B
The
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DARK
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Business Culture and the Culture Business
Why Johnny Can't Dissent page 5
ApostIes ol the New Entrepreneur page 69
The Advertised Lile page 145
IPlus Fiction hy James Kelmanl 67he .Journal That Blonts the CuUing Edge"
the law stares across the desk out of angry eyes his face reddens in splotches like a gobbler's neck with the strut of the power of submachineguns sawedoffshotguns teargas and vomitinggas the power that can feed you or leave you
to
starve
sits easy at his desk his back is covered he feels strong behind him he feels the prosecutingattorney the judge an owner himself the political boss the minesuperintendent the board of directors the president of the utility the manipulator of the holdingcompany he lifts his hand towards the telephone the deputies crowd in the door we have only words against -John Dos Passos, The Big Money
The Baftler Thomas Frank, Editor-in-Chief "Diamonds" Dave Mulcahey, Matt Weiland, Damon Krukowski, Angela Sorby, Contributing Editors Greg Lane, Engineer I Keith White, Publishing Strategist The Baffler thanks Matt Roth, Bill Boisverr, Ron Sakolsky, Ed Barry, Steve Laymon, Andrea Laiacona, Kevin Esterling, Rob Boatright, William B. Mollard, Carmen Marti, Vernon White (for inspiration), Rob Schrader, Christopher Holmes, Josh Mason,Wendy Edelberg, Allison True and David Futrelle for helping us find management texts, Temp Slave! for their wisdom about sabotage, and Daniel Raeburn, who suggested the line, "Are you insinuating something by not c-c'ing me on this?" We are especially grateful to everyone who sent in memos, documents, and management strategy tracts taken from work They were extremely helpful. We also thank the Illinois Arts Council for their supporr. We produced this Baffler in two gruelling weeks in November and December, 1994 in the offices of WHPK-FM. Diamonds pulled an unprecedented three-day non-stop editing streak and deserves special recognition. The Baffler (ISSN 1059-9789) is published by its editors in the South Side of Chicago. AI; it is produced without the benefit of any corporate help, it can be extremely difficult to find in stores. We recommend that anyone who enjoys our magazine buy a subscription. Send us $16 (add postage outside the U.S.); we'll send you the next four issues (a little more for libraries). This is a particularly good deal, since subscribers also receive various assorred Baffler stuff. Direct all correspondence to P. O. Box 378293, Chicago, IL 60637.
In the future The Baffler will be appearing more regularly. The next issue will feature excellent essays by Rick Perlstein, Daniel Harris, and Robert Nedelkoff, in addition to the continuing saga of Gedney Market and outrages by all the usual perpetrators. The selection from How Laft It Was, How Laft is copyright © 1994 by lames Kelman. "$$$$$: That's Publishing" is copyright © 1993 The Guardian. Everything else is copyright © 1995 The Baffler. Generallyspeakingit's OK for magazines with circulations under 1000 to reprint anything of ours they want; larger publicatiolU should write to w first. But if you're from a cultural conglomerate, please take note: we have gone and trademarked a number of favorite Baffler neologisms. These include "CuitureTrwt,"Th! "ConDev,"ThI "CorporareAntinomianism,""", and" AdvertisedLifc:."Th! You may nor use them without our permission. If you're Tim, magazine, you may not use them, period. Also, we have trademarked the word "Gedney,""" so don't name any of your kids that.
