Workers of the World, Enjoy!: Aesthetic Politics from Revolutionary Syndicalism to the Global Justice Movement (Politics History & Social Chan)

Workers of the World, Enjoy!

In the series Politics, History, and Social Change, edited by John C. Torpey Also in this series: Ernesto Verdeja, Unchopping a Tree: Reconciliation in the Aftermath

of Political Violence Rebecca Jean Emigh, The Undevelopment of Capitalism: Sectors and

Markets in Fifteenth-Century Tuscany Aristide R. Zolberg, How Many Exceptionalisms? Explorations in

Comparative Macroanalysis Thomas Brudholm, Resentment’s Virtue: Jean Améry and the Refusal

to Forgive Patricia Hill Collins, From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism,

Nationalism, and Feminism Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, translated by Assenka Oksiloff,

The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age Brian A. Weiner, Sins of the Parents: The Politics of National

Apologies in the United States Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley, Seeking Mandela: Peacemaking

Between Israelis and Palestinians Marc Garcelon, Revolutionary Passage: From Soviet to Post-Soviet

Russia, 1985–2000 Götz Aly and Karl Heinz Roth, translated by Assenka Oksiloff, The

Nazi Census: Identification and Control in the Third Reich Immanuel Wallerstein, The Uncertainties of Knowledge Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees from the

First World War Through the Cold War

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Workers of the World, Enjoy! Aesthetic Politics from Revolutionary Syndicalism to the Global Justice Movement

Kenneth H. Tucker, Jr.

TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Philadelphia

Temple University Press 1601 North Broad Street Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122 www.temple.edu/tempress Copyright © 2010 by Temple University All rights reserved Published 2010 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tucker, Kenneth H. Wokers of the world, enjoy! : aesthetic politics from revolutionary syndicalism to the global justice movement / Kenneth H. Tucker, Jr. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-59213-764-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Popular culture—History. 2. Art—Political aspects—History. 3. Social movements—History. I. Title. HM621.T83 2010 306.4'709—dc22 2009046953 The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992 Printed in the United States of America 2

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

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Part I Theoretical Reflections 1 Public Life, Aesthetics, and Social Theory

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2 Social Movements and Aesthetic Politics

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3 Identity, Knowledge, Solidarity, and Aesthetic Politics

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Part II History and Social Movements 4 The World Is a Stage and Life Is a Carnival: The Rise of the Aesthetic Sphere and Popular Culture

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5 Labor and Aesthetic Politics: French Revolutionary Syndicalism, the IWW, and Fascism

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6 The Flowering of Aesthetic Politics: May 1968, the New Social Movements, and the Global Justice Movement

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Conclusion

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Notes Index

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Acknow ledg ments

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orkers of the World, Enjoy! refers to graffiti from the May 1968 protests in France, and encapsulates many of my ideas about aesthetic politics. Just as this title did not originate with me, so there are many people who either directly or indirectly helped me formulate my ideas. Of course none of them are responsible for the use that I made of their comments, and I am sure that many of them would disagree with several aspects of my argument. I would like to thank Ron Lembo for suggesting this project and Micah Kleit of Temple University Press for overseeing the production of the book. Special thanks also to Bob Dunn, who read several chapters and made insightful suggestions. For helpful comments on various aspects of the text or ideas related to it, I thank Jeffrey Alexander, Debbora Battaglia, Tony Lee, Ron Lembo, Jean-Frédéric Monod, Steven Seidman, John Torpey, Eleanor Townsley, and Sherry Silveus Tucker. Barbara Tucker offered emotional and intellectual support. Finally, I am grateful to and for Sherry in every way, as always.

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Introduction

aris, August 1908. Emile Pataud of the Electricians Union dramatically darkens all of Paris during a strike, illuminating only the Bourse du Travail, the headquarters of the revolutionary syndicalist Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), the largest union organization in France. Pataud, donning his working-class beret to full effect and appearing every bit the working-class revolutionary, cordially received journalists during the blackout, demonstrating the power of the CGT. Two years earlier, on May 1, 1906, syndicalist demonstrators engaged in a general strike, covering the streets of Paris, singing the proletarian anthem the “Internationale,” throwing rocks at police, and flaunting their working-class roots.1 As a major player in an incipient proletarian public sphere different from its more staid bourgeois counterpart, the CGT combined socialism and anarchism with popular traditions of carnival and an avant-garde concern with individual authenticity and freedom through autonomously controlled labor unions. Syndicalists in France, like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), their counterparts in the United States, cultivated a distinctive working-class culture, integrating politics and aesthetics through their proletarian dress, playful and colorful demonstrations in the streets, and a language of labor based on personal fulfillment at the workplace. In opposition to reformist socialism or state-centered

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Marxism, syndicalists contended that workers would be moved to action not by their economic interests but through the mythology of a general strike of all laborers that would usher in a new worker society. Their aesthetic politics pointed toward a democratic, playful, and participatory vision of society. Yet French syndicalist ideas of dramatic political actions, rejection of parliamentary democracy, sympathy for proletarian violence, and mythological thinking were embraced by the fascist leaders Mussolini and Hitler, who turned aesthetics and politics in a new direction. The National Socialist Congress in Nuremberg, Germany, early September 1934. The enormous audience falls silent as Adolf Hitler strides to the podium to deliver a speech to his Nazi followers in a stadium decorated with a giant eagle and adorned with colorful, massive swastikas. Hitler enters the stage; a band plays the “Badenweler” march followed by Beethoven’s “Egmont” overture, as enormous Klieg lights illuminate the platform.2 Hitler’s passionate speech amid a deafening chorus of “Sieg Heils” not only eulogizes the Aryan master race but also emphasizes the centrality of labor in creating the thousand-year Reich. Immortalized in Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous cinematic masterpiece, Triumph of the Will, the Nuremberg Congress represented what the Frankfurt School theorist Walter Benjamin designated the “aestheticization of politics,” where the dramatic gesture and charismatic leader turn politics into theater, a nationalist spectacle based on a mythologized history of shared German blood and soil, severed from any connection to rationality and debate.3 Hitler and his forerunner Mussolini elaborated a new kind of aesthetic politics, a “politics of the piazza” where the public was conceived as a passive audience to be emotionally manipulated rather than persuaded. Hitler and Mussolini saw themselves as artists shaping the masses, their followers grouped around the  all-powerful, hypnotic leader, where community and submission reinforce one another. Their fascist aesthetic politics glorified violence, demanded surrender to the leader, and idealized death.4 May 1968 in Paris. A student protest turns into a mass uprising in France, culminating in the largest strike in French history, as upwards of ten million workers left their jobs, and French society faced a social and economic crisis. Though syndicalist ideas, from demands for higher wages to labor control of the workplace, were important in this uprising, this was a new kind of protest, as postindustrial conflicts around

Introduction ▪ 3

freedom of expression, communication, and information began to displace the labor battles between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. Demonstrators identified not only with the labor militant, but with the thirdworld revolutionary who challenged the power of the West. Though demonstrators often used Marxist language to describe their demands, they engaged in a new kind of aesthetic politics that informed their alternative vision of society. The dramatic gestures of protesters were complemented by graffiti such as “Free the imagination,” “Workers of the World, Enjoy,” and “Take your desires for reality” that were scrawled on walls throughout the Latin quarter in Paris. Demonstrators wished to break free of the instrumental reason and bureaucratization of both capitalism and Soviet-style communism and create a new type of society. Many of them reinterpreted Leon Trotsky’s idea of permanent revolution to mean living life as a perpetual carnival, a playful and joyous continual celebration.5 Aesthetics and politics merged, as desires to realize an authentic self and live life as if it were a work of art were promulgated alongside demands for the overthrow of capitalism and the end of American imperialism. Criticizing mass media for creating a consumerist society of the spectacle, demonstrators wanted to found a new community outside of the manipulated and manufactured desires promoted by advertising and capital. Late November and early December 1999, Seattle. Seemingly out of nowhere, at least 40,000 people took to the streets to protest the policies of the World Trade Organization. Demonstrators pointed to the lack of democracy and accountability of this international organization and how its practices of globalization favor corporations over workers and impoverish poor countries throughout the globe. Labor unions were well represented, but environmental activists, farmers, students, and many other groups from countries all over the world also participated in these demonstrations. Marxist language among participants all but disappeared as concerns about economic exploitation were joined by a new postmodern vocabulary of respect for difference and indigenous rights. Artistic ideas and practices were everywhere, as a carnival mentality ruled the streets. With drums beating in the background, the group Dyke Action playfully reworked media images of women, marching topless through Seattle. Members of the Humane Society dressed as human butterflies on stilts or as cardboard sea turtles paraded through the streets, performing for the television cameras, while

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the “Raging Grannies” sang protest songs dressed in shawls, long skirts, and bonnets. All of these different groups were allowed to develop their own type of protest, their own distinctive style, with little centralized control of the demonstrations. Though largely peaceful, the dramatic aesthetic gestures of these demonstrations sometimes took a violent turn, as black-clad anarchists trashed stores owned by multinational corporations such as McDonald’s and Starbucks.6 The Seattle demonstrations were followed by a much larger protest of 200,000– 300,000 people at the meetings of the G-8 in Genoa, Italy, in July 2001. Later rallies also took place in Prague, London, and other cities where the governmental leaders of the wealthy countries met, though these demonstrations weakened after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States. This global justice movement gave rise to a new organizational center, the World Social Forum, as a meeting place for discussions regarding alternative visions of globalization. These are four examples of major social protests that dramatically challenged the dominant capitalist society, often in the name of labor (even the Nazis cynically used socialist ideas in their propaganda). But they are more than labor movements; they reveal the ambivalent ties of labor, aesthetics, and politics that have increasingly characterized many social movements in Europe and the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They raise some central questions for our era. First, what does it mean for public life and social movements when politics is increasingly characterized by the dramatic gesture, the resonant image, and the search for an authentic and fulfilling experience, alongside the adjudication of interests or rational debate? As politics and drama have come together, art and performance often provide new and creative ways of understanding self and society and influence the very structure and dynamics of social protest, as in the 1999 Seattle global justice demonstrations and May 1968 in Paris. But the “aestheticization of politics” can diminish political and rational discourse, with the worst-case scenario being fascism or the destruction of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by the September 11 terrorists, whose mass killings were also a symbolic attack on the bastions of American capitalism and militarism. The aesthetic politics of these movements also challenges fundamental notions of the nature of democratic public spheres that are ostensibly based on rational debate and a search for consensus, as public spaces take on aspects of theater

Introduction ▪ 5

and become sites of performance and playful activity, which can take progressive or xenophobic and racist forms. Second, what are the historical origins of this aesthetic politics, and how does it become manifest in social movements? I tie the rise of modern aesthetic politics to the crisis of modernity, especially regarding debates about the nature of subjectivity and knowledge in the wake of industrialization and the decline of tradition in the West. Aesthetic politics owes much to avant-garde artists, who were central participants in this crisis. They elaborated critical versions of art and individualism, and rethought everyday life in terms of aesthetic categories. While aesthetic politics draws on bohemian notions of expressive authenticity and living life as a work of art that opposes bourgeois, commercial culture, it is also defined by its relationship to popular culture, especially traditions and practices of carnival and play. These aesthetic ideas and practices were politicized in contested public spaces and social movements from revolutionary syndicalism to the global justice movement, though this aesthetic dimension takes on varied meanings in different social contexts. If we follow these four movements chronologically, they gradually drop a Marxist or nationalist language of revolution in favor of a more postmodern discourse of respect for difference and local concerns. While these changes mirror the transition from Fordist to post-Fordist capitalism, and transformations in the notion of art from an emphasis on authentic self-expression to postmodern criticisms of the idea of the artistic subject, aesthetic ideas and practices remain central to each movement. Indeed, the aesthetic dimension becomes even more important as mass media pervade postmodern capitalism. In this book, I discuss the distinctive aesthetic politics that developed within these four movements. I define aesthetic politics as the use of aesthetic criteria from notions of authenticity to the resonance of dramatic images that provide “the common faculty of feeling, of experiencing” for a social group. It informs the understanding and practice of politics, the latter defined not only in terms of representative institutions but also concerning a broadly “politicized” public life.7 Aesthetic politics appeals to and relies upon identification with emotions, visual styles, and images when constructing political activities and ideas. While I am most interested in the role of aesthetic politics in social movements, I also examine the relationship between aesthetics and

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public life, the rise of a distinctive aesthetic sphere, and the importance of popular culture for social protest.

Aesthetics Aesthetics is an indeterminate term, and it becomes even more complicated when tied to politics. Philosophers and art historians have traditionally defined aesthetics in terms of the nature of beauty and taste. Art historians often take a specialized approach to art, viewing the history of aesthetics in terms of changing perceptions of beauty, tensions between high and low art, and subjective versus objective and formal understandings of the art work. Aesthetics has always been tied to the senses, concerned with how we know the world through our bodies, respond to sensation, and form judgments of taste.8 Most abstractly, aesthetics refers to the analysis of form apart from content. Kant’s equation of aesthetics with the particularity of sense perception rather than universal conceptual thinking clarifies this perspective. To be aesthetically intelligent and sensitive means developing a distinctive sense of taste or judgment, where the unity of disparate parts is not trapped within the boundaries of preexisting conceptual categories, but the subject imaginatively weaves different meanings into new and contingent wholes, based on the particularity of the aesthetic experience.9 While aesthetics claims its own laws and logic, in the modern era it has frequently been tied to politics. No doubt the use of dramatic aesthetic imagery and display from pageants to parades has always been a part of the repertoire of ruling elites, but only in the modern era does aesthetic politics become self-consciously thematized, infused into everyday life, and deliberately appropriated by oppositional movements. We have already encountered Benjamin’s interpretation of Nazism as the “aestheticization of politics,” the undemocratic construction of a repressive social unity through aesthetic means. More broadly, nationalists everywhere have attempted to enlist art and aesthetic projects in constructing a nationalist identity, and in this capacity art can sometimes become an elitist endeavor that reinforces existing social inequality. Aesthetics may create a sense of common culture that transcends particular histories while camouflaging social conflict, opposing popular culture, and acting as a defensive block to public discussion of issues of race, gender, and class.10 Yet others see aesthetics as an almost

Introduction ▪ 7

a priori form, a kind of politicized Kantianism, based on the harmonious ordering of the chaos of political and social life. Hannah Arendt argues that aesthetic judgment allows people to move beyond the limitations of their individual selves, that an aesthetic capacity allows citizens to see the world through the eyes of others. An aesthetically sensitive citizenry can grasp the common good, live together in a vibrant political community, and create shared culture and ethical thought.11 Elaine Scarry echoes this idea, contending that those citizens who develop an appreciation for aesthetic categories of balance and proportion also develop a disinterested taste for fairness, justice, and equality in political life.12 Finally, the aesthetic emphasis on creativity and respect for the integrity of particular experiences and identities can be counterposed to the instrumental, bureaucratic world of contemporary society. Aesthetics can be transformative and transgressive, “defamiliarizing the world” and inventing a sense of new political and social possibilities. Like its sister activity play, it can take to the streets, parks, and other public venues and inform a vision of social life that opposes capitalist and bureaucratic instrumental reason in favor of a qualitatively different social, political, and personal world. I emphasize both the creative and order-giving aspects of aesthetics in my discussion of public life and social movements. In my view, aesthetic understandings privilege sense perception over universal conceptual thinking and advance particular judgments attuned to specific contexts and objects over more generalizing approaches to knowledge. Yet aesthetic experience occurs in a communal and social context and provides a specifically social awareness that has more to do with the processes, feelings, and activities involved in “living aesthetically” rather than with the representational meanings of the artistic object itself. Aesthetic ideas from authenticity to living life as a work of art are not properties of an essential individual, but are socially constructed visions of self and society that arise in particular social circumstances, and were elaborated in the aesthetic sphere.

The Aesthetic Sphere Drawing on Max Weber and Jürgen Habermas, I utilize the analytical tool of a distinctive aesthetic sphere to provide historical and social contexts for these issues. The aesthetic sphere, arising alongside the

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scientific and normative realms in a differentiated modernity, is a counter-rationalizing realm of pleasure, play, and creativity, characterized by influences as diverse as the practices of bohemian artists and Kantian and Nietzschean philosophy. It is particularly important in developing distinctive ideas of the self and knowledge that play an increasingly prominent role in personal and public life. As Habermas argues, a specific understanding of individual authenticity oriented toward particular experiences emerges in this realm. In his words, the aesthetic sphere involves the “authentic interpretation of needs, interpretations that have to be renewed in each historically changed set of circumstances.”13 Yet Habermas and Weber do not adequately delineate the history of the aesthetic sphere, grasp the distinctive tensions around ideas of subjectivity and knowledge that arose in this sphere, analyze the role of image and performance in the aesthetic realm, nor address the importance of marginal urban spaces that allowed artists to develop their work outside of institutions such as the art school. I turn to thinkers such as Cornelius Castoriadis and Michel Maffesoli to address these issues, for they examine the imagistic and performative dimensions of the aesthetic sphere neglected by Habermas and Weber. I also explore how the artists and intellectuals within this aesthetic sphere reflected upon and thematized the political implications of aesthetics, and the ways in which their ideas and practices were deployed outside of this realm. Beginning in the early twentieth century, philosophers and bohemian artists developed ideas of aesthetic authenticity emphasizing wholeness and sincerity in opposition to the cynicism and shallowness promoted by the commercialism of capitalism. Yet this modernist notion of authenticity, important to theorists as diverse as Marx and John Dewey and recast as a critique of worker alienation by many labor militants, was not the only notion of the self developed within the aesthetic sphere. The avant-garde also drew on a kind of postmodern view philosophically expressed by Nietzsche that critiqued all notions of an essential, authentic self as a seat of action, embracing instead a celebration of a fluid self of transgression and fragmentation. This latter approach became increasingly prevalent after 1960 in the aesthetic sphere. This postmodern vision of the self has an ambivalent relationship to commercial culture, for it enjoys playing with images and finds pleasure and delight in such activities.14

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I also see the aesthetic sphere generating unique ideas about knowledge. In this aesthetic realm, knowledge is oriented toward the particular case rather than the universal generalization and toward sense experience rather than abstract concepts. Though aesthetic ideas are oriented toward particular circumstances, they are not always consistent. The history of the aesthetic sphere demonstrates a continuum from a modernist, Kantian orientation toward the self and knowledge based on the search for coherence and harmony and Nietzschean postmodern, transgressive understanding of the self and knowledge that emphasizes the centrality of fragmentation and difference in our experience. Theorists such as Castoriadis also point to the role of fantasy and desire in structuring postmodern knowledge.15 These different types of aesthetic orientations have influenced both the ideas and practices of social movements. As art critics and historians from Clement Greenberg to T. J. Clark state, modernist art beginning in the nineteenth century developed a critique of capitalist society as alienating and inauthentic that meshed well with socialist criticisms of society.16 Later postmodern criticisms of representational artistic practices moved away from this socialist orientation, intersecting with postmodern philosophical and social critiques of essentialist ideas of subjectivity and the repressive homogeneity and normalizing logic of contemporary disciplinary societies.

Popular Culture and Carnival The goal of the aesthetic sphere is not a communicative consensual community, but the cultivation of an authentic self and/or varied and distinctive experiences. Such practices are often created in marginal spaces in the interstices of cities, as artists attempt to avoid the commercialization of their craft. Yet as artists and bohemians have left their specialized enclaves and mass media have become increasingly pervasive, themes from the aesthetic sphere have reshaped public life. But these aesthetic ideas could become politically powerful only when tied to communal and solidaristic practices and social movements outside of the aesthetic sphere. Popular culture, especially its traditions of carnival, provided the terrain and context for such a politicized aesthetic politics to be cultivated. Popular culture historically supported a distinctive type of playful and emotional practice, a form of mutual

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display that is not based on shared traditions or scientific discourse. This type of theatrical solidarity differs from Habermasian communicative action or functionalist normative integration. It is less coherent, more indeterminate, more visual, and more experiential than these other understandings of social cohesion. The idea of play best captures this social practice, for it is a form of doing as well as speaking and encourages creativity and the emergence of new identities. Deriving especially from traditions of carnival, this playful solidarity informs public arenas that foster diverse visions of public life. It is tied to actual spaces such as streets, parks, and other areas. Though often created for commercial or transportation purposes, these spaces provide arenas of display where style is created and presented. Popular culture supplies a fruitful terrain for alternative constructions of social identity. The practice of carnival from medieval times to early capitalism was one such space for opposition to discipline and social control. In the contemporary era, scholars from Donna Gaines to Paul Willis and Dick Hebdige demonstrate that unconventional identities are constructed in marginal urban and suburban spaces, where distinctive forms of culture that draw on media and popular culture provide common symbolic meanings, a rhythm of life, and a playful solidarity for subgroups from bike boys to goths and punks. Style becomes a symbolic code that expresses these new identities. Punk music and appearance contributed to an alternative public space for white youths, defined more by style than by discourse. Much the same can be said of rap and hip-hop. They provide a form of common literacy for many young African Americans, helping to reawaken them to their Afrocentric traditions.17 In my view, popular culture and the aesthetic sphere merge on the terrain of civil society and social movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bohemian ideas of the self and knowledge intersect with a new playful solidarity. This intersection recasts public spaces as realms of dramatic performance and mutual display. In these aesthetic public spaces, meanings are fluid and particular rather than stable and universal, deriving from emotions as much as from rationality. There is little idea of a shared public or mutual interest within these realms. Public life increasingly appears to take on the form of theater, and an aesthetic politics becomes increasingly prominent.

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Aesthetics and Social Movements These notions of theatrical public spaces and aesthetic politics have especially important implications for the dynamics of social movements. Aesthetic politics provides alternatives to the material and cultural incentives usually invoked as reasons for engaging in political activity and social movements. It supplies new strategic options for social movements, for dramatic images and street performances can be used to draw attention to the movement, recruit new members, and satirize the state and other powerful elites, while implicitly prefiguring a new society. These images often provide the “frames” by which movement participants perceive the world. The aesthetic politics of social movements views public life as a public stage, where mutual display and performance often trump rational debate, and urban streets become sites of festival and carnival. It redefines politics to mean changing everyday life as much as devising particular policy proposals or seizing state power. My discussion of social movements seems to mirror the familiar argument that issues concerning aesthetics and culture become more important as “new social movements” based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and the like replace the labor movement as major contributors to social change. My view certainly has affinities with this perspective, though it is a bit different. I emphasize the distinctive aesthetic moment in social movements. I also discuss historical changes in the types of aesthetic politics associated with these different movements. While I stress that there was an aesthetic dimension to many labor movements in the past, the aesthetic politics of these labor movements were tied to critiques of alienation based on ideas of authenticity and an expressive subjectivity that were not allowed free rein under capitalism, and secondarily to more transgressive ideas about ruptures with dominant cultural forms. I will examine the French syndicalist CGT in the Belle Époque in this context, as well as the American IWW.18 The tie of aesthetics and politics has also contributed to some of the most vicious movements in history, as Nazism demonstrates. I will explore the fascist aestheticization of politics and its role in the Nazi ascension to power. While aesthetic ideas of authenticity and expressive subjectivity remain important in contemporary social movements, as in many forms of identity politics, the transgressive dimension of aesthetic

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politics, with its emphasis on identification with images, respect for cultural differences, and stress on the overturning of accepted identity categories, has become more prominent in the context of a new postmodern culture and society. Movements from ACT UP to the global movement for justice transgress conventions and re-create and recode private relationships in a new forum, often utilizing theatrical and playful forms of performance in their demonstrations. Modern culture becomes a contested arena, from fashion to music. The playful dimensions of public life do not necessarily adapt to existing values, but transform them. They can change the very ways that we conceive of the self, sexuality, dress, and language creating a new aesthetics of existence, in Foucault’s terms.19 The nature of human rights, globalization, and the like will also be affected, as neoliberal or universalist understandings of globalization are challenged by groups that have different visions of social and public life.20 Like worker and populist movements of the past, they offer the possibility of breaking into history and “turning the world upside down.”21 I will explore in particular May 1968 in Paris and the contemporary global justice movement as examples of these new kinds of movements. Finally, in this book I hope to bring sociological thinking, especially regarding social movements, into a dialogue with postmodern approaches. Such conversations have been far too infrequent, to the detriment of a vibrant contemporary sociology, in my view.

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I

Theoretical Reflections

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1 Public Life, Aesthetics,

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and Social Theory

he nature and quality of public life in the contemporary West has been the subject of numerous, controversial studies. Whether bemoaning the fate of the modern public or celebrating its potential openness and solidarity,1 many authors define and theorize public life in terms of shared rational consensus or a common culture, regardless of their political orientation.2 In contrast, I argue that the public realm must be understood in large part as an arena of play and performance alongside its other dimensions. Publics are volatile combinations of aesthetic and political imagination and experimentation rather than simply realms for rational debate and cultural consensus. They are now sites of aesthetic politics, as aesthetic criteria from notions of authenticity to the resonance of dramatic images inform the understanding and practice of politics. Emotions, visual styles, and images are central to political activities and ideas. Most approaches to public life neglect this aesthetic dimension. This chapter reviews various theories of public life, concentrating on those that address at least implicitly the role of aesthetics in understanding social life. I begin with several dominant sociological and political perspectives on these issues. Pierre Bourdieu, Jürgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser, Jeffrey Alexander, and Richard Sennett all develop differentiated notions of society that have an aesthetic dimension to them,

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and Alexander in particular conceives of public life as akin to a stage for performance rather than a sphere of rational debate. Yet none of these authors adequately theorize the types of aesthetic politics that have increasingly influenced public life in the West. The cultural studies perspective, especially the notion of “invisible aesthetics” associated with Paul Willis, provides a richer and more politically informed analysis of the role of aesthetics in social life. Yet his ahistorical perspective also underplays the importance of image, fantasy, and desire, which are so central to contemporary aesthetic politics. Postmodern theorists have addressed these issues, but without a good understanding of the meaning of aesthetic politics and the importance of playful solidarity. Cornelius Castoriadis, with his theory of the autonomous society, and Michel Maffesoli’s analysis of contemporary neo-tribalism provide a better understanding of the role of imagination and creativity in shaping contemporary politics. But their perspectives are limited in many ways, for they too are ahistorical and do not address changes in aesthetic politics over time. I end with a brief discussion of my approach to the relationship of aesthetic politics and public life.

Bourdieu and the Production of Culture Most sociological studies of aesthetics adopt the production of culture approach. They explore the social context of art and how it functions in society. In this perspective, artists are reliant on a system of relationships, institutions, and markets which define the nature of art. There is not an intrinsic “artistic work” that arises naturally from the creative genius of the artist; rather, art is socially defined by particular groups with specific interests. The definitions of art are contested, tied to the power struggles between different groups.3 Art worlds depend upon markets, distributions, social conventions, and patronage for their very existence. Pierre Bourdieu develops the most sophisticated analysis of artistic practices from this perspective. For Bourdieu, as art becomes autonomous in the nineteenth century, its own particular field arises that defines specific criteria for success or failure. Works of art and the career trajectory of particular artists and genres emerge from the intersection of habitus and field. Artists compete for status and power

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within this artistic field, taking up relations to one another and to particular genres. For Bourdieu, the field of art is constantly changing, as new artists contest orthodoxies and create new genres. While the field of art is characterized by conflicts between older and younger artists and by battles over high art versus popular culture, it is primarily structured by competition between orthodox artists and those who transgress these conventions. With artists such as Manet, Baudelaire, and Flaubert, who confronted state-supported definitions of art in the nineteenth century, the ideal of the autonomous, bohemian artist who would continually shock the bourgeois world was born. As Bourdieu writes, “Thus the invention of the pure aesthetic is inseparable from the invention of a new social personality, that of the great professional artist who combines, in a union as fragile as it is improbable, a sense of transgression and freedom from conformity with the rigour of an extremely strict discipline of living and of work, which presupposes bourgeois ease and celibacy.”4 Despite their rebelliousness, the success of Manet and others was tied to bourgeois cultural and social capital inseparable from these artists’ elite backgrounds. Moreover, they could not exist as artists without social conditions that promoted an independent field of artistic practice, such as increased schooling and a large number of unemployed artists who sought new avenues of aesthetic expression. Bourdieu’s analysis is insightful in many ways, especially his recognition that the artistic field is characterized by a constant conflict between orthodoxy and transgression and his contention that this literary realm was as riveted by power conflicts as any other field. However, his analysis is too instrumental and deterministic. As Ron Eyerman and Lisa McCormick state, Bourdieu and the production of culture perspectives “reify the institutional spaces surrounding art and overestimate the external determinants of action and belief.” They do not understand art as an “experiential space for imagination, creativity, and critical reflection.” 5 Moreover, Bourdieu does not explore how the particular aesthetic interpretations of the subject, representation, and per formance influenced not only artists but all of social life. It is necessary to broaden the discussion of aesthetic politics and tie it to a more in-depth understanding of public life and social change.

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The Public Sphere A more fruitful discussion of modern Western publics can be found in the enormously influential work of Jürgen Habermas on the public sphere. First published in German in 1962, the 1989 English /American translation of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere coincided with a groundswell of social movements claiming to represent a new vision of public life, exemplified most forcefully in Poland’s Solidarity labor movement. These movements reinforced the theoretical ferment that placed the notion of the public at the center of social theory and study. Habermas raises some interesting ideas about aesthetics, though they remain marginal to his overall theoretical approach. Habermas argues that the public sphere, an arena outside of the state and the family, arose in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and the United States in coffee houses, salons, and other places where unimpeded conversation took place and new forms of criticism of existing power could be voiced. Moreover, as capitalism developed, property owners attempted to secure the necessary information regarding commodity exchange in the market, thereby demanding more information from the press. Through newspapers, a large-scale, critical public grew which contributed to the formation of public opinion and promoted discussion based on principled argument. This in turn encouraged a more professional criticism in the public sphere, where law was interpreted as the expression of reason. These new public spaces, where private persons came together to discuss issues of communal importance, became the origin of public opinion, a new source of political legitimacy in the West. This was not just another rhetorical strategy camouflaging elite interests, for it postulated a form of public authority that could guide state decisions without abolishing government. By bringing the control of the state under the guidelines of the franchise and an opinion guaranteed by public discourse, any rule of law had to answer to the sovereignty of the people.6 In his more recent writings on the public sphere, like almost all writers on this topic, Habermas recognizes that any sense of shared public life, or social solidarity in an older sociological vocabulary, is more fragile and diverse now than in the past. For Habermas, issues of general scope cannot be resolved on the basis of taken-for-granted

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cultural traditions; they require public arguments about the goals of a good society. Yet his “discourse ethics” still locates the basis for social solidarity in the creation of a shared rational consensus. The public sphere grants citizens equal access to discussions of common interest, guaranteed by rational and fair legal and democratic procedures. The equal treatment of every person and universal human rights are necessary for the public sphere to function. According to Habermas, in the contemporary era, the public sphere must be broadened beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. The rights of citizens and noncitizens have to become legitimated in international democratic institutions that take precedence over the particularities of the nation-state, an issue that will only become more prominent and contentious with increasing global migrations.7

Nancy Fraser: Rethinking the Public Sphere Especially in his early work, Habermas ignores issues of the construction of identity in the public sphere, the existence of many different subaltern public spheres, and the interplay of discourses and interests that might not be amenable to consensus. Nancy Fraser takes up these arguments. She contends that Habermas does not examine multiple and contested public spheres, especially subaltern publics. Created by disenfranchised groups, these realms often raise issues around identity and solidarity that are not easily met by the dominant public sphere. Fraser also explores the shifting boundaries of public and private and discusses their implications for identity formation. Finally, she develops a distinctive analysis of justice that attempts to capture the varied dimensions of inequality neglected by Habermas. Like other feminist theorists such as Iris Marion Young, she integrates postmodern concerns with difference with conventional commitments to a more universal feminist project. Further, Fraser links this revised feminism to socialist ideals of socio-economic equality. She argues that feminist theory should avoid celebrating differences based on race or sexual orientation, and aim instead to generalize claims about women that take into account specific historical and cultural contexts and that are always subject to revision. Fraser agrees that while the fantasy of a completely transparent community is dangerous, some exclusions are better than others. Historical context

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determines this evaluation, as democracies, for all their faults, are more inclusive communities than dictatorships or fascist regimes, for example. She believes that her perspective envisions new, more egalitarian social arrangements while protecting the importance of differences among individuals and groups in the context of multiple public spheres. For Fraser, such goals cannot be reached without fundamentally transforming public life.8 Fraser utilizes these insights to rethink the nature of Habermas’s idea of the public sphere. According to Fraser, Habermas posits a model of a single public sphere, and he does not explore the nature and dimensions of competing public spheres. He does not recognize Antonio Gramsci’s point that the public sphere can be the arena of hegemony, allowing the rule of elites through consensus rather than by force. Moreover, feminist theorists demonstrate that rational deliberation in the public sphere can mask domination, for “bracketing” differences among groups within the public sphere does not foster participation, but works to the advantage of dominant social groups. Participants are placed in a rational/legal straightjacket that effectively bars identity claims and issues from public discussion. Fraser states that a focus on multiple, competing publics promotes the idea of democracy better than the notion of a single, overarching public sphere. Not only do subaltern publics raise new issues for public discussion, but public spheres are also arenas for the formation and enactment of social identities through social performance and display. The public/private distinction also is not clear-cut, and often permits oppressive social relations defined as private, such as sexual abuse or workplace discrimination, to escape public scrutiny, and effectively shields dominant groups from criticism. For Fraser, the definition of private and public, and what issues should be of common concern, can only be decided through debate and contestation. Rethinking the public sphere also means reassessing the leftist political project in the context of new circumstances. Fraser contends that contemporary leftist ideas and practices are at an impasse because of conflicts between identity politics and more conventional, universal claims for economic justice, regardless of race and gender. She states that these are false dichotomies, for identity politics criticizes claims to a counterfeit universalism, rather than the concept of universalism itself. She develops a critical theory of recognition that can incorporate

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demands for the redistribution of economic resources, distinguishing those groups that advance social equality from those that inhibit it.9 Groups defined by race and gender share economic and cultural oppression, for they do not have the economic benefits of dominant groups while they also lack the same possibilities for social recognition. Fraser realizes that different politics result from a focus on economic oppression and discrimination and demands for social recognition, though the two can work in tandem. Women and African Americans, for example, both require redistribution and recognition as remedies. She states that transformative remedies for injustice that restructure the “generative frameworks” of class and recognition can emancipate people. For recognition, the best theoretical approach is queer theory, while socialism is the preferred solution for the transformation of the economic sphere. While deconstructive feminism considers liberation as the freeing of identity from coercive definitions and the recognition of multiple shifting differences, this is consistent with the socialist/feminist goal of social equality. Both of these perspectives demand an egalitarian orientation, whether in culture or the economy, that can only be achieved by transforming these realms.10 In her most recent work, Fraser has reconceptualized her ideas about justice and the public sphere in the context of a globalizing world. She argues that a new transnational public sphere needs to be theorized that moves beyond Habermas’s abstract commitment to constitutional patriotism. For Fraser, public sphere arguments have assumed the existence of an intact nation-state that can domestically implement the demands of public opinion. But a “post-Westphalian” globalized world, punctuated by global protestors such as the Mexican Zapatistas and the global justice movement, have made such assumptions outmoded. Fraser recognizes that this new global context means rethinking her arguments about injustice based on the unequal distribution of economic resources and the cultural hierarchies that prevent full participation in public life. Fraser adds a third principle, the lack of political representation, to her criticisms of injustice. Political decision rules provide the “stage on which struggles over distribution and recognition are played out,” and they can deny groups public voice in decisions that affect them.11 Such “misrepresentation” is especially true in a global context, where the global poor are influenced by the policies and actions of multinational corporations and powerful nation-states, but have no say

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in these policies. The demands of the global poor are often confined to the weak domestic states that they inhabit, and such states have little influence in international affairs. To combat such political injustice, Fraser advocates an “all subjected principle,” so that all should be able to  politically participate who share “joint subjection to a structure of governance that sets the ground rules that govern their interaction.”12 Such a principle applies beyond the boundaries of the nation-state to all those influenced by global policies and decisions.13 The “all-subjected principle” requires a transnational public sphere of unconstrained political debate and formal institutional power to implement the results of these discussions. She sees the seeds of such a transnational public sphere in the World Social Forum, where the poor have equal standing with wealthier nations in evaluating and combating the effects of neoliberal policies, though she recognizes that the Forum has little institutional power to influence globalization policies at this point in time. In sum, Fraser argues that an effective notion of public life requires a new transnational public sphere based on the elimination of socio-economic inequality, cultural hierarchies, and political misrepresentation. She states that a multiplicity of publics is better for democracy than a single public sphere, and that private and public boundaries are porous, their definitions subject to debate and discussion. Moreover, she demonstrates great insight in her call for a new leftist political project that combines cultural and socio-economic issues without privileging one over the other, recognizing that identity formation is central to the dynamics of any public sphere. Fraser also realizes that the spread of global mass media has meant that public spheres are now realms of hybridity where multiple identities overlap, and they are dominated by visual images that make the idea of a shared, rational public hard to imagine. Yet Fraser does not integrate the rise of this visual culture into her analysis of the public sphere, nor does she develop ideas about new types of solidarity that might accompany such a culture. She does not explore the role of distinctively aesthetic issues in the public sphere or in social movements, and how this aesthetic dimension has influenced new conceptions of identity and authenticity while reshaping understandings of politics, public life, and social movements. Habermas and Weber have addressed this aesthetic dimension of modernity in their notions of the aesthetic sphere, though

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they too do not develop adequate notions of how aesthetics influences public life today. Further, Habermas’s work on the literary sphere offers a preliminary if inadequate analysis of a type of aesthetic politics.

Habermas and the Literary Sphere In his early work on the public sphere, Habermas recognizes that the rise of this arena involved more than the rational analysis of politics. As private persons came together to discuss issues of communal importance, they initially addressed literary matters. This type of discussion eventually became public opinion, a new form of political legitimacy in the West. Several authors view Habermas’s analysis of the literary dimension of public life as a model for an aesthetic public sphere.14 They note that Habermas recognizes the importance of a distinctive bourgeois subjectivity formed through the cultivation of an intimate sphere that arose in eighteenth-century Britain. This realm encouraged discussions of new literary forms such as novels in salons and coffeehouses, which presaged the norms of free criticism and debate of the political public sphere. While Habermas’s recognition of the centrality of identity formation associated with literature and letters is indeed salutary, there are two problems with his approach and those who draw on it. One, they downplay the specifically aesthetic understandings of identity and display, and their distinctive tensions, which are not reducible to rational analysis, in favor of the intersubjective discussion of literary works as a prelude to the formation of a political public sphere. This leads to the second problem. In Hegelian fashion, Habermas sees discussions of art as a precursor to a more encompassing politicized rationality. For Habermas, the literary sphere is destined to disappear as a “true” political public sphere is formed. Similarly, those attempting to resurrect Habermas’s ideas of a literary public sphere grant it little distinctive autonomy and view it through the lens of politics, seeing it as a disguised realm of political discourse played out in aesthetic categories, conflating political positions with aesthetic practices, and vastly oversimplifying the complex connections of the aesthetic sphere and political positions and actions. A still problematic but more systematic interpretation of aesthetics occurs in Habermas’s reconstruction of Weber’s theory of rationalization.

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Habermas argues that Weber’s differentiated scientific, legal, and aesthetic spheres, when viewed as ideas, form “cultural value spheres.” Linked with interests, they establish “orders of life” that regulate the possession of goods.15 The distinctive inner logics of these realms create the particular spheres of science, jurisprudence, and artistic enterprise organized through the market. Habermas elaborates and extends Weber’s argument that different types of rationality are at work in each of these realms. For Habermas, every sphere must debate validity claims to procure legitimacy. The scientific realm analyzes facts and arguments in a cognitively objectified manner. The legal or normative sphere involves legal and moral understandings of interpersonal relationships. The aesthetic sphere posits “a subjectivism freed from imperatives of objectification in dealing with individualized needs, desires, and feelings.”16 While each of these spheres raises validity claims that must be socially recognized, their logics, evaluations, and practices must remain autonomous from one another so that they maintain their distinctive integrity. They transmit specialized knowledge from one generation to the next while also connecting expert cultures to the languages of everyday life.

Weber and Habermas: The Aesthetic Sphere Habermas contends that Weber does not sufficiently explore the communicative and communal dimensions of rationalization and differentiation, reducing reason to a bureaucratic understanding of social life oriented toward calculation and efficiency. For Habermas, modernity is an unfinished project, which can be completed only with the institutionalization of communicative action. However, both Weber and Habermas, rather uneasily, see art as an alternative to instrumental rationality. For Weber, the artist provided a means to escape this instrumentally rationalized life. According to Weber an “esthetic sphere” is one of the distinctive arenas of a differentiated modernity that challenges the ethic of brotherliness characteristic of the great world religions as well as the imperatives of a rationalized life. In modern societies, art vies with religion as a means of achieving salvation, providing a this-worldly deliverance

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from the routines of everyday life and instrumental rationalization. Salvation religions devalue the aesthetic concern with form as detracting from the communication of meaning, and they fear the artist’s rejection of moral codes. In the aesthetic sphere, judgments of moral intent are transformed into opinions of taste. These judgments not only preclude possibilities of discussion of the relative merits of taste but also conceive of moral norms as a type of coercion antithetical to genuine creativity.17 While Weber hints at the expressive ideals of this realm, they are made explicit by Habermas. For Habermas, the aesthetic sphere is a realm of self-expression, concerned with individual authenticity, institutionalized in art worlds. As the artistic arena becomes more autonomous, a new understanding of subjectivity arises, promoting a bohemian and countercultural cultivation of eroticism and self-exploration. But these countercultures cannot be internally rationalized; they are “parasitic” on other realms. This arena, and the artistic countercultures associated with it, have little influence on society as a whole, as they are concerned with inner-worldly salvation rather than social issues.18 This notion of a distinctive aesthetic sphere is key to my interpretation of aesthetic politics. But its implications for politics are not sufficiently developed by either Habermas or Weber. Further, Habermas does not adequately address the social implications of art and aesthetic creativity for public life. Ever fearful of a dedifferentiation of modernity to aesthetics, Habermas views art as a type of rationality distinct from moral and scientific reasoning. He ghettoizes aesthetic practices in this aesthetic sphere. Aesthetics remains an exceptional aspect of human experience because Habermas does not show how it might be grounded in everyday life. He radically distinguishes the prosaic tasks of coordinating social action from the aesthetic sensibility, which marginalizes the playful and expressive aspects of interaction in his social theory. He is suspicious of activities such as play and art that cannot be easily translated into the language of rational validity claims. His vision that societies reflexively progress through learning processes leaves little room for the possibility of social and psychic creativity. Habermas at times references the ideas of the earlier Frankfurt school theorist Walter Benjamin. Like Benjamin, he fears the aestheticization of politics, demonstrated most brutally in Nazism. But unlike

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Benjamin, he does not call for the politicization of aesthetics, nor does he develop a theory of the possible democratization of aesthetics, which can allow people to both criticize art and have access to it. Benjamin recognizes the importance of media images in everyday life in the modern West and calls for a critical understanding of these images. Yet he also sees that a more playful orientation to knowledge can be part of this new understanding, and aesthetics can contribute to emancipation. Benjamin regards a kind of anamnestic remembering as a spark for revolutionary action, redeeming the hopes of forgotten generations.19 This memory is not always joyful; frequently the collective memories of shared suffering bind a people. This mode of remembrance means rethinking the rational foundations of understanding, seeing the world in part in the context of intuitions sparked in part by childhood experiences and a knowledge of what has been lost in the past. Stories and “dialectical images” capture this process more successfully than does discursive argument. Thus, Benjamin believes, traditions of learning based on “high” culture should be displaced by “the utopian tradition of fairy tales, which instruct without dominating.”20 A critical understanding of meaning involves recovering the lost hopes of the past and playfully exploding the reified images of the present. Yet Benjamin has no systematic theory of public life that can illuminate the history and dynamics of aesthetic politics.

Civil Society and the Public Stage: Sennett and Alexander Richard Sennett and Jeffrey Alexander also recognize the importance of the aesthetic dimension of public life. They adopt the metaphor of the public sphere as a public stage, which highlights the affective and performative aspects of public life. Somewhat similar to Erving Goffman but moving beyond his microsociology to an analysis of public life on a grand historical and contemporary scale, they argue that individuals are actors as much as rational agents, engaging in dramatic selfpresentation that influences the practices and beliefs of society. To understand the history of modernity means focusing on these theatrical practices, as the public sphere is as much a realm of mutual display as an arena of rational collective action. Public spaces are places for the formation of identity as well as the creation of shared culture.

