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Hegemonia Those
are fears about lost jobs than there are actual jobs lost, the author says.
And the fears are due to a "new class phenomenon," in that they're
being experienced by white,
early-40s professionals who, historically, have been insulated from the natural
employment instability
that has "always been" the lot of "blue collar workers, the
unskilled, and the young." Here Samuelson
implies that for this group, this class of workers, job loss was its own fault---it
was a result
of some intangible, unvoiced choice the group members made---whereas the class
of workers now
being affected has "always felt safe" in its employment status since
its jobs were the result of hard
work, long education, and thorough dedication. Because these natural phenomena
have now been
ruptured, because a "fissure" has appeared which "must be filled,"
in the words of Gramsci, Samuelson
tells his audience that "[i]t's important to separate facts from fears."
2.
Transmute and mystify the problem until the audience can no longer see it
clearly. For men, job security
has decreased by nearly twenty percent in an equal number of years, the author
notes---but in a
ten-year span, average job tenure has gone from seven years to eight for women.
The implication
here is that, when a man loses his job, it won't be a traumatic experience since
his spouse can
maintain the household finances while he seeks another. This implication relies
on a huge assumption
of both heterosexuality and a traditional-marriage arrangement (each of which is
current status
quo for American hegemony), and further assumes that the woman's salary will be
sufficient to carry
the weight of a household income suddenly halved. Since the author overlooks the
fact that average
"job tenure" for women, however positively portrayed, is only eight
years for women as opposed
to twelve years for men, we ought to suspect that equal gender discrepancies in
salary likewise
still exist in many professional fields. Samuelson
admits that all is not rosy for women, since "[t]hey get fired, too,"
but he explains that as more and
more of them enter the job market, the average length of their employment with a company
increases---and this "offsets more frequent layoffs." It's a highly
problematic issue he raises
here, and so it gets only three short lines of his attention. Presumably, when
the woman's shorter
job tenure ends, her husband will be employed once again, and the two of them
can simply trade
household-finance duties while she goes about her turn at being laid off. The
problem is solved, although
once again the solution comes through implication and assumption. 3. Shift
the audience's concerns toward the larger ideology of hegemony. Samuelson does
this, first, by
naturalizing the problem yet again. Layoffs, the author notes, have become
"routine and respectable"
practices for business in the years since they began, and can no longer be
viewed as violations
of an unspoken agreement by business to care for its workforce. Moreover, by
citing statistics
from years past, the author makes the argument that since the number of laid-off
workers has
remained at a fairly-constant half-million people annually, the number of
individuals actually affected
by job loss is "only a tiny part" of the current 125 million-person
labor force. To
further deproblematize the issue, Samuelson notes that 75 percent of the annual
half-million unemployed
find new jobs, while nearly fifteen percent of the newly-unemployed are older
than 55 and as a
result are now---by implication---actually benefitted by being freed to retire
early. The remaining
percentage remain unemployed after two years, which is admittedly a problem for
the white-professional
audience being addressed, so Samuelson quickly transmutes the fact by noting that
"unemploy-ment rates [are] even higher among blacks (18 percent) and
Hispanics (19 percent)."
These groups are clearly other, and their lot is of course natural in American
hegemony ---and
the author plays on each of these features to convert his audience's fears to
reassurances, its unrest
to renewed patience. His message comes through clearly: Relax; it could be a lot
worse. At least
you're not them. Once
again, Samuelson finds himself in trouble by citing the rehiring statistics,
since they reveal that a new
job often entails an income reduction of up to 25 percent and that reductions
are especially prevalent
for workers older than 45. Here the author glosses quickly and without much
development through
the numbers: worse for older workers, not as bad for younger ones. The
assumption is, of course,
that older workers have already built up their savings accounts (as all good
Americans do) during
their years of solid employment, so the loss of a job isn't as unfair as it
would seem---especially
since younger workers just beginning their journey down the paths of the American
Dream are, very fairly, still rewarded with high incomes when they have to
undergo the job-loss/job
replacement ritual. 4. Limit
the options for individual agency while appealing to the individual's desire to
possess such agency.
Samuelson does this while continuing to subject his audience to the larger
ideology of the hegemony
he represents. In closing his argument, he pulls out all the necessary appeals
to the American
Way with which we are all very familiar by now. Yes, individuals who lose their
jobs experience
a "sense of betrayal" and a great deal of "pain of change"---but
once again the author reminds
us that "[job] loss is not as bad as the headlines about it." The
American economy, happily personified
by Samuelson, "still generates a steady stream of new jobs. . .to replace
those that are lost,"
and in the end, those who are disenfranchised by the new corporate mindset of
disposability for its
workforce must change their attitudes and behaviors since business should not
reasonably be expected
to change its own. "We believe that all good jobs should be lifetime jobs,"
Samuelson writes,
"and [that] if they aren't, [then] everyone's a temp. Neither stereotype is
true." Thus the author
effectively cuts off any possible act of agency for his audience, save one: Deal
with it. This is how
business operates. 5.
Appeal to the audience by presenting a utopian yearning for improvement. In his
conclusion, Samuelson would have us believe that he's criticizing American
business---for all of three
short column lines. "Companies that can't control their costs won't survive,"
he writes, "but neither
will those that are so callous that they demoralize their workers and can't draw
good new workers."
