social reproduction and the post-war

“What was the living worker’s activity becomes the activity of the machine. Thus the appropriation of labor by capital confronts the worker in a coarsely sensuous form; capital absorbs labor into itself—‘as though its body were by love possessed.’”
--Karl Marx

I was initially unsure how to begin this project. To be honest, my examination of literature doesn’t follow a path that could be labeled explicitly feminist. However there is a question that I have been following in the guise of cultural studies that could be linked up with a feminist politics, both producing a theoretical framework that is involved in that work and a framework that can think through the politics of feminism. This project is linked up with a certain concept of the popular. It poses the same problem that Gramsci poses in the Prison Notebooks “to establish not why a book is “beautiful” but why it is “read,” “popular,” “sought after.”[1] To begin to pose the problem in these terms is to begin to ask how structures of power are reproduced within moments of the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘everyday’. It also points to their contingency and perhaps the possibility of those circuits.

This, of course, is not the first time for this question to be posed. One can read it in the competing narratives of the cultural criticism of the Frankfurt School, and in the various uptakes of cultural studies, most notably the readings by American critics in the 1990’s. Stuart Hall in his essay “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’ best describes the binary produced in these debates. He notes that “the study of popular culture has tended to oscillate wildly between the two alternative poles of that dialectic—containment/resistance.”[2] These terms that have some value when constituted dialectically, become problematic when separated. I want to read the popular within that tension. The popular must both draw from the lines of flight from capital and the ways that those lines of flight are captured again and made productive for capital. I will only approach this question at the very end of the paper, and briefly. The primary focus will be on the question of reproduction and the feminist political response to this in the late 60’s and early 70’s.

In order to do this, I want to begin by producing a provisional definition of the concept of reproduction. I will begin with the way that Louis Althusser in his unfinished text, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses defines it. This will be revised by an examination of Rosa Luxemburg’s investigations into the question of reproduction in her most significant work, The Accumulation of Capital. This will challenge some of the conservatism that Althusser reads into the reproduction of structures of domination in capital. I will then move into a discussion of the ways that the structures of reproduction have been challenged and rerouted by new forms of collectivity created by a feminist and queer politics. I will end the piece with a discussion of how these challenges have been taken up in popular forms of media, most notably television.

The question of how capitalism reproduces itself on a day to day level became a focus for Louis Althusser in his well read essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” The essay has become a cheap and short way for many college courses to dismiss a Marxian politic and methodology, but it is worth returning to in order to bring out certain structural elements in the everyday. He begins this effort with a fairly conventional discussion of the ways that reproduction has been discussed within a Marxist context. Most of this has focused on the reproduction of the means of production, where Althusser states that he is going to focus on the reproduction of the relations of production. He states early in the essay.

I shall say that the reproduction of labor power requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression, so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class ‘in words’.[3]

Althusser is beginning to point to a whole series of institutions that are required for the continuation of capitalism’s existence. It isn’t enough to reproduce the means of production, and the skills needed for that production, but one also needs to reproduce the social order which produces the logic of the former. These institutions are needed in order to reproduce a ‘submission to the ruling ideology for workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology for the agents of exploitation and reproduction.” Althusser finds these institutions primarily outside of the workplace itself. Following the footsteps of Antonio Gramsci, he finds these structures primarily in the institution of the school (which he sees as the replacement of the church as the dominant ISA) and the institution of the family.

One may not be entirely convinced by the narrative that Althusser gives to the transition, but the more significant argument is the way that ideology works in this system of reproduction. Althusser argues against an earlier conception of ideology that makes it into a form of illusion or false consciousness. Instead he argues that ideology is made up of material practices constructed in a nexus of institutions. Althusser expresses this in the following terms, “his ideas are material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject.”[4]

Althusser marks modern subjectivity as being produced in the nexus of two main institutions the school and the family. Although if we take Foucault seriously, we also have to recognize that these institutions are produced by and propped up by a whole other series of institutions, and by the production of a whole series of knowledges. This places the most important work of reproducing dominant structures of society into what had been constructed as the private sphere. The narrative Foucault creates of this is contiguous with the history of capitalism. It has its most productive moments of creation at the moment of the middle of the 16th century and at the beginning of the 19th century.[5]