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NUtnberSix BUS NIESS C LTU IE DarkAge, Tom Frank, p. 5 The Killer App, Keith White, p. 23 Sony vs. IBM, Stephen Duncombe, p. 33 I Shall Be Released, Jesse Eisinger, p. 53 "How May I Serve Paul Lukas, 61 Apostles of the New Entrepreneur, Bill Boisvert, p. 69 Soft City, Chicago, Seth Sanders, p. 157 What This Country Needs is a Leaderl Dave Mulcahey, p. 165
YUlE <CULTIJ IE B S NESS $$$$$: That's PublishinglJoanna Coles, p. 93 Henry Holt vs. Exact Chmzge, Damon Krukowski, p. 100 The Selling ofKatie Roiphe, Jennifer Gonnerman, p. 104 How Poetry Survives, Charles Bernstein, p. 114 Our Peg in Cultureburg, Maura Mahoney, p. 139 The Advertised Life, Tom Vanderbilt, p. 145
IF C DON Famous Men, Mike Newirth, p. 29 Clip-on Tie, David Berman, p. 42 Peeing on Polanski, Jamie Callan, p. 83 How Late It Was, How Late, James Kelman, p. 125
POE RY Charles Bernstein, p. 18 Charles Simic, p. 67 Rod Smith, p. 90 Margaret Young, p. 110 David Trinidad, p. 113 Steve Healey, p. 122 Joe Fodor, p. 138 Jennifer Moxley, p. 173
AR Don MacKeen, pp.4, 28 Patrick Welch, p. 30 Clay Butler, p. 66 Robin Hunicke, pp. 148, 153 Matt Roth, pp. 167, 187
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Contributors Williams Rossa Cole, unwilling to prostitute himself, is cutrently seeking employment with a major media network. Joanna Coles is a correspondent for the Guardian in London. Jesse Eisinger is a reporter for Quick Nikkei News, a financial newswire in New York. Jennifer Gonnerman writes on city politics for the Village Voice, the New York Observer, Ms. magazine, and other publications. James Kelman was born in Glasgow in 1946. The author of many books, his latest novel, How Late It Was, How Late, won the Booker Prize this year. Some Recent Attacks, a collection of political essays, is available in the US from AK. Along with Naomi Yang, Damon Krukowski runs Exact Change Press in Boston and plays in Magic Hour, whose new record is out on Twisted Village. Jennifer Moxley lives in Providence, Rhode Island where she edits The Impercipient, an independent poetry magazine. Charles Simic's most recent book is Hotel Insomnia. Rod Smith has two books forthcoming, The Boy Poems (Buck Downs Books) and In Memory ofMy Theories (0 Books). He also edits the journal Aerial Tom Vanderbilt, a writer and cultural critic, was luted into The Baffler's New York offices by promises of cheap gin and a Park Avenue pied-a.-terre. Margaret Young is finishing a book ofessays called Fringe Kitchens. Recently she won a box of fishing lures in a raffle. Robust Matt Weiland just ordered you a pint of eighty shilling from down the bar. - )
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DARK AGE Why Johnny Can't Dissent Tom Frank 1. Wealth Against Commonwealth Revisited It was, indeed, the Age of Information, but information was not the precursor to knowledge; it was the tool of salesmen. - Earl Shorris, A Nation ofSalesmen In the United States, where political "change" means further enriching the already wealthy, and where political "dialogue" is an elaborate charade that excludes dangerous and difficult topics from public consideration, one must look to the literature of business to find serious talk about national affairs. Here, in publications like the Wall Street Journal, Advertising Age, and the steady stream of millennial tracts about the latest leadership practices, is where one hears the undisguised voice of the nation's ruling class grappling with the weighty affairs of state, raised in anguish over foreign competition, strategizing against its foes, proselytizing passionately for the latest management faiths, intoxicated with the golden promise of radical new marketing techniques. The jowly platitudes about "bipartisanship," "consensus," or "the center" that make up political commentary are thankfully absent: here all is philosophical realpolitik, the open recognition that the world belongs to the ruthless, the radical, the destroyer of all that has gone before. The great earth-stopping subject these days in business literature is the fantastic growth of the culture industry. The nation is advancing from the clunking tailfinand-ranch-house economy of the 1950s into a golden new hyper-consumerism, where ever-accelerating style and attitude fuel ever-more rapidly churning cycles of obsolescence; where the mall has long since replaced the office or the factory at the center of American life; where citizens are referred to as consumers; and where buying things is now believed to provide the sort of existential satisfaction that things like, say, going to church once did. And culture, once the bane of the philistine man ofcommerce, stands at the heart of this vital new America. No longer can any serious executive regard TV, movies, magazines, and radio as simple "entertainment," as frivolous leisure-time fun: writing, music, and art are no longer conceivable as free expressions arising from the daily experience of a people. These are the economic dynamos of the new age, the economically crucial tools by which BAFFLER路
