UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE In Defense of the Political: Housework and Policework in the Post-Civil Rights Era DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Comparative Literature by Philip Anselmo Dissertation Committee: Professor Eyal Amiran, Chair Professor Allison Perlman Professor Gabriele M. Schwab Professor Rei Terada 2019 ii © 2019 Philip Anselmo 2019 iii DEDICATION in memory of my father Weaker and weaker, the sunlight falls In the afternoon. The proud and the strong Have departed. Those that are left are the unaccomplished, The finally human, Natives of a dwindled sphere. — Wallace Stevens (“Lebensweisheitspielerei”) ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF FIGURES v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vi CURRICULUM VITAE vii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION vii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: Domestic Crisis — The Making of a Post-Civil Rights Era 27 CHAPTER 2: Frustrated Desires — Representations of Labor in Post-Civil Rights Film 82 CHAPTER 3: Policework and Heistwork — The Banality of Labor Outside Production 131 BIBLIOGRAPHY (WORKS CITED) 165 iii LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1.1 80 Figure 1.2 80 Figure 1.3 81 Figure 1.4 81 Figure 2.1 130 Figure 2.2 130 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to my committee with special thanks to my chair, Professor Eyal Amiran, who knew when I most needed encouragement and when I most needed criticism and provided both with equanimity and sympathy. By example, you taught me to be a better scholar and instructor and a more ethical member of the academy. I would also like to thank my committee members, Allison Perlman, Gabriele M. Schwab, and Rei Terada. The rigor, scope, and genius of your academic work — in the classroom and on the page — serve as the horizon towards which I continue to strive. Your influence on my own thinking and practice is immeasurable. I cannot begin to express my gratitude to those who welcomed me in with kindness and generosity, those who were always willing to share a bit of the madness that surely animates us all. James Goebel, Anirban Gupta-Nigam, Nima Yolmo, Sally Terrefe, James Funk, Christopher Kang, and Ryanson Ku — your collective brilliance has been a constant source of intellectual and emotional sustenance. Without your love and friendship this work (this labor) would simply not have been possible. In addition, I would like to thank the many students and scholars whose paths I was fortunate to cross during my time at Irvine: Asma Abbas, Dina Alkassim, Willie Chase, Alexander Jabbari, Gerald Maa, Toru Oda, Jamie Rogers, Morgan Slade, Jean Tsui, Parisa Vaziri, Ameeth Veejay, and the many others. Thank you as well to Bindya Baliga whose support behind the scenes was nothing short of invaluable. Finally, I would like to thank my family for believing in me even when I struggled to believe in myself. v CURRICULUM VITAE Philip F. Anselmo 2002 B.A. in English at Southampton College at Long Island University 2002-03 Post Graduate work in Language Studies at University of Massachusetts at Amherst 2012 M.A. in Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine 2019 Ph.D. in Comparative Literature University of California, Irvine vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION In Defense of the Political: Housework and Policework in the Post-Civil Rights Era by Philip Anselmo Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Irvine 2019 Professor Eyal Amiran, Chair This dissertation argues that concerns about labor, productivity, and social mobility are inextricable from anxieties about the gendered and racial reconfiguration of the reigning political reality as it was contested in the last years of the Civil Rights Movement and the decade after. This claim is supported through material analyses of films, congressional hearings, theoretical essays, and television broadcasts from the period (roughly 1967-1983). Methodologically, the work of analysis is informed by object relations theories of care and defense and political and social critique from the post-Marxist emancipatory tradition of critical theory. In contrast with more traditional studies of post-civil rights era literature, this dissertation sees its objects in relational terms as sites of facilitation and frustration where sociopolitical anxieties about the nation, the home, and the state of work are worked through — or not. vii INTRODUCTION “This small non-time-space in the very heart of time, unlike the world and the culture into which we are born, can only be indicated, but cannot be inherited and handed down from the past; each new generation, indeed every new human being as he inserts himself between an infinite past and an infinite future, must discover and ploddingly pave it anew.” — Hannah Arendt1 “There is much more continuity between autonomically appropriate quanta and the waves of conscious thought and feeling than the impressive caesura of transference and counter-transference would have us believe.” — W.R. Bion2 “The