The Flexible Personality:
For a New Cultural Critique
by Brian Holmes
The events of the century's turn, from Seattle to New York, have
shown that
a sweeping critique of capitalist globalization is possible, and
urgently
necessary - before the level of violence in the world
dramatically
increases. The beginnings of such a critique exist, with the
renewal of
"unorthodox" economics.1 But now one can look further,
toward a critique of
contemporary capitalist culture.
To be effective, a cultural critique must
show the links between
the major articulations of power and the more-or-less trivial
aesthetics of
everyday life. It must reveal the systematicity of social
relations and
their compelling character for everyone involved, even while it
points to
the specific discourses, images and emotional attitudes that
hide
inequality and raw violence. It must shatter the balance of
consent, by
flooding daylight on exactly what a society consents to, how it
tolerates
the intolerable. Such a critique is difficult to put into
practice because
it must work on two opposed levels, coming close enough to grips
with the
complexity of social processes to convince the researchers whose
specialized knowledge it needs, while finding striking enough
expressions
of its conclusions to sway the people whom it claims to describe
- those
upon whose behavior the transformation of the status quo
depends.
This kind of critique existed very recently
in our societies, it
gave intellectual focus to an intense and widespread
dissatisfaction in the
sixties and seventies, it helped change an entire system. Today
it seems to
have vanished. No longer does the aesthetic dimension appear as
a contested
bridge between the psyche and the objective structures of
society. It is as
though we had lost the taste for the negative, the ambition of
an
anti-systemic critique. In its place we find endless variants on
Anglo-American "cultural studies" - which is an
affirmative strategy, a
device for adding value, not for taking it away. The history of
cultural
studies argues today for a renewal of the negative, of ideology
critique.
When it emerged in the late fifties,
British cultural studies tried
to reverse aesthetic hierarchies by turning the sophisticated
language of
literary criticism onto working-class practices and forms.
Elevating
popular expressions by a process of contamination that also
transformed the
elite culture, it sought to create positive alternatives to the
new kinds
of domination projected by the mass media. The approach greatly
diversified
the range of legitimate subjects and academic styles, thereby
making a real
contribution to the ideal of popular education.2 What is more,
cultural
studies constituted a veritable _school_ on the intellectual
left,
developing a strategic intention. However, its key theoretical
tool was the
notion of a differential reception, or "negotiated
reading" - a personal
touch given to the message by the receiver. The notion was
originally used
to reveal working-class interpretations of dominant messages, in
a model
still based on class consciousness.3 But when the emphasis on
reception was
detached from the dynamics of class, in the course of the 1980s,
cultural
studies became one long celebration of the particular twist that
each
individual or group could add to the globalized media product.
In this way,
it gave legitimacy to a new, transnational consumer ideology.4
This is the
discourse of alienation perfected, appropriated, individualized,
ethnicized, made one's own.
How can cultural critique become effective again today? I am
going
to argue for the construction of an "ideal type,"
revealing the
intersection of social power with intimate moral dispositions
and erotic
drives.5 I call this ideal type the _flexible personality_. The
word
"flexible" alludes directly to the current economic
system, with its casual
labor contracts, its just-in-time production, its informational
products
and its absolute dependence on virtual currency circulating in
the
financial sphere. But it also refers to an entire set of very
positive
images, spontaneity, creativity, cooperativity, mobility, peer
relations,
appreciation of difference, openness to present experience. If
you feel
close to the counter-culture of the sixties-seventies, then you
can say
that these are _our_ creations, but caught in the distorting
mirror of a
new hegemony. It has taken considerable historical effort from
all of us to
make the insanity of contemporary society tolerable.
I am going to look back over recent history
to show how a form of
cultural critique was effectively articulated in intellectual
and then in
social terms, during the post-World War II period. But I will
also show how
the current structures of domination result, in part, from the
failures of
that earlier critique to evolve in the face of its own
absorption by
contemporary capitalism.
Question Authority
The paradigmatic example of cultural critique in the postwar
period is the
Institut für Sozialforschung - the autonomous scholarly
organization known
as the Frankfurt School. Its work can be summed up with the
theoretical
abbreviation of Freudo-Marxism. But what does that mean?
Reviewing the
texts, you find that from as early as 1936, the Institut
articulated its
analysis of domination around the psychosociological structures
of
authority. The goal of the _Studien über Autorität und Familie_
was to
remedy "the failure of traditional Marxism to explain the
reluctance of the
proletariat to fulfill its historical role."6 This
"reluctance" - nothing
less than the working-class embrace of Nazism - could only be
understood
through an exploration of the way that social forces unfold in
the psyche.