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In his classic work The Fall of Public Man, Sennett argues that the distinctiveness of the modern world lies in its attempts to make the private realm a place of authentic experience, and the implications of this expansion of authenticity to the public world. He contends that such concerns fracture the fragile balance of public and private realms, as the autonomy of public life is overwhelmed by the onslaught of psychological and intimate “private” categories that invade the public sphere.21 Public life becomes an arena of acting, where image trumps argument and substance. Categories based on intimacy undermine the “codes of impersonal meaning” that are necessary for the maintenance of a vibrant public life, for such codes allow individuals to sustain psychological distance from one another. The ideology of intimacy redefines public life as the “mutual revelation” of a collection of personalities sharing their innermost feelings, simultaneously preventing people from understanding their own interests and interacting with people who are different from them. Public actions are now evaluated in terms of the character and performances of public figures, not in terms of their rationality and the consequences of their actions. For Sennett, such characteristics of public and private life demonstrate the modern influence of narcissism. Sennett believes that narcissism governs society, which causes people to have difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality and encourages a self-absorption that collapses public and private realms. Sennett labels narcissism the “Protestant Ethic of modern times.” Narcissism, like the Protestant ethic but reformulated in a therapeutic key, emphasizes the feeling, authentic self as the standard by which to judge the world. Accordingly, people care about institutions only to the extent that personalities embody them, or to the degree that institutions influence their everyday life. He distinguishes such a narcissistic way of thinking from Marx’s dialectical approach, which requires a reflexive distance from the concerns of the self so that beliefs can be altered as social circumstances change. Sennett traces the fall of public man to the rise of capitalism and secularism in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States. As the cosmopolitan city arose in the precapitalist era, it created a rich public culture with open public spaces. People were able to interact without feeling the need to know the innermost secrets of others. Capitalism’s emphasis on wealth creation and mass production eroded

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this impersonal urban culture, as individuals came to believe that public life was inferior to the private world of the family and consumerism. Secularism, based on the immediacy of sensation, encouraged the search for clues behind appearance to find the true personality of the public figure. Sennett views psychological imagery becoming the major criteria for evaluating public events in the era of the 1848 Revolution in France, when public figures were assessed in terms of their authentic, personal commitment to the revolution rather than by their beliefs or actions. The ideology of intimacy has had dire effects on public life in the contemporary social world. For example, the attempts of city planners to create communities in impersonal urban areas only results in class and ethnic stratification by neighborhood, as spaces for cross-cultural interaction decline and people solely come to know others like themselves. The public elects a politician on the basis of its reactions to his or her personality, rather than to the politician’s convictions and programs. In this context, class as a category by which to understand collective identity declines in the face of ethnicity and personality. The contemporary electronic media advance these trends by encouraging social passivity and isolation on the part of the audience. In sum, as cities become less hospitable to public life, the narcissistic self becomes more important. An emphasis on authenticity and personality pervades private and public life. Yet this self cannot handle the burdens placed on it. As the individual retreats into a small circle of family and friends, she projects her psychological categories into public life, reinforcing the culture of narcissism and isolation. Societies with low levels of social interaction among different groups develop “destructive collective personalities” that inhibit communal solutions to social problems and undermine the capacity of groups to understand and fight the structure and impersonal foundations of injustice. In his most recent work, Sennett continues this theme, the ramifications of the decline of public life and any sense of shared responsibility and common purpose, tracing it through the new information economies of modern capitalism and the deterioration of the practice of craft in modern labor.22 His focus on the actual urban spaces where social interaction takes place, and how cities and social life change over time, is an important antidote to the more abstract discussions of

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public life found in Habermas. However, despite his attention to urban space, he does not address how such spaces promote new types of social interaction and mutual display. Bemoaning these trends, he does not analyze how politics, social movements, and aesthetics have to be rethought in these new circumstances. Alexander takes on these challenges. For Alexander, following Weber, we exist in a web of meaning that we ourselves have spun. Alexander’s analysis has taken an increasingly aesthetic turn, as he sees the rise of theater and the public sphere as coterminous with one another. Alexander recasts the public sphere in terms of civil society, an arena of moral action and identity creation as well as rational discourse. He contends that Habermas’s rationalist assumptions misconstrue the centrality of shared normative and symbolic narratives in shaping democratic debate. Publicness is not an ethical principle, but related to performance, symbolic action, and projections of authenticity.23 Alexander believes that social solidarity reflects people’s orientation toward the ideal and the transcendent. Civil society, bounded by the institutions of family, religion, community, state, and economy, is a realm of values and institutions that allows social criticism and democratic integration simultaneously to occur and provides the foundation for the generation of solidarity. It is sustained by public opinion, cultural codes, distinctive organizations, and practices such as tolerance, civility, and mutual respect. Democracy itself depends on the rather mysterious “habits of the heart” cultivated in civil society, which allows people to combine universal and particular interests and demands. The formation of solidarity is a creative act. As Alexander states, “in real civil societies, extending solidarity to others depends on the imagination.”24 Civil society consists of the sacred beliefs of society, and its tensions and contradictions are located in a broad vision of social community that resonates with utopian ideals of justice and inclusion. In promoting such a universalism, citizens do not rely on a disembodied rationality a la Habermas, but rather draw on concrete images, myths, and the like which arise in our everyday lifeworlds. The civil language that we create is “symbolic and experiential.”25 These vocabularies are bounded by codes which create narratives of good and evil that define who is in and out of civil society. Boundaries and identities are always contested, as proponents of a par ticular

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political point of view try to paint themselves as defenders of liberty, justice, and other social ideals. Alexander recognizes that the normative dimension of civil society does not simply influence the moral outlook of passive individuals but that such moral ideals must be sustained, re-created, and revised in everyday life. In his most recent work, Alexander draws on the literature of performance studies to explore this complexity. In the context of contending power relations and institutional differentiation, modern social integration must be achieved through the process of performative refusion, the imaginative synthesis of disparate normative, aesthetic, and cognitive elements into a convincing whole. As societies become more complex and shared rituals among disparate social groups decline, performances become defused, and they require more complicated and imaginative actions to attain successful refusion. For Alexander, social action as symbolic communication becomes effective through such cultural performances. Refusion is a way for cultural scripts to communicate meaning and achieve power and for audiences and actors, in realms from politics to social movements, to identify with one another. Alexander contends that the notion of a public stage is a better concept than the public sphere for analyzing the multidimensional aspects of civic life and the emergence of modern democracy, as performance for an audience was as much a part of the creation of modern practices of popular legitimacy as rational discourse concerning matters of common interest. Populations were transformed not only into citizens but also into an interpretive audience. Elites had to translate their actions into widely believed performances.26 For Alexander, theater arose alongside the public sphere as societies became more reflexive, democratic, and “subject to conflict and argument.”27 As theater and public life intertwine, Alexander argues that the idea of a public stage is more compelling than that of a public sphere for understanding political discourse and practices, for the stage metaphor emphasizes all of the dimensions involved in debate and persuasion, including dramatic performances, symbolism, and aesthetic considerations. Not only did people become citizens with political rights; they also became a more active audience for political performances. Elites and all social agents were forced to become better actors, so that they could translate their ideas into effective and persuasive performances.

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Dramatic presentation and power became intertwined; one could not exist without the other. The rise of the public stage was indicative of a weakening in the centrality and effectiveness of rituals. Alexander contends that rituals based on strong, shared belief have declined in the context of a “differentiated, stratified, and reflexive” modern society. While remnants of ritual remain in modern societies, and are indeed central to the human condition, they have become less powerful in the face of increased critical reflexivity and “open-ended conflicts between parties who do not necessarily share beliefs” or even assumptions about how the world works.28 This does not mean that people are motivated solely by self-interest, or that instrumental reason rules society. People still need some form of integration, even if such integration is more contingent and short-term than in the past. For Alexander, this depends on processes of refusion, where actors synthesize the disparate elements of social performances that have become separated in modernity. The idea of modern public life defined by a stage rather than a public sphere is indeed salutary. Like Alexander, I see performance as a central dimension of social action. Yet there are problems with this approach. Ritual’s monopoly on meaning always had to confront its Janusfaced partner, the transgressive and boisterous carnival. Carnival challenged the sacredness, cohesiveness, and memory of ritual with a politicized and erotic alternative that gave voice to different ideas about social power and social structure. Carnival defines social action as play, as unpredictable, fluid, and changing, which not only has challenged the predictability of ritual but also provides an alternative vision of solidarity different from more rationalistic and communal approaches. Finally, the differentiation of modernity resulted not only in the decline of ritual but also in the emergence of a distinctive aesthetic sphere and a new popular culture where these ideas of play, carnival, and style became thematized and politicized. These realms of pleasure, creativity, and opposition to instrumental reason supplied spaces where a particular type of aesthetic display could be cultivated, and came to influence more and more of everyday life. They have infused the symbolic and increasingly postmodern politics of the present era. In sum, Alexander does not connect aesthetics and politics in his approach.

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Cultural Studies Another more politicized approach to aesthetics can be found in cultural studies. The cultural studies perspective views individuals as actively contesting and reinterpreting the meanings that they receive from institutions such as the mass media. Like Marx, cultural studies theorists such as Stuart Hall, David Morley, and Dick Hebdige contend that capitalist societies are divided by unequal power relations, though they consider gender and racial divisions as important as class in the dynamics of social stratification. Subordinate groups struggle for social and economic power against ruling groups. A key component of this power struggle is the contestation over cultural meanings, as ruling groups “attempt to ‘naturalize’ the meanings that serve their interests into the ‘common sense’ of the society as a whole,” through the mass media, schools, and other institutions. Cultural meanings are linked to groups unequally positioned in the social structure. Subordinate groups resist attempts at cultural homogenization that favor ruling class interests; the cultural realm is not an arena of disinterested discussion, but a place where struggle over the control of social meanings occurs.29 This approach distinguishes between the production, circulation, and consumption of cultural meanings. Because a message is a commodity produced by a capitalist medium does not mean that it will be interpreted in a single, unified manner, as the production and reception of meanings are not identical. Hall argues that the dominant discourses promulgated by ruling elites are subject to different interpretations. Media texts, for example, do not have a single meaning, but can be read in different ways by people of different social backgrounds. Understanding a media message is a process of negotiation between the viewer and the media text. While the cultural studies perspectives show that some preferred social meanings, created by dominant groups, are more easily accepted than alternative ones, they also argue that meanings must be actively created by the audience, for a mass-produced text can be made popular only by viewers. Such reinterpretations are always political, even if only implicitly, for cultural meanings invariably involve social power. This approach posits that individuals are capable of responding creatively and critically to the messages that they receive and that such critical interpretations can inform radical politics.

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Paul Willis develops a more properly aesthetic perspective within cultural studies. He calls for a new approach to cultural studies grounded in the investigation of the “invisible aesthetics” of everyday life. Raymond Williams earlier had broached aesthetics in his idea of a “structure of feeling,” a common set of perceptions and values characteristic of a generation, demonstrated through the artistic forms and the conventions of lived experience. Willis implicitly specifies this notion of a structure of feeling in the context of everyday life. He contends that most discussions of art focus on the internal aspects of the particular artwork. When sociologists explore aesthetics, they recognize that art can be a marker of social class, and so-called high culture can be an ideology that helps to reproduce hierarchy. But neither the sociology of art nor art history has an understanding of the importance of aesthetic matters, especially aesthetic creativity, for everyday life. Willis thinks that aesthetic issues are becoming more important in people’s lives. The invisible aesthetics of everyday life develops meaning, purpose, and identity from a variety of aesthetic forms including fashion, popular music, room decoration, subcultures, and television, among many others. These aesthetic meanings have a political dimension. As radical political discourses become marginalized and workingclass institutions such as unions decline, “the burden of collective ‘thinking’ and representation will fall ever more onto informal life and onto lived cultures and cultural forms.”30 Aesthetic materials allow individuals to make sense of their particular social location and develop alternative ways of understanding and evaluating their lifeworld. In doing so, they use the commodities produced by capitalism, but often in a creative manner. Aesthetic practices occur at the “interface” of the commodity and everyday life.31 Subaltern groups can create their own meanings despite the pervasiveness of consumer culture because of the openness of the commodity form, for even commodities have to be interpreted in order to be effective, and these meanings can be reframed and understood in new and different ways. For Willis, this theoretical turn toward aesthetics does not mean that art criticism will disappear, as categories from traditional aesthetics such as elegance and unity will still be valuable but will take on a new social significance. He writes, “In the academic imagination of the twenty-first century, the ‘artistic’ imagination and the sociological imagination will have to be fused together.”32 In sum, a social aesthetics

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means not freezing art in institutions or viewing art as solely a commodity, but understanding how all kinds of symbolic meanings are aesthetic and belong to “invisible chains of ‘possession’ ” grounded in everyday life. Such a perspective can contribute to an artistic democracy.33 Willis rightly attempts to move cultural studies beyond the textual model toward a more intangible aesthetics of everyday life while maintaining a focus on the influence of social structure on the creation of meanings. He states that commodity culture does not eliminate politics but rather creates new conditions for the exercise of political options. I agree with his emphasis on aesthetics as central to everyday life and his call for a reconsideration of the meaning of politics. Yet Willis does not address the genesis of the “aestheticization of everyday life.” Major aspects of this historical process are neglected, such as the rise of the aesthetic sphere and its emphasis on authenticity and the importance of carnival and play in popular culture, both of which dramatically influenced contemporary notions of identity and culture. Willis also assumes that aesthetic creativity will automatically become politicized in a “progressive” direction. He does not realize that such aesthetic meanings can take different political forms, even reactionary ones, depending on social circumstances. Finally, Willis does not spell out the implications of this invisible aesthetics for contemporary public life and social movements. Politics is now often practiced in a new aesthetic key, and its forms of expression have to be reformulated and recontextualized.

Postmodernism and Public Life Contemporary Western societies have taken a postmodern turn, and aesthetic imagery now pervades social life. Many postmodern social theorists from Gilles Deleuze to Judith Butler are skeptical about the very notion of a civil society or a public sphere. In their view, any public, shared space has disappeared or withered away with the social and cultural transformations of the late twentieth century, so that the concept has little theoretical purchase. To the extent that a civil society still exists, they often adopt Foucault’s notion that it is an arena where conformist individuals are created through the disciplinary mechanisms of power and knowledge. The state and other disciplinary institutions control everyday life through multiple sources of power, from

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the media to schools, prisons, and the family. The individual is produced through such power relations, as the state and civil society merge and surveillance and discipline influence all social relations. For theorists like Jean Baudrillard, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri, civil society disappears in this world of images and simulacra, of copies of copies, where everyday life takes on the texture of Disneyland. At the workplace, people engage with images, symbols, language, and not directly with nature and old-style industry.34 As labor increasingly involves manipulating images, social and political struggles will be over the control of information flows, identities, and culture rather than class conflict of a Marxist type. Yet some postmodernists recognize that this celebration of difference and new cultural politics lacks any conception of the type of institutional space and ethical reflection that might inform such a “post-identity” order.35 To the extent that postmodernists envision a common public life, they often couch it in terms of performativity, with its emphasis on the construction of the self and others through practices and actions as well as language, often retaining Foucault’s suspicion of disciplinary institutions. For example, Judith Butler’s theory of performativity refers to the disciplining and production of subjects through institutions and particular practices.36 Butler contends that we are formed by a series of exclusionary and selective procedures associated with conventional gender categories of male and female. Butler does not take the extreme position of Deleuze that every repetition of an act is novel, without context, and thus there is nothing but ever new differences in our experience. Rather, she argues for a pluralism of meanings that can explode the category of gender. We can resist established meanings by reversing or resignifying them. For Butler, any social norm is ultimately constraining, and all shared values must be viewed with suspicion.37 Yet Butler’s approach to public life remains undeveloped. Nothing is shared among participants interacting in public spaces. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe craft a more coherent postmodern understanding of the public sphere. They argue that the distinctions between public and private boundaries are fluid, and they advocate the “proliferation of radically new and different political spaces” that no longer occupy a unified public sphere. Tied to a “multiplicity of social logics,” new institutions have to be created that can give voice to the plurality of subjects characteristic of the contemporary era.38 Mouffe

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contends that the “dimension of antagonism” is “ineradicable in politics.”39 Their definition of democracy and public life involves shifting alliances and stresses the fragility and fleeting nature of all identities and boundaries. They do not see conflicts between social groups resolving themselves in a higher unity; rather, antagonisms will be “articulated” in an unstable union or coalition, subject to radical change and revision. Laclau and Mouffe are more sensitive to the incommensurability of different cultures than are Habermas, Fraser, and Alexander. They are also aware of the role of power, rupture, dissonance, and fragmentation in all debates within and outside of public life. Yet, as John Keane states, Laclau and Mouffe do not clarify “who is to be ‘articulated,’ for what person, by whom, and with which means.”40 In addition, Laclau and Mouffe retain a cognitive approach to conflict that does not specify the role of images, fantasy, and the like in contemporary public life. They do not pay sufficient attention to the aesthetic and playful dimensions of public life.

Cornelius Castoriadis and Michel Maffesoli Perspectives such as those of Cornelius Castoriadis and Michel Maffesoli provide a better understanding of contemporary aesthetic politics and changes in public life than do the postmodern perspectives, in my view. The renegade Marxist Cornelius Castoriadis came to prominence in the wake of May 1968 in France. Castoriadis’s analysis of the autonomous society calls for a new conception of public life and aesthetic politics, for he highlights images and fantasy as major components of the creativity that he believes is inherent in social action. He revises Marxism in the context of the decentralized worker movements from 1871 to 1968, giving his perspective a grounding in real politics and history that is lacking in postmodern approaches. Castoriadis recasts civil society and the public sphere in terms of the autonomous society, which allows a diversity of individual and collective projects to be achieved. For Castoriadis, the individual and society are in a complementary but also conflictual relationship and are irreducible to one another. The individual must find pleasure through modifying the world outside of herself. Society cannot but help allow an individual an autonomous space, for the “individual will

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always be his own centre.”41 The individual’s imagination brings forth “modes of being” so that she can define herself autonomously and authentically. For Castoriadis, the imagination gives us images of ways of living, “new figures of the thinkable.”42 Castoriadis grants a central place to art in this process. He states that art often portrays such new modes of being, while it also always reminds us of our closeness to Chaos, and the necessity of giving form to it.43 Art is tied to creativity and individualism. Castoriadis contends that societies cannot be reduced to rational and functional processes. Psychoanalytic ideas inform his notion of the imaginary and his break from Marxism. Revising Jacques Lacan’s notion of the imaginary in a social direction, he sees the centrality of fantasy and images rather than rationality as the key to understanding individual and social change. What is universal for people is the creative imagination, not rationality. Lacan like Sigmund Freud demonstrates that our imaginary, fantasy lives are more powerful than rationality. Castoriadis takes this claim one step further, for he interprets psychoanalysis as demonstrating that the person is “an imagining being, one endowed with radical, unmotivated, defunctionalized imagination.”44 The imagination is creative, the surging forth “of a spontaneous and unmasterable flux of representations, affects, and desires.”45 It is the origin of both the psyche and society. The imagination has a kind of diversity akin to the unconscious, for its images cannot be reduced to a more “real” or material foundation. The imaginary’s power lies in large part in its ability to “evoke images.”46 In particular, the psychic imaginary consists of “largely self-generated streams of unconscious representations or images that are not ‘subject to determinacy,’ ” such as notions of time or contradiction.47 These images can break into public life in the form of the imagination, transgressing existing ways of thinking and acting. For every individual, a private world coexists with a public world, each distinct yet interdependent. Individual fantasies cannot create the public world of institutions, however. To become a subject means acting on something outside of the self that codetermines the agent’s activity, as the subject is intertwined with the world. While imaginary significations “must find points of support in the individual’s unconscious,” social conditions shape the unconscious of multitudes of people, for otherwise collective beliefs could not arise.48 This is Castoriadis’s concept of

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the social imaginary; it creates a universe of meaning for individuals. This interplay between the psychic and social imagination guarantees that the individual’s search for authenticity will not take the form of narcissism. Rather, it is a quest for meaning and autonomy, open to new psychic and social possibilities. The social imaginary is informed by history. For Castoriadis, history is the emergence of the radically new, constantly supplying novel forms to society which can be taken up in the social field. All societies have different modes of “historicity,” their definitions of their history. But most historians and social scientists adopt a causal social scientific or historiographic model that limits their understanding to the repetition of the same, events tied to one another, inhibiting their understanding of the possibility of new historical configurations. The imagination finds its possibilities in the social historical world but posits “new determinations,” the emergence of new laws. No existing society ever exhausts the possibility of new phenomena and cultural forms. Only a public realm allowing experimentation in cultural and social phenomena can allow the new to emerge.49 These ideas are central to Castoriadis’s understanding of politics. In a manner akin to that of Hannah Arendt, politics for Castoriadis is best understood in the classical Greek sense. According to Castoriadis, the classical speeches of Pericles capture the essence of politics, for they posit a citizen who loves and practices beauty and wisdom and who cares for and is responsible for the public good. Philosophy and art become ways of life for the good citizen. Politics is not the struggle of interest groups for more political and economic power, but “a collective activity whose object is the institution of society as such.”50 Politics must always mean the possibility of spontaneous creations of new beginnings. People posit their own laws and participate in the maintenance of them. Castoriadis valorizes direct democracy as the constitution of political life through self and social activity, as seen in the town meetings of the American Revolution, the sections of the Paris Commune, workers councils such as those in post–World War I Germany and 1956 Hungary, and the original soviets of 1917 in Russia. In all of these instances, there was no separate state run by representatives over and above the people. Castoriadis advocates procedures that guarantee the immediate recall of representatives, for he is suspicious of bureaucratic forms of authority.51

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These reflections inform his notion of the autonomous society. The autonomous society is based on not only self-management but also the creation of a new culture that accepts and celebrates a diversity of ways of life and recognizes the self-limitations of any single model of society. The project of autonomy gives people choices about how to live. It creates a public life where the political division of labor and its attendant bureaucracy is abolished, information freely circulates, decisionmaking is decentralized, and consumer sovereignty is guaranteed. Those affected by decisions directly participate in their framing, discussion, and resolution.52 Castoriadis develops a distinctive approach to public action. While for Castoriadis all social problems are culturally and historically defined, and each society creates meaning and validity for its members through a distinctive social imaginary, people are always open to the possibility of new experiences and forms of social organization. The reception of new modes of living have nothing to do with learning from the past in a linear way, but spring from the imagination. Much of this creativity is due to unconscious fantasies and images becoming part of public life, which portray aesthetically how a new world might come into existence. This is a public life defined more by “affect and play” rather than rational discourse.53 Castoriadis argues that a vital public sphere must provide spaces for the realization of autonomy and arenas where different people’s sense of their own experience is recognized and respected. This emphasis on public life as supplying a place for the expression of authenticity and the possibility of transgressive social action is missing in most analyses of public life, from Habermas through cultural studies. Castoriadis views cultural and psychological change tied together, as the quest for authentic experience is a central element of creativity in the public realm, not an irrational or narcissistic dimension of social action that should be subsumed under more general rational categories. Yet Castoriadis does not sufficiently historicize his notion of the autonomous society, systematically discuss differences in the social imaginary over time, or adequately address changes in ideas of individualism and authenticity. His idea of aesthetic politics relies heavily on notions of transgression and rupture. This is due in part to his trust in psychoanalysis and its static view of the psyche. Though psychoanalysis provides needed categories of fantasy and image for the

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understanding of contemporary society, this perspective does not explore the rich and differentiated history of public life. Castoriadis also does not sufficiently analyze reactionary visions of public life that flow from his emphasis on fantasy and image, such as the aestheticization of politics under fascism. While Castoriadis draws from Freud and Marx in developing his  understanding of society, Maffesoli turns to Simmel and the Durkheimian tradition. He focuses on new types of affective and playful solidarity that he sees arising in the contemporary West, making use of Durkheimian notions such as “collective effervescence” and Simmel’s idea of sociality. He adopts the metaphor of the tribe, for it connotes the centrality of feeling and emotion, fluidity and diversity, rather than rational reflexivity in understanding social cohesion.54 For Maffesoli, the decline of people’s attachment to political parties in the West reflects the separation of parliamentary politics from everyday life. Moreover, politics today has taken on an aesthetic cast, where the theatrical and spectacular qualities of politicians and their ability to inspire passion influences their success or failure more than their capacity for rational persuasion. While this reflects the commodification of politics and the spread of the values of entertainment into the political realm, such trends can promote both alienation and playful, subversive types of political criticism. Play, for example, “can be commercialized as well as being the realm of a real collective desire to reappropriate existence.”55 Maffesoli sees the desire for pleasure as part of the resistance to dominant culture in everyday life. This resistance can also be found in the laughter and satire aimed at political and economic elites. For Maffesoli, people oppose the homogenizing goals of contemporary power because of their plural and subcultural identities and the diversity of their values. He sees multiculturalism as a sign of renewed social life and “new forms of sociability.”56 Following Simmel, Maffesoli views sociality as “the play form of socialization,” based on stylized existence, unconcerned with the instrumental consequences of social action. He prefers the concept of sociality to that of the social, for sociality involves no functionalism, but emphasizes instead the complexity and theatricality of role playing, and the importance of mutual display, of style and fashion. Building on Durkheim’s notion of collective effervescence, Maffesoli views

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social change as the generation of new symbols and ideals during times of intense social interaction. In sum, Maffesoli is interested in the “aesthetic form” of everyday life, “the way in which the collective sense is experienced and expressed,” and he is more concerned with lifestyle than traditional art.57 He argues that we need such an aesthetic sociology to understand the aestheticization of our experience. A new practice arises in everyday life, based on shared spaces and local knowledge. A vision of society founded on closed and essential identities gives way to a new social logic of identification with diverse others, resulting in more fluid and transitory political practices and allegiances. He implicitly calls for a new aesthetic politics to understand major features of contemporary societies, and locates this politics in everyday life rather than in public spheres. Maffesoli’s writings contain many insights that can illuminate contemporary public life and social movements. I especially find significant his focus on the aesthetics of everyday life as a new type of resistance that is located in specific spaces. However, like Simmel, his writing is elusive and fragmentary, more metaphorical than substantive. Like Castoriadis, he does not adequately historicize his perspective, so that it is unclear exactly how and why this aesthetic dimension came to prominence. Also like Castoriadis, Maffesoli uncritically celebrates this aesthetic turn. None of the approaches that I have reviewed are satisfactory in and of themselves. I will draw on a number of them in my analysis, which will be developed in Chapter 3. But a few preliminary remarks are in order here. In my view, following Alexander and Castoriadis and Maffesoli, public life is better conceived as a stage rather than a sphere, for it is a realm of performance as well as debate. Further, following Fraser, different public arenas exist and compete with one another. Yet it is necessary to clearly delineate the historical origins and sociology of these notions of public life and tie them to new ideas about aesthetic politics. Drawing on Weber and Habermas, I view the rise of aesthetic politics in terms of the differentiation of modernity and the emergence of a distinctive aesthetic sphere of pleasure and bohemian resistance to instrumental rationality. I then explore the interconnection of this realm with practices and ideas from popular culture. Like Castoriadis

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and Maffesoli, I view images, transgression, authenticity, and playful collective action as central ingredients in contemporary aesthetic politics, though I see such a politics emerging from different combinations of aesthetic practices and carnivalesque solidarity, which are influenced by historically specific economic and social changes. Different kinds of aesthetic politics, tied to expressive notions of authenticity or more postmodern concerns with transgression, emerge from these combinations. Yet in every case, aesthetic politics involves new ways of imagining solidarity and identity, and new forms of identification, in Maffesoli’s terms. Aesthetic public displays, from fashion statements to the dramatic demonstrations of new social movements, emphasize the creation of distinctive cultural styles and novel forms of participation in a broadly defined “politics” that is as much about contested images of legitimate self and group presentation as it is about rational debate about public issues. This new aesthetic politics calls for attention to multiple and autonomous types of local knowledge rather than more abstract and universal legal or moral principles. Yet such aesthetic politics only becomes effective,and can only influence the texture and dynamics of public life, when it becomes an integral part of social movements. The next chapter explores different approaches to social movements, especially those perspectives that emphasize culture and aesthetics.

❖

2 Social Movements

A

and Aesthetic Politics

esthetic imagery and practices are now widespread in social movements. In first-world societies, aesthetic themes became commonplace among many of the new social movements, such as gay and lesbian movements in the 1970s and 1980s. These movements are as much about imaginatively reconstructing identities displayed through style and speech as about developing rational programs to implement their political and economic demands. They appear to have more in common with the peasant tradition of carnival, with its revelry of festivals and pilgrimages, than with the ordered demonstrations of reformist politics.1 Yet even before the rise of the new social movements, many labor movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had an important aesthetic dimension to them, as did fascist movements such as Nazism. Most scholars of social movements have ignored this aesthetic dimension, concentrating instead on resources, strategies, and political opportunities in their analysis of social movements. The resource mobilization perspective focuses on conflicts over the distribution of social and political power and the mobilization of resources, while political opportunity theorists look to government weakness, such as conflicts among elites within the state, to understand how social movements can take advantage of these tensions to implement

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their own agendas. Many sociologists are dissatisfied with this instrumental approach. They have responded to this materialist perspective by integrating an appreciation of the role of cultural experience and imaginative forms of solidarity and subjectivity in the dynamics of social movements. In this chapter, I begin with an analysis of the cultural turn in the study of social movements. This attention to culture has often underplayed the important aesthetic moment in social movements, though some researchers have been more sensitive to this aesthetic dimension than others. I examine the perspectives of Eyerman, Andrew Jamison, and Alexander, who see social movements as arenas for the generation of new aesthetic and moral meanings that can influence not only political strategies but also the meanings that define solidarity in civil society. I then move on to the approaches of Alberto Melucci and Alain Touraine, who, like many postmodern theorists, take aesthetic issues seriously. They view social movements as expressions of new forms of subjectivity and transgression (what Touraine, borrowing from Foucault, labels subjectivation) that no longer depend on a weakened or nonexistent civil society. I then explore the postmodern perspectives of Laclau and Hardt and Negri, who posit a transgressive role for social movements, as they understand contemporary movements as agents of rupture with the existing society. Sociologists have not confronted these postmodern analyses, so I spend a bit more space on summarizing their ideas and placing them in a larger theoretical context. I end with a brief discussion of my approach to aesthetic politics and social movements that draws on yet moves beyond these perspectives.

Culture and Social Movements Many social movement scholars are turning away from an emphasis on resources and opportunity costs to take into account the ways that collective identity and culture influence movements. Focusing on culture and collective identities allows the understanding of the processes by which identities emerge, rather than just viewing them as reflections of a group’s social position and economic and/or political interests. Such issues have come to the fore with the rise of new social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, which were focused as much on changing the culture of society as on improving the material conditions of their

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participants. For many sociologists, culture is understood in terms of “framing,” for it provides the interpretive schema by which movements make sense of social processes and social changes. Several scholars, including Doug McAdam and Aldon Morris in their respective analyses of the civil rights movement, see preexisting collective identities as central to the actions of social movements. Institutions like the African American church, with its organizational capacity and language of historical oppression and redemption, provided both the resources and the cultural frames that informed the civil rights movement.2 Other scholars such as Charles Kurzman argue that culture should be even more squarely at the center of social movement analysis. As he states, meaning making is “a goal in itself, a spur to action, and a site of contestation.”3 This attention to culture reinforces the notion that collective identities are socially constructed. These transformed identities allow new meanings and ideas about self and society to be elaborated within social movements. Culture and meanings are created through interpretations, repertoires, and rituals, though these meanings are always contested. The ways in which social movements define key identity terms such as black, gay, worker, and so forth depend on the cultural codes and stories that they have available to them, for these codes inform the very meanings of these key terms. Moreover, even when movements fail to achieve their explicit political or economic objectives, their ideals and discourse can influence the larger society. Collective identities themselves may be the outcome of activism, as well as  providing resources that attract participants to social movements. James Jasper also emphasizes the strategic dimension of culture, and incorporates the role of emotions as well. Culture is not just an unconscious force structuring social action or pushing people in particular directions. Groups can self-consciously use symbols to advance their goals, meanings are often used to shape the choices of activists and movement participants, and emotional satisfaction can be a reason for movement mobilization.4 Such sensitivity to culture and meaning making is certainly salutary, and it moves the study of social movements beyond the mechanistic approaches of resource mobilization and political opportunity theory. Yet culture is a too broadly defined concept in the study of social movements, and for our purposes, distinctively aesthetic criteria are often included in this definition. For example, Kurzman contends that

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culture includes moral understandings of right and wrong, perceptions of similar and dissimilar, social understandings of identity and difference, and aesthetic understandings of attraction and repulsion.5 T.V. Reed too in his insightful book The Art of Protest tends to collapse cultural and aesthetic categories.6 There is no doubt that cultural and aesthetic meanings overlap and are mutually implicated with one another in the practices of social movements. Yet the respective emphases of aesthetic and cultural meanings lead to some different directions. A focus on aesthetics points to the role of art and music in social movements and the issues around representing the collective identities and meanings of movements that artistic practice involves. More theoretically, the aesthetic meanings that become part of everyday life are more fluid, more diverse, and less coherent than those of a more patterned culture, as aesthetic ideas often break or rupture existing conventions and codes. These meanings are not moral definitions of right and wrong, but concern the communication of tone and feeling. Aesthetics conveys meaning through images and emotions rather than coherent stories or cultural schemas. Within social movements, especially in a mass-mediated environment, people draw not only on cultural narratives but also on these more inchoate images to construct identities. Finally, the social solidarity arising from aesthetics is emotional, playful, and often transgressive, less patterned than in cultural approaches to social movements. In my view, a distinctive aesthetic politics has influenced social movements since the late nineteenth century. This aesthetic politics is based on opposition to instrumental rationalization and the capitalist commodification of experience and pleasures. It involves a concern with emotion and symbolism rather than moral meanings. It too allows for particular types of strategies. Street theater and dramatic performances can be strategically planned to encourage publicity and visibility for the movement. Moreover, aesthetic politics presents an array of images to identify with. Politics becomes concerned with play, fantasy, desire, and dreams, as well as programs and reforms. Yet within this aesthetic politics differences can be ascertained. On the one hand, aesthetic politics has often been concerned with the realization of a romantic, authentic subjectivity and posited a knowledge sensitive to particular experiences that can be counterposed to the alienation of a capitalist and bureaucratic society. This was often the dominant form

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of aesthetic politics in late-nineteenth-century labor movements, informing not only their critiques of labor exploitation but also their calls for more sexual freedom and the transformation of the bourgeois family. The emphasis on authenticity was echoed by the identity politics of the 1970s and 1980s. Many recent social movements, such as the global justice movement, have moved beyond concerns with the realization of an authentic identity and have turned to a more transgressive aesthetic politics that draws on art, emotion, and the like to break with existing social conventions and create an entirely new type of social subjectivity and new knowledge that has little to do with the model of expressive authenticity. I will elaborate these ideas in later chapters. But now I turn to those scholars who are sensitive to the aesthetic and performative dimensions of social movements.

Alexander, Eyerman, and Jamison As we saw in the previous chapter, for Alexander there is a tension between the universal and the particular ideals and practices of a social order, and civil society provides a realm where the two can be mediated and social solidarity created. The production of social solidarity is an inventive act. For Alexander, social movements are integral to this imaginative process of creating new types of social solidarity. Arising on the terrain of civil society, social movements can broaden a society’s social solidarity by reframing and expanding existing moral and symbolic codes. Social movements raise particular issues of injustice but also have an orientation toward the common good. It is their ability to combine their particular demands with a universalistic appeal that determines their success or failure. Social movements must typify the sacred beliefs of society, locating their problems in a broad vision of social community that resonates with utopian ideals. In promoting such a universalism, movements, like citizens, do not rely on a disembodied rationality like Habermas, but rather draw on concrete images, myths, and the like which arise in our everyday lifeworlds. The civil language that they create is “symbolic and experiential,” not just rational.7 These languages are bounded by narrative codes of good and evil that define who is in and out of civil society. These boundaries and identities are always contested, as proponents of a point of view try to paint themselves as defenders of

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liberty, justice, and other social ideals. The success of social movements depends a great deal on their performance of these sacred ideals. For example, the civil rights movement in the United States was successful because it was able to effectively dramatize the sacred beliefs of American society, such as justice and equality, that were denied to African Americans.8 Like Alexander, Eyerman and Jamison recognize the role of power, resources, and institutional constraints in the dynamics of social movements but focus on the aesthetic and cultural elements in movements. For Eyerman and Jamison, social movements create and reconstitute culture, mobilizing and reformulating cultural traditions. The collective identity formation that occurs in social movements provides a catalyst for other changes in the lifeworld, from values to lifestyles. They influence the “deeper structures of feeling that provide cohesion to social formations.”9 Social movements such as those of the 1960s promote a kind of cultural politics, politically transforming culture and everyday life rather than only changing laws. Music and other aesthetic forms are central to this process. They allow movements to remain alive in collective memory, providing resources for collective learning processes, social narratives, and shared stories. Social movements experiment with new aesthetic principles, create new rituals, and reconstitute new aesthetic forms, meanings, and genres. They are “both an inventive, creative work of artistic experimentation and a critical, reflective work of evaluation.”10 These creative narratives look to the past but reconstruct it. Often this takes the form of creatively rethinking rituals. Festivals and carnivals can express rebellion and a desire for freedom rather than simply reflecting conservative ideals of social order. Like Herbert Marcuse, Eyerman and Jamison see art and music providing a utopian vision of a more communal, rich existence through reworking and making accessible traditions of resistance and critique.11 In his most recent work, Eyerman has emphasized the performative dimension of social movements. In his view, movements must be performed and dramatized in order to be effective. This is especially true today, as the anticorporate/global justice movement provides arenas for the expression and dramatization of identities, and lifestyles are articulated and reproduced through these movements. These mobile and flexible movements are more like carnivals, with spontaneous

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aesthetic aspects, that draw on but creatively reshape traditions from previous movements, from labor to environmentalism.12 In sum, social movements, through their creative cultural and aesthetic activity, “mediate between the marginal and the mainstream” by politicizing traditions and giving them new meanings.13 They are performative, requiring an audience for their enactment of meaning, ritual, and art. While this idea of performance does not draw explicitly on the notion of play, it has affinities with it. It emphasizes nonrational, reflexive creativity taking place in a free public realm. Like Eyerman and Jamison, I view the creativity of social movements in terms of an aesthetic orientation to identity formation, providing new types of meanings and models of social integration. However, like Alexander, Eyerman and Jamison tend to overemphasize a coherent model of the role of aesthetics in social movements, for aesthetics helps participants fuse different cultural traditions and communicate these meanings to audiences outside of the movement. Further, they do not frame their analysis in terms of a particular aesthetic response to the problems of modernity that devises distinctive interpretations of the subject, emancipation, meaning, and knowledge. Finally, none of these thinkers examine the internal tensions characterizing aesthetic experience.

Melucci/Touraine Many of these aesthetic themes, especially the focus on identity and play, are made even more explicit in Melucci’s and Touraine’s approaches to social movements. Melucci and Touraine move away from an emphasis on civil society and relatively stable cultural traditions toward an analysis of contemporary society and social movements that points in a more postmodern direction. Melucci argues that identity is now the crucial element in social movements. He writes that social movements are “today more and more obviously located at precisely this border area between the individual and the apparatuses of the system.”14 In a postindustrial context where the control of communications and knowledge become increasingly important determinants of social power, major conflicts now concern the production and reproduction of culture and identity. Contemporary social movements challenge the language and cultural codes that organize information in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.

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They demand that the system take responsibility for its choices and direction. Class and labor movements no longer define the important struggles of society, which have increasingly turned to conflicts over cultural definitions of freedom, normal and abnormal, and the like, and movements from religious fundamentalism to gay and lesbian struggles have become increasingly prominent. The search for identity is central to the dynamics of this new uncertain world, whether it be personal, cultural, regional, or racial/ethnic identity. These identities are fluid, changing, and reflexively monitored, as people are no longer tied to a specific place or a history.15 Melucci sees civil society having little influence on the dynamics of identity formation or social movements. In his words, “social action, economic investments, and forms of domination are increasingly exerted at the individual level; there is . . . a transfer of the structure of society to the individual level.”16 Because the site of the dominant logic of contemporary societies is constantly changing, conflicts can take on a systemwide scope. Yet he still views the subject as bound by culture and the intersubjective recognition by others. Melucci contends that we must understand this “nomadic” subject as a playing self, an aesthetic self. He states, “Our self may learn to play if we allow ourselves to create, to go beyond the limit and open up to the possible still without losing our boundaries.”17 Melucci does not view creativity as the exclusive province of the artist, but grounds it in everyday experience. The contemporary information society is based on this creative reflexivity of people, and social movements incorporate this reflexivity into their very structure. Touraine’s sociology too criticizes the idea of civil society and focuses on a revised understanding of the subject. He sees modernity defined by the conflict between the freedom and authenticity desired by the subject and the rationalization processes the subject encounters. Touraine wishes to “recentre the theory of modernity around a pattern of conflict rather than a principle of organization or a project of reconciliation.”18 Touraine recognizes the limits that any creative subject faces, from the necessity of economic participation in a rationalized world to the concrete social problems confronted by social movements attempting to institute change. Society is no longer characterized by social solidarity, and any fleeting social cohesion is often based on nonrational factors.

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Touraine bases his arguments on a reconstruction of modernity. He states that the Enlightenment attempted to link the individual, society, and nature through reason. He sees this process culminating in an overweening technical rationality, which threatened to destroy possibilities of creativity. But the Enlightenment was only one side of modernity. Creativity, grounded in “subjectivation,” was the other important modern tradition. First outlined in Christian dualism, subjectivation arose in an interdependent yet antagonistic relationship with instrumental rationality. Touraine views Friedrich Nietzsche and Freud as providing the theoretical justification for the subject, as they destroyed the illusions of a rational fit between the individual and society while highlighting the nonrational themes of the body and sexuality.19 Touraine contends that we are living in an epoch where change defines our experience, as people are constantly exposed to new ideas and ways of life through the media, immigration, and increasing international interdependency. A globalized economy has made the nationstate increasingly powerless, institutions like the family are unable to integrate the fragmented experiences of people into a whole, and individuals have more difficulty maintaining a coherent sense of self. In such a context, attempts to sustain personal and collective meaning have become separated from the global economy. Rationality cannot hold together these two dimensions of modernity any longer. Only the subject can reconcile the instrumental demands of the economy and cultural meanings. Accordingly, the analysis of the duality of subjectivation and rationalization should replace sociological concerns with social integration. For Touraine, a critical subject that distances itself from social roles has generated the most liberating visions of social life. Politics today involves resisting domination and power and ensuring “the right of each individual to exist and to be treated as an actor in all the spheres of individual or collective experience.”20 This subjectivation process, when tied to social movements, is a safeguard against the standardizing potential of the market and the totalitarian dreams of a fully administered society. Social movements combine the “awareness of social conflict with loyalty to the [dominant] values of the society.”21 Despite his emphasis on the seemingly autonomous activity of a subject, Touraine still retains a sense of the cultural context in which the subject arises and the role of social movements in changing this context. Social

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movements struggle over claims to “historicity,” “the capacity to produce the models by which [society] functions.”22 In sum, like Melucci, Touraine has little use for the concept of civil society, and his analysis of postindustrial society and social movements draws on themes of widespread consumerism and the decline of social solidarity. Yet Touraine still maintains a sense of the cultural embeddedness of the subject and social movements, as they draw on cultural traditions in struggling over the definition of a society’s historicity. The subject for Touraine engages in an imaginative synthesis of different traditions and experiences in developing a sense of her distinctive identity.

Postmodernity and Social Movements: Laclau and Hardt and Negri The postmodernist theorists Laclau and Hardt and Negri radicalize this critique of the subject and criticisms of the idea of civil society in an even more dramatic way than do Melucci and Touraine. Their view of social movements privileges difference over unity and historical breaks over continuity and emphasizes transgressive behaviors and ideas. In their earliest work on social movements, Laclau and Mouffe argue that new social movements dissolve boundaries between public and private realms, as there is no longer a unified public sphere in postmodern society. New institutions must arise that can provide arenas and new political spaces for the free play of multiplicities and the plurality of subjects characteristic of the contemporary era. Democracy, in their perspective, means constantly shifting alliances; no higher unity will ever be achieved as incommensurable social movements ally and compete with one another, achieving new identities and creating hybrid boundaries in their interactions.23 In his most recent work Laclau develops these postmodern ideas in the context of populist movements.24 Like Nietzsche and Foucault, Laclau is suspicious of common meanings, seeing them as an indicator of power or hegemony that marginalize the ideas of less powerful groups. He shares their definition of creativity as tied to a decentered self that is always experimenting and changing. Creativity is transgressive, and it

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involves the transvaluation of values rather than reconstructing existing culture and meanings. For these theorists, the emergence of a new, innovative perspective on social life cannot be predicted ahead of time. Further, Laclau’s analysis dismisses any notion of civil society. While Marx reduced the idea of an autonomous civil society to the logic of capital, and Foucault sees civil society as a realm of power where institutions create the disciplinary practices that not only produce obedient subjects but marginalize and sequester those who are different, Laclau sees it as a realm of hegemony and conformity. There is never any common space in a society, for it is always broken by the heterogeneity of demands of different social groups, which cannot be symbolically mastered or controlled by any single power. Moreover, ideas such as the “people” can never be truly conceptualized, and any definition of it will always be partial and fleeting. Like Freud, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Lacan, Laclau sees meaning as overdetermined, in that any object is defined by multiple meanings that can vary as perspectives change. Notions such as civil society attempt to freeze these meanings into conformist beliefs, and thus simply replicate the hegemony of a dominant class or elite. Laclau draws heavily on Lacan for his analysis of social movements. Though Lacan was only obliquely concerned with issues of society, Laclau utilizes Lacanian psychoanalysis to argue that the very idea of social solidarity is illusory. Laclau makes an analogy between language and society, linking the two because our social life is linguistically structured. Just as language inevitably confronts its limits in that which is heterogeneous and cannot be symbolically represented (what Lacan calls the Real), for Laclau, any community, any type of social totality, will be limited and partial, excluding those dangerous, potentially transformative social groups, values, or ideas that cannot be integrated into it. Like Lacan, Laclau believes that visions of shared community reflect the fantasy and longing for totality, reminiscent of the original unity of the mother/child relation, that can never be achieved. Laclau uses Lacan’s idea of the symbolic, the realm of language use, as indicative of the particular logic of social life in general and social movements in particular. The symbolic realm is that which can be talked about, and it functions almost automatically, like a signifying chain. Ideas, values, beliefs, and the like become meaningful only when inserted into a particular signifying chain. Finally Laclau

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draws on Lacanian ideas of a break in the symbolic realm when discussing social change. The creative subject for Laclau and Lacan produces a breach in the symbolic realm, a rupture of it, which cannot be predicted beforehand and creates a link between signifiers which had not been there before. These new meanings move beyond the automatic functioning of the symbolic order, transgressing and transforming it. Laclau concentrates specifically on the analysis of populist movements. He is interested in how populist participants are constituted as social subjects who can challenge dominant social codes and meanings. For Laclau, this is the central question, for populism, or any other social movement, does not represent interests or express an identity, but is created over time through discourse and performance. As Laclau states, populism, like all social movements, is defined by “the discursive sequences through which a social force or movement carries out its overall political performance.”25 According to Laclau, social movements begin with a demand arising from a particular social group, such as the assertion of the right to a fair wage. He argues that such a demand arises both within and outside of the established order, depending on how that demand is met. If the existing order can satisfy the demand, it is “totalized” within the existing system. Drawing on Lacanian ideas of the symbolic realm, Laclau is interested in how demands become linked together in “chains” which define their significance but which are not the creation of a synthesizing subject. A demand becomes meaningful only when inserted into a chain of other demands, or a new chain that can transform the meaning of a particular demand. He calls the chain that coalesces demands into the existing system the logic of difference, for the demand is integrated into the system as one more claim among others and cannot ally with other radical demands for social change. If the demand cannot be met by the existing hegemonic order, it is an instance of the heterogeneous, that which is marginalized by mainstream society, the “outside” akin to Lacan’s Real that shadows any totality. This type of radical demand can create a “logic of equivalence,” for it can ally with other unintegrated demands and lead to the  creation of an “antagonistic frontier” that defines the difference between a populist movement and the existing system. Populism arises when different demands become analogous to one another in terms of

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their opposition to the existing society and find common ground in this antagonism. They are equivalent in this negative sense of opposition to a dominant cultural and social code. Yet as demands coalesce, they create a new “social subjectivity,” a radical difference from existing society, which is more than the particular links of the chain. All social identities are based on how this meeting of difference and equivalence takes place. Laclau believes that this is an ongoing process, for differences are all that exist, and any social totality will be wracked by differences. There is no contradiction that can be overcome, no dialectic that ties diverse demands together in the Marxist sense.26 While Laclau recognizes that these processes take place in particular cultural contexts, he stresses the general logic of the creation of populism. Because he starts with the assumption of difference, any shared solidarity is precarious and fleeting, and any community will be  a “failed totality,” because this tension between difference and equivalence cannot be overcome. Yet the social totality must be somehow represented, for without it there is no meaning even possible. Following Lacan, Laclau argues that it is only an arbitrary name that can unify and create representations of community. This name is an “empty” signifier, in that it is not the result of some mirror-like representation of reality or the logical outcome of preceding social processes. It is contingent and empty, and its effectiveness is dependent on its own “productivity,” its ability to create webs of association, and not on anything outside of it. Words such as nation, community, or justice, which have no clear referent and refer to only differences (there is no justice without injustice, for example), can become filled with content and meaning. Yet no word or phrase or demand can capture the impossible social totality, so inevitably particular differences come to represent the whole of society. Moreover, there is nothing in a particular demand that anticipates that it should play a leading role in defining a symbolic chain. For Laclau, this is the nature of hegemony, which is based on the part representing the whole. This demonstrates Laclau’s residual Marxist orientation, as it seems to be a straightforward Marxist theory of ideology as the partial interest represents the whole of society, though refracted through Lacanian psychoanalysis. He gives this a populist twist, however, arguing that a particular movement like Solidarity came to represent all of the dissenting elements in communist Poland. While “empty” signifiers assume the existence of antagonistic

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frontier between populism and the powers that be, “floating signifiers” arise in periods of crisis and can drift between rival equivalent chains to define particular demands, again in a contingent manner. This is how Laclau accounts for the variable political stances of populism, which can be tied to left- or right-wing definitions.27 For Laclau, the history of bourgeois hegemony is based on the primacy of differential logic, which isolates and integrates demands into the existing system and attempts to avoid the “equivalent ruptures” of populism.28 In sum, for Laclau, “history is . . . a discontinuous succession of hegemonic formations that cannot be ordered by a script transcending their conceptual historicity.”29 Thus, the change from one hegemonic formation to another “will always involve a radical break, a creatio ex nihilo.”30 This break does not derive from any preceding logic of the situation or of history. The emergence of the idea of the people is always transgressive relative to what came before it. Social movements must break with and transgress the realm of shared meanings in order to truly create social change.