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the public is informed of the latest offerings, enchanted by packaged bliss, instructed in the arcane pleasures ofthe new, taught to be good citizens, and brought warmly into the consuming fold. Every leader of business now knows that the nation's health is measured not by production of cars and corn but by the strength of its culture industry. Nightly business programs routinely discuss the latest boxoffice receipts with the utmost gravity; France is threatened with trade war over its protectionist cinema policy; the Wall Street Journal publishes long special reports on what used to be naively called "the entertainment industry." The shift has been a gigantic one, altering even the way we appreciate the world around us. Those things we used to read about in the quaintly eccentric books of post-structuralist theory have become facts of everyday life, the triumph of "the image" over "reality" promoted from 'fascinating abstraction' to a simple matter of 'profit and loss.' We have entered what the trade papers joyfully call the "Information Age," in which culture is the proper province of responsible executives, the minutiae that were once pondered by professors and garret-bound poets having become as closely scrutinized as daily stock prices. Guided as ever by that all-knowing invisible hand, the business "community" has reacted to the new state of affairs in an entirely predictable manner, rapidly erecting a Culture Trust of four or five companies (This just in! Spielberg and Geffen have started their own studio! That makes six!) whose assorted vicepresidents now supervise almost every aspect of American public expression. Business ideologists speculate wildly about the potential for "synergy" when "content providers" join forces with "delivery systems." Time-Warner unites the nation's foremost mass-cultural institutions under one corporate roof; Sony now produces the movies and recordings you need to make your Sony appliances go; a host of conglomerates battle over Paramount, then over CBS; Disney casts about for its own TV network; Rupert Murdoch acquires an international publishing and broadcasting empire bringing him cultural power undreamed of by bush-leaguers like William Randolph Hearst. Culture can now be delivered cleanly and efficiently from creator to consumer, without the static or potential for interference posed by such vestiges ofantiquity as bolshevik authors, strange-minded artists, local accents, or stubborn anomalies like that crotchety old editor in the MCI "Gramercy Press" commercials who doesn't know how to work his voice-mail. The entire process of cultural production is being modernized overnight, brought at long last out of the nineteenth century and placed in the hands of dutiful business interests. With the consolidation of the Information Age has come a new class of executives, a consumerist elite who deal not in production and triplicate forms, but in images. Management theorist and pseudo-historian Peter Drucker calls them "Knowledge Workers," Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has dubbed them "symbolic analysts," but the term applied to them by the nation's highest-ranking asskisser, Vanity Fair, in its recent "Special Report" on the handful of luminous fabulosities who head up the Culture Trust, seems more appropriate: "The New
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Establishment." Learn to revere them, the magazine wetly counsels its readers, for they are the new Captains ofIndustry, the Titans of the future, "a buccaneering breed of entrepreneurs and visionaries, men and women from the entertainment, communications, and computer industries, whose ambitions and influence have made America the one true superpower of the Information Age." As Americans were once taught to regard the colossal plunderings of Rockefellers and Carnegies with patriotic pride, we are now told to be thankful for this "New Establishment": it is, after all, due to figures like Murdoch, Geffen, Eisner, and Turner (memorize these names, kids) that the nation has been rescued from the dead end of "militaryindustrial supremacy" and restored to the path of righteousness, "emerging as an information-and-entertainment superpower." These great men have struggled their way to the top, not just to corner the wheat market, buy up all the railroads between here and New York, or bribe the odd state legislature, but to fabricate the materials with which the world thinks. As its products steadily become the nation's chief export, the Culture Trust further rationalizes its operations through vertical integration, ensuring its access to the eternal new that drives the machine by invading the sanctum of every possible avant-garde. Responsible business newspapers print feature stories on the nation's hippest neighborhoods, how to navigate them and what treasures might be found there. Sober TV programs air segments on the colorful world of"zines"; ad agencies hire young scenesters to penetrate and report back on the latest "underground" doings. Starry-eyed college students are signed up as unpaid representatives of record conglomerates, eager to push product, make connections, and gain valuable experience on the lower rungs of the corporate ladder; while