>>> <d-m-c at worldnet.att.net> 02/03 6:29 AM >>>
>Charles: I take it you are paraphrasing something in "Marxism". Have you
got any references as to where Marxist theory suggests this about empirical
reality.
Prof.K: Charles his entire body of work stands against naive realism.
Charles: Yes, Marxism-Leninism is definitely being street smart. When I see cops on the street , I know they are not as portrayed on television. They have guns on their sides , which always makes me perfectly conscious that they can kill me and I can't kill them.
Charles
> But still I thought Marx read a lot of the Bluebooks in the British
Museum and Lenin poured over stats in economics and they all kept their
eyes open as to what was actually happening around them. Engels was walking
around Manchester checking out the housing problems or whatever.
Prof.K Then why were you complaining about social science research? It made no sense since Paul wasn't calling for a survey and I don't think he was disputing your claim that cops are disprop represented. Why do you elide the argument in this way?
Charles I wasn't complaining about social science research. I was claiming that my social scientific research is very good and Paul's claims that I was overgeneralizing were inaccurate. That I have a good social scientific generalization and the exceptions he mentions do not refute my facts. I AM a social scientist, like all Leninists. I have taken classes in social science statistics. This is an epistemological dispute between social scientists. I am not only a scholastic social scientist. I place more emphasis on the unity of theory and practice
>Charles: In this case, I am claiming objectivity from my location as to
the actual images broadcast.
Prof. K How are you free from the ideologies that ensnare the writers and producers? Funny too, a lotta those TeeVee writers take classes in semiotics, lit crit, marxist semiotics, ad naseum. It's like one of my bus mgmt students said once when taking a course on Sociology of Work with me. "Hey cool, I like learning about marxist theory, helps me figure out how to oppress and exploit people even *more* efficiently and in even more hidden ways."
Charles: My approach is that no one is free from ideology. No social scientist is free of ideology. The only thing a social scientist can do is be conscious of her ideology. My perspective is from the working class social location. This very objective because it is the most social of the social locations, sociality being associated with objectivity. To use Marxism against the working class is, obviously, a perversion of Marxism, but I agree that a main occurrence of our epoch is the bourgeois expropriating Marxism for the opposite of its purpose. The bourgeoisie studying Marxism makes Capital fully self-reflective.
Charles:
>It is something like me being a native speaker of English in a linguistic
analysis. >I am an objective source of English grammar , all by myself.
Prof. K funny, I always open my first lecture up with: "fish swim in the ocean, but they're not oceanographers" Of course, I don't just leave that statement there, unproblematized, b/c I go on to talk about hierarchies of power, status, authority and how they operate in the classroom, in soc, and in the academy and elsewhere. but really, in the end, what you're leaning toward Charles is some notion that people can basically "get" it on their own and we know this isn't happening.
Charles: Of course , fish can't talk, but I don't think that's what you are emphasizing. We can't really have the revolution if people don't get it on their own. The Party can give some intial pushes but democratic centralism has to be DEMOCRATIC centralism, all power to the people.
Charles:
>You know, structuralism, culture has a grammar like language.
Prof.K Well see Charles, I once did a study of the ways in which people thought about political talk in small town dealing simultaneously with a plant closing and an attempt to site a nuke dump. You know what, they guaged people's speech in terms of Habermas's Ideal Speech situation, but that didn't make 'em any better at figuring out how to fight the nuke dump or the plant closing and they sure as heck didn't read Habermas.
Charles: Too bad, but here we are reading Judith Butler, and there is structuralism in post modernism.
Charles
>It is sort of do it yourself science at home.
Prof. K
What I have a problem with is your claim against Paul that somehow your experience is better than social science research. And, I found it rilly and trooly odd that you went into this rave when all Paul was complaining about was the fact that you didn't watch the specific show under consideration. Yes, you can speak about the genre, but obviously you can't speak too much about L&O right?
Charles: You are not reading my posts accurately. I'm saying that what I am doing is statisitically good. I have a large sample of data on television shows. My objection is that Paul is making an unscientific objection, based on shows that might be exceptions to the generalization I am making, but some people seem to dispute Paul's facts. I don't have to watch every show. I have a big sample and other people's reports. I had not tried to speak about L&O directly, although now I have evidence on it from Paul and others, so of course I can speak about it.
>Are you disputing my claim that there are a disproportionate number of cop
shows compared to other occupations ?
No.
>Are you saying that people in other social locations are not seeing cops
portrayed as heroes more than oppressors ?
Prof. K Yes and no. They might see this, but how they feel about it, what it means to them, and what they do about it will be different. A white person living in upper middle class suburbia is NOT going to engage the show in the same way you do. You know this all too well. And that might have been the better point to make.
Charles: It is a point It is not a better point. What does it have to do with Judith Butler's discussion of subjection and our turning when a cop calls ? Black people (in general, and I fear not generalizations; this is the one you just made on a general difference between Black people and White people). I know I turn because that motherfucker has a gun on her hip, not because I like Cagne and Lacey. The LA riot also indicates that a lot of working class people, white, brown and black, don't buy that tv cop stuff, but get the point of the night stick.
