Valerie Walkerdine
Recently the Guardian newspaper carried an editorial about the day-long strike by rail workers. One of the things that interested me about the editorial was the suggestion that the rail workers would have been more effective putting a day's pay into a media campaign about their position than losing it on a strike, which it described as a 1 960s tactic. Whether their political j udgement was wise or not is not the issue that I want to address here. Rather, it is what it signals about the relation of 'mass', 'mass action', subjectivity and the media.
What I would like to do in this short chapter is to sketch out the possibility for a new psychological engagement with the media. I do so because various writers on the postmodern have pointed to the media as the site of considerable importance in the production of subjectivity. Not only have writers like Baudrillard and Jameson put forward a thesis of split-off and psychically distressed subject, but in each case the writers are making a point about modernity and the place of grand meta-narratives, the narratives which have been so clearly criticized within the new social psychologies. However, while many proponents of discourse theory battle on with sterile debates about realism and relativity, psychology fails to engage critically with debates relevant to the present political conjuncture.
Thus, while the trajectory of my work might usefully be signalled with reference to Henriques, H ollway, Urwin, Venn and Walkerdine's Changing the Subject ( 1 984) and to the use of post-structuralism and psychoanalysis for feminism and left thinking in psychology, I do not want to rehearse that trajectory here. Rather, J want to sketch out some of the relevant issues for a critical psychology in the age of electronic reproduction.
I want to explore what some of the recent pronouncements about post
modernity might have to say to us at this moment. Most of the work comes from outside psychology, but I think that it is vital that we address it. I t seems t o m e especially relevant because it addresses the power and import
ance of the media in an age of information. I want to look at what all this might mean for approaches to subjectivity. I use the term 'subjectivity' advisedly. My interest derives from the position developed in Changing the Subject. My particular interest has always been how to understand the
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relationship between subjectification and subjectivity. If the subject is created as a textual relation, positioned in apparatuses of power/knowledge and regulation, it is not co-terminous with lived subjectivity. H owever, hardly any post-structuralist work addresses this question: it simply neatly sidesteps it. Indeed, most work has turned to psychoanalysis to fill this gap, though the relation between post-structuralism and psychoanalysis is uneasy. I have explored ways in which it might be possible to understand ourselves as formed within apparatuses of social regulation but also to be able to move, to shift and change. If there is no underlying person to be set free as in humanism, what is the status both of the inquiry and of the stories that can be told about ourselves? If, when we try to say something different, we are not setting free some suppressed inner voice, what are we doing? This work has led me to examine, among other things, my own subjectification and to use it as a point of questioning. I have tried to focus on the relation between regulation and the gaps and silences, the places in which material/discursive relations can be spoken another way, so that another story of our subjectivity may be told. While this kind of work has been important for feminism and is common in the humanities, it has certainly placed me at the very margins of what could be considered acceptable psychology, with its scientific narratives, and at times I shift uneasily between the kinds of stories that I tell. However, I do feel strongly that it is important for us to be able to address these issues at this time: a time in which we are already post-crisis but in which the regulative power of normative stories continues unabated.
Postmodernity and the Media
The lessons of the 'postmodern' for psychology seem important to consider because, in various ways, psychology has been implicated in the production of the postmodern condition and a number of writers have argued for a transformation not only of forms of the subject, but in social organization, arguing that both grand meta-narratives and grand social movements are phenomena that rightly belong to modernity.
I want to sketch out some of the issues that we might address, bearing in mind that the boom of the 1 980s has turned to bust and that we are witnessing not only a huge rise in nationalism in Europe, for example, but a level of poverty and oppression in Britain and elsewhere that has brought with it a resurgence of the diseases of poverty: TB, typhoid, scabies, etc.
What do we do as critical psychologists in a world in which change seems tied to the grand movements and grand narratives that have been so roundly criticized and which rely so wholeheartedly on psychological models, especially in relation to the twin poles of ideology and consciousness?
In an article in the magazine Wired, entitled 'Virtual War', the journalist Bruce Sterling ( 1 993) points out a number of links between the develop
ment of virtual systems and American war technology. In particular he
Postmoderniry, Subjectivity and rhe Media 1 7 1 points to a link between the defeat of the US in Vietnam (referred to as South-East Asia) and strategies deployed in the Gulf (referred to as South
West Asia), He sees the development of virtual war systems as an attempt to gain absolute certainty of military superiority and victory, to make certain that South-West Asia cannot become like South-East Asia, He details the way in which areas of the world such as the Gulf are digitally mapped in great detail, so that simulated battles can be fought. His claim is that virtual technology creates not only a cheaper, virtual military (i.e. one that may be part-time, scaled down) but also one which is elaborately prepared and trained in simulated battles which would be bound to ensure massive superiority in actual ones. Taken to its limits his arguments relate to important psychological concomitants of the military machine that he sketches out. Basically, I suggest that it can be understood in terms of an extension of the desire for the kind of omnipotent control that I sketched out in The Mastery of Reason ( i 988). Here Reason's Dream was that things once proved stayed proved for ever. But in this military scenario we are confronted with the mastery of a super-rationality, a virtual system whose goal is the total and omnipotent control of war, of complete dominance and military superiority. The 'real' is not evacuated in this scenario but rather the aim is total knowledge and mastery of the real through its virtual simulation. In this sense, then, the postmodernist turn implies a move to far greater levels of regulation and surveillance and very particular kinds of megalomaniac f/phantasies. Thus, the fears and fantasies underpinning the Cogitv are not weakened but strengthened by this move.