Hardt and Negri Hardt and Negri develop another postmodern version of social movements in their analysis of the multitude versus Empire. Like Laclau, they dismiss the idea of civil society but criticize it in historical as much as theoretical terms, arguing that as civil society fades away, it is replaced by a new society of control characteristic of capitalist Empire. Hardt and Negri contend that a new form of imperial sovereignty or Empire has emerged in the twenty-first century. This Empire does not rely on the nation-state, whose sovereignty is declining, but is rather decentered and, in the words of Gilles Deleuze, “deterritorialized,” for there is no single national government determining contemporary imperialism. In such a decentered form of imperialism, distinctions between first and third worlds no longer make sense, as “global flows” create a “smooth” system where worldwide systems of information and communication have replaced the factory as the major forms of labor. Yet in classical Marxist fashion, Empire creates out of its very bosom its own gravediggers. But it is not the proletariat, but the “multitude” who will fulfill this task.31

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The governing structures of Empire are based on a new kind of structural logic. Hardt and Negri compare Empire to a “machine” that generates constant authority. Exemplified in supranational organizations like the United Nations, Empire justifies its continual military interventions in the name of international law and peace. In many ways, it is “called into being” because of the innumerable crises that erupt in the world that require intervention. Though peace is the supposed goal, the world is in a ceaseless state of crisis, a “state of exception” to the normal rule of law, that demands constant action from Empire. Empire creates a new universality. Its power is based on its capacity to deploy police power in the name of ostensible humanitarian and human rights concerns. Because these rights are not generated locally but defined in global terms, all conflicts over rights tend to become universal.32 This Empire is capitalist, but it is a qualitatively different type of capitalism than that which existed in the past. Like Fredric Jameson, Hardt and Negri see a new postmodern logic characterizing capitalism. Contemporary capitalism combines economic and political power, and it is flexible, mobile, and accepting of differences among people. Many capitalists themselves embrace differences in race, gender, and sexual orientation, organizing them so that they can create profits. Power is not based on coercion or direct violence, but works through ordering these new identities and subjectivities.33 Hardt and Negri view one of their major theoretical contributions as integrating the theoretical approaches of Foucault and Deleuze into their understanding of how power functions within Empire. Drawing on these theorists, Hardt and Negri argue that Empire reflects a transition from a disciplinary society analyzed by Foucault in such works as Discipline and Punish to a Deleuzian society of control, based on the production and control of biopower, in Foucault’s terms, and a new integrated society that resembles a smooth surface with different sites of power, as Deleuze characterizes it. Hardt and Negri argue that the disciplinary society did not completely permeate the consciousness of individuals. In a way reminiscent of Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man and Theodor Adorno’s vision of a total society, the new society of control reflects the breakdown of these disciplinary institutions, as power is now exercised by communication systems that directly influence

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brains and bodies, through processes from advertising to monitored systems of control. In this new type of biopower, there is no distinction between mind and body in labor, and individuals themselves interiorize exclusion/inclusion techniques, intensifying normalizing procedures by making them part of their very internal constitution. Drawing not only on Foucault and Deleuze but also on more conventional sociological ideas such as Arlie Hochschild’s notion of “emotional labor,” Hardt and Negri argue that biopower regulates life from the interior, influencing our emotions, ideas, feelings, and so on. Biopower produces and reproduces life itself.34 The contemporary Society of Control is the realization of capitalism, for capitalism no longer depends on anything outside of its purview, such as noncapitalist forms of labor, in order to function. Civil society is completely absorbed into the state and economy. Public spaces become privatized, and malls, freeways, and gated communities replace public arenas for interaction. This crisis of institutions means that the creation of subjectivity no longer occurs in one place, like the family or the school. Rather, previously coordinated aspects of social life are exploded and dispersed throughout the society, and subjectivities are more fluid. As factory discipline, school discipline, and the like wither away in the context of crisis, they create “a hybrid production of subjectivity.”35 Capital permeates all of social life. There is no longer any distinction between an inside and outside of Empire, as it gobbles up everything it touches. Following Deleuze, for Hardt and Negri, the inside/outside distinction is replaced “by a play of degrees and intensities, of hybridity and artificiality.”36 Empire appears like a smooth surface, everywhere and nowhere, but it is in reality a system of crises. Because of this interconnectedness, crises become immediately universal, as do resistances to Empire. There are no longer any mediating institutions that can harness and control these crises and outbursts. Imperial sovereignty is not organized around one central struggle, such as class conflict, but around flexible networks of microconflicts. As civil society declines, the struggles of today are no longer defined by any common sense of solidarity or connection. They have become incommunicable; there is no dialectical synthesis either between protesting groups, such as the Zapatistas in Mexico and/or the global justice/anticorporate movements, and the larger society, or between

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protesting groups themselves. Yet precisely because of these differences, and the decline of civil society, contemporary movements jump immediately to the level of the global, so these movements are subversive and dangerous for Empire. Such movements cannot be easily controlled, and increasingly they begin to appear as alternatives to the system of Empire. Now, because of its global dominance, Empire must face the multitude without any mediation.37 The multitude is composed of “singular” movements, which cannot be reduced to sameness.38 Hardt and Negri argue that capital works by attempting to crush the heterogeneity of demands and lifestyles characteristic of the multitude, ordering them into a new, smooth, integrated system. Yet Hardt and Negri are not satisfied with this state of affairs, and they do not understand the multitude as simply an incoherent bundle of struggles. Despite the rhetoric of singularity and difference so characteristic of postmodernism, they argue that the multitude does share some similar “interests.” The multitude consists of all who produce in all forms of work. The multitude also shares the attitude of “being against” Empire, no matter its particular social condition.39 In this context, Hardt and Negri argue that a new public commons can be created, akin more to a carnival than a public sphere. Any sense of commonality must be produced, and cannot simply express pre-existing social positions that will somehow automatically create a culture of shared resistance to Empire. But their arguments here become contradictory and confused. On the one hand, they demand a radical break with Empire. They contend that only a rupture with the logic of Empire can create a new society. On the other hand, their actual ideas about social change sound surprisingly moderate. The multitude is mobile and migratory, so Hardt and Negri call for rights to global citizenship and a social wage. They also argue that the multitude’s demands are coalescing around more democracy and opposition to war and poverty.40 These postmodern perspectives capture some important dimensions of contemporary movements neglected by sociological studies of social movements. Though they do not use the language of aesthetic politics, they adopt a vocabulary of transgression and difference, seeming more like a surrealist version of social movements than like a typical sociological analysis. They implicitly view society not as a patterned set of shared cultural norms or determined by common or antagonistic

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economic interests, but through the metaphor of a text or an artwork that is open to new interpretations and constant changes. Accordingly, they emphasize the unpredictability of social movements, stressing that new movements may arise that break into society and convulse it, moving it in unforeseen directions. This is an excellent point, as Nazism, the civil rights movement, May 1968 in France, and the contemporary global justice movement were not foreseen by scholars, yet they have burst into the social landscape and changed our view of what is possible in social life. These postmodern perspectives, with their orientation toward difference and away from coherence, point to the contemporary emphasis on the autonomy of social movements and groups that come together only warily and the difficulties that activists face in fusing these different struggles together. The postmodernists tie the crisis of subjectivity that has accompanied modernity since its inception, the problems associated with the idea of a coherent subject, to social movements. These perspectives also raise issues of representation—how will a group portray itself; what social meanings will it draw upon? There is no simple representation of a group anymore, as many cultural traditions supplying clear meanings for groups have broken down, and the naming of a group can influence its direction and dynamics. This is especially relevant today in the wake of the decline of the labor movement and the grand narratives of emancipation and progress associated with it. Finally, these perspectives emphasize that any adequate analysis of social movements must take into account a new social context for social movements, from the existence of a novel type of global capitalism and types of immaterial labor to the proliferation of aesthetic ideas throughout society. However there are some problems with these postmodern perspectives. They do not adequately address the history of aesthetic politics within social movements. They reify difference and rupture in social relations as much as other perspectives stress societal coherence. In their eagerness to dispense with ideas of the subject, they view people as cultural dopes who have no clue as to what they are doing, and who accidentally achieve social change outside of their conscious awareness. They have no theory of the reflexivity of participants in social movements. Because of their emphasis on transgressive breaks with a completely “totalized” society, these approaches do not develop criteria to distinguish reactionary from progressive move-

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ments. Finally, there is no notion of social solidarity in these perspectives. I tie this directly to their rejection of the idea of the subject and their argument that civil society has disappeared in the contemporary world. In contrast, I argue the idea of the subject remains key to analyzing the practices and beliefs of social movements, but this subject changes over time as new circumstances warrant. Further, civil society has not so much disappeared as been transformed in a playful, indeterminate, and aesthetic direction. These changes have created a new context for social movements that have brought aesthetic politics to the forefront of new social movements. Not only civil society but also the idea of the “subject” remains an important analytical tool for the study of social movements, but they have to be rethought in light of these postmodern critiques. For example, the appeal of the civil rights movement was due in part to its image of authenticity, of living a life congruent with one’s deepest self. While this notion of authenticity certainly had a powerful moral element, in that participants in the civil rights movement believed that they were righting the wrongs of a racist society, there was also a strong emotional and aesthetic dimension that allowed participants to believe that they were realizing their inner, authentic core. Such a belief in authenticity derived in part from the aesthetic tradition of romanticism, and its appeal was communicated to many people through the dramatic performances of the movement that portrayed images of existential struggle and symbols such as the wearing of blue jeans that allowed identification with the black poor. While providing an emotional backdrop for social action, this vocabulary of images also points to a view of the self different from the authentic subject, towards a constantly shifting and changing experimental subjectivity, prone to breaks and ruptures, arising in the context of a proliferation of images that do not necessarily cohere into long-lasting cultural codes. Later movements such as the struggles of gays and lesbians demonstrate this more transgressive approach, satirizing and breaking existing cultural heterosexual codes not in the name of an authentic subject, but calling for an experimental self that explodes existing concepts of gender and the hetero/homosexual divide. The aesthetic politics of social movements changes over time, though their appeal often remains emotional and intense, as they ask the recipient for an identification with the symbols and images of the movement. People are attracted to

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movements in part because of style, dress, and manner of speaking, alongside dramatic and theatrical display. These aesthetic ideas and political views did not arise out of nowhere. In my view, aesthetic ideas and practices were formulated in a distinctive aesthetic sphere and within the contours of popular culture, and then come to influence social movements through various combinations and permutations. A historical perspective is necessary to grasp these changing dynamics. Concurrent with the aestheticization of everyday life, the tensions characteristic of the aesthetic sphere have migrated to social movements. As the artistic ideas and practices of the aesthetic sphere intersect with social movements, the theoretical understanding of these movements changes, as do the selfunderstanding and practices of movement participants. Aesthetic politics arose in nineteenth-century social movements, as anarchists and bohemians found common cause with workers, allied with a carnivalesque solidarity that informed new types of organization and practice. In the contemporary era, a more postmodern aesthetic politics has come to the fore in social movements. As working-class traditions and discourse disappear, the economy becomes increasingly tied to aesthetic criteria, and the aesthetic sphere and carnival merge in everyday life. In this context, social movements become increasingly concerned with transgressive ideas of fantasy and desire. The next chapter moves beyond this discussion of social movements. I outline my theoretical approach to aesthetic politics through exploring the philosophical and historical dimensions of the aesthetic sphere and popular culture.

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3 Identity, Knowledge, Solidarity,

T

and Aesthetic Politics

he various perspectives that I explored in the previous two chapters have not adequately explained the relationship of aesthetic politics to either public life or social movements. In this chapter, I develop the approach to aesthetic politics that informs my analysis of public life and social movements. I consider the philosophical and conceptual basis of aesthetic politics through an examination of the issues of identity, knowledge, and solidarity. With the rise of a differentiated aesthetic sphere, a consciously aesthetic version of the subject and knowledge could be elaborated by artists and philosophers. I move beyond the contours of the aesthetic sphere and theorize a new playful solidarity associated with popular culture and carnival. The latter did not generate intellectuals who provided a philosophical explanation of its own genesis and functioning, so it is necessary to look to a number of different philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists in constructing a theory of play and its relationship to aesthetic politics. It is clear that these aesthetic ideas cannot be determined solely by their internal history, for these abstract ideas of play and identity were practiced in public spaces that were influenced by changes in culture, the economy, and media. These issues will be discussed in Chapter 4.

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Beginning with the contributions of romanticism, Immanuel Kant, Nietzsche, and John Dewey, I address the not entirely consistent ideals of the subject and knowledge that develop within the aesthetic sphere, which in turn provide models for broader identity formation and individual change and the transformation of society as a whole and for many social movements. I then explore the idea of play associated with carnival and festival, grounded in popular culture. Aesthetic ideas of the subject, knowledge, and play inform an aesthetic politics that looks to create alternatives to a rationalized modernity. At the end of this chapter, I develop the implications of these versions of aesthetic politics for social movements. The aesthetic politics that derives from the aesthetic sphere can be conceptualized as two “ideal-types.” The first type of “modernist” aesthetic politics posits an expressive subjectivity in opposition to the instrumental reason and creative-denying characteristics of modern capitalism. Deriving from romanticism, this version of aesthetic politics appeals to a notion of community that combines the individual and society in a nonrepressive whole, often expressed in utopian visions of aesthetic harmony and solidarity. Philosophers from Friedrich Schiller to Kant to Marcuse contend that art provides such ideas of unity, and they call for a subject that can harmonize the sundered fragments of modernity. This notion of art translates into a politics based on the realization of an authentic self, and it critiques positivist views of knowledge in favor of a more hermeneutic epistemology that focuses on the distinctiveness of particular experiences, especially aesthetic ones. A vision of expressive aesthetic politics has informed labor movements’ criticisms of capitalist and bureaucratic societies as alienating, as not allowing the fulfillment of individual creative capacities within and outside of the workplace. It has also provided an alternative basis of knowledge for many social movements, for their visions of social change incorporate emotional and creative dimensions of social life that cannot be fully grasped by positivistic categories. It calls for a reconstruction of the particular experiences and a recognition of the identities of those groups marginalized by dominant narratives of history and society. The other type of aesthetic politics has a more postmodern and transgressive orientation, first elaborated in the philosophy of Nietzsche

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and developed by later postmodern thinkers, from Foucault to Deleuze. This transgressive aesthetic politics deconstructs coherent identities in favor of more fluid and nomadic individualities, finding pleasure or jouissance in this act of deconstruction. It also critiques the very idea of coherent meaning and historical narratives as the basis of knowledge, substituting cultural and epistemological ruptures for collective meanings developed over time. From this perspective, power works by homogenizing diversity, creating a fiction of a community that invariably excludes and marginalizes some groups and identities. This more transgressive politics is a politics of desire, fantasy, and rupture. Though evident in labor movements in the late nineteenth century, it achieves its most powerful political resonance in the new social movements from the 1960s until today, as concerns with difference and diversity and a suspicion of communities as marginalizing those who do not fit into its categories come to the fore in these movements. Though these two types of aesthetic politics roughly correspond to the modernist late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the more postmodern society emerging after the 1960s, this distinction obscures as much as it clarifies. All too often these two perspectives are juxtaposed to one another, in a now tired modern/postmodern battle. Yet their similarities are as important as their differences. Both share a nonrational and aesthetic critique of the rationalization and instrumental “disciplinary” orientation of modern societies. Both provide different ideas of solidarity and emancipation than those found in classical thinkers such as Marx or Durkheim, or contemporary thinkers like Habermas. We now turn to the exposition of these ideas.

Philosophy and the Aesthetic Sphere Weber and Habermas emphasize the autonomous forms of subjectivity, knowledge, and institutions developed within the aesthetic sphere. They are less attentive to Bourdieu’s focus on tensions in the aesthetic sphere between orthodoxy and innovation, and struggles for power within this realm. Yet Weber, Habermas, and Bourdieu do not adequately outline the distinctive philosophical tensions within this realm or discuss their implications for politics and public life. Moving beyond

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these theorists, I explore the distinctive understandings of aesthetic experience and the political implications for civil society and social movements in the thought of Kant, Nietzsche, and Dewey. The rise of modernity brought with it a crisis of subjectivity. Freed from tradition, subjectivity also threatened to splinter in the context of a differentiated society that privileged rational thought over emotion and sensibility. Weber in particular correlates the rise of art as a promise of salvation with the disenchantment of the world associated with the decline of religion and tradition. Influenced by the eighteenthcentury romantic critique of science and Nietzsche’s epochal claim that God is dead, Weber sociologically reformulates the widespread nineteenth-century view that a crisis of reason is at hand. He argues that rationalization processes create an emptiness of meaning at the heart not only of capitalism but also of modernity itself, for moral meanings cannot be created in the absence of a religious ethic. This results in a crisis of the subject, Weber’s post-Protestant “sensualist without spirit,” for the individual’s very existence as an autonomous agent is made problematic by a rationalized, bureaucratized world. A differentiated and disenchanted modernity also shatters shared cultural meanings, generating a fragmented world of competing gods. Aesthetics offers a new understanding of subjectivity different from either the rational or moral subject, thus providing a potential way out of the crisis of modernity.1 Aesthetics could play such an important role in the formation of new ideas about subjectivity and its relations to politics and knowledge only because of the rise of romanticism and the insights deriving from the philosophies of Kant, Nietzsche, and Dewey. Romanticism provided an aesthetic solution to the crisis of subjectivity. Beginning in eighteenth-century Europe, art became an independent endeavor, with its own distinctive characteristics, laws, and criteria for evaluation. In opposition to Enlightenment rationalism and to an emerging productivist and capitalist culture that emphasized work and discipline, romanticism inaugurated a new notion of individuality, based on the cultivation of personal feelings and intuition rather than appeals to science and reason. Authors from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to William Wordsworth searched for the natural and authentic core of humanity. In their views, objective reason could not understand the depths and complexity of human feeling, and the hegemony of scientific thinking

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contributed to the emergence of an instrumental bureaucratic economy that dominates society and nature. For romantics, people and nature should be reconciled, for nature should be celebrated as an arena where one can explore sensuality and experience. Romantics desire an authentic existence, not an artificial life separated from feeling and nature. Authenticity requires each individual to discover her own voice. This is not a rational process, however. It involves sensitivity to distinctive experiences and feelings. People must find their inner voices and create their own particular lifestyles.2 Art becomes increasingly important in this context. It is the expressive and creative medium par excellence. Music and laughter, emotion and art, feed off of one another. Romantic art opposed the classical style of its time, calling for more experimentation in artistic forms, and saw itself as an expression of a unique inner self. Many romantic painters, writers, and musicians believed that art exemplified the creative imagination, providing more insight into reality than science or reason. Romantics embraced a mysticism based on the celebration of nature and experience, in opposition to the commercialism that they saw developing around them. Art is a realm of beauty in and of itself, and the artist should live for her art. In the romantic worldview, art has its own distinctive characteristics and informs a vision of expressive self-development where a good life is one rich in experience and feeling. Yet romantic self-expression had no systematic theory of aesthetic knowledge or judgment. The philosophical justification for an autonomous aesthetic realm and a distinctively aesthetic knowledge was developed by Kant, who distinguished a par ticular aesthetic sphere of knowledge and judgment, separate from those of science and morality. While Kant did not explore the constitution of an authentic self, substituting concerns with individual autonomy for the search for one’s inner essence, he concentrates on elaborating a specific type of nonconceptual knowledge within the aesthetic sphere, oriented toward particular cases rather than general principles and tied to emotional pleasure rather than cognitive processes. Kant is the philosophical precursor to Weber’s and Habermas’s definition of modernity as the separation of distinctive value spheres, but he has a much richer philosophical discussion of these realms than they do. Kant addresses the specific epistemological dimensions of an

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aesthetic realm, from taste to judgment, which distinguish the aesthetic realm from the scientific and moral spheres. For Kant, arguments about truth in the scientific and moral arenas derive from universal principles that are valid for everyone regardless of circumstances, whether they be the a priori categories of the mind such as time and space that order our perceptions of the natural world, or the universal categorical imperative that instructs us about how to act morally in every situation.3 Such is not the case with aesthetics. Kant differentiates an independent arena of taste and aesthetic judgment from the knowledge produced by theoretical and practical reason. Aesthetic judgment concerns the knowledge of beauty and the sublime, not of impartial truth. In the realm of art, people can discuss aesthetic experience without arriving at an understanding of objective truth or a consensus about the meaning of artistic beauty. Art is a practice of freedom because it is not bound by universal rules.4 Rather, a different kind of truth emerges in art, tied to the particular artistic object and based on insight into our emotional experiences. For Kant, the awareness of beauty is a contingent reconciliation of nature and mind, and aesthetic experience consists of pleasure and delight in this recognition.5 Achieving aesthetic delight, however, is not a conceptual process, for we can experience it without reference to clearly delineated conceptual meanings. According to Kant, aesthetic delight and the experience of beauty emerge from the interaction of imagination and more conceptual knowledge.6 In Kant’s view, the imagination structures experience in a preconceptual manner, such as the ordering of visual patterns, which interweave different meanings into new and contingent wholes, based on the particularity of the aesthetic experience. In art we confront the particular object in all of its profundity. Understanding is different from the imagination in Kantian terms, for understanding is the process whereby a particular object is placed in a larger group or class that gives it meaning. The understanding is not “turned off” during an aesthetic experience, but is “at play,” unable to ever completely codify the distinctiveness of an aesthetic experience in universal categories. The artist does not follow simple rules, but engages in the free play of the imagination. As Kant states, “it is only in the presence of the particular individual work that concepts “come to reverberate.” 7

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The free play of the imagination should have no purpose other than its own disinterested pleasure. However, this does not mean that unity cannot be achieved in the aesthetic realm, though this unity is not based on concepts of the understanding. A community of judgment is founded on shared taste, but this fragile consensus cannot be demonstrated to be objectively true in any simple manner. Seeing that something “fits” in a narrative or whole, that it makes sense, cannot simply result from the application of cognitive rules to a particular case. Rather, part and whole intertwine in complex ways in aesthetic experience. This is not just a haphazard process, for the senses must be educated to appreciate the beautiful. For Kant, aesthetic judgment is not conceptually rule based, but founded on immanence, on the internal coherence of the particular object rather than the application of a rule. To be aesthetically intelligent and sensitive means developing a sense of taste or judgment, where the beautiful can be understood as “disinterested delight.”8 Kant elaborated a notion of aesthetics having a “truth” criterion different than that of science or morality. For Kant, neither moral values nor scientific categories are involved in the evaluation of aesthetic experience or artistic objects. The truth of aesthetics is tied to the particular experience rather than the universal concept, and to the pleasures and delight of experience rather than its conceptual and objective dimension. Art, a realm of the “spirit,” has a playful dimension that distinguishes it from work and other empirical needs. Artistic taste is located in the subject’s response to beauty.9 These abstract reflections on knowledge have important political implications, which Kant did not develop. Kantian aesthetic principles provide a critical version of knowledge that is an alternative to the hegemony of scientific and moral reasoning in public life. Art can supply different criteria for a harmonious social life, a “republic of taste” that places aesthetics at the heart of the public sphere. Kant’s aesthetics stress the particularity of knowledge, which can inform an appreciation of the integrity of indigenous knowledge tied to local and historically specific contexts that resist the universalizing categories of science and morality. Such localized perspectives have influenced the dynamics of the global justice movement, for example. His emphasis on pleasure and delight accents the importance of emotions in experience and knowledge. Finally, when Kantian aesthetic principles of knowledge are applied to

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social and historical issues, despite his emphasis on the transcendental subject, they have affinities with the critiques of absolute and universal knowledge so fashionable in the current era. While Kant contributed greatly to the subjective turn in philosophy and aesthetics, he still holds onto the idea of an objective reality that can harmonize with our subjectivity, even if this relationship is complicated in aesthetic experience. He also does not ground his notion of the transcendental self in historical or social experience, and confines art to a particular type of relationship with the world, restricted to its own specific realm. The innovations of avant-garde artists in the nineteenth century, their constant aesthetic novelty and attempt to lead their lives as works of art, demonstrate the limits of Kant’s notion of the disinterestedness of art.10 Nietzsche’s dictum that people should live life as an art form has affinities with the ideas of these avant-garde artists who arose in latenineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe and the United States. Nietzsche, who both admired and severely criticized Kant, severs the subject from any external referent, radicalizing ideas of knowledge in the process. His ideas about the self and knowledge differ from those of Kant. There is no coherent subject standing behind experience and giving it meaning. The artist does not express her inner emotions, but constantly experiments with and transgresses social conventions. Nietzsche views this transgressive artistic criterion as informing all of our understandings of the world. For Nietzsche, experiences can never be fully grasped by concepts, and this excess will always give rise to new interpretations. Nietzsche believes that the philosopher must give way to the artist. He views art as a utopia that can guide social action, for it shows not only how we should understand the world but also how we should live in it.11 Nietzsche, best known for his passionate assertion that “God is dead” and his critiques of Judaism and Christianity as conformist “religions of the herd,” was at heart an artist.12 For Nietzsche, the artist, the archetype of the “free spirit,” must redeem the modern world. All societies need artists who can test the community’s limits and question its most sacred beliefs and practices. Moreover, because of the unconscious forces structuring the psyche, there is no unity of the subject, and the ego cannot be a basis of representation. There is no common sense or taste, no tie of subject and object. The artist does not pursue

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truth as in theoretical or practical reason, for art does not simply posit one truth that all must follow. The world is structured like a work of art, open to endless interpretations and creative possibilities, and does not follow laws that determine social action. Reality for Nietzsche is a  process of change and becoming, which means that truth cannot be defined in terms of identity and universality. Different truths exist side-by-side, depending on the way of life of the observer. This does not mean that Nietzsche is an irrationalist. Rather, reason takes its place in the play of forces, mastering them without confining them to concepts. Knowledge requires the ability to control the chaos of life through projecting one’s will to power onto it. Art is the best model for such knowledge; it is an enhancement of life, an overflowing of forces. Nietzsche identified strongly with the Greek god Dionysus, the god of wine. In The Birth of Tragedy, Dionysus represents the dissolution of the individual into ecstatic and intoxicating feeling. Dionysus contrasts with Apollo, the god of music and poetry. Nietzsche came to embrace Dionysus at the expense of Apollo and adopted an experimental approach to life. According to Nietzsche, what is significant for each person differs from individual to individual. There is no unvarying or authentic self that lies beneath individual experience. People’s very sense of self can be changed by a new way of life, a new way of thinking. People have the possibility of changing the stories that they tell themselves and how they live, because life is fluid and varied. The self is something to be achieved, not a given in our experience. Individuals should not just contemplate life, but actively transform it. Nietzsche’s famous will to power means channeling desires in a creative direction rather than repressing them. People should actively shape their lives. They must “live dangerously,” accepting that there are no absolute truths. Rather than following a universal morality, individuals should strive to be the “poets of [their] life” and lead a life rich in meaning and experience, though without any guaranteed truths to guide them.13 Nietzsche was not a political figure, but his thought has enormous political implications, often developed by postmodern philosophers such as Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Nietzsche is the embodiment of the artist resistant to the rationalization of modernity. He dissolves beliefs in absolute or universal knowledge in favor of a plurality of truths, emphasizes that knowledge and power are intertwined with

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one another, ties knowledge to the body and its pleasures, and critiques all notions of shared community that marginalize different ways of acting and knowing. He does not see the social fragmentation of modernity as an alienated condition to be bemoaned, but delights in its possibilities for social creativity. Nietzsche develops a notion of the “experimental self” who values transgression and creativity over coherent moral judgment, for this latter morality creates individuals who replicate the disciplinary authority of the state in their very being. He provided a model for the bohemian who finds jouissance or pleasure in dissolving her identity into fragments and reconstructing it in a new way. Foucault in particular politicizes Nietzsche’s philosophy, for Foucault criticizes the exclusionary and normative implications of the modern disciplinary society. Foucault also emphasizes the transgressive critique of knowledge, which must push us to the “limits of ourselves” and open up “the points where change is possible and desirable.”14 He raises the possibility that transgression might replace contradiction as an organizing “experience” and/or principle of postmodern thought.15 He calls for a politics of diversity, fluidity, and difference, where all homogenous social formations are subject to criticism. Dewey, in contrast to Kant and Nietzsche, is concerned with the social dimension of aesthetic experience, how understandings of social action are changed by incorporating and understanding its aesthetic features. Writing after the rise of the avant-garde and the emergence of the labor movement, Dewey supplies a more communal understanding of aesthetic experience, though he remains within the orbit to some degree of Kantian philosophy. Dewey tries to establish coherent and meaningful connections between a knowing and acting subject and the external world. But unlike Kant, Dewey is most concerned with the specific qualities of aesthetic experience rather than the philosophical evaluation of the artistic object. He also adopts a more collective, prudential, and experiential approach to the art of living than does Kant. Dewey in Art as Experience attempts to break down the division between the creative artist and the everyday individual, and the distinction between art and everyday life. He contends that there is an aesthetic aspect to experience that transcends the practice of the artist in his or her studio. Dewey sees aesthetics providing a sense of form for this rhythmic quality of life. It concerns the struggle of the individual to overcome obstacles and reach shared fulfillment, after

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which a new process of creation begins. The actual world in which we live is a combination of movement and culmination, of breaks and reunions, and the experience of a living creature is capable of aesthetic quality. The live being recurrently loses and reestablishes equilibrium with his surroundings. At special times, the individual experiences a moment of passage from disturbance to harmony, and this aesthetic experience is the most intense life for us.16 Because experience is shaped and shared communally, aesthetic sensibility is elicited by others through interaction. For Dewey, to engage in aesthetic experience requires sensitivity, empathy, and imagination. From Dewey’s perspective, a rationalized, bureaucratic modernity has denied this aesthetic dimension of our experience. To live richly and fully demands an appreciation of aesthetic experience in our work and in our lifeworlds. Dewey’s ideas lead to a critique of the alienating aspects of this rationalized society and call for an understanding of the communal conditions that can lead to a more fulfilling, satisfying way of life. Kant’s, Nietzsche’s, and Dewey’s ideas inform the philosophical dimensions of a distinctive aesthetic sphere. Responding to the crisis of subjectivity and knowledge in the wake of the rise of modernity, Kant establishes the autonomy of the aesthetic realm and its particular version of knowledge that is not conceptual but requires the free play of the imagination. He also posits the role of the subject in creating taste. For Kant, pleasure or “disinterested delight” is the defining characteristic of aesthetic experience. Nietzsche expands the artistic dimension to all of social life, viewing art as a model for grasping different truths and reflecting the reality of contemporary fragmented subjects, severing both art and the subject from any objective referent. Nietzsche believes that art gives us a glimpse into a utopia, though this is an individual and subjective experience rather than any kind of social one. Dewey’s social critique of rationalization emphasizes aesthetic experience as a way of being in the world. For Dewey, experience carries the possibilities of an aesthetic dimension, for experience can consist of emotionally charged, dramatic qualities that escape rational categories. While the philosophical ideas that I discuss seem to mirror differences between modern and postmodern understandings of the self and society, I again stress that their similarities outweigh their differences,

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from their nonrational basis to their criticisms of instrumental reason, and that neither is a self-enclosed whole that remains immune to change and transformation. I emphasize instead how these different yet complementary aesthetic themes demonstrate the complexity of this realm. Yet these ideas were not politicized in and of themselves, but had on implicit political dimension, for they formed the philosophical basis of an aesthetic sphere of pleasure, creativity, and resistance to instrumental reason.

Dilemmas of the Self We are now in a position to elaborate in more depth the particular dimensions of this aesthetic realm, especially concerning the notions of self and knowledge, and further address their political implications. The creation of a distinctive aesthetic identity different from a moral or instrumental self has been an integral aspect of modernity since its origins. This lineage can be seen in Rousseau’s search for an authentic self, romanticism’s call for individuals to express their genuine feelings and desires, and Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s idea of self-creation as akin to a work of art. There are differences between these perspectives, from Rousseau’s and romanticism’s embrace of an expressive individuality proclaiming its authenticity to Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s rejection of humanist ideas of a core self, and their redefi nition of individuality as living one’s life as an artist, with all of the fluidity and experimentation that such a life entails. Nevertheless, these approaches coalesce around the idea that practices of self-formation, whether expressive or not, have an aesthetic dimension to them and have become central ingredients of contemporary life. The distinctive version of the subject that emerges in this arena has important implications for public life and social movements. It takes the form of a continuum from a Nietzschean, experimental self to more holistic or romantic/expressive understandings of the subject associated with romanticism and Dewey. This romantic notion of an expressive self, like a craftsman, depicts a subject whose creativity occurs through the fusion of disparate experiences into a convincing though always fragile narrative. In Kantian fashion, this subject undertakes aesthetic activity for its own sake, appreciating the “commonality of experience” that such projects entail, as George Herbert Mead

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states in his discussion of the nature of aesthetic experience.17 This self, evident in theorists as disparate as Mead and Marx, finds “joy in creation” as it consciously fashions an object. The artistic enterprise is a synthesis of form, feeling, and content, as an expressive subject reworks conventions into a narrative that provides a sense of meaningful continuity over time. Our aesthetic consciousness is fully alive only when we are engaging all of our faculties and creating a sense of wholeness among our emotions, actions, and thinking.18 The expressive self is tied to conventional understandings of authenticity as the search for a “true” self. But other perspectives on the self also arise within the aesthetic sphere. The “experimental self” deriving from Nietzsche is suspicious of ideas of an essential subject and the systematic narratives that define the nature of the self. While the expressive self has affinities to the craftsman who constructs a continuity of self over time and develops an ethical character based on habitual practices, the experimental subject has no such continuity and lives a much more fragmented existence. The idea of the experimental subject draws on Nietzsche’s Dionysian conflation of art and life and ranges from Lacan’s notion that the subject arises only as an unconscious disruption of the taken-for-granted, shared meanings of the “imaginary” to Foucault’s more reflexive “care of the self” and call for an aesthetics of existence.19 These practices of identity creation are oriented toward a postmodern bricolage of disparate qualities and experiences that do not lend themselves to clear-cut rules for social action. The creative life is equated with the constant experience of the new. The postmodern self must break with and transgress the conventions and meanings of everyday life and posit a transvaluation of values in Nietzsche’s terms, for the social realm is considered to be an arena of power and conformity. This self does not seek to abstract from experience in order to understand it, but intensifies experiences, which coalesce in fleeting and multiple judgments that do not cohere into a clear self-narrative. To the extent there is an ethics here, it is a personal ethics that does not refer to a shared, patterned narrative or code of morality. Foucault puts this idea well. In his words, “From Antiquity to Christianity, we pass from a morality that was essentially the search for a personal ethics to a morality as obedience to a system of rules. And if I was interested in Antiquity it was because, for a whole series of reasons, the idea of a morality as obedience to a code of rules is now

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disappearing, has already disappeared. And to this absence of morality corresponds, must correspond, the search for an aesthetics of existence.”20 Indeed, like Weber’s idea of morality as coercion within the aesthetic sphere, it is difficult to conceive of moral action in this version of aesthetic experience.

Knowledge and Meaning Kant and Nietzsche point to the specific type of knowledge elaborated in aesthetics, based on an attention to particular experiences and ideas rather than universal categories, and a nonconceptual sense of pleasure and delight that results from engagement with the artistic object. Dewey emphasizes a holistic version of aesthetic experience, based on the contingent reconciliation of part and whole laced with emotional meaning, while Foucault points to its more fluid and transgressive dimensions. The expressive self is tied to a version of knowledge based on the idea that any notion of a social whole must be sensitive to the particular case and that aesthetic knowledge à la Kant differs from its scientific and moral counterparts. It recognizes the slippage between signifier and signified but does not completely rupture this relation. Neither the self nor any other aspect of social life is severed from social relations. The reflexive appropriation of tradition “schools” aesthetic taste in a Kantian manner, creating new narratives that can inform understandings of personal and social life.21 These aesthetic narratives of social action, experience, and knowledge differ from the moral and scientific understandings of experience in the other differentiated realms of modernity. Aesthetic knowledge highlights the complexity of particular experiences, and any form of knowledge must be sensitive to this richness. Moreover, experience is dramatically and emotionally charged and points to the interplay of harmony and tension that characterizes social action. Interactions with others and with nature require receptivity to the textures of meaning, its variability and richness. Through such interactions, cognition becomes meaningful and imaginative as we create a contingent sense of wholeness. This sense of  the totality of the social world is communally shared and created through social interaction, new possibilities for change always emerge, and meaning is dramatically and creatively enacted. The expressive

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subject has the reflexive capacity to bring together disparate meanings into a coherent whole that builds on and/or reframes existing cultural scripts. This aesthetic perspective can inform the analysis of society in a more nuanced way than is possible through positivistic approaches. This perspective often views society as a holistic text. For example, Clifford Geertz’s aesthetic version of anthropology contends that social experience can be understood in a textual manner. Through this analysis, the observer can see how social meanings, differing social statuses, and power relations are expressed and sharply defined in different aspects of social life, from ritual to art and statecraft. Truth is not foundational; it is not based on a simple reflection theory of signified and signifier. Rather, a more “truthful” interpretation provides a meaningful and integrated understanding of social processes that cannot be reduced to discrete variables, and this interpretation is attentive to the particularities of indigenous experiences and cultures. It reconstructs collective histories or resurrects hidden and suppressed ones so that they can provide meaningful resources for the elaboration of meaningful action in later eras.22 The experimental subject is also sensitive to particular and the subjective experiences rather than the ideal and generalizing concepts. This subject emphasizes the fluid and transgressive dimensions of subjectivity and knowledge. As Weber recognized in the early twentieth century, and any teacher or student knows, the cultural relativism prominent in college classrooms often reduces questions of truth to issues of preference. Akin to Nietzsche’s philosophical perspectivism, the experimental subject defines truth in terms of constantly shifting approaches, each of which can inform a different way of life. This discarding of representational truth means that the goal of knowledge is to break with traditions, and creativity is defined as either transgression or fleeting coherences subject to sudden transformation. Thus, variations in ideas of truth are not due to better arguments or insight into cultural traditions, but occur through more random changes in preferences or breaks with existing conventions. Like shifts in fashion, these changes define a variety of truths. Fashion arises in modern urban life because of its constant change and “accentuation of the present,” as old authorities lose their power to dictate dress and behavior.23 Fashion paradoxically allows one to conform to a group

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while concurrently expressing one’s individuality. It is based on imitation and demarcation simultaneously. Though broadly tied to social changes and associated with class distinctions, variations in fashion are based on elusive internal criteria that follow no clear pattern, and often result from the disruption of an existing narrative.24 This subjective experience entails fleeting, intense moments of insight, the immediacy or suddenness of a particular type of aesthetic perception, that do not necessarily link up to larger social narratives in a coherent way.25 A kind of nondiscursive or affective meaning may arise through the disintegration of identity, as it constantly experiments with new identities and experiences, what Roland Barthes, borrowing from Lacan, calls jouissance, or the experience of bliss in the dissolution of identity.26 For example, Ron Lembo points to this jouissance in his discussion of “image play” as a typical type of television watching, as viewers often become interested in the flow of colors and intense, singular images rather than following the narratives of particular shows.27 I have focused on the ideas of self, authenticity, and knowledge within the aesthetic sphere, exploring their expressive and experimental dimensions. Both of these perspectives emphasize that attention to the particular case over general concepts can better capture the richness and fluidity of experience, and carefully generalizing these insights into political forms can help us imagine new narratives of self and social development. These notions inform public ideas of art removed from the isolated aesthetic sphere, as theorists from Zygmunt Bauman to Castoriadis and Maffesoli rethink the social actor as an artist. More concretely, beginning in the nineteenth century, the avantgarde carried these aesthetic ideas into everyday life in European and American cities. They helped to reshape conceptions of public space as theatrical arenas for performance rather than simply functional spaces for the reproduction of social life. I have painted a portrait of the complexities and tensions within this sphere, which is to be expected, for it is a realm where experimentation and change are encouraged. These diverse perspectives lead to different conceptions of aesthetic politics. Yet the aesthetic sphere does not explain the whole of aesthetic politics. Despite Dewey’s attention to the communal dimensions of aesthetic experience, there is no theorization of social solidarity in these different perspectives, and its politics remains mired in individualistic notions of revolt. As Naomi

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Klein writes of this critical bohemian approach, “What is left is little more than a vaguely sarcastic way to eat Pizza Pops.”28 Neither the expressive nor transgressive visions of self and knowledge deriving from the aesthetic sphere address the recurring crises of social solidarity that have characterized modernity since its founding.29 The ideas of the aesthetic sphere have a powerful social impact only when tied to collective traditions, in other words, when they can be practiced in solidarity with others. This requires a reconceptualization of solidarity in a playful direction, and a recognition of the dramatic and emotional images and ideas that increasingly characterize public spaces. Just as the ideas of the self and knowledge developed with the aesthetic sphere to critique instrumental rationality, these new ideas of solidarity derived from popular culture, especially its incarnations in carnival and festival, also problematize the bureaucratic ideal. It is the merging of ideas and experiences from two realms, the aesthetic sphere and popular culture, that provides the framework for aesthetic politics. To move from philosophical ideas to their practice in social life, we turn to a notion of solidarity tied to play.

