Hegel writes, “What is rational is real; and what is real is rational”1, to which François Laruelle responds: “The real is communicational, the communicational is real”2, but why? Why this distinction? Is it a distinction? What’s at stake? In other words, what’s the difference between saying that something’s “rational” and that it’s “communicational?”
Because Hegel wrote in the Enlightenment, or “The Age of Reason,” it should perhaps come as no surprise that, throughout his work, one sees Hegel valorize rationality. One might contend that Hegel banalizes reason—above, the “rational” simply appears as a dimension of reality—but there can be no doubt that Hegel’s environment is one in which the “highest” use of reason tends to be seen as a great virtue. Hegel’s own conformist tendencies3 at least ought to suggest that Hegel sees himself as no great rebel with regard to the Enlightenment tendency to valorize reason.
By valorizing reason, Hegel both supports the conformism implied in his work and he provides a telos to “human progress.” Because, as Hegel claims, reality tends to unfold in a rational manner, one would be foolish to rebel against social developments. Historical progress will continue to push reality forward toward the endpoint of the overall rational, or good. While Hegel allows what he calls “contingency” into his system of thought, that contingency is always treated as the contingency both by which the future is unknowable and by which the the past can, in the present, be made legible.4 Hegel’s contingency, then, can be understood only retrospectively; in the present, contingency appears either as chaos or as an open question. Because one can’t know what the future brings, conforming to the established, and rational, forms of life is reasonable; again, to do otherwise would be foolish. If one accepts Hegel’s argument, then it has the effect of closing down argumentation: Hegel’s system is all worked out; Hegel appears to have proven that human progress is reasonable and good. Hegel’s telos leaves nothing to argue over. For Hegel, contingency is an out-of-reach contingency that determines the interactions that appear in the “real” world.
One could go so far as to say that Hegel’s thought surreptitiously reintroduces a kind of dualism through a back door. If the rational good of historical progress is at the bottom of everything, then it’s what Marx calls a “fetish”—unilaterally producing the effects that we know as the world. By this conception, the world changes because the rational history of human progress determines the effects experienced on the surface of the world. This rational progress, then, is what one might call a “deep structure” (or, again, a “fetish”) and what appear to us as human conflicts are really only that structure’s effects. No one ever really intervenes. Until historical progress pushes things along, then, the things, and even processes, of the world are fixed and static. If, in Hegel’s account, it’s historical progress that brings about change, then Marx and his followers offer a very different conception of change and contingency.
Laruelle, following in Marx’s footsteps, reopens the possibility of meaningful difference at the level of people’s behavior (and, more generally, of real-world phenomena). The “communicational” entails no telos; there’s nothing at the bottom of the communicational aspect of the real (or, for that matter, of the real [or mediational] aspect of communication). By emphasizing the material, the processual, and the practical, Marx binds everything to everything else. Every interaction is one by which phenomena meet one another in a context that is surrounded by a broader context, ad infinitum. By this conception, objects and processes are not epiphenomenal to any deep-lying cause.5 Crucially, if Hegel’s conception of reality is determined by the motor of historical progress, Marx’s engine is one of social interaction—class struggle. Without flattening phenomena so that all phenomena are equally effective and/or productive, Marx construes all phenomena as having the potential to affect others. Any process entails interactions and choices.6 One could never predict that any development will be better than that which came before it. Nothing is guaranteed. History becomes something over which people must struggle.
If all this is true, then Marx is more monist than is Hegel. Rather than bracketing off the ultimate cause of all reality, Marx makes the world’s dynamism immanent to the world of interactions. This is partly because the communicational aspects of all things aren’t presumed to communicate toward the ultimate utopia of liberal rationality. In fact, things can, and often do, go awry. Refusing to conflate means with ends, then, a Marxist might rightly claim that revolution must be communicated and communication must be made revolutionary.
1 Hegel, G. W. F. The Philosophy of Right, London: Chiswick Press, 1896, xxvii. 2 Laruelle, François. “The Truth According to Hermes.” Parrhesia 9: p. 22. 3 Hegel. G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. 4 In Hegel’s own words, “The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.” The Philosophy of Right, xxx. 5 I ought to point out that some very old Marxists weren’t themselves very Marxian. While Marx’s conception of “mute compulsion” could imply (indeed, did imply to many very old Marxists) that Marx construed capitalism as a kind of fetish, Marx’s own consistently monistic methodology, as well as the historical, and complex, way by which he conceives of capitalism ought to dispel the notion that mute compulsion complicates Marx’s monism. Marx, Karl. “Capital, Vol. 1.” Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, Vol. 35, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996. 6 This might best be seen in Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of “practice.” Because Bourdieu’s concepts keep in dialectical tension the relationships—between the subject’s inner experience and encounters with the outside world, the scale of the person and of the social, symbol and referent, and so on—they’re useful for explaining how forms of capital help to mediate the ongoing formation of any habitus—that is, both a subjectivity and a culture, or sociality. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than to imagine the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations. — Fredric Jameson
When is the cure worse than the disease? In A Clockwork Orange (1971), Stanley Kubrick asks this question in the context of social control[1], or if one prefers, “law and order.” Kubrick says of his controversial film[2] that it “warns against the new psychedelic fascism—the eye‐popping, multimedia, quadrasonic, drug‐oriented conditioning of human beings by other beings—which many believe will usher in the forfeiture of human citizenship and the beginning of zombiedom.”[3] If Kubrick means to warn of “the new psychedelic fascism,” he, in so doing, portrays familiar elements of fascism alongside problematically fascistic tendencies in certain aspects of liberal social forms. In other words, if teenage boy Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) and his “droogs” (Alex’s friends/gang) obsess over the apparent eyesore, and impurity, of homeless people living in the streets; a clear sense of hierarchy enforced through brute force (like when Alex physically assaults his droogs); engaging in “a bit of the old ultra-violence”; sexual maleficence; and the indiscriminate, resentful punishment of the privileged, then the state’s use of law, police, imprisonment, discipline[4], and mind-altering medical remedies is, according to Kubrick, a kind of fascism[5] within liberalism. With its own violence and its own irrationalities and contradictions, fascist aspects of liberalism respond to the violence one might sometimes see in disaffected young European men (perhaps among others). At one point in the film, the prison chaplain (Godfrey Quigley) states, “When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.” It’s the tension between state control and personal agency on which the film, and this paper, rest.