The decline of the father's authority over the family, and the
increasing
role of social institutions in forming the personality of the
child, was
shown to run parallel to the liquidation of liberal, patrimonial
capitalism, under which the nineteenth-century bourgeois owner
directly
controlled an inherited family capital. Twentieth-century
monopoly
capitalism entailed a transfer of power from private individuals
to
organized, impersonal corporations. The psychological state of
masochistic
submission to authority, described by Erich Fromm, was
inseparable from the
mechanized order of the new industrial cartels, their ability to
integrate
individuals within the complex technological and organizational
chains of
mass-production systems. The key notion of "instrumental
reason" was
already in germ here. As Marcuse wrote in 1941: "The facts
directing man's
thought and action are
those of the machine process, which itself appears
as the embodiment of rationality and expediency. Mechanized mass
production is filling the empty spaces in which individuality
could assert
itself."7
The Institut's early work combined a
psychosociological analysis of
authoritarian discipline with the philosophical notion of
instrumental
reason. But its powerful anti-systemic critique could not
crystallize
without studies of the centrally planned economy, conceived as a
social and
political response to the economic crisis of the 1930s. Institut
members
Friedrich Pollock and Otto Kirchheimer were among the first to
characterize
the new "state capitalism" of the 1930s.8 Overcoming
the traditional
Marxist portrayal of monopoly capitalism, which had met its
dialectical
contradiction in the crisis of 1929, they described a definitive
shift away
from the liberal system where production and distribution were
governed by
contractualized market relations between individual agents. The
new system
was a managerial capitalism where production and distribution
were
calculated by a central-planning state. The extent of this shift
was
confirmed not only by the Nazi-dominated industrial cartels in
Germany, but
also by the Soviet five-year plans, or even the American New
Deal,
anticipating the rise of the Keynesian welfare state. Authority
was again
at the center of the analysis. "Under state
capitalism," wrote Pollock,
"men meet each other as commander or commanded."9 Or,
in Kirchheimer's
words: "Fascism characterizes the stage at which the
individual has
completely lost his independence and the ruling groups have
become
recognized by the state as the sole legal parties to political
compromise."10
The resolution of economic crisis by
centralized planning for total
war concretely revealed what Pollock called the "vital
importance" of an
investigation "as to whether state capitalism can be
brought under
democratic control." This investigation was effectively
undertaken by the
Institut during its American exile, when it
sought to translate its
analysis of Nazism into the American terms of the Cold War. What
we now
remember most are the theory and critique of the culture
industry, and the
essay of that name; but much more important at the time was a
volume of
sociological research called _The Authoritarian Personality_,
published in
1950.11 Written under Horkheimer's direction by a team of four
authors
including Adorno, the book was an attempt to apply statistical
methods of
sociology to the empirical identification of a fascistic
character
structure. It used questionnaire methods to demonstrate the
existence of a
"new anthropological type" whose traits were rigid
conventionalism,
submission to authority, opposition to everything subjective,
stereotypy,
an emphasis on power and toughness, destructiveness and cynicism,
the
projection outside the self of unconscious emotional impulses,
and an
exaggerated concern with sexual scandal. In an echo to the
earlier study of
authority, these traits were correlated with a family structure
marked not
by patriarchal strength but rather weakness, resulting in
attempts to sham
an ascendancy over the children which in reality had devolved to
social
institutions.
_The Authoritarian Personality_ represents the culmination of a
deliberately programmed, interdisciplinary construction of an
ideal type: a
polemical image of the social self which could then guide and
structure
various kinds of critique. The capacity to focus different
strands of
critique is the key function of this ideal type, whose
importance goes far
beyond that of the statistical methodologies used in the
questionnaire-study. Adorno's rhetorical and aesthetic
strategies, for
example, only take on their full force in opposition to the
densely
constructed picture of the authoritarian personality. Consider
this quote
from the essay on "Commitment" in 1961:
Newspapers and magazines of the radical
Right constantly stir up
indignation against what is unnatural, over-intellectual, morbid
and
decadent: they know their readers. The insights of social
psychology into
the authoritarian personality confirm them. The basic features
of this type
include conformism, respect for a petrified façade of opinion
and society,
and resistance to impulses that disturb its order or evoke inner
elements
of the unconscious that cannot be admitted. This hostility to
anything
alien or alienating can accommodate itself much more easily to
literary
realism of any provenance, even if it proclaims itself critical
or
socialist, than to works which swear allegiance to no political
slogans,
but whose mere guise is enough to disrupt the whole system of
rigid
coordinates that governs authoritarian personalities...12
Adorno seeks to show how Brechtean or Sartrean political
engagement
could shade gradually over into the unquestioning embrace of
order that
marks an authoritarian state. The fractured, enigmatic forms of
Beckett or
Schoenberg could then be seen as more politically significant
than any call
to rally collectively around a cause. Turned at once against the
weak
internal harmonies of a satisfied individualism, and against the
far more
powerful totalizations of an exploitative system, aesthetic form
in
Adorno's vision becomes a dissenting force through its refusal
to falsely
resolve the true contradictions. As he writes in one of his
rhetorical
phrases: "It is not the office of art to spotlight
alternatives, but to
resist by its form alone the course of the world, which
permanently puts a
pistol to men's heads."13
The point is not to engage in academic
wrangling over exactly how
Adorno conceived this resistance of contradictory forms. More
interesting
is to see how a concerted critique can help give rise to
effective
resistance in society. The most visible figure here is Herbert Marcuse,
whose 1964 book _One-Dimensional Man_ became an international
best-seller,
particularly in France. Students in the demonstrations of May
'68 carried
placards reading "Marx, Mao, Marcuse." But this only
shows how Marcuse,
with his directly revolutionary stance, could become a kind of
emblem for
converging critiques of the authoritarian state, industrial
discipline and
the mass media. In France, Sartre had written of
"serialized man," while
Castoriadis developed a critique of bureaucratic productivism.