There's a conflict here, he notes, that "is ongoing and reflects an even
deeper dilemma." Yet what
this dilemma may be, he never explains. Instead, the column ends with one
sweeping statement
that brings all of hegemony's big guns---limitation of agency, naturalization of
the problem, transmutation
of the issue, and subjection to a larger ideology---to bear on its audience. The American
economy, Samuelson writes, "produces higher efficiences, new technologies,
and rising living
standards," so it can't possibly be expected to also "provide absolute
security." Why not? The answer
is simple: Because "[i]t never has, and quite probably, it never will." In
addition to this piece by Samuelson, I also brought to class some pages from
Victor Villanueva's book
Bootstraps in order to try and clarify the link between Gramsci's theory of
hegemony and more ancient
theories of rhetoric. As I've tried to do in the analysis of Samuelson's column
above, so Villanueva
shows how hegemony preseves itself through rhetoric, through language practice
and audience
interaction. His explication is highly Gramscian, drawing on the terms "historic
bloc" and "counter-hegemony,"
and Villanueva shows how, through careful "persuasive articulatory practice," counterhegemony
wages a "war of position" with hegemony (and vice versa) until a new
historic bloc is
formed, one which uses "new terms, or new definitions for existing terms, [that
are] agreeable
to all." In Villanueva's view, such wars of position are not threatening,
not revolutionary in a
life-endangering or militaristic sense, but rather are very positive and
reflective of Paulo Freire's "hope
that in changing the word we [may] change the world." I also
brought to class a page from Harlan Ellison's introduction to his omnibus
collection of short stories,
Dreams with Sharp Teeth. In his introduction, Ellison writes not of hegemony,
but of resistance
to it: The publishing centers in New York and Boston have had a lock on what is
deemed "literature"
since they were formed, and their way to maintain hegemony is to relegate works
they find too
"commercial" or "popular" to the basement of some
specialized genre: westerns, science fiction,
detective novels, and many other such labels. And yet, Ellison writes, even with
its work thus ostracized
from the Important Literature canon, there is a core group of writers working
today who nonetheless
form the "blood and muscle of American Literature." Their work may
sell regionally, or nationally,
but sell it does, and its purpose is, in Ellison's view, what the purpose of all
literature should
be: to make its readers wake up and think hard about issues they prefer to
ignore. The literature
of the East Coast hegemony gets critical acclaim and attention in the hegemonic
press, but it will
never be able to suppress the work of less elite authors who persist in not
playing hegemony's games.
These writers don't seek to replace current hegemony; thus they are not
counterhegemonic. But they
do seek to place the products of their labor alongside the canon dictated by the
publishing hegemony,
and to have it validated by a buying (and reading/thinking) public. From VTR
to Cyberspace: Jefferson, Gramsci & the Electronic Commons by Mark
Surman 7. What
is Hegemony Anyways? A "hegemony"
is really nothing like a heffalump In fact, it isn't any kind of animal at all.
Rather, it is a state
of being where everything is in harmony, at least for those with a lot of money
and power. More
specifically, hegemony is taking one way of seeing things, and convincing people
that this way of
seeing things is natural, that it is "just the way things are". This
"way of seeing things" in question is
almost always in the interests of people who are rich and powerful. In other
words, ideas that support
the rich and powerful usually define the way a society sees the world. In late
20th century North America, most of us see the world through the eyes of
consumerism. The mass
happiness of mass consumption pretty much dominates our shared conceptions of
the way things
are. [SIDEBAR -- Cultural hegemony refers to those socially constructed ways of
seeing and making
sense of the world around us that predominate in a given time and place. In the
latter 20th century
US the supremacy of commodity relations has exercised a disproportionate
influence over the way
we see our lives. (Goldman, pg. 2)] This idea of hegemony _ a way of seeing
power in which
"the war for mens' minds" is paramount _ will help us understand how
the corporate world has been
able to disable environmentalism. But before we see how this happened, we should
take a closer
look at the inner workings of hegemony. One way to get at these inner workings
is to explore a single
element of the consumerist way of seeing the world. The private automobile _
with all of the
cultural and structural elements that support it _ is as good an example as any.