In this essay, I’ll draw on classical social theory, as well as on contemporary cultural studies approaches, in order to think through social problems as they’re articulated through the images and dialogue in A Clockwork Orange. The controversy around Kubrick’s film is evidence of what Stuart Hall, as referenced in Ralina Joseph’s Postracial Resistance, showed—“that some audiences might believe the favored meanings encoded in the text, but others will believe only certain elements while rejecting other features in a negotiated manner, and still other audiences will embrace instead an entirely oppositional view.”[6] As I argue for a particular interpretation, or “decoding,” of the film, I’ll use Kubrick’s words to corroborate my intuitions on the film’s meanings. Throughout the paper, I’ll weave together, on one hand, the film’s encoded messages, and on the other hand, sociological concepts from thinkers like Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Pierre Bourdieu. I’ll then show how these thinkers’ concepts form a lexicon for understanding the sociological argument that Kubrick puts forward in the film. By connecting aspects of the film to social theory, I’ll show how Kubrick responds to some of the most basic problems that tend to animate sociological research. Crucial to the film, and to sociological understanding, is the set of roles that institutions play.
Liberal Institutions and Fascism in Images
Louis Althusser referred to the ideology-producing, and ideology-reproducing, institutions as “Ideological State Apparatuses” (ISAs) and he referred to the violent hegemonic state institutions as the “Repressive State Apparatuses” (RSAs).[7] Clear in Althusser’s analysis is that these two kinds of institutions relate to each other and that ideological institutions aren’t mutually exclusive with repressive ones.
One would be hard-pressed to find an imagaic representation more densely packed with representations of liberal ISAs and RSAs than in the image below—the uniformed prison guard (Michael Bates)[8], the preacher and crucifixes[9], and the schoolroom chalkboard. In addition to these familiar institutional representatives are recognizable symbols of fascism. The protagonist of the film, Alex, appears in a dark suit and a red armband (like the garb that was common, and peculiar, to Nazi Germany), the preacher simultaneously raises his arm in a manner reminiscent of the Nazi salute, and the prison guard’s small mustache and dark militarist uniform help to grant him a Hitlerian appearance. If Kubrick’s quotation above—on the relationship he saw between fascism and liberal social life—weren’t enough to convince the reader of the film’s central problematic, one could read this image as a clear indictment of some of the liberal state’s fascist tendencies. For Kubrick to evoke Christianity, liberal institutionalism, and Hitler and the Nazi Youth, all in one image, seems particularly poignant and especially accusatory with regard to the problems of the liberal state.
The theme of surveillance and control—a popular theme in sociological research—appears throughout the film. From a technical perspective, Kubrick’s frequent use of a super-wide angle lens (possibly the Kinoptik 9.8mm) gives a kind of panoramist, or perhaps panopticist, perspective. The lens’s distortions might appear familiar to viewers who recall the effect of the “fisheye” lens. The fisheye lens allows the viewer to see an impossibly omniscient perspective—a perspective that radiates in a wide arc from a single point—and this kind of perspective can be useful for surveillance. For a similar surveillance technology, one might think of the mirrors that appear in ceiling corners in certain buildings; they allow hall monitors, police, prison guards, and other surveyors to track the movements and activities of many people at once, and in many nooks and crannies at once.
Kubrick sometimes combines the use of this lens with backlighting. When characters are backlit, instead of allowing the viewer to clearly see the characters’ features, things are backward. If the light comes from behind the characters on screen, then the lighting that’s behind the on-screen characters lights the viewer from the front. While this is a subtle feature of the viewer’s experience[10], the viewer can, at times, be subjected to the off-putting sense of having a small crowd of people on screen who are looking toward the viewer. In these cases, on-screen characters appear shadowy; the viewer only partially makes out the characters’ expressions and actions. These silhouetted characters can make the viewer feel a bit as though they’re being interrogated, or surveyed, by the people who appear on the screen—the viewer in the position of someone potentially made to feel small, powerless, and alienated.
For Kubrick, this combination of lens and lighting achieves the effect of sucking the viewer into the film’s action and into the feeling of being monitored, accused, imprisoned, disciplined, and/or punished. The point for Kubrick is that the legal-rationalist justification for bureaucratic milieux—in which contemporary forms of surveillance and punishment occur—make them no less terrifying and harmful. The painstakingly slow proceduralism of liberal bureaucracies can make them seem trustworthy. The seemingly boring normalcy of these bureaucratic institutions is both the condition by which their forms, and their social forces, tend to be reproduced and that by which people in these institutions are granted legitimacy when they commit violent acts.[11] Alex’s relationships to his parents (Sheila Raynor and Philip Stone), his parole officer, the prison chaplain, the police, and the government minister (Anthony Sharp) all show how different social institutions reductively figure Alex as a mere atomized part of an overwhelming and undeterrable social structure. These institutions mediate relationships between Alex and others as they help to contribute to the constitution of the social conditions in Alex’s world and to the nature of those social conditions.[12]
Liberal Bureaucracies and Social Reproduction
Whether or not the reproduction of social forms is part-and-parcel of the “overwhelming force” by which liberal economic activity traps subjects in “a steel-hard casing”[13], clearer is that liberal modernity tends to entail a somewhat difficult-to-explain tendency toward the reproduction of social forms. One might say that this particular issue is the problematic most central to sociology. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim claims that the purpose of rites is “to evoke, maintain, or recreate certain mental states of the groups.”[14] While Durkheim writes about so-called “elementary forms of religious life,” he writes from a modern perspective and his points are intended to be instructive with regard to complex bureaucratic societies. Cultural sociologist Jeffrey Alexander has gone so far as to claim that the success or failure of people’s performances—their social practices of whatever sort—hinge on whether or not they convincingly articulate various aspects of social life into the same performance.[15] Such a conception of social activity entails reproduction of social forms as a core normative value and the failure of reproduction as a normative bad.
