From Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (Routledge, 2000)
CHAPTER THREE
Cultural Study, Commodity Logic, Sexual Subjects
I. Cultural Management Under Neo-LiberalismAs the reigning social policy guide for late capitalism, neo-liberalism spreads its reach across the globe, leaving in its wake structural changes that are exacting a profound toll on human lives. We see the symptoms everywhere: contradictions in the global economic landscape have intensified, deepening "third world" debt and the mass poverty associated with globalization, provoking fiscal crises in overdeveloped nations, and reinforcing the victory of the market as challenger of the democratic state. Corporate downsizing and free trade agreements consolidate the reorganization of production and enhance the scramble for cheap labor supplied by expendable human lives. Increased privatization and de-regulation have meant that services to meet basic human needs--welfare, health care, education--are being reduced, in some states in the U.S. channeled through profit-making agencies, and often snatched away from the most needy: the poor, many of them disabled, immigrants, single mothers.
The term "neo-liberalism" refers to economic and political policies that have been shaped and enacted since the early seventies when the bourgeois ruling bloc responded to the falling rate of profit by way of an ensemble of economic, political, and ideological strategies. Primarily fostered, promoted, and implemented by a relatively small group of private interests and the financial institutions they dominate, neo-liberal economic policy has been a calculated offensive aimed at controlling social assets and state power in order to maximize profits. Drawing on the classical liberal arguments about the economy's proper relation to the state, neo-liberalism holds that economic crises are the result of excessive government intervention and can best be remedied by redistributing income from labor to capital, returning state-supported economic ventures to the private sector, re-establishing the family as a cushion to absorb the social effects of hard times, and re-personalizing economic dependency, incentive, savings and work (O'Connor 234). Neo-liberal policies have been strategic offenses against the Post World War II social compact. Economically, neo-liberalism seeks to free up the operation of the capitalist market from public (state) controls and regulations and at the same time it tries to extend the rationality of the market--its schemes of analysis and decision making criteria--to areas of social life that have not been primarily economic. In maintaining its position as the dominant economic global force, the United States has made use of neo-liberal trade and domestic social policies to shore up multinational corporate interests and support emergent transnational ones. But "less government," "privatization," and "free trade" have meant tax breaks and more profits for businesses at the expense of those most in need. Behind free trade agreements like NAFTA lies the expansion of the exploited cheap labor force of the maquiladoras, while less government domestically has meant cuts in food, health, and education programs that most affect the poor, disabled, and the elderly. The damage wrought by this rollback of the New Deal's social contract is not a secret. Throughout the eighties and nineties the costs of neo-liberal economic policy to workers has been reported daily in our news sources, in headlines reading "US Jobs Lose Out in Global Market" or "Record Profits, Fewer Workers, " "Number of Poor Children Soaring in the City" or "New York Study Finds Uninsured Are on the Rise." The widening gap between rich and poor is neo-liberalism's most glaring legacy. The measure of this gap varies from one report to another. The figures may indicate that the richest 1% own more than 30% of the total private wealth or that 90% of families hold a little less than one third of a country's assets or any number of other obscene disproportions. While headlines in the past few years have also announced that the U.S. economy is improving and is in fact better than ever, the small print indicates that the gap between rich and poor, between workers and owners, is deeply entrenched. While profits remain "spectacular" for the world's largest corporations, payrolls are not expanding much. For most of the U.S. population, despite economic recovery, incomes have stagnated or declined over 20% in the past twenty years and job security has diminished (Aronowitz and Cutler 37). The U.S. worker now produces about 12 percent more in an hour's work than he or she did in 1989, but after adjusting for inflation the typical worker's wages have increased only 1.9 percent, and the share of middle income workers with some form of health insurance has actually declined in the past ten years (Schmitt). If the economy is on an upswing, this is in large measure because more workers have part-time, temporary and contingent jobs which are counted as if they are full time.