Play Kant tied art to play, opposing the artistic dimension to the realm of work. Yet apart from Schiller’s appreciation of the play instinct and Johan Huizinga’s influential 1939 text Homo Ludens which explored the cultural dimensions of play, few nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury philosophers or budding social scientists addressed play in any depth. If anything, most dismissed it as a childish stage in human development or as a symptom of a debased form of art associated with the mediocrity of popular culture. Often, they contrasted the triviality of play with the seriousness of art. This perspective has not radically changed in the twenty-first century, at least among social scientists. As Gary Fine states, for most contemporary sociologists, “accounting for play and games requires surmounting a triviality barrier.”30 But playful themes are central to public life and social movements. The understanding of aesthetic politics calls for a model of social solidarity and collective action that points to playful activity rather than to the moral or rational theories of integration so dear to sociologists. Play apprehends this performative and unstable dimension of solidarity better

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than more cognitive models of social action, for as a “structuring movement of thought and feeling,” it captures the interplay of form, symbol, and body characteristic of style.31 Though play seems to have no meaning outside of itself, for it is undertaken for its own sake and pleasures, it is pregnant with enormous social implications. It privileges creativity, local knowledge, and the corporeal actions of the body over action that is based on abstract conceptual ideas. By its very existence, play serves as a counterpoint to rationalization, an implicit critique of social life defined in terms of profit or efficiency rather than creativity and delight. Though play can be hierarchically structured, it has egalitarian and transgressive strands that also provide an alternative to social orders based on inequality The free form of play is usually contrasted with the more structured and strategic dimensions of games, but that difference is overstated. Play like games involves cognitive and moral dimensions, from the strategic aspects of playing to respecting the rules of the play sphere, even if the latter are ephemeral. Though often very serious, games also involve creativity and delight. Though more strategic, structured, and rule bound than play, games provide spaces for creative action within their boundaries. Games also create a context for collective memory—integral to many sports, for example, is knowledge of previous accomplishments, which provide a sense of shared cultural traditions and standards of excellence.32 The study of play has often been the province of psychologists, who usually explore the play of children. Most of these studies, influenced by Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, view children’s play in terms of psychological progress, as a stage in the development of children’s cognitive abilities, as they learn more complex, abstract types of reasoning and behaviors. For more socially minded psychologists, play is an arena where children learn to interact with others more competently. Psychoanalytical interpretations influenced by Freud have also been important. They stress that children learn to master their anxiety through play.33 Sociologists have been better at grasping the social dimension of play. Mead emphasizes the orderly qualities of play, seen most often in games. The “play stage” is a central phase of self-development for Mead. Georg Simmel views play as a central part of the human experience, a situation of sociability where nothing matters beyond the event itself. Play is a social phenomenon, where, for example, fashion allows

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one to stand out from others, not stand apart from them. Simmel defines sociability as playful social interaction, attractive for its sheer joy and vivacity. Sociability develops and changes according to its own momentum and content, depending on circumstances. It resembles the free movement of art rather than rational discourse. Play also is indicative of a kind of in-between status, where playing means being apart from yet connected to people.34 Goffman recognizes the tensions between order and disorder within public life, often analogizing social action to a game. For Goffman, in ritualized social action persons are given respect according to their status and position. Individuals act strategically to maximize their standing and avoid embarrassment in the context of this behavior, much as in a game. Games and social life depend on “problematic outcome and sanctioned display,” a realm of uncertainty that also allows the skillful use of talents.35 These sociological approaches emphasize the negotiated nature of play and touch on its cultural dimensions. Yet their often fragmentary comments on play do not result in a systematic approach to it. I wish to return to the thought of Huizinga, the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, and the anthropologist Victor Turner, who most fully develop the notion of play as culture and as creative practice. Huizinga argues that play is synonymous with culture. He contends that play and culture became separated only as societies rationalized. In his words, “in its earliest phases culture has the play-character, that it proceeds in the shape and mood of play. In the twin union of play and culture, play is primary.”36 Even as societies modernize and differentiate, “at any moment, even in a highly developed civilization, the play ‘instinct’ may reassert itself in full force.”37 Huizinga defines play as serious, rule-bound activity. To play together requires some shared norms, which often crystallize into games with relatively fi xed rules. But even this type of play-game is fraught with tensions. As Huizinga states, “Tensions and uncertainty as to the outcome increase enormously when the antithetical element becomes really agonistic in the play of groups.”38 Roger Callois also sees play as a creative and transgressive activity. Much of play is stylized and ritualized, characterized by conformity as well as innovation. Caillois summarizes several important dimensions of games. They are freely chosen, and people can leave them at any time; they take place in separate spaces apart from the rest of everyday life; their outcome, though

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rule bound by conventions, is uncertain; games do not produce anything; they are unproductive; and they are fictive.39 Thus play has implications for culture and identity. It provides a space for the development of creative performance. The ideas of play as culture and as a creative in-between psychological and cultural space are also addressed fruitfully by the psychoanalyst Winnicott. For Winnicott, play is a universal activity, preceding speech. It is doing, not just speaking, in particular spaces and times. Winnicott sees play as an intermediate realm of experience, which ties inner reality to external life. Play is characteristic of transitional space; it relieves the strain of connecting inner and outer experience. Play allows the illusions of the infant free expression, which become the basis of art and culture for adults. According to Winnicott, the distinctive human capacity is not rationality, but relating to others and objects in a sensitive and playful way. Cultural creativity is grounded in play, through piecing together and interpreting experiences in an artful manner.40 For Winnicott, play, grounded in the first attempts of the infant to break from his caregiver, frees the individual from the strain of relating inner and outer selves. Play also teaches people to live with ambiguity, to realize that there is no easy reconciliation between self and other, or between the individual and social life. It promotes a sense of culture that is simultaneously shared and permeated by fantasy, fluidity, and constant change and creativity. Winnicott’s theory of transitional space as the place where a sense of play develops promotes a distinctive kind of relationality, which is both within and outside of the individual, not exclusively rational or irrational, and not quite the custody of either the psychic or the social. Winnicott’s psychological approach is complemented by Victor Turner’s anthropological perspective on liminal spaces. For Turner, focusing on non-modern societies, the liminal realm is a marginal space that allows the transition to a new status. It is an “anti-structural” space, where social order is turned upside down. It is an arena of social creativity and free experimentation, based on a ludic recombination of cultural ingredients. Turner distinguishes the more plural and optional liminoid actions of industrial societies from the liminal spaces of nonmodern societies, where work and play are not so easily distinguished. In industrial societies, this liminoid activity occurs in leisure spaces, apart from work. The modern liminoid condition often comes from the

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margins of society, and takes place in festivals such as Mardi Gras, but also in more permanent spaces such as bars and pubs. These spaces take on particular resonance for different groups, from workers to young people, and provide arenas where identity can be reshaped and performed, and new symbols for living created.41 To the extent that play cultivates a common sociability, or sense of connection, it relies on pleasure and delight. Winnicott’s idea of transitional space and Turner’s notions of the liminal and the liminoid are important here, for they point to a kind of solidarity based on the interplay of identity and difference, being both a part of and different from the other. Acting in transitional space requires the infant to improvise, to recategorize, in sum to play, as does the adult in liminal or liminoid space. This idea has affinities to Simmel’s and Maffesoli’s concepts of sociability as akin to the free movement of art and to Mead’s notion of  sociality. For Mead, sociality is “the principle and form of emergence.” Sociality refers to the person’s simultaneous existence in several psychological and cultural spaces at once. The individual has to constantly reintegrate new experiences into a fluid identity, reinterpreting the past as conditions change, negotiating the interplay of identity and difference.42 Such ideas encourage an approach to culture that emphasizes its unpredictability and fluidity, rather than its patterned, normative characteristics, and its practice in particular social spaces. Drawing on the above perspectives, I contend that playful social action is not tied to social narratives in a simple way. Play is not based on private individuals coming together to rationally discuss issues of mutual concern, nor is it based on a shared morality that informs an ethical orientation. The ideal public space for play promotes innovation, experimentation, the transformation of categories, and the renegotiation of boundaries. Play mediates social practices and creates new spaces for rethinking and experiencing social life. It is intertwined with fantasy and imagination, with its own distinctive styles and performances. This playfulness creates not just new subject positions but also novel forms of communication and ways of experiencing the world. A defining feature of aesthetic experience as play is that it combines affect and meaning in particular ways, offering “vividly felt and subjectively savored” experiences.43 Play involves a tension between feeling and cognition, pleasure and meaning without privileging one over the other. Play is an activity that emerges and structures our subjective

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intentions as much as being influenced by them. Aesthetic experience as play cannot be reduced to the intentions of the subject, her material circumstances, or mere convention. It not only exceeds individual experience but also outstrips the concepts that are available to understand it. When playing, people are participating in something larger than themselves, new experiences and interpretations often emerge, and not only players but spectators can be transformed as well. Play captures the fluidity and emotional valence of the self as elaborated in the aesthetic sphere in both its expressive and transgressive modes, while also emphasizing the particularity and contextuality of all knowledge. The social context for the public experience of play as solidarity can be seen in in carnivals and festivals, studied by thinkers from Mikhail Bakhtin to Hans-Georg Gadamer. Festivals and carnivals constitute a community formed around pleasures. They initiate play time, allowing participants to understand more profoundly their own social existence, and change their relationships to one another. Through festival people realize that they belong to a shared community, to past and future communities of meaning, many of which can be in opposition to conventional or hegemonic ideas. But these meanings do not necessarily change in an evolutionary manner, nor do they cohere into a totality. In festivals, these meanings can overflow their traditional boundaries and take on multiple interpretations, generating new meanings and revitalizing old traditions. The carnival can result in the creation of new identities or the dissolution of existing identity in a kind of Dionysian frenzy. Rather than building new communities through shared meanings, this transgressive dimension equates a personal liberation with the transgressive disruption of shared meanings.44 For example, the continued popularity of festivals and carnivals such as Mardi Gras demonstrates this dimension of play for adults, as they celebrate intense and transgressive behavior, dressing up as clowns, jesters, in costumes of different genders, and the like. Moreover, multiple, autonomous cultures of play exist, which have to be understood on their own terms. Play has its own distinctive styles and performances which are created out of fantasy and imagination. They are not moral or immoral, good or bad in themselves.45 Play has become a central part of American and European societies with the spread of popular culture. This focus on play calls for a fluid

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and flexible conception of social solidarity. This playful solidarity supposes that pleasure and novelty are goals of interaction as much as strategic or moral concerns, and only a solidarity that incorporates such delight can create a “rich intersubjectivity.”46 It is not based on shared civic or moral norms, a rational consensus, or common economic interests. When combined with the ideas of the subject and knowledge derived from the aesthetic sphere, it creates an aesthetic politics that critiques instrumental rationality and calls for a society where creativity can be lived and constantly renewed, akin to Castoriadis’s idea of the imaginary, which can “evoke images” that take on a social existence and provide possibilities for new types of social organization.47 These images create a social world of spontaneity and experimentation, and the identification with such images is a major psychological dimension of the contemporary era. This aesthetic dimension raises new issues for the study of politics, especially social movements, which are now inseparable from questions of identity, the status of local knowledge in a globalized world, and new attempts to think through the connection of the global and the local. The search for an authenticity and/or transgressive subjectivity from romanticism through Foucault and the elaboration of distinctive types of knowledge and meaning that focus on the particular experience and are suspicious of the universal have also become very influential in public life. This type of aesthetic politics involves two different visions of social critique that I have elaborated throughout this chapter. Its more expressive dimension involves a quest for an authentic identity and a knowledge sensitive to how disparate parts fit together to create a coherent whole. This expressive subjectivity involves revising and revitalizing ideas of collective history. From the cultures of African Americans to the nationalist identities of Eastern Europeans, a shared cultural history, akin to what Robert Bellah et al. call a “community of memory,” often ties people together.48 The idea of a shared history of suffering and possible redemption through collective action can inform strong critiques of existing political arrangements. In more prosaic form, this sense of a shared fate and of cultural belonging, often embodied in sports and games, provides the resources crucial for holding the present to critical standards, as embodied metaphorically in heroes, heroines, and stories that do not merely replicate the existing culture’s self-understanding. Collective memory can provide

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some continuity with models of acting, and heroes or heroines from the past have a facticity that makes them more than simply raw data for a cynical and narcissistic present.49 Yet people draw not only on collective stories to inform their sense of self and society but also on less coherent and more fleeting images. We now live in a world of images and often converse in a language of images. The appeal of the image is often to an intense experience, an emotion, or a desire rather than to a clear argument or narrative. A politics that builds on this vision of the social world is mistrustful of any closed totality, of any interpretation that brings finality. This image politics is represented by ideas ranging from the Lacanian imaginary sphere of fantasies of wholeness which inhibit creativity to Foucauldian discourses of power which structure our understandings of the world. In such a context, an experimental subject looks to break with existing systems of meaning. From these perspectives, issues of historical continuity and collective memory are often explained by psychoanalytic ideas of nostalgia for the security of the mother’s womb or a golden past, and/or the Foucauldian argument that power and knowledge are linked, and any form of power will deploy knowledge in its functioning. This is especially true in collective memory, for in the experimental approach there is no continuity in history, but our collective memory rather represents a configuration of forces that structure social understandings. Public life has seen the eruption of fantasy and desire into social spaces previously occupied by rationality and morality, reshaping politics and the self so that subjectivity is no longer comprehensible as a “private and compensatory reaction against public situations, but rather a way of reading those situations in its worn right, of thinking and mapping them, of intervening in them, albeit in a very different form from the abstract reflections of traditional philosophy or politics.”50 This postmodern sensibility is characteristic of much contemporary aesthetic politics. These versions of aesthetic politics have not only influenced the texture and ideas of the public sphere but also been practiced in actual public spaces, from parks to streets, where social movements have paraded new aesthetic ideas and practiced new forms of solidarity. There are few public events, from rallies to sports to rock concerts, that have not been touched by this aesthetic dimension of social life. These spaces always have the possibility of becoming politicized, of becoming sites

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for the enactment of aesthetic politics. These are often marginal, hidden, and forgotten urban spaces, such as the artists’ studio or the warehouse turned into a meeting place for social activists. They can become sites of resistance or liminal, transgressive change, and then burst into the public arena through mass marches, demonstrations, and social movements.51 Social movements are vehicles for the practice of aesthetic politics. The aesthetic ideas of the self and knowledge deriving from the aesthetic sphere, the idea of an aesthetic break from existing culture and the creation of new frames for understanding self and society, and the notion of playful solidarity arising from popular culture have influenced social movements from French revolutionary syndicalism to the May 1968 uprising in France and the global justice movement today. The next chapter explores the histories of the aesthetic sphere and popular culture, addressing how their intersection helped create new types of aesthetic politics that had enormous implications for social and public life.

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II

History and Social Movements

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4 The World Is a Stage and Life Is a Carnival The Rise of the Aesthetic Sphere and Popular Culture

T

he idea that social life consists of actors playing parts has a famous lineage from Homer to Shakespeare to, more ingloriously, the sociologist Talcott Parsons. Sociology historically has been fascinated by such issues, centered on the idea of role. While functionalists like Parsons assume that role playing stabilizes a social order, Erving Goffman constructs a dramaturgical approach to understanding social action around this acting metaphor that criticizes the functionalist assumption of the stability of the self and of social meanings. For Goffman, public life is an arena where players make particular moves to save face and augment their status. Society is like a Beckett play, a performance where sense is not guaranteed—it is a discontinuous deferral of satisfaction and closure, as meanings are fragile and liable to break down at any time, and the fullness of meaning is never achieved.1 Goffman alerts us to the taken-for-granted and complicated cultural knowledge that informs any social performance. Performances require settings that have a history. They are more of an art than a mere replay of existing norms and values. Though Goffman does not develop this idea, they also frequently have implicit or explicit political implications. In my view, performances often involve aesthetic

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politics. In this chapter, I move beyond the microperspective of Goffman to address the social and cultural foundations of aesthetic politics. The aesthetic and theatrical dimensions of social movements and public life are inseparable from the history and dynamics of the aesthetic sphere and popular culture. I will briefly examine the emergence of the aesthetic sphere and popular culture, tying them to social and economic changes. Differing configurations of ideas and practices from avant-garde artists and popular culture created distinctive ideas of aesthetic politics and impacted public life and social movements. Moving beyond the abstract ideas of Weber and Habermas on the constitution of the aesthetic sphere, I consider the bohemian practices, especially concerning aesthetic display and performance, within the aesthetic sphere. This realm took on its particular texture because of social changes tied to urbanization, capitalism, and the rise of a bohemian subculture that became increasingly politicized in the early twentieth century. Second, I address the emergence of popular culture and the mass media, especially those aspects associated with carnival. While the bohemian dimension of the aesthetic sphere is tied to individualistic performance, carnival represents a distinctive communal and playful solidarity. Both have influenced public life and social movements in important ways, and each contributed to the rise of aesthetic politics. They provide the context for the emergence of the expressive and transgressive aesthetic politics and the playful solidarity outlined in the last chapter. I then discuss how both of these aesthetic features become part of everyday life in Western society as a consumerist and postindustrial economy emerges, especially after World War II. In this new society, artists have an important role in the production process, and culture and emotion often characterize both the experience of work and the marketing of commodities. Today, aesthetics are central to a post-Fordist West and globalized world where the welfare state is in crisis, and nation-states are losing the capacity to control their internal economies, police their borders, and manage the inflow and outflow of migrant populations. These social changes create a new context for aesthetic politics. As Slavoj Žižek writes, “the ‘postmodern’ politics of resistance [is] permeated with aesthetic phenomena, from body-piercing and cross-dressing to public spectacles.” 2

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The History of the Aesthetic Sphere Weber and Habermas see the aesthetic sphere as a distinctive dimension of modernity, positing in Habermas’s words “a subjectivism freed from imperatives of objectification in dealing with individualized needs, desires, and feelings.”3 Yet it is necessary to put some historical meat on these abstract theoretical bones, and in particular to revise Habermas’s understanding of the aesthetic sphere. Habermas thinks of the aesthetic sphere as akin to a public sphere where debate about artistic claims to truth takes place. This is true to some degree, but it is also an arena where different artistic practices are elaborated. As Raymond Williams states, when discussing works of art or any aesthetic phenomenon, it is best to conceptualize them as practices, not as objects. This leads to examining the nature of the practice and the social conditions influencing these works of art, and a conception of aesthetic spaces as visual and emotional realms of style and rhetoric.4 Moreover, Habermas and Weber do not explore the entire realm of popular culture and its influence on the aesthetic dimension of modernity. While Habermas is correct in seeing bohemia as an important aspect of the aesthetic sphere, he does not discuss its history. By the end of the nineteenth century, artists and philosophers had to confront an increasingly bureaucratized society and emerging commodity culture which threatened their autonomy, and their practices were forged in an urban environment that gave them an arena to practice a lifestyle politics, an aesthetics of existence, in Foucault’s terms.5 These artists had to make peace with a popular culture that they often found distasteful but that gave their ideas a vitality and social dimension that they lacked. The figure of the bohemian was central to the history of the aesthetic sphere. For many bohemians, their rejection of bourgeois conventions translated into an avant-garde political critique of capitalist life. But it was not clear that bohemians would necessarily follow a “progressive” direction. Opposition to capitalism could take the form of extreme nationalism and the desire to found an authentic national culture. The marginal status of artists in capitalism could generate enormous resentment and rage. Hitler himself exhibited bohemian tendencies, despite his rejection of avant-garde art. Like Mussolini, he

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also utilized the appeal of the artistic genius to inform his charismatic political leadership. The emergence of the aesthetic sphere occurred in the context of the industrialization of European society. The growth of new technologies, the nation-state, and a new culture of change are well known and need not be repeated here. Most important, in Weberian terms, modernity resulted in the differentiation and rationalization of distinctive “life spheres” in which art, science, and ethical reasoning become independent of their original religious and traditional context. Each sphere develops its own particular inner logic and standards of evaluation. Yet this new society was also a disciplinary society, in Foucault’s terms, that owed as much to state power as to the potency of the market. The disciplinary society, based on institutions like the prison, the school, and the military barracks, was founded on a micropower that produced customs, habits, and notions of work through processes of inclusion and exclusion and definitions of normal and deviant. It created a new standardized society out of the fragments of the heterogeneity that preceded it. Foucault’s analyses of the prison and the asylum exemplify these processes, for they incarcerated in particular institutions those who were defined as different or deviant, disciplining them with new forms of subtle power, tied to knowledge claims. These new institutions increased the rule of experts and educators, promoting the surveillance of subject populations, whether they be students, patients, or workers. Bodies, emotions, and speech became more rationalized and restrained.6 The rise of the disciplinary society created new contexts for opposition to power. Much resistance to capitalism took on the rationalized terms that the new society mandated, as workers and citizens demanded rights within the established logic of the disciplinary order. But other types of opposition arose as well, often contesting the disciplinary society. The autonomy of the aesthetic sphere was one space for the cultivation of new types of resistance, from romantic demands for the realization of expressive authenticity to a Nietzschean transgressive politics that wanted to overturn all social conventions. The aesthetic sphere also arose with urbanization, which provided new arenas for artistic display outside of the specialized world of art. In many ways, public life became more spectacular and theatrical with the rise of new media and increased urbanization. Urban

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life promoted an aesthetic feel to everyday life. As especially Western societies industrialized in the nineteenth century, cities grew dramatically. Vienna increased from 400,000 residents in 1846 to 700,000 in 1880; Berlin from 378,000 in 1849 to almost a million in 1875; Paris from 1 million to 1.9 million and London from 2.5 million to 3.9 million from 1851 to 1881. Newer cities such as Chicago and Melbourne increased their populations at an even faster rate.7 Cities had been the hope of democracy, for they allowed people who are different from one another to engage in common action across differences. Urban life brought together people from diverse backgrounds, occupations, and classes. It provided distinctive public spaces for communication and display, from mingling on city streets to interactions in coffee houses and theaters.8 When urban street life is combined with a novelty-producing capitalism that destroys tradition and “all that is solid melts into air,” visual pleasures become increasingly important, and fleeting images characterize more and more of public life. In this context, individuals maintained their sense of identity through theatrically cultivating a specific sense of style. Simmel recognized this in his early essays on urban life, where his “modern city dwellers turn into bohemians, aestheticists, exhibitionists.”9 Though streets, parks, coffee houses, and the like were not created to promote a distinctive aesthetic sensibility, they served that purpose. They became scenes of aesthetic display and performance, of the cultivation of style. These scenes of mutual display promoted a distinctive type of social interaction. They involved not collective action and rational debate, but “horizontal, simultaneous, mutual presence” among strangers, creating a “strange zone between loneliness and communication.”10 Rather than an arena of rational discourse or moral debate, their mode of communication consists of a “common mood or tone that will color everyone’s actions.”11 Fashion is one of its major characteristics, providing “the background needed to give our gestures the sense they have.”12 These public spaces of mutual display are maintained through a language of signs and symbols. This new type of public life became increasingly important in an urban society of strangers. It promoted the individualism so characteristic of modernity. The ideas of an expressive “true self” and the notion that the self is a constant source of experimentation and change owe

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much to this dimension of aesthetic display and performance. In a sense, capitalist urban life encourages everyone to be a bohemian. Yet the history of this type of style and aesthetic display is intimately tied to the history of European and especially French bohemianism, which took art to the streets in an attempt to transform public life.

The Bohemian and Urban Life Bohemia is a modern phenomenon. Since the 1830s, bohemia has come to refer to “the activities of artists and lifestyle eccentrics as they cohere in and around distinct urban districts.”13 Bohemia originated in nineteenth-century Europe and was concentrated in Paris. Throughout the nineteenth century, European and especially Parisian artists grew in numbers and became increasingly autonomous from other established communities. Indeed, the bohemian could not have existed without an autonomous aesthetic sphere, which was initially a realm of self-absorbed artistic cultivation. Art was conceived as a self-referential arena separated from politics and ethics and was considered to be primarily a luxury product. This notion that artists produced art for its own sake was summed up by Oscar Wilde’s comment that all art is useless and that the world cannot be shaped by art.14 This elitist notion of art had always been challenged by other perspectives within the aesthetic sphere. As late as eighteenth-century Europe, many observers still saw art encompassing both the mechanical and fine arts, not essentially different from Aristotle’s definition of art as the essence of production. The ideal of craftsmanship, the creation of an object for its own sake according to objective standards, derives from traditions and practices of work from ancient times to today, and never disappeared even within artistic milieus. Yet throughout the nineteenth century the artist was increasingly defined as an individual virtuoso, mining the mysteries of nature and his inner creative genius.15 He or she cultivated this new lifestyle in the marginal spaces of urban society. This creative artist not only exhibited his work in museums and galleries but also began viewing social life writ large as his canvas. The city streets, bars, and coffee houses provided an arena of mutual display in which a bohemian and idiosyncratic aesthetic sensibility arose. It occasioned new, experimental approaches to self and style. This

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realm of display encouraged the showing of style to one another. The Parisian flâneur in particular captured this new sense of spectacle and urbanity, as he casually traversed the streets of the city, taking in its many charms while displaying his distinctive style to others. The street as his public arena, the flâneur created a kind of aesthetic self-willing that combined elements of spectatorship and activity into an artistic whole in his very being. The wanderings of the flâneur in the urban territories of modern life symbolized the practice of public display integral to the modern aesthetic realm. The flâneur is most closely associated with the outré actions of the bohemian, famous in nineteenth-century Paris for such activities as walking turtles on a leash. These transgressive behaviors of the flâneur reflected his practice of art as a way of life, beyond the museum or the studio.16 As both a member of a distinct area within a city and a practitioner of a particular type of artistic lifestyle, the bohemian came to embody modern ideas of aesthetic authenticity and practice. He does not evaluate his life or his artwork according to scientific or moral criteria, but in aesthetic terms. As Habermas states, the bohemian views the expression of his “authentic” needs as the goal of a good life. In a Weberian sense, the bohemian practices art as a new form of salvation that differs from religious experience. He desires to live and perform his life as a work of art.17 The public space for the displays of the bohemian became especially pronounced with the new spectacular urban and commercial displays of the late nineteenth century. Particularly after 1900, capitalism became increasingly aestheticized, as new advertising techniques from the logo to the trademark linked aesthetics and the commodity form and culture was increasingly integrated into production.18 By the first decades of the twentieth century, improvements in communication and transportation technologies had created a social world where “public time was becoming ever more homogeneous and universal across space.”19 In France, for example, technological developments and the expansion of capitalism encouraged a new consumerism. Symbolized by the department store, its sensuousness and seductiveness were highlighted by the shadows and luminosity created by electric light. Especially in Paris, as large boulevards and grand department stores intersected, commercialized types of leisure tied to tourism, fashion, and recreation displaced more privately improvised pursuits.

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Electricity illuminated a new consumer landscape, including “spectacular forms of recreation ranging from the café concert to the tour de France.”20 This new consumerist and urban context provided an arena where lifestyle displays became more frequent. A burgeoning capitalism promoted conspicuous displays of the possession of goods as indicators of class position. Aesthetic considerations became increasingly a part of everyday life with the rise of consumer capitalism, and the figures of the bohemian and artist grew increasingly common and popular.

The Politicized Artist As artists adopted innovative techniques in this emerging capitalist context, a new type of politicized artist became increasingly prevalent. Bohemians elaborated ideas about the centrality of expressive authenticity and /or transgressing social mores as the major goal of human existence. They created a vision of an emancipated life free of bourgeois conventions, often identifying with the socially marginalized and outcast. Frequently drawn to left-wing politics because of shared interests in promoting free speech and more sexual freedom, bohemians created an alternative to established cultural elites and began creating a new cross-class politics through their interactions with workers.21 This notion of the politicized artist who redeems society could be seen as early as eighteenth-century France, when artists wished to create a public sphere with art at its center, a “republic of taste.”22 However, the rise of capitalism broke apart and reformed ideas and practices regarding art and craftsmanship and promoted a new type of bohemian, lifestyle politics in the process. The autonomous artist “claimed originality for his work,” even though in reality aesthetic labor was in many ways still a collective enterprise.23 By the time of romanticism, art became an indicator of the complexity of inner life, and the artist as political figure begins to emerge, as he or she rejects the philistinism and materialism of the bourgeoisie. Yet it was only around 1900 that art began to fully shed its self-absorbed orientation. Some artists embraced the machine-based production and spirit of rationalization in the early twentieth century. For example, the architect Le Corbusier advocated principles of design invoking Taylorist models of efficiency. Other artists realized that they could not maintain the autonomy of

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the aesthetic sphere and retain the integrity of their aesthetic practices solely through cultivating art for its own sake. Some avant-garde artists in the early twentieth century saw themselves as visionaries, protecting the sanctity of art from both the instrumental and utilitarian proclivities of a bureaucratic society and its reduction to a commodity in a world dominated by the market.24 By the first decades of the twentieth century, and especially following World War I, artists also confronted political movements that forced them to act outside of the aesthetic sphere. Bolshevism, fascism, and conservatism joined capitalism in creating a new context for politicized art. Nationalists enlisted art, from painting to architecture, in their projects of nation-building, especially as they competed with other nations for prestige and national honor as well as economic dominance. By the 1930s, like other intellectuals, many artists recognized that these movements were symptoms of a crisis of modernity, and they believed that art, representing a qualitatively different vision of the world than capitalist materialism, would be central to the creation of a new society.25 Artists also had to confront the democratization of culture, most clearly apparent in the increasing power of popular culture and mass media in shaping individual and social taste. The nineteenth-century distinction between high and low art became compromised by the mechanical, photographic reproduction of artistic works and the rise of a new, entertainment-oriented popular culture. Art itself became more democratized and resistant to the dominance of an “aesthetic caste.”26 Artists and philosophers reacted to this leveling process in different ways, from outright rejection of mass culture to Walter Benjamin’s contention that a democratized culture that breaks free of the “aura” surrounding traditional art can become a means of emancipation. Many artists looked to create a broad aesthetic culture based on universalizing an aesthetically informed elite. For example, the futurists hoped to use commodity forms to build a new art for a democratic culture, though they eventually made common cause with Mussolini, demonstrating the contradictions and unstable ideological orientation of the avant-garde project.27 Like the futurists, other artists were attracted to nationalist projects, as they saw nationalism as a way to create an authentic culture, overcoming the separation between whole and part, divine and human, public and private. Artists found themselves in

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demand to make nationalist use of flags, uniforms, monumental architecture, and other aesthetic paeans to nationalism.28 Avant-garde artists placed themselves at the center of the cultural crisis of modernity. Many believed that this crisis was due to the dominance of the commodity form over all other aspects of life. They contended that artists could reshape modernity in a new direction, and not just return to the old art for art’s sake of the past. Finally, they saw art as a means of reshaping public life because it offered a qualitative alternative to instrumental rationality.29 Their resistance to commodification was not just based on argument and discourse, but concerned the creation of distinctive styles and actions. This aesthetic politics spread throughout the West. Bohemian artists allied with anarchists and syndicalists in France. In the United States, many bohemians of early-twentieth-century Greenwich Village, New York, found themselves attracted to left-wing political ideas, ranging from free speech to sexual freedom to worker revolution.30 As in Paris, radical art and radical politics merged. Greenwich Village became a politicized area where individual choices and styles challenged social mores, from advocates of free love to unconventional styles of dress, presaging the “lifestyle politics” discussed by Anthony Giddens and others. Leftwing militants and artists congregated there, and they placed more emphasis on lifestyle experimentation than on problems of economic redistribution. Artists reacted against the rationalization, bureaucratization, and standardization of American life represented by Fordist mass production and the stultifying effects of an emerging consumer culture. The craft orientation of many artists provided a critical standard by which to judge modern capitalism. It merged with working-class radicalism to supply an alternative vision of human nature and human possibility that contrasted with the instrumental and utilitarian reason of capitalism. Alongside this expressive, craft-oriented author of creative works was the artist who had no fi xed identity, who constantly tested society’s values, looking to transgress both aesthetic and social boundaries. The early twentieth century saw the increasing prominence of this type of artist. In this context, artists began to adopt less coherent types of artistic practice, as they increasingly abandoned linear perspective and realistic portrayals for more abstract and subjective interpretations of experience and reality. By 1910, with cubism, art broke with tradition

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and conventional art forms, no longer referring to or representing any external object.31 This post-impressionist art severed any simple relationship between subject and object, emphasizing both the instability of any conception of the subject and the multiplicity of perspectives that the breakdown of the unitary subject entailed. As “artistic expression became totally subjective,” artists “broke with the very idea of learned technique, of artistic skills transmitted by teachers.”32 They advocated an artistic freedom from authority and saw life as an aesthetic process, informed by continual experimentation. This led to an aesthetic politics based more on transgression than on authenticity, as the figure of the lone, gallant artist articulating his vision of pure art in opposition to a philistine society gradually gave way to a type of art concerned with the problematic nature of artistic representation itself, demonstrated in surrealism and eventually the postmodern turn of contemporary art. In sum, with the rise of cities, artists began developing distinct aesthetic styles and practices in an independent aesthetic sphere. Bohemians in particular became an autonomous subculture, creating distinctive styles of life and thematizing the particular characteristics of the aesthetic sphere, from style to new ideas about authenticity. The aesthetic display of the urban environment became a bohemian playground. As a realm of display, one’s style was paraded for all to see through urban streets. Artists adopted an implicit and sometimes explicit political stance, as they represented the defense of authenticity and expressive freedom and/or the transgressive challenge of societal boundaries and codes in an increasingly standardized economic and social world. The artist had a duty not only to his art, but to live his or her life as a work of either aesthetic wholeness or constant change and experimentation. These ideas and practices increasingly influenced everyday life outside of the aesthetic realm, as artistic and avant-garde ideas of style and display became widespread with the rise of modern consumerism and mass media.33 The aesthetic sphere was a source of a new type of aesthetic politics. But aesthetic spaces were not just an arena for bohemian individual display and style. The aesthetic sphere always had to face its more widespread counterpart, popular culture. While many artists feared that the aesthetic mediocrity would result from the hegemony of popular culture, the latter exhibited its own kind of aesthetic politics,

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more collective and plebeian, that sometimes supported yet also often opposed capitalist bureaucratization and efficiency. Urban streets and venues could be not only sites of individual performance but also spaces of a carnivalesque collective experience from political demonstrations to sporting events and in recent years rock concerts. Such collective actions consist of an emotional fusion of meaning and action. As Charles Taylor states, “There is a heightened excitement at these moments of fusion, reminiscent of Carnival or of some of the great collective rituals of earlier days.”34 Modern aesthetic politics is informed by two dimensions, the individualism of the bohemian artist and the collective vitality of popular culture and carnival.

Popular Culture and Carnival Prior to the differentiation processes of modernity, play and art were part of everyday life in the Middle Ages. Rituals too were central to the social imagination. But there was always the counterritualistic action of carnival that emphasized the transgressive and political dimension of collective action. The carnival’s emphasis on pleasure resulting from imagination and sensation could be seen in all aspects of social life, from the jesters entertaining royalty in the aristocratic courts to the medieval fairs attended by rich and poor alike. Such themes were especially prevalent in the plebeian popular culture that took shape in the Middle Ages. Medieval carnivals created an autonomous public space of excess, transgression, heterogeneity, and joy, where rules were overturned, categories were upset, and people broke with the formal laws of the dominant rulers. Most of these “liminal acts” had a carnal aspect about them, as the body and culture merged. Excess ruled, as images of abundance and sensuality guided the carnival. All idealized images were transferred to a profane level, as the belly, genitals, and buttocks were elevated to a position of symbolic importance, and defecation and eating became important figurative acts. Accepted gender roles were reversed, cross-dressing was common, and everything serious was parodied.35 As Terry Eagleton puts it, “carnival involves both a return to the particular and a constant overriding of identity, transgressing the body’s frontiers in a play of erotic solidarity with others.”36 The carnival’s subversive qualities invariably involved an at least implicit critique of the political power of established elites. Yet carnivalesque

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excess could lead to rage and violence, which could translate at times into anti-Semitism and racism.37 Carnivals in the Middle Ages were often tied to markets and fairs. They were places of abundance and excess, where people could eat and drink with abandon. These markets were places of magical thinking, where people believed that they could transform themselves through purchases of exotic artifacts and goods.38 As if in an animated world, fire-eaters performed side-by-side with peddlers. With modernity, carnivals did not disappear, but took on a new cast. Urbanization, differentiation, and capitalism were especially important in the dynamics of carnival. As popular culture became increasingly commercialized, so too did carnival. For example, antebellum American popular culture was characterized by a combination of commercialism, deception, and illusion, exemplified by the exploits of P. T. Barnum. Adapted from British plebeian culture, this American version was a disorderly working-class culture, epitomized by the rise of the penny press, museums showcasing exotic wares, black-faced minstrel performances, and freak shows. Commercial and ubiquitous, this new culture was created by “hawkers and walkers.” Puppeteers, peep show exhibitors, and animal showmen, among many others, traveled throughout the urban centers of the East and the frontier West, performing in places from street corners to taverns. They carried the materials for their shows with them from town to town, as curious onlookers might see a man traveling with anything from an orangutan to a hot air balloon. These performers pioneered new types of publicity, taking out advertisements in the newly popular penny press, printing handbills and bulletins for public display, and attempting to expand their popularity through word of mouth. Even well-known lecturers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Washington Irving embraced some of these new techniques.39 There was little agreement on what constituted high or low art, and most culture was organized on a commercial basis. Shakespeare’s plays were not considered high art at this time and were performed before rowdy audiences composed of a mixture of social classes. Shakespeare’s plays were staged in a carnival-like atmosphere, as jugglers and others also performed.40 This was in many ways a magical culture, where deception mingled with reality, the genuine with the artificial. Medicine men were part of this “itinerant culture.” The famous gun maker Samuel Colt, originator of the repeating six-shooter, is a

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case in point. At age eighteen, Colt traveled the country in order to make money for research on his weapons. He introduced himself as “Dr.  Coult,” specializing in pseudoscientific demonstrations of a new drug, nitrous oxide. Samuel Colt as “Dr. Coult” presented himself as a respectable man of science, whose knowledge of nitrous oxide could enlighten people regarding the latest scientific discoveries. Beginning first on street corners, Colt eventually worked his way up to lecture halls, giving addresses on Natural Philosophy to complement the laughing-gas shows. On a trip Colt made to Albany, New York, a local newspaper covered Colt’s performance and reported: “We never beheld such an anxiety as there has been during the past week to witness the astonishing effects of Dr. Coult’s gas. The Museum was crowded to excess every evening and so intense was the interest which was manifested, that the doctor has been compelled to give two exhibitions almost every evening.” “Dr. Coult” played with these illusions quite self-consciously, confusing trickery and reality. Like P. T. Barnum, he practiced a kind of “artful deception” as a purveyor of laughing gas, tying his showmanship to a pseudoscientific discussion of nitrous oxide’s history and benefits.41 Colt utilized these techniques drawn from popular culture and traditions of carnival as he revolutionized advertising and marketing, bringing emotional and sensational appeals to consumers that increased the sale of guns and contributed to the rise of the American gun culture. Early-twentieth-century vaudeville also drew on these themes of carnival. This commercial popular culture could reinforce an emerging capitalism, as demonstrated in Colt’s innovative use of popular culture to sell his weapons. Moreover, as we have seen, many artists and cultural elites reacted negatively to popular culture, attempting to create a realm of high or pure art and culture. Yet popular culture, especially carnival, also had oppositional dimensions that could become politicized in distinctive ways. In both the United States and Europe, in contributing to the formation of popular consciousness, this popular culture helped to promote the idea of distinctive labor or proletarian public spaces as class divisions and cultural divisions became increasingly pronounced as capitalism took hold in the nineteenth century. This popular culture provided workers and others with an egalitarian vocabulary, especially when refracted through their particular class experiences.

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This politics drew on a sense of plebeian collective memory that carnivals helped to express. In the eighteenth-century United States, for example, parades, celebrations, and songs were central in constructing a notion of the new U.S. nation and nationalism as a type of popular experience rather than an abstract commitment to ideas and institutions.42 These celebrations drew heavily on British ideas of carnival; when revelers or demonstrators took to the streets, they could just as easily vilify leaders through protests and riots as praise them.43 Such a festive culture, with its playful elements, was performed in public. A satisfactory public life in the early American republic required the marshaling of passion and emotion, which could not be mobilized through rational speeches and debates in the print media. Crowd behavior, in both the United States and Europe, was often playful, both as ordered activity in sponsored demonstrations and in frequently violent, transgressive collective actions in which crowds demanded political and/or social changes.44 In the urban Jacksonian America of the 1830s, groups based on ethnicity, class, race, or pet cause intersected in a variety of public spheres, often engaging in raucous debate, festive drinking, and a general carnivalesque atmosphere. They promoted new principles of economic association, such as worker councils and selfmanagement.45 In France, traditions of carnival were also important. The French Revolution of 1789 was a festive and a violent occasion, and ensuing governments attempted to define and control this revolutionary heritage for their own purposes. Yet such government control was only partially successful, for from the early modern carnivals to the pornography of the Old Regime and the era of the 1848 Second Republic, the satirical tradition of carnival encouraged le peuple to criticize and ridicule elites and invert their symbols of governing into objects of scorn and insult.46 According to Tocqueville, this radical disjunction between the people and its rulers, their separate spheres of existence, helped initiate the French Revolution and created continuing problems for French rulers.47 In the era of the Second Republic, writers from Honoré Balzac to Eugène Sue commented on the radical otherness and unruliness of the people, often depicting them as savages, akin to white European descriptions of Native Americans.48 Middleand upper-class fears were demonstrated in books such as Gustave Le

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Bon’s 1890 treatise The Crowd, which saw plebeian and democratic collective action as an indicator of lawlessness, social destruction, and unbridled emotionality, indicative of the fall of Western civilization to the unruly masses. These festivals and symbolic practices continued to influence popular upheavals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from the Paris Commune of 1871 to the revelry among striking workers.49 In Europe more generally, the memories of a shared past, whether expressed in the rights of the “free-born Englishman” or in the traditions of journeymen’s associations, helped provide the vantage point for a critical analysis of capitalism.50 In sum, carnival helped inform a new type of working-class popular politics in the modern era. This working-class politics contributed to the rise of proletarian public spaces, distinctive arenas of proletarian struggle that arose in opposition to bourgeois and capitalist hegemony. Throughout the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States, working class militants emphasized proletarian direct action, such as strikes and demonstrations, as the best means to realize their goals, rather than the ballot box. They engaged in militant, carnivalesque street demonstrations, directly confronting authorities with their proletarian power. Many workers created local, decentralized worker’s organizations, following the anarchism of theorists such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, alongside the large, hierarchical associations characteristic of Marxism. In France, for example, after the worker protests in June 1848, the Proudhonian decentralized strand of federalism became even more powerful and acquired ideological coherence in opposition to more Jacobin versions of republicanism that were tied to a centralized state. Militant workers questioned divisions between public and private spheres, viewed the state as a realm of alienation, advocated direct action as the best means of exercising power, and idealized the proletarian workplace and the working-class neighborhood, informed by class solidarity. Such a politics was evident in the direct action of French syndicalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the early-twentieth-century United States, which we will cover in Chapter 5. Yet the politics of carnival was ambivalent at best. Fascism too could draw upon the themes of carnival to legitimate its anticapitalist

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bona-fides while solidifying its power. Akin to carnival, fascist spectacles interrupt everyday life, and people experience an emotional joy in celebrating their seeming equality before the all-powerful leader. This type of fascist carnival allows individuals to express themselves in cultic arenas, rewarding submission. Its celebration masks violence and reinforces national and state power.51 The idea of debate about differing political perspectives disappears behind the drama of the fascist spectacle. As Taylor states, carnival does not necessarily promote informed and self-conscious collective action, but can instead encourage conformity and a desire for surrender to the community. It is open to different political interpretations depending on its particular social context. Carnival’s consequences are “up for grabs,” amenable to groups and leaders who can be, among other orientations, “utopian revolutionary, xenophobic, or wildly destructive.”52 Carnival and popular culture proved to be central ingredients in the emergence of a new aesthetic politics, as they provided an incipient political orientation critical of capitalist society. Yet it took the emergence of proletarian public spaces, and social movements such as French syndicalism, the IWW, and anarchism, to provide the organizational and ideological basis for a rudimentary proletarian version of aesthetic politics, which arose alongside the more familiar labor demands regarding higher wages, better working conditions, and the like. Artists critical of the inauthenticity of capitalism mingled with working-class militants in Paris and New York City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and these artists contributed to a critique of the alienation produced by modern culture that would be a standard socialist criticism of capitalist society. These working-class movements combined the individualism associated with the bohemian artistic style of the aesthetic sphere and the more communal and emotional intensity of carnival to create new criticisms of authority and discipline. They critiqued the alienation of the authentic, creative capacities of the worker produced by capitalist discipline, while also developing a new proletarian solidarity of unruliness and play prefigured in worker strikes and demonstrations. These carnivalesque and aesthetic themes arose as an alternative to capitalism, a kind of lifestyle politics that helped make labor and later social movements “explosive mixtures of aesthetic and political imagination.”53

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The Contemporary Era The combination of bohemian individualism and carnivalesque excess was not just a property of fin-de-siècle proletarian public spaces. By the first decades of the twentieth century, carnivalesque themes and the distinctive styles cultivated by artists in the aesthetic sphere were perched to become central components of everyday life in the West. The mass media was central to these changes. For example, in the United States, movies began as working-class and immigrant entertainment, appearing in fairs, vaudev ille, and nickelodeons. Nickelodeons were cheap, there were many show times, and their democratic seating favored a working-class audience, while the films themselves were often subtly satirical criticisms of capitalism. By 1908, cinema was a more narratively based, storytelling medium, replacing films that showed boxing matches or were based on optical tricks. In 1912, the feature film gained prominence, appealing to an expanding middle class. Movie palaces began replacing nickelodeons in large numbers in 1915. As they entered the mainstream, films adopted bohemian themes that emphasized the importance of life as pleasure, inaugurating a new laxness about sexuality and leisure, embodied in the lifestyles of stars in their private life.54 By the 1920s, such notions were becoming more widespread. But it was the post–World War II era, with the rise of mass consumerism and corporate capitalism, that created the conditions for a more prominent role for aesthetic considerations in public life. As the market expanded into every aspect of society, the ubiquity of fashion, the quest for an authentic self, and the importance of cultivating a distinctive style increasingly became grounded in everyday life. In particular, with the outbreak of social unrest and lifestyle changes in the 1960s, bohemian ideas began to infiltrate the mainstream. As a new aesthetic economy has arisen, the bohemian and carnivalesque dimensions of popular culture have spread throughout the contemporary West. All of social life, from the economy to politics, now has an aesthetic coloring. Modern advertising retains the carnival ideas of excess and abundance, alongside the notion that selves can be transformed through the purchasing of goods. Consumption has become eroticized, as advertisers play on themes of longing and sexuality. The press often emphasizes the grotesque and the sensational in its cover-

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age. These elements are no longer necessarily critical of capitalism, as they are promoted by the entertainment orientation of the mass media and rebellion has become part of the marketing machine. Yet from contemporary rock concerts to sporting events, the unruly aspects of carnival survive within the interstices of commercial culture and bleed into the political and economic realms of late modernity. These changes in everyday life were influenced by the par ticular history of the aesthetic sphere and the new politics that arose within it.

Changes in the Aesthetic Sphere Modernist and avant-garde art had often criticized bourgeois culture, implicitly portraying a new and better society in visual styles that challenged the market’s hegemony over social life. However, by 1960, the context for avant-garde opposition to capitalist bureaucratization had changed dramatically. Artists had lived through the twin disasters of fascism and Soviet-style communism; such radical movements began losing their luster. The market had spread into even more areas of social life, compromising the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere and demystifying art itself. The idea of a universalized aesthetic elite who supplied definitions of art was under fire, as younger artists believed that many different objects can become art. Most important, the Nietzschean/Foucauldian critique of the authentic subject and the types of coherent knowledge associated with it  became increasingly prominent in the aesthetic sphere during the 1970s. This postmodern critique attacked the idea of a monolithic artistic space, criticizing the museum as a “disciplinary institution,” arguing instead for a plurality of artistic venues. Books such as Hal Foster’s The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture attacked the ideas of artistic representation and the notion of the singular genius who produces such works, drawing on Foucault’s analysis of the ties of representation and power.55 To control representation meant to control power, for representation constitutes reality. Art is always a copy of a copy, always precoded, and there is no traditional subject that is creating representations. Rather, the role of art is to transgress, to create ruptures and breaks. Differences are all that exist; the function of the aesthetic is to disrupt the mainstream, without drawing on the romance of the subject.56

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In the permeable world of modern capitalist globalization, this more postmodern aesthetic critique meshed with new types of politics that arose in the wake of the decolonization movements of the 1950s and 1960s and the “new social movements” of the 1960s and 1970s, which problematized taken-for-granted historical narratives, envisioning social development in terms of new ideas of national and racial identity. But this was not a one-way process from the aesthetic sphere to everyday life. As Bauman states, “new currents in the fine arts follow, with some delay, changes in the mode of life— even if their creators do their best to anticipate these changes and sometimes succeed in inspiring or facilitating a change and smoothing its entry into the practices of everyday life.”57 The 1960s slogan that the “personal is political” could just as easily mean that the “personal is aesthetic,” as that decade saw an enormous increase in lifestyle experimentation and a search for authentic experience that outstripped standard political positions. Its anarchic and libertarian aspects could be embraced by those of the right or the left.58 Further, many young artists no longer created their works outside or in total opposition to commodity culture, but within its confines. Art and the “aesthetics of existence” become politicized in different ways by the late twentieth century, as issues around personal and cultural identity and indigenous rights move to the center of political debate. Such a new aesthetic politics could have resonance only because of accompanying changes in the economy and society. With the rise of contemporary consumerism and mass media, the separation of the aesthetic sphere from social life has declined, as the spheres of science, law and morality, and art become dedifferentiated to some degree, and economic, political, and aesthetic issues interpenetrate. It is also clear that politics has been reshaped by mass media and aesthetic considerations. From the prominence of political advertising to the criteria of authenticity and image that inform contemporary evaluations of politicians, democratic politics has taken an aesthetic turn. Artistic considerations now also dramatically influence the contemporary “aesthetic economy.” Especially the cultural industries from advertising to fashion are parasitically dependent on everyday experience, as they attempt to craft images and stories that appeal to the public. In so doing, they not only commodify experience but also contribute to the aestheticization of everyday life.