The most significant spaces for the reproduction of the logic of capitalism occur in the disciplinary space of the school and the discourses of sexuality in the family. These spaces constitute the locus points for the operations of the “polymorphous techniques of power.”[6] This productive arrangement was initially “elaborated in its more complex and intense forms, by and for the privileged classes, spread through the entire social body.”[7] There is something is dropped out of this account, that needs to be recognized, which is the way that the colonies acted as laboratory for this creation, but I will have to leave that aside for now. The important thing to draw from this is that the household has been made productive for the current structures of modern disciplinary power. It has done this precisely through its neutralization as a space of political contestation, by placing it in the private sphere. This will become an important issue later in the paper, but lets return to the more formal question of reproduction of the relations of power.

The difficulty that I find in Althusser (although not in Foucault’s) notion of the production of ideology, is its conservative quality. The reproduction that Althusser describes doesn’t capture the violent ruptural nature of capitalism, nor does it approach its appropriative nature. In order to capture that, I want to make a move that may seem a little retrograde at initial consideration, but it may be the two steps backwards that we need to make to make one step forwards. Rosa Luxemburg also approached this issue of reproduction in her work, The Accumulation of Capital, only she was approaching the more formal question as it would be asked by the classic critics of political economy, Marx and Engels. She opens up the question of reproduction in the following terms.

The literal meaning of the word ‘reproduction’ is repetition, renewal of the process of production. At first sight it may be difficult to see in what respect the idea of reproduction differs from that of repetition which we all can understand—why such a new and unfamiliar term should be required. But in the sort of repetition that we shall consider, in the continual recurrence of the process of production, there are certain distinctive features.[8]

Rosa Luxemburg opens up her book with the statement that reproduction is not repetition, as it seems to operate in the logic of Althusser’s (admittedly incomplete) understanding of the concept. Instead, the continual process of production must be understood as being a distinct problem. I want to look at two basic notions that she develops in this understanding of the reproduction of social capital in order to bring them into the discussion of the reproduction of capital as it occurs in everyday life. The first main issue is that of the conditions that it takes to ask the question in the first place. The second deals with the expansive nature of capitalism.

Luxemburg argues that in order to ask the question of reproduction, production must reach a certain level of productivity. Or as she puts it, “Reproductions is something more than mere repetition in so far as it presupposes a certain level of society’s supremacy over nature, or in economic terms, a certain standard of labor productivity.”[9] This is not perhaps the language that would be used to explain the phenomenon today, but it gets at the point that in order to ask the question of reproduction, one must pass over a certain level of scarcity. For Luxemburg, this requires placing the ability to supply the basic necessities of life outside of the contingencies of the non-human, into the realm of the social, otherwise one is only dealing with the bare form of repetition. This element becomes especially relevant when one remembers that the question of social reproduction only gets its full hearing within the context of post-scarcity late capitalism, the point when capital subdues a rebellious labor forces by providing it a living standard that is considerably above the subsistence level.

The second important feature that Luxemburg brings into the picture of reproduction is the issue of expansion. This will become the more important of the two features. As Luxemburg notes,

Capitalist methods of production do more than awaken in the capitalist this thirst for surplus value whereby he is impelled to ceaseless expansion of reproduction. Expansion becomes in truth a coercive law, an economic condition of existence for the individual capitalist… A growing tendency towards reproduction at a progressively increasing scale thus ensues, which spreads automatically like a tidal wave over ever larger surfaces of reproduction…. For the individual capitalist, failure to keep abreast of this expansion means quitting the competitive struggle, economic death.[10]

The uniqueness of capitalism is that it must continually expand in order to survive. Luxemburg captures the ruthless nature of this necessity. Capital is the sovereign figure of this system, not the bourgeoisie. But for our purposes, one can never understand the nature of reproduction of capitalism within static terms. There must be a continuous expansion of the system. Unlike other systems of production, capitalism thrives on the crisis produced by its own contradictions. It must continually absorb that which seeks to destroy it. Luxemburg shows how this produces the logic for the colonial venture, capital needing to continually incorporate its other, the non-capitalist in order to survive. I want to argue that this same ruthless expansive nature must be understood in order to understand how the reproduction of a social order works, it must both incorporate non-capitalistic relations into its structure, and more importantly for us, it must make its resistances productive as well.