Neo-liberalism is the economic and political policy that steers this economic boom through the global restructuring of production and consumption. As every school child of the nineties knows, manufacturing jobs are flowing out of the U.S. Massive layoffs have occurred at almost every major corporation since the early nineties, with the biggest layoffs occurring in the apparel and garment industries. (From 1971 to 1990 more than eight million factory jobs were lost in the U.S., and over 700,000 workers lost their jobs in the textile and garment industries of the U.S. South alone in the 1990s) (Arronowitz and Cutler 43). The forces that are shifting workers in over-industrialized nations from jobs in manufacturing to jobs in service and building a workforce of "symbolic analysts" rather than factory workers are rooted in shifts in production that have been global in scope. Neo-liberal free trade policy has allowed capital, technology, and managers to flow freely over borders, and as a result capital's unskilled manufacturing labor force is no longer primarily located in industrialized nations, but wherever unorganized cheap labor can be found--in off-shore free trade zones or in domestic sweat shops.
Globalization relies on "just-in-time" production which lowers wharehousing and overhead; "lean production" which entails employing a cheaper and less specialized labor force for easy to assemble products; "reengineering the workforce" by replacing workers with software packages that perform tasks once done by clerks; and "outsourcing" production to non-union workers who can be paid lower wages. These changes have been possible in part because businesses face less opposition from unions. Organized labor in industrialized nations has lost much of its clout, but corporations have also developed strategies for by-passing the striking power of unions. To give one example: General Motors Company has lost every strike in the last decade while still managing to shrink its payroll by more than 100,000 jobs by relying on outsourcing--that is, by buying parts from outside companies.
The rise in part-time employment which is much more difficult to organize and which requires few if any health and retirement benefits is another facet of this picture. The increase in part-time employment makes it possible for economic forecasters to claim that employment is up and the economy booming. But there is more to this reality than the figures for the Gross National Product and the Dow Jones Industrial Average would lead you to believe. In fact, the overwhelming job growth has been in retail and wholesale, in food service such as McDonald's, Wendy's and Burger King, in department stores and non-union construction, and in businesses employing fewer than 25 workers (Aronowitz and Cutler 45). All of these jobs offer low wages and few benefits, such as pensions, paid vacations, and health insurance. According to a study released in 1998, the number of people without health insurance in the U.S. is rising at a rate of over 100,000 persons losing coverage every month, despite the nation's "strong economic growth." One in six Americans now has no health insurance. While unemployment may be down, then, it is more likely for people to put together piecemeal jobs which are low paying and offer fewer benefits than the full-time jobs they had before.
One of the reasons neo-liberalism has succeeded so well is that it works best in countries where there is formal democracy but the public is diverted from meaningful participation in governance. In the U.S. this divergence happens in part because large corporations have access to the means to influence the information voters receive, and they do so. The richest one percent of Americans make 80% of all individual political contributions and corporations outspend unions by 10-1 (Mc Chesney 9-11). An effective democracy needs people to feel a connection to one another. In fostering consumption, neo-liberalism provides the fabric for these connections; but it replaces community for critical citizenship with shopping malls. It is also important to remember that despite neo-liberalism's antipathy for public subsidy, in fact it relies heavily on state support for corporate interests. Large scale state interference in trade has been the leitmotif of neo-liberal policy. Steel, automotive, aircraft, semiconductor industries--to name only a few--have all relied on protectionist trade policies and government funding. In fact, virtually all of the world's core firms have been influenced by government politics or trade barriers and "at least twenty companies in the 1993 Fortune 100 would not have survived at all as independent companies, if they had not been saved by their respective governments" (Ruigrock and Tulder quoted in Chomsky 38). At the same time, neo-liberalism is also bolstered by multinational corporate organizing like the World Trade Organization or the Multinational Agreement on Investment that is officially outside the parameters of any one nation's public reach, intervention, or accountability.
To some extent, there is nothing fundamentally new about this situation. Liberal free market policies have been a guiding principle of democratic nation-states in the industrial world since the eighteenth century, combated more or less consistently by oppositional struggles of varying kinds and intensities, movements aimed at installing full democracy through revolution, socialist, or civil rights campaigns. It is not the game plan, then, but the form and articulations of liberalism now that are new.