music talent scouts, rare creatures once, are seen everywhere prospecting for the cultural fuel that only straight-off-the-street 'tude can provide. Believing blithely in the fabled democracy of the marketplace, the objects of this cultural speculation are only too happy to cooperate, never quite realizing that the only reliable path to wealth in the "entertainment" business starts with a Harvard MBA. And as every aspect of American cultural production is brought safely into the fold, business texts crow proudly of the new technologies which promise to complete the circle of corporate domination. The delivery of such eagerly-awaited gloriosities as "interactive media" and "virtual reality," it is hoped, will open vast uncharted regions of private life to business colonization, will reorganize human relations generally around an indispensable corporate intermediary. Business writers understand that the great promise of the Information Age is not that average consumers will soon wake up to the splendor of 100 high-res channels, but that every imaginable type of human relationship can now be reduced to digital and incorporated into the glowing televisual nexus-brought to you by Pepsico, of course. What reformed adman Earl Shorris has written of the early promise of TV may finally be accomplished in the near future: "Reality did not cease to exist, of course, but much of what people understood as reality, including virtually all of the BAFFLER路
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So much of the best independent rock music these days is concerned, at least in part, with the menacing new power of the cultural conglomerates that one would expect rock criticism to give a fair hearing to popular discontent wih the state of American culture. After all, rock critics present themselves to the public as connoisseurs of cultural dissent, explicators of rebellion, American-style. But one would expect wrong. The primary impulse of mainstream rock criticism today is not to make-or even repeat-the punk rock case against Big Media, but to deny it at every opportunity, to insist on a sort of offended formalism: how could anyone suggest that a critic of musicMusic!-take into account any criteria other than the immediate sounds themselves? The rise of the Culture Trust just isn't a problem for most such critics: it's viewed as an unremarkably natural part of the rock' n' roll process. Rock is show business. That's all. What needs to be denounced are not those oily, omnipresent reps from Geffen, Atlantic, and Sony, but those relatively powerless kids who attempt to stand outside the process. No doubt the nation's official rock critics would prefer to simply ignore the annoying noises on the margins, to reserve their prose for the safe, press-kitted grounds of corporatesponsored rebellian--ofter all, this is what they did for years without disturbance. But now that the music industry has settled on â&#x20AC;˘alternative" as its lifestyle product of choice, the
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commercial world, was mediated by television. It was as if a salesman had been placed between Americans and life." TV is no longer merely "entertainment," it is on the verge of becoming the ineluctable center of human consciousness, the site of every sort of exchange. As the Information Revolution proceeds the myths, assumptions, and folklores of business become the common language of humanity; business culture becomes human culture. Working and consuming from our houses, wired happily into what Harper's magazine has called the "electronic hive," we will each be corporate subjects-consumers and providers of" content"-as surely as were the hapless industrial proletarians of the last century. Granted, few things in recent memory have been as over-promoted as "synergy" and the "information superhighway." But for all the hollow boosterism, for all the anglo-tincted squealings of that child on TV who equates MCI with God, the changes are real and they are vast, unimaginable. As Richard Turner wrote recently in the Wall Street Journa4 "Don't let all the blather fool you, because this much is clear: A sea change is coming in communications, information and entertainment. And in some measure, it's already here." The most intriguing aspect of these developments is not the unprecedented magnitude of cultural power being amassed by American business, but the singular imbalance between the size of the change and the comparative silence of protesting voices. Certainly the putatively 'conservative' politics of the nation's powerful Right does not include suspicion of vast cultural upheavals like this one, provided that responsible business interests are safely in charge (one can imagine their outrage were the government to assume comparable powers). From mainstream journals that dare to allow themselves an opinion, the only view one is likely to hear is the ecstatic proclamation that the rise of the Culture Trust heralds, perversely, a newfound cultural democracy. Not only are the guys who are taking charge of the American cultural economy a bunch of existential individualists-what with their jet airplanes, fabu-