In addition to this the distinction between fantasy and 'reality' becomes blurred and, in actual battles, the distinction between simulated object and material object becomes increasingly unclear.
War has become a phenomenon America witnesses through screens. And it is a
simple matter to wire those screens to present any image desired. Fake threats can show up on real radar screens, and real threats on fake screens. While the crews in real machines can no longer tell live from Memorex, the simulators themselves will move closer to the 'scratch and sniff; level of realism . . . .
I t is intense and horrifk violence at headlong speed, a savage event of grotesque explosive precision and terrible mechanized impacts. The flesh of real young men was there inside those flaming tank-shaped polygons, and that flesh was burning . . . . That is what one knows and not what one sees. What one really sees . . . is something new and very strange: a complete and utter triumph of chilling, analytic, cybernetic rationality over chaotic, real-life human despera
tion. . . The omniscient eye of computer surveillance can now dwell on the extremes of battle like a CAT scan detailing a tumour in a human skull. This is virtual reality as a new way of knowledge: a new and terrible kind of tran
scendent military power. (Sterling, 1 99 3 )
What I am trying to point to here is the way in which that 'new way of knowledge' builds upon the surveillance of modernity so well detailed by Foucault, but the new knowledge, the new mastery, has some components which suggest the production of new forms of the subject and subjectivity.
In this case, we are talking about a virtual knowledge as omnipotent
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control over a real which can no longer be adequately and easily separated from virtuality and in which 'chaotic, real-life human desperation' is controlled, surveilled, monitored, dealt with, but yet also occluded. Some
thing to be seen by the observer, only fleetingly, out of the corner of an eye and then maybe as a dream, just as we have only ever barely seen and in horror turned away from the chilling reality of the charred Iraqi bodies, the huge numbers of Iraqi dead, the decimation of the Iraqi infrastructure.
I believe that this is something like what Baudrillard ( 1 983) was getting at when he talked about 'cool fascism': it is characterized not by the hyperactivity of modernity, but by a melancholic fascism, drained of drive and energy. It is silent, it longs nostalgically only for some other space, some other place, the lost belongingness that attracts a melancholy and not a mournIng.
While this may seem unsupported and a little far-fetched, I want to argue that we urgently need to address the issues raised, because they suggest to me the necessity of rethinking the subject/social relation especially in a political conjuncture in which so much has broken down and so little in terms of radical political organization has sprung up in its place.
It would seem to me that, for example, children's playing of computer games could then be looked at in two ways: the way in which they present us with a mode of learning which has nothing to do with realist models of development and the ways in which they suggest super-rationality, with its dreams of power and ambivalent relation to destruction and violence -destruction as a game, protected by a screen from any material pain and destruction. Pain, oppression and destruction have to be split off from a disconnected rationality. I suggest that this might be similar to the drug
induced hypnotic state in which two teenage girls savagely humiliated and killed an elderly woman neighbour on a Welsh housing estate or the recently well-publicized cases in which children and adults tortured and murdered their helpless victims. It was Frederic Jameson ( 1 984) who suggested that the new subjectivity was 'schizophrenic'. I think that idea is much too general, but it is suggestive of states of being in which a virtual state splits the subject off from and disavows the consequences of material action.
This is further amplified by the concept put forward by several writers (notably Baudrillard, 1 983; Hebdige, 1 989) of the breakdown of traditional communities and solidarities (of class for example) being accompanied for Baudrillard not by an alienation but by an autistic silence (an absence of depth, of unconscious) and for Hebdige by what he calls the development of communities of affect, imagined communities of Neighbours watchers, for example, in which the community is not geographical, but in virtual space, yet a place in which affective ties can be formed in the absence of classic community ties (weakened or destroyed by the apparatuses of social regulation of modernity, of the modern form of the individual). This latter claim does have some support from studies of fans of soap operas (e.g. len Ang's, 1 985, study of Dallas). It also touches on issues raised in an
Postmodernity, Subjectivity and the Media 1 73 important paper written by two American anthropologists, H orton and Wohl ( 1 956), where they inaugurate both the idea of simulation and a mode of simulated or para-social interaction, in which they suggest that TV viewers can form imagined relationships and interactions with TV stars and in which the television set in the corner of the living room brings simulated relationships for the lonely.