Among these articulations are the ways of knowing that accompany neo-liberalism's advance. While obscene greed and staggering unmet human need are most rampant, the knowledges required to translate this evidence into action for change seem less and less available. Indeed, it might even be said that the success of neo-liberalism is directly related to the triumph of ways of knowing and forms of consciousness that obscure its enabling conditions. It is the relationship between these forms of knowing and commodification that I want to address in this chapter, especially as they have an effect on new forms of sexual identity.
The knowledges that promote or demystify neo-liberalism are varied and are generated from many social sites. They are most often identified with the advocacy of entrepreneurial initiative and individualism--in the form of self-help, volunteerism, or a morality rooted in free will and personal responsibility. In the United States, the discourses of neo-liberal individualism are generally perceived to be generated by conservative networks that informally link politicians, churches, Right wing think tanks and the media, while universities are more typically seen as unorganized bastions of progressivism. Often represented as the last shelter of the fragmented left, universities have been linked in the public imagination with "politically correct" challenges to traditional values. Despite this public image, universities also have been caught up in the wave of neo-liberal privatization both economically and ideologically. Tuition at state colleges and universities and the tenure system have been two targets of economic downsizing. Since most universities rely on some degree of public support, in the face of its erosion, they have increasingly sought funding from private, corporate sources for technological and ideological development. In the last decade, as privatization has become the order of the day, universities have scrambled to recover their losses in state funding through increased support from the corporate sector. As a result, business and university partnerships have proliferated. During the 1980s the U.S. Congress enacted legislation "which granted huge tax write-offs, along with the right to purchase patents derived from academic research, to corporations that engage in partnerships with universities" (Zaidi 52). Between 1980 and 1996 corporate dollars going to universities increased more than threefold (Soley 11). In the life sciences especially, the university is far from being an ivory tower isolated from the marketplace. In 1997 U.S. companies spent $1.7 billion on university-based science and engineering research. More than 90% of life-science companies have some type of formal relationship with academic scientists (Shenk 12). While these alliances have resulted in important new discoveries, they have also generated enormous profits as well as an entrepreneulial atmosphere that has begun to alter the ethos of science (Shenk 13-14).
University administrators claim that corporate and foundation money is accepted with no strings attached. But this is not so. Centers like Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Center for Product Innovation conduct research for corporate clients and the University of Arizona's Karl Eller Center for the Study of Private Market Economy conducts research bolstering "free enterprise" (Soley 14). Can the outcomes of research projects with corporate sponsors ever be untainted by the client's interests? While corporate funding for research, foundations, and institutes is now pervasive, a more subtle effect of neo-liberal influence on colleges and universities has been a gradual but concerted pressure to reshape the priorities in higher education to conform with the goals of the marketplace. This transvaluation manifests in several ways, among them a growing emphasis on education for professional-technical skilling and a shift in the forms of consciousness universities produce in the liberal arts and social sciences.
The traditional function of the humanities and social sciences has been the production of subjects who are familiar with the history of their society and firmly situated within the prevailing codes and traditions of their culture. In this regard, universities historically often have served as the handmaidens of the free market and liberal state. This function has never gone uncontested by knowledge workers who have promoted critical thinking as the "other" mission of education, however. While the liberal face of education may have prevailed, it has never done so without ideological struggle, crisis provocation, and crisis management. One arena where this struggle has left its impact during the decades of neo-liberalism's growing dominance is Cultural Studies.
Cultural Studies has been seen as one of the "hot spots" of academic progressivism, a discursive and institutional magnet for leftists and queers of all sorts--feminists, marxists, theorists of popular culture, race, and sexuality. As Cultural Studies has been gradually incorporated into the academic mainstream in the last decade, however, some assessment of the supposedly "progressive" nature of its theoretical paradigms and critical concepts seems in order. I want to stress that I think Cultural Studies continues to hold tremendous potential for producing critical citizens who can demystify the dominant ideologies and support the formation of broad-based movement for social change. Indeed it is because of my belief in this potential that I think a critical assessment of its unsettled debates is important.