Most
North Americans believe that the private automobile is the only way to get
around, and that it is
definitely the best and coolest way to get around. In this way, it could be said
that the belief system
which supports the automobile is hegemonic, it is all encompassing. Given all of
the other ways of
moving about that are available _ walking, biking, bussing, boating, training _
this overwhelming
support for cars as the only way is amazing. It is so amazing that it is hard to
believe that it
happened on its own, that people just naturally love the car. In reality, the
move towards a near
universal acceptance of the car as the North American way to get around required
a great deal of work
on the part of big corporations and the people who help them sell ideas. A
number of structural,
legal, and cultural shifts had to take place before North Americans would
joyously shout in
unison _ "the car is the only way to get around, and we love it!". The
most significant elements involved
in driving this almost univocal shout are: suburban road and shopping systems;
the creation of a
government funded car-only infrastructure; the destruction of the American
public transit industry;
the creation of Hollywood myths around the car; the connection of our
unfulfilled desires to automobile
ownership; and the linking of the car to fundamental cultural values like
freedom. Let's
start with suburban road and shopping systems. Since the 1940's, North Americans
have constructed
their new cities in such a way that people almost literally have no choice but
to get around
by car. We have built suburbs where stores and houses that are too far from each
other to allow
walking. We have built shopping places surrounded by seas of pavement, making it
impossible to
stroll along and window shop like we did in our old downtowns. We have built
streets so big and wide
that we fear for our children's lives if they aren't safely tucked inside our
cars. The easiest way to
convince people of something is to make sure they don't have any choices. This
is exactly what the
suburbs have done as a part of their contribution to the hegemony of car culture,
and the dominance
of consumerism in general. If it is very difficult to get around without a car,
people will quickly
come to the conclusion that the car is the only way to get around. The
governments of North America gave the suburbs a good deal of help in convincing
people to buy into
this only way scenario. Although there are many other examples, the two biggest contributions
that governments made to the development of a car centred culture were road subsidies
and centralized planning. Federal, regional and municipal governments in North
America massively
subsidized _ and continue to massively subsidize _ the road system. If they
didn't do this, most
people just couldn't have afforded to drive their cars. And that wouldn't have
been very good for
business, would it? [SIDEBAR -- To find out more about the subsidizing of car
infrastructure, you
should look at the articles by Sue Zielinski , Gord Laird, Michael Replogle and
Charles Komanoff
in the book Beyond the Car, by Steel Rail Press] Once people could afford cars,
planners were
brought in to design spaces that people could only get around by car (the
suburbs). This planning
aspect of things represents a whole sub-belief system contained within a
profession. By directly
controlling the ways in which certain aspects of society are organized, these
professional belief
systems provide essential support for the development of broader public
conceptions of the way
things are. Of
course the car corporations themselves had a big hand in the development of the
car centred belief
system. They made and advertised the cars that would fill the roads. They also
made sure that there
was no competition from more economically viable and economically accessible
forms of transportation.
"In 1936 General Motors, Standard Oil of California, and Firestone Tire
formed a company
called National City Lines, whose purpose was to buy up alternative transport
systems all across
the US., and then close them down. By 1956, over one hundred electric surface
rail systems in 45
cities, serving millions of people had bought up and dismantled entirely."
With no buses or trains available,
it was much easier to convince potential suburban transit users that the car was
the only way.
National City Lines was a step in this direction. All of
these structural motivations couldn't have convinced people to believe so deeply
in the car unless
people really wanted the car and the suburbs. North America's cultural
industries quickly stepped
in to help the want develop. From the 1940s to the 1960s, TV shows and movie
screens were
filled with glorious visions of suburban life. The suburban bliss of the Beaver
Cleaver family and the
futuristic excitement of the Jetsons made the old downtowns _ where you walked
to the market
and socialized on the front porch _ look drab and boring. These programs let
people know that
progress, that ever illusive commodity lusted after by every God-fearing
American, was to be found in
the car filled suburbs. And, if pulp TV and movie fiction wasn't enough, news
producers helped
push "White Flight" to the suburbs by constructing downtowns as
hostile places filled with criminals
and minorities. This muddling mixture of Hollywood fantasy and "real world"
news melded together
to make the suburbs into "the place to be". Media
makers not only helped people with the psychological leap to the suburbs, they
also helped to create
some powerful, down home myths about what the car could do for your life. The
American film
industry re-created the car as a provider of social and sexual power.
Hollywood-made home town
America drag races from the 1950s_ where the winner always gets the girl _ are
only the tip of the
iceberg. Car advertising brought similar messages to television. Women draped on
the front of slowly
rotating automobiles drew the ever stronger connection between cars and the
ability to get women.
These images of the car as a great thing, as a way to get power and sex,
filtered quickly into
real and everyday life. The rites of passage that have developed around the car
are evidence of this.
Most North American teenagers just can't wait to get their driver's license, the
official proof of adulthood.
This
cultural link between the car and sexuality demonstrates how the car centred
belief system was built
from the rubble of our most valued life experiences and the mortar of our
perceived personal inadequecies.
Sexuality is one of the most vital and exciting parts of our lives.
Unfortunately, the dominant
messages of our society and the day to day enforced morality of the 1950s made a
good job of
quashing the sharing and beauty of sex. If you didn't have a horrible sex life
already, the myth-makers
did as much as they could to convince you that you did. As sexuality has been
broken down
into something that we don't have, or can't have, it has been easily sold back
to us in the form of cars
and other consumer objects. In other words, advertising and other forms of
popular culture have
linked sexual fulfillment to the car as a way to help us buy the car and love
the car. It is important
to note that the accelerating car culture of the 1950s focused on the car only
as the solution
to male sexual needs. In this way, the sexualization of the car not only
commercialized desire
but also it contributed to the post-war rebuilding of male dominance in North
American society.
Finally,
the car was also brought into the hegemonic consumerist belief system by the
skillful application
of words. Certain words hold immense power in a society, the power to sway
people and justify
actions. In North American society, one of these words is "freedom".