In A Clockwork Orange, political and criminal justice institutions in the film change in order to stay the same.[16] First, two of Alex’s violent former droogs (Warren Clark and James Marcus) become police officers. In the film’s world, the police institution reproduces itself by recruiting new members[17], even from the ranks of violent criminal gangs. As ironic as this might initially appear, Kubrick’s message seems clear: Other than the blessing of the state, what really distinguishes police, and their violence, from so-called “criminal” violence? After the old droogs/new police officers encounter Alex, they use the opportunity to torture him in retaliation for his previous maltreatment of them. The other example of changing things in order to reproduce them appears when the government minister twice in the film wants to change policies in order to more efficiently control society and in order to (at least indirectly) win a political victory for his government.
For sociologists, the question of how societies reproduce their forms and institutions is a crucial one. Durkheim argues that societies’ beliefs and rituals resulted in their members basically worshipping their own society and its values.[18] For Weber, the “steel-hard casing” of capitalism was a problem insofar as—rather than leading to potentially healthier, more gratifying alternatives—it could trap people in lives that were more miserable than was necessary. For Bourdieu, habitus, capital, fields, and doxa relate to one another in order to balance reproduction with innovation.[19] Bourdieu calls habitus the “structuring structure” out of which strategies emerge.[20] Because people relate agonistically as they struggle for dignity, their investments in their achievement, or accrual, of dignity cause their behaviors to fall into patterns that appear to follow successful strategies that others have used. However, the investment in dignity also leads people to creatively do what they can in order to gain dignity. When one understands how various forms of capital differentiate the hierarchy that constitutes whatever field in which they find themselves, they can either use their resources in order to follow established patterns for gaining capital or they can experiment in order to gain capital, dignity, and social status within the field. In other words, they have the option to follow doxa—the taken-for-granted, unchallenged assumptions in the field—or they can go against doxa.
Political Struggle
A perennial problem in sociology coincides with the question of social reproduction: the question of what leads to social change. In the film, the political struggle between the left—who are represented by subversive writer Frank Alexander (Patrick Magee), who says of “the common people,” “[T]hey must be led, sir, driven, pushed”—and the right—who clamor for “law and order”—leads to a kind of impasse that’s masked by superficial change. To be clear, Kubrick seems to view social change as inhibited by something like Weber’s “steel-hard casing”: liberalism produces an appearance of change without necessarily changing things very much at all. In the film, subversive leftists can engage in an aesthetic, or rhetorical, project of trying to rally the public behind criticisms of those in power, but government ministers can use human subjects as guinea pigs for new innovative techniques of control. Bureaucrats, then, might argue that they, and their bureaucracies, are working on the important problems.
The apparent conflict between the two sides (in this case, left and right) helps to set the boundaries of whatever debate. In other words, according to the film, there’s a problem with what, following the work of Jürgen Habermas, is often thought of as “the public sphere”—the combination of written discourse, spoken discourse, and the settings and norms in which discourse occurs—by which interlocutors meet as equals in order to discuss important social issues.[21] Different forms of capital help to determine how the public sphere functions. So long as the film’s leftists have their writers and their means of message dissemination, and the conservatives have money and bureaucratic power, these forms of capital help to make the public sphere uneven. The public sphere’s unevenness often facilitates the reproduction of forms of privilege at the expense of the needs and welfare of the disadvantaged.[22] The power of the public sphere in this case is challenged especially because most people don’t have very much power, or capital in its various forms. To relate this to the epigraph from Fredric Jameson, liberal institutions’ tendency to reproduce social forms helps to place limits on people’s ability to think outside of the liberal discursive landscape. The production of social change from within the public sphere is complicated by an ideological mirage: political struggles can sometimes appear as conflicts and function as affinities.
Kubrick clearly sees a conspicuous relationship between authority and so-called “criminals.” This is especially true in two scenes that mirror each other. One of the backlit wide-angle lens shots above is of teenage Alex lying in bed, wearing nothing but brief underwear. That scene begins with Alex walking past an open bedroom where he notices his adult parole officer, P. R. Deltoid (Aubrey Morris) sitting on the bed. Alex sits next to Deltoid, and Deltoid puts his arm across Alex’s back, resting one hand on Alex’s shoulder. The other hand lies on Alex’s naked leg, and Deltoid rests his head on Alex’s near shoulder, looking up at him, smiling like a gleeful lover. He pulls Alex down onto the bed with him, his arm still wrapped around Alex. Alex tries to sit up, but Deltoid pulls him back down. Alex’s hand slowly slides over his genitals. Deltoid speaks loudly, and his speech is increasingly animated. As Deltoid’s leg repeatedly brushes and nudges Alex’s, Alex has to keep pushing his hand back into his groin in order to keep his hand from leaving the area due to Deltoid’s erratic movements. After a few moments, Deltoid eventually punches Alex in the groin. Alex laughs and stands up. If Kubrick made the point that the police are just as violent as the criminals, then perhaps the liberal authorities are often just as sexually “perverted,” too. In a later scene, Alex walks alongside the chaplain. The chaplain’s arm is around Alex, and Alex’s hands press against, and shift about, his groin. At one point, Alex’s thumbs nervously fidget and Alex looks into the chaplain’s eyes. Alex’s face moves closer to the chaplain. Alex glances down, for a moment, at the chaplain’s mouth, and then, Alex begins to speak. It’s worth noting that Kubrick was very detail-oriented. If, in these two scenes, Alex appears to masturbate while being held close by his authority figures, the fact that it happened twice in the film ought to assure the viewer that Kubrick did this intentionally. The sexual tension that Kubrick depicts between authority and “subversives” relates to the invisibility of bureaucratic power functions.
Bureaucratic Power and Its Appearances
Earlier, I wrote about how Kubrick’s lens and lighting choices help to produce the effect of making the audience member feel as though they’re a relatively powerless person being surveyed, or monitored. The other important effect (at least for the purposes of this paper) of Kubrick’s camera and lighting choices is that of detachment. The shadowy, backlit figures on the screen appear menacing and almost inhuman. For the viewer, the on-screen characters are practically faceless people in suits—they’re silhouettes, hollowed-out impersonal members of institutions and nothing more. The faces of bureaucracy’s evils are, it seems, no faces at all. And, isn’t this exactly how bureaucracy works?