The Gay Left's absorption into the academy in the eighties was shaped by many developments that also inflected Cultural Studies; in fact, they follow parallel and overlapping tracks. Some of them also had an immediate bearing on the reformation of sexual identities--like the emergence of the historical catastrophe of AIDS and its political wake, or the moral crusades of the religious Right, or developments in feminist discourses on sexuality; others--like neo-liberalism's growing global hegemony--registered more indirectly. Among the most formative forces to leave its mark on the understanding of culture in Lesbian/ Gay/Queer Studies as well as on Cultural Studies during the decade of the eighties was the academic left's abandonment of marxism and the development of a compensatory post-marxist cultural materialism.
Cultural materialists maintain that culture may be historical and political, but it is not shaped by capitalism's division of labor in any determinate way. That is, cultural materialists renounce the causal link in marxism's systemic analysis between culture and economy. By the nineties, as Cultural Studies was becoming more and more institutionalized in academia, the debates over how to understand the relationship between culture and economy that had shaped its rise over the previous decade were considered to be settled or at least securely transplanted onto new ground, congealed into the cultural materialisms of Michel Foucault, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and others. It is my argument that because they can only imagine social change as the struggle for discursive or cultural democracy within capitalism, these theories are not only limited but quite compatible, finally, with the forms of consciousness encouraged by neo-liberalism. In order to redress the limits of cultural materialism, I think we might beneficially return to some of the concepts that frame the debates out of which this now dominant version of Cultural Studies emerged. Before I do, however, I want to take a more deliberate look at Cultural Studies now.
Cultural Studies is an extensive and eclectic transdisciplinary mode of inquiry, marked by contestations, internal divisions, disparate genealogies and a rich diversity. I take the risk of offering some generalizations about it as a body of knowledge, not because I want to subsume this contentious plurality under a monolithic profile, but in order to highlight some of the ways the discourses and paradigms that came to prevail amid this diversity bear a historical relation to the process of commodification that has accompanied the triumph of neo-liberalism in the past twenty years. Cultural Studies is now a massively funded field, and in that sense, as in much other cultural production, its U.S. variant has become the leading global instance. In some very literal ways, Cultural Studies in the U.S. has been commodified in that its knowledges have entered the circuit of commodity exchange pervasively and profitably. What emerged twenty years ago as maverick institutes insecurely anchored in academic institutions has become a full-blown, funded discipline, complete with graduate programs and Ph.D.s, conferences and cross-continental networks, high-profile corporate publishers, course readers and histories. Some of the leading figures in cultural Studies have commented on the perils of its success. Laurence Grossberg suggested in 1988 that the selling (out) of U.S. cultural studies was well advanced and that its success story has "all the ingredients of a made-for-tv movie" (Pfister 204). Stuart Hall has commented on this evolution, too, referring to it as a dangerous time for Cultural Studies in the U.S. precisely because of the incorporation of academia and the isolation of American intellectuals within the established confines of institutional academic life. If these are boom times for Cultural Studies, it may be no accident that these are also times when one of the potentially sharpest combatants of neo-liberalism is losing its critical edge. "In the period of this Clinton administration," Stuart Hall warns, "[Cultural Studies] feels like a deeply reactionary form of free enterprise modernity" (Morley and Chen 397).
The enormous outpouring of academic work in Cultural Studies over the past two decades has also been characterized by a distinct and emphatic erasure of capitalist economy from its knowledges, more specifically an erasure of the historical links between culture and capitalism which is characteristic of cultural materialism. Critical notice of this de-linking has been a part of the history of Cultural Studies, however, too, and more of these critical voices are beginning to be heard in the U.S. For example, the collection Cultural Studies in Question, edited by Marjorie Ferguson and Peter Golding, takes this problem as one of its main concerns. In their introduction, Ferguson and Golding contend that "Cultural Studies has neglected the deep structural changes in national and global, political and economic and media systems by eschewing economic, social or policy analysis" (xiv). In an essay in the same volume, Nicholas Garnham argues that in order to move on and fulfill the promises of its original project, Cultural Studies needs to "rebuild the bridges with political economy that it burnt in its headlong rush towards the pleasures and differences of postmodernism" (56).
