BOOK REVIEW Images Wild Todd Gitlin All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture by Stuart Ewen. Basic Books, 1988, 306 pp. he sharp divide between image and reality, mask and face, false and true consciousness, is a standby of mod- ern thought. Hegel, Marx, and Freud, for example, each said in his respective way: the world may look like this (history, ideology, neurosis) but it is actually something else, something ?underlying? (spirit, class relations, drives). Surfaces are misleading, irra- tional; the search for bedrock is neces- sary, rational. Ordinary consciousness is idolatry, window shopping: a shop- ping mall consciousness. Reality is a job for the Supertheorist, who can ?penetrate,? ?get to the bottom.? Does all thought make comparable distinctions? For a long time, images have been credited with a mysterious and dangerous value-v?which is prob- ably why the Second Commandment banned them, Plato suspected them, and Christianity, with the cross, en- shrined them. But the image/reality distinction becomes universal and ur- gent in modern times?and peculiarly puzzling too. For the profusion of images seems the very business (in both senses) of modernity. When citi- zens are formally free to sell themselves on the open market, impressions count. The authority of images has an ancient history, but only in modernity does the production of images become routine. That is why a good date for the founding of modernity is 1839, the year of the first photographs. By now, the portrait is no longer something Todd Gitlin is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of The Whole World Is Watching (University of California Press, 1980), Inside Prime Time (Pant/neon, 1983), and The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (Bantam, 1987). 110 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 4 only the rich can afford; it is avail- able to anyone who can pay for the studio sitting. Advertising, movies,TV, billboards?the resulting profusion of images becomes the world of homo urbam's. By the twentieth century, in industry or politics, a great deal of the ?reality? that society produces is, in fact, packaging; sophisticates grow used to enclosing ?reality? between quota- tion marks. A whole second world comes into existence?there is the ma- terial plane and the plane of represen- tations, and the two seem equally vast, equally rich. Family albums, ads, and movies alike have the power of seeming to transform the ordinary into the transcendent. By peeling away from things, images seem to par- take of magic. Writers in the Platonic tradition are displeased?some sort of blasphemy is at work. But the world of images does not displease writers who like the burly-burly of modernity? Walt Whitman, for example, who took the trouble to write a poem denouncing Hegel?s ?terrible doubt of appearances.? Dazzled by images, modern thought is also spooked by them. The fear is that images debase, conceal, even can- nibalize reality. One critic has written, for example, of the fear that in the era of photography the image w0uld become more important than the object itself, and would in fact make the object disposable. . . . Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beauti- ful, grand objects, as they hunt cattle in South America, for their skins and leave the carcasses as of little worth. The author of this statement is neither Walter Benjamin nor Susan Sontag but Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing in 1859. I owe this fact to Stuart Ewen?s interesting and frustrat- ing book, which is among other things a history of modern design and a com- pendium of apropos quotations. For the most part, Ewen identi?es himself with the Platonist, Holmesian, rational- ist style of theory, a style which reaches its modern acme in Herbert Marcuse? spiritual father of a whole generation of critical spirits, including Stuart Ewen. In Marcuse?s world, false consciousness has seeped so deeply into daily life that no one?well, hardly anyone? can begin to envision an alternative. Mind-numbing, body-con?ning work has been coupled to a fun culture? ?repressive desublimation.? Ewen?s ?rst book, Captains of Consciousness (1976), argued that advertising and American- ization had more or less deliberately diverted the working class from its proper class-conscious mission. All Consuming Images is also filled with evidence of the chilling intentions of corporate-minded strategists and de- signers, and with a rhetorical tendency to assume that their manipulations are irresistible. In much of this book, Ewen still follows Marcuse, deploring false consciousness and crediting it with Pharaonic powers. In the world of official style, facades mislead, images betray. In a long aside on modern architecture, Ewen writes (and I have added emphasis): From below, the pedestrian is overcome by awe. For some this is exaltation. For others, an uneasy sense of threatened or diminished humanity. In either case, it is but a feeling. The aestheticization of value leaves little space for the exercise of critical reason or socio- economic analysis. Power resides above the canyons, but for most it is incomprehensible. But analysis this grim poses four intertwined problems for all cultural theorists with a New Left inclination? how to account for themselves, justify activism, believe in democracy, and ?nd sources of possible change. And so, in his new book, Ewen tries to scale the wall of the Marcusean cul-de-sac. Style, he writes, has a ?curious capacity . . . to serve as a mark of privilege and a device of democratization simultane- ously.? On the dark side, alienated work