Freedom has many meanings,
and many connotations. The most overarching of these meanings play into the
hands of consumerism
and the powers-that-be. In our culture, "freedom" can be used to
conjure up ideas about
the right to espouse any political beliefs you like, the ability control your
own body, or the right to
protection from oppressive economic and political forces. But more often than
not, "freedom" is used to
invoke ideas about economic liberty in the marketplace _ the right to make a
buck or the right to
buy the product you like, the "free" market and the "free"
press. These more dominant uses of the
word freedom act as fundamental supports to consumerism. In the case of the car,
freedom has been
strongly linked to freedom from parents, from the state, and the freedom to
chose your favourite
model of car. By making such strong links between the car and freedom,
culture-makers have
helped to secure the car's position as a "must have" product, and as a
central element to our obsession
with mass consumption. All of
these things _ the suburbs, government road subsidies, the destruction of public
transit in the US, the
creation of Hollywood car myths, the appropriation of our desires, and the links
between the car and
central values like freedom _ have contributed to the creation of an almost all
encompassing car
loving belief system in North America. This belief system has been so successful,
and is so pervasively
connected to concepts of personal power and fun, that few North Americans would
say that
they don't like cars. In fact, they can't get enough of them. This belief system
is so pervasive that the
vision of the car as the only way to get around seems natural, "just the
way things are". Massive
support for the car _ and in similar ways for consumerist beliefs in general _
amounts to a tacit
public consent to the political and economic system that makes mass consumption
work. This natural-seemingness
of a belief system and this broad consent for a economic and political system are the
elements that make up hegemony. They indicate a situation where the desires of
the "general
public" and the money making schemes of big corporations are "in
harmony". Of
course there will always be people who either don't participate in the dominant
way of doing things,
or who downright oppose it. In the case of the consumerist car culture, there
are definitely people
who choose to use the predominantly shut out modes of transportation such as
walking, biking,
busing and training. There are also people who come right out and say that cars
should be gotten
rid of altogether and that we should all turn to other options. Although these
people may be acting
and talking in ways that go counter to the dominant way of seeing things _
counter to the hegemony
_ the big car corporations don't bother with them much. Corporations are much
more interested
in keeping consumerist myths rolling along than they are in talking to people
who think that the
consumerist lifestyle is bunk. Big
corporations only start to worry about people who oppose them when there is
actually a threat to their
ability to make a profit. People can rant and scream and do their own thing all
they want as long as
they don't interfere with profits. But once you start tampering with profits _
by convincing enough
people that consumerism is a bad thing or by directly standing in the way of
money making operations
_ you have crossed an important threshold. This is the threshold that stands
between the powers-that-be
being nice to you, and being thrown in jail. It is at this point that the
environmentalists re-enter the story. As we saw earlier, the spread of eco-ideas during the 1980s was seen as a threat by those at the top of the consumerist power ladder. Large numbers of people started to question widely held beliefs that stood at the foundation of consumerism. Many North Americans started to understand that using paper doesn't have to mean clearcutting our forests and that getting around doesn't have to mean driving a car. This was a questioning of the dominant way of seeing the world. When the dominant ways of seeing the world start to be questioned, the rich and powerful start to wonder how they can keep the harmony of hegemony. A situation like this is often called a "crisis of hegemony". Such a crisis usually results in two actions on the part of the powers-that-be. The first is to undermine your opponents by making sure that the "general public" gets real happy again, real fast. The second is to use force against the "agitators" who won't get back in line, while convincing everybody else in society that the "agitators" were just a bunch of criminals anyway. In the environmental "war for mens' minds", the rich and powerful generally choose to use the undermining tactic first. Next Section Table of Contents kows.web.net For a complete version of this paper -- including pictures, sidebar commentary and a full bibliography -- contact Mark Surman (msurman@web.apc.org) This paper is COPYRIGHT MARK SURMAN (1994). Permission is granted to duplicate, print or repost this paper as long as it is done on a non-commercial (ie. keep it free)and as long as the whole paper is kept intact. HEGEMONY. In its most common sense, hegemony (hejEMoNEE) refers to the dominance of one group, nation, or culture over another. In the twentieth century, it has acquired the connotation of political dominance, especially in regard to the activities of superpowers like the United States and the former Soviet Union. Though many theorists and critics often casually (and confusingly) use hegemony in this general way, for Marxist and poststructuralist criticism it actually has a complex and specialized meaning. As a theoretical concept, hegemony became important through the writings of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), who uses the term in at least two distinct ways. At first, Gramsci used hegemony to describe a revolutionary strategy that depended upon a structure of alliances within the working-class that could serve as a unitary base for the overthrow of bourgeois capitalism. Later, in his Prison Notebooks, hegemony refers to relationships between classes, specifically the control that the bourgeoisie exerts over the working-classes. For Gramsci, hegemonic control is not