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Liquid Modernity These changes took place with the rise of a postmodern, informational economy and consumer culture, which allowed aesthetics to break out of its specialized niches. The nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century industrial disciplinary society of factory workers, a bourgeoisie whose wealth rested on manufacturing, the nuclear family, and a trust in science as a solution to social problems, has been replaced by a global postindustrial order characterized by the dominance of ser vice work, information technologies, new types of blended families, and an ecological and fundamentalist distrust of science. Mass media and consumerism have spread throughout the world, creating arenas of shared information where events can be broadcast to vast audiences simultaneously. Bauman names this new type of economy and society “liquid modernity.” The disciplinary society was tied to the mastery of space and time. In this new modernity, spatial boundaries no longer make sense, as the new economy calls for a world free of borders and checkpoints.59 Late modernity or postmodernity has witnessed a massive increase in the scope and pace of social change. Multinational corporations have contributed to a world where commodities flow freely from one section of the globe to another. As a new type of flexible capital moves freely around the world with little restriction, not only nation-states but also the basic institutions of modernity are changed, from the family to the economy. In this context, the nation-state is weakened, surrounded by a network of trade, production, science, and communication. Old-style, hierarchical economic and political bureaucracies are unable to cope with this new world. For Bauman, this is the “revenge of nomadism,” as we are now ruled by an increasingly peripatetic, even placeless elite.60 In this version of capitalism, elites embrace the multiplicity, complexity, and uncertainty of the future. These processes result in the crisis of modern institutions, from the family to schools, where authority is increasingly difficult to legitimate. This crisis is particularly acute in the welfare state. The welfare state attempted to assuage class conflict through government programs and collective bargaining between workers, employers, and a large, centralized state. Faced with rising oil prices, inflation and unemployment cycles, global competition, and the ascendancy of neoliberal

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privatization policies, the Western welfare state compromise has been under siege since the 1970s. With contemporary globalization, the movement of capital quickly from one arena to another, and the rise of new cultural identities, the state cannot control economic growth by itself. As Giddens states, we live in a runaway world, with no one central institution in control, where people face constant tensions between security and risk, particularly manufactured risks of our own creation, from global warming to the possibility of nuclear catastrophe.61 The response of elites in the West to the crisis of the welfare state has been to embrace neoliberal principles, such as privatizing public enterprises, guaranteeing the rights of private property, and keeping state interventions in markets to a minimum. The neoliberal state supports in theory the idea that individuals are responsible for their actions and well-being, but it often intervenes to protect the powerful when markets fail.62 This neoliberal globalization has coincided with changes in capitalist production processes, from Fordism to post-Fordism. Post-Fordism is a flexible, globalized, and increasingly information-based capitalism, different from the mass production–based economy of Fordism. Beginning about 1970, Fordist rigidity, from production processes to ideas of homogeneous space and time, began to be supplanted by a post-Fordist regime of flexible accumulation, elastic labor processes, rapid shifts in consumption, and geographical mobility. This transition dramatically affected the U.S. economy, among others. For example, in 1947, 85 percent of the nation’s products contained some form of steel made in the United States, and 40 percent of workers depended directly or indirectly on the steel industry for employment. In 1950, U.S. steel production amounted to 46 percent of the world’s total supply. By 1979, the U.S. worldwide share was only 17 percent, and by the mid-1980s many steel-producing communities had upwards of 50 percent of their population unemployed.63 Post-Fordism brings about new and unstable markets and demands quick innovation on the part of producers. It compresses space and time as decisions are spread throughout the globe in accelerated time. This new capitalism is disorganized, and consumption is diversified and individualized. Consumers also have a new market authority compared to Fordism, as producers must adjust quickly to consumer demand. Television and other new technologies have promoted this transition, creating an environment of global simultaneity

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while defining public issues in terms of private pleasures and interests. Commentators from Touraine to Bauman to Giddens note the increased individualism associated with this new society. Hybrid identities and multimedia characterize post-Fordism, rather than the unified consumption of Fordism.64 As the United States moved to a predominantly ser vice and retail economy, the manufacturing of meanings and the rise of symbolic workers have become increasingly important.

The Transformation of Work The free flow and sharing of information among firms are central to this new economy. This post-Fordist modern capitalism is characterized by communicative and immaterial labor, which has replaced factory work as the major source of the reproduction of capital in the West. Unions have declined worldwide, and new flexible labor markets are precarious as workers and firms need to produce goods, ser vices, and symbols very quickly, and profits rise and fall accordingly. In the wake of deindustrialization, many areas, especially cities, are turning to immaterial labor, particularly in arenas like finance and design, for economic development. Immaterial labor is based on the sharing of information through communicative and computer networks, interactive processes of problem solving and symbolic analysis, and the manipulation of emotions not only through advertising but also in the very nature of work itself. Such work takes on an increasingly aesthetic significance, as it is expected to be gratifying in itself, often defined in terms of its entertaining and amusing characteristics rather than through any evaluation of its moral qualities or contribution to greater public good.65 Work has also become more affective, which has coincided with women entering the workforce outside of the home in great number. In Eva Illouz’s terms, the West is now characterized by emotional capitalism, where emotional and economic discourses shape one another, and “interpersonal relationships are at the epicenter of economic relationships.”66 In a corporate world, coordination and cooperation, an attention to social relations, and the management of self are increasingly important. Arlie Hochschild describes much of this type of work as emotional labor, which emerges with the ser vice and retail industries and the

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restructuring of the economy. In professions from retail to teaching, emotional labor requires workers to create a publicly observable emotion through facial and bodily display. An emotional experience is part of the ser vice offered. Emotional labor involves face-to-face or voiceto-voice contact with customers, workers must produce an emotional state in another person, and the employer exercises a degree of control over the activities of employees. Workers have to be actors to perform their jobs well. Companies also give workers scripts that they should follow, making the individual worker dependent on the company.67 This is clear in the scripted and fake happiness at fast-food restaurants such as McDonald’s but also increasingly apparent in the importance of entertainment criteria for deciding who is or is not a good teacher at many high schools, colleges, and universities. If creating an emotional experience both in the worker and in the customer is now a central part of the economy, so are cultural considerations. Culture is now everywhere; it informs production processes as well as everyday experience. Goods become more symbolic and informational, work more emotion-laden, and property more intellectual.68

The Aesthetic Economy These changes in the postindustrial economy have contributed to the rise of an aesthetic economy. Media promote new ways of life through encouraging consumption and various lifestyle alternatives, eroding the very distinction between work and leisure. Media enterprises, such as finance and advertising, are based on a new group of educated people who work in and ser vice these industries. There has been an enormous increase in these “cultural workers” since the 1960s, who labor in areas like finance, advertising, media design, and other aspects of symbolic production.69 Artists in particular are important in the new economy, for they not only supply workers but also provide lifestyle clues about how to live and consume in this novel world. As Richard Lloyd shows, a great number of artists living in an area tend to correlate with concentrations of high-tech industries and more robust levels of economic development. The fate of the contemporary bohemian is tied to the market, even though many of them are uneasy about this situation. Creative and educated workers contribute to a dual city of wealth and poverty, for they possess the wealth that enables an area to become

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gentrified. In a typical pattern of change in the new mobile capitalism, marginalized, poor areas of cities begin to attract artists, who then gradually contribute to gentrification through the establishment of coffee shops, art galleries, and restaurants, which eventually attract professionals to live there, who in turn often locate their businesses in these areas. This creates a type of “hip consumerism,” satirized by popular writers such as David Brooks, as art and commerce merge.70 Within the new gentrified areas, old industrial buildings are converted into artist’s lofts; offices become spaces for design firms and provide locations where leisure and image production merge. As such transformations take place, cultural workers become increasingly central to the economy, and they create the symbolic content of commodities that is increasingly a feature of the new capitalism. Flexible capital requires quick changes in fashion and ever-new inducements for people to buy commodities. Marketing and tourism become important economic activities that reinforce this new culture and information economy.71 Corporations, especially brands, produce not only things but also images and “experiences” for us, as in advertisements that promise emotional intensities and increasingly in actual places such as Niketown and Ikea that provide a kind of Disneyland of shopping experience for adults.72 As all spaces become arenas for marketing, the commercial cooptation of unsponsored space expands rapidly, and aestheticism and commercialism appear seamlessly integrated. For example, until the early 1990s, youth culture was not marketed nearly as aggressively as it is now. But with the rise of a massive U.S. teenage population beginning in the early 1990s, youth culture has become the target of aggressive corporations. Given the 1960s persona of corporate CEOs such as Richard Branson, new “rock star CEOs” obsessed with their own coolness began novel types of advertising campaigns that are directed toward kids, no longer based on standard old-style Madison Avenue techniques, but rather on the marketing of cool. Finding what is cool and alternative became the marketing mantra for companies from Sprite to Nike—yet it is difficult to know what is cool. A new breed of young entrepreneurs known as “cool hunters” sprang up to inform older CEOs about what is and is not hip. Rebellion, racial and lifestyle diversity, gay and lesbian identity—all become grist for the marketing mill. Especially black inner-city life becomes aestheticized and sold to

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middle-class white kids as the essence of cool.73 Diversity, lesbianism, and other aspects of identity politics have come to inform commercial campaigns, as corporations and advertisers recognized that diversity was a valued trait among young people and diversity could be sold to them. Aesthetic imagery is everywhere. It is constantly changing, with styles shifting from one fashion cycle to the next. These new experiential marketing strategies encourage difference and shifting identities rather than a singular sense of self among consumers.74 This “society of control,” in Gilles Deleuze’s phrase, different from the disciplinary society of the past, is based on the production and control of biopower, in Foucault’s terms, and a new integrated society that resembles a smooth surface with different sites of power. In the new society of control, power is exercised by communication systems that directly influence brains and bodies through processes from advertising to monitored systems of control. Aesthetic and economic considerations merge, and bohemian and carnival themes pervade this new society. I wish to stress that this new commodity culture or society of control does not represent progress toward more freedom in any simple sense. The often illusory belief that lifestyle choices are autonomous is in tension with the enormous marketing of lifestyles by huge corporations. We should also not forget that mass media are economic as well as cultural institutions. In the United States, privately owned media compete in a capitalist environment, and we have seen the concentration of major media in fewer and fewer hands. Yet commodity culture, modes of aesthetic display, and modern media have contributed to a new type of postmodern aesthetic experience.

Media, Aesthetic Politics, and Public Spaces In Bauman’s perhaps hyperbolic terms, we in the West are all artists now.75 As old certainties about self and society disappear in a privatized world, we are almost coerced to “create and shape things,” primarily our identities. But the shaping of identities is a never-ending process, as the social conditions for a stable narrative of the self have disappeared. Though public, urban spaces are still sites of mutual display, they have been commodified and streamlined. Class and racial segregation has increased in cities not only in the West but throughout the world. The ubiquity of the artistic self also takes place

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in the privatization of public spaces, as malls, freeways, and gated communities replace public arenas for interaction. With the rise of an emotional and aesthetic capitalism, public spaces become sites of private emotions, and the distinction between a rational public sphere and an emotion-laden private sphere breaks down. The public is now colonized by the private, rather than vice-versa. Public life involves compelling figures, who must often confess their innermost feelings. The private problems of public persons are the new currency of the public realm.76 Public issues now must be put into such private terms in order to have resonance with the populace, a move made easier by the media’s simplification and visualization of issues. As public spaces change, their terms of understanding are transformed. Public spaces become increasingly arenas of drama, where private displays are watched, like observing a performance. Given the privatization of public spaces, much resistance by social movements now concerns revitalizing these spaces, creating a new public commons where interaction can take place that does not replicate the profit motive. Creating playful spaces, new types of carnival, is integral to this new opposition, as seen in the movement Reclaim the Streets, for example, where young people turn private roadways into sites of public festivity. Yet these public spaces have also been invaded and transformed by electronic media in new ways, which commodify space while simultaneously producing a number of different art worlds and creative possibilities. This mediated environment creates a more abstract context for politics. In contemporary societies, in contrast to the “topical” spaces of nineteenth-century urban life, where participants shared similar media spaces, “twentieth-century communications have produced metatopical variants, when, for instance, we lob a stone at the soldiers before the cameras of CNN, knowing that this act will resonate around the world. The meaning of our participation in the event is shaped by the “whole vast dispersed audience we share it with.” 77 We live in an increasingly image-based, imaginary world, where “hypermedia” accelerate and expand processes of image production and simultaneous experience. The very quality of our experience is now influenced by aesthetic notions of style and image provided by the media. Modern media supply structures of feeling, as we live in a media flow, in Raymond Williams’s terms.78 As Todd Gitlin states, media are conduits of “fun,

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comfort, convenience, or pleasure.” Media “saturate our way of life with the promise of feeling,” repeating images over and over again. Media offer us “occasions of experience,” which often do not consist of coherent meanings.79 Ron Lembo argues that people often engage media at the level of images rather than meaning—they engage in “image play,” following no coherent narrative, but disengage from textual meaning altogether. Such an aesthetic sensibility emerges between the cracks of discourse, as contemporary viewers often refuse to participate in the already ordered space and time provided for them by television shows. Viewers interpret the visual quality of images, from colors to textures, playing with them and forming a kind of immediate symbolism, flowing in and out of television discourse. This is a freefloating imaginative experience that symbolizes the aesthetic forms of television programming. Viewers will “feel” meaning before they think of it, if they think of it at all.80 This mass-mediated environment creates a new context for social movements and aesthetic politics. Class issues are still relevant, resurgent in a global environment characterized by increasing social and economic inequality between the North and the South. But in the West, politics is indeed often centered on issues of identity and authenticity. But this identity politics is not as coherent as many of its adherents claim, for a social subjectivity based on attachment to images and fleeting meanings creates a personal politics of experience and authenticity shorn of links to the cultural and political traditions of the past.81 Contemporary identities are constructed, not static; they do not reflect in a simple way group interests. They often arise through protests which fashion stories of suffering, triumph, and redemption, as in the civil rights movement. Yet often these stories do not cohere, as no overriding narrative can explain all of the different beliefs, identities, and interests of the diverse groups characteristic of present-day coalition politics. The shifting subjectivities of contemporary movements create new alliances and solidarities that did not exist before they came into contact with one another. These groups are often torn between deconstructing and asserting clear identities.82 Moreover, in a mass-mediated visual culture, identification with a movement often takes place through attraction to an appealing image. Many Western young people in the 1960s, as in May 1968 in France, defined their radicalism through emotional associations with images, identifying

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with the figure of the third world militant, adopting his dress and style. The cultural politics of resistance occurs within the realm of mass culture. Style and choice of music, for example, can become a symbolic code that expresses alternative identities and cultural politics.83 Such an image-based politics emphasizes drama and visual effects, and contemporary social movements self-consciously present dramatic and symbolic displays of their political positions. Aids activists dramatized their criticisms of heterosexism through street theater, while antiglobalization protesters used industrial and domestic waste to construct giant puppets dominated by a huge dollar sign to playfully and visually symbolize the problems of globalization. This adoption of image and style so characteristic of visual culture provides a fleeting sense of unity in movements, where differences among individuals and groups are respected, giving identities a less coherent and more emotional and aesthetic makeup. Individuals themselves lead contradictory existences that merge fantasy and reality in a mass-mediated world. The appeal of political positions is not necessarily rational, but involves issues raised by Castoriadis’s imaginary institution, such as stories, myths, fears, desires, imagination, and fantasy.84 In sum, as bohemian individual style and authenticity and carnivalesque themes of satire and play have become widespread in a new consumerist context, the appeal of social movements is increasingly emotional and performative, visual as much as discourse-centered, and playful rather than rational, as new identities and practices emerge in public spaces of expression, transgression, and experimentation. They offer “possibilities of playing with multiple (dis)identifications and lateral connections subverting the established social networks.”85 Social movements thus present the promise of new experiences and new identities, with all of the problems that such a politics entails, from incoherence and lack of organizational continuity to defining politics as a fashion statement. This chapter has explored the two streams of the aesthetic sphere and popular culture that fed into modern public life and social movements, each critical of capitalist utility and functionality. Those two streams provided social movements with aesthetic categories to critique bourgeois hegemony and supplied alternative definitions of authenticity, knowledge, and a type of playful solidarity that could create new public spaces and practices. These realms contributed to actively

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changing the practices as well as the discourse of public life. From bohemians living life as a work of art to working-class militants drawing on traditions of carnival to revitalize their demonstrations against capitalism, aesthetics took to the streets, taking advantage of the public spaces created in a burgeoning urban environment to create alternative ways of speaking and acting and new forms of identity. Urban public spaces from streets to parks to theaters, though tied to the needs of a consumer capitalism or the desire of the state to create monuments to national unity, were taken over in part by these aesthetic rebels and became arenas of display, places where a distinctive style was created and a new type of playful solidarity forged. As aesthetic style and symbols seeped into the everyday world, public life was transformed, increasingly taking on aspects of theater. Drawing on elements of the aesthetic sphere and popular culture, many social movements too cultivated a bohemian sensibility about expressive authenticity alongside a carnivalesque sense of possibilities for a new solidarity. Those social movements eventually became major components of a postmodern aestheticized capitalism by the twenty-first century, raising new issues around aesthetic politics in the contemporary era. This politics of image and the marketplace is everywhere now, and a postmodern texture characterizes much contemporary interaction. Commodified, aesthetic, and emotional, this social world of pleasure and feeling is better captured by metaphors of playful carnival and bohemian and transgressive lifestyle than by classical sociological understandings of social integration through adherence to shared norms or economic interests. Yet as this chapter has shown, aesthetic politics cannot be reduced to a singular formula, and it has a complex history. The next two chapters demonstrate how aesthetic politics developed in the context of social movements. I discuss this trajectory from French revolutionary syndicalism to the contemporary global justice movement.

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5 Labor and Aesthetic Politics French Revolutionary Syndicalism, the IWW, and Fascism

I

n 1906, the maverick intellectual and French revolutionary syndicalism sympathizer Georges Sorel published Reflections on Violence. He praised the cleansing and regenerative act of proletarian violence in opposition to the mundane and passive parliamentary politics of the bourgeoisie, justifying such violence in a mythology beyond reason. In his words, “lofty moral convictions . . . never depend on reason or on any education of the individual will, but on a state of war in which men voluntarily participate and which finds expression in well-defined myths.”1 On May 1 of that year, workers took over the streets of Paris, engaging in combative demonstrations with police throughout the city and the entire country. In 1909, the avant-garde futurists led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, disgusted with the mediocrity of bourgeois society, announced their vision of social change in the Futurist Manifesto. It proclaimed, “We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness. . . . We want to glorify war—the only cure for the world—and militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for women.”2 Unsurprisingly, Marinetti became a supporter of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. On June 7, 1913, Madison Square Garden was the site of a giant re-creation of the Paterson, New Jersey, silk workers’ strike that had

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begun earlier that year. Over one thousand workers participated, reenacting the strike on a stage decorated with modernist and avantgarde backdrops painted by New York City artists. More than 15,000 people attended the pageant, afterward filling city streets singing “La Marseillaise” and the “Internationale” and chanting “Strike! Strike!” The pageant was organized as a collaboration between the radical union the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and Greenwich Village bohemians such as John Reed, who would gain fame as the author of Ten Days That Shook the World, and the radical feminist Mabel Dodge.3 These perspectives characterized the new aesthetic politics of authenticity, drama, and spectacle that was arising throughout earlytwentieth-century Europe and the United States. For thinkers such as Marinetti and Sorel and bohemians such as Reed, the line between art and society was thin at best, as social life was akin to theater, and the proclamation of political positions took on the appearance of the grand aesthetic gesture. Sorel and Marinetti in particular glamorized destruction and violence, and rejected as petty all politics that did not demand perpetual struggle. Reed joined these intellectuals in advocating a rupture with bourgeois, middle-class society that was as much aesthetic as social, as they called for a reorientation of our understandings and perceptions of the social world that dismissed conventional morality and politics and celebrated links between labor and revolution and the remaking of our perceptual and experiential universe. Sorel and Reed demanded expressive freedom, the realization of the authentic self in the context of labor. The aesthetic politics symbolized by these figures represented important trends within the IWW, revolutionary syndicalism, and fascism, central movements in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. French revolutionary syndicalism was the major social and political doctrine from 1900 to 1920 of the largest union organization in France, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT). The movement was inspired in part by anarchism but also had elements of Marxism, Blanquism, and other left currents prominent in nineteenth-century France and Europe. The movement was anticapitalist and suspicious of bureaucratic and state authority. Syndicalists took seriously the slogan of the First International of Labor that the emancipation of the

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working class should be the work of laborers themselves. They advocated direct action against employers, particularly strikes, as the most effective way to build solidarity and advance their demands. Most leaders were from working-class backgrounds, and they emphasized building a distinctive working-class culture apart from state and capitalist structures. The American IWW advocated many of the same ideas and practices as the French syndicalists, from direct action to a rejection of electoral politics. In their opposition to the reformist business unionism of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the IWW envisioned “one big union” that would create a new workers’ society to replace capitalism. Fascism needs little such extended introduction, being the subject of innumerable popular and scholarly commentaries and controversies. Arising after World War I, fascism borrowed elements of working-class movements but replaced the idea of class conflict with struggles between young and old generations, nations, and /or races. All classes would be organically integrated into the nation, under the leadership of the charismatic, dictatorial leader who embodied the virtues of the community. Fascism too saw itself as a revolutionary movement, but one based on blood and soil rather than on an egalitarian culture. This chapter explores the aesthetic politics developed by French revolutionary syndicalism, the IWW, and fascism, especially Nazism. These movements drew on many ideas and practices of the aesthetic sphere and popular culture, including notions of authenticity, critiques of existing knowledge, a break with society, and festival and carnival. They challenged the differentiation of society into separate scientific, moral, and aesthetic spheres, arguing that aesthetic and moral imperatives should inform the discussion and practice of politics and economics.4 Avant-garde artistic ideas that criticized the materialism and decadence of capitalist society and that advocated the merger of life and art played an important role in these movements. These movements, in particular French syndicalism and Nazism, created their respective versions of aesthetic politics in the context of worker and nationalist cultures, positing the authenticity of the laborer or the racially based nationalist in opposition to the ideal of the bourgeois citizen. While they posited notions of an apocalyptic break from existing society, French

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syndicalism and Nazism also constructed coherent working-class or nationalist narratives that portrayed workers and/or the German nation in terms of suffering and redemption through the movement, drawing on existing republican and/or nationalist and racist discourse. French syndicalism and Nazism also offered critiques of universal knowledge based on the particular experiences of the working class and/or the experiences of the race and nation, though these different forms of knowledge were not entirely consistent and had universal pretensions of their own. These themes of authenticity, an aesthetics of existence, and the particularity of knowledge were complemented by a vision of public space that integrated elements of carnival and popular culture and differed from the staid conventions of the bourgeois public sphere and democratic politics. From syndicalist direct action and strikes to the enormous pageants of Nazism, their respective visions of collective life asserted the ecstasy of community, a joyful jouissance as identities were either submerged in the greater community or transgressed in practice. Despite these similar approaches to aesthetic politics, there were major differences between these movements. Opposition to parliamentary politics could take varied forms. While some French syndicalist leaders did flirt with or even embrace fascism, the syndicalist rank and file transitioned to communism after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and fought the fascists in the streets in the 1920s and the 1930s. The ideological and social context for the formation of their respective notions of aesthetic politics also diverged. For French syndicalists and the Wobblies, aesthetic politics were refracted through a proletarian public space that arose in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, creating distinctive working-class institutions that prefigured a utopian vision of free, decentralized workshops.5 This proletarian sphere was more a public stage than a public sphere, and much of syndicalist appeal was based on its ability to dramatize class struggle through direct action, such as strikes. Fascists too dramatized their beliefs, but their use of avant-garde and carnivalesque ideas were reflected through the prism of the nation, the race, and the leader. Their hierarchical utopia based on the sanctity of blood and soil called for a strong dictator to embody the virtues of the Fatherland. Fascist aesthetic politics did not encourage self-governing participation in an

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egalitarian community, but glamorized submission to the national will and obedience to the leader.

Labor Movements and Aesthetics Labor movements are often viewed as having little to do with aesthetic ideas. Historians and sociologists tend to emphasize the rational and productivist dimension of labor movements. Sociologists in particular see labor as the antithesis of the more playful dimensions of protest and action characteristic of the new social movements. This has been expressed by scholars in many ways, from Melucci’s distinction between old versus new movements, Giddens’s differentiation of emancipatory and life politics, and Fraser’s dichotomy of redistribution versus recognition.6 Labor movements’ concern with “bread and butter” issues such as wages, working conditions, social welfare legislation, and the like seemingly distance them from aesthetic issues such as selfexpression and playful types of social action. Further, sociologists and labor activists alike often dismiss these latter subjects as bourgeois or just plain silly. These rational characteristics are indeed important in labor movements. Labor movements pioneered rational forms of direct action, from strikes to demonstrations, which allow their economic demands on the state and employers to be voiced in a powerful and clear manner. Yet labor movements are diverse, and many have historically emphasized aesthetic themes, though not always using the language of the aesthetic sphere or carnival in doing so. Ideas of authenticity and honor have often motivated workers, as free lifestyle expression, expressive labor, and dignity formed an inseparable mélange within working-class culture.7 Within French syndicalism and the IWW, aesthetic and economic themes coexisted side-by-side. Syndicalist and IWW militants interacted with bohemian artists, as they shared interests in anarchism and aesthetics. In sum, syndicalists and other like-minded labor movements such as the IWW created a distinctive aesthetic politics while also advocating more conventional economic and political demands. Mediated by the experience of craftsmanship that workers saw threatened by an emerging capitalism, worker militants developed this aesthetic politics in the context of a proletarian public sphere.

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The Proletarian Public Sphere Faced with the rise of a disciplinary society of surveillance that accompanied industrialization, many workers attempted to create their own unique space in which they could articulate their vision of a new society. Distinctive working class neighborhoods and cultures provided the foundation for this proletarian arena. The proletarian public sphere was bound by the dominant discourse yet also developed its own specific “forms of expression.” For many labor movements in the nineteenth century, the synthesis of working-class and political and republican themes created a distinctive type of “labor republicanism.” France and Great Britain developed relatively popular socialist or labor-oriented political parties, and the United States did not. No doubt there were differences in the worker organizations in each country. The timing of industrialization and the emergence and decline of labor republicanism varied within each country. Labor republicanism in the United States was sympathetic to small property owners, while in Britain collective action and labor republicanism were oriented toward suffrage. In France, direct action and an antistate orientation on the part of workers often predominated.8 Yet much working-class resistance to capitalism was remarkably similar in the three countries. Centralized socialist political parties arose in each nation. Alongside these parties, more decentralized organizations also emerged. Drawing on a shared belief in the nobility of artisanal work, labor organizations in France, Britain, and the United States combined this producerist vision with a strongly democratic orientation. Workers (or producers) were seen to be the carriers of the best aspects of the democratic tradition. Labor republicanism was informed by different cultural traditions in each nation. The British Commonwealth tradition influenced the radicalism of the Chartists and later the Guild Socialists; the French CGT, the American Knights of Labor, and the IWW drew on their respective republican heritages. In each nation, labor republicans criticized the “egoism” that they saw corrupting society. The emphasized the necessity of worker participation in both state and economic institutions, tying worker control to labor emancipation. Each group also attempted to build distinctive working-class organizations that embodied the principles of democracy and emancipated labor.9

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There was also an important aesthetic component to the activities within the proletarian public sphere. Many avant-garde artists suffused with antibourgeois sentiment were attracted to this realm and helped infuse it with a bohemian dimension, often in tension with more Puritanical and instrumental approaches to work and private life. This aesthetic impulse proceeded from Marx and the nineteenthcentury anarchists through revolutionary syndicalists in France and the IWW in the early-twentieth-century United States. This aesthetic dimension could also be seen in the festive solidarity that arose when workers went on strike or engaged in demonstrations, and in the utopian, expressivist and aesthetically inflected vision of the potentialities of labor that characterized thinkers from the young Marx to the syndicalist Fernand Pelloutier and the intellectual Georges Sorel. Fearful of the antidemocratic effects of bureaucracy and centralization, these labor radicals developed their aesthetic politics in the context of decentralized worker unions. This decentralized form of organization helped create a proletarian, antistate, and federalist vision of emancipation and a new proletarian playful solidarity and public space, different from other socialist movements concerned with seizing state power.

The IWW Influenced by the ideas and practices of French syndicalism, the IWW was founded in Chicago in 1905.10 Big Bill Haywood, the flamboyant leader of the organization, called for a “continental congress of the workers of the United States.” The IWW came to prominence in 1909, as it helped organize strikes by immigrants. It achieved national and international fame in 1912 and 1913, with its leadership of well-publicized, large strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Paterson, New Jersey. The IWW had its biggest success between 1916 and 1917, organizing migratory wheat harvesters for gains like the eight-hour day and the minimum wage.11 The IWW had perhaps one hundred thousand members during its best years, though two to three million workers may have joined the organization at some point during its existence. The IWW faced many issues distinctive to the American context, such as a history of racial division between laborers, a workforce composed of immigrant and native workers, and strong anti-union sentiment

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among employers and the government. The union represented the unskilled, the most dispossessed workers, unlike its rival the American Federation of Labor, a business-oriented union that organized skilled laborers. Many Wobblies were immigrant workers without any benefits or job security. Others were itinerant workers, like hoboes, who moved from place to place in search of work. Many of these laborers were young and receptive to the radical message of the IWW.12 Arising in a United States with a weak central government and an industrializing economy, the IWW advocated a kind of a “practical syndicalism,” for it rejected electoral politics, emphasized collective action at the point of production, and relied on worker-direct action and self-organization as the primary means of class struggle. Wobblies supported the strike as a challenge to management and invented the sit-in as a form of labor protest. Unlike the centralized American Federation of Labor, they relied on decentralized unions to guide the movement, for the IWW did not want to limit the spontaneity of its members.13 While the IWW organized workers around practical benefits like better wages and working conditions, it also had a more grandiose vision. Like its French counterpart, the CGT, the IWW saw a general strike of all workers leading to the overthrow of capitalism. The IWW advocated a world based on equality, without bosses, politicians, a coercive state, or a military. The movement declined after World War I, crushed by state repression in the wake of the postwar Red Scare. The IWW also split apart over debates about the degree of centralization that it should maintain. In addition, it was hampered by its problematic relationship to the Socialist Party, which also declined after 1916. In 1913, Haywood was expelled from the Socialist Party Executive Board because he did not condemn sabotage, alienating many more conservative socialists.14 A number of Wobblies ended up joining the Communist Party, as they initially saw the 1917 Russian Revolution and the formation of small-scale soviets in its wake as the realization of their decentralized vision of society. Important legacies of the IWW included its cross-class collaboration with artists and the incipient aesthetic politics that it created. The IWW produced an enormous amount of art and songs. Many Wobblies self-identified as artists. The famous IWW militant Joe Hill stated before his execution in 1915, “I have lived like an artist, and I shall die like an artist.”15 They were influenced in part by avant-garde bohemians, as

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they looked to experiment with different artistic styles.16 But they also developed a specifically worker version of aesthetic politics. IWW militants known as the “overalls brigade” dressed in working-class black shirts, denim overalls, and red kerchiefs, symbolizing in dress the distinctive proletarian culture and forms of direct action that they advocated in practice. The IWW had a tradition of oral speakers who wandered the countryside singing songs, telling jokes, and speaking parables that were often read collectively and aimed at forming a kind of street party, forecasting a new type of proletarian solidarity.17 Such aesthetic practices would reemerge in a new social context with the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

French Syndicalism Filtered through the lens of anarchism, French revolutionary syndicalists, like the IWW, attempted to develop a union structure that promoted a “pragmatic of direct action.” They drew on a strong sense of autonomous worker culture expressed in a working class argot. Such a culture was especially evident in strikes that created egalitarian conditions among workers and encouraged the distrust of economic and political hierarchy, the hatred of capitalist exploiters, and the advocacy of proletarian direct action. Two organization forms crystallized in this context. The Bourses du Travail grouped together all unions within a particular region, while the CGT, created in 1895, organized unions of the same trade or industry into a national federation. The Bourses united with the CGT in 1902. These organizational forms, developed in part from the experience of spontaneous organizations developed by striking workers in nineteenth-century France, prefigured the shape of the new syndicalist society in their very structure. The CGT opposed all affiliation with political parties, for mixing with parties diluted the class basis of the movement and incorporated the CGT into the “authoritarian” state and the machinations of politicians. Syndicalist decentralization, based on the trade union and the Bourse, allowed workers to develop a vision and experience of small-scale community that did not divorce the exercise of skill from the exercise of power. Syndicalist unions represented counterinstitutions, an alternative public sphere for organized workers. This view of working-class militancy and labor oppression

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resonated with many French workers. Despite historically low unionization rates, the CGT grew from 1,792 federated unions in 1904 to 2,399 in 1906.18 Syndicalism also created a new aesthetic politics, as the movement was more than a vehicle for expressing the rational, political interests of workers. French syndicalists wore distinctive working-class clothes and often spoke in a particular working-class dialect. Through demonstrations, strikes, and democratic, often raucous meetings, they created an arena of mutual display within the proletarian sphere different from its bourgeois variant, for this proletarian version merged solidarity and expressive individualism. The unrestrained and boisterous atmosphere of the tavern and the union hall provided militant workers with a proletarian public space that differed markedly from the more orderly dialogue of the bourgeois public sphere’s coffee houses.19 Unions and individual workers had the freedom to act as they wished within the confederation, extending even to planning demonstrations, yet they still retained a sense of solidarity with one another. They created a kind of laborist aesthetic, where a strong sense of work, courage, and dignity was contrasted with the laziness of the boss or patron. Syndicalists portrayed laborers as forced to courageously work in dangerous industries such as mining, carry ing on an elemental struggle with nature akin to the Hegelian slave in the master/slave dialectic. The syndicalist Georges Dumoulin, for example, wrote of French miners attempting to save their comrades and the productive possibilities of their mine after a collapse, combating the “flames and the murderous gas” as they entered the mineshaft. The miner’s physicality, his sweat and dirt, infused syndicalist imagery of the worker and contrasted with the overweight, cigarsmoking portrayal of the boss, drunk on his egoistic luxuries.20 Syndicalists crafted an alternative narrative of labor as a symbol of courage, dignity, and heroism in opposition to bourgeois notions of progress, as ideas of free labor based on free expression and proletarian honor became part of the taken-for-granted culture of workers.

Syndicalism and Strikes French syndicalism is most famous for its advocacy of strikes, and in particular the general strike. Founded after the massive strike waves in France from 1878 to 1880, the movement successfully organized

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an increasing number of strikes. In France, 1,026 strikes occurred in 1904, nearly twice as many as in 1903. In 1906, there was one striker per sixteen industrial workers, as nearly five hundred thousand laborers took part in 1,300 strikes, with an average duration of nineteen days. May 1, 1906, saw the first national coordination of strike activity in France, with the most workers on strike during one day in the history of the nation. Strikes were dangerous, as workers often fought police and the military in pitched battles, sometimes resulting in deaths. In 1907– 1908, strikes resulted in the deaths of workers at Nantes, Narbonne, and Raon l’Étape. During a strike at Draveil on June 2, 1908, two workers were killed and ten wounded. These numbers were dwarfed a month later; on July 30, a building strike at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges left four workers dead and hundreds wounded.21 With these strike waves, revolutionary syndicalism became a powerful movement, integrating the experience of strikes and the strong sense of working-class culture into organizational and political forms. The insurgent activities of workers helped spread the suffrage and guarantee rights of fair and equal treatment and made issues from comprehensive health care to the conditions of the workplace part of public discourse. These worker’s demonstrations, strikes, and forms of direct action (such as the sit-down strike) became “repertoires of action” which prefigured modern types of civil disobedience and allowed workers to make political claims on the state. Many of these worker’s associations asserted that some form of economic equality, based on economic independence, was as fundamental to the rights of the individual, from freedom of speech to freedom of assembly, as were the rights guaranteed by constitutions. Only economic independence ensured that the practice of rights could be widespread. The right of the individual to authentically express his ideas through his labor was also paramount.22 As the historian Michelle Perrot notes, “To go on strike was such a positive act, from the vantage point of working-class morality, that those who stayed out of it were called, by a significant twist of language, idle.” Strikes and demonstrations served as arenas where workers developed a sense of autonomy and difference from the ruling classes.23 Strikes were one component of the larger category of direct action, which also emphasized demonstrations, boycotts, and occasionally sabotage. Syndicalists recognized that direct action could force government and

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employers to enact reforms that would benefit labor. But strikes in particular highlighted working-class solidarity and class struggle. The syndicalist leader Victor Griffuelhes observed that a strike “educates, it hardens, it involves, it creates.”24 In the militant Emile Pouget’s words, “Direct action implies that the working class claim for itself the ideas of liberty and of autonomy instead of yielding to the principle of authority.”25 These forms of collective action (particularly strikes and demonstrations) dissolved the dichotomies of thought and action, experience and expertise. They gave laborers a sense of their own power. Syndicalists argued that bourgeois democracy atomized and split people apart; their forms of direct action created worker solidarity, providing workers with a method of mastering reality through active participation.26 Strikes were festivals of resistance, actions that transgressively broke with existing social norms and practices. Street demonstrations, like strikes, were arenas for the creation of working-class solidarity and a new proletarian aesthetic politics. Strikes were social dramas, exemplifying the gulf between workers and owners, and presaging the solidarity and organization of a new socialist society. Strikes created active forms of social cohesion, uniting workers not only through shared opposition to employers but also through marching, picketing, and the singing of proletarian anthems such as the “Internationale.” May 1 demonstrations held in France throughout the early twentieth century became carnivals of resistance, with much chanting and marching through the streets, usually accompanied by colorful banners displaying opposition to the government while proclaiming proletarian solidarity. Many of these demonstrations ended with confrontations with the police and military, as demonstrators would begin to throw rocks at the authorities, who would in turn chase them throughout the boulevards of Paris. Such raucous activity was also demonstrated in events such as funerals for victims of police and military actions. In January 1907, during a funeral for a woman who died in the aftermath of a massive demonstration for better enforcement of labor laws, thousands of syndicalist militants and sympathizers marched behind her carriage, often wearing red carnations and carrying wreaths of red flowers to symbolize the blood of murdered workers. They sang the proletarian anthem the “Internationale” and, inverting the language usually directed at themselves, called French leaders such as the president Georges Clemenceau “jackals” and “brigands” who

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recklessly killed workers and their sympathizers while hypocritically calling militant laborers violent and uncivilized.27 In this and other instances, the rowdy activities and speech of the working-class tavern and union hall were taken to the public streets. This was a new kind of aesthetic display, indebted to traditions of plebeian carnival. Sometimes the danger and ecstasy of these demonstrations and strikes would encourage a kind of jouissance, a loss of identity through transgressive and perilous behaviors. Yet the overriding narrative of class solidarity always was at play in worker consciousness, mitigating this experimental dimension of their activity. Workers proudly marched through the streets in proletarian dress, not only claiming their rights but also demanding recognition of the dignity of their culture.

Syndicalism and Bohemia While French syndicalist direct action drew on traditions of carnival, the movement also incorporated many bohemian ideas from the aesthetic sphere. Artistic themes had begun to influence the incipient French and more broadly European proletarian public sphere by the mid-nineteenth century. The 1820s in England and France had already seen the rise of a working-class press, trade unions, and dissenting churches. In midcentury England, artists inspired by the revolutions on the continent and the Chartist movement, including William Homan Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, began portraying class differences in their art. This portrayal of peasants and workers created much artistic controversy and debate.28 In France, working-class and middle-class artists developed distinctive workingclass depictions of the nation. They portrayed the muscular and virile mythological Hercules as the real symbol of the French nation rather than the bourgeois symbol of Marianne. Hercules was a representative of the working class, and he symbolized the power of labor and middleclass fears of the proletariat.29 The working-class body became a masculine sign on which the ideals of a new, active, and progressive laborer was represented in opposition to an often overweight and passive bourgeois boss. In France, the artist Gustave Courbet radically challenged the conventions of the art world and helped inaugurate the intersection of radical artist and working-class politics. Courbet was vital to the rise of

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the avant-garde art during the Second Republic and tied the avantgarde to radical politics. Courbet lived in Left Bank Paris, the home of the bourgeoning bohemia that was also the residence of many workingclass militants. He came into contact there with figures ranging from the poet Baudelaire to the working-class anarchist Proudhon. Courbet saw himself as a socialist, a partisan of revolution. Unlike art that portrayed the religious themes and idealized portraits of social life, which was characteristic of most artists, Courbet’s new art invoked realistic class differences and antagonisms, depicting a range of contemporary figures from drunken priests to peasants and prostitutes. By showing this new view of class, Courbet attempted to depict workers as potentially revolutionary actors.30 Courbet not only contributed a novel portrayal of workers that opened up spaces for proletarian art but also forged a connection between bohemian art and lifestyle and working-class culture that would influence the understanding of labor and emancipation of revolutionary syndicalists. Anarchist philosophy, working-class revolution, and bohemian ideas mixed together, as artists and labor militants emphasized personal freedom, criticized bourgeois morality, and stressed emancipation from capitalist discipline. Though the 1848 Revolution and the Paris Commune of 1871–1872 failed, the bohemian influence of artists on worker militants created a legacy of working-class art and lifestyle politics. This bond between working-class leaders and artists, first forged in 1848 with the link between Courbet, anarchists, and working-class militants, became even stronger by the late nineteenth century. Syndicalist leaders such as Emile Pouget, Jean Grave, and Fernand Pelloutier mingled with bohemian French artists, as anarchism and art found common ground in antibourgeois sentiment. Artists from Paul Signac to Camille Pissarro influenced the vision of self, labor, and society characteristic of these militants. Syndicalist militants embraced selfexpression as freedom. Images of unalienated, expressive labor and a utopian future drew on the themes of authenticity and life as a work of art elaborated by French bohemians.31 The United States had no such history of collaboration between workers and artists during the nineteenth century. However, the IWW and Greenwich Village bohemians forged new ties in early-twentiethcentury New York. Joe Hill, Bill Haywood, and the firebrand IWW

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leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn were active in bohemian circles, often coming into contact with artists and intellectuals through salons like that of Mabel Dodge, a radical bohemian and feminist in Greenwich Village. Especially after the IWW success in the Lawrence, Massachusetts, strike of 1912, many bohemians gravitated to the IWW. IWW militants and artists were drawn to one another by shared criticisms of capitalism and demands for free speech and more sexual freedom.32 Many bohemians recognized that the IWW was a truly revolutionary organization, committed to changing all of society rather than just working conditions. These artists and intellectuals praised the IWW for its solidarity and seemingly reckless courage against great odds. The political and artistic journal The Masses, run by Ivy League graduates Max Eastman and John Reed, published pieces by IWW leaders including Haywood, Flynn, and the Lawrence strike leader Arturo Giovannitti. The magazine also advocated feminism and free love, as did Haywood. The IWW reciprocated, as Eastman and other Greenwich Village intellectuals spoke to thousands of Paterson strikers and their families in the working-class suburb of Haledon.33 This collaboration of workers and artists did not proceed smoothly and eventually collapsed after the IWW fell apart in the wake of World War I. However, this cross-class collaboration influenced American culture, contributing to what the historian Michael Denning calls the laboring of American culture in the 1930s, as working-class themes abounded in art and literature.34 In France, after the initial eruption of working-class art into public life associated with Courbet, oppositional publics declined, and many artists attempted to assert aesthetic autonomy from all connections to politics. In the wake of the repression of the 1848 Revolution and the empire of Louis Bonaparte, by the late nineteenth century French art had become increasingly privatized and commercialized. While this independence of art allowed artists to forge distinctive ideas about aesthetic authenticity and practice, figures such as Arthur Rimbaud rejected this separation and attempted to bring these aesthetic themes and politics together through the activities of the avant-garde and worker militants after the Paris Commune. Avantgarde artists in particular revolted against this commodification and privatization of art. Especially neo-impressionists such as Pissarro and Signac embraced anarchist and working-class ideas, attempting to create a utopian vision and promise of a better world in their paintings.

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Signac argued that the artist must express his inner self, almost unconsciously, and that the social and revolutionary character of art would follow from this articulation. Grave’s journal La Révolte included many contributions from neo-impressionist artists such as Pissarro and Signac. Pouget, who lived in Montmartre alongside bohemian artists, founded the paper Le Père Peinard in 1889, which was written completely in worker slang. It also incorporated many neo-impressionist images into its texts, as Pouget employed many artists. The art critic and anarchist champion of the avant-garde Félix Fénéon contended that this journal demonstrated that art and working-class life could become fused and that a new type of aesthetic utopia of everyday life was presaged by this writing and the images of these artists.35 Many ideas flowed from this intersection of avant-garde artist and working-class militant. The more abstract themes of aesthetic sphere were refracted through working-class experience and practices. The most obvious tie of working-class militants to bohemian artists and aesthetic considerations was demonstrated in their depiction of labor.

Marx and the Aesthetics of Labor Many working-class leaders from revolutionary syndicalists to Marx drew on traditions of craft autonomy in developing their conceptions about free labor, but they also adopted ideas from the aesthetic sphere including the romantic tradition of individual self-expression and bohemian notions of lifestyle freedom. They synthesized ideas of the autonomy and collectivity of craft labor with the individual self-expression of the avant-garde. These ideas were part of the expressive and romantic philosophical tradition that sees the quest for autonomy as a fundamental component of human freedom and a major source of the modern self, as Taylor argues.36 Labor rather than art became the vehicle for this authentic self-expression, as work took on some of the characteristics of play as well as art. The most famous exponent of such a romantic vision of labor was the young Marx, though such ideas were widespread in the proletarian public sphere. Though this is a tangent and a bit jarring for the narrative of this chapter, I would be remiss if I did not briefly address Marx’s ideas on expressive labor. Despite Marx’s famous dismissal of bohemians as part of the lumpenproletariat, he clearly adopted many of their themes around

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lifestyle freedom, especially in his early work. This is not surprising, for he led a bohemian existence as a young man, often drinking and carousing, and leaving his residence open for anyone to stay with him while living in Paris during the 1840s. He undoubtedly, if ambivalently, shared in the critique of commercialism of the bohemians. While bohemians believed that freedom could be realized only in play and art, and Marx saw such freedom occurring through work, there is no doubt that Marx’s vision of unalienated labor has affinities with aspects of play. In the 1844 Paris manuscripts, Marx speaks poetically about how communism will emancipate our senses so that the opposition of individual experience and social demands will be transcended, and we will feel fulfilled through our social activities. Marx’s debt to romanticism is clear here. The realization of our authentic human capacities requires that all of our senses, not just thinking, be satisfied. Our senses have been formed throughout history. Yet under capitalism all that matters is what can be bought and sold, so that we approach life with an eye toward what we can get out of it. Such a perspective corrupts the role of sense in human gratification. Music must not be understood in terms of how much money it can make, but a musical ear must be developed to appreciate music; a sense of form must be cultivated to appreciate beauty. Each of the senses must be nurtured in a way that is appropriate for the objects that they consider. This is another way that humans are distinguished from animals, for humans can create according to the laws of beauty and not simply follow functional demands and forms. One of the worst features of capitalism is that it reduces the many-faceted and diverse nature of the human senses to the criterion of profit.37 Free labor provided the conditions for true human fulfillment that was not cheapened by capital.