thwarts freedom, desire, and what Roland Barthes called ?the dream of wholeness? ?whereupon of?cial, ad- vertised style steps in with (Ewen's nice phrase) a ?decoration of inde- pendence.? The of?cial style smothers rebellion. But popular style presumably nourishes it. In his populist mood, Ewen quotes approvingly one of his Hunter College students, StefanJ?,? who defends his skinhead style as ?a way of making a statement . . . a reaction to the long-haired hippie style which had gone from being the rebellious style to a conformist one damn rebellious. . .. To a skin, one way of rejecting the power structure is to get rid of as many fashionable things as possible.? ?In Stefan testimony,? Ewen adds breathlessly, ?there is an air of autonomous culture. While buy- ing combat boots may constitute consumption, the commodity is being employed as part of an oppositional cultural politics.? Stefan it seems, need not read Capital to overcome false consciousness; all he needs to do is wear his combat boots when he heads over to midtown. tying to break out of a Marxian Puritanism in which images are condemned as frivolous because they belie ?the real,? Ewen flirts with a romance of stylistic rebellion. In doing so, he is not alone?a riot of this kind of writing has come out of British popular culture and ?lm studies in the last decade, to the greater glory of punk, among other discordant styles. Dick Hebdige?s Subculture: The Mean- ing of Style (1979) is the canonical text. As I write, I pick up the Winter 1988-89 issue of Film Quarterly and read in an article by David James: [I]n the early eighties certain extremely marginal forms of punk and pornography did in fact sustain opposition to the aesthetics of the hegemony and to commodity culture. Marking a survival of sixties? utopianism, these forms of erotic and music video . . . consti- tuted a survival of the project of the classic avant?garde-??the turn of cultural practice against the status of art in bourgeois society as de?ned by the concept of autonomy and against the distribution ap- paratus bourgeois art depends on. It is hard to know which is worse, the prose or the idea. How did things come to this not-so- pretty pass? After the sixties, two things happened simultaneously: youth revolt became an institution?each cohort revolting against the previous cohort?s style?and radical politics was stymied. Leftists clung to the prayer, or convic- tion, that a suf?ciently angry youth culture would constitute, by itself, radical politics?keeping alive a ?ame that the working class had long since let ?icker out. This fantasy is based on a serious misreading of the relation between radical politics and youth cul- ture in the sixties. Then, thanks to the Vietnam War, the two movements con- verged. The trinity of sex, drugs, and rock roll seemed to promise that avant-garde culture would fuse with a revolutionary assault on capitalism?or even become that assault all by itself. The surrealist manifestos came back to earth, this time destined for a constitu- ency extending beyond the intellectual coteries of the avant-garde. Legions of baby boomers carried the old hope that you could shock the bourgeoisie and overthrow it at the same time. Culture was politics?and, in the sixties, a case could be made for that claim. But twenty years on, avant-garde shock has become routine, and avant- gardists have to go farther and farther out to prove they haven?t been taken in. Meanwhile, some of yesterday?s out? riders of youth culture have become theorists scavenging the clubs and the back alleys for a ?resistance? they are convinced, a priori, must exist. Failing to find radical potential in the politics of parties or mass movements, they conjure it in subcultures, even in pop- ular styles. Some have found the grail in sitcoms, some in slash movies, some in the pace of MTV, some in the long tracking shot, and some in punk, pornography, what have you. All they agree on, Hegelian to the core, is that ?it? the resistance? ?must exist. Whenever I hear exotic youth culture defended as ?oppositional,? I reach for my common sense. What kind of opposition is this? What does it stand for? What does it have in mind for people whose aesthetic is different? Beneath the romance of style, the revolutionary Other has been smuggled back into the scheme as the unwitting carrier of historical rationality. Thus, to return to All Consuming Images, a Marxian metaphysic of labor value rumbles along under the pages like a never-ending subway. At his best, Ewen wants to move beyond the classical model of consumer goods as distrac? tions from The Revolution. ?On the one hand,? he writes, style speaks for Avum?garde shock has become routine, and avant-gardz'sts have to go fart/yer cmdfartlaer out to prove they haven?t been tu/eeu m. the rise of a democratic society, in which who one wishes to become is often seen as more consequential than who one is. On the other hand, style speaks for a society in which coherent meaning has ?ed to the hills, and in which drift has provided a context of continual discontent.? The essence of modern style is change, Ewen argues, ?one way by which we perceive a world in These are important points. Likewise, Ewen is quite telling when he discusses streamlining, credit, and ?commercial paper? as forms of ab? straction that dominate American cul- ture. But underneath, I sense, lies a nostalgia for hard-and-fast material things?a pre?post-industrial economy. Nostalgia of this sort is the occupa- tional hazard of radical social critics. Who doesn?t want to ?nd a still point in the churning market economy? Ewen writes at a moment when many