maintained merely by force or the threat of force, but by consent as well. That is, a successful hegemony not only expresses the interest of a dominant class (see IDEOLOGY), but also is able to get a subordinate class to see these interests as "natural' or a matter of "common sense." For Gramsci, this attitude of consent to the social order permeates all aspects of social existence, institutions, relationships, ideas, morals, etc. Gramsci further argues that the basis of hegemony is not purely economic, but also exists within the cultural life of any society. Therefore, a strategy of working-class revolution that depends solely on economistic models of analysis is inadequate and doomed to failure. The concept of hegemony as a unifying web of relations that function as natural or evident shares much with poststructuralist discussions of, IDEOLOGY, DISCOURSE, and POWER, which are also often seen as irreducible to a determinate origin and as constitutive of lived experience. While such formulations have proven a problem for discussions of resistance, especially in the works of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, Gramsci actually formulates hegemony in terms of resistance. He proposes that in order to overthrow bourgeois hegemony--in order to perceive it as primarily (though not exclusively) self-interested--it is necessary to form a "new" hegemony, which will have an even greater basis of consent and which will address the needs and interests of a larger number of groups. This fully extended society realizes itself in a democracy that will allow various groups to unite at various times and according to their perceived shared social and political needs and goals. Such a new hegemony can only be fashioned in opposition to the dominant one, which is perceived as hegemony and not common sense when its unified, coherent worldview is no longer able to explain satisfactorily events and experiences that contradict that unity. See also BASE/SUPERSTRUCTURE, DETERMINISM, MARXIST CRITICISM. The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism, edited by, Childers, Joseph and Gary Hentzi
COMPTE RENDU MODERNITY AND THE HEGEMONY OF VISION, ÉDITÉ PAR DAVID MICHAEL LEVIN Louis Cummins Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, édité par David Michael Levin (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press, 1993, 408 p.). W.J.T. Mitchell remarquait dans son commentaire [1] portant sur le livre de Martin Jay intitulé Downcast Eyes[2], que les publications récentes sur les fonctions de la vision et de la visualité dans l'histoire de l'art, la philosophie, et la critique de la culture (Cultural Stuties) se sont multipliées de manière exponentielle durant les dernières années, à tel point qu'il a cru pouvoir identifier l'émergence d'un nouveau paradigme dans l'histoire des idées. Au <<virage linguistique>> (linguistic turn) de Richard Rorty, caractéristique des pratiques scientifiques et des interactions ethico-politiques de ce siècle, Mitchell oppose un <<virage pictural>> (pictorial turn) constitutif du discours dans les critiques récentes de la culture. Si Mitchell a raison d'observer une resurgence des préoccupations quant à la question de la visualité dans les pratiques discursives américaines, il conclut peut-être un peu trop rapidement en ce qui concerne la nature du déplacement des paradigmes en question. Les procédures allégoriques des pratiques artistiques identifiées à la postmodernité (C. Owen et B. Buchloh), aussi bien que les lectures du modernisme comme pratiques sémiologiques (Y.A. Bois, R. Krauss, L. Steinberg, C. Poggi), devraient nous inciter à plus de circonspection. En accordant plus d'attention à l'un des /pp. 4-5/ ouvrages mentionnés par Mitchell, par exemple Visual Theory[3], on constate que les historiens américains contemporains de l'art se partagent (trop schématiquement peut-être) en deux groupes opposés: les perceptualistes qui, comme Richard Wollheim, supposent une position similaire (donc universalisable) de tous les sujets regardant par rapport aux oeuvres d'art et, d'autre part, les tenants d'une position sémiologique pour qui la production et la réception des images sont intégrées l'une à l'autre, de même qu'aux conditions sociales et culturelles historiquement déterminées, en tant que pratiques intertextuelles. Selon ce deuxième groupe, il ne serait guère possible de comprendre correctement les productions artistiques en fonction de leurs conditions sociales, culturelles et historiques, si l'on est pas en mesure de saisir et de montrer comment elles opèrent comme systèmes de communication, non seulement sur le plan sémantique, mais aussi sur celui de leur structure et surtout de leur énonciation, c'est-à-dire de leur pragmatique. Telle est, à tout le moins, la position défendue par des historiens d'art comme Norman Bryson, Yve-Alain Bois, Rosalind Krauss. À mon avis, la recrudescence des travaux sur la vision et la visualité est principalement due à deux facteurs déterminants. Le premier est d'ordre méthodologique, puisque l'importation de modèles qui se sont développés à partir de la linguistique et des analyses littéraires dans le champ de l'art et de la production culturelle d'images ne va pas sans poser des difficultés majeures (ce qui ne veut pas dire qu'elles soient insurmontables). Tant et si bien que les recherches effectuées aux États-Unis dans le sens d'une sémiologie de la production artistique ont connu récemment un retournement qui laisse présager des orientations méthodologiques prêtes à soutenir que les contenus des oeuvres déterminent leur signification. Le second facteur relève d'une analyse de la culture contemporaine, médiatisée par la télévision, la vidéo, le cinéma, l'informa-/pp. 5-6/ tique, la télématique et la surveillance électronique[4], qui nous inciterait à penser l'importance grandissante de la culture visuelle dans le monde contemporain, et dont les modalités n'auraient plus rien à voir avec le perspectivisme ou, contrairement à ce que pense Mitchell, avec un quelconque <<pictorialisme>>. L'édition préparée par David Levin de textes inédits portant sur l'hégémonie moderne de la vision est donc publiée dans le contexte d'un débat, ayant cours plus particulièrement aux États-Unis et en Angleterre, qui oppose les tenants d'une