This brings us to the question of the feminist and queer politics of the 1970’s and the way they act as a form of countersystemic politics. My understanding of this has been driven by both Negri and Wallerstein’s understanding of the revolution of 1968 as something that both opposed the U.S. hegemony, but also opposed the older models of countersystemic movements that failed to destroy it. The first thing that we must understand is that these modes of politics developed in a certain context. Before we discuss the nature of these movements, the ways that they tried to reroute the circuits of capitalist reproduction, not at the level of grand narratives, but at its more intimate spaces, the spaces that had been so assiduously neutralized, I thought it would be best to draw out the basic political preconditions for these movements. And I should note that we are discussing movements primarily in the U.S. and Europe.

The period that we are discussing is the post war era. I am not going to go into all of the details of the structures and changes that defined that era, but rather I am going to discuss the sections that directly impact the movements that I am discussing. The first thing that should be noted is that the era is defined by a backlash against the radical workers’ movements that were in effect in the 1930’s. This backlash is most strongly defined by McCarthyism, the attempt to drive women out of the workplace, and the continued enforcement of structures of white supremacy. In effect, the political movements had been placated by the offer of a decent wage and the creation of a family structure that had only been enjoyed by the upper echelons of society. By in large what I am driving at is there was a shift in living conditions in a large section of the working class, that was allowed through the destruction of a radical political project. So that while I take socialist feminism as a serious political project, I reject its self-narration of creation. The politics of the period were not created so much by the inadequacy of a marxian politic so much as its destruction.

What followed from there was a new terrain for a politic, one that was less defined by necessity of reproducing everyday life, as reshaping what that would constitute. We can return to the comment that Luxemburg made in The Accumulation of Capital. One can only think about the question of reproduction as such at the point of a certain level of security. That security had been obtained, but only at the cost of generations of radical politics and experience. Many of the substantial problems of New Left politics came out of that amnesia. At the same time, the situation created new possibilities for new forms of social relations and taking advantage of that accumulation. It is notable that the radical politics of the New Left were the first not to be defined by necessity.

As I stated in the general overview of the period, the post war period was defined by a return to a certain structure of household economy. This household economy is defined by women fulfilling the reproductive role of caretaker in the household, a neutralized position that allowed for the continuance of production while not being acknowledged as being a part of that productive process. This restructuring occurred through a great deal of state planning and action. One can find its creation in both official state institutions, and in the influence put on women’s publications. Obviously, this was not a universal condition for women in the United States, but it did act an ideal blueprint for the production of the household, in the same way that Foucault proposes that we read the panopticon for disciplinary society.

To push this into a discussion of the feminist movement, it should be noted that Betty Friedan was involved in writing for the women’s magazines that aided in drawing up some of the blueprints for this structure. She was able to produce her work due to a somewhat privileged position concerning the enforcement of the new household economy. She was able to then put a name onto the system of labor and drudgery that was being effaced under the term, the domestic. At the same time, the political movements of the time, whether we are talking about the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, or the New Left in its broader structures, tended to replicate this division of labor unthinkingly. Women filled the positions in these organizations that were crucial to the day to day operations, but positions that were devalorized as meaningful labor. So, in effect, the problem that Frieden identified was considerably more contemporary than many writers at the time would recognize.

The first initial response to this structure was the consciousness raising session. This took form in both liberal feminist circles and in response to the deficiencies of New Left politics. The model drew from practices used both in black power circles and in the Chinese Revolution. To get a sense of the power that was found in this structure, I point to the words in the Socialist Feminist Reader. “They proved to be a supportive forum for discussing the liberation of women, personal and political experiences, frustrations with movements for social change that were supposed to be different from the rest of the world, and insights about domination and oppression that had fallen on deaf ears in the new left.”[11] The consciousness raising session became a powerful vehicle for organizing and rerouting the political desires of a new collectivity.