In the middle of the film, Alex is in prison for murder. He’s been put in a program to “cure” him using what’s called the “Ludovico technique.” He’s given drugs that make him feel ill and he’s forced to watch images of physical violence, sex, and images associated with the Nazi party. The person in charge of the cadre administering the technique, and observing Alex, Dr. Brodsky (Carl Duering), at one point says to his colleagues, “Very soon, now, the drug will cause the subject to experience a death-like paralysis, together with deep feelings of terror and helplessness.” After the video-watching session, Alex comments to a facilitator, Dr. Branom (Madge Ryan), that he doesn’t understand why he felt sick. She says, “You felt ill this afternoon because you’re getting better.” Alex accepts this confusing statement, and continues with the program. The next day, while watching more videos, he screams in agony, “Stop it! Stop it! Please! I beg you!” Dr. Brodsky says to Dr. Branom, “It can’t be helped. Here’s the punishment element, perhaps. The governor ought to be pleased,” before telling Alex, “I’m sorry Alex. This is for your own good.” Alex pleads for the end of the torture, thanking God that he’s “cured.” Alex, now a good pupil/disciple, says of violence, “It’s wrong because it’s, like, against society,” but Dr. Brodsky replies, “No, no, boy, you really should leave it to us and be cheerful about it.”
To synthesize the earlier point—about the film’s production of the viewer’s feelings of smallness, powerlessness, and alienation—with the point about the arbitrary power and violence of shadowy bureaucracy, I’ll point to how Alex is used by different parties toward the end of the film. On one hand, the doctors who administer the Ludovico technique seek their professional advancement, i.e. social capital. The government minister, who wants to cut down on crime and look good in the eyes of the voting public, also uses Alex’s case for his advancement. He arranges for Alex to be put on a stage in order to demonstrate Alex’s feelings of illness and terror. This would show the public that the Ludovico technique can help to reduce crime. The minister later uses Alex for an opportunity to have the press take photos of the two smiling together, implying Alex’s approval of the minister. Finally, the leftist subversive writer tortures Alex partly in order to try to convince the public of the sins of the bureaucracy—who cruelly conditioned Alex to feel terribly when exposed to certain stimuli. In each case, Alex is treated as an instrument to gain capital and power. In each case, Alex has his own reasons to play along and to perform the role of the reformed criminal.
Das Ende
My sense is that the ending of A Clockwork Orange tends to get misinterpreted. The Ludovico technique leads Alex to react adversely to images of violence and sex, along with (incidentally) the playing of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. When Alex sees the images or hears the music, he feels ill and helpless. When Alex goes on stage to perform his feelings of dread and illness, a man physically abuses him. Alex then retches. A young, topless woman comes onto the stage and stands next to Alex. Voice-over informs the viewer that Alex wants to have sex with her. He reaches to grab her, but he seizes up and again feels ill. The faces in the audience seem to signal optimism: He’s cured of his propensity toward violence! Maybe. He’s clearly not cured of his desire to have sex. In the next scene, Alex confronts a man, leading to Alex scowling and pulling his fist back to punch the other man. He seizes up again. Even if he can’t act violently, he’s apparently not cured of his desire to act violently.
After having been tortured by the leftists, Alex jumps from a window, landing him in the hospital. A few weeks later, a psychiatrist, Dr. Taylor (Pauline Taylor), tests him. She shows him cartoons that include someone speaking and another person with an empty speech bubble. His job is to provide the second person’s response. As she goes through the test, his responses increasingly revolve around violence and sex. In one case, the dialogue he suggests is, “I’ll smash your face!” Then, “No time for the old in-and-out, love; I’ve just come to read the meter.” Finally, “You know what you can do with that watch? Stick it up your ass!”
In the final frames of the film, the minister has brought Alex some large speakers, and music plays over them. The Ninth Symphony starts to play, and Alex’s face deteriorates, going from a big smile into an anguished grimace, and Alex’s eyes begin to roll back in his head. Suddenly, the image cuts to a scene in which a young woman enthusiastically has sex with a man lying on the floor. The film viewer hears Alex’s voiceover. The combination of the image and voiceover indicate that we’re in Alex’s mind. He says, “I was cured alright.”
If one is to take internet search results as evidence, a common interpretation of the film’s ending is that Alex means that he’s cured of the cure, but my sense is that Kubrick has in mind something both more sinister and more sociological. Alex pleads to the chaplain and the minister to let him into the treatment so that he can be freed from prison. He performs his illness and his perfect Christian reformation. There’s no friction between his initial reactions to the Ludovico technique and his behaviors at the end of the film. Instead, at each point where Alex gets ill, it’s due to an external stimulus: the images, the music, the violence enacted on him, his attempt at sexually groping the young woman on stage, etc. Until the psychiatry test, the question of Alex’s internal (mental and emotional, perhaps) relationship to violence and sex is never broached. In fact, after Alex is “cured” by the Ludovico technique, the film shows Alex trying to have sex and trying to punch someone. When Alex says that he’s cured, it’s ironic, to be sure, but Kubrick’s point is subtler than a straightforward narrative about Alex overcoming his supposedly curative social conditioning.
In my interpretation, Alex isn’t so different from the teachers, his parents, the parole officer, the chaplain, the prison guard, the doctors, the government minister, or the leftist writer. Alex manipulates people’s perceptions and institutional understandings in order to try to get what he wants: his freedom. He even uses forms of cultural capital and social capital in order to achieve his freedom. He performs certain roles in order to get certain benefits. He operates according to the liberal language that’s imposed on him. “Violence is wrong,” he learns to say, and he says it with his body as well as with his voice.