I am here particularly concerned with the relationship between material
ity, pain, oppression and their occlusion by virtual systems. If this rela
tionship is not a simple one of ideological representations obscuring materiality, then how can we understand it? I am suggesting that the relationship is far more complex than previous models of ideology would allow. I say this because I am suggesting that postmodernity is characterized by horrendous pain and oppression but exists within a governmentality and civil society that produces as its object an individual, isolated, Robinson Crusoe on the desert island, in a space in which cybernetic rationality works by attempting to master materiality without ever having to confront it. I n this scenario oppression doesn't leave the stage, but it is harder and harder to see, to talk about. Are we then increasingly in an age in which virtuality, veridicality and the real get so mixed up that ordinary people, just like the soldiers in the Gulf War, cannot really tell which one they are operating with? In addition to this, the oppressed increasingly become the dis
possessed: they are not seen, addressed. They are isolated and cannot cling to old solidarities, such as those of class. Did Baudrillard's apparently wacky comments about silence and autism have something to offer after all?
The Masses
Baudrillard certainly shares modernity's obsession with the masses, but what interests me here is the move from the nineteenth-century obsession with the classification of the masses through, on the one hand, Le Bon's lawless rabble to the individuated moral subject, and, on the other, Marx's mass, which has to become The Working Class through its conscious realization of its place in history and the power of its agency. BaudriIIard turns the mass into a silent majority, with no consciousness and no agency.
If theories of ideology and of consciousness belong to modernity, to grand meta-narratives of classes and forces and H istory, what are we to make of those narratives in a moment of post Cold War, of the breakdown of the Eastern bloc, of the fall of a Berlin Wall in which East Berliners got their view of the plenty of the West from West Berlin television? Theories of ideology and models of consciousness derived from M arx (as in false consciousness) assume a depth model, a materiality to be seen, the real relations, when not obscured by clouds of ideology. But at a conjuncture in which 'fictions can function in truth', real effects can be produced out of fictions and the real, veridical and virtual get hopelessly mixed up, accounts of the relations of ideology to un/consciousness seem hopelessly crude. I am
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therefore proposing that it is important to begin to examine how we might understand the production of subjectivity outside such grand totalizing narratives and what effect this might have for our understanding of change and transformation, given that M arxist and M arxian models have relied so heavily on concepts of the subject. I would argue that critical social psychologists are well placed to address such issues. They are vital, because most of the work which has gone on comes from sociology, cultural studies and literary theory, which disciplines and fields of study have often stated too crudely the psychological issues that I am attempting to raise here.
The Masses and the Mass Media
One of the central tropes of modernity is the concern with the emergence of the urban population in towns and cities. Foucault ( 1 979) has well described the strategies of disciplining this population through techniques of management which relied upon a knowledge of the population to be managed. The endless description of the masses, from the human and social sciences, charted both the problems and the potential of the masses and was central to the emergence of certain aspects of social psychology. It is this figure of the masses which has been so central to modernity, in sociology, in politics.
Judith Butler ( 1 990) suggested that
. . . what is commonly that called an introject is . . . a fantasied figure within a fantasied locale, a double imagining that produces the effect of the empirical other fixed in an interior topos. As figurative productions, these identifications constitute impossible desires that figure the body, active principles of incorporation, modes of signifying the enactment of the lived body in social space. Hence, the gender fantasies constitutive of identifications are not part of the set of properties that a subject might be said to have, but they constitute the genealogy of that embodied psychic entity, the mechanism of its construction.
One does not have fantasies, and neither is there a one who lives them, but the fantasies condition and construct the specificity of the gendered subject with the enormously important qualification that these fantasies are themselves disciplinary productions of grounding cultural sanctions and taboos. (p. 334) In her analysis, fantasy becomes a central trope for understanding the social and the psychic, but while her account uses psychoanalytic concepts, it does so in a different way, not assuming the primacy of a universalized set of unconscious phantasies. I suggest that working on these issues is important for any kind of critical approach to the psychological in the present conj uncture.
What, then, is the relationship of the veridicality and fantasies through which the tropes of the masses have been constructed? It is my argument that the production of a scientific truth about the masses has been a central aspect of their regulation and that the pleasures and fantasies of the masses have also been the target of considerable concern right across the political spectrum. What I propose to do here is to sketch out the trajectory of
Postmodernity, Subjectivity and the Media 1 75 concern in relation to the relationship between the mass mind and the mass media in order to demonstrate how we might approach that concern today, I shall then briefly discuss how we might understand the relation of subjectification to subjectivity, in order to sketch out a project for a critical social psychology,
The dubious pleasures of the masses have been the object of concern as outlined by volumes such as Nicolas Rose's The Psychological Complex
The dubious pleasures of the masses have been the object of concern as outlined by volumes such as Nicolas Rose's The Psychological Complex