However, we should probably recognize that there is another model that could be drawn as a precedent for the consciousness raising session, and that is the confessional. This structure as Foucault points out is based on a certain “will to knowledge.” This structure, far from being absent from the post-war family, was animating feature of it. This family structure can be properly called post-psychoanalytical. The structure had been successfully transformed from a structure of alliance into “a whole series of tactics that combined the body and that of regulating populations.”[12] The structure of consciousness raising was successful, not because it was in revolt against the modern family, but precisely because it used its libidinal structures to its advantage.

This is not to say that the movement was tricked into using these methods or that it was trapped into a mode of false consciousness, but that it could only engage in a process of subjectivization based on the modes of subjection that had created its members as subjects. The interesting element of the feminist movement was ultimately not its narrative of liberation, but the way that it brought out a whole series of power relations outside of the neutralizing element of the private and pointed out that those relations were crucial to the constitution of capital. The field of the reproduction of the household became a site of contestation. The intensity of this politic is best captured by a comment about the relationships developed in the Bread and Roses collective.

From the perspective that the personal is political, almost everything in women’s lives was a potential target of struggle. Women were changing in many contexts: in friendships, in self-image, in sexual relations and the experience of sexuality, in work and new forms of competence, in the imagining and creating new alternatives.[13]

We find a radical politic here that is defined not by the mystified destruction of the structures of reproduction, but by rerouting them to create other forms of collectivity, other forms of subjectivity. This in turn lead to a whole series of political projects that ranged from attempting to recognize the labor of the household as crucial to the production of labor power, to child care collectives, and a whole range of other activities. It would be curious to try to write another History of Sexuality from the perspective of this resistance. I don’t think that it would radically change Foucault’s work, but it would be interesting to see what the differences are.

Ironically, I end on the note that initially made me think about this question in the first place, the question of the popular. As we have seen feminist politics and the queer movement (which I haven’t dealt with) have created new ways of thinking of family structures, de-emphasizing the nuclear family and presenting the possibility of other forms of kinship then previously available. One can go as far as to say that Gayle Rubin’s project in regards to this has been a success. Obviously the goal of destroying capitalism hasn’t been successful, but one cannot say the same for the structure of the family.

The way that I turn to the question of the popular is in a whole series of television series that define themselves precisely through these alternative sets of kinship. These television programs are defined by, in their most banal form, series such as Friends and Seinfeld, but they take more interesting political forms such as the series Queer as Folk and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. These various programs, which may constitute a new genre, provincialize the nuclear family in order to emphasize a variety of other networks of kinship and care. This is obviously yet another appropriation, but I am curious to what its effects will be. It would be wrong to read this as an inherently depoliticizing gesture. After all, the latter two shows are to some extent defined by a political project. The question that I want to ask is to what extent does this new form carry the political energies of the former project? And perhaps more significantly, how will this effect the ways that new forms of subjectivization will come out of the new forms of subjection as defined by late capitalism?

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[1] Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks: Volume II, Ed. and Trans., Joseph A Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 123.

[2] Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’, in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey (London: Prentice Hall, 1998), 443.

[3] Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an investigation)” in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 132-133.

[4] Ibid., 169

[5] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction, trans., Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978),119.

[6] Ibid., 11.

[7] Ibid., 122.

[8] Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzchild (New York: Routledge, 1951), 3-4.

[9] Ibid., 4.

[10] Ibid., 12-13.

[11]Ilene J. Philipson and Karen V. Hansen, “Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination: An Introduction”, in Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination: A Socialist-Feminist Reader, Ed. Ilene J. Philipson and Karen V. Hansen (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1990), 6.

[12] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction, trans., Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978),146

[13] Annie Popkin, “Social Experience of Bread and Roses”, in Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination: A Socialist-Feminist Reader, Ed. Ilene J. Philipson and Karen V. Hansen (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1990), 185.

A Short Comment on Althusser and Gramsci in relation to Ideology

     The common thread that runs through both Althusser’s comments on Ideology and Gramsci’s reading of hegemony is an attempt to understand the reproductive mechanisms of capital. The question of reproduction is an important one for both of them. Althusser phrases it in the following terms, “What, then, is the reproduction of the conditions of production?” (Althusser 127) The question could be rephrased in the following terms, what is it that reproduces the structures of our society that facilitate the current relations of production? This same question is asked by Gramsci under the terms of hegemony. Gramsci’s concerns were much more immediately polemical in nature. He was in argument with what might be referred to as vulgar marxists, as well in argument with a group of syndicalist thinkers. His argument comes close to Althusser’s discussion, that the reproduction of capital cannot be thought of purely in terms of the work place and a purely repressive government.