Pelloutier and Sorel Marx’s lyrical and aesthetic vision of labor was paralleled by Fernand Pelloutier’s notions of work and self-expression and advocacy of free, decentralized workshops, though the syndicalist militant and founder of the Bourses du Travail expanded his critique beyond capitalism to the state. Pelloutier, friend to many anarchists and bohemians, contended that capitalist economic and political institutions generated

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subtle forms of oppression that crushed independence and initiative. The modern centralized state not only protected the interests of the ruling economic elite but also promoted conformity at the expense of individuality. Governments promulgated laws that restricted possibilities of creative self-expression in everyday life and the workplace. The state’s promotion of the monogamous nuclear family inhibited forms of experimentation within personal relations; its protection of private property and capitalist control made work a burden rather than a joy. Pelloutier critiqued any imposition of “bourgeois” morality on personal and sexual relations. He advocated the “liberation of spirits and bodies.” Like Engels in his Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Pelloutier supported the abolition of penalties for adultery, the repeal of any differences between legitimate and illegitimate births, and equal rights for women, including divorce by mutual consent. Pelloutier contended that a strict tie existed between capitalist exploitation and the subjugation of women. An emancipated society could lead to the freeing of sexual practices and a liberated private life.38 Pelloutier called for an integral education for workers, which emphasized intelligence over memory, the understanding of relations over scholarly erudition, and general culture over specialization. Such an education would encourage independence, freedom, and activity. Pelloutier took art seriously, believing that art was a necessary element in education and revolutionary transformation. He advocated a revolutionary art that criticized capitalist society. Pelloutier moved beyond this version of art as a kind of socialist realism, integrating an aesthetic component into his vision of individual freedom and worker emancipation. He developed a theory of unalienated labor similar to the young Marx. An egalitarian workplace and a fair distribution of resources would allow workers to know “that their effort will be rewarded; that they will receive the whole of the product of their labor; that ease will replace misery.” This organization of labor would embody the anarchist and communist dream of “a redistribution so equitable that each can enjoy the fruits of his labor, the production of these fruits having no limit other than the full satisfaction of needs.”39 To “affirm the force of personality,” work would become a creative, aesthetic act, transformed from a burden into an art. As Pelloutier

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states, workers “dream of free workshops where authority will have been replaced by the personal sentiment of one’s duty . . . workers, after for so long believing themselves condemned to the status of a machine, wish to become intelligent beings, to be simultaneously the inventors and the creators of their work.”40 Only these circumstances would lead toward the “perfect blossoming of the individual.” Skilled work in the context of these free associations provided the arena for self-fulfillment and authentic creativity. Georges Sorel incorporated an even more extensive vision of aesthetic labor into his vision of a good society. Sorel, as an independent philosopher, has often been seen as having little influence on French syndicalism, for he was not an active participant in the CGT. However, recent evidence shows more intimate ties between Sorel and syndicalist militants.41 Sorel is most famous for his advocacy of proletarian violence and the myth of the general strike. Both sharpened the separation of workers from owners and made compromise between them impossible. Sorel contended that myths and not interests or strategies inspired people. The socialist myth was the general strike, for it moved workers to take action against modern society. Strikes produced the most sublime sentiments in workers. The myth of the general strike gave to each individual worker the maximum intensity of the war of labor versus capitalists. The worker received a spontaneous picture of reality which language could not give to him. The myth of the general strike offered an undivided whole that could not be broken down into its elements. Only one interpretation was possible. Society would be split into two opposing groups, and there would be no room for compromise.42 Sorel was a moralist, and he thought that workers underwent a complete moral transformation when they became syndicalists. They learned to rely solely on the actions of the proletariat. For Sorel, freedom occurred only when people broke away from determinism and created a world after their own imagination. Syndicalism offered this possibility in part by creating an alternative worker culture through the myth of the general strike. Sorel writes, “Economic transformations cannot be realized if the workers have not acquired a superior level of moral culture.” In such a culture, the workshop would function “without bosses.”43 The working class would become “capable of governing

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itself in an independent way, of understanding its own activity and of administering production.”44 For Sorel, a federalist society without bosses required a high level of aesthetically informed work. He thought that technological development actually encouraged such labor, for it promoted processes of reskilling. According to Sorel, modern work was becoming “more intense and more absorbing.” The manufacturing process and the growing complexity of technology mandated that workers continually revamp their understanding of machinery and labor. Sorel equated the worker with the artist and the inventor. They all needed to master new techniques, innovate constantly, and create new models. Sorel tied labor to an aesthetic, imaginative, and poetic moment, where the laborer, like the artist and the inventor, engaged in creative freedom. The laborer did not “drift into automatism” in modern work, but developed new, professional skills as technology advanced, reaching a “method of reasoning that is concrete, individual, and therefore rapid.”45 The free producer would constantly improve production, while experimenting with new methods of work. Sorel believed that many economists, including Marx, had mistakenly taken the incipient mass production of the textile industry as a model for the nature of labor under capitalism. Such views posited a homogeneous, uniform labor undergirding the entire capitalist economy. For Sorel, this quantitative redefinition of labor was an error, for the skills of different occupations were not reducible to one abstract, calculable standard.46 An education in aesthetics was necessary for workers to achieve the requisite level of skill in modern industry. Such training had to avoid rote exercises and develop the judgmental qualities of workers. Aesthetic education would help laborers realize “that economic relations are not exactly reducible to quantitative ones, that life is not equivalent to mathematical calculations and that the law of cost accounting does not govern the world rigorously.” Art would ennoble labor and challenge workers to make better products while improving production. As the cultivation of mind and the learning of a trade progressed together, manual work could become the equivalent of a creative art, for trades would require skill while promoting dignity. Art would help ensure moral and material progress, becoming “the means

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by which the worker will understand the infusion of intelligence into manual work.”47 Sorel, like the critical theorist Walter Benjamin, believed that technology could fuse with art, creating a more democratic and aesthetically pleasing workshop. Labor was a noble struggle to impose form on a recalcitrant nature, akin to an art; modern technology only transformed the aesthetic nature of work, creating more psychological complexity and replacing strength with skill. Sorel and Pelloutier tied expressive labor to the maintenance of moral solidarity and free workshops. Their skepticism about a scientifically deterministic history allowed them to retain a belief in smallscale economic development and a distinctive working-class culture. Their federalism mirrored the small-scale development of French industry. They believed that working-class decentralization, embodied in the organization of French syndicalism, harmonized with the local spirit and economy in France. Labor and technology would be embedded in small-scale workshops. According to Pelloutier, syndicalist organization represented the best type of federalism, while for Sorel it effectively limited any overcentralization of authority.

Knowledge and Emancipation The ideas of Sorel and Pelloutier were indicative of a syndicalist movement that granted sovereignty to a central power only grudgingly. They rejected the grand narrative of emancipation associated with statecentered socialist movements. Their revised narrative of working-class history emphasized the centrality of labor’s struggle and suffering and the image of the courageous worker ready to strike at a moment’s notice. Syndicalist conceptions of knowledge viewed worker action through the lens of distinctive local practices that could not be easily generalized beyond their particular context, akin to the way that Kant understood aesthetic judgment. Of course this was mediated for syndicalists by the shared experiences of labor and capitalist exploitation, but this localist current ran throughout the movement. Their utopian society consisted of culturally and regionally diverse small workshops. In their utopian tract How We Shall Bring About the Revolution, syndicalist leaders Pouget and Emile Pataud argued that the revolutionary drama

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of the general strike would abolish the conditions of alienated work and inaugurate the reign of free, expressive labor. As industry advanced, skills would be upgraded, a great number of occupations would exist, and craft labor would never be extinguished. Such a new society would require a new type of aesthetic form and aesthetic politics, a novel way of structuring the understanding of the relations between work and laborer. Yet the syndicalist language of an apocalyptic break with the past was rhetorical at best, for Pataud and Pouget also advocated increasing production through the use of the latest scientific expertise at the workplace.48 For Sorel, Pelloutier, and other syndicalist militants, themes of science, craft, transgression, and play were rather inchoately stitched together in a vision of a new working-class culture. These themes coexisted alongside more specifically worker demands such as the eighthour day and better wages and working conditions. Yet many of the major features of revolutionary syndicalism cannot be understood without reference to its aesthetic dimension. Ideas of a new collective working-class authenticity, local knowledge and the distinctiveness of working-class history, and a festive solidarity derived in part from the intersection of labor politics, the aesthetic sphere, and popular culture. Syndicalist aesthetic politics wished to make labor an expressive, playful act and create a new democratic and lively proletarian public space in arenas from city streets to union halls. They advocated a revolutionary break with existing society that would inaugurate different social relations, new social practices, and a new vision of the social world, not just redistribute wealth in a more egalitarian manner. Of course, many other factors influenced syndicalist doctrine and practice, and aesthetic ideas were always refracted through class position. But such ideas gave revolutionary syndicalism a distinctive view of decentralized, proletarian liberation.

Syndicalism and Fascism Much has been made of fascist connections with revolutionary syndicalism. Several syndicalist leaders moved to fascist positions by the eve of World War I. Scholars sympathetic to this position focus more on the similarity of ideas, however. Sorel is an especially prominent figure in this discussion. Mussolini called himself a disciple of Sorel. While

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Sorel’s myth of the general strike encouraged workers to engage in class rather than national or racial struggles, such myths are irrational; they cannot be refuted; and in his more extreme formulations Sorel contended that moral regeneration could take place only through violence. Fascism in general adopted Sorel’s ideas that parliamentary democracy was a symbol of decadence, that a new world can be born out of violence, and that only a society founded on permanent struggle rather than parliamentary democracy can avoid social decadence. His idea that politics was more of an aesthetic act than a sphere of rational discussion of interests seemed particularly conducive to fascist ideology. In sum, Sorel’s emphasis on the irrational myth and violence and his stance against parliamentary politics all seemed to presage fascist ideology. While there is no doubt that fascism adopted many of these ideas, they do not necessarily mean the same thing when placed in the context of workers’ circumstances in France. In particular, fascist and syndicalist aesthetic politics, while having some similarities, meant different things and served different functions within their movements. Aesthetic politics for syndicalists took place in a context of a decentralized movement advocating democratic participation in the workplace, while fascist aesthetic politics encouraged devotion to the nation and the leader. Moreover, the French movement that had the most influence on fascism in my view was the royalist Action Française that arose in latenineteenth-century France to oppose the Third Republic. Demanding the return of the monarchy in France, this movement was among the first to make reactionary politics populist. It developed a rhetoric of French authenticity in opposition to the seemingly foreign Jews and republicans, while encouraging blind submission to its leaders. The movement organized large demonstrations of its followers and held meetings that attempted to sway workers to its perspective. Leaders such as Charles Maurras and Léon Daudet drew on carnivalesque imagery to ridicule and satirize democratic elites, often depicting Third Republic politicians as sexual perverts or donkeys with no intelligence. The Action Française organized a group of young men, the Camelots du Roi, who provided a quasi-military force for the movement. A peculiar combination of aesthetic dandy and storm trooper, these men dressed in bowler hats and suits and carried canes, affecting the

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appearance of the flâneur. But they used these canes to beat opponents and often engaged in dramatic and almost comical street violence. In one instance, they took over the classroom of a professor whose ideas they did not like, spanking him in front of his students and then carting him off for a more serious flogging. This was not only a new kind of conservative populism but also an aesthetic politics that drew on the rhetoric of authenticity and the drama of street violence. It presaged the much more serious actions of fascism.49

Fascism Fascism has had no shortage of interpreters, nor has the idea of a distinctive fascist aesthetics been without commentary. From the argument that fascism as a social movement differed from its role as a party in power to differences between Nazism and other fascist regimes to the viability of fascism as a generic concept, theory and research on fascism and especially Nazism are the subject of wide-ranging, intense, and passionate debate. For example, some scholars dispute the idea that fascism and Nazism belong to the same political category, pointing to Hitler’s racism, anti-Semitism, and destructive regime as qualitatively different from other fascist governments.50 Scholars such as Sidney Tarrow look to the importance of splits within the state that allow groups the political opportunity to gather resources and gain political power, which could easily be applied to the Nazis in postwar Germany.51 Richard Hamilton emphasizes the importance of networks, personal influence, and personal ties in the success of Nazism, especially in the context of economic and political crisis and the loss of legitimacy of other political parties.52 Others such as Ian Kershaw recognize the centrality of Hitler’s charisma in the success of Nazism, though he also details the political struggles and compromises that allowed Hitler to come to power.53 For many people, including scholars, Nazism and Hitler are still the personification of evil. Yet the notion that Nazism was a unique aberration in history owing to Hitler’s demonic powers has given way to a more sophisticated understanding of Nazism and fascism that ties the movements to the economic, political, social, and cultural context of the post–World War I era, with many scholars arguing that its roots extend back into the late nineteenth century. It is now commonplace to acknowledge that fascism had a

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consistent ideology and even a coherent aesthetics that informed its distinctive brand of aesthetic politics. Though primarily discussing Nazism, I also draw on the larger context of fascist ideology and aesthetics beyond Germany in my discussion of fascist aesthetic politics. Fascist aesthetic politics drew on avant-garde themes of authenticity and knowledge from the aesthetic sphere and collectivized them in particular ways. Their massive pageants and meetings also had affinities with many aspects of carnival. However, fascism politicized these ideas and practices in terms of the nation and the leader, so that the aestheticization of politics sought to give “these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves,” while maintaining existing social and property relations.54 I will begin my discussion of fascism by first turning to the social conditions facilitating the rise of Nazism, then examining fascist ideology, and finally exploring fascist aesthetic politics. The rise of Nazism is most immediately attributable to the economic and political crisis in Germany following its defeat in World War I. The economic dislocation caused by the Great Depression and the ineffectiveness of the Weimar government in dealing with economic and social problems contributed to a pervasive sense of crisis in Germany and throughout Europe. With inflation and unemployment rampant, and political parties in a fledgling and deeply polarized Weimar democracy endlessly squabbling with one another and seemingly more interested in maintaining power than in solving problems, the appeal of a great leader above partisan politics grew dramatically. Many Germans also considered the Versailles treaty at the end of World War I to be unfair. In ceding land to France that Germans believed belonged to them and demanding crippling reparations payments, the populace saw a Germany stripped of its dignity. This treaty not only encouraged a resurgence of German nationalism but also gave credence to the “stab in the back” theory that Nazis never tired of proclaiming, that is, the idea that petty civilian politicians had sold out the nation and the military for their own purposes in agreeing to a peace treaty with the allies, when Germany still might have won the war. In addition, Germany had a long history of militaristic and aristocratic traditions, exemplified in the power of the Junker landed elite, who opposed capitalist rationalization and democracy. They and other German elites were afraid of a communist revolution in the wake of the Bolshevik

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seizure of power in 1917, and looked to a party like Nazism that could defeat the communists.55 Finally, many Europeans were attracted to fascism because of a pervasive sense of cultural crisis and a decline in European power, symbolized by vague fears associated with disparate phenomena from the rise of American-style consumerism to a fall in the fertility rate. Hitler and Nazism addressed many of these needs and fears. Hitler, an exceptional politician, was able to either integrate or eliminate his other right-wing rival parties, and Nazism became the reactionary alternative in Germany by the 1920s. Nazis argued that democracy could not solve social problems and that parliamentary politics contributed to cultural decadence and a lack of national unity and will. An anti-Marxist party that proclaimed the virtues of German nationalism and militarism, the Nazi party also embraced some socialist ideas and imagery and was ambivalent at best about capitalist rationalization. Nazism, like fascism more generally, saw itself as a revolutionary movement, a third force between communism and capitalism, using the ideology of nationalism and mass mobilization to replace an old with a new elite.56 Many fascist leaders such as Mussolini had been involved in left-wing movements, and their ideology had cross-class appeal. They used socialist symbols and adopted socialist ideas about mass participation but substituted struggles between nations for class conflict.57 They honored Italian or German traditions, from conventional gender roles to a belief in the sanctity of peasant life. Their idea was not so much to return to old traditions as the creation of distinctive, modern rituals “that celebrated hierarchy and order.58 Becoming modern did not mean democracy and individual rights, but the choice of values based on communal feelings of submission and national spirit. So Nazism and fascism were not simply movements that desired a return to an idyllic past. They were new, dynamic movements that drew on modern themes from the latest technological development to the mass mobilization of the people in their rise to power. As Jeffrey Herf states, fascism was a kind of reactionary modernism, appealing to tradition while undermining it with a rationalized state and technological advances. Hitler and Mussolini were fascinated with speed, with the latest technological developments in the most modern modes of transportation like the airplane.59 They used technologies such as the radio to transform private living rooms into public spaces, inaugurating a to-

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talitarian politics. Fascism created a new form of total social integration, abolishing distinctions between public and private spheres and injecting the state into all aspects of life. Fascists did not define politics in terms of the negotiation of interests or rational debate, as they denied the legitimacy of democracy. Fascists used force and terror to rule their subjects, not only denying the rights of anyone who disagreed with them but either placing them in concentration camps or killing them.

Fascist and Nazi Ideology Nazis and fascists did not rule by terror alone. Their movement was genuinely popular, in large part because of their ideological appeal. The experiences of soldiers and citizens in World War I were central to the creation of this ideology. Not only did Hitler demand revenge for the loss of the war, but the mass mobilization of Germans took place in the context of war rather than through political democracy. Nazi ideals of male camaraderie, courage, action, and virility both drew from and appealed to the experiences of war veterans. Nazi beliefs were shaped around the ideals of war. They drew on the nostalgia for the comradeship that arose in the battle. Military experience symbolized a man’s strength, his ability to face death, testing his courage. It emphasized devotion to the nation and the leader. Through combat, soldiers got in touch with the elemental forces of death, blood, and soil while also learning to use some of the most sophisticated technology available. Nazis looked to make everyday life like a war, constantly invoking metaphors of struggle and battle in their ideological appeals to citizens. Moreover, such ideals of manliness, devotion to duty, and discipline had a broader resonance, as they were middle-class virtues that had triumphed in nineteenth-century Germany.60 Participation in military-style public festivals tried to re-create the excitement of the war while cementing the unity of the nation.61 The new politics and ideology of fascism were built on eighteenth-century ideas of popular sovereignty, where people were mobilized into the political process. Nazis and fascists incorporated a type of popular mobilization to integrate the masses into the state. In fascist propaganda, people see themselves everywhere, from mass gatherings to mass pageants, but always in the context of the leader and the party. These mass

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gatherings were designed with military precision, and everything was rationalized as in an assembly line. These gatherings gave people a sense of participation, though nothing changed politically because of their participation in a group, and they had no real power. Rather, these were symbolic political events that seemed to evoke the organic spirit of community so important to Nazis and fascists. For Nazis, nationalism represented an organic, biological community. They wished to return to the original spirit of the Aryan race. This mystical emphasis on the spirit of the people (the Volk) meant that Nazis were above mundane politics, indeed that they embodied the Volkish spirit broken apart by democracy and capitalism. They recognized the complexity of appealing to tradition, attempting to integrate nationalist and Nazi symbols such as the swastika with Christian symbols, mixing the idea of mystical community and middle-class respectability. Yet Nazis were always ambivalent about religious symbols. Like Nietzsche, Hitler considered Christianity to be a slave morality, and Nazis tried to replace prayer to a Christian God with invocations to the national spirit of Germany’s racial ancestors.62 Nazis discounted the importance of the intellect, stressing experience over rationality, and the importance of youth over vitality. They substituted the pure heart of Cinderella for the Horatio Alger story of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps as the path to success.63 This activism and spirit were channeled through the leader, who personified the organic community. Nazi ideology was structured by a number of binaries, including “the contrast between the clean and the impure, the incorruptible and the defiled, the physical and the mental, the joyful and the critical.” The major criticism of the Jews was that they were carriers of a destructive urban, intellectual, critical, and corrupting spirit. Jews placed the “individual over the community, the intellect over feeling.”64

Aesthetic Politics This ideology contributed to a distinctive type of aesthetic politics. Fascist aesthetic politics appropriates the language of art, staging political events, and stressing spectacle over active participation. This new aesthetic politics stimulated charismatic renewal through participation in mass spectacles and pageants. In Benjamin’s terms, it used

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art and image making to create a new aura for the leader and a novel type of mass unity.65 Fascist aesthetics posited politics as art-giving form, removing the diseased and creating freedom for the healthy. Fascists emphasized classical ideas of beauty and form. Fascist aesthetics meant physical perfection. The structure of the body mirrored the structure of the mind; if the body was diseased, so was the intellect.66 For many Germans, beauty existed beyond rationality. Nazi art was influenced by the classical European revival of the eighteenth century, and Nazis’ ideal of beauty derived from Greece, stressing the importance of harmony, order, and balance. The ancient Greek profile became the dominant image for the Aryan man. This Greek ideal of beauty fused with the Germanic importance of simplicity. This emphasis on simplicity and emotion was exemplified in the sacred flame, a symbol that evoked rebirth and purification. Nazis also drew on the German fascination with sun worship, which led to an obsession with blond hair, blue eyes, and light skin pigmentation. But Nazi aesthetics was not just grounded in classical traditions. It drew on politicized avant-garde themes such as authenticity and opposition to materialism. Though Hitler was not enamored of modern art, many fascists such as Mussolini embraced nineteenth-century avant-garde ideas from the aesthetic sphere that criticized the centrality of instrumental reason and functional efficiency in modern societies, and such ideas seeped into Nazism. Both fascists and avant-garde artists opposed capitalism and emphasized drama and emotion rather than reason as the springboards of human action. Fascists and artists such as the futurists linked nature and the human soul, critiquing the mediocrity and materialism of bourgeois society. The futurist manifesto enumerated several of these avant-garde themes in 1909 that would come to characterize fascism: “The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity, and revolt . . . we want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the forced march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist . . . we want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism, and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice”67 Fascism mobilized these themes in the context of nationalism and a call for the rule of the unquestioned charismatic leader who embodied the virtues of the nation and the race. They blamed Jews, Freemasons, and international financiers for their problems, seeing Western

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civilization as fundamentally corrupt. Fascists opposed this corruption with an ideal of authenticity. Creating an authentic experience through demonstrations and experiences of nationalist camaraderie was the goal of fascist aesthetic politics. Fascism collectivized this experience of authenticity, placing it in the context of the nation or the race. The particular experiences of Germans and Aryans were the basis for Nazi aesthetics, shorn of all ties to rationality and emphasizing feeling and experience rather than intellect. In creating its distinctive historical narrative, fascism constructed a story of suffering and redemption but tied it to nationalism and the plight of the leader. Fascist aesthetics emphasized the ideal of life as art. Though fascist aesthetics stressed the dissolution of alienation in the ecstasy of community akin to the loss of identity associated with jouissance, the result was not the creation of a new, diverse, and distinctive self, but submission before the leader. Fascist aesthetic politics neutralized people’s senses as well as their reason, flooding the senses with images and playing on their sensory alienation. This aesthetic politics culminated in war, separating the pursuit of any political aim from all ties to ethics. The dramatic spectacle, the moment pregnant with feeling, the loss of self in the community became substitutes for political reflection. Fascist spectacles seemed to create a new sense of community, a “politics of the piazza” that reached people’s emotions directly.68 Akin to carnival, in fascist spectacles people experience an emotional joy in celebrating their seeming equality before the all-powerful leader. This type of fascist carnival allows individuals to express themselves in cultic arenas, rewarding submission. Its celebration masks violence and reinforces national and state power.69 The idea of debate about differing political perspectives disappears behind the drama of the fascist spectacle. Fascist leaders are glorified, not satirized. The critical component of carnival is lost.70 Fascist aesthetic politics celebrated submission, “the endurance of pain,” and “extravagant effort.” It endorsed two seemingly different states of mind, egomania and servitude. It evoked orgiastic relations between the people and the leader, while glamorizing and eroticizing death, aggression, and submission. Sexuality “was converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers.”71 Political violence and war were converted into aesthetic expression. For fascists, life imitated theater, and leaders played upon people’s emotions in creating the fascist

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community. Their transgressive break with society was illusory, for they not only reproduced the worst features of a hierarchical society but also gathered the support of many economic and political elites in their rise to power. Fascism and Nazism were defeated in World War II. Despite recurring fears of a return of neo-Nazism, its revival in anything like its previous incarnation is very unlikely. And what of the fate of revolutionary syndicalism and the IWW? The revolutionary syndicalism of the CGT and the IWW was undoubtedly the high point of a particular type of aesthetic politics associated with expressive authenticity, as it criticized the alienation of capitalism and demanded the realization of the creative self in the context of free labor, alongside its festive street demonstrations and strikes. Yet these unions failed to achieve their most radical goals. The reasons for these failures are complex, from the repressive actions of the republican state that aimed to crush the movements to a transition to corporate capitalism that undercut the decentralized ideology of syndicalism. Yet the laborist doctrine of syndicalism contributed to its problems and shows the limits of a politics based on labor for the twenty-first century. The syndicalist vision of labor radicalism, like many other labor movements, was based to some degree on the exclusion of gender and race, both theoretically and practically, as a white, masculine vision of working-class independence predominated. Outside of the French context, in the United States, for example, the whiteness of working-class immigrants such as the Irish was constructed in opposition to stereotypes about African Americans. Blacks represented an erotic, careless life that immigrant and native white workers both ambivalently longed for and hated.72 Workers defined their identities in terms of race rather than class. But even the idea of class solidarity is suspect. Joan Scott argues that class is gendered in its very core, as productivity is equated with masculinity. Like the extreme devotion to a destructive masculinity characteristic of fascism, syndicalist notions of class had little room for the participation of women.73 The exclusivity of class mirrors the gender coding of public/private and material/ spiritual so prominent in the West. As C. Wright Mills argues, worker’s movements also adopted a “labor metaphysic,” overemphasizing the role of the working class as a revolutionary agent. Such a perspective reduced social change to the history of labor.74 Moreover, in today’s

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postmodern era, class no longer has a singular definition as in the industrial context. Though persuasive in many ways, these criticisms raise complex issues, for the diversity of labor movements and the different elements constituting them have often been narrowed into a productivist narrative that dovetails nicely with liberal and conservative beliefs that labor unions are outmoded and at best should be concerned only with wages and working conditions. These critiques tend to dismiss the aesthetic dimension of labor movements, which were not narrowly productivist. The syndicalist dream of free association and free labor posited a new kind of solidarity, and at least had the potential to be more inclusive of many different types of workers. The history of surrealism, the situationalists, and indeed the 1960s and contemporary new social movements could be rethought with syndicalist themes in mind, demonstrating the labor movement’s diverse influences beyond mere productivism. That history remains to be written. I will discuss many of these themes in the next chapter, as we turn to the aesthetic politics of 1968 in France and the new social movements, particularly the global justice movement.

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6 The Flowering of Aesthetic Politics May 1968, the New Social Movements, and the Global Justice Movement

B

y the 1960s, the proletarian public sphere was breaking down, as deindustrialization, the rise of mass culture, the suburbanization of metropolitan areas, and globalization gained full force. As the economy moved in a post-Fordist direction and working-class institutions from unions to neighborhoods throughout the world faced the onslaught of a neoliberal state, the site for resistance to capitalism moved to civil society and the “new social movements.” An emerging “society of control” based on mobility, the quick movement of capital and people, and a media-saturated postmodern culture of fragmentation and fantasy created a new context for social movements. Beginning with the civil rights movement in the United States, which influenced the student, women’s, and environmental movements, among others, these new movements combined concerns with economic rights with demands for creating a more democratic and inclusive society. They were increasingly global in scope, as the civil rights movement drew on the nonviolence of Gandhi and the experience of the decolonization movements of the 1950s throughout the world. These new movements questioned the dominance of economic growth over all aspects of society, arguing for a more fulfilling idea of public and private life. They demanded public respect for their particular identities that had been eclipsed by the dominant culture. Though many

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labor movements of the nineteenth century cannot be simply dismissed as productivist, as they experimented with new forms of solidarity, only in the post-1960s era does the concern with identity and knowledge elaborated in the aesthetic sphere and ideas of play from popular culture become powerfully and self-consciously thematized in social movements, often overshadowing concerns with material conditions. I explore the development of aesthetic politics from the May 1968 movement in France to the rise of the contemporary global justice movement, as the transgressive dimension of this politics gradually eclipses the emphasis on expressive authenticity. These movements occurred not only in the context of a post-Fordist economy but in a new, globalized world where issues from regional and local selfdetermination to problems of genetic engineering become prominent. With the emergence of the new social movements, aesthetic politics bursts into social life in a very public way. Play, festival, transgression, and the like were both experienced and theorized as never before.

Aesthetic Politics and the Counterculture Crucial to this new prominence for aesthetic politics was the growth of a distinctive youth culture in the 1960s. In this youth culture, the aesthetic and bohemian themes of authenticity and transgression merged with notions of play and festival derived from popular culture, achieving a historically new widespread influence and popularity. Though the idea of generational conflict has been a staple of many societies, it became especially significant in the post–World War II era. Between 1946 and 1951, a record twenty-two million children were born in the United States. This coincided with the spread of mass media and a new aesthetic economy. In the 1960s, over forty-six million Americans entered teenager status. In this social context, issues of sexuality and free expression became increasingly prominent.1 The rise of the postwar university in the United States and Europe also helped create the conditions for a distinctive youth culture. Enormous numbers of students participated in higher education in the 1960s. The university system allowed a freedom from supervision almost unparalleled in other parts of society, while also legitimizing and encouraging critical analysis. It provided a space for individual development and experimentation which drew heavily on bohemian themes.

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From student activists against injustice and war to bohemian critics of the crass commercialism of advanced capitalism, this new youth culture created its own distinctive styles and music, reaching beyond the confines of the university. Rock music was especially important in this context. Rock drew from blues and country music, the music of the black and white working classes, respectively. Blues especially had heavily sexual themes, emphasizing the importance of struggle and the recovery of black manhood in a post-slavery era. Rock fused elements of jazz, blues, and folk, creating a new “rock star” who combined the attention to lyrics from the folk tradition, the beat from blues, and the virtuosity of jazz into a definition of the bohemian artist who lived outside of the boundaries of existing society. Rock created a “common language” for youth culture, giving a public voice to issues that usually remained in the private sphere, such as sexuality and risk. Rock also contributed to a type of protest that combined political, lifestyle, and aesthetic moments into a critique of the entire society as destructive, hypocritical, and unjust. Many young people rejected social norms through their dress, demeanor, and speech, as well as their actions. Social change occurred not just through changing institutions, but through changing people— change had to be lived and experienced, and the personal became the political.2 This new type of radicalism often adopted a language of authenticity and organic growth, for many of the participants believed that the communities of young people were the outgrowth of distinctive youth cultures, which provided a new context for the realization of expressive autonomy. Black American music carried connotations of authenticity, reinforcing among many of the young the idea of a distinctive community of like-minded, alienated people. This radicalism was not necessarily overtly political in a conventional manner, though, but often more aesthetic, a politics of style and culture. The vibrancy of this youth culture was inseparable from mass media, and young people were bound together by shared images of youth, radicalism, and the like as much as by organic connections to one another. This image-based identification cut across class boundaries, at least for the middle class, as middle-class young people adopted many working-class values of toughness, excitement, and risk taking.3 Youth culture also symbolically expressed yet imaginatively resolved some of the contradictions of the parent culture. For example,

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the racism against blacks in the United States and Great Britain was transformed in youth culture into a figurative assimilation of black culture, as controversial issues from sexuality to rage and resistance could be played out in imagistic form, through music, dress, and language. Many white youth in particular had imaginary relations with black culture, a harbinger of more imaginary social relations generally that developed within a post-Fordist consumer culture. Such an image politics translated into not only a politics of authenticity but also a politics of transgression, of rejecting dominant images, and an embrace of difference over community. This transgressive politics could be seen in punk music, a successor to rock in the 1970s. While much punk music was rooted in passion and community, it also attempted to literally smash musical conventions. Other musicians associated with punk saw all music as subjective and self-consciously explored the texture of music. They criticized the naturalness of musical sound, emphasizing the artificiality of music, that all music is constructed, not a natural outgrowth of social conditions. Thus their music was ironic, juxtaposing different genres.4 This tension between authenticity and transgression was seen in the politics of many of the new social movements. Student activists, for example, in opposition to the centralized politics of the “Old Left,” emphasized self-actualization as a political goal and participatory democracy as the route to changing society. Participatory democracy on the one hand meant expressing one’s authentic voice in the context of a community of like-minded people. This emphasis on face-to-face democracy recalled the syndicalist vision of worker control, a decentralized version of power which diffused decision making to as many arenas as possible. Yet student activists also advocated an experimental and transgressive dimension to participatory democracy and direct action. To act was to be spontaneous, to improvise, to innovate, to constantly try the new. The idea of permanent revolution was taken out of the political sphere and transferred to individual experience.5

May 1968 May 1968 in France was a pivotal moment that saw these cultural, political, and aesthetic trends become explicit and practiced. In May 1968 France, an aesthetic politics took hold, with both authentic and

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transgressive elements, alongside a language of labor that was in the process of losing its power over public discourse. Students were often the carriers of this aesthetic politics, and they proved to be the catalyst for the largest worker strikes in French history, as eight to nine million workers took to the streets in protest, and the French government and economy tottered on the brink of collapse for a month. While advocating the overthrow of capitalism, they developed aesthetic politics in a new key, for May 1968 saw the explosion of a language of transgression, desire, creativity, and fantasy alongside more conventional worker demands. In France in the 1950s and 1960s, though worker culture was starting to fragment, Marxist imagery and analysis did not disappear. In fact, they migrated out of the proletarian public sphere into the university system, buoyed in France by the popularity of the postwar Communist Party among many intellectuals. An ouvriériste critique of capitalism remained powerful in 1950s France, as the Communist Party was a powerhouse of ideas, as many talented intellectuals from Louis Althusser to Foucault to Jean-Paul Sartre joined the party, if only for brief periods of time. This emphasis on worker culture and exploitation combined with anti-imperialist sentiments reinforced by the French experiences with the Algerian War and, by the 1960s, a growing opposition to American involvement in Vietnam. Such a Marxist language of tiers-mondisme (Third Worldism) and anticapitalism became increasingly widespread among a number of students.6 While this language informed May 1968, demonstrators also moved beyond the expressive productivism and critique of alienation at work characteristic of much of the aesthetic politics of labor movements. They turned the streets of Paris into festivals of opposition, different from its laborist predecessors because of the May protest’s emphasis on freeing individual desire as well as changing capitalism. Graffiti and posters in the streets proclaiming the freedom of the imagination joined the red flags of communism and the black flags of anarchism as symbols of revolt. Theater moved from the classical shrine, the Odéon, to the streets, as life and art intermingled in a new realm of mutual display. Demonstrators advocated a revolutionary break with the past, tying them to the French radical tradition from the Revolution of 1789 to the Paris Commune. Yet this was a different kind of rupture with tradition, an aesthetic break, reminiscent of

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surrealism rather than working-class revolution. New types of alliances that severed existing categories of community and identity were briefly created in May, producing new types of resistance and opposition.7 This transgressive aesthetic politics coexisted alongside its expressive, authentic counterpart in May 1968, both of them in play with a still-dominant Marxist rhetoric of social change.

May 1968 and the Intellectuals There has been no shortage of analyses of the meaning of May 1968 in  France. For left-wing authors such as Henri Lefebvre and Alain Touraine, May 1968 represented a challenge to bureaucratic and consumer society. Touraine in particular sees May as representing a crisis of the Old Regime of capitalism, as students and workers reinvented class struggle by challenging technocracy and bureaucracy. For Touraine, a new class of professionals was leading this demand for autonomy.8 For conservatives such as Raymond Aron, May 1968 represented an Oedipal psychodrama of radical students opposing authority, with the revolt played out on symbolic rather than material grounds. It was not a serious movement for social change, but an immature adolescent opposition to governments and universities.9 Yet even Aron believes that May 1968 represented a break with the past, and this idea informs most analyses of the movement. The most popular perspective, advanced by Luc Ferry and Alain Renault and echoed to some degree by Gilles Lipovetsky, was that May 1968 signified an individualistic revolt against authority. For Luc Ferry and Alain Renault, 1968 saw the emergence of an individualism that challenged tradition, while Lipovetsky highlights the libertarian but ultimately narcissistic aspects of this individualism.10 Jean-Pierre Le Goff maintains that May 1968 attempted to merge this countercultural individualism with radical Marxist politics through the practice of workers’ control of industry but that such a merger was doomed to failure. Accordingly, rather than a worker revolt, the radical Regis Debray contends that May 1968 represented a new bourgeois revolution, a new stage of capitalism, and that its legacy was to create a more libertarian culture and lifestyle conducive to a postindustrial society.11 Kristin Ross takes issue with these analyses, arguing that the radical political dimension of the movement has been forgotten in these

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perspectives. She contends that May 1968 introduced a new type of dissociated radical politics, where old categories of political allegiance and belonging dissolved in a dizzying crosscurrent of novel types of association.12 I have much sympathy for Ross’s arguments. Though she does not describe this new politics in aesthetic terms, many of her observations on this politics of difference correspond to my views. I see May 1968 as the flowering of an aesthetic politics that radicalized the expressivist and carnivalesque themes within the labor movement, particularly its syndicalist branches. Novel political alliances promoted the rise of a new kind of imagistic politics. May 1968 allowed the transgressive dimension of aesthetic politics to flourish. Coherent narratives of politics and social change were ruptured. A kind of jouissance emerged from the collapse of the discrete categories of worker, student, and capitalist. The traditional anonymity of festival and carnival reinforced this dissolution of identity. Marxist imagery began to break down, pointing to a new politics that moved beyond existing categories of representation.

The Events May 1968 did not arise out of nowhere. The events in Paris were part of student revolts that occurred throughout the world. In the 1960s, American, Spanish, Polish, West German, British, Swedish, and Italian students protested for educational reform and battled authorities, linking critiques of the Vietnam War to student issues and revolutionary critiques of capitalism. For example, in 1968 in Italy, twenty-six universities were occupied. Labor unrest also existed in France in the period before the explosion of May 1968. Large strikes had occurred in 1953 and 1963, while immediately before May 1968 several wildcat strikes had taken place.13 The student movement began in the suburban university of Nanterre, where a core of twenty-five radical students led by Daniel CohnBendit protested restrictions on student activities and politics within the university. Though influenced by generalized anti-imperialist and anticapitalist sentiments, the radical Nanterre students also had local concerns. They wanted more open admissions to working-class students so that higher education could be democratized; they desired more student control of university policies; they encouraged more political

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activity within the universities; and they wanted to replace the distant, abstract French educational system with politicized, activist, community-oriented practices. Within a month, this movement grew to one thousand students, a week later to fifty thousand, and in another ten days, over ten million students and workers. Then it was gone in another month.14 Many student protesters drew on the French revolutionary past for their understanding of the present. Steeped in Marxist rhetoric, they looked to worker traditions, particularly factory occupations and worker councils, for inspiration. They formed student action committees, modeled on the Paris Commune of 1871, French syndicates, and the radical soviets at the beginning of the Russian Revolution of 1917, hoping to turn them into vanguards of revolutionary activity. Colored also by the experiences of Nazism and Vichy France, militant students accused the government and the university of engaging in “fascist” tactics, such as closing Nanterre as officials moved to contain the crisis. These governmental repressive actions only made the situation worse, and after Nanterre was closed, the protests moved to Paris. The May protests became more radical as students experienced repression and arrest at the hands of police, which outraged much of French public opinion.15 Spontaneity characterized much of the movement, as tactics and strategies were improvised as changing events warranted. The first barricades erected by students occurred without the control of any organization. The large student protests of May 10 in Paris demanded freedom for arrested students, though protesters were careful not to alienate workers. The first occupations in a Parisian university occurred on May 11, when about sixty students took over the Censier, a Sorbonne annex. Two days later about five hundred students occupied much of the Sorbonne. Their demands included eliminating traditional examinations while also voicing broader support for workers and opposition to consumer culture and American imperialism. After students took over the Sorbonne in early May, the police were called in, violating the sanctuary status of the Sorbonne for the first time in its history. When the Sorbonne was closed by officials, this led to new student demands which fueled the movement, including amnesty for arrested and expelled students and the reopening of the Sorbonne.16

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While improvising their tactics, student leaders were very selfconscious about their strategies. Their occupations invoked worker traditions and derived repertoires of actions from working-class history, from labor councils to factory sit-ins. They tried to create a sense of shared cross-class solidarity versus the brutality of the police. They were aware of the widespread public distrust of the police, a fear grounded in the revolutionary tradition in France. Protesters were also not above provoking authorities into retaliation for their actions, which fueled the movement and gave it momentum. Such tactics were certainly effective, as workers joined students to create an enormous mass movement in France. The student movement turned into a widespread movement as workers began striking in the middle of May. Many workers admired the direct-action tactics of the students and responded angrily to what they saw as the police repression of students. Workers engaged in three weeks of strikes in May. The initial strikes were instigated by rank-andfile workers, not by the union leadership. Railroad workers led the way for the working class, engaging in sit-down strikes on May 13. Industrial sectors like metallurgy, construction, transportation, and mining powered the strikes, taking advantage of state weakness to pursue their demands. Nationalized industries also participated in great numbers. Sympathetic public opinion encouraged the spread of the strike movement. Workers and students briefly made common cause, engaging in large protests on May 23–24 in Paris. Moreover, as in the Popular Front movements of 1936, many workers occupied factories, though these occupations were often run by union leaders and had little internal direct democracy. Nevertheless, the government was unable to stop these protests, and it appeared that France might very well experience a revolution.17 However, as some protesters grew more violent, they began to turn public opinion against the demonstrators. The French union leaders, in tandem with the government, appeased workers through granting them more union rights, higher pay, and progress toward the forty-hour week. President Charles DeGaulle was able to use the threat of communism to rally public opinion to his side, as three to four hundred thousand people engaged in a massive progovernment rally on May 30. Authorities became more confident in the wake of these pro-government demonstrations, as three thousand

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police evicted eleven thousand striking Renault workers in Flins, west of Paris, on June 7, with three days of violence occurring. The final night of the barricades occurred on June 11 in the Latin Quarter of Paris but did not spread to the countryside. Finally, the right was victorious in elections in June 23– 30.18 Yet May 1968 saw the arrival of aesthetic politics on a mass scale. On May 8, the art students at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts went on strike, demanding better, more focused teachers and desiring an education that emphasized a more politicized art. While on strike, they created art that emphasized changing the university to make it open and democratic. Artists were involved in most aspects of the movement, critiquing the idea of a division of art and life and claiming that everyone is an artist and a creator. Committees replaced individual artists as promoters and producers of art, as they tried to eliminate distinctions between author and audience.19 The anonymity of artistic practices was seen in the famous graffiti produced in the streets of Paris, including slogans such as “Take your desires for reality,” “It is forbidden to forbid,” “All power to the imagination,” “We refuse a world where the assurance of not dying from hunger is exchanged for the risk of dying from boredom,” and “Workers of the world, enjoy!”20 This outbreak of street art was but one instance of the “postering of Paris” in May 1968. Students created posters en masse, and they became more important as a means of communication because other media were disrupted by strikes. Though often appearing somewhat like conventional socialist realist portraits, as artists attempted to directly communicate with workers in a visual language that laborers could understand, both their content and much of their commentary were different from this realist art. Artists often employed satire and irony to communicate their point of view. They also incorporated libertarian themes of individual freedom and creativity alongside internationalist third-world revolutionary themes, as pictures of Mao and Che Guevara appeared alongside more traditional worker portraits. This internationalism took other forms, as a popular poster protested French immigration policies, contending that all of the French were aliens and foreigners under this repressive regime. These students attempted to move beyond the individualistic and bohemian tradition of art, in favor of an art that focused on building a new society. These posters made the streets of Paris festive, often inspiring the student

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protesters. In the words of Helene Golder, a protester, May 1968 was “a great battle, a festival.”21 The streets became scenes for theatrical performance as well. On May 15, about fifty students occupied the Odéon National Theater, raising the red flag of revolution to proclaim their intentions. These critical dramatists wanted to link up with workers and end capitalism. For them, only guerilla and street theater was true art, for it politicized the stage and avoided the consumerist spectacle of capitalism and the old bourgeois notions of theater. Their celebration of street theater was accompanied by a desire to destroy the star and celebrity system of acting and art more generally, for artistic anonymity meant the ser vice of art for the revolutionary cause.22 Street theater became mixed with more conventional symbolic political activity. When the movement spread to Paris, students walked up the Champs Élysées, singing the “Internationale” and waving the red flag of communism and the black flag of anarchism.23 Students controlled the Latin Quarter or student section of Paris, as police retreated from this area. This student sovereignty symbolized their power, as the Sorbonne became a kind of sacred space and symbol of freedom for the movement. When workers and students demonstrated together, they shared their respective sacred places of history and protest. As workers joined the demonstrations, they protested around historically significant areas for them, such as the Gare de l’Est and the Place de la République. Beginning at these sacred spots for workers, they went to the Place Denfert-Rochereau, of symbolic importance historically to students.24 Such distinctive elements of protest showed how different May 1968 was from previous movements. As the first general strike to move beyond the sphere of industry into all realms of society, it created a logic of difference, not of the same, as Kristin Ross states.25 As it was a multidimensional movement, different factions from Leninists to anticolonial militants came together in protest. This movement also called for people to rethink their existing political allegiances and the very social categories that they took to be the basis of politics. This new movement achieved unforeseen alliances between different categories of people. Workers, students, farmers, and others were ideologically displaced, as existing social categories could no longer make sense of their respective situations and political positions. This “political opening

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to otherness” created an entirely new political situation.26 A novel type of political subjectivity arose when many people could no longer identify with the existing French society or with any simple notion of shared community. Overcoming social boundaries resulted in the dissolution of identity, but this was a joyful social jouissance, a delight that encouraged spontaneity and creativity. This pleasure and creativity had to be lived in a festive space characterized by playful social relations between people. Such a fluid solidarity corresponded to various attempts to move beyond existing social representations. For example, students utilized many working-class symbols, from barricades to black flags, in their demonstrations, to create a new type of connection to workers, over the heads of their union representatives.27 Such connections involved new ideas about radicalism and militancy. Many French middle-class young people identified with workers and anti-colonial militants, despite having little concrete connection to them. This imagistic connection to them meant that these categories became objects of political desire and fantasy.28 The image of the thirdworld, romanticized militant was grafted onto the European worker, often through the linkage of Maoism (as in the slogan “Vietnam is in our factories”). The discourses of anti-imperialism and anticapitalism were combined. Social categories such as “worker” or “student” no longer expressed particular ideas and interests, for they were ruptured in the course of the movement. This breakdown of social categories encouraged new ideals of equality, which emerged in the context of the struggle. Political organizations like action committees created new political horizons, which then influenced political practices. These practices concerned direct democracy and collective self-organization and attempted to prefigure the new society in their very structure.29 They aimed at liberating creativity, overcoming the alienation associated with the division of labor. These new ideas were also realized on the street, as May became a kind of festival of public happiness, where work for a new society became pleasurable. In sum, May transformed everyday life for a brief period, and public and private concerns and experiences were transcended for participants. Though the protests of May 1968 seemingly were defeated, their ideas retained an underground existence. Aesthetic politics, concerned with ruptures with the past, the liberation of creativity, and the symbolic remaking of society, was in tension with especially the more

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productivist and union-oriented politics of Marxism. Its model that a proletarian revolution had to be a cultural revolution that broke with the previous society in almost every way owed as much to surrealism and transgressive aesthetics as to traditional worker’s movements. While an ouvriériste outlook characterized many students as well as workers, the enormous emphasis on the liberation of creativity, and the graffiti that called for taking desires as reality, could not even have been articulated in earlier movements, for it was beyond the realms of the possible before May 1968. This new aesthetic politics demonstrated that aesthetic themes had penetrated all aspects of society and social movements. The festive aspects of May also showed that the carnival elements of popular culture had become part of this new type of politics. Criticisms of the artistic star system, satirizing elites, and the calls for a revolutionary, collective art recalled the traditions of carnival. These dimensions of aesthetic politics, the festive/carnival and the transgressive and authentic, united in an uneasy mixture in May 1968. Much of this new political orientation was seen in the work of the Situationists associated with Guy Debord, who came to prominence in May 1968. They saw the history of worker’s councils and French syndicalism as the key but neglected historical precedent that students and workers could draw upon in this new situation. Situationists believed that worker’s councils were central to any revolutionary situation, for they represented the only group that could lead the working class in revolutionary struggle that did not result in a more bureaucratic society. They criticized the “society of the spectacle,” contending that such a consumer social world encouraged passivity and conformity. Yet they also saw revolutionary moments as festivals, where an enormous creative energy emerged. The proletarian revolution should be a festive type of play rather than simply the issuance of new political demands. They employed art for subversive ends, often placing images in new contexts so that people would see them in a critical light. Though art and revolutionary activity should merge, this was not to be a tired and predictable socialist realism, whose very form was dictated by hierarchical authorities. Rather, art should try to capture the energy of the revolution and promote new ways of understanding the world, overcoming the separation of aesthetics and life.30 Though May 1968 did not produce the revolution hoped for by many, for many young people, it signaled the acceptance of a new,

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more tolerant and globally aware value system.31 Yet the failure of political and social revolution in France was indicative of a decline in the radical movements and rhetoric that occurred throughout the world in the wake of the 1960s. The reasons for this decline are many. In the U.S. context, Gitlin argues that students in particular created no lasting organizations, and groups such as Students for a Democratic Society fell apart in the face of government repression and the collapse of friendship networks that had provided leadership for the movement. The media also promoted flamboyant leaders such as Jerry Rubin and Abby Hoffman of the 1960s, preventing the movement from certifying its own leadership. Mass media portrayed the movement as more radical than it was, alienating liberals in the process. Finally, as drugs and rock music became recreational rather than political statements or means of transcendence, a kind of loose antiauthoritarianism became legitimated in mainstream culture.32 However, in the wake of the decline of the movements of the 1960s, other new social movements have arisen. The emphasis and tension between expressive authenticity and a transgressive politics can still be seen in activist politics. The desire for authenticity is evident in the personal politics of many activists and members of contemporary social movements. Several current studies demonstrate that participation in voluntary organizations is transitory, as people move from one organization to another without developing a strong sense of shared social capital.33 Yet as conventional social capital declines, individualism takes on a political dimension. A type of personalized politics pervades many political judgments and activities. For many activists now, politics must be fulfilling and expressive of an authentic self. The authentic self, not the rational or discursive self, informs their approach to political life. This emphasis on authenticity is based on experiences and actions rather than discourse. Paul Lichterman labels this new type of activism “personalism.”34 It lacks institutionalized forums for expression and responds to the decline of shared political traditions and institutions and the permeability of public and private boundaries. These post-1960s movements are often based on personal, politicized selves, where feeling that one is doing the right thing is very important. Changing one’s entire life, from what one eats to the transportation one chooses and how one understands and acts on gender relations, is seen as a political act. It is

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a contingent, experiential approach to politics that is based on openness to experiences and new ideas, as well as shared moral beliefs and shared discourse. These activists create distinctive practices and styles of communication, where the manner in which an individual states his or her viewpoint is as important as the content of her statement. The beliefs of participants do not have to share a political tradition. As Nina Eliasoph and Lichterman state, in their study of suburban activists, distinctive group bonds encourage “members to respect one another’s private motivations without having to revere the same cultural and political traditions. So one member could speak as an “anticapitalist,” while another member presented herself simply as a “good citizen,” and another as a new age spiritualist, because the group validated all sincere expression that did not tread on another individual’s autonomy.”35 New age spirituality also demonstrates the centrality of authenticity to contemporary experience. Central ideas of romanticism and bohemianism, such as the emphasis on unique, subjective experience, the sacredness of subjectivity, and a holistic approach to self and others, are evident in new age spiritualities. Proponents of new age argue that they offer a critical counterpoint to capitalist modernity, rather than reinforcing its utilitarian, materialistic individualism and rampant commodification of life. Though not as radical as the counterculture of the 1960s, new age spirituality opposes capitalist realms of instrumentality and money making. Many new agers have adopted postmaterialist values, attempt to humanize the workplace, ameliorate the stresses of life, and contribute to a better existence for the ill and the dying, among other mainstream practices that contest the logic of capital. The essence of new age spirituality entails being true to oneself, as in Taylor’s ethic of authenticity. Ethical authority is experienced as coming from within the person, valuing the unique, the interior, and the equal. Contemporary new age practices focus on the whole person, who becomes a site of spiritual practice, and life is crafted as a work of art. In Paul Heelas’s terms, this is an expressive humanism, which posits that every person has a right to develop her own form of life and define what is significant for herself. This tolerant humanism ties new age philosophies to considerations beyond the self.36 This emphasis on authenticity is one side of contemporary aesthetic politics. Yet there is also a transgressive dimension to the new aesthetic politics that could be seen in many movements as well. This

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tension, for example, has been played out in the gay and lesbian movement. Despite differences in the history and politics of gay men and lesbians, there are some commonalities among them regarding this distinctive tension. As gay and lesbian communities began to form in the 1970s and 1980s, they adopted an “ethnic model” of homosexuality, akin to that of minorities in the United States. This model posited that gays and lesbians have a distinctive common experience in a heterosexist society. Homosexuality was at the core of a gay or lesbian person’s life, communities should be built around this identity, and politics should legitimate this identity. This allowed gays and lesbians to come out, to assert their true, authentic selves and live with other like-minded people.37 Yet in the wake of the HIV/AIDS crisis and a new direct-action politics associated with groups like ACT UP, a more transgressive, postmodern politics became more prominent. For example, queer theory associated with this politics critiques notions of essential identity, arguing that homosexuality and heterosexuality are unstable, socially constructed identities, always implicated with one another. Oppression lay less in laws than in the very identity logic and cultural codes of society. These codes must be transgressed. Ridding society of the very notions of homosexuality and heterosexuality can provide the key to new types of personal and social liberation.38 This transgressive politics associated with queer theory corresponds to the contemporary multicultural, postmodern social environment, with its accompanying polytheism of values. The postmodern crisis of representation that characterized the evaluation of art in the aesthetic sphere, where there is no essential truth that can be easily reflected in language or art, applies to the notion of an authentic self. Now everyday life often seems to lack coherence, to be nonnarrative, and identity is often based on identification with images rather than concrete beliefs. In this case, people occupy multiple subjective positions, as collectivity is both inside and outside of us. An aesthetic politics of rupture with the mainstream and constant experimentation becomes increasingly prominent in this context.39 Further, a new concern for global issues has become part of the rhetoric of the contemporary left. For example, the massive strikes in May 1995 in France began as local protests around pension reform but soon turned into demonstrations against neoliberalist globalization. Protests against American involvement in Iraq and the continuing protests

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against neoliberal policies in the wake of the contemporary economic crisis have also been global. These latter demonstrations follow the global justice movement that began in the 1990s. This movement has resurrected the “lost figures” of the worker and the anticolonial militant who were so central to May 1968.40 Yet this global justice movement explodes the hegemony of Marxism, bringing a distinctive aesthetic politics to the fore.

