Continuing my voyage in the Wayback Machine to the early 1990s, I was re-reading Anne Norton’s 1993 work Republic of Signs: Liberal Theory and American Popular Culture.
I liked the book when I first read it and I still do. It couldn’t have been an easy book for a political scientist to write, given the current hostility of the discipline towards qualitative or interpretative analysis. For all that it has a strong theoretical infrastructure, it’s a very readable, well-written book.
The basic thrust of the argument is that representation is a site of American politics; Norton focuses on popular culture, consumption, surveys, the image of the President, construction of “homeland” and so on to make this point. As a basic starting point, this seems pretty inarguable to me, that Americans act politically and are acted upon through representation, in various domains of everyday life. Norton talks about how liberalism is part of common sense, in the Gramscian sense of that term, and how it is enacted through everyday practice.
Still, re-reading the book, I’m really struck at how Norton’s authorial voice captures a whole mode of cultural analysis common in the 1990s. What she’s offering is an interpretation of texts and representations interwoven with a commentary on American life and society. The authorial voice is omniscient, olympian, even when Norton uses the first person plural. Declarations are made in passive voice, or placed beyond argument. Americans do this, Americans are that. The American mind thinks this-and-that. The Constitution is this, the Constitution is that. “We” do this, “we” do that.
A little of this tendency was jarring to me even when I first read it, as the basic thrust of Norton’s argument strikes me as requiring a kind of situated ethnography. (At least that’s how I saw things in terms of my own study of consumerism and commodity culture.) If you want to talk about how common sense or consciousness manifests in everyday practice, you’ve got to talk about everyday practices, about what actual people actually do. This absence is more jarring to me now.
More, however, it really reminds me of something I wrote a little while back about Derrida, that the odd thing about Derridean criticism is its back-door empiricism. The same thing appears here in spades. What Norton is doing is interpretation, but she writes it like God inscribing the Ten Commandments on stone. There’s never anything tentative, open, arguable about the interpretative statements she makes. There’s never anything plural, contradictory, comparative about the American society she describes.
Some examples:
“The simultaneous affirmation of the absence of history and the presence of the past is at the foundation of the American regime. It is written into the Constitution, where we, the people, speak out of time, equally present in the present, past and future. Those who read the Preamble speak as their predecessors did, as sovereign. No difference is admitted between them. When Americans celebrated the bicentennial of this document, there were copies of the Constitution in Constitutional Hall and in neighborhood schools and groceries for one to sign or not sign, as one chose. Whether one aligned oneself with the Federalists or the Anti-Federalists–or, for that matter, with the indolent or the indifferent–one stood with the generation of the founding.” p. 15
“Americans in Disneyland do not mistake it for reality. Rather, recognizing it as a representation of desire, they celebrate their collective capacity to produce a world more rational and more rewarding than that which Providence supplies them. In their play, as in their politics, they know themselves as the creators of a new world order.” p. 21
“In America those things that are labeled food, particularly the notorious ‘cheese food’, are the things most far removed from nature. In the republic of signs, food signifies not the sustenance that nature provides but something altogether synthetic. ‘Natural foods’ become an indulgence and a luxury, foods of choice rather than necessity. Human needs, this language implies, can be supplied synthetically, from the most improbable materials. We can provide for, we can constitute, ourselves. The simplest of foods become the battleground in this context over constitution. Bread and milk and cereals, basic foods on which all are dependent, are ‘enriched’ and ‘fortified’. The language of nutrition becomes a language of wealth and conquest. The addition of artificial value enriches these foods as it enriches the regime. Their natural merits, implicitly insufficient, are supplemented by vitamins and minerals and by the addition of ingredients from other sources…The milk, the bread, the cereal become battlegrounds in the war for independence and self-determination. They are ‘fortified’. In strengthening them, we establish our title. By reconstituting them we establish our authority.” p. 28
I could go on: a lot of the book reads like that. I don’t quote these passages to make fun of them, though I’m sure some people will see them as self-evidently risible. Take a step back, be patient and tolerant, and I’m sure you’ll see a version of any of these claims that you’d be perfectly willing to accept and find interesting. The language of “fortified” or “vitamins added” really is odd, when you think about it a bit. The question of what Americans think about Disneyland is an interesting one. The way that the Constitution constitutes a national identity in everyday life and in memorialization is obviously crucial.
The problem isn’t with Norton’s observations per se, it’s the form that they take, which again, I’d say is fairly representative of a scholarly mode of cultural analysis in the 1990s. It’s a kind of Benjamin-envy that drove a generation of scholars, an aspiration to achieve a desired intersection of inspired cultural commentary and high theoretical rigor. But that envy was a trap because it took place within the context of academic professionalism. A book like Republic of Signs, given its ambitions, really either needs to break cover and go running in the direction of cultural commentary or it’s got to be more sober in its scholarly methodology.
You can be Garry Wills, Stanley Crouch, Greil Marcus, and so on, and get away with grand pronouncements about the American character. You just have to be funny, or peculiarly incisive, or a writer with a gift for memorable turns of phrase. (Heck, on one level, Republic of Signs could even turn into a kind of Jerry Seinfeld everyday-humor schtick: “Have you ever noticed the phrase ‘fortified’ on bread? What the heck does that mean?”.)
This kind of writing is not a requirement for writing a good book about American society. But if Republic of Signs is to work as scholarship, then it’s got to climb off the perch of omniscience. To talk about everyday practice, you’ve got to be somewhere in the frame of your analysis. To talk about texts and representations, you’ve got to actually quote what you’re interpreting, bring it into your own analysis. To make interpretations, you’ve got to allow for other ways of interpreting the same thing, you’ve got to be tentative, limited, provisional in your readings. I’ve complained about how academics sometimes have timid, over-qualified prose, but this is a book that illustrates why a little of that is a good thing. It wouldn’t kill Norton to say, “Some Americans” or “One way of seeing this phenomenon is…”.