      These texts are primarily directed to thinking through the both the preconditions of capitalist society and the spaces of contestation of the class struggle as occurring in spaces outside of the workplace. As Althusser notes, “the reproduction of labour power takes place outside the firm. Althusser links this to two separate institutions in two different epochs, the first being the church and the second being the school. The focus is on the school which “is not enough to say ‘not only but also’, for it is clear that it is in the forms and the forms of ideological subjection that provision is made for the reproduction of the skills of labor power.” (Althusser 133) Which is to say, the forms in which education takes place contain the structures of class society immanently. That is to say that they are not a mere addition, but are contained in the very forms and structures of education itself.

      There is a similar focus in the work of Gramsci. Gramsci is interested in how various forms of cultural structures are involved in the reproduction of the capitalist system. This is why his critique of structures of syndicalism are so significant. After all, the syndicalists are arguing that the real struggle against capitalism occurs in the workplace, and that the state only enters in as a negative agent. Whereas, Gramsci is interested in looking at this question in terms of hegemony, which is to say, how is it that the various institutions of the society work to produce consent for people’s own subjugation and exploitation. In effect, Gramsci produces a much expanded and intensified notion of the class struggle in the guise of his war of position against the much more limited notion of war of maneuver. Hegemony is the way of thinking through this broader more intensive mode of the class struggle.

      So the question should be asked, what does this mean for ‘us’? The us that I am referring to is in reference to both people in the academy, and more specifically, people who are involved in examining literary texts of various sorts in the academy. I would argue that it opens up quite a bit more space for thinking through the political effects of the production of and consumption of texts. Instead of thinking through the political consequences of the text as some sort of emanation schema related to directly to the relations of production, we can think about the ways that they are involved in modes of the class struggle in more nuanced manners.

      There is already direct evidence for this in other parts of both authors. For instance, Gramsci discusses the ways that popular texts construct different forms of the national-popular in his texts. The same thing occurs in the text that Macherey produces For A Theory of Literary Production, where the contradictions and effects of the class struggle should be found immanently within the form of the text rather than in the conformity to a specific form.

      For me, the Althusser text is the more interesting, but at the same time, the more misunderstood of the two texts. The thing that seems to be most misunderstood is that there is a dynamic element to his notion of ideology. After all, it not only produces ‘good’ and ‘bad’ subjects, but it also acts as the first space of the class struggle. The other thing that often is missed is that Althusser is engaged in a certain amount of deconstruction in relation to classical marxist theory, which is to say, the piece may start with a classic structure-superstructure formulation, it certainly doesn’t end there. This comes out of the emphasis on ideology as a material phenomenon, and the critique of false consciousness.

A short comment on Rob Latham's Consuming Youth

        Rob Latham’s Consuming Youth operates somewhere between the field of cultural studies and the forms of cultural critique that one would find in the Frankfurt school, particularly with Adorno.  It stands between the mode of cultural celebration that is traditionally associated with the American cultural studies moment (which he presents the work of John Fiske as a symptomatic figure) and the condemnation of popular culture as without redeeming value (Baudrillard’s paranoiac reading of ‘the code’ stands in here.)  In both cases, Latham argues that, “despite their various protestations of fidelity to marxist premises, neither side is sufficiently dialectical in its analysis of consumption; neither, in short, fully grasps the contradictory force of the vampire-cyborg, in which exploitation and empowerment function and develop together (Latham 37).  Latham then attempts to present another model to understand a set of fantastic and science fictional texts and films from the 1970’s to the 1990’s

            Reflecting this tension seems to be one of the most significant goals in Latham’s work.  He uses both Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, and the particular deployment of the Regulation school to capture this tension.  As he points out, “hegemony is neither automatic nor guaranteed, but must itself be reproduced.”  (Latham 11)  That hegemony is dependent on consent and is constantly at threat due to political and economic crisis.  This threat can easily be seen in the last days of the Fordist structure.  Although Latham doesn’t discuss it explicitly, this era is defined by political unrest in both the center and periphery.  Rather, Latham focuses on showing those tension precisely at a moment where consent seems much more assured, starting with the period of the late seventies and moving into the eighties and nineties, opening with the period of Gil-Scott Heron’s “Winter in America.”