lous homes, virtual offices, and muscular celebrity friends-but the system they're setting up will allow ever-so-desirable sounds and laoks each one of us to be exotic, VR game-playing rebels as of independent rock be severed well. With computers we'll be able to talk to people who from the cultur,al-pohtlcal baggage are far away! And with the miracle of "interactive," it is that them through the ' d 'II I b bl alk b k h b' prevIous decade, It has fallen beIIeve , we WI at ast e a e to t ac to t ose Ig k 't' t h t to'htheb ," 'II b ' roc en ICS 0 suppress w a mig t e medIa guys, Consumers WI e constructmg what called the "indie heres" k' h' , " h' V;' F.' "y d y, pun s ester ay, we hostility to and suspicion of corporate t ey re gettmg, c Irps antfJt mr, changed the channel; today we hIt the remote; tomorrow, media (which almost every we'll reprogram our agentslfilters," sings Wired magazine, commentator agrees to be among its in between the latest cyber-advertising and little editorial central activating principles), to root epiphanies about the most expensive new consumer goods, out and dismiss the dangerous "We'll interact with advertising where once we only thoughts, watched; we'll seek out advertising where once we avoided , it," Since letters to the editor can now be electronic it medltallon on the rise of alternative seems the obvious and unavoidable dangers that co:ne rock, which appeared last summer in ' ' human I'lIe C the tVillage Voice is typical WI'th rearrangmg around the cuItural nee dSfO ' Ass th tthof this 11' , '''S' "d " opera lon, e IRg a e b ' are, we , t, mc: means appearance of the •Alternative" more chOICes, and mformatIon technol- format signals a new openness ogywtll vastly mcrease the power of our channel changers, among the majar labels, Weisbard hey presto! More democracy! berates the die-hard adherents af The Baffler humbly asks anyone who believes this independent rock for their reluctance argument-that business is building as costly a system to "seize the day," to recagnize that as "interactive" in order to reduce its power over view- the repressive 80s are aver and that ers-to contrast the hastiness with which the Culture we have somehow stumbled into a Trust is bringing this particular technology to market time of radical social progress, "a with the strange (and strangely unremarked) unavail- Clintonian era where power is there for the taking." Even though he ability of consumer CD-recording technology (which clearly understands thallhe defining is available to "professional" radio engineers and such- characteristic of the indie 80s was like), devices which, if accessible to everyone, would "resistance to mass culture," forever ground the soaring prices of Microsoft shares as Weisbard insists that now such well as David Geffen's much-admired private jet, resistance, is-not'doubly But still one is surprised by the quiet, Years ago meaningful,' not'deeply trenchant,' Americans viewed similar instances of such rapid and not'prescient in the most valuable complete concentration of economic power into so few sort of way'-no longer necessary. hands with alarm, Democratic sensibilities were of- Anyone wha refuses to snap up the fended by the prospect of an entire region's or class's various benefits by the impoverishment for the benefit of a small ring of Culture Trust-<elebrlty, MTV, , , 'bl b d h appearances on Leiterman, nice compames, Corporate arrogance mvana y re , t e synth et'IC product'Ion, an d Iucrat'Ive , ,, vaned) ofPopultsm, contracts-is just a bad businessProgresslVlsm,Anarcho-SyndicalIsm, and the New Deal, man and a traitor to the progressive Today, ofcourse, the situation is very different, and ' BAFFLER·
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movement as well. The great problem facing rock music, according to Weisbard, his colleagues in Spin, Rolling Stone, Sassy, and at almost every other point along the mass-hip spectrum, is not the prospect of the culture industry using the sounds and images of opposition to rejuvenate its sagging fortunes, but a "fatalistic marginality" inherent in the indie heresy's suspicion of big media. In other words, the true radicalism of American show business is somehow being undermined by the reluctance of a handful of marginal figures to accept the Culture Trust's benevolence, to realize that the industry has reformed, to stop complaining and get in the game. Whereas punk rockers had once been universally shunned in major media as menacing thugs (a characterization common on primetime TV programs right up until the Nevermind moment), now they are said to exhibit the opposite vices: they are over-saintly, unrealistically pure, elitist party-poopers who want to keep all the fun for themselves. The excesses of this Inquisition have been amusing in their intoxicated stretching: caught up in the joyous frenzy of inquisition, for example, a great number of critics in different parts of the coutry simultaneausly came up with the theory that the suicide of Kurt Cobain was somehow attributable to the anti-corporate puritanism of his nefarious indierock friends. But the most immediately striking feature ofthe rock critics' kulturkampfis its one-sidedness.