The Global Justice Movement The most interesting contemporary social movement that demonstrates the prevalence of aesthetic politics is the loose coalition of groups aligned in the global justice or anticorporate movement. These groups are diverse, from the black-clad anarchists who often are attracted to violent protest, to more mainstream labor and environmental organizations. The global justice/anticorporate movement not only experiments with new ideas about identity but also plays with new conceptions about style and display. From Greenpeace activists dressed in gigantic condoms proclaiming “practice safe trade” to demonstrators clothed as an endangered species of turtle, street performance plays a central role in these demonstrations. Questioning the dichotomy of old and new social movements, the antiglobalization movement combines seemingly “productivist” demands for social justice and economic redistribution of resources with an agenda that calls for “postmaterialist values” from a respect for cultural diversity to a more ecologically sensitive quality of life.41 This movement arose a post-Fordist economy that has increased the power of global capital. As nation-states find it more and more difficult to control their domestic economies, so that even left-leaning governments cannot regulate the flow of capital in and out of their countries, political and economic influence has begun to move to global institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. Their adoption of neo-liberal economic and social policies provided the immediate impetus for the global justice movement. The book that introduced this movement to a broad public was Naomi Klein’s 1999 bestseller, No Logo. She argued that neo-liberal globalization was simultaneously increasing economic inequality and narrowing cultural choices, so that Third World sweatshops and

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commodified cultural space were the hallmarks of the new global village. Klein contended that the next big movement would be led by young people against corporate globalization, especially huge brands such as Nike and McDonalds, in favor of more public spaces and democratic control of multinational corporations.42 Other approaches that have explored this movement include T.V. Reed, whose book The Art of Social Protest located the global justice movement in the history of distinctively cultural protests from the 1960s to today.43 Sidney Tarrow, in The New Transnational Activism, calls these protesters “rooted cosmopolitans,” still concerned primarily with domestic national issues and how globalization impacts their particular interests.44 Donatella Della Porta and her colleagues see global protests as a new phenomenon that is suspicious of professional organizations and lobbying. This movement has turned to the streets as the site of protest, and proclaimed a new vision of globalization around protection of indigenous rights and a more democratic governing structure.45 Jeffrey Juris, in his book Networking Futures, stresses the flexible organization of this movement that mimics new technologies such as the internet. This “informational utopics” of global protest are a novel, decentralized way of organizing political ideas, creating networks that are transnational counterpublics, and that inform the very logic and practice of the global justice movement.46 Though many of these protestors are union members, these studies demonstrate that a new cultural and aesthetic politics has come to the fore in this movement. The global justice movement began to take root in the 1990s, as a variety of groups loosely joined together. Working outside of state governments, often in tandem with nongovernmental organizations, these movements included the global antisweatshop movement and the movement to end the use of landmines. Jubilee 2000, an international campaign to cancel third-world debt that had the rock star Bono as its spokesperson, focused attention on problems associated with globalization.47 In 1990s Great Britain, many young people began to unite around the issue of uncolonized space. The “Reclaim the Streets” movement arose from this concern, as twenty thousand partyers crowded into Trafalgar Square in April 1997. This movement was part of a self-reliant, decentralized, and informal infrastructure in Britain, including food co-ops, independent media, squatters, and free music festivals. The anarchist spirit was resurrected in these movements.

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The street parties of Reclaim the Streets imagined an aesthetic freedom that saw cities turned into sites for festivals and existing space becoming arenas for play and carnival.48 Much of the impetus for the movement has also come from the global south. For example, the Zapatista revolt in Mexico that began in 1994 was one of the first to challenge global neoliberalism in the form of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This global context has created new issues for the left alongside more traditional concerns with class inequality and human rights, from the protection of indigenous cultures to containing the spread of pandemics such as HIV/AIDS.49

Seattle Many of these different movements converged in the Seattle demonstrations of 1999. The Seattle demonstrations were a protest against neoliberal versions of globalization and targeted the international economic and political institutions responsible for shaping much of this process, particularly the World Trade Organization (WTO). Protesters argued that neoliberal globalization weakened the power of national governments over their economies, increased the power of corporations over local populations, and increased social inequality. They advocated a critical globalization from below, with attention to more democratic and indigenous, local issues.50 Seattle’s “festival of resistance” began on November 27, 1999, lasting about a week. Protests against NAFTA in the United States gave a boost to activists associated with the consumer advocate and Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader. Nader’s group Global Trade Watch helped organize many of the lectures and forums in Seattle. The original plan was to have the protest spearheaded by the AFLCIO, which was to peacefully march through the streets, led by its leader James Hoffa Jr. Yet this march never occurred, as President Clinton promised organized labor a seat at the table at future WTO meetings. The protests did not disappear, but became more diverse. The demonstrations included a wide variety of groups, such as labor, farmers, indigenous peoples, environmentalists, human rights activists, and students, among others. Academic presentations critical of neoliberalism took place alongside cultural events such as concerts, theater performances, and street parties. Protesters met in warehouses

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and abandoned dance-clubs, excluding conventional media from their deliberations. Usually a spokescouncil would be created, an improvised body that decided where and when protests would occur after much democratic discussion, debate, and voting. These protests were more festive and diverse and less sexist than those in the past, rejecting celebrity leaders.51 On the first day of protest, people dressed as sea turtles paraded through the streets, for sea turtles became a potent symbol of the evils of neoliberalism when the WTO ruled that the U.S. Endangered Species Act was an unfair trade barrier. Groups such as Art and Revolution, drawing on themes associated with Reclaim the Streets, organized theatrical street demonstrations, contending that most conventional types of protest were simply boring, “bad theater.” In their view, all of social life is theatrical, and public space has to be transformed into a site of performance and joy, not of capitalist functionality. From dancing Santas to a proliferation of clowns, the streets of Seattle were turned into scenes of carnival. Giant puppets were everywhere. Many costumes parodied the military-industrial complex.52 Energized by young people from ravers to hip-hoppers, music, theater, and other pleasurable activities were considered to be better ways to get attention from media and governments than traditional demonstrations. It was a small step for these militants to begin performing for the camera, as they realized that their performances influenced global public opinion about their demonstrations. The overreaction to these demonstrations by the Seattle police helped promote the ideas of the movement, for it showed that democratic rights of assembly and protest were becoming defi ned as illegal, as something to be crushed by police.53 The Seattle demonstrations were also able to gain legitimacy because of allies in the WTO, especially among developing countries that felt that they were shut out of major discussions on policy and that a small group of wealthy countries were making decisions for the entire world. The death of a young protester in July 2001 at Genoa, followed by the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, put a damper on these protests. Yet their ideas have not faded, and have been resurrected in the most recent worldwide demonstrations in the context of the global economic crisis, and have continued to influence a new organization, the World Social Forum.

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The Ideas and Practices of the Global Justice Movement The global justice movement criticizes the economic exploitation in the third world and the corporate takeover of public spaces. Protesters contend that as third-world countries have taken over the manufacture of the bulk of brand-name merchandise, workers in these countries are being exploited and their resources plundered by multinational corporations. Many young people in the West also feel overbranded and overmarketed, as the market takes over more and more of public space. Everything is touched by the market, so that even seemingly rebellious activities, from gay and lesbian beliefs to tattoos, become subject to the marketing mill. This movement draws on many repertoires of action developed in previous movements, from demonstrations to boycotts. Internationalism was always a major goal of labor movements until World War II. But these groups are different from the labor movements of the past, as a diversity of protests encompass issues from ecological destruction to women’s rights and consumer protection. These contemporary groups target corporations and supranational agencies such as the International Monetary Fund rather than governments as the major actors on the world stage. This movement stresses the protection of indigenous cultures and ways of life from the inroads of capitalist globalization and emphasizes the importance of more democracy and accountability as the remedy for injustice, as well as a fairer distribution of the world’s wealth.54 Viewing the movement through the lens of the aesthetic sphere and popular culture highlights several of its important dimensions. First, the aesthetic sphere and popular culture spotlight themes of authenticity, subjectivity, and fluidity in identity that are central to this movement. Second, protesters self-consciously confront problems of representation, for they do not represent a single class, like the proletariat, or a single group, like gays and lesbians, but a coalition of different groups. Their strategies and actions have to incorporate diversity into their very performance. Third, they are experimenting with new forms of solidarity as well as authenticity, as evidenced by the many carnival-like demonstrations that accompany protests. Finally, these

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protests give rise to a new utopia of the everyday that has affinities to Foucault’s “aesthetics of existence.” Protesters do not identify with a collective subject, but rather with a collective process. Identity building within the diverse movement is always in flux, always continually being negotiated. Protesters view politics as a constant process of becoming, where their different “wealth of subjectivities” can coexist and a plurality of demands can be expressed.55 This process can result in the questioning and even the dissolution of conventional meaning and identity on the one hand or a reconstruction and/or celebration of existing identities on the other. Yet neither orientation embraces an overall sense of a single collective subject. As with the immigrant, whom Touraine sees as the exemplary figure of modern societies, identity is best conceptualized as a mutable border, where old identities often dissolve and new identities are created that are an amalgam of the homeland and the new country of residence.56 Within the global justice movement, this composite sense of identity accepts and indeed celebrates ideas of individual subjectivity and multiple belongings and solidarities. The movement valorizes values of creativity, spontaneity, and self-realization. Protesters search for consensus but respect subjective opinions and do not see a necessary split between individual and collective action.57 This movement emphasizes that authentic protest must be experienced and lived in everyday behaviors, from what one eats to the occupation one chooses. There is no single narrative, no one view of activism and the correct position on issues that determines a “party line.” The movement is based on direct democracy animated by a plethora of individual voices. “Rather than one dominant political voice, one dogma, one party line, we present you with a collision of subjectivities.”58 Protesters come together through informal networks, often mediated by technologies like the Internet. The anticorporate protesters emphasize the importance of decentralized local knowledge and the ability to adapt to situations quickly, rather than a bureaucratic, goaloriented political party. The antiglobalization and anticapitalism activists also repudiate hierarchy, preferring the metaphors of the Web and the network to describe their organizing activities. Such metaphors support an idea of horizontal rather than vertical power. As Eyerman states, this movement is looking beyond typical ideas of solidarity, experimenting with new transnational forms. Protesters often use images

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to express opposition to neoliberalism and solidarity with the disadvantaged and excluded, rather than developing a clearly formulated ideology. Collective actions are places and spaces of social learning, where identities are performed and selves are created and empathy demonstrated through buttons, flags, and other symbols.59 Participants engage in street theater, staging “festivals of resistance” that draw on the cross-fertilization of heterogeneous movements. In the words of the Tactical Frivolity group, in its defense of nonviolent direct action, “We are a colourful party of the street, a carnival with theatre, pink fairies and radical cheerleaders, clowns and music, and creative, magical and confrontational dance that takes decisions in a horizontal manner through affinity groups. We want to reduce aggressivity to a minimum with imagination, samba, art, playing with space (and the police), to create a relaxed atmosphere with good vibes.”60 In the 2000 Prague demonstrations, jugglers and fire eaters marched alongside other protesters, illustrating a utopia of creativity and play in opposition to the hierarchy of global capitalism.61 This experience is more like the aesthetic appreciation of a painting or a poem than a clearly formulated political demand. In this context, concerns about identity creation and more traditional protest politics “flow easily into one another,” and discipline over the movement is harder to maintain.62 Protesters self-consciously reinvent tactics of resistance, engaging in playful carnivalesque actions. They emphasize spontaneous joy, rejecting the commodified body of advertising and bringing a nonmanipulated body into the public sphere. Rebellion should emphasize “the principles of diversity, creativity, decentralization, horizontality, and direct action.”63 This movement results in a rethinking of some of the basic categories of social understanding and analysis. The class politics of the labor movement are still relevant for the global justice movement, but the very idea of class is in flux in a post-Fordist economic environment. Stanley Aronowitz, for example, sees class now divided over who has power, defined broadly, rather than just ownership of the means of production. Thus, elites rule politically and culturally as well as economically, consisting of owners of capital and powerful politicians. Classes now battle for control over the conditions of their own existence, their ability to direct their own lives, their historicity, which in turn constantly reshape the conditions of class struggle. Most struggles

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now are over class formation rather than occurring at the point of production. New class relationships occur when insurgent groups, from wage workers to activists for African Americans, the environment, and other causes come together to cleave society into distinct groups, thereby creating new social relations and new types of struggle.64

The World Social Forum This new, wider conception of class and politics has informed the creation and maintenance of the World Social Forum (WSF), the organizational counterpart to the global justice movement. Formed as a democratic alternative to the G8, fifteen thousand participants first met in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2000 under the slogan “Another World Is Possible.” The WSF has since met often in the global south, including Mumbai, Caracas, and Nairobi, among other cities. The forum now draws about one hundred fifty thousand participants and has given birth to regional and smaller forums to supplement the international meetings.65 The goals of the WSF include opening a space for cross-national dialogue around issues of globalization and inventing new types of political participation in the process. The WSF is not an organization that creates a doctrine or program, but rather provides an infrastructure, a series of public spaces, so that different groups can come together to debate and discuss. It hopes to prefigure social change in its very structure and practices, so that constituents can decide on issues of importance. Its spaces are plural and contested and give rise to many tensions, including reformist groups against neoliberal globalization versus more radical anticapitalist groups, violence versus nonviolence, structure versus nonstructure, and the role of vertical, sustained organizations in the global justice movement. Diversity defines the nature of the WSF. It no longer emphasizes the old dichotomies of the labor movement, such as reform versus revolution. The WSF attempts to maintain a decentralized, democratic structure so that the groups themselves can work out these issues and not yield power to a representative institution. This provides a context for interrecognition between groups, allowing them to forge links with one another. For example, though anticorporate and peace movements may have different goals, they can ally on a shared belief that U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

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are reaping profits for corporations. Finally, the WSF believes that its networking practices follow from the logic of the new postFordist, informational capitalism and encourages activists to forge horizontal ties among one another, to collaborate through informal, decentralized decision making, and to create self-directed and autonomous networks. Most groups who participate in the WSF adopt this perspective.66 From the use of alternative media like the Internet to create new types of radical politics to a celebration of tolerant and hybrid identities that result from this cross-fertilization, the WSF represents new ways to think about class politics while also rejecting the old identity politics based on creating a singular sense of group solidarity. It insists that another world is possible that can better deal with contemporary issues from sexual oppression to the control of natural resources and global health pandemics than either neoliberalism or the class politics of the old left.67 A new conception of utopia is emerging in this movement that differs not only from the neoliberal vision of a free world but also from Marx’s communist utopia of economic equality and nonalienated labor and Habermas’s transparent “ideal speech situation” of communicative action. It is a more postmodern utopia of diversity, difference, and performance. It coincides with Jameson’s contention that contemporary Western depictions of utopia draw on the metaphor of different yet coexisting islands, whose relations to one another are based on shifting alliances and solidarities. Such a utopia will always be incomplete.68 This is a utopia of the specific, the local, the everyday, the “domestic,” in Michel Maffesoli’s terms. Utopias exist in the here and now and are not to be found in saviors or in the distant future. These diverse utopias are an “existential bricolage” that can take sexual, religious, musical, or other forms of everyday life.69 These utopias are about transgressing borders. But rather than moving from one stable identity to another, they create a new sense of hybrid identity that is always open to difference and change.70 In many ways, Foucault’s ideas about an “aesthetics of existence” encapsulate this new understanding of utopia. In his later work on the care of the self, Foucault moves away from his analysis of the subject as simply a product of power relations. He explores connections between self-cultivation and a new type of morality among the ancient Greeks. The model for self-cultivation is art, for the creation of a self as a work

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of art involves improvisation and invention. This creativity does not occur in a vacuum, for the aesthetic self must work with the experiences and social conditions in which it finds itself. This experimental self must constantly reevaluate one’s actions in a contingent, uncertain world. It seeks new experiences that will make it different from its past self and from others. In Foucault’s view, this experimentation creates a new kind of morality based not just on duty to others but on how we understand and regulate ourselves. He contends that in practicing this form of self-government, we can understand the conditions that have produced our identity and can transform it. It is a necessary step in opposing contemporary forms of power.71 This utopia is the culmination of contemporary aesthetic politics. It is decentralized, open to new experiences, and constantly changing. Its solidarity is not rational, but emotional and playful. The creative self reflects the intersection of self and society and the permeability of public and private boundaries. The global justice movement represents the perils and promise of this new utopian thinking. It brings aesthetic politics to a central place in social movements, yet may break down or disappear precisely because of its emphasis on decentralization and suspicion of authority.

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Conclusion

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e live in a culture inundated with images, advertisements, fashion statements, a social world promising us fun, pleasure, and fame. Commodities offer us an emotional experience. Celebrities tell us that we can be like them. In our YouTube world, Andy Warhol’s dictum that everyone will have fifteen minutes of fame is believed to be a reality by many young people. For example, many young Americans now think that they will become a celebrity at some point in their lives. Yet the image of the world as a giant mirrored funhouse where people perform for one another is not restricted to adolescents. Even seemingly serious events such as a road race can be a scene of playful activity. For example, in the ING Bay to Breakers race in San Francisco, “60,000 runners make a 12-kilometer journey through downtown San Francisco in Halloween-parade-like-style” amid “a melee of flying tortillas and inflatable beach balls.”1 San Francisco and other cities now regularly host gay and lesbian parades, where participants often dress, or cross-dress, in outlandish costumes. As we have seen, participants in demonstrations and social movements often adopt a self-consciously aesthetic and playful demeanor. Many street protests now seem like a colorful carnival. While such activities are often consumerist, trivial, and politically irresponsible, they are more than this and deserve to be taken seriously.

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As I have argued in this book, the ubiquity of these actions and ideas signifies an aesthetic sensibility about a variety of topics central to modernity: the nature of the self and knowledge and a new way of understanding solidarity. In sum, they represent an aesthetic politics, which appeals to emotions, visual styles, and images when constructing political activities and ideas and calls for a playful social solidarity. Not only have conventional politics and social movements been influenced by this aesthetic turn, but the contemporary portrayals of utopia outlined by Foucault, Maffesoli, and Jameson among others have taken on aesthetic and playful dimensions, different from the depictions outlined by the productivist socialist utopians of the past. I have discussed how French syndicalism, the IWW, fascism, the May 1968 demonstrations, and the contemporary global justice movement have drawn on aesthetic politics to inform many of their ideas and actions. The trajectories of these movements represent a gradual transition from an expressive aesthetic politics, associated with labor movements and ideas of authenticity, to a more transgressive approach to politics, though elements of these different kinds of aesthetic politics were part of all of these social movements. I have situated these movements’ understanding of aesthetic politics in the context of the crisis of modernity and the differentiation of the value spheres of science, morality, and art, each with its own logic and internal criteria for adjudicating truth claims. In the nineteenth-century aesthetic sphere, art developed its own standards of evaluation. As art became a specialized domain, the slogan “art for art’s sake,” having little connection to politics or the concerns of everyday life, became the dominant creed of this aesthetic sphere. Yet this isolation of art from the concerns of public and personal issues, always tenuous at best, could not last. Many artists and intellectuals were not satisfied with this sundered modernity and looked to create a new, integrated public life with art at its center. By 1900, artists had to confront the hegemony of the capitalist market and commodity culture, which threatened the autonomy of their artistic endeavors. Moreover, the aesthetic sphere had always been an implicit realm of resistance and creativity, for artistic standards were tacitly in opposition to the functional utility and instrumental reason of a capitalist economy. As artists confronted the pervasive commodity culture, many became self-consciously politicized, elaborating a notion of art as an alternative to this instrumental world and the aesthetic sphere as

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a realm of creativity and resistance. Avant-garde artists began to form alliances with left-wing movements opposing capitalism, while others looked to nationalist and even fascist movements as alternatives to a seemingly soulless market and philosophical materialism. Many artists not only influenced European and American cultures in general ways but also became acquainted with militants in labor movements, and they helped these militants to formulate new ideas about expressive authenticity and the particularity of knowledge. The aesthetic sphere was shadowed by popular culture, associated with the democratization of art and culture beginning in the nineteenth century. As artists attempted to change the world, they had to confront not only political and economic conditions, but this new popular culture that had its own kind of aesthetics oriented toward carnival, and entertainment. Many artists initially resisted this new popular culture, seeing it as either the exemplar of a debased commodity capitalism or an attempt to replace true art with mediocre folk art. They believed that the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere was compromised. Other artists hesitantly explored how elements of popular culture might be integrated into their art. By the 1960s, as popular culture and mass media became widespread, many artists came to embrace or at least tolerate the aesthetics of popular culture. But popular culture too always had an implicitly political dimension, as it was not simply an entertainment product created by the culture industry. Though increasingly colonized by capitalism, popular culture, especially its elements associated with carnival, provided powerful critiques of instrumental reason and capitalism. From its satirical criticisms of elites to its playful social practices, carnival posited a realm of freedom outside of the utility of bourgeois life, and implicitly, if not explicitly, criticized the social inequalities generated by capitalism. The change from an industrial, disciplinary economy to a postindustrial “society of control” created new conditions for aesthetic politics and social movements. In the context of the shifting subjectivities of liquid modernity and the rise of an aesthetic economy, movements forged new alliances and contacts with one another. Moreover, in a mass-mediated visual culture, movement identities are often associated with image and style rather than a clear, common belief system. Fashion styles and music, for example, can become symbolic codes that express identities and cultural politics that differ from mainstream

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ideas and practices. Such an image-based politics emphasizes dramatic and colorful, attention-grabbing actions. The image and style so characteristic of visual culture provides a fleeting sense of unity in movements, and identities are less an authentic expression of an underlying common culture than a relatively incoherent and more emotional and aesthetic cobbling together of different ways of life and expressions of subjectivity. The future of this image politics remains to be seen. While I have emphasized the progressive nature of contemporary aesthetic politics, this politics can certainly take on reactionary meanings. For example, with the contemporary globalization of culture, many racist neo-Nazis now embrace hip-hop and reggae music. The German neo-Nazi band Dissau Crew, whose first CD was entitled Zyklon D, after the gas used in concentration camps, dress in the hip-hop uniform of oversized clothes and running gear. They have adopted the violent lyrics of rap and hiphop. Hitler is recast as an uber-gangster, and the flaunting of Nazi symbols represents the ultimate transgression of taboos.2 While the political significance of such rock groups may be overstated, it is clear that as popular and working-class traditions and neighborhoods have declined, identities have become more abstract and fluid. Subcultures based on particular activities or concerns have flourished in this context, but they are porous and unstable, often based on style more than on strong shared beliefs. These styles can also migrate from one group to another and take on a variety of political meanings that cannot be predicted beforehand. Let me close with some theoretical observations. Aesthetic experience is certainly not confined solely to the aesthetic sphere or popular culture. The idea of a differentiated aesthetic sphere is as much an analytical tool as a description of reality. There is at least an aesthetic strain or possibility in all experience, as Dewey reminds us. Yet the notion of an aesthetic sphere allows us to thematize what is distinctive about aesthetic ideas and practices. It also allows us to historicize the changing configuration of the meaning of these ideas and practices and how they intersect with popular culture. In the current era, the aesthetic sphere has increasingly interpenetrated with the other spheres of modernity and everyday life. Such intersections have created distinctive patterns and problems, from the nature of the contemporary self to

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new ideas about politics and emancipation. As aesthetic themes became reflexive, they became politicized, and aesthetic ideas have been an integral part of oppositional alternatives to a rationalized and bureaucratized modernity. Moreover, by analytically separating aesthetic experience from its rational and moral kin, the idea of homo ludens can move from the periphery to a more central place in sociological thinking. I stress that I am not uncritically advocating the “aesthetic” as a new type of emancipation, or embracing postmodern criticisms of modernist interpretations of philosophy and society. Modernist ideas of the self, knowledge, and the like are still very relevant, even within the aesthetic sphere. Moreover, the dedifferentiation of the spheres of modernity has not occurred in as radical a way as postmodernists argue, for the spheres of science, art, and morality still have a relative autonomy from one another, even if they are interpenetrating more and more. I am also sympathetic to many modernist criticisms of postmodernism. I recognize that the celebration of culture and aesthetics is not politics and that aesthetic themes can be used in the most dastardly ways, as was evident in the fascist aestheticization of politics. Yet the criticism of postmodernism and aesthetics often turns into condemnation, and that leads to a major scholarly sin, to use an oldfashioned term—misunderstanding the present social situation. One does not have to be a postmodernist to recognize the shortcomings of contemporary sociological understandings of social integration, and their inability to theorize the aesthetic dimension of social life so prevalent today. To minimize the aesthetic influence on contemporary society results in replaying the old conflicts of the past, using previous sociological categories to misread the conflicts of the present, from the nature of social movements to contemporary political divisions. Such ways of thinking are reminiscent of Marx’s criticisms of the lack of insight of the revolutionaries in mid-nineteenth-century France who misinterpreted the social conditions and forces leading to the rise of Louis Bonaparte to president and then emperor. Marx, at his theatrical best in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” writes, “And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things . . . they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their ser vice, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored

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disguise and borrowed language.”3 On the one hand, Marx implicitly recognizes the autonomy of not only language but also aesthetic factors like dress in influencing social action. But his comments have more direct relevance for our concerns here. Marx echoes an unlikely ally, Jesus of Nazareth, in imploring us to “let the dead bury the dead.” In our postmodern world, such words have a nostalgic air, as the idea of a break with the past is as much an intoxicating elixir as a realistic possibility. But if we do not wish to engage in the fantasies of new beginnings, if standard sociological theories of integration and conflict do not exactly weigh upon the living like a nightmare, the ghosts of theories past surely refract the social world through a dreamlike prism that distorts what it claims to understand. Any sociology of the present, to paraphrase Mead, must take into account the aesthetic turn of social life.

❖

Notes

Introduction 1. Theodore Zeitlin, France 1848–1945, Vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 236–237. 2. Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), p. 182. See also William Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941 (New York: Knopf, 1941), pp. 13–16. 3. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Refl ections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 241–242. 4. Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” in Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), p. 91. See also Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 5. See among many works Andrew Feenberg and Jim Freedman, When Poetry Ruled the Streets: The French May Events of 1968 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981). 6. Time, December 13, 1999. 7. Michel Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society (London: Sage University Press, 1996), p. 74. Maffesolit goes on to cite Theodor Adorno, who sees aesthetics a a bulwark against the compulsive power of identity to create homogeneity. See also Kevin Hetherington, Expressions of Identity: Space, Per for mance, Politics (London: Sage Publications, 1998), p. 70.

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8. Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, p. 11; Russ Castronovo, Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 2. See also Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (New York: Routledge, 1995). 9. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987). 10. Castronovo, Beautiful Democracy, p. 3. 11. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1963). See also Castronovo, Beautiful Democracy, pp. 6–7. 12. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). See also Castronovo, Beautiful Democracy, p. 18. 13. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), p. 238. 14. I do not want to overstate this distinction, however. The modern/ postmodern difference is very imprecise. Both have informed aesthetic politics, and opposed modernist rationalization, though their respective emphases on overcoming alienation and building versus celebrating diversity and fragmentation in the face of cultural and social homogeneity can result in different types of politics. Moreover, both the “modernist” and “postmodernist” notions of subjectivity have played important roles in the dynamics of social movements in the past and the present. 15. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). 16. Paul Mattick, Art in Its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 153–154. 17. bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1991), p. 31. See also Donna Gaines, Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia’s Dead End Kids (New York: Pantheon, 1991); Paul Willis, Profane Culture (London: Routledge, 1978); and Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1984). 18. See Thomas Brennan, Public Drinking and Popular Culture in Eighteenth- Century Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Kenneth H. Tucker, Jr., French Revolutionary Syndicalism and the Public Sphere (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Kim Voss, The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1994); Mary Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 19. See Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984 (New York: Routledge, 1984). 20. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in an Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004); Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (New York: Picador, 1999).

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21. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1975).

Chapter 1. Public Life, Aesthetics, and Social Theory 1. Jeffrey Alexander, The Civil Sphere (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 2. Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000); Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Norton, 1978); Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). 3. David Inglis, “Thinking ‘Art’ Sociologically,” in The Sociology of Art: Ways of Seeing, ed. David Inglis and John Hughson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 12–19. 4. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 111. 5. Ron Eyerman and Lisa McCormick, “Introduction,” in Myth, Meaning, and Per for mance: Toward a New Cultural Sociology of the Arts, ed. Ron Eyerman and Lisa McCormick (London: Paradigm Publishers, 2006), p. 7. 6. Habermas, Structural Transformation. 7. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 408ff. In the contemporary public sphere, the exercise of democracy is intertwined with human rights. Human rights require moral universalism, where every person is treated as an individual with specific liberties, and legal procedures are in place to guarantee this universalism. Different subcultures must be allowed to flourish in the context of this universalism if a multicultural society is to succeed. As Habermas states, plural ideas of what a good life entails must coexist with procedures and norms that guarantee that diverse communities will be fairly treated. Democratic practices develop political legitimacy only when groups have equal access to the public sphere, their identities are respected, their needs and goals can be autonomously articulated, and no par ticular group is marginalized. Institutions based on parliamentary government that remains closely tied to its citizenry must be in place to respond to the demands raised in the public sphere. In the European context, Habermas contends that a European democratic public sphere must emerge as a counterbalance to the administrative unification of the European Union and inform a more abstract and cosmopolitan civic solidarity. In his words, the task now is to “manufacture increasingly abstract forms of solidarity among strangers,” which Habermas labels a constitutional

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patriotism that complements if not replaces more localized identities (Habermas, “Toward a European Political Community,” Society 39 [July 2002], p. 61). A postconventional morality, attuned to principled reasoning, can inform a constitutional patriotism necessary for procedural democracy. This patriotism is founded on common, universal principles of equal rights, even if these universal principles are interpreted differently “within the context of a par ticular national history and tradition.” Only a constitution based on the rule of law and incorporating communicative and participatory practices can guarantee the democratic conditions necessary for individual and cultural integrity. Indeed, for Habermas the only alternative to constitutional patriotism and proceduralism is a decisionistic politics in which par ticular values are imposed on people, and the rule of the stronger reigns. See Jürgen Habermas, “Reply to Symposium Participants, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law,” in Habermas on Law and Democracy: Critical Exchanges, ed. Michel Rosenfeld and Andrew Arato (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 392– 398). See also Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 403. 8. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Refl ections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 214–218. 9. Ibid., p. 5. 10. Ibid., pp. 22– 30. 11. Nancy Fraser, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 17. 12. Ibid., p. 65. 13. Ibid., p. 98. 14. See Ronald Jacobs, “American Television as a Global Public Sphere,” unpublished manuscript 2006; Paul Jones, “Beyond the Semantic Big Bang: Cultural Sociology and an Aesthetic Public Sphere.” Cultural Sociology 1, no. 1 (2007), pp. 73– 95. 15. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), p. 234. 16. Ibid., p. 216. 17. Max Weber, “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 323– 359. 18. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, pp. 238–240. 19. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Refl ections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 262. 20. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 337. 21. Sennett, Fall of Public Man. 22. See, for example, Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

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23. Jeffrey Alexander, The Civil Sphere, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 16. 24. Ibid., p. 35. 25. Ibid., p. 50. 26. Jeffrey Alexander, “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy,” in Social Per for mance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, ed. Jeffrey Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, and Jason L. Mast (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 51– 54. 27. Jeffrey Alexander, “Cultural Pragmatics: Sociological Theory between Ritual and Strategy,” Sociological Theory 22 (2004), p. 544. 28. Ibid., p. 528. 29. See Ronald Lembo and Kenneth H. Tucker, “Culture, Television, and Opposition: Rethinking Cultural Studies,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 7 (1990), pp. 97–116. 30. Paul Willis, “Invisible Aesthetics and the Social Work of Commodity Culture,” in The Sociology of Art: Ways of Seeing, ed. David Inglis and John Hughson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 77. 31. Ibid., p. 82. 32. Ibid., p. 83. 33. Ibid., p. 84. 34. See Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 35. Steven Seidman, “Deconstructing Queer Theory or the Undertheorization of the Social and Ethical,” in Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics, ed. Linda Nicholson and Steven Seidman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 137–138. 36. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). 37. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 221. Among her other works, see Gender Trouble. 38. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (New York: Verso, 1985), pp. 181, 188. 39. Chantal Mouffe, “Which Public Sphere for a Democratic Society,” Theoria (June 2002), p. 56. 40. John Keane, Democracy and Civil Society (New York: Verso, 1988), p. 239. 41. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), p. 320. 42. Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 169.

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43. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Culture in a Democratic Society,” in The Castoriadis Reader, ed. David Ames Curtis (Malden, MA: Blackwell Press, 1997), p. 346; Cornelius Castoriadis, “Done and Be Done,” ibid., p. 366. See also Kenneth H. Tucker, Jr., “From the Imaginary to Subjectivation: Castoriadis and Touraine on the Performative Public Sphere,” Thesis 11, no. 83 (November 2005), pp. 42– 60. 44. Castoriadis, “Psychoanalysis and Philosophy,” in Curtis, Castoriadis Reader, p. 351. 45. Ibid., p. 356. 46. Castoriadis, Imaginary Institution, p. 127. 47. Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, p. 169. Castoriadis grounds his understanding of imagination in the socialization process. He states that infants are self-sufficient “monads,” the source of all their meaning and pleasure. As the infant loses her self-sufficiency as she enters society, she attempts to re-create her original experience of wholeness through fantasy and imagination, as well as more rational interpretations of experience such as religion, science, and philosophy. The psyche engages in a “madness of unification,” seeking to re-create its original monadic unity. It never succeeds in this attempt, and the self is not harmoniously integrated. Traces of previous socialization experiences and desires persist in an incoherent and conflicted psyche. The psyche is imperfectly socializable. The individual integrates fantasy satisfactions into her psyche as she matures, but she must hold this diversity together (see Castoriadis, Imaginary Institution, pp. 299– 302). As Whitebook states, Castoriadis does not reject this desire for unification as a form of alienation, but asks “how much unification, and of what sort?” (Perversion and Utopia, p. 174). 48. Castoriadis, Imaginary Institution, p. 344. 49. Castoriadis, “Done and Be Done,” in Curtis, Castoriadis Reader, p. 369. 50. Castoriadis, “The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy,” in Curtis, Castoriadis Reader, p. 272. See also Linda Zerilli, “Castoriadis, Arendt, and the Problem of the New,” Constellations 9, no. 4 (2002), p. 541. 51. Castoriadis, “Greek Polis,” pp. 276–278. 52. Castoriadis, Imaginary Institution, p. 415. 53. Michael Warner, “Publics and Counter-Publics,” Public Culture 14 (2002), p. 88. 54. Michel Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society (London: Sage, 1996), p. 76. See also Kevin Heterington, Expressions of Identity: Space, Per for mance, Politics (London: Sage, 1998), pp. 52– 53. 55. Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes, p. 52. 56. Ibid., p. 48. 57. Ibid., p. 85. See also Hetherington, Expressions of Identity, p. 64

Notes to Chapter 2. Social Movements and Aesthetic Politics ▪ 191

Chapter 2. Social Movements and Aesthetic Politics 1. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005), p. 60. 2. See Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: The Free Press, 1984). 3. Charles Kurzman, “Meaning Making and Social Movements,” Anthropological Quarterly 81, no. 1 (Winter 2008), p. 5. See also Francesca Polletta and James Jasper, “Collective Identity and Social Movements,” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (August 2001), pp. 283– 305. 4. Ibid. See also James Jasper, “What Do We Do with Meanings?” Sociological Forum 22 (August 2007), pp. 387– 395; James Jasper, The Art of Social Protest: Art, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements, ed. Jeff Goodwin, James Jasper, and Francesca Polletta (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 5. Kurzman, “Meaning Making and Social Movements,” p. 5. 6. T.V. Reed, The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 7. Jeffrey Alexander, The Civil Sphere (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 50. 8. Ibid., pp. 55– 67. 9. Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 22. 10. Ibid., pp. 10–11. 11. Ibid., pp. 6, 46. 12. Ron Eyerman, “Performing Opposition, or How Social Movements Move,” in Social Per for mance, ed. Jeffrey Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, and Jason Mast (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 200–205. 13. Eyerman and Jamison, Music and Social Movements, p. 164. 14. Alberto Melucci, Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 146. 15. Alberto Melucci, “A Strange Kind of Newness,” in New Social Movements: From Ideology to Identity, ed. Enrique Larana, Hank Johnston, and Joseph R. Gusfield (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), p. 115; see also Melucci, The Playing Self: Person and Meaning in the Planetary Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 16. Melucci, Challenging Codes, p. 146. 17. Ibid., p. 139.

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18. Johann Aranson, “Touraine’s Critique of Modernity: Metacritical Reflections,” Thesis Eleven 38 (1994), p. 41. 19. Alain Touraine, Critique of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Press, 1995). 20. Alain Touraine, “Equality and/or Difference: Real Problems, False Dilemmas,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 28 (2003), p. 550. See also Touraine, A New Paradigm for Understanding Today’s World (Malden, MA: Polity, 2007). 21. Alain Touraine, What Is Democracy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 99–100. 22. Alain Touraine, The Voice and the Eye: An Analysis of Social Movements (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 25. 23. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). 24. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005). 25. Ibid., p. 13. 26. Ibid., pp. 69–70. 27. Ibid., pp. 70, 132–133. 28. Ibid., p. 93. 29. Ibid., p. 226. 30. Ibid., p. 228. 31. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) pp. xii–xv. See also Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” from OCTOBER 59 (Winter 1992), pp. 3–7. 32. Hardt and Negri, Empire, pp. 14–19. 33. Ibid., pp. 151–153. 34. Ibid., pp. 23–24. See also Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995); Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti- Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). 35. Hardt and Negri, Empire, pp. 330– 331. 36. Ibid., p. 188. 37. Ibid. pp. 55– 58, 237. 38. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in an Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004) p. 99. 39. Ibid., p. 210. 40. Hardt and Negri, Empire, pp. 396– 413.

Chapter 3. Identity, Knowledge, Solidarity, and Aesthetic Politics 1. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 1976). 2. See for example Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 368ff.

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3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987). 4. Paul Mattick, Art in Its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 41. 5. Luc Ferry, Homo Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 49– 50. 6. See John Armstrong, “Beauty and the Mind: Lessons from Kant,” paper presented at the Art and Cognition Virtual Conference, 2002–2003. 7. Quoted in Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 21. 8. Gadamer, Relevance of the Beautiful, p. 19. 9. Mattick, Art in Its Time, p. 174. 10. Ibid., p. 132. 11. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 1994), p. 67; Ferry, Homo Aestheticus, p. 21. 12. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Geneaology of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1992). 13. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: 1974), pp. 228, 239–240. 14. Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 46. 15. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 33. 16. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Capricorn, 1934). See also Victor Turner, “Dewey, Dilthey, and Drama: An Essay in the Anthropology of Experience,” in The Anthropology of Experience, ed. Victor Turner and Edward Bruner (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), p. 38. 17. See George Herbert Mead, “The Nature of Aesthetic Experience,” International Journal of Ethics 36 (1925–1926), pp. 382– 387. 18. Dewey, Art as Experience. See also Thomas Alexander, John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987); and Richard Shusterman, Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 22. 19. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (New York: Norton, 2007); Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self (New York: Vintage, 1986). 20. Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984 (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 49. 21. See Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 22. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 23. Georg Simmel, “Fashion,” in Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 303.

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24. Roland Barthes, The Language of Fashion (New York: Berg, 2005). 25. Bernhard Giesen, “Performing the Sacred: A Durkheimian Perspective on the Performative Turn in the Social Sciences,” in Social Per for mance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, ed. Jeffrey Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, and Jason Mast (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 327. 26. On the concept of jouissance, see Roland Barthes, The Plea sure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975). 27. Ron Lembo, Thinking through Television (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 28. Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (New York: Picador, 1999), p. 83. 29. It is not a convincing argument to state that such concerns no longer matter, for “the social” has disintegrated. In my view, Durkheimian ideas about solidarity should not be dismissed, but rather recast to take into account the new type of playful solidarity associated with this aesthetic dimension of social life, something that Durkheim hinted at with his analysis of collective effervescence. 30. Gary Alan Fine, “Mind, Games,” review essay in Contemporary Sociology 37 (July 2008), p. 319. 31. Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Malden, MA: Blackwell Press, 2000), p. 17. Play represents a fluid type of solidarity associated with carnival and popular culture. We can thank postmodernism for resurrecting the notion of play, from Derrida’s play of signifiers to Judith Butler’s analysis of performativity. Yet this postmodern discussion of play does not lead to a theory of play as a type of social solidarity. Nor do modernist invocations of play grasp its complexity, for even when they attend to play theorists such as Geertz tend to read social life as a text to be understood, missing much of the indeterminacy of playful solidarity. 32. Robert Perjubanayagam, Games and Sport in Everyday Life: Dialogues and Narratives of the Self (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2006). 33. Jean Piaget, Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood (London: W. Heinemann, 1951); Lev Vygotsky, Mind and Society: The Development of Higher Mental Processes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 34. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), pp. 150–164; Georg Simmel, “Sociability,” in Levine, Georg Simmel on Individuality, pp. 127–140. See also Thomas S. Henricks, Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), p. 212. 35. Erving Goffman, “Social Life as a Game,” in The Goffman Reader, ed. Charles Lemert and Ann Branaman (Malden, MA: Blackwell Press, 1997), pp. 130–131.

