Cop Shows & Althusser's Law (was Re: surplus and otherstuff)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Kelley responds to
>>Another fact I feel sure in is that there are a disproportionate number of
>>cop shows relative to other occupations. I haven't seen  any shows based on
>>auto or steelworkers lives. There are very few or none on busdrivers, etc.
>, etc.
>
>Who cares??!!  As if this will matter one wit.  And what about Roseanne?
>And Grace Under Fire?  There are a slew of other shows that depict the
>working class and, indeed, cops are working class in TeeVee land.  They are
>considered working class in 'not' TeeVee land as well.
>
>The entire genre comes out of the hard-boiled detective genre:
>
>The cop is the lone hero struggling against bureaucratic regimes of rules
>and regulations as well as the bureaucratic incompetence that these effect.
>The cop is also struggling against the self-serving rhetoric of the
>managerial professional class (the parade of expert witnesses,
>psychologists, social workers, etc).  Cop shows that follow this genre in
>the strictest sense reinforce our commitment to individualism:  the idea
>that individuals can struggle against oppression, that society and
>collective struggle is somehow inherently impure and corrupt, that
>society--in effect--corrupts us rather than makes us who we are.
>
>Cops *are* working class.  And yeah they are often portrayed as loveable
>complex human beings, so the fuck what??!!  Cops *are* human beings in real
>life for pete's sake.

It's quite astonishing to see, in Kelley's post here, how a fairly decent
textual analysis (as to cop shows/detective genres' commitment to the
'individual versus corrupt society/bureaucracy' model) gets married to a
total lack of political sense. As Zizek says, folks do the work of ideology
_not_ because they don't know what they are doing; more accurately,
ideology (esp. of the ironic) allows us to _continue_ the work of ideology
even though we 'know' (at one level) what we are doing.

Why doesn't Kelley see any ideological problem in cops (of all jobs!)
becoming a _privileged representative_ of the working class on the TV, to
the marginalization (if not total erasure) of others? Aren't there problems
of _hegemony_ here, such as those of the working class consenting to their
own repression, of seeing a 'complex humanity' of the police officer
represented as a paradigm of humanity (_the_ individual, whose 'complexity'
+ 'moral predicaments' serve as alibi for 'just doing the job'), and so on?
Why not read Gramsci, seriously??? (Well, in fact most postmodern
intellectuals actually are closer to Croce than Gramsci; they just invoke
Gramsci as a kind of talisman against the dreaded charge of being an
'Idealist.')

I also wonder why Kelley wants to insist that "cops are working class" so
strongly, considering her vehemance and dense verbiage in defining me and
my fellow teachers (including herself) out of the working class. Ideology
performs a strange inversion!

Yoshie