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very strange. No social group is more audibly or visibly 'radical' than artists, musicians, and writers, and with the rise of the Culture Trust capitalism seems to have elevated these malcontents to positions of power and responsibility. And just think of the results: now we are sold cars by an army ofearringed, dreadlocked, goateed, tattooed, and guitar-bearing rebels rather than the labcoated authority figures of the past. But even while we live in time in which ostentatious displays of rebellion are celebrated and admired as much as the building of grandiose imitations of Versailles and the burning of hundred-dollar-bills were once, we are constantly reminded of their meaninglessness, their irrelevance to questions of actual power. For all our radical soda pops, our alternative lifestyles, and the uninhibited howls of our hamburger stands, we seem to have no problem with the fact of business control over every aspect of public expression. Even as we proclaim ourselves a nation of credit-limit rebels, prepared to drive our Saabs "in the face of convention," we are incapable of raising even the feeblest material challenge to business's assumption of near-absolute cultural power. We are left, glassy-eyed and numb, to choose between the various corporate accounts of media takeovers. This is not to imply that no one has noticed the dangers of the Information Revolution or that direct assaults on the aesthetic and economic basis of the Culture Trust have not taken place. It is to point out, simply, that the dominant intellectual tendency of our time-in a strange complement to the prevalence of ersatz rebellion everywhere on TV-is to confront not the power of the media but those who dare to criticize it. In academia, where proclamations of "cultural radicalism" are routine, we observe the consolidation of "Cultural Studies," a pedagogy that seems tailor-made for the intellectual needs of the Culture Trust. Beginningwith the inoffensive observation that an audience's reception of a given culture-product is important and unpredictable, Cultural Studies proceeds to assert that the facts of corporate cultural production are therefore utterly irrelevant, that David Geffen and Madonna are exactly as cool as Vanity Fair says they are (but for
different reasons, dude), and to new ways to apply the label "elitist" to people who don't like TV. Its rise to promInence, as Herbert Schiller noted a while ago, coincides The voices of official hip stand perfectly with the Information Revolution, both tem- unified in their condemnation of residual indie mass-cult mistrust, but porally and ideologically: The power of the Western cultural industries is more concentrated and formidable than ever; their outputs are more voluminous and widely circulated; and the transnational corporate system is totally dependent upon information flows. Yet the prevailing interpretation sees media power as highly overrated and its international impact minimal .... Its usefulness to existing power is obvious. Rock music is a case in point: though Cultural Studies is overwhelmingly concerned with what is called "The Popular," a thorough reading of its leading books, journals, and anthologies turns up few references to independent rock music ("punk rock," by the way, is understood to have been a curious phenomenon of the late 70s that vanished soon afterwards) or non-corporate publications like, say, ForcedExposureor Maximum Rocknroll. Although these are "popular" works in the true sense of the word, they tend to take far too hostile
where does one turn to hear the heresy that merits such strident refutation? No high-power radio stations will play the offending records, nor can they be found in any collection to which the public has access. No libraries carry the handful of zines that question the aesthetic uprightness of the Culture Trust. The offending sentiment is almost completely invisible, limited to small, powerless publications and the products of financially marginal record campanies. So in one sense at least the official critics are doing the indie heresy a favor, documenting the anti-corporate feeling that they seek to suppress instead of allowing it to wither away from inattention. The attitudes that so annoy them BAFFLER路
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may have received no expression in any of the offidal annals of American cubure, but one can imagine future social historians using these outraged articles as a means of proving that there was something going on outside the corporate monotone during the late 20th-century; just look at their efforts to stamp it out. Certainly this school of writers would never identify themselves as upholders of the American power structure, much less as ns cultural Inquisitors. No doubt they think of themselves as standard-bearers, not suppressers, of insurgent culture; foes, not servants of The Man. No doubt their conscious intentions are perfectly honorable: they simply aim to redirect what they perceive to be a misguided movement back along the paths of true revolutionary righteousness. But in so doing they illustrate the basic problem fadng cultural dissent in the ulnformation Age": our standard ideas of how cultural rebellion is to be done are obsolete. They have no connection to the new fads of cultural power. Weisbard, for example, concludes his article by invoking the names of those hallowed cultural revolutionaries that today's indie-rockers, constrained by their hostility to cultural populism,' can never duplicate: they must accommodate themselves to the major labels, otherwise their music just Swon't upset the applecarts of cultural hierarchy the same way ndid with Presley or the Stones.' Stones? Rolling Stones? What, is cultural hierarchy' a brand of beer in competition with Budweiser? U
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a view of the Culture Trust-the only" reading," apparently, that "the people" aren't supposed to undertake. Therefore, they might as well not exist. Only corporate culture deserves to be considered, lauded over and over again for the ways in which this sitcom empowers that subaltern, this rock video questions that hierarchy. This blindness towards anything but the products of the Culture Trust makes the prognosis of one of its academic opponents more apt: Globalisation ... means that (high added-value) cultural production is increasingly important to advanced economies so that an increased proportion of jobs are found in the cultural sector. Cultural studies prepares students for these jobs. It also prepares them to become good consumers of increasingly sophisticated cultural industries. To judge TV programs from the top down by some rigid, pre-existing standard, Cultural Studies argues, is a serious intellectual offense. But just a mention of the more critical media theories of, for example, the Frankfurt School, is enough to send these self-proclaimed avatars of popular resistance into a fury of denunciation. Suddenly a different system of values seems to apply. Here one finds no finenesses of "negotiated readings," no hints of that liberating potential just beneath the text's surface: that particular reading is not OK; those who denounce the offerings of the Culture Trust just plain wrong.