approche sémiologique, structuraliste ou post-structuraliste, à ceux, plus nombreux, qui défendent soit des modèles iconographiques, en prétextant l'apolitisme des thèses formalistes, soit des approches phénoménologiques qui prétendent que les expériences visuelles ne sont pas réductibles aux propositions discursives. Malgré leurs différentes visées, les opposants au <<virage linguistique>> soutiendraient d'un commun accord que les sémiologues ne sont, en fait, que des formalistes déguisés. L'importante contribution de Levin, et des auteurs qu'il a réunis, ne se situe pas toutefois sur le terrain de l'histoire et de la critique de l'art, ni de la critique de la culture, mais plutôt sur celui de la philosophie, favorisant ainsi des considérations plus générales, plus spéculatives, qui s'enlisent peut-être moins dans des discussions techniques et factuelles. En effet, seuls font exception le texte de Mieke Bal qui porte sur le regard et les dispositifs de représentation du nu féminin dans la Danaé de Rembrandt et L'Olympia de Manet, celui de Susan Buck-Morss qui a trait au projet de Walter Benjamin concernant les Arcades parisiennes, et le texte de Robert D. Romanyshyn portant sur la télévision. Les quinze articles réunis dans l'ouvrage préparé par Levin ont ceci en commun: au lieu de démontrer <<l'oculocentrisme>> de la modernité, comme nous serions portés à le croire de par le /pp. 6-7/ titre, ils visent plutôt à déplacer les enjeux d'une telle présupposition. S'il est question de l'hégémonie de la vision comme constitutive des <<Temps Modernes>> -- comme nous l'avait enseigné Heidegger, entre autres, dans <<L'époque des 'conceptions du monde' (Weltbild)>>, le second article de Holzwege --, ce n'est pas tant pour défendre cette thèse que pour examiner la diversité des régimes scopiques qui se trouvent impliqués dans l'histoire de la philosophie occidentale depuis les Pré-socratiques jusqu'à nos jours. En fait, seuls les articles de Levin lui-même [5] et de Martin Jay[6] assument d'emblée que le <<Monde comme représentation>>, initié par le cartésianisme et rétrospectivement identifié par Heidegger, fonde la culture occidentale de la connaissance, de la morale et de l'esthétique. Dans les autres textes, on nous laisse entendre que l'association de la vision et de la vérité est aussi vieille que la philosophie occidentale elle-même, voire que le monde chrétien (à travers la métaphore de la lumière, comme le montre Hans Blumenberg); ou encore que dans le cartésianisme même ainsi que ses dérivés modernes jusqu'à Hegel, le régime scopique perspectiviste ne fut pas seul à être privilégié et que d'autres modèles, auquels on devrait accorder plus d'attention, furent aussi l'objet d'un questionnement philosophique. Quant au cartésianisme, qui a en quelque sorte servi de cible aux attaques philosophiques contre l'hégémonie de la vision depuis Nietzsche jusqu'à Derrida, l'argumentation de Dalia Judovitz démontre que dans les thèses de Descartes, ce n'est pas tant la vision qui serait paradigmatique que les conditions et les limites promulguées par la raison réfléchissante. Car la vision elle-même n'est qu'une construction de la pensée rationnelle et son référent n'est que la projection optique d'un système géométrique. Chez Descartes, la visualité en tant que structurée par la raison et la technique, /pp. 7-8/ c'est-à-dire l'optique instrumentale, serait transposée sur le plan de la pensée pour fournir un modèle de la connaissance, mais ne constituerait pas en soi un lieu privilégié, bien au contraire. Stephen Houlgate, quant à lui, soutient que dans la tradition moderne de la connaissance, où le rationalisme et l'empirisme ne seraient que des variantes d'une même épistémè, ce n'est pas la vision qui ferait problème, mais plutôt une conception étriquée de la pensée; et, en définitive, que l'intuition visuelle offrirait une conception plus généreuse de la fonction de la vision dans sa formation, comme dans le cas du système philosophique de Hegel: If we accept that vision is properly to be identified with the blending together of visual sensation and spatial awareness in visual intuition, then we can see that, at least as Hegel presents it, vision does not effect the kind of narrow reduction of things to mere disposable objects, and does not have an "inveterate tendancy to grasp, secure, master and dominate" as David Levin, for example, suggests. Visual intuition certainly relates to objects: it places objects before itself and thus incorporates within itself the moment of consciousness or Vorstellen. But it does not just think of these objects as things which are reflected back into themselves and which stand over against us, presenting their visible properties to view and being available for use. Visual intuition does not push objects away from it, or appropriate them, in order to gain greater certainty of itself; it attends to objects -- opens and gives itself to them -- and discloses the concrete, unified presence of the objects themselves by letting them stand out in space, that is, by making space for them -- a space which is known to be real and present all around us and to be the space which we ourselves share.[7] Malgré les différences entre Houlgate et Levin portant sur les caractéristiques de l'oculocentrisme de la Modernité, en particulier en ce qui concerne la philosophie de Hegel, le rejet d'une /pp. 8-9/ conception instrumentale de la vision les réunit, comme elle réunit d'ailleurs tous les auteurs rassemblés dans l'ouvrage. Dans la perspective heideggerienne de Levin, il ne s'agissait pas seulement de faire la critique de l'oculocentrisme moderne, mais surtout de faire opérer subversivement d'autres régimes de vision: Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida have all seen, traced, and attempted to understand the advent of a distinctively modern form of ocularcentrism. Each one, of course, in his own perspective. But, for all their differences, each one has gone beyond critique, using the textuality, the work of critique to articulate and practice what might be called "countervisions": not only critical and strategically subversive observations, but also historically new ways of seeing, ways that model visions very different in character from the one that has become hegemonic. ( 7) Dans son