have a near stranglehold over financial systems and economies around the world. Though they exert power as real as any military ever could, the language of imperialism—of land grabs and slavery—is not adequate for capturing the dynamics of a system that encompasses imperialistic tendencies into a larger scheme that seeks to join with and appropriate commercially and culturally all the peoples consumed by Empire’s media and conquered by its militaries.

Globalizing any field or theoretical framework would involve at a minimum looking post-nationally—not outside the framework of the nation-state but outside the framework in which the nation-state is the fundamental sovereignty formation. And to look at postcolonial history or culture that way is utterly anachronistic. While globalization is a tendency as old as capitalism itself, the emergence of globalization as a structure of feeling demanding to be accounted for as a transnational and supranational force is a relatively recent development and needs to be theorized within its cultural milieu. That is what I have tried to do with this dissertation.

Sweatshops and Citizens

Ultimately, then, this dissertation is an argument for a narrative of the present that represents it outside of the major frameworks that have thus far dominated academic studies of culture. I argued in Chapter Two that postmodern theory works from a model

179 that sees the current moment as a time of retrenchment born out of the failure of the

1960s. I turned instead to Empire as the guiding force of my project, for it sees the present as a time of hope for the power of the multitude. But given the accounts of the previous chapters, how then can we reflect the hope and joy Hardt and Negri find? How can we be hopeful in the power of the multitude given the brutal global policies that launch wars against nations for the acts of their dictatorial leaders? How do we find joy in the welfare policies discussed in the previous chapter that force mothers and children into the street and then punish the poor for their own poverty? How can we find any great joy here at all?

Comaroff and Comaroff point to a rebirth of civil society as a way to move the world beyond the current situation, a situation emblematized here by NWO welfare policy. For their part, Hardt and Negri see civil society as a force of the past, a mediatory agent between capital and sovereignty that has played its hand. Indeed, they see the breakdown of civil society as timed with the erosion of the welfare state because they see each of these as deeply connected to the rise and fall of the institutions that propped up capital in the era of modern sovereignty; the family is one very key site that has been a focus of this trend in the present work. Other sites include for example the school, the workplace, and the criminal justice system. The breakdowns in these locations are all symptoms of the dissolution of a sense of public-ness and a commitment to the commons and the commonweal as it is replaced by the “transcendent power of private property”

(Empire 301).

However, Hardt and Negri proclaim that their intention is not to weep for capitalism’s destruction of the commons, for they maintain “today we participate in a

180 more radical and profound community than has ever been experienced in the history of capitalism” (Empire 302). It is a community not based on goods but on relations that structure interactions between people and even within each individual because “[t]hrough circulation, the multitude re-appropriates space and constitutes itself as an active subject”

(Empire 397).

In response, the discourse of neo-liberal globalization attempts to corral these ideals under the alluring promise of freedom from out-dated rules and stifling regulations and to supposedly reinvigorate the whole system through constant rebuilding. When people unquestioningly fall for that temptation, we have Las Vegas—the city that embodies the rhetoric of freedom and de-regulation. But at the other side of Vegas’s limited, libertarian conception of independence stands the figure that always inhabits and always sustains neo-liberalism’s supposed spaces of freedom: the overworked, underpaid, and unrepresented poor. If the Strip’s unions tell a story of the possibilities of labor in the industries of globalization—that is, in the service and tourism industries—then the corporate influence on welfare reform presents the other side of that possibility. That is the removal of all public employment into the private sector such that it is increasingly impossible to distinguish between public and private. Neo-liberal economics works to position the newly “freed” recipients of welfare as organized labor’s rival—instead of labor’s ostensibly old-fashioned adversaries management and ultimately capital itself. In short, neo-liberalism magnifies class difference while undercutting class consciousness.

The ideology that enables Wal-Mart to actually be accepted as family develops as a result of this libertarian freedom. As the old and often oppressive structures of

“traditional” family life erode, Empire steps in to fill the void and redirect people’s desire

181 for unity and belonging. Interestingly, Sam Walton, who represented himself as a kind of real-life nephew of his Uncle Sam, wrapped himself in the aegis of nationalism to sell cheap goods and in the process help re-create the way Americans imagine themselves— that is, primarily as consumers. The end of welfare, the end of the “traditional” family, the end of national sovereignty, the end of civil society all evince the changes that have occurred. But the message of hope comes from the call for a global commons, from affirming the power and the productive energy of the multitude. Thus, the fight to protect welfare unites with the plight to protect child laborers like Wendy Diaz who was forced to work in Wal-Mart’s sub-contracted sweatshops. In the end, hope hangs on the multitude.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Patricia Ventura was born in Itajuba, Brazil, and is now a citizen of the United

States. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Clemson

University and her master’s degree in English from the University of Florida

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