            Latham does a good job of defining why the Fordist and post-Fordist periods are defined by their relationship to consumption, and how this relates to the figure of youth.  It becomes a “site of integration between the natural body and the newly mechanized labor process.”  He marks how this structure of youth and consumption has created crisis as well as consent.  “This is the dialectical paradox at the heart of Fordist consumer culture: its capacity to unleash the most powerful, exhilarating desires, and its inability finally to satisfy the epochal hungers it has itself invoked.” (Latham 41)  The structures of flexibility become a way to try to resolve these tensions, creating a process in which forms of subcultural resistance are captured and transformed into niche markets, that is, new possibilities for accumulation.  Latham marks how this has created mediation in the crisis, but it hasn’t resolved the profound tensions in the process.

            The transformation in the process is represented by the cyborg and the vampire.  These two figures “metaphorically embody the libidinal-political political dynamics of the consumerist ethos…  The vampire is literally an insatiable consumer driven by a hunger for perpetual youth, while the cyborg has incorporated the machineries of consumption into its juvenescent flesh.” (Latham 1).   Within this context, the figures both act as symptom, and simultaneously, allow for a critical exploration of the social formation that creates the symptom. This connection of the question of the libidinal-political is interesting and once again links up Latham’s work with that of Fredric Jameson.  Both take Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of libidinal assemblages seriously.  Whether deliberately or not, this language takes up that conceptual language, and also takes seriously the idea of the critique of the repressive hypothesis.  At the same time, he holds onto the concept of the dialectic, which is explicitly rejected by Deleuze and Guattari, focusing on contradiction rather than lines of flight or apparatuses of capture.

            Interestingly enough, Latham takes the dialectical structure of argumentation much more seriously than Jameson does.  While Jameson constantly references this tension in his work, the emphasis is on the negative side of the equation. This emphasis is structured into the entire argument, as Latham begins by showing the utopian possibilities of consumption hidden in the figure of the vampire, and reverses this with his reading of the cyborg.  All the central arguments are defined by this tension, between dystopian reading that see a closed system and readings that offer an interpretation that emphasize possibilities for self creation.  As a good dialectician, Latham then shows how the dystopian readings already contain a utopian trace, and the readings emphasizing agency contain the fears contained in the former reading.

            While there is something relentless in the way that Latham returns to this trope, it accomplishes a couple things.  To begin, it constantly emphasizes the moments of incompleteness contained in the structures of consent of hegemony, through gaps, lacunae, and small moments of resistance.  He can point these out in even some of the most banal sources, the celebrations of video games and pulp novels.  The dialectic also stops this from becoming celebratory, recognizing that these text remain incorporated within the logic of capital.  At the same time, there is an emphasis on the active critical engagement of these texts that can’t be found in Jameson.  For Jameson, the text is most aptly read as symptom, primarily acting as an expression of economic forces.  In this sense, Jameson has a habit of falling into crude economic determinism, despite his sophisticated theoretical apparatus.  Latham certain reads texts symptomatically as well.  This is gestured towards in the way the texts read the ‘60’s, but Latham is willing to see these texts as having a critical awareness of world that they operate within.  For instance, Latham reads Romero’s Martin as a narrative that is engaging in some of the same problems that are taken on by the Birmingham school rather than using that work to read the film as symptom.  The same can be said of the work of Coupland, Rice, etc., which Latham critically reads for both their engagement with the logic of the commodity, and for the subversive moments contained within that often uncritical engagement.

            This occurs through Latham’s emphasis on the satirical elements and texts that operate through satire.  We are given several satires on the malls and given readings of texts normally read negatively with this satirical dimension in mind (I have the reading of The Hunger in mind).  Satire becomes a way of mapping a politics without a horizon, a criticism of a system that is simultaneously without alternative.  This breaks out of the utopia/dystopia binary that he reads in so many of the theorists that he approaches and makes a case that these texts are as constitutive as they are reflective, critical as they are reproductive.  It offers a critical symptomatic reading of the collapse of the 1968 revolution, and the counter-attack of capital, recognizing the shift in the relation of forces, while refusing a narrative of capitulation. 