article, Levin discute les thèses de Heidegger en proposant que l'opposition essentielle ne s'articule pas principalement entre l'écoute et la vue (ce qui, bien sûr, est l'une des positions de Heidegger, puisque c'est dans la parole poétique d'un Holderlin, d'un Rilke ou d'un Trakl que se manifeste le dévoilement de la vérité de l'Etre dans la Modernité), mais entre une vision instrumentale, quotidienne et réifiante, qui pose le monde comme Gestell, c'est-à-dire comme une organisation ordonnée et totalisante du monde régie par une volonté de pouvoir et de domination, d'une part, et une vision aléthétique qui propose d'autre part une ouverture à la vérité de l'Etre. En d'autres mots, ce qui fait problème pour Levin, ce n'est pas tant la vision elle-même que le caractère qu'elle a pris, et prend toujours, dans la Modernité. Si tel est le cas -- s'il s'agit effectivement de développer des formes de vision qui échapperaient à l'hégémonie de la perception perspectiviste et réductionniste où la structure fondamentale de la connaissance s'articule sur le mode d'une appropriation du monde comme forme réféchissante du Moi, ou du Sujet comme Gegenstand, et des rapports sociaux sous le mode de la soumission et de la surveillance --, on constate avec surprise que les réfé-/pp. 9-10/ rences aux deux principaux théoriciens francais, Lyotard et Lacan, qui ont consacré une partie importante de leurs travaux à l'analyse des régimes scopiques en initiant un déplacement determinant de cette question, sont presque complètement absentes de l'ouvrage. Ils ne sont cités que par Martin Jay, et ce, en regard de leurs différences par rapport à Merleau-Ponty. On peut se demander ce que signifie une telle omission. Il faut d'abord noter que le parti pris, aussi bien de l'éditeur que de la plupart des auteurs rassemblés, est essentiellement philosophique. Ce qui les intéressent avant tout, ce sont les fonctions de la vision (et de l'audition) dans la constitution de la connaissance et de la morale, du savoir et du pouvoir. À mon avis, ce point de vue philosophique, qui prend tout naturellement position contre une vision instrumentale, cache en fait un autre programme assez conforme à la position éthique traditionnelle de la philosophie. En effet, de cette conception de la vision (fût-elle réceptive au dévoilement de l'Etre de l'étant, ou fût-elle défocalisée), ce qui <<honteusement>> s'absente une fois de plus, c'est le corps, le désir et les pulsions. Car une vision incarnée est également instrumentale et objectale. Elle n'a pas, bien sûr, l'élévation d'une vision qui prétend constituer un savoir et qui désire embrasser la totatité du monde, ou de la vision aléthétique qui se veut réceptive à la révélation de l'Etre. Elle est partiale, intéressée et, tout compte fait, ignoble! En d'autres mots, la révision anti-instrumentaliste des régimes scopiques de la Modernité, proposée par Levin et les auteurs qu'il a réunis, est elle-même marquée par la répression d'un autre type de vision objectale dont il n'est pas même fait mention. Pourtant, elle devrait constituer une assise anthropologique indispensable pour une critique efficace du privilège accordé à la conception paradigmatique de la vision dans le champ de la connaissance. Si la légitimité des régimes scopiques dominants de la Modernité nous apparaît de plus en plus devoir être remise en question, précisément à cause de leur occultation des rapports de domination qui se camouflaient derrière l'objectivité et la transparence du Savoir, il n'est pas du tout certain que la restauration de leurs modalités intuitives, ouvertes et désintéressées /pp. 10-11/ puissent échapper à d'autres systèmes de légitimation qui seraient tout aussi totalisants, et d'autant plus inquiétants s'ils paraissaient indiscutables. Il importe, bien sûr, de revoir ces régimes; mais peut-être pas à la manière dont il nous est proposé dans cette collection d'essais, laquelle a, malgré tout, l'avantage de susciter une relecture différenciatrice de l'histoire de la philosophie occidentale de la vision. Ce n'est peut-être pas, non plus, en adoptant ipso facto le point de vue du <<virage linguistique>> constitutif du modernisme, qu'on saura se garder complètement de l'hégémonie de la vision. Car ce point de vue se laisse souvent, lui aussi, subsumer dans une utopie de la transparence que les interactions communicationnelles devraient pouvoir atteindre à travers un processus progressif de clarification. Mais en adoptant, dans le cas de la vision comme dans celui de la textualité, une déconstruction des principes de sublimation qui y sont à l'oeuvre, on pourra peut-être échapper aux présupposés hégémoniques de l'explication rationaliste. Il serait souhaitable qu'une critique de la vision et des différents régimes scopiques de la Modernité puisse d'abord montrer comment ceux-ci ont consisté à réprimer le corps et le désir, pour ensuite analyser comment l'ignoble et le plaisir intéressé ont travaillé insidieusement la position éthique du discours philosophique. Il faudrait aussi voir comment certaines oeuvres philosophiques, scientifiques et artistiques avaient réussi à subvertir les normes de ces régimes, en faisant valoir non pas les modalités non-instrumentales, défocalisées, intuitives ou ouvertes, mais les composantes étranges et inquiétantes qui ont laissé poindre l'abîme de ces systèmes. On peut les repérer, en histoire de l'art, dans les travaux de Georges Didi-Huberman, d'Hubert Damisch, de Jurgis Baltrusaitis, de Rosalind Krauss et de quelques autres. Louis Cummins City University of New York /p. 11/ [1]<<The Eyes Have It>>, Artforum 32;5 (January 1994): 9-10. [2]Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: The University of California Press, 1993). [3]Visual Theory, edited by Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly & Keith Moxey (New York: Harper Collins, 1991). [4]Voir à ce sujet le court texte de Deleuze, <<Postscript on the Societies of Control>>, October 59 (Hiver 1992). [5]<<Decline and Fall; Ocularcentrism in Heidegger's Reading of the History of Metaphysics>>, 186-217. [6]<<Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and the Search for a New Ontology of Sight>>, 143-185. [7]Houlgate, <<Vision, Reflection, and Openness; The 'Hegemony of Vision' from a Hegelian Point of View>>, 114.