In America,
the business writer William Whyte warned against the
"organization man" as
early as 1956, while in 1961 an outgoing president, Dwight D.
Eisenhower,
denounced the technological dangers of the
"military-industrial complex."
Broadcast television was identified as the major propaganda tool
of
capitalism, beginning with Vance Packard's book _The Hidden
Persuaders_ in
America in 1957, then continuing more radically with Barthes'
_Mythologies_
in France and above all, Debord's _Society of the Spectacle_.
Ivan Illich
and Paul Goodman attacked school systems as centers of social
indoctrination, R.D. Laing and Félix Guattari called for an
anti-psychiatry, and Henri Lefebvre for an anti-urbanism, which
the
Situationists put into effect with the
practice of the _dérive_. In his
_Essay on Liberation_, written immediately after '68, Marcuse
went so far
as to speak of an outbreak of mass surrealism - which, he
thought, could
combine with a rising of the racialized lumpen proletariat in
the US and a
wider revolt of the Third World.
I don't mean to connect all this subversive
activity directly to
the Frankfurt School. But the "Great Refusal" of the
late sixties and early
seventies was clearly aimed at the military-industrial
complexes, at the
regimentation and work discipline they produced, at the
blandishments of
the culture industry that concealed these realities, and perhaps
above all,
at the existential and psychosocial condition of the
"authoritarian
personality." The right-wing sociologist Samuel Huntington
recognized as
much, when he described the revolts of the 1960s as "a
general challenge to
the existing systems of authority, public and private."14
But that was just
stating the obvious. In seventies America, the omnipresent
counter-culture
slogan was "Question Authority."
What I have tried to evoke here is the
intellectual background of
an effective anti-systemic movement, turned against capitalist
productivism
in its effects on both culture and subjectivity. All that is
summed up in a
famous bit of French graffiti, _On ne peut pas tomber amoureux
d'une courbe
de croissance_ ("You can't fall in love with a growth
curve"). In its very
erotics, that writing on the walls of May '68 suggests what I have
not yet
mentioned, which is the positive content of the anti-systemic
critique: a
desire for equality and social unity, for the suppression of the
class
divide. Self-management and direct democracy were the
fundamental demands
of the student radicals in 1968, and by far the most dangerous
feature of
their leftist ideology.15 As Jürgen Habermas wrote in 1973:
"Genuine
participation of citizens in the processes of political
will-formation,
that is, substantive democracy, would bring to consciousness the
contradiction between administratively socialized production and
the
continued private appropriation and use of surplus
value."16 In other
words, increasing democratic involvement would rapidly show
people where
their real interests lie. Again, Huntington seemed to agree,
when he in
turn described the "crisis" of the advanced societies
as "an excess of
democracy."17
One might recall that the infamous 1975
Trilateral Commission
report in which Huntington made that remark was specifically
concerned with
the growing "ungovernability" of the developed
societies, in the wake of
the social movements of the sixties. One might also recall that
this
specter of ungovernability was precisely the foil against which
Margaret
Thatcher, in England, was able to marshal
up her "conservative
revolution."18 In other words, what Huntington called
"the democratic
distemper" of the sixties was the background against which
the present
neoliberal hegemony arose. And so the question I would now like
to ask is
this: how did the postindustrial societies absorb the
"excess of democracy"
that had been set loose by the anti-authoritarian revolts? Or to
put it
another way: how did the 1960s finally serve to make the 1990s
tolerable?