For Kubrick, the issues of discipline, control, institutions, bureaucracy, liberalism, and legitimate violence appear throughout the film, and Kubrick’s message is fairly clear. You can control people’s behaviors—you can even lock them in whatever “steel-hard casing”—but when you don’t allow people to choose, then you merely lock them in a kinder, gentler prison. Moreover, the alienation that liberalism often seems to engender in people might also relate to some people’s tendency to want to be violent. If that’s the case, then the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence doesn’t make people better; it only complicates people’s lives and makes them less free than they’d otherwise be.
[1] Without making Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control” central to my argument, its influence will likely be noticed throughout my essay. Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59: 3-7.
[2] It was controversial for its depictions of violence, drug-use, and sex, including sexual assault, but also because its subtle social and political criticism was sometimes confused for advocacy for fascism and because it was sometimes rightly viewed as critical of liberalism. See: Kubrick, Stanley. “Now Kubrick Fights Back.” The New York Times, New York: The New York Times, 1972, (https://www.nytimes.com/1972/02/27/archives/now-kubrick-fights-back-movies-now-kubrick-fights-back.html), [accessed 17 Dec., 2020].
[4] Like the idea of “control,” from Deleuze’s “Postscript,” concepts like “discipline” and the “panopticon,” from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, influence this essay. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
[5] I take Kubrick’s invocation of “fascism” to be an indictment of elements of violence and of control of people’s ideologies and practices. Kubrick, I argue, criticizes the conditions that tend to lead to liberal subjects being pressured into the performance of something like “good citizenship.”
[6] Joseph, Ralina. Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity. New York: New York University Press, 2018, p. 114.
[7] Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation).” On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, New York: Verso, 2014, pp. 232-72.
[8] Using Max Weber’s conceptualization, the prison guard also represents what Weber calls “the monopoly of legitimate physical force”—a concept to which I’ll return. See: Weber, Max. Economy and Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019, p. 136.
[9] It’s worth pointing out that the prison chaplain can represent two forms of authority discussed by Weber: traditional and charismatic. To use his language, the scene takes place in a “legally” and “rationally” authorized prison—itself highly bureaucratized. I’ll return to these points. See Weber’s Economy and Society.
[10] In “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin claims that these subtle aspects of film make them especially potent for influencing people who are in a state of “distraction.” See Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Selected Writings, Vol. 3, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of HUP, 2002, pp. 119-20.
[12] In a different context, David Ryfe makes basically the same point. See his “Guest Editor’s Introduction: New Institutionalism and the News.” Political Communication 23 (2): p. 136.
[13] Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 123.
[14] Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: The Free Press, 1995, p. 9.
[15] Alexander, Jeffrey. “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy.” Cultural Sociology 22 (4): pp. 527-73.
[16] In his upcoming “Everpresent Pasts,” Stefan Tanaka argues that ideologies of change (as in the case of “innovation”) often reproduce their own conditions, basic assumptions, and even a multitude of their practices.
[17] I’m here thinking of Annette Weiner’s work in Inalienable Possessions, by which she shows how, even in societies that are often described as “primitive,” the changing roles of various actors within any social group, and the need to replace people at different times, means that “primitive societies” don’t simply reproduce their social forms whole cloth, as though they live simple, cyclical lives. See: Weiner, Annette. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992.
[18] Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.
[19] Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
[21] Habermas, Jürgen. “The Public Sphere.” Rethinking Popular Culture, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991, pp. 398-404.
[22] Nancy Fraser makes a similar point in “Rethinking the Public Sphere.” See: Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25/26: pp. 56-80.
[23] This relates both to Weber’s concept of representation, in pp. 127-8 of Economy and Society and to his concepts of rationalization and the division of labor, seen in pp. 143-334 of the same text.
[24] In the trial of Adolf Eichmann, this line of thinking was crucial to his defense—particularly the use of “amtssprache,” or “bureaucratic language.” See: Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.
Bibliography
Alexander, Jeffrey. “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy.” Cultural Sociology 22 (4): pp. 527-73.
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation).” On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, New York: Verso, 2014, pp. 232-72.
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Selected Writings, Vol. 3, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of HUP, 2002, pp. 101-33.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59: 3-7.
Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: The Free Press, 1995Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25/26: pp. 56-80.
Habermas, Jürgen. “The Public Sphere.” Rethinking Popular Culture, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991, pp. 398-404.
Jameson, Fredric. The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Joseph, Ralina. Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity. New York: New York University Press, 2018.
Here the “politics of signification”—the struggle in discourse—is joined. — Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding”[1]
It’s certainly not wrong to say that Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding” was largely about how people relate to media. Indeed, he tells us a great deal that’s useful about how people can, and do, produce and consume media. Yet, I think that his essay is far more radical than a simple (or even complex) description of media production and consumption. Instead, I claim that Hall presents us with an ontological proposition that implicates a form (or perhaps, as Hall sees it, the only form!) of politics.
Describing how the media circulate messages, Hall says, “[D]iscourse must […] be translated […] into social practices if the circuit is to be both completed and effective.”[2] Here, he describes how a producer values the production end of a discourse circuit (in terms of how it manifests in reception). Yet, “social practice” has an important, specific meaning for Hall. Hall defines a social practice as the way by which “a structure is actively reproduced.”[3] This adds significance to Hall’s determination of how a circuit of discourse is valued. Any discourse operates in a significatory system. A discourse is effective insofar as it is “actively reproduced”—or, manifest in embodied practices. Therefore, one criterion to judge the effectiveness of a discourse lies in the degree to which the discourse is enacted, or embodied. A discourse is more effective when it is more embodied. The other criterion Hall gives us is the degree to which it is social, or reproduced—the degree to which it is reproduced in multiple people. Therefore, the most effective discourse is that which is embodied in the most people’s active practices whereas the least effective discourse is that which is least repeated in whatever way.
The implication here is even more radical than this, though. Production is always at least partly-discursive. Hall says, “[T]he production process is not without its ‘discursive’ aspect: it […] is framed throughout by meanings and ideas.”[4] Hall has no way to guarantee what any production process might or might not entail. If it were possible that an aspect of some media process could be exempt from significatory framing[5], then he could not say that the process is “framed throughout.” If all production is framed by “meanings and ideas,” then every embodied act in any chain of production is subject to any informing, or to any significatory act.[6] A significatory act may entail a constraint—do not pass—or it may help to inform a decision—in X situation, pull Y lever. At the very least, any materiality discursively imposes a constraint on what is near—do not be here; I am already here. At the same time that any materiality is already a kind of signification, all signification is most effective when it is most embodied. To be clear, all significations are mediated through some materiality. There is no clear distinction between materiality and symbol; instead, there is a spectrum. For any subject interacting with (or observing) an object, the object may appear more as material object or more as symbolic object, but neither is ever fully extricated from the other. All is content and all is form.