SEHR, volume 4, issue 1: Bridging the Gap Updated 8 April 1995 what's love got to do with it? Adriano Palma Herbert Simon appears very neutral with respect to the many possible "schools" of literary criticism. And maybe he achieves that goal (but not by uttering sentences consisting only of common sense, though; hence he did not fail). He is not neutral, however, in philosophy. In what follows, I would like to suggest at least some of the ways in which what Herbert Simon states is not uncontroversial at all. 1. Externalist Construals of Meaning In much of contemporary philosophy of language a sort of quasi- consensus has developed to the effect that "meanings ain't in the head." Externalist ideas have been around since seminal articles written by Hilary Putnam, for example. They can be summarized roughly as follows: what determines the meaning of a symbol cannot be only what goes on from within the thinking-meaning entity because if that were the case we would run afoul of the intuitions encased in the so-called twin-earth tests of intuitions. For reasons of space I don't want to wax long on this, but Herbert Simon is squarely on the other side. The meaning not only of a single term (Putnam's example was "water") but of entire texts is the meaning of that text to someone or something, and that thinking entity can recover meanings via recognitional capacities internal to it. Herbert Simon's "physical symbol system hypothesis" runs directly counter to this somewhat orthodox standpoint: all that is needed to have meanings is the ability to "input symbols into memory, combine and reorganize them into symbol structures, store such structures over time, erase them, output them through motor processes, compare pairs of symbols for equality or inequality, and branch." These are capacities that are not only present in humans, but, as Herbert Simon unambiguously states, they are already present now in computers. And, I take it, computers are not externalist meaning-engines at all. 2. Is This an Empirical Question or Not? The physical symbol system is an empirical hypothesis for Herbert Simon. But again this is not universally accepted. To cite the clearest example of the opposition, John Searle (1990) presents the following "formal" argument to prove the hypothesis a priori incoherent. Premise 1: Computer programs are formal (syntactic); premise 2: Human minds have mental contents (semantics); premise 3: Syntax by itself is neither constitutive of nor sufficient for semantics. Conclusion: Programs are neither constitutive nor sufficient for semantics. Now only either Searle or Simon is right (either it is an empirical hypothesis that computers think and access meanings or it is false, but it is false a priori because of a very basic form of conceptual misunderstanding). Personally, I tend towards the view that what we face here is the need to uncover of the implicit premisses of both (Searle's and Herbert Simon's views). In particular much of the premises Searle is using depend upon a specific stand (a first-person stand is the one and only affording us the knowledge that our brain is not only a syntactic engine) but it would be very interesting to uncover more of the implicit structure of Herbert Simon's reasoning in that respect. 3. Antiholism and Literary Meanings One important strand of Herbert Simon's views-and again, at least in the experience of this writer, far from uncontroversial-is that meaning pertains to single words (or even to units smaller than words). There is a vast area of literary criticism which is standing dogmatically behind the holistic dogma along the lines "no meaning without larger and larger contexts." At the limit of the process, of course, the context is the universe as a whole and we can not isolate anything as the meaning of a text. I found very refreshing in Simon's treatment the development of the idea that recovering more meanings out of a literary text is not at all contradictory vis-à-vis the plain fact that "dog" can be a meaningful term all by itself. The idea is that we need not underplay or undermine the evocative power of a novel or of a poem by denying that the use of terms in it can be as commonplace as ever. 4. What's Love Got to Do with It? I found most intriguing but eventually less than fully satisfying Simon's comments on the representational character of some "artistic expressions." "Representational" is something which denotes outside itself and "nonrepresentational" is something which does not have a "built-in" semantics. Music (and not operas or songs) is nonrepresentational by this standard. The mechanisms which make us "understand" music are very obscure indeed, but I can't help but ask whether we should not go one step further and see meanings also in syntactic structures (broadly interpreted) themselves. Music seems to me to evoke meanings purely via its syntax, and we should try to develop a comprehension of what the contemplation of syntax brings about in terms of meanings attached to meaningless texts. 5. Who Owns a Text Is a Trivial Question Simon tends to see the realm of literary criticism in catholic ways: there is no point is trying to show that authors' intentions are irrelevant, since they are relevant to she who writes. The readers can, and most often will, find more meaning and different meanings from the intended ones. What is relevant is that the richness of meaningful structures is common wealth: it is open to all from the airport reading of a pulp novel to the rarefied atmosphere of Cummings. And one cannot but agree that much of the debates between different schools of criticisms appears to be an effect of the need of academia to produce new fashions and new ways to publish to enhance one's status within academia itself. But it remains that if meanings are, albeit tenuously, dependent on intensions or intentions of those who write and of those who read, then there are meanings in text, that they are not composed by free signifiers, as some would have us believe. It seems to the present writer that the increased cooperation between a cognitive approach and literary criticism cannot but be helpful in seeing more clearly that literature (and maybe art in general) does not have any privileged status. It is indeed part and parcel of the evocation of meanings we encounter everywhere. One important way of looking at this consists in the construction of cognitive theory of rhetoric. Much of what is evoked by literary texts depends on the skillful ways writers have used to evoke without saying, and ambiguity is just one of them. In this sense perhaps the "two" cultures can start talking to each other, escaping from the traps of the imperialist views that not long ago saw language as a "fascist" order of discourse.
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