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36. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), p. 46. 37. Ibid., p. 47. 38. Ibid. 39. Roger Callois, Man, Play, and Games (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), pp. 42– 43. 40. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971), pp. 3–13, 41. See also Kenneth H. Tucker, Jr., “Aesthetics, Play, and Cultural Memory: Giddens and Habermas on the Postmodern Challenge,” Sociological Theory 11 (July 1993), pp. 203–205. 41. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), pp. 24- 55; Hetherington, Expressions of Identity, pp. 72, 113. 42. George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 85. 43. Shusterman, Performing Live, p. 17. 44. See Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006). See also Gadamer, Relevance of the Beautiful, pp. 124–130. 45. Sutton-Smith, Ambiguity of Play, pp. 193–195, 219. 46. Robert Antonio, “The Normative Foundations of Emancipatory Theory: Evolutionary versus Pragmatic Perspectives,” American Journal of Sociology 94 (1989), p. 743. 47. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), p. 127. 48. Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 152–155. 49. See Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 50. Frederic Jameson, “On Negt and Kluge,” in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 66. 51. Kevin Hetherington, Expressions of Identity: Space, Per for mance, Politics (London: Sage, 1998), pp. 103, 112.

Chapter 4. The World Is a Stage and Life Is a Carnival 1. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1958). 2. Slavoj Žižek, “Afterword,” in Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 79.

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3. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), p. 216. 4. Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Theory,” New Left Review 1, no. 82 (November–December 1973), pp. 421– 422. 5. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). 6. Ibid. 7. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (New York: Scribner, 1975), p. 211. 8. Craig Calhoun, “Populist Politics, Communications Media, and Large Scale Societal Integration,” Sociological Theory 6 (Fall 1988), pp. 219–241. See also Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (New York: Knopf, 1990). 9. Lutz Koepnick, Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), p. 145. 10. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 168. 11. Ibid., pp. 168–169. 12. Ibid., p. 168. 13. Richard Lloyd, Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 48. See also Elizabeth Currid, The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 14. Koepnick, Walter Benjamin, p. 94. 15. Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 16. Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant- Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (New York: Vintage Books, 1968); Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 17. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, p. 238. 18. Walter Adamson, Embattled Avant- Gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), p. 38; Koepnick, Walter Benjamin, p. 23. 19. Kenneth H. Tucker, Jr., French Revolutionary Syndicalism and the Public Sphere (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 191. 20. Ibid., p. 192. 21. Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York, Metropolitan Books, 2000), p. 3. 22. Adamson, Embattled Avant- Gardes, p. 8. See also Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 23. Sennett, Craftsman, p. 66.

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24. Paul Mattick, Art in Its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 77–79. 25. Adamson, Embattled Avant- Gardes, pp. 2– 8. 26. Ibid., p. 20; Koepnick, Walter Benjamin, p. 54. 27. Koepnick, Walter Benjamin, p. 23; Adamson, Embattled AvantGardes, p. 8. 28. Adamson, Embattled Avant- Gardes, p. 14. 29. Ibid., p. 18. 30. Stansell, American Moderns, pp. 151ff. 31. Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 7–10. 32. Tucker, French Revolutionary Syndicalism, p. 165. 33. See Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: HarperCollins, 1977). 34. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, p. 169. 35. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977); Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); Michael Gardiner, The Dialogics of Critique: M. M. Bakhtin and the Theory of Ideology (New York: Routledge, 1992). See also Kenneth H. Tucker, “Harmony and Transgression: Aesthetic Imagery and the Public Sphere in Habermas and Poststructuralism,” Current Perspectives in Social Theory 16 (1996), pp. 112–117. 36. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 337. 37. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), pp. 22–23; Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, p. 169. 38. Lears, Fables of Abundance, p. 9. 39. Benjamin Reiss, The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 28–29. See also Barbara Tucker and Kenneth H. Tucker, Jr., Industrializing Antebellum America: The Rise of Manufacturing Entrepreneurs in the Early Republic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 46. 40. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 41. Albany Microscope 26 (October 1833), quoted in William L. Kellner, “On Samuel Colt and the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company of Paterson, New Jersey” (MA Thesis, Fairleigh Dickinson University, 1968), p. 10. See also Tucker and Tucker, Industrializing Antebellum America, p. 46. 42. David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of Nationalism in America, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

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43. Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). 44. Among classic works, see E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: V. Gollancz, 1980); Natalie Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press); George Rude, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1981); Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Peter Shaw, American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). 45. Brooks McNamara, Day of Jubilee: The Great Age of Public Celebrations in New York, 1788–1909 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997); Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 259– 88; Tucker, French Revolutionary Syndicalism; Christopher Johnson, The Life and Death of Industrial Languedoc, 1700–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Kim Voss, The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 46. See Davis, Society and Culture; Darnton, Literary Underground. 47. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (New York: Random House, 1955). 48. Lloyd Kramer, Threshold of a New World: Intellectuals and the Exile Experience in Paris, 1830–1848 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 145–147. See also Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes: In Paris during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Random House, 1973). 49. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988; Alain Dalotel, Alain Faure, and Jean- Claude Freiermuth, Aux Origines de la Commune: Le Mouvement des Réunions Publiques a Paris 1868–1860 (Paris: François Maspero, 1980); Michelle Perrot, Workers on Strike: France, 1871– 1890 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). 50. See Thompson, English Working Class. See also Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1840–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); William H. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 51. Koepnick, Walter Benjamin, pp. 70–72. 52. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, p. 170.

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53. Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 33. 54. Russ Castronovo, Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 139–143. See also Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). 55. Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983). 56. Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 67– 99. 57. Zygmunt Bauman, The Art of Life (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008), p. 73. 58. See Rebecca Klatch, A Generation Divided: The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 59. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000). 60. Ibid., p. 14. 61. Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalization Is Reshaping Our Lives (New York: Routledge, 2003). 62. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neo-liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 64– 67. 63. Stanley Aronowitz, How Class Works: Power and Social Movement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 27. 64. Koepnick, Walter Benjamin, pp. 227–228. See also Giddens, Runaway World; Bauman, Liquid Modernity. 65. Lloyd, Neo-Bohemia, p. 13; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), pp. 29– 30; Bauman, Liquid Modernity, pp. 139–140. 66. Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007), p. 5. 67. Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 68. Scott Lash and Celia Lury, Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007), p. 7. 69. Lloyd, Neo-Bohemia, p. 65. 70. Ibid., pp. 16–22; David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2000). See also Richard Florida, Cities and the Creative Class (New York: Routledge, 2005). 71. Lloyd, Neo-Bohemia, pp. 42– 43, 72. Ibid. Lash and Lurry, Global Culture Industry, p. 9. See also Robert Dunn, Identifying Consumption: Subjects and Objects in Consumer Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008).

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73. Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (New York: Picador, 1999), pp. 64–76. 74. Lash and Lurry, Global Culture Industry, pp. 5–7. 75. See Bauman, Art of Life. 76. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, p. 70. 77. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, p. 169. 78. On the structure of feeling, see Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), pp. 48–71. 79. Todd Gitlin, Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001), p. 5. 80. Ron Lembo, Thinking through Television (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 81. Paul Lichterman, The Search for Political Community (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 82. See Francesca Polletta, It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Francesca Polletta and James Jasper, “Collective Identity and Social Movements,” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (August 2001), pp. 283– 305. 83. See Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Simon Frith, Taking Popular Music Seriously: Selected Essays (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007). 84. Stephen Duncombe, Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy (New York: New Press, 2007), pp. 30, 76. 85. Žižek, “Afterword,” in Ranciere, Politics of Aesthetics, p. 79.

Chapter 5. Labor and Aesthetic Politics 1. Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (New York: AMS Press, 1975), p. 209. 2. Filippo Tommanso Marinetti, quoted in Zeev Sternhell, “Fascist Ideology,” from Fascism: A Reader’s Guide: Analyses Interpretations, Bibliography, ed. Walter Laqueur (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 334. 3. Steve Golin, “The IWW and the Bohemians: The Case of the Paterson Pageant,” WorkingUSA 8 (September 2005), p. 569; Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), pp. 111–112. 4. Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 244. 5. See Kenneth H. Tucker, Jr., French Revolutionary Syndicalism and the Public Sphere (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 6. Alberto Melucci, Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,

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1990), pp. 154ff; Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Refl ections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 11– 39. 7. William Reddy, The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France, 1814–1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 8. Tucker, French Revolutionary Syndicalism, p. 6. 9. Ibid., pp. 6–7. Other works on syndicalism in France include Peter Stearns, Revolutionary Syndicalism and French Labor: A Cause without Rebels (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1971); F. F. Ridley, Revolutionary Syndicalism in France: The Direct Action of Its Time (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Jeremy Jennings, Syndicalism in France: A Study of Ideas (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). On the syndicalist movement in Spain, see George Richard Esenwein, Anarchist Ideology and the Working Class Movement in Spain, 1868–1898 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Michael Seidman, Workers against Work: Labor in Paris and Barcelona during the Popular Fronts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). For Britain, see Bob Holton, British Syndicalism, 1900– 1914: Myths and Realities (London: Pluto Press, 1976). For Italy, see Sidney Tarrow, Peasant Communism in Southern Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). 10. On the history of the IWW, see Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969); Howard Kimeldorf, Battling for American Labor: Wobblies, Craft Workers, and the Making of the Union Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Salvatore Salerno, Red November Black November: Culture and Community in the IWW (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). 11. Melvyn Dubofsky, “The IWW at One Hundred: The Return of the Haunted Hall?” WorkingUSA 8 (September 2005), p. 341; Paul Buhle, “Commentary: Wobbly Inspiration,” WorkingUSA 8 (September 2005), pp. 635– 640. 12. Franklin Rosemont, “The Legacy of the Hoboes: What Rebel Workers Today Can Learn from the Footloose Wobblies of Yesteryear,” WorkingUSA 8 (September 2005), p. 594. 13. Howard Kimeldorf, “Joe Hill Ain’t Never Died: The Legacy of the  Wobblies’ Practical Syndicalism,” WorkingUSA 8 (September 2005), pp. 546– 548. 14. Van Gosse, “Heroes and Villains: Picturing the IWW,” Reviews in American History 34, no. 1 (March 2006), p. 60. See also Paul Buhle, “The Legacy of the IWW,” Monthly Review 57, no. 2 (June 2005). 15. Stansell, American Moderns, p. 151. 16. Buhle, “Commentary,” pp. 637– 639. 17. Ibid., pp. 637– 639; Stewart Bird, Dan Georakas, Deborah Shaffer, Solidarity Forever: An Oral History of the IWW (Chicago: Lake View Press, 1985), p. 35.

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18. Tucker, French Revolutionary Syndicalism, p. 149. 19. See Michael Hanagan, The Logic of Solidarity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980); Thomas Brennan, Public Drinking and Popular Culture in Eighteenth- Century Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). 20. Tucker, French Revolutionary Syndicalism, pp. 136–138. 21. Ibid., pp. 152–153. 22. Ibid., p. 63. 23. Michelle Perrot, “On the Formation of the Working Class” in Working- Class Formation: Nineteenth Century Patterns in Europe and the United States, ed. Ira Katznelson and Aristide Zolberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 106. 24. Victor Griffuelhes, L’Action directe, April 23, 1908. 25. Emile Pouget, Direct Action (London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2003), p. 1. 26. Tucker, French Revolutionary Syndicalism, p. 152. 27. Ibid., pp. 22–23. 28. Stephen F. Eisenman, “The Generation of 1830 and the Crisis of the Public Sphere,” in Stephen F. Eisenman, Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984), pp. 189–190. 29. See Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 30. Eisenman, “The Rhetoric of Realism: Courbet and the Origins of the Avant-Garde,” in Eisenman, Nineteenth Century Art, pp. 206–220. 31. See Richard Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin-de-Siècle France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989); Alexander Varias, Paris and the Anarchists: Aesthetes and Subversives during the Fin-de-Siècle (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); Allan Antliff, Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant- Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Allan Antliff, Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007) 32. Rosemont, “Legacy of the Hoboes,” p. 603; Stansell, American Moderns, pp. 180–181. 33. Golin, “IWW and the Bohemians,” pp. 566– 568; Stansell, American Moderns, pp. 181–183. 34. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996). 35. Martha Ward, Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism, and the Spaces of the  Avant- Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 2– 8, 231–268. 36. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 368ff. 37. Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), pp. 74ff.

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38. See the collection of Pelloutier’s writings in Fernand Pelloutier et les origins du syndicalisme d’action direct: Textes choisis, ed. Jacques Julliard (Paris: Seuil, 1971), pp. 180–181. 39. Ibid., p. 385. 40. Ibid., p. 415. 41. Jennings, Syndicalism, pp. 1– 4. 42. Sorel, Reflections on Violence. 43. Georges Sorel, From Georges Sorel: Essays in Socialism and Philosophy, ed. John Stanley (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1987), p. 90. 44. Georges Sorel, Social Foundations of Contemporary Economics (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1984), p. 46. 45. Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p. 242. 46. Sorel, Social Foundations of Contemporary Economics, pp. 150–152. 47. Georges Sorel, “Social Value of Art,” in From Georges Sorel, Vol. II: Hermeneutics and the Sciences, ed. John Stanley (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1990), p. 118. 48. Emile Pataud and Emile Pouget, How We Shall Bring about the Revolution: Syndicalism and the Cooperative Commonwealth (London: Pluto Press, 1990 [1909]), pp. 123–133; see also Tucker, French Revolutionary Syndicalism, p. 151. 49. The best book on the Action Française remains Eugen Weber, Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962). See also Kenneth H. Tucker, Jr., Ideology and Social Movements: A Comparative Analysis of the Action Française and Revolutionary Syndicalism (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1986). 50. On fascism and aesthetics, I have found the classic works of George Mosse to be most helpful. See The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism (New York: H. Fertig, 1999); Masses and Man: Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality (New York: H. Fertig, 1980); The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). Other works on aesthetic politics in Nazism and fascist Italy that have a bit more narrow focus include Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (New York: Overlook, 2009); Jonathan Petropoulos, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); Jeffry Schnapp, Staging Fascism: 18BL and the Theater of the Masses for the Masses (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s

204 ▪ Notes to Chapter 5. Labor and Aesthetic Politics

Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Ruth Ben- Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 51. On political opportunity structures, see Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 71– 90. 52. Richard Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). 53. On the social and political background to the rise of Nazism, see the exceptional scholarly political biography of Hitler by Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (New York: Norton, 1999); and Hitler 1936– 45: Nemesis (New York: Norton, 2000); and the incredibly detailed and rich political analysis by Richard Evans in his trilogy on the Third Reich, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin Press, 2004); The Third Reich in Power, 1933–1939 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005); and The Third Reich at War (New York: Penguin Press, 2009). 54. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 241. 55. On the social and political background to the rise of Nazism, see Kershaw, Hitler 1936– 45: Nemesis; Evans, Coming of the Third Reich. 56. Mosse, Fascist Revolution, pp. 6–7. 57. Ibid., pp. 21–22. 58. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 3. 59. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 60. Mosse, Nationalization of the Masses, p. 100. 61. Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, p. 5. 62. Mosse, Nationalization of the Masses, pp. 80– 82; Mosse, Fascist Revolution, pp. 18–19. 63. Mosse, “General Theory,” p. 25. 64. Mosse, Fascist Revolution, p. 25. See also Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), p. 88. 65. See Benjamin, Illuminations, pp. 241–242. See also Koepnick, Walter Benjamin, p. 53. 66. Mosse, Fascist Revolution, p. 48; Mosse, Nationalization of the Masses, pp. 22– 44. 67. Quoted in Sternhell, “Fascist Ideology,” p. 339. 68. Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, pp. 6, 11–12. 69. Koepnick, Walter Benjamin, pp. 70–72. 70. Ibid. 71. Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” pp. 91, 93.

Notes to Chapter 6. The Flowering of Aesthetic Politics ▪ 205

72. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 2007), p. 14. 73. Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 63. 74. C. Wright Mills, Power, Politics, and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 256.

Chapter 6. The Flowering of Aesthetic Politics 1. Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Times Books, 1994), p. 61. 2. Colin Campbell, The Easternization of the West (Paradigm Publishers, 2007), pp. 210–211, 220–241. See also Richard Flacks, Youth and Social Change (Chicago: Markham, 1971); Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 3. Campbell, Easternization of the West, pp. 213–249. 4. See, for example, Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock and Roll (New York: Pantheon, 1981); Greil Marcus, In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977–1992 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 5. Francesca Polletta, Freedom in an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). 6. For overviews of May 1968, see Michael Seidman, The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian Students and Workers in 1968 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004); Boris Gobille, Mai 68 (Paris: La Découverte 2008); Mai –juin 68, ed. Dominique Damamme, Boris Gobille, Frédérique Matonti, and Bernard Pudal (Les Éditions de L’Atelier, 2008); on the intellectual history of May 1968 in France, see Arthur Hirsh, The French New Left: From Sartre to Gorz (Boston: South End Press, 1981). 7. See Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 8. Alain Touraine, The May Movement: Revolt and Reform (New York: Random House, 1971); Henri Lefevbre, The Explosion: Marxism and the French Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969). For an overview of interpretations of May 1968 in France, see Keith A. Reader (with Khursheed Wadia), The May 1968 Events in France: Reproductions and Interpretations (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993). 9. Raymond Aron, The Elusive Revolution: Anatomy of a Student Revolt (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1969). 10. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990);

206 ▪ Notes to Chapter 6. The Flowering of Aesthetic Politics

Gilles Lipovetsky, L’Ère du vide: Essais sur l’individualisme contemporain (Paris: Gaillimard, 1993). 11. Jean-Pierre Le Goff, Mai 68: L’Heritage impossible (Paris: La Découverte, 1998); Regis Debray, Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France (Paris: Ramsay, 1979). 12. Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives. 13. Seidman, Imaginary Revolution, pp. 162–163; Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850– 2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 342– 343. 14. Seidman, Imaginary Revolution, p. 67; Gobille, Mai 68, p. 27; Andrew Feenberg and Jim Freedman, When Poetry Ruled the Streets: The French May Events of 1968 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), p. 3. 15. Seidman, Imaginary Revolution, pp. 92, 101; Gobille, Mai 68, p. 27. 16. Seidman, Imaginary Revolution, pp. 103, 112, 123–129. 17. Gobille, Mai 68, pp. 34, 37– 38. 18. Eley, Forging Democracy, pp. 348– 350. 19. Gobille, Mai 68, pp. 61– 62. 20. Feenberg and Freedman, When Poetry Ruled the Streets, p. 38. 21. Quoted in Eley, Forging Democracy, p. 345. On the postering of Paris, see Seidman, Imaginary Revolution, pp. 130-144. 22. Seidman, Imaginary Revolution, pp. 130–147; Gobille, Mai 68, p. 66. 23. Feenberg and Freedman, “When Poetry Ruled the Streets,” p. 17. 24. Lilian Mathieu, “Les manifestations en mai-juin 68,” Mai– juin 68, ed. Damamme et al., pp. 195–202. 25. Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, p. 6. 26. Ibid., p. 26. 27. Ibid., pp. 100–109; see also Gobille, Mai 68, p. 31. 28. Ross, Mai ’68 and Its Afterlives, p. 10. 29. Ibid., pp. 10–11, 74–78. 30. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1977). See also Pascal Dumontier, Les Situationnistes et mai 68 (Paris: Gerard Lebovici, 1990); Gobille, Mai 68, p. 29; Seidman, Imaginary Revolution, pp. 29– 32. 31. Ibid., p. 281. 32. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987); Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 33. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2000). 34. Paul Lichterman, The Search for Political Community (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 183–199.

Notes to Chapter 6. The Flowering of Aesthetic Politics ▪ 207

35. Nina Eliasoph and Paul Lichterman, “Culture in Interaction,” American Journal of Sociology 108 (January 2003), p. 16. 36. Paul Heelas, Spiritualities of Life: New Age Romanticism and Consumptive Capitalism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008). See also his book The New Age Movement (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996). 37. Elizabeth Armstrong, Forging Gay Identities: Organizing Sexuality in San Francisco, 1950–1994 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 53– 54. 38. Ibid., p. 176. See also Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). 39. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future (New York: Verso, 2005), pp. 213–215. 40. Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, pp. 208–215. 41. See Donatella della Porta, Massimiliano Andretta, Lorenzo Mosca, and Herbert Reither, Globalization from Below: Transnational Activists and Protest Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 42. Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (New York: Picador, 1999). 43. T. V. Reed, The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 44. Sidney Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 45. Porta et al., Globalization from Below. 46. Jeffrey S. Juris, Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 47. Reed, The Art of Protest, pp. 241, 247; Klein, No Logo, p. 328; Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Five Days That Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond (New York: Verso, 2000), p. 5. 48. Klein, No Logo, pp. 313– 317. 49. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “The World Social Forum and the Global Left,” Politics and Society 36 (June 2008), p. 249. 50. Reed, Art of Protest, pp. 242–244. 51. Cockburn and St. Clair, Five Days, pp. 4, 22, 36. 52. Ibid., p. 22; Reed, Art of Protest, pp. 248–257. 53. Cockburn and St. Clair, Five Days, pp. 10–11. 54. See Klein, No Logo; Frederick Buttel, “Some Observations on the Anti-Globalization Movement,” Australian Journal of Social Issues 38 (February 2003), pp. 95–117. 55. Porta et al., Globalization from Below, pp. 90, 215. 56. Alain Touraine What Is Democracy? (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), p. 186. 57. Porta et al., Globalization from Below, p. 246.

208 ▪ Notes to Chapter 6. The Flowering of Aesthetic Politics

58. Notes from Nowhere, We Are Everywhere: The Irresistable Rise of Global Anticapitalism (New York: Verso, 2003), p. 14. 59. Ron Eyerman, “Performing Opposition, or How Social Movements Move,” in Social Per for mance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, ed. Jeffrey Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, and Jason L. Mast (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 206. 60. Quoted in Porta et al., Globalization from Below, p. 120. 61. Juris, Networking Futures, pp. 129-131. 62. Eyerman, “Performing Opposition,” p. 200. 63. Notes from Nowhere, We Are Everywhere, p. 174; see also Kevin McDonald, Global Movements: Action and Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), p. 104. 64. Stanley Aronowitz, How Class Works: Power and Social Movement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 10–11. 65. Jackie Smith et al., Global Democracy and the World Social Forums (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), pp. xi–xii. 66. Ibid., pp. 28– 32. See also Christopher Chase-Dunn, Richard Nieneyer, Robert Hanneman, and Ellen Reese, “The Contours of Solidarity and Division among Global Movements,” International Journal of Peace Studies 12 (Summer–Winter 2007). 67. Ibid.; Santos, “World Social Forum,” p. 254. 68. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 223. 69. Michel Maffesoli, “Utopia or Utopias in the Gaps: From the Political to the ‘Domestic,’ ” Diogenes 52 (May 2005), pp. 25– 30. 70. Gerald Raunig, Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 252–253. 71. Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self (New York: Vintage, 1986).

Conclusion 1. Runners World (November 2007), p. 66. 2. Michael T. Putnam and John T. Littlejohn, “National Socialism with Fler? German Hip Hop Music from the Right,” Popular Music and Society 30, no. 4: (October 2007), pp. 453– 469. See also Mabel Berezin, Illiberal Politics in Neoliberal Times: Culture, Security and Populism in the New Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 3. Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 595.

❖

Index

ACT UP, 12, 168 Action Française, 143 Adorno, Theodor, 57, 185n7 Advertising, 3, 58, 97, 103, 104, 108–110, 113, 114, 115–116, 173, 175, 179 Aesthetic sphere, 6–10, 22–25, 31, 34, 41, 62–67, 73–79, 84–85, 87, 91–92, 99, 101, 119, 120, 123, 125, 136, 142, 145, 149, 154, 168, 173, 180–183; autonomy of, 17, 25, 65, 67, 73, 93–94, 96, 98–99, 101, 109, 135, 155, 180–181, 184; changes in, 109–110; contemporary era, 107–108; history of, 93–96 Aesthetics: aesthetic economy, 108, 110, 114–116, 154, 181; “aesthetics of existence,” 75, 93, 110, 124, 174, 177; defined, 6–7; “invisible aesthetics,” 16, 33–34 AFL-CIO, 123, 171 Alexander, Jeffrey, 15–16, 26, 29–31, 36, 41, 44, 47–48, 49 Althusser, Louis, 53, 157 American Federation of Labor, 123, 128 American Knights of Labor, 126

Anarchism, 1, 4, 62, 100, 106, 107, 110, 121, 122, 125, 127, 129, 134, 135–136, 137, 138, 157, 163, 169, 170 Arendt, Hannah, 7, 38 Aronowitz, Stanley, 175 Art: avant-garde, 5, 8, 70, 72, 78, 92–93, 99, 100–101, 109, 122–123, 127, 134–136, 145, 149, 181; democratization of, 99, 181; high versus low, 6, 17, 26, 33, 99, 103, 104, 181; modernist, 109, 122; neo-impressionist, 135–136; post-impressionist, 101; street art, 3, 11, 46, 96–97, 101–103, 119–120, 157, 162–164, 175; surrealism, 101, 152, 158, 165. See also Bohemians; Culture; Postmodernism Authenticity, 1, 4–5, 7–9, 11, 15, 22, 25, 27–29, 34, 37–39, 41, 46–47, 50, 61, 66, 67, 78, 85, 93, 94, 97, 99, 101, 107–110, 119–120, 122–125, 131, 134–137, 139, 142–145, 149, 150–156, 158, 165–168, 174, 180–182; “authentic self,” 3, 8–9, 27, 64, 67, 71, 74–75, 108, 122, 166, 168

210 ▪ Index

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 84 Barnum, P. T., 103–104 Baudelaire, Charles, 17, 134 Bauman, Zygmunt, 78, 110–111, 113, 116 Benjamin, Walter, 2, 6, 25–26, 99, 141, 148 Biopower, 57–58, 116 Bohemians, 5, 8–10, 17, 25, 41, 62, 72, 79, 92–102, 107, 154–155, 162, 167; and capitalism, 96–98; contemporary, 108, 114, 116, 119–120; and syndicalism, 62, 122, 125, 127, 128, 133–137; and urban life, 96–98 Bolshevism, 99, 145 Bonaparte, Louis, 135, 183 Bourdieu, Pierre, 15–17, 65 Bourses du Travail, 1, 129, 137 Butler, Judith, 34–35, 194n31 Capitalism, 3, 4, 7–9, 27–28, 32, 33, 46, 64, 66, 92–94, 96–103, 108–120, 134, 135, 137–141, 146, 153, 155, 157; and artists, 99–102; and bohemianism, 96–98; development of, 10, 18, 27; emotional capitalism, 113, 117; and fascism, 148–149; global, 3–4, 12, 21–22, 51, 56–60, 85, 92, 110–112, 118–119, 153–154, 168–178, 180–182; and imperialism, 56–57, 164; and labor, 122–129, 135, 139–141, 151; post-Fordist, 5, 92, 112–113, 153–154, 156, 169, 175, 177. See also Global justice movement; Neoliberalism Carnival, 1, 3, 5, 9–11, 31, 34, 42, 43, 59, 63–64, 79, 91, 92, 102–109, 116, 117, 119–120, 143, 181, 194n31; and fascism, 123–124, 145, 150; global justice movement, 48, 171–172, 173, 175, 179; and labor, 62, 123–125, 132–133, 159; May (1968), 165; and popular culture, 9–10, 102–107, 165, 194n31. See also Festivals Castoriadis, Cornelius, 8–9, 16, 36–41, 78, 85, 119 CGT. See Confédération Général du Travail Chartists, 126, 133 Civil rights movement, 45, 48, 60, 61, 118, 153

Civil society, 10, 26, 29–30, 34–36, 44, 47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 56, 58–59, 61, 66, 153 Clemenceau, Georges, 132 Coffee houses, 18, 23, 95, 96, 130 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 159 Colt, Samuel, 103–104 Communicative action, 10, 24, 177, 188n4. See also Habermas, Jürgen Communism, 3, 55, 109, 124, 128, 137, 138, 145–146, 157, 161, 163, 177. See also Soviet Union; Soviets Communist Party: France, 157; U.S., 128. See also Communism Confédération Général du Travail (CGT), 1, 11, 122, 126, 128–130, 139, 151. See also Labor; Syndicalism, French; Unions Consumerism, 3, 28, 33, 52, 92, 97–98, 100–101, 104, 108, 110–112, 115–116, 119–120, 146, 156, 158, 160, 163, 165, 179. See also Capitalism Courbet, Gustave, 133–135 Craftsmanship, 9, 28, 74–75, 96, 98, 100, 125, 136, 142 Cultural studies, 32–34, 39 Culture: bourgeois, 5, 17, 93, 109, 124, 130, 180; consumer, 33, 100, 111, 156, 160; counterculture, 25, 154–156, 158, 167; “high vs. low” culture, 6, 17, 26, 33, 99, 103, 104, 181; and play, 79–84; plebian, 102–103, 105; production of, 16–17; and social movements, 44–55, 59–61; subcultures, 33, 40, 92, 101, 182, 187n7; visual, 22, 118–119, 181–182; working class, 1, 62, 123–126, 129, 130–135, 139, 141–142, 153, 155, 157–158, 182; youth, 10, 115–116, 118, 123, 154–155, 156, 173, 179. See also Popular culture Daudet, Léon, 143 Debord, Guy, 165 DeGaulle, Charles, 161 Deleuze, Gilles, 34–35, 56–58, 65, 116 Democracy, 2–4, 19–20, 26, 29, 30, 34, 36, 52, 59, 95, 106, 110, 124, 132, 153,

Index ▪ 211

156, 181, 187–188n7; global justice movement, 3, 170–174, 176; labor, 126–127, 130, 132, 141, 142, 143, 156; May (1968), 159, 161–162, 164; parliamentary, 2, 40, 121, 124, 143, 146, 187n7 Derrida, Jacques, 71, 194n31 Dewey, John, 8, 64, 66, 72–74, 76, 78, 182 Differentiation, 8, 24, 30–31, 40, 41, 63, 66, 76, 81, 94, 102, 103, 123, 180, 182; dedifferentiation, 25, 110, 183 Discipline, 10, 17; disciplinary institutions, 34–35, 53, 57–58, 94, 109; disciplinary society, 9, 57–58, 65, 72, 94, 111, 116, 126, 181 Display, 6, 10, 20, 23, 31, 42, 62, 81, 92, 94–98, 101, 103, 114, 116–117, 119, 120, 132–133, 169; mutual display, 10, 11, 26, 29, 40, 95, 96, 116, 130, 157 Dodge, Mabel, 122, 135 Durkheim, Emile, 40, 65 Eastman, Max, 135 Economy, aesthetic, 108, 110, 114–116, 154, 181 Emancipation, 21, 26, 60, 65, 98, 99, 122, 125–127, 134, 137–138, 183; and knowledge, 141–142 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 103 Emotion, 2, 5, 7, 9, 10, 15, 24, 27, 33, 40, 45–48, 61, 64, 66–69, 73, 71, 74–76, 79, 83–84, 86, 92–94, 102, 104–107, 113–115, 117–120, 146, 148–150, 178–180, 182 Environmentalism, 3, 49, 153, 169, 171, 173, 176 Ethnicity, 28, 50, 105, 168 Expressive authenticity, 42, 47, 67, 74, 78, 85, 94, 101, 120, 136, 151, 154, 166–167, 180, 181 Eyerman, Ron, 17, 44, 47–49, 174 Fascism, 2, 4, 11, 20, 40, 43, 106–107, 109, 121, 122–124, 142–151, 160, 180, 181, 183 Fashion, 12, 33, 40, 42, 62, 77–78, 80, 95, 97, 100, 108, 110, 115–116, 119, 155, 156, 179, 181, 182, 184;

cross-dressing, 92, 102, 179; proletarian dress, 1, 129, 133 Feminism, 19–21, 122, 135, 149. See also Gender; Women Fénéon, Félix, 136 Festivals, 11, 43, 48, 64, 79, 83–84, 106, 123, 147, 154, 157, 159, 163–165, 170–171; “festivals of resistance,” 132, 171, 175. See also Carnival First International of Labor, 122 Flâneur, 97, 144 Flaubert, Gustave, 17 Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, 135 Fordism, 100; post-Fordism, 5, 92, 112–113, 153–154, 156, 169, 175, 177 Foucault, Michel, 12, 34–35, 52–53, 57–58, 65, 71–72, 74–76, 85–86, 93–94, 109, 116, 157, 174, 177–178, 180 France, 1, 28, 96, 97, 98, 100, 105–106, 134, 135, 141, 143, 145, 157, 160, 183; Paris, 3, 95, 96, 97, 100, 132, 134, 137; Paris Commune, 38, 106, 134–135, 157, 160; revolution (1789), 105, 157; revolution (1848), 28, 105, 106, 134, 135 Frankfurt School, 2, 25 Fraser, Nancy, 15, 19–22, 36, 41, 125 Freud, Sigmund, 37, 40, 51, 53, 80 Games, 79–82, 85 Geertz, Clifford, 77, 194n31 Gender, 6, 11, 20–21, 32, 35, 57, 61, 84, 102, 146, 151, 166. See also Feminism; Women Germany, 2, 38, 124, 144–150, 159, 182 Giddens, Anthony, 100, 112–113, 125 Gitlin, Todd, 117, 166 Global justice movement, 4–5, 12, 21, 47, 48, 60, 87, 120, 152, 169–178, 180. See also Globalization; World Trade Organization Globalization, 3–4, 12, 21–22, 51, 56–60, 85, 92, 110–112, 118–119, 153–154, 168–178, 180–182. See also Capitalism; Global justice movement; World Trade Organization

212 ▪ Index

Goffman, Erving, 26, 81, 91–92 Grave, Jean, 134, 136 Great Britain, 4, 23, 103, 105, 126, 156, 159, 170 Greece, classical, 38, 71, 149, 177 Griffuelhes, Victor, 132 Habermas, Jürgen, 7–8, 10, 15, 18–25, 29, 36, 39, 41, 47, 65, 67, 92, 93, 97, 177 Hardt, Michael, 35, 44, 52, 56–59 Haywood, Big Bill, 127–128, 134, 135 Hebdige, Dick, 10, 32 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 23, 130 Hill, Joe, 128, 134 Hitler, Adolph, 2, 93, 144, 146–149, 182. See also Nazis HIV/AIDS, 119, 168, 171 Hochschild, Arlie, 58, 113 Homo ludens, 79, 183 Huizinga, Johan, 79, 81 Identity: collective, 28, 33, 44–46, 48, 77, 85, 174; construction of, 6, 10, 19–20, 23, 26, 35, 43, 45–46, 48–50, 64, 72, 74, 75, 118, 124, 151, 168, 174–175; hybrid, 22, 113, 177; racial, 50, 110, 115. See also Nationalism; Sexuality Illouz, Eva, 113 Image politics, 86, 156, 182 Imperialism, 56–59, 157, 159, 164; American, 3, 157, 160, 168, 176 Indigenous rights, 3, 110, 170, 171, 173 Individualism, 5, 37, 39, 95, 102, 107, 108, 113, 130, 158, 167 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 1, 11, 106, 107, 121, 122–129, 134–135, 151 Industrialization, 5, 82, 94, 95, 111–112, 126, 128, 131, 142, 181; deindustrialization, 113, 153. See also Postindustrial society International Monetary Fund, 169, 173 “Internationale”, 1, 122, 132, 163 Internet, 170, 174, 177. See also Media Iraq, 168, 176

Jamison, Andrew, 44, 47–49 Jasper, James, 45 Jesus of Nazareth, 184 Jouissance, 65, 72, 78, 124, 133, 150, 164 Kant, Immanuel, 6–9, 64, 66–70, 72–73, 74, 76, 79, 141 Klein, Naomi, 78–79, 169–170 Labor: autonomy, 1, 129, 131–132, 136; and bureaucracy, 122–129, 135, 139–141, 151; collective self-organization, 128, 164; “emotional labor,” 58; expressive labor, 11, 64, 122, 125, 130, 134, 136, 141–142, 157, 180–181; productivist, 125, 152, 154, 165, 169, 180. See also Unions Lacan, Jacques, 37, 53–55, 75, 78, 86 Laclau, Ernesto, 35–36, 44, 52–56 Le Bon, Gustave, 105–106 Lembo, Ron, 78, 118 Lichterman, Paul, 166–167 Lifestyle, 41, 48, 59, 67, 96–98, 108, 114, 115, 116, 120, 125, 136–137, 155, 158; experimentation, 100, 110; lifestyle politics, 93, 98, 100, 107, 134 Literary sphere, 17, 23, 30, 135 Maffesoli, Michel, 8, 16, 36, 40–42, 78, 83, 177, 180 Mao Tse-tung, 162 164 Marcuse, Herbert, 48, 57, 64 Mardi Gras, 83, 84 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 121–122 Marx, Karl, 8, 27, 32, 40, 53, 65, 75, 127, 136–138, 140, 177, 183–184 Marxism, 2, 3, 5, 35, 36, 37, 55–56, 106, 122, 146, 157–159, 160, 165, 169. See also Communism; Socialism Maurras, Charles, 143 May (1968), 2, 4, 12, 36, 60, 87, 118, 152, 153–154, 156–169, 180; capitalism, 158–159, 163, 164, 166–167; carnival, 165; democracy, 159, 161–162, 164; theater, 157, 163; violence, 161–162 Mead, George Herbert, 74–75, 80, 83, 184

Index ▪ 213

Media, 3, 5, 9–10, 22, 26, 28, 32, 35, 46, 51, 63, 92, 94, 99, 101, 108–119, 153–155, 162, 166, 170, 172, 177, 181; internet, 170, 174, 177; print, 103, 105; radio, 146; television, 3, 33, 78, 112, 118 Melucci, Alberto, 44, 49–50, 52, 125 Memory, collective, 26, 31, 48, 80, 85–86, 105–106 Mexico, 21, 58, 171 Millais, John Everett, 133 Mills, C. Wright, 151 Modernity, 8, 22, 24–26, 31, 41, 49, 50–51, 60, 64, 66–67, 71–74, 76, 79, 81, 93–95, 102, 109, 167, 180–183, 186n14; crisis of, 5, 66, 99, 100; “liquid modernity,” 111–113, 181 Mouffe, Chantal, 35–36, 52 Multiculturalism, 40, 168, 187n7 Multinational corporations, 3, 21, 111, 170, 173–174. See also Globalization; Global justice movement Music, 10, 12, 33, 46, 48, 67, 71, 119, 137, 170, 172, 175, 177, 181, 182; hip-hop, 10, 172, 182; punk, 10, 156; rock, 86, 102, 109, 115, 155–156, 166, 170, 182 Mussolini, Benito, 2, 93, 99, 121, 142, 146, 149. See also Fascism National Socialism. See Nazis Nationalism, 2, 5, 6, 85, 93, 99, 100, 105, 123–124, 145–146, 148–150, 162, 181 Nazis, 2, 4, 6, 11, 25, 43, 60, 123–124, 144–151, 160; neo-Nazis, 182. See also Fascism Negri, Antonio, 35, 44, 52, 56–59 Neoliberalism, 12, 111–112, 153, 168–169, 171–172, 175–177. See also Capitalism; Globalization New age spirituality, 167 New social movements, 11, 42–44, 52, 61, 65, 110, 125, 129, 152–154, 156, 166, 169 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8–9, 51, 52, 64, 66, 70–77, 94, 109, 148 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 171

Paris Commune, 38, 106, 134–135, 157, 160 Parsons, Talcott, 91 Parties, street, 170–171, 175. See also Festivals Pataud, Emile, 1, 141–142 Patronage: art, 16; labor, 130 Pelloutier, Fernand, 127, 134, 137–138, 141–142 Personalism, 166 Pissarro, Camille, 134–136 Play, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7–8, 9–10, 12, 15, 25–26, 31, 34, 36, 39–40, 42, 49–50, 61–64, 68–69, 78–87, 102, 105, 107, 117–120, 125, 136–137, 142, 154, 164–165, 171, 175, 178–181, 194n31; and children, 79–80; vs. games, 79–82, 85; “image play,” 78, 118 Poland, 18, 55 Political opportunity theory, 43, 44, 45, 144 Popular culture, 5, 6, 17, 26, 31, 34, 41, 62–64, 79, 84, 87, 91–93, 99, 101, 108, 119, 120, 123–124, 126, 142, 153, 154, 173, 181–182; and carnival, 9–10, 102–107, 165, 194n31. See also Culture Populism, 12, 52, 54–56, 143–144 Positivism, 64, 77 Postindustrial society, 2, 49, 52, 92, 111, 114, 158, 181. See also Industrialization Postmodernism, 3, 5, 8–9, 12, 16, 19, 31, 34–36, 42, 44, 49, 64–65, 71–73, 75, 86, 92, 101, 109–111, 116, 120, 152, 153, 168, 177, 183–184; and social movements, 52–62 Pouget, Emile, 132, 134, 136, 141–142 Proletariat. See Labor Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 106, 134 Public sphere: proletarian, 1, 104, 106–108, 124, 126–127, 130, 134, 142; public/private distinction, 19–20, 22, 27–28, 35, 37, 52, 99, 106, 113, 117, 127, 146–147, 151, 153, 155, 164, 166, 178; theories, 15–42; transnational, 21–22, 170 Queer theory, 21, 168. See also Sexuality

214 ▪ Index

Racism, 5, 61, 103, 124, 144, 156, 182 Reclaim the Streets, 117, 170–172 Reed, John, 122, 135 Reed, T.V., 46, 170 Religion, 24–25, 29, 50, 66, 94, 97, 134, 148, 177, 190n47 Republicanism, 106, 124, 143, 151; labor republicanism, 126 Resource mobilization theory, 43, 45, 48 Revolution, 5, 26, 28, 107, 133–136, 138, 146, 157–163, 165, 166, 172, 176, 183; American, 38; French (1789), 105, 157; French (1848), 28, 105, 106, 134, 135; Russian, 38, 124, 128, 145–146, 160; Third World, 3, 119, 157 Revolutionary syndicalism, 1, 5, 87, 100, 120, 121–123, 127, 129, 131, 141–142, 151 Rights: human, 12, 19, 30, 57, 59, 94, 106, 112, 146, 147, 171, 172, 187–188n7; indigenous, 3, 110, 170–171. See also Civil rights movement Ritual, 30–31, 45, 48–49, 77, 81, 102, 146 Romanticism, 46, 61, 64, 66–67, 74, 85, 94, 98, 136–137, 164, 167 Ross, Kristin, 158–159, 163 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 66, 74 Satire, 11, 40, 61, 105, 108, 115, 119, 143, 150, 162, 165, 181 Schiller, Friedrich, 64, 79 Seattle, 3–4, 171–172 Sennett, Richard, 15, 26–28 September 11, 4, 172 Sexuality, 12, 51, 61, 108, 143, 150, 154–156, 168, 172, 177; heterosexism, 119; homosexuality, 43, 45, 50, 61, 115–116, 168, 173, 179 Shakespeare, William, 91, 103 Signac, Paul, 134–136 Simmel, Georg, 40–41, 80–81, 83, 95 Situationists, 165 Sociability, 40, 80–81, 83 Social capital, 17, 166 Socialism, 1, 4, 9, 19, 21, 107, 126–128, 132, 134, 138–139, 141, 146, 162, 180; socialist realism, 138, 165

Socialist Party (U.S.), 128 Sociality, 40, 83 Society of control, 56–58, 116, 153, 181 Solidarity, 9, 15, 22, 42, 44, 55, 58, 83–87, 118–120, 142, 161, 164, 173, 174–175, 177, 178, 180, 187n7; erotic, 102; moral, 141; playful, 10, 16, 40, 42, 46, 62, 63, 79, 84–85, 87, 92, 119–120, 127, 164, 178, 180, 194n29, 194n31; proletarian, 106–107, 123, 127, 129–133, 135, 151–152 Solidarity Movement (Poland), 18, 55 Sorel, Georges, 121–122, 127, 137, 139–143 Soviet Union, 3, 38, 124, 128, 160 Soviets, 38, 128, 160. Strikes, 1, 2, 106–107, 121–133, 135, 139, 141–143, 151, 157, 159, 161–163, 168; sit-ins, 128, 131, 161. See also Labor; May (1968); Unions Students, 77, 94, 144, 153–157; May (1968), 2, 158–166; Seattle, 3, 171 Students for a Democratic Society, 166 Subaltern publics, 19, 33 Subjectivation, 44, 51 Subjectivity, 5, 6, 8, 9, 24, 25, 44, 46, 57–58, 61, 64–66, 70, 77–78, 83, 93, 100–101, 156, 167–168, 173–174, 181–182, 186n14; crisis of, 60, 66, 73; expressive, 11, 64, 85–86; intersubjectivity, 23, 50, 85 Suburbs, 10, 135, 153, 159, 167 Syndicalism, French, 1–2, 5, 11, 87, 100, 106–107, 120–133, 134, 136, 137, 139, 141–143, 151–152, 156, 159, 160, 180. See also Labor; Unions Taylor, Charles, 102, 107, 136, 167 Television, 3, 33, 78, 112, 118. See also Media Theater, 4, 10, 29–30, 95, 120, 122; and fascism, 2, 150; global justice movement, 119, 171, 172, 175; May (1968), 157, 163; street theater, 46, 119, 163, 175 Third World, 118, 119, 157, 169, 172–173, 176 Touraine, Alain, 44, 49–52, 113, 158, 174

Index ▪ 215

Transnationalism, 21–22, 170, 174 Turner, Victor, 81–83 Unions, 1, 3, 33, 113, 122–123, 127–130, 133, 142, 151–153, 161, 164, 165, 170. See also Labor; specific unions; Strikes; Syndicalism, French United States, 18, 27, 38, 70, 78, 100, 103–105, 108, 116, 146, 153–156, 168, 171, 172, 179, 181; civil rights movement, 45, 48, 60, 61, 118, 153; imperialism, 3–4, 157, 160, 168; September 11, 4, 172; and workers, 1, 11, 104–106, 112–113, 123, 124, 126–129, 134–135, 151 Universalism, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 19–20, 29, 37, 42, 47, 57, 58, 68–71, 76, 82, 85, 97, 99, 109, 124, 187–188n7 Universities, 154–155, 157, 159–160, 162 Urbanization, 92, 94, 103 Utopianism, 26, 29, 47–48, 64, 70, 73, 107, 124, 134, 135–136, 141, 174, 175, 177–178, 180 Versailles Treaty, 145 Vietnam War, 157, 159, 164

Weber, Max, 7–8, 22, 23–25, 29, 41, 65–67, 76, 77, 92, 93–94, 97 West: global West, 3, 5, 15, 16, 18, 23, 26, 34, 40, 92, 95, 100, 106, 108, 112–113, 116–118, 149, 151, 173, 177; U.S. West, 103 Williams, Raymond, 33, 93, 117 Willis, Paul, 10, 16, 33–34 Winnicott, D. W., 81–83 Wobblies. See Industrial Workers of the World Women, 3, 19, 21, 113, 121, 138, 151, 153, 173. See also Gender; Feminism Working class. See Labor; Unions World Social Forum, 4, 22, 172, 176–178 World Trade Organization, 3, 140, 171–172 World War I, 99, 123, 128, 135, 142, 145, 147 World War II, 92, 151, 173 Youth, 10, 17, 83, 109–110, 115–118, 123, 128, 148, 154–156, 164–165, 170, 172–173, 179 Zapatistas, 21, 58, 171 Žižek, Slavoj, 92

Kenneth H. Tucker, Jr. is Professor of Sociology at Mount Holyoke College, and author of Classical Social Theory: A Contemporary Approach, Anthony Giddens and Modern Social Theory, French Revolutionary Syndicalism and the Public Sphere, and (with Barbara Tucker) Industrializing Antebellum America.