For Hall, the subject, then, performs two functions.[7] In the production, or “encoding,” moment, the subject articulates a set of material objects together to form a message. In the reception, or “decoding,” moment, the subject articulates the message to a materially-stored system (in one’s mind, perhaps) of symbols. What these share—and perhaps that to which the slash (in “encoding/decoding”) is owed—is the articulation of the message to a symbolic system. In message production, one draws significatory objects from a system and arranges them to try to convey an intended message. This entails reflection on how the message might be received—decoding the message from the position of the assumed receiver. The reception of a message entails consideration of how the ordered significatory objects—the message—might articulate to a system of symbols. The receiver might consider from what system the message-producer drew significatory objects. The receiver chooses a message interpretation. What these two share are two steps: consideration of the message’s various articulations to a symbolic system and consideration of the other’s interested position in relation to the message. Where they differ, on one hand, is that the producer chooses the message’s symbolic objects, and the objects’ order, while the receiver can only consider why these objects and order were chosen. On the other hand, the receiver chooses an interpretation among many while the producer can only consider what interpretive options may be available to the receiver in an effort to constrain the variety of possible interpretations. Each has incomplete information, but each also has limited agency in the determination of the ultimate interpretation of the message. No particular interpretation of a communication could ever be guaranteed in advance.
Flexibility of interpretation ensures that meanings change over space (between people) and time (from moment to moment). Hall addresses this through his explanation of connotation and denotation.[8] Connotation, Hall tells us, is any signifier’s flexible set of associated meanings, whereas denotation is the signifier’s more rigid set of associations. If the effectiveness of a discourse lies in its social reproduction, then the denotation is both the product of, and productive of, a more effective discourse than is the connotation. The more denotative the association, the more it is taken-for-granted, or ideological; more obviously contested associations are more connotative. Taken-for-granted associations are important for communication.
No one could reconstruct the totality of associations and meanings every time anyone uttered anything. Instead, some associations are necessarily taken for granted. Hall says, “The connotative levels of signifiers, Barthes remarked, ‘have a close communication with culture, knowledge, history, and it is through them, so to speak, that the environmental world invades the linguistic and semantic system. They are, if you like, the fragments of ideology.’”[9] While Barthes refers to the connotation as ideological, we might say that the denotative is even more ideological in the sense that it is more taken for granted. Through the taken-for-grantedness of the denotative, people do not always notice ways by which associations grant advantage and disadvantage.
To the degree that any association empowers, denotation grants more power than does connotation because empowerment is more automatic and entrenched in the denotative case. The degree to which a significatory association is taken for granted is the degree to which it is denotative. For example, we can consider a society that normalizes and values equal distribution of their resources. If in such a society, it’s said that someone lacks water, then a likely assumption would be that the one who lacks water is someone who got less water than everyone else did. The denotation is that unequal distribution constitutes a lack for someone. If—in a society in which only some people value equal distribution of resources—it’s said that someone lacks water, the assumption would not necessarily be the same. For some people, the lack might connote the need for more equal distribution of water. What is at stake between the connotative and denotative case is the degree to which unequal distribution implies lack. In the connotative case, this association would find more resistance, and require more struggle to make. In the denotative case, the assumption of the association would be more likely.
Hall says of the power enabled through codes of discursive production and interpretation, “These codes are the means by which power and ideology are made to signify in particular discourses.”[10] It is harder to change denotative meanings; denotation is the signification of the most consistently observed associations between aspects of the material world. On the spectrum of materiality and discourse, denotation lies closer to the side of materiality, and connotation lies closer to the side of discourse. Again, the flexibility of the connotation reflects the instability of any signification.
At the same time that language requires the ideological taking for granted of associations, there is no guarantee of any particular formulation of a message or any particular interpretation of a received message. Hall says that the code most tied to language’s power-producing function is the “dominant” code: “We say dominant, not ‘determined’, because it is always possible to order, classify, assign and decode an event within more than one ‘mapping’. But we say ‘dominant’ because there exists a pattern of ‘preferred readings.’.”[11] The more widely held an association—the more it is socially preferred—the more the association becomes automatic, i.e. ideological. This automation is powerful for producing outcomes that might be resisted if the outcome was given greater consideration. The power-producing function of language bears on relations between people. In other words, significatory associations are always already political. Here, we take politics to signify the ways by which communities and societies negotiate and coordinate between their constituents. These negotiations and coordinations occur through discourses and through embodied practices, but to the degree that an embodied practice is political, it must entail effective communication—it must engender a socially reproducible response. Politics, then, entails the social reproduction of power-laden behaviors[12]—including behaviors meant to challenge the status quo.[13]
Because information, or discourses, bear on the continual reproduction of reality, the nature of any discourse is important for determining which reality is reproduced, and how. Hall says, “Discursive ‘knowledge’ is the product not of the transparent representation of the ‘real’ in language but of the articulation of language on real relations and conditions.”[14] Knowledge and the real are always contingent both on the relations that determine each and that determine the shifting relations between forms of knowledge and instances of the real. The real of now includes its significations, and the real of tomorrow will entail the information that comes from what is the real of now. What will be known tomorrow depends on what now is, including what the real will have made legible for tomorrow’s understanding. For example, a run on the bank today could not have been surely predicted yesterday, but the run will have implications on the reality of tomorrow. This is because the run has widely understood symbolic meanings. Its meanings help to determine people’s embodied acts.
