> Last three paragraphs from David Bromwich's review of Perry Anderson's The
> Origins of Postmodernity and Fredric Jameson's The Cultural Turn that
> appeared in the London Review of Books. Bromwich teaches at the Whitney
> Humanities Center at Yale.
> ...But it leads them [Anderson and Jameson] to overrate in
> turn the social influence of works of art and philosophy and political
> thought. At the same time, they now underrate the effects of ideology - the
> 'bridge of excuses', as Havel called it, between a government and a people
> or a culture and its participants. What is missing in their account is any
> of evidence of the feelings, or even, for it would be something, the false
> consciousness of the feelings of people implicated in the system. All that
> is submerged in a theory whose demand is that people be known as obedient
> consumers, or exploited consumers whose revolt can only emerge through
> modified acts of consumption.
I'll leave it to others to point out the ironies of quoting Havel, that dissident-turned-neoliberal, who successfully applyied the same savage austerity to the Czech economy which the Party elites failed to apply during the Eighties. Suffice to say that Adorno and Horkheimer already solved the is-Disney-brainwashing-us-with-evil-propaganda-or-is-Mickey kinda-cool conundrum back in 1944, in their "Dialectic of Enlightenment", which talked about the culture industry of monopoly capitalism as being *both* mass deception and canalized rebellion, simultaneously. Progress in capitalism *is* regress.
-- Dennis