II Serious Attitude Adjustment: The Rise of Corporate Antinomianism The public be damned! I work for my stockholders. -William H. Vanderbilt, 1879 Break the rules. Stand apart. Keep your head. Go with your heart. - TV commercial for Vanderbilt perfume, 1994 The American economy may be undergoing the most dramatic shifts in this century, but for the past thirty years people in music, art, and culture generally
have had a fixed, precise notion of what's wrong with American life and the ways in which the responsible powers are to be confronted. It is a preconception shared by almost every magazine, newspaper, TV host, and rock star across the "alternative" spectrum. And it is the obsolescence and exhaustion of this idea of cultural dissent that accounts for our singular inability to confront the mind-boggling dangers of the Information Age. The patron saints of the countercultural idea, which for convenience is what we'll call this now-standard way of understanding power and resistance, are, of course, the Beats, whose frenzied style and merry alienation still maintain a powerful grip on the American imagination. Even forty years after the publication of On The Road, the works ofKerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs remain the sine qua non of dissidence, the model for aspiring poets, rock stars, or indeed anyone who feels vaguely artistic or alienated-in other words, for everyone. That frenzied sensibility of pure experience, life on the edge, immediate gratification, and total freedom from moral restraint which the Beats first propounded back in those heady days when suddenly everyone could have their own TV and powerful V-8, has stuck with us through all the intervening years andbecome something of a permanent American aesthetic, an official style of the consumer society. Go to any poetry reading in New York or Chicago and you can see a string of junior Kerouacs go through the routine, "upsetting cultural hierarchies" by pushing themselves to the limit, straining for that beautiful gasp as the nonexistent bourgeoisie recoils in shock, struggling to recapture that gorgeous moment of original vice when Allen Ginsberg first read "Howl" in 1955. The Gap may have since claimed Ginsberg and USA Today may run feature stories about the brilliance of Kerouac, bur here the rebel race continues, with ever-heightening shit-references calculated to scare Jesse Helms, talk about sex and smack that is supposed to bring the electricity of real life, and ever-more determined defiance of the repressive rules and mores of the American 1950s-rules and mores which by now we know only from movies. The verdict of the Beats is the centerpiece of the countercultural idea to which we still ascribe such revolutionary potential: the paramount ailment of our society is conformity, a malady that has variously been described as over-organization, bureaucracy, homogeneity, hierarchy, logocentrism, technocracy, the Combine, the Apollonian. We all know what it is and what it does. It transforms humanity into "organization man," into "the man in the gray flannel suit." It is "Moloch whose mind is pure machinery," the "incomprehensible prison" that consumes "brains and imagination." It is artifice, starched shirts, tail fins, carefully mowed lawns and always, always the consciousness of impending nuclear destruction. It is a stiff, militaristic order that seeks to suppress instinct, to forbid sex and pleasure, to deny basic human impulses and individuality, to enforce through a rigid uniformity a meaningless plastic consumerism. As this half of the countercultural idea originated during the 1950s, it is appropriate that the evils of conformity are most conveniently summarized with BAFFLER路
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images of 1950s suburban correctness. You know, that land of church-goers, tailfins, red-scares, smiling white people, lines of commuters, sedate music, sexual repression. An America of uptight patriarchs, friendly cops, buttoned-down collars, B-47s, and deference to authority-the America of such backward-looking creatures as Jerry Falwell. Constantly appearing as a symbol of arch-evil in advertising and movies, it is an image we find easy to evoke. Picking up at random a recent Utne Reader, for example, one finds an article which seeks to question the alternative ness of coffee by reminding the reader of its popularity during that cursed decade: "According to history-or sitcom reruns-" the author writes, "the '50s were when Dad tanked up first thing in the morning with a pot of java, which set him on his jaunty way to a job that siphoned away his lifeblood in exchange for lifelong employment, a two-car garage, and Mom's charge card." The correct response: What a nightmare! I'll be sure to get my coffee at a hip place like Starbuck's. The ways in which this system are to be resisted are equally well understood and agreed-upon. The Establishment demands homogeneity; we revolt by embracing diverse, individual lifestyles. It demands self-denial and rigid adherence to convention; we revolt through immediate gratification, instinct uninhibited, and liberation