In large measure this headlong rush took the form of Foucaultian cultural materialism. We can see this trajectory quite distinctly in the work of Stuart Hall himself, who finally abandoned his always somewhat tenuous endorsement of historical materialism by the late eighties in favor of the post-marxism of Foucault and Laclau and Mouffe. Hall's contributions to Cultural Studies are formidable, as evidenced in his own work, his relationship to the many projects produced out of the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England, and his transnational influence. At the Center, after a protracted engagement with Althusserian marxism throughout the seventies, Hall and other scholars shifted their attention from grappling with the problem of how to address the relationship between capitalism's economic base and the cultural-ideological superstructure to elaborations of the internal articulation of the superstructure itself (Sparks 83).
In the next decade and into the nineties concern with the complex causal connections between capitalism's underlying structures and cultural forms and with any specifically marxist analysis virtually disappeared from the incorporation of Cultural Studies.
One index of the materialism that has come to define the British legacy can be seen in the Open University textbook series Culture, Media and Identities. These are glossy, well packaged books aimed at introducing an undergraduate audience to Cultural Studies. Each of them follows a heuristic model called "the circuit of culture." Through a circuit of interlocking relations--production, consumption, regulation, representation--this model illustrates the various processes by which identities come to be. The authors assert that it is "possible to start at any point" (2) in the circuit, but that an analysis has to go all the way round in order to be complete. Two features of this heuristic are notable: capitalism's relationships of exploitation have no determining force on culture because "culture is now regarded as being as constitutive of the social world as economic or political processes." Not only this, the authors go on to confirm, "in recent years 'culture' has been promoted to an altogether more important role as theorists have begun to argue that because all social practices are meaningful practices, they are all fundamentally cultural" (DuGay 2). In the Open University Series textbook on Identities edited by Kathryn Woodward, the "production" and "consumption" of identities are also thoroughly cultural activities. The section on "Sexual Identities," by Lynn Segal, for example, treats the ways sexual identities are represented through cultural texts and symbolic systems. It includes a historical perspective that stretches from Anglo-European sexology to queer theory, and indeed it does mention scholarship that "correlate[s] shifts in scientific accounts of sexual difference with wider social changes and contests for power" (Segal 190). But there is no mention of what these "wider social changes" might be, what they might have to do with adjustments in capitalism's relations of labor or with forms of commodification.
The question remains whether abandoning all causal connections between culture and material relations outside of culture has strengthened Cultural Studies' critical edge. My own view is that it has not. It seems to me that no analysis of cultural forms that professes to critically intervene in the violence taking place in the wake of neo-liberal social policies can evade the historical relationships between culture and capital. In promoting a view of culture severed from any ties to the fundamental structures of capitalism, Cultural Studies is helping to produce forms of consciousness that supplement neo-liberalism's conservative individualism. While much work in cultural Studies may seem overtly opposed to the privatizing tactics of neo-liberalism, to the extent that Cultural Studies produces ways of understanding that exile meaning-making and identity in the realm of culture, sheltered from any link to capital or class, its discourses reiterate a cultural logic that has been one of capitalism's most potent ideological forms.
Surprisingly, this is a view that Stuart Hall himself intimates against the grain of his own later work. In an interview in 1992, he predicted that in the future class concerns will be more central to Cultural Studies than they were in the eighties. In fact, he added, "I am sure that we will return to the fundamental category of capital" (Morley and Chen 400).
What would it mean to reverse this trend, to return Cultural Studies to the fundamental category of capital? How might we do so in a way that would allow us to link culture to the development and meeting of human needs and yet not forfeit inquiry into the complex ways cultural forms and identities are historically articulated? Of course, I am especially interested in how the answers to these questions might affect how we understand sexual identity. Sexual identity has become one of the prime channels of Cultural Studies' "headlong rush toward the pleasures and differences of postmodernism." Not only has it provided the occasion for much new work on the libidinal economies of culture, but sexual identity also has been hailed as the basis for new postmodern models of political alliance and cited as an obvious index of the limits of class analysis. Consequently, the very possibility of linking the study of sexual identity to capital has become all but unspeakable. As a way into this hyper-managed forbidden zone of cultural work, I want to suggest that we revisit some of the abandoned debates in the encounter between Cultural Studies and marxism at the dawn of neo-liberalism.