absolutely inward nature of matter, as it would have to be conceived by pure understanding, is nothing but a phantom [Grille]; for matter is not among the objects of pure understanding, and the transcendental object which may be the ground of this appearance that we call matter is a mere something of which we should not understand what it is, even if someone were in a position to tell us.” — Immanuel Kant3 “Sensuous knowledge is a different kind of materialism, neither idealistic nor alienated, but an active practice or passion for the lived reality of ghostly magical invented matters. Sensuous knowledge is receptive, close, perceptual, embodied, incarnate. It tells and it transports at the same time. Sensuous knowledge is commanding: it can spiral you out of your bounds, it can hollow out, with an x-ray vision, the seemingly innocuous artifacts of the master. To experience a profane illumination is to experience a something to be done.” — Avery F. Gordon4 1 Between Past and Future, 13. 2 Two Papers: The Grid and Caesura, 56. 3 Critique of Pure Reason, 286. 4 Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 205. 1 General Project Introduction My dissertation began with a simple question: Why does the problem of civil rights in the United States force a reconfiguring of the way the state imagines its relationship to an insistently heterogeneous populace? Situating this question in the context of the post-civil rights era (roughly 1967 – 1983), I show the ways in which literature and film, both popular and minor, figure the structural violence of a nation whose hegemonic forms of social representation were in crisis. While scholars attentive to the historical context of civil rights and political reactionism often privilege a binary aesthetics in which a culture of hegemony is opposed to a counter-culture of resistance,5 I argue that, in its overdetermination, a novel or a film offers a space for the working through of political anxieties otherwise at odds with its aesthetic intent.6 Furthermore, this refusal 5 Much of the film and genre analysis of the 1970s and 1980s can be said to more or less abide by such a distinction — and I show several places where the work on melodrama, in particular, often insists on an almost ontological separation of popular and true art. One prominent example is the work of Laura Mulvey, whose canonical theory of the “male gaze” was applied with critical force to the category of “narrative cinema,” while her own work as an “experimental” filmmaker laid claim to a theory and praxis outside of and in resistance to the ideological norm. In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), she writes, invoking the Brechtian influence that was prevalent in many of the early works of Screen Theory: “The first blow against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions (already undertaken by radical film-makers) is to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate detachment” (844). This is not to call out Mulvey’s work, by any means, and much of the early film theory that was invested in ideology critique would eventually reckon with its problematic distinctions and (perhaps) utopian defenses. We might also note here Fredric Jameson’s attempt to evade this problematic and overcome the implicit binary of good art/bad art in his use of the concept of allegory. I will take a closer look at an example of his work from this period in the final chapter. 6 As I explain in the subsequent methodological introduction, I turn to the language and theory of object relations psychoanalysis to inform my analysis of objects so conceived. 2 to separate out the political (as well as the economic) and the aesthetic results in an understanding of the cultural object that sees it, primarily, as a site of facilitation and mediation.7 As a result, my objects include: television news broadcasts, feature films, documentary film, essays, and their source material (where relevant), but also congressional hearings, political philosophy, psychoanalysis, and genre theory. The point is not to read one from the first series of more traditional objects of cultural analysis according to the prescribed methods of those from the latter, although the methods of, say, psychoanalysis are often informative of the analytical perspective I bring to bear on, say, political and economic theory.8 As will become clear in the following chapters, I am as interested, for example, in the defensive and prescriptive desires that manifest in 7 Influenced by the work of Jacques Rancière, which is central to much of the work of this dissertation, Asma Abbas convincingly articulates the relational conception of these two supposedly disparate categories of experience/analysis. She writes: In every pathos that we offer up to liberal society can be found a clue to our lost senses — senses that have lost their way, forgetting where to look, what to look for, how to smell, how the dead call on us, how being tickles, how freedom tastes, what love sounds like, what intimacy suffering allows and asks for, and where a memory enters us.