What all of this shows is that politics occurs through the production of messages—either embodied or discursive acts that appear meaningful and that evoke response. We can rework Hall’s statement from earlier[15]: The political message must be translated into social practices if the circuit is to be both completed and effective. The production of an effective political message is easier said than done. In the context of significatory struggles, one of the challenges to producing effective political messages lies in the fact that all significations entail use of the prevailing, dominant ideology.[16] For any signification to be legible, the mutually-held code—by which a signifier is encoded on one end and effectively decoded at the other end—must be at least partly constituted by dominant, taken-for-granted associations related to any effective signification. In other words, there can be no communication without some ideology. Hall says, “[T]he vast range [of readings] must contain some degree of reciprocity between encoding and decoding moments, otherwise we could not speak of an effective communicative exchange at all. Nevertheless, this ‘correspondence’ is not given but constructed.”[17] At the same time that shared ideological underpinnings are necessary, there’s no guarantee that the producer of the message acts on the same set of ideological meanings as does the message’s receiver. Some meanings are more pervasive than are others.
Hall, describing the ways that pervasive meanings can shift, says, “In speaking of dominant meanings, then, we are not talking about a one-sided process which governs how all events will be signified. It consists of the ‘work’ required to enforce, win plausibility for and command as legitimate a decoding of the event within the limit of dominant definitions in which it has been connotatively signified.”[18] The struggle over significatory associations requires work. To employ our schema, an embodied need could be brought to light through an embodied or discursive act. If that act engenders a response, that response could change a connotative meaning for a group of people. If the political message is absolutely effective, it will eventually transform denotative associations until the taken-for-granted aspect of the significatory act reflects the original embodied concern that began the series of significatory changes. For example, if I felt that resources should be equally distributed, then I might walk around with a poster saying that all resources should be equally distributed. If people agreed with me, they might make signs and walk with me. If that led to the whole society deciding that all resources should be equally distributed, then a lack might come to ideologically (automatically, thoughtlessly, frictionlessly) signify an unequal distribution of resources.
What we’ve seen is that politics is always a matter of being able to communicate a vision of social life that engenders an embodied response to the communication. Arjun Appadurai relates subaltern politics to what is sometimes called “globalization.” He says, “[T]he imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work […] and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility.”[19] Appadurai here sees the social imagination as the socially constructed product of various forces. Whatever the political possibilities are, they come from a commonly held set of imagined possibilities. The global must be negotiated at the level of the local in order for political possibilities to be realized. In other words, at the same time that dominant forces bear on any local situation, the reproducibility of any meaningful symbol or act depends on how subordinate actors receive the symbol or act.
Appadurai gives the example of gender and violence. He says, “A central link between the fragilities of cultural reproduction and the role of the mass media in today’s world is the politics of gender and violence.”[20] There is never a guarantee that any aspect of culture will be reproduced; any reproduction is vulnerable to misinterpretations, distortions, and intentionally subversive interpretation. He continues, “As fantasies of gendered violence dominate the B-grade film industries […] they both reflect and refine gendered violence at home and in the streets, as young men (in particular) are swayed by the macho politics of self-assertion in contexts where they are frequently denied real agency, and women are forced to enter the labor force in new ways on the one hand, and continue the maintenance of familial heritage on the other.”[21] Here, imagined relations meet local contexts. Representations of aspects of life can alter existing relations, but a number of forces help to determine the reception of these images. In the case above, gender relations, economic constraints and pressures, and cultural traditions ultimately help to determine interpretations.
Marwan Kraidy succinctly makes the point: “The local, that always already hybrid realm, is where relations between political, social, cultural, and economic forces take concrete forms in people’s lives.”[22] All localities lie at the nexus of an ever-changing multiplicity of forces, and each force bears differently on the locality at any point in time. The locality in any moment is produced through a variety of negotiations, making outcomes highly unpredictable. These forces are especially complicated as localities and super-localities interact.
Appadurai makes clear that, while these complications always persist, transcultural communication between global hegemons and local subalterns can be especially challenged. First off, any transcultural translation can entail tricky linguistic difficulties.[23] Additionally, Appadurai tells us, “the use of these words by political actors and their audiences may be subject to very different sets of contextual conventions that mediate their translation into public politics.”[24] The social, cultural, and political distance between the elite and the relatively powerless can be as great as the physical distance sometimes is. In these cases, difficulty in translation is not always merely technical. Instead, differences in lived experiences and social and economic pressures can lead to subaltern political acts that the elites could never have predicted.
Kraidy notes the variety of means by which people can act. He says, “[A]gency must be grasped in terms of people’s ability to accomplish things in the world they inhabit.”[25] It is never simply that power operates as an absolute determinant from above. Because of the various aspects of people’s lives, people can coordinate their lives—whether according to the wishes of the elite or against those wishes—through creative, and unexpected, uses of whatever means are at their disposal.
While people can, and sometimes do, act unpredictably, what counts in political, or social, life is the degree to which an act is reproduced through society—the degree to which it becomes ideological. Stuart Hall saw politics as the struggle over what gets taken for granted—the hegemonic, or the ideological—and what aspects of social life ought yet to be negotiated. He defines “articulation” as “a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under certain conditions, to cohere together in a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects.”[26]Articulation, then, describes language’s ideological content as the product of discursive negotiations. At the same time, articulation attends to the ways that people’s lives are partly-shaped by ideologies. People have agency in the production of material reality, but only insofar as they interact with the world. When they can coordinate by agreeing on particular representations of reality—both real and imagined—they can go much further in their pursuit of mutually valued realities.
[1] Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” Media and Cultural Studies Keyworks, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005, p. 173.
[5] “Frame,” here, might mean anything from a context to a whole readymade system of reality, as in Heidegger’s Gestell [this German term for framing tends to go untranslated because it is a specific, technical term], but in any case, I take Hall to be signifying the commonly-held conditions necessary for existence.
[6] To take “inform” very literally, its original meaning is “to give form to something.” Its contemporary meaning tends more toward the formation of a mind or a depository of knowledge of some sort. For our purposes, it’s useful to see how any object is always already embodied knowledge—always informed by various sorts of information.
[12] By “power-laden behavior,” I mean any behavior that empowers and/or disempowers. One might note that any behavior grants potential (and/or actual) advantage and disadvantage. The point is taken, but it also lies outside the scope of this paper.