theorists and artists so deeply question whether it is possible to know or re? cover anything beneath images that they revel in doubt. The image be- comes everything?it?s images all the way down. Trumping Andy Warhol?s painted reproductions of commercial art, the photographer Sherrie Levine shoots pictures of famous pictures? meaning to raise the question, In what sense does the photographer create anything in the ?rst place? The French REVIEWS 111 theorist Jean Baudrillard, all the rage from academic quarters to the Village Voice, imagines?and ?nally exalts?a world in which nothing has intrinsic value, everything is made for exchange and impression, and the representative object is ?the simulacrum,? the copy for which there is no original. The essential thing in itself has dissolved. A cultural trapdoor opens beneath our feet. When theoretical discussions are framed in such terms, I sympathize deeply with Ewen?s desire to ?nd cultural bedrock; but since social life is coated with images?the mind it- self and feelings are wallpapered with them?~it is not at all clear where standards of value are to be found. As Ewen himself says in an offhand, last- minute recognition, [T]he ?ourishing diversity of images has opened people?s eyes to a wide variety of new possibili- ties, new ways of imagining.? But such tributes to style rattle arOund loose; they are not integrated into his argu- ment, which is more about closure. In the end, Ewen grows murky. He wants to criticize style in the name of BOOK REVIEW ?our own experiences??but which experiences, understood how, are ?sub- stantial?? If feeling is the essential determinant, how do I know which of my feelings to take seriously? Ewen wants to overcome ?the dominance of surface over substance?; he wants ?a reconciliation of image and meaning, a reinvigoration of a politics of sub- stance.? But what would that be? The reason for Ewen?s failure to be clear is that ?surface? and ?substance? are fatally blurred in our very categories of understanding. So no one who writes about these matters, in fact, has done better than Ewen. As he says, ?The way out of this confusion is dif?cult to imagine.? Inside an argument that keeps clamp- ing down, a Coney Island of the mind is bursting to get out. All Consuming Images is overstuffed with ?ne riffs from the history of architecture and design, and with some marvelous read- ings of texts?the ?Charlie Chaplin? in which the free-spirited tramp sells IBM the Rita Hayworth poster fusing desire and alienation in The Why the Liberals Lost Bicycle Thief. Ewen also recognizes that when culture pivots on celebrity, celeb- rity deserves an analysis of its own? toward which he delivers some excel- lent pages. Following Warren Susman?s valuable Culture as History, he realizes that ?the phenomenon of celebrity reflects popular longings. In celebrities, people ?nd not only a piece of them- selves, but also a piece of what they strive for.? The insight deserves to be extended. That striving?for pleasure, for happi- ness, for identity?is not induced from on high by the marketers; it is a great deal of American culture. We desire what we miss; style makes its empty promises. In the age of Trump, this Regilded Age, the public world is ?lled with corporate logos and Charlatans. We hire our confidence men and women, then, weary of them, turn the rascals out and hunt for replacements. Style is the siren who also sells earplugs stamped with her logo. Finally, this is a problem with style as politics: yester- day?s counterimages are tomorrow sold over the counter. El Theda Shocpol The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order; 1930-1980, edited by Steven Fraser and Gary Gerstle. Princeton University Press, 1989, 311 pp. he 19803 have been a perplexing and demoralizing decade for every- one on the broadly progressive side of Theda Sleocpol is a professor of sociology at Harvard. Her books include States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China Cambridge University Press, 1979) and Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge University Press, 1985). She is the co? editor of The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton University Press, 1988). 112 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 4 American life. Successive rightist vic- tories have apparently signaled an ex- haustion of the liberal forces which seemed hegemonic as recently as the late 19603 and early 19705. Many intel- lectuals have an overwhelming urge to look several decades backward, toward the New Deal, as the alleged starting point for whatever has now ended. Aged liberals and neoconservatives can examine the past with pure nos- talgia?celebrating the policy-making triumphs of their contemporaries who shaped and inherited the New Deal?s accomplishments. But looking back is far more challenging for intellectuals of the ?New Left? or ?sixties? genera- tion. Many in this group once thought of liberalism as The Enemy, not antici- pating that much worse lay ahead (and not understanding how much worse lay behind and alongside modern Ameri- can liberalism). These intellectuals are now in midlife, facing uncertain and often hostile tendencies within as well as beyond the professional worlds where many of them seem to be securely en- sconced. Moving beyond either cele- bration or condemnation, they must reconsider the possibilities and limits of liberalism in order to understand the alternative political directions that America might take from here. The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order exempli?es both the breadth of vision and the blinders that intellectuals