>Charles: I didn't dismiss all social science research. I would dismiss
some though. We have to be picky about it, critical
>so to speak. For example, I don't need a survey to tell me that there are
a disproportionate number of cop shows as compared with other occupations.
Prof.K But Charles, was this the point? There was no discussion about this at all, but you tried to turn it into that discussion eliding any sort of engagement with Paul. Paul wanted to discuss the specificity of Law and Order asking how it works in more complex ways than earlier variants of the cop show genre. I think he's trying to examine how hegemony works in a more sophisticated way than those who embrace more conventional notions of ideology seem to think it does. Hegemony works by opening sites of resistance that can be elaborated and extended through political commentary of the sort Paul's been trying to engage in. Or maybe not. But going on to complain that TeeVee fails to represent the working class, that *wasn't* the point and it's much too simple a concern.
Charles: You've got it backwards. I first said something about cop shows in general. I had established "THE POINT". Then he jumps in an insultingly, critical tone trying to change from the general to the particular, with the implication that this particular exception to my generalization had some significance. I am not obligated to talk about the point he has tried to change to. I have been talking about THE point all along. And you can't even get me off of it, by your forgetful comment above. Paul is welcome to talk about those shows, but he choose to speak about them by attacking what I said which gives a strong implication that somehow those shows refute the generalization I made.
>Charles: Who cares. Cops are not objectively the same as autoworkers and
steelworkers in capitalism.
Prof. K Tell this to Yoshie and Carrol will ya. They don't want to listen to me cause they don't like my style <sob, sniff>
Charles: Well, I have some criticism of your substance.
Charles:
>That's
>why TeeVee land tries to slur over the difference.
Prof. K I don't think they have to try very hard to slur over the difference. In most people's mind cops are working class.
Charles: Partly because television, the movies and novels have done such a good job of brainwashing the population.
Prof.K They do a survey every year on occupational status ranking. Most people consider cops to rank in the 30s out of 100. This has stayed the same for decades. (Lawyers, doctors, profs usually vie for the top three spots btw). I do an experiment with my students every semester so N=800 approx. Every year my students who think they're so NOT influenced by society, rank cops as in the 30s out of a scale of 100. Yeah, yeah this is ideology 'cause we're all workers. No kidding. But the question that I want to ask is: how does this happen. I don't think the answers are simple.
Charles: The specific question here is does Butler's theory of subjection explain some of the complexity, and more specifically, does the chapter in her book on Althusser's theory explain those facts some.
Prof.K No cops aren't like steelworkers in the kind of work they do or who they do it for and who/what they 'work' on. My point is that people have, for quite a long time, seen cops as workers. After all, aren't the Irish associated with the occupation. Why is that? I'm sure you know the history of the Irish, right? There is a reason that cops are recruited from the ranks of the working class right?
Charles: Now you are starting to catch on. Practical-critical thinking. Why are cops recruited from the ranks of the working class ? Why are most of the members of the armed forces from the working class ? How is it that the working class is convinced to be its own oppressor, to self-repress, to subject itself, to subjection ?
Prof.K: Yes, the occupation has been seen as one that might offer a path out of the working class, but nonetheless most people see it as a working class job. And they saw it as a working class job well before TeeVee was such a central force in our lives. There are very good reasons for this, I think.
Numero Uno: the state doesn't operate as some monolithic force absent any internal contradictions. Theories of State Power often operate at such a level of abstraction and they fail to grasp this, and failing to examine the internal contradictions leaves us with a grand Either/Or if you ask me.
Look at the ways in which cops are coded. Their work environment is often dirty, gritty. They work in the mean, dirty streets. They work in offices that are disorganized, chaotic, the equipment is often outdated. The hues are gray, dark and black and this extends even to their home life. The people they oppose are often middle class professionals: lawyers with their fucked up legal loop holes undermining their work, psychologists who always get it wrong cause they don't understand the human psyche quite as well as the cop in the street, social workers with their liberal do-goody rap. Now where do we see these themes played out: intellectual v. anti-intellectual; professionals v. workers; theory v experience.
BUT, the representation of this working classness is more complex than this. For ex, there is always a cop--sometimes the genre encourages us to sneer at him, sometimes identify--who exhibits working class mobility, typically signfied by his threads. Jimmy Smits character comes to mind here as a character who dresses really well, while his partner looks like he shops at Sears what with those square pocketed polyester slacks and short sleeved shirts and all. And the ties!! Accck! The ties. Paul, what say you about the ties? My ex mother-in-law always told me that the tie is the most important thing, the diff between whether you'll pass as middle class or not hinged on the knot! Look at how those ties are knotted. So, cops are coded as both working class and not working class and they do so very often by coding the main characters differently.