[13] Also among the kinds of political acts are the production, and reproduction, of the material conditions necessary for the survival of a person or group of people.
[19] Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Media and Cultural Studies Keyworks, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005, pp. 584-603.
[20] Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference,” p. 598.
[23] Some words and phrases—like the German weltschauung, the Arabic safari, the French coup d’etat, and the Sanskrit guru—tend to go untranslated, often because so much is lost in translation that the decision is made to explain the meaning of the untranslated term rather than to distort the term to an unacceptably great degree.
[24] Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference, p. 591.
(note: I may use gender-neutral “they,” “them,” “their,” and/or “theirs” to refer to anonymous imagined persons)
In Benjamin’s, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” he largely focuses on how the bourgeoisie use film to perpetuate bourgeois ideology and fascist ideology. On p. 120, Benjamin says, “For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at historical turning points cannot be performed solely by optical means—that is, by way of contemplation. They are mastered gradually—taking their cue from tactile reception—through habit [emphasis his].” Here, Benjamin points out that we learn by doing. It is not enough to simply see something being done—our bodies must partake in the activity in order for our bodies to learn it. Tasks take time to master and they require what Benjamin calls “tactile reception,” which is code for the distracted intake of experience. When we absorb new information without paying attention to the absorption, we form habits of perception and of practice. The distraction in this absorptive process implies less opportunity to resist the absorption. If we are unaware of the absorption, then we cannot resist it or criticize it; we have no recourse.
Benjamin goes on, “Even the distracted person can form habits. What is more, the ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction first proves that the performance has become habitual. The sort of distraction that is provided by art represents a covert measure of the extent to which it has become possible to perform new tasks of apperception.” (120) When we are able to perform tasks without paying attention to what we are doing, our bodies are so well-trained that our conscious minds are no longer required. For Benjamin, this kind of mastery equates to habit. When Benjamin talks here about distraction that is provided by art, he is referring to art that is consumed as a means of entertainment. This requires the unengaged viewer, rather than the intent art critic or sophisticated consumer of art. When we do not pay attention to the art we consume, the art secretly rearranges how we perceive things and how our minds engage with the world. Film, in Benjamin’s mind, is a perfect medium for performing this kind of rearrangement, and who better to do so than the privileged bourgeoisie?
Benjamin claims just that: “[T]he same is true of film capital in particular as of fascism in general: a compelling urge toward new social opportunities is being clandestinely exploited in the interests of a property-owning minority.” (115) Film takes advantage of opportunities to refigure the perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and embodied knowledges and practices of the proletariat. But, why?
Benjamin says,
Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the property relations which they strive to abolish. It sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses—but on no account granting them rights. The masses have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping these relations unchanged. (120-1)
Through film, the bourgeoisie legitimates their power and redirects repressed feelings of discontentment. They refigure the proletarian’s inner workings in ways that tap into, and give “expression” to, the frustrations of the proletariat. But, instead of allowing the proletariat to confront the (bourgeois) forces responsible for the proletariat’s plight, film merely escalates destructive emotions and directs them elsewhere.
Benjamin explains the repressive function of film by saying,
[O]ne also has to recognize that […] technologization has created the possibility of psychic immunization against such mass psychoses. It does so by means of certain films in which the forced development of sadistic fantasies or masochistic delusions can prevent their natural and dangerous maturation in the masses. […] The countless grotesque events consumed in films are a graphic indication of the dangers threatening mankind from the repressions implicit in civilization. (118)
Film helps to contain the rage of the proletariat by giving expression to that rage. The proletariat can watch films and vicariously feel satisfied by the carnage on the screen. These expressions of rage are amplified in film in ways that could not otherwise be felt—perhaps save for actual physical destruction. As people are made to feel satisfied through film viewings, any liberatory violences against the bourgeoisie are momentarily forestalled… at least until the sequel.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version.” Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 3. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 1966. 101-33.
Brecht begins “A Short Organum for the Theatre” by inspecting how art relates to social relations. “This theatre justified its inclination to social commitment by pointing to the social commitment in universally accepted works of art, which only fail to strike the eye because it was the accepted commitment.” (179) What is clear here is that all works of art rely on social commitments. The most invisible of these commitments are the most banal—the least challenging to our assumptions of how things should go (which is often, simply, the way things tend to go). So, when Brecht’s theater challenges social norms, criticisms of Brecht’s works—on the grounds of their tendency to express social commitments—ring hollow. Legitimate criticism must acknowledge that all works of art have social content value, so if one is to criticize a work of art on the basis of its social commitments, those criticisms are only legitimate when they confront the content-values of those commitments. As such, works of art that do not foreground critical positions tend to perpetuate the status quo.
Brecht concerns himself with relationships between science and art, especially in their figuring of culture and social relations. First, on p. 184, he says that the bourgeoisie have stopped science from illuminating the relations between people “during the exploiting and dominating process.” Regardless of the intention, the meaning of the quoted section is multiple: the “exploiting and dominating process” can apply to primitive accumulation; settler colonization; cultural hegemony; worker relations; identity relations, like those of “race,” gender, sexual preference, etc.; neocolonialism; big data, and probably other social phenomena. In fact, humans’ exploitation of nature shares a relationship to humans’ exploitation of other humans. On p. 185, Brecht points out that attitudes that were once reserved for natural disasters now apply to “undertakings by the rulers.” Brecht then says, “But science and art meet on this ground, that both are there to make men’s [sic] life easier, the one setting out to maintain, the other to entertain us.” When Brecht says that science makes people’s life easier by maintaining the status quo, it seems to me that he is, in some sense, being sarcastic. If we consider that he sees his theater project as potentially subverting the status quo, along with the fact that he sees science as exploiting nature and exploiting humanity—all for the sake of domination by the bourgeoisie—he cannot mean that science is purely beneficial to society. So when Brecht says, “In the age to come art will create entertainment from that new productivity which can so greatly improve our maintenance, and in itself, if only it is left unshackled, may prove to be the greatest pleasure of them all,” he may be unintentionally predicting how modern society’s science and art do more to enrich the wealthy few than to liberate the underprivileged masses.
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