A brief comment on the Rifftrax commentary on Twillight

      I've been a big fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 since its beginnings in the Minneapolis suburbs. I have a vague recollection of seeing one of the original episodes on UHF television, and watched the show through its full run on Comedy Central, watching it shift from the Joel Hodgson years to Mike Nelson. Like a lot of folks, I didn't see a lot of the episodes on the Science Fiction Channel, but I was pretty excited to hear that the break up of the group led to not one but two new groups, a group with Joel called Cinematic Titanic, and a Mike oriented group which has produced material at The Film Crew or Rifftrax. That group features Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett.

     For those who don't know the concept behind Rifftrax, its a revision on the original project set up by MST3K. Rather than offering commentary on a film that has entered the public domain, or is available for very little money, Nelson, Corbett, and Murphy simply offer commentary tracks for sale, which you can sync with your DVD. This allows for the group to comment about contemporary films, rather than old films, so you get material on obvious targets such as the Star Wars prequels and the Twilight films. It's a pretty nifty idea, and the guys get a few bucks for the material.
     So far, so good.  I saw Cinematic Titanic a couple years ago, and I had a great time.  Pretty much my favorite folks are involved in the process, Joel, TV's Frank, and the Dr. Clayton Forrester guy.  But more significantly, I enjoyed the entire ensemble. (I had been suspicious of Mary Jo Piehl's role in the later years, but I've had to rethink that prejudice, and looking back at the later episodes, she was really funny).  My response to the Nelson, Corbett, and Murphy group has been a lot more mixed.  I've seen a number of the episodes through Neflix, and there has been some good material, but the absence of censorship, something kind of nasty has been revealed.  This initially came out in the material contained in the commentary on the film, The Giant of Marathon, which slipped into an increasingly tedious series of gay jokes, referring implicitly to the sexual practices of Ancient Greece, as well as the naked and oiled torsos of actors.  It became pretty obvious that far from playing with a set of repressed signifiers for comedic effect, that is satirizing the strange repressed, homosocial nature of the film, the guys needed to distance themselves from homosexuality.

     When I got the Rifftrax commentary on Twillight, I had hoped that phenomenon had been an anomaly.  Unfortunately, I was mistaken.  The guys clearly felt the need to distinguish themselves from the audience of the film, through both juvenile homophobic commentary* and often misogynistic commentaries about the teenage girls that make up the audience.  The former was marked by tedious 'that's gay' comments as well as mocking several of the American Indian characters for have 'girly' hair, and the latter was marked by both insults and the need to instruct young women the expectations of young men in dating practices.  I'm not going to go into further detail than that, but it was notable that many of us began to respond back to the podcast half way through the film because of our frustration with the material.  More than anything, it indicated the insecurity of the group.  That insecurity translated into a sort of comedy of hatred that I had never expected from a group of artists that I have attempted to follow and support, and perhaps more significantly, have loved over the years.  It genuinely upsets me to see these talented artists waste their talents in the service of the hatred of women and gay men, and really puts me in the position of asking whether I want to support such artists.

       Before I end, I want to indicate that despite these substantial problems, there were some genuinely funny moments on the podcast.  The guys made a number of sharp comments about the abusive dimension of the budding 'romance' between Edward and Bella, the ridiculous dialogue and camera angles, poor acting, etc.  It  was also clear that the guys had done their homework, and brought some comments in from the books.  None of this stuff is meant to excuse the material I discussed above, nor is it meant as a way of leavening that criticism.  I mention it because this is the sort of material that makes me want to watch their stuff, a continuation of the quality material found in MST3K, material that didn't legitimate bigotry and hatred.  I hope that Nelson, Murphy, and Corbett can return to this tradition, and perhaps more significantly, recognize the phobias that have led to this material.  Until then, I guess I still have the work of Joel, Trace, Mary, Frank, and J. Elvis to fall back on.

*I want to make the point that I have no problem with juvenile humor in and of itself.  A lot of very funny moments of the show are juvenile, just not homophobic