Divide and Recuperate
"We lack a serious history of co-optation, one that
understands corporate
thought as something other than a cartoon," writes the
American historian
and culture critic Thomas Frank.19 In a history of the
advertising and
fashion industries called _The Conquest of Cool_, he attempts to
retrieve
the specific strategies that made sixties "hip" into
nineties "hegemon,"
transforming cultural industries based on stultifying conformism
into even
more powerful industries based on a plethoric offer of
"authenticity,
individuality, difference, and rebellion." With a host of
examples, he
shows how the desires of middle-class dropouts in the sixties
were rapidly
turned into commodified images and products. Avoiding a simple
manipulation
theory, Frank concludes that the advertisers and fashion
designers involved
had an existential interest in transforming the system. The
result was a
change in "the ideology by which business explained its
domination of the
national life" - a change he relates, but only in passing,
to David
Harvey's concept of "flexible accumulation."20 Beyond
the chronicle of
stylistic co-optation, what still must be explained are the
interrelations
between individual motivations, ideological justifications and
the complex
social and technical functions of a new economic system.
A starting point can be taken from a few
suggestive remarks by the
business analysts Piore and Sabel, in a book called _The Second
Industrial
Divide_ (1984). Here the authors speak of a _regulation crisis_,
which "is
marked by the realization that existing institutions no longer
secure a
workable match between the production and the consumption of
goods."21 They
locate two such crises in the history of the industrial
societies, both of
which we have already considered through the eyes of the
Frankfurt School:
"the rise of the large corporations, in the late nineteenth
century, and of
the Keynesian welfare state, in the 1930s."22 Our own era
has seen a third
such crisis: the prolonged recession of the 1970s, culminating with
the oil
shock of 1973 and accompanied by endemic labor unrest throughout
the
decade. This crisis brought the institutional collapse of the
Fordist
mass-production regime and the welfare state, and thereby set
the stage for
an _industrial divide_, which the authors situate in the early
1980s:
The brief moments when the path of industrial development itself
is at
stake we call industrial divides. At such moments, social
conflicts of the
most apparently unrelated kinds determine the direction of
technological
development for the following decades. Although industrialists,
workers,
politicians and intellectuals may only be dimly aware that they
face
technological choices, the actions that they take shape economic
institutions for long into the future. Industrial divides are
therefore the
backdrop or frame for subsequent regulation crises.23
Basing themselves on observations from Northern Italy, the
authors
describe the emergence of a new production regime called
"flexible
specialization," which they characterize as "a
strategy of permanent
innovation: accommodation to ceaseless change, rather than an
effort to
control it." Abandoning the centralized planning of the
postwar years, this
new strategy works through the agency of small, independent
production
units, employing skilled work teams with multi-use tool kits and
relying on
relatively spontaneous forms of cooperation with other such
teams to meet
rapidly changing market demands at low cost and high speed.
These kinds of
firms seemed to hark back to the craftsmen of the early
nineteenth century,
before the first industrial divide that led to the introduction
of heavy
machinery and the mass-production system. To be sure, in 1984
Piore and
Sabel could not yet have predicted the importance that would be
acquired by
one single set of products, far from anything associated with
the
nineteenth century: the personal computer and telecommunications
devices.
Nonetheless, the relation they drew between
a crisis in institutional
regulation and an industrial divide can help us understand the
key role
that social conflict - and the cultural critique that helps
focus it - has
played in shaping the organizational forms and the very
technology of the
world we live in.
What then were the conflicts that made
computing and
telecommunications into the central products of the new wave of
economic
growth that began after the 1970s recession? How did these
conflicts affect
the labor, management and consumption regimes? Which social
groups were
integrated to the new hegemony of flexible capitalism, and how?
Which were
rejected or violently excluded, and how was that violence
covered over?
So far, the most complete set of answers to
these questions has
come from Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, in _Le Nouvel Esprit
du
Capitalism_, published in 1999.24 Their thesis is that each age
or "spirit"
of capitalism must justify its irrational compulsion for
accumulation by at
least partially integrating or "recuperating" the
critique of the previous
era, so that the system can become tolerable again - at least
for its own
managers. They identify two main challenges to capitalism: the
critique of
exploitation, or what they call "social critique,"
developed traditionally
by the worker's movement, and the critique of alienation, or
what they call
"artistic critique." The latter,
they say, was traditionally a minor,
literary affair; but it became vastly more important with the
mass cultural
education carried out by the welfare-state universities.
Boltanski and
Chiapello trace the destinies of the major social groups in
France after
the turmoil of '68, when _critique sociale_ joined hands with
_critique
artiste_. They show how the most organized fraction of the labor
force was
accorded unprecedented economic gains, even as future production
was
gradually reorganized and delocalized to take place outside
union control
and state regulation. But they also demonstrate how the young,
aspiring
managerial class, whether still in the universities or at the
lower
echelons of enterprise, became the major vector for the artistic
critique
of authoritarianism and bureaucratic impersonality. The strong
point of
Boltanski and Chiapello's book is to demonstrate how the
organizational
figure of the _network_ emerged to provide a magical answer to
the
anti-systemic cultural critique of the 1950s and 60s - a magical
answer, at
least for the aspirant managerial class.