Now, as for Paul's concerns I think he's right to want to examine the ways in which the show works against the genre rules, to look at the places where people might grasp different interpretations that might *might* lead to some sort of critical examination. I frankly don't think people do this as much as Paul would like, but then teaching Media and Society can be pretty depressing given that attitudes polarize in terms of two postures: 1} Oh why can't I just watch and enjoy? Leave me alone. I don't want to be critical or 2} Everything's a big lie, a Grand Conspiracy, so who cares. Let me watch and not believe anything. I don't want to be critical in any sophisticated way. Attitude 1 is more typical of upper middle class students which I think is pretty interesting. BOTH attitudes lead to and reinscribe the desire not to have to think.
I think what Paul is trying to get at is the insistent way in which L&O refuses to boil everything down to black and white ethical dilemmas. Cops aren't all good, nor are they all bad. And the good/bad is contained w/in each character. This is diff from the conventional forms of the genre. Conventionally, there are good cops and bad cops. In fact, this is one of the mechanisms by which audiences are able to *identify* with cops and NOT see them as enemies working for the repressive apparatus of the state. In fact, in the conventional version, the good cops are the renegades who undermine the Law in all its bureaucratic glory. Good cops *don't* follow the Law. They seek the Right in spite of the Law. And we cheer them on and identify because that's how we'd like to see ourselves. (In more complex versions of this, films for ex where you have more time to work with, the bureaucratic rule following cop is also portraed sympathetically --Danny's Glover's character in Lethal Weapon for ex)
Cops are often played as victims of the state, as tools of the state, nothing more than grunts. The work of the cop show genre is to reinforce this belief and reality: cops really are grunts in the vast machinery of the state. In other words, and this is the reality of which I speak, the state apparatus does not operate *monolithically* as if there are no internal contradictions. (And this, I think is Paul's point.) But it is also important that it doesn't go too far in asking us to look at them dismissively, afterall where would we be if we were to really see cops as on the same order as janitors or truckdrivers. Why we wouldn't respect them, we might not pull over when we see their sirens in our rearview mirrors and that wouldn't be good either. THAT is something writers and network execs would surely want to avoid. If they are total freaks no one would want to watch either.
Charles: Yea, The old Marxist way of saying "not monolithically" is sort of "dialectically". One of the first things I said, and then reiterated to Paul was that I was examining a contradiction , hero/repressor. This means a non-monolithic analysis, although, I wouldn't underestimate the monolithic qualitiy of monopoly capitalism, and its media and entertainment sector in the 1990's. With Reagan's presidency, the media and entertainment sector was sort of number one. State monopoly capitalism in this age of supermonopoly makes the state more monolithic than "ever".
Judith Butler starts off referring to a paradox and focussed on Hegel. So, we are dealing with dialectical contradiction of some sort.
>Charles: Yes, this is ok, but it is still an accurate generalization that
cops' status as the teeth in the repressive apparatus of the state is not
at all featured for any of the audiences.
Prof.K But my point is: why on earth should you expect this to be the case. And frankly I do think that L&O addresses this at least a wee bit. But the maneuvers they make aren't altogether different than the contradictions I described above about working classness, good cop/bad cop, lone hero v. corrupt society/corrupt organizations
Charles: Did I say I expected this to be the case ? I said the revolution will not be televised. Paul is the one who seems to be seeing profound and inciting political critiques on television shows.
Charles
> No audience ends up feeling repressed by cops. They feel sad for the
cops, smarter >than the cops, laugh at cops, saved by cops - all true about
cops - but not beat on >the head by cops, which is also true.
Prof.K But again, it wouldn't work very well to do that either now would it.
Charles: "Wouldn't work well to do that" ?? By work what are you referring to ? Are you a radical, are trying to change things or are you just trying to figure out how things work ?
Gotta go. finish later
CB
Today, people are just too saavy. They're going to feel condescended to by the pious moralism of a show that portrays cops as wholly evil in the same way they'd feel condescended to by the pious moralism of a show that portrays cops as Officer Friendly. It just won't work. And that might be my beef with Paul--when I'm feeling rilly rilly Marcuse, of course.
>I never said things would be changed by a radical infusion of shows. I
said the revolution will not be televised. I said the powers-that-be
wouldn't allow such shows which would make too many working class heroes
and stars.
Maybe, maybe not. But look at the proliferation of people of color and diversity in adverts. When I find my book I'll send you along the stats on the representation of people of color in TeeVee--and not just in terms of numbers, but more qualitatively in terms of the kinds of roles they play. there has been progress, but a prominent author has argued that racism is simply more subtle.
You're right though, the one group of people that have been excluded systematically are the working class. however, given the lit on the ways in which people of color and white women have been portrayed as their numbers increased over the past decade, I'm not at all clear that it will be an advance to have shows about bus drivers, waitresses, etc. I don't care for the multi=culti, what about me? represent me too? rap and I really doubt you do either. Not, at least, from what I've read from you on this List.
Kelley Kelley