of the libido and the appetites. Few have put it more bluntly than Jerry Rubin did in 1970, "Am erika says: Don't! The yippies say: Do It!" The countercultural idea is hostile to any law and every establishment. "Whenever we see a rule, we must break it," Rubin continued. "Only by breaking rules do we discover who we are." Above all rebellion consists of a sort of Nietzschean antinomianism, an automatic questioning of rules, a rejection of whatever social prescriptions we've happened to inherit. Do Your Own Thing is the whole of the law. But one hardly has to go to a poetry reading to see the countercultural idea acted out, for its frenzied ecstasies have long since become the official aesthetic of consumer society, the monotheme of mass culture as well as adversarial culture. Turn on the TV and there it is instantly: the unending drama of Consumer Unbound and in search of an ever-heightened good time, the inescapable rock en' roll soundtrack, dreadlocks and pony tails bounding into Taco Bells, a drunken, camera-swinging epiphany of tennis shoes, outlaw soda pops, and mind-bending dandruff shampoos. For corporate America no longer speaks in the voice of oppressive order that it did when Ginsberg moaned in 1956 that Time magazine was always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me. Today nobody wants to appear serious. Fox, Disney, and Time/Warner, the nation's economic standard-bearers, are also now the ultimate leaders of the Ginsbergian search for kicks upon kicks. Corporate America is not an oppressor but a sponsor of fun, provider oflifestyle accoutrements, facilitator of carnival, trusted
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ally of the people, our slang-speaking partner in the search for that ever-more apocalyptic orgasm. The countercultural idea has become capitalist orthodoxy, its hunger for transgression upon transgression, change for the sake of change, now perfectly suited to an economic-cultural regime that runs on ever-faster cyclings of the new; its taste for self-fulfillment and its intolerance for the confines of tradition now permitting vast latitude in consuming practices and lifestyle experimentation. For consumerism is no longer about "conformity" but about "difference." Advertising teaches us not in the ways of puritanical self-denial (a bizarre notion on the face of it), but in orgiastic, never-ending self-fulfillment. It counsels not rigid adherence to the tastes of the herd but vigilant and constantly-updated individualism. We consume not to fit in, but to prove, on the surface at least, that we are rock 'n' roll rebels, each one of us as rule-breaking and hierarchy-defying as our heroes of the 60s, who now pitch cars, shoes, and beer. This imperative of endless difference, not that dread "conformity," is the genius at the heart of American capitalism, the eternal fleeing from "sameness" that gives us a thirst for the New and satiates it with such achievements of civilization as the infinite brands of identical cola, the myriad colors and irrepressible variety of the cigarette rack at 7-11. Capitalism has changed dramatically since the 1950s, but our understanding of how it is to be resisted hasn't budged. As existential rebellion has become the more or less official style ofInformationAge capitalism, so has the countercultural notion of a static, repressive Establishment grown hopelessly obsolete. However the basic impulses of the countercultural idea may (and that's a big "may") have disturbed a nation lost in Cold War darkness, they are today in fundamental agreement with the basic tenets ofInformation Age business theory. So close are they, in fact, that it has become impossible to understand the countercultural idea as anything more than the self-justifying ideology of the new dominant class that has arisen since the 1960s, the cultural means by which this group has proven itself ever so much better skilled than its slow-moving, security-minded forebears at adapting to the accelerated, always-changing consumerism of today. The anointed cultural opponents of capitalism are now capitalism's ideologues. The two come together in perfect synchronization in a figure like Camille Paglia whose annoying ravings are grounded in the absolutely non-controversial ideas of the golden Sixties. According to Paglia, American business is still exactly what it was believed to have been in that beloved decade, that is, "puritanical and desensualized." Its great opponents are, of course, liberated figures like "the beatniks", Bob Dylan, and the Beades (needless to say, while Paglia proclaims herself a great fan of rock music, bands like Shellac, Slant 6, and the Subhumans never appear as recipients of her praise). Culture is, quite simply, a binary battle between the repressive Apollonian order of capitalism and the Dionysian impulses of the counterculture. Paglia thus validates the central official myth of the "Information Age," for rebellion makes no sense without repression; we must remain forever convinced of capitalism's fundamental hostility to pleasure in order BAFFLER路
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