The World Turned Inside Out Read online

  The World Turned Inside Out

  American Thought and Culture

  Lewis Perry and Howard Brick, Series Editors

  Era of Persuasion

  American Thought and Culture, 1521–1680

  By E. Brooks Holifield

  The Roots of Democracy

  American Thought and Culture, 1760–1800

  By Robert E. Shalhope

  Voices of the Marketplace

  American Thought and Culture, 1830–1860

  By Anne C. Rose

  Reluctant Modernism

  American Thought and Culture, 1880–1900

  By George Cotkin

  The Postmodernist Turn

  American Thought and Culture in the 1970s

  By J. David Hoeveler

  Twentieth-Century Multiplicity

  American Thought and Culture, 1900–1920

  By Daniel H. Borus

  The World Turned Inside Out

  American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century

  By James Livingston

  The New Era

  American Thought and Culture in the 1920s

  By Paul V. Murphy

  The World Turned Inside Out

  American Thought and Culture at the

  End of the 20th Century

  James Livingston

  rowman & littlefield publishers, inc.

  Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

  Published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

  A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

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  Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom

  Copyright © 2010 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

  First paperback edition 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  The hardback edition of this book was previously cataloged by the Library of Congress as follows:

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Livingston, James, 1949–

  The world turned inside out : American thought and culture at the end of the 20th

  century / James Livingston.

  p. cm. — (American thought and culture)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. United States—Intellectual life—20th century. 2. Popular culture—United

  States—History—20th century. 3. Political culture—United States—History—20th

  century. 4. Social change—United States—History—20th century. 5. United

  States—Politics and government—1981–1989. 6. United States—Politics and

  government—1989– 7. United States—Social conditions—1980– I. Title.

  E169.12.L558 2010

  973.91—dc22 2009025274

  ISBN: 978-0-7425-3541-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

  ISBN: 978-0-7425-3542-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  ISBN: 978-1-4422-0117-0 (electronic)

  ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of

  American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper

  for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  This book is for my favorite teachers,

  Mike Fennell and Marvin Rosen

  The Lord maketh the earth . . . waste, and turneth it upside down. . . . And it shall be, as with the people, so with the priest, as with the servant, so with his master, as with the maid, so with her mistress. . . . The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard.

  —Isaiah 24:1–2

  Certain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of color, nature, workers, animals—in short, domination of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self. Chief among these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female,

  civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/

  made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man. . . . High-tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine.

  —Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”

  Social revolution in America has so far proved a dream; cultural revolution has been an important reality.

  —Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence

  Foreword

  Howard Brick and Lewis Perry, Series Editors

  Over twenty years ago, this series on American Thought and Culture began with the aim of offering concise, provocative volumes that, taken together, would survey the long span of American intellectual and cultural life from the sixteenth century to the present. Since then, the output of richly documented monographs in the field has continued to grow, sustaining the demand for inventive historical syntheses. The goal of the series has always been to bring together readable, well-informed books that stand on their own as introductions to significant periods in American thought and culture. There is no attempt to establish a single interpretation of all of America’s past, for the range of American experiences and their change over time would frustrate any such attempt. All the authors in the series, innovative practitioners in the field in their own right, bring their own independent research to bear as they strive for a broad reach in interpretation. They aim to explore issues that are of critical importance to the particular period under discussion and, on that basis, to cast new light on the whole of American experience as it both shaped and was transformed by that time.

  The series now nears completion with the publication of this and two other forthcoming volumes treating discrete periods of the twentieth century. The culture and intellectual life of the United States remain subjects of heated debate. Scholars of the mid-twentieth century often assumed that the country bore a common culture that could be summed up in a few basic themes or characteristic dilemmas. By the 1980s, historians were more likely to recognize a plurality of thoughts and traditions in the American past. Variation and contention among the multiple strands of American consciousness made it difficult to achieve a synthetic view of the culture in times past. Nonetheless, the relation between the many and the one continues to preoccupy historical observers. Few historians today are likely to challenge a strong emphasis on diversity among subcultures in American life. At the same time, the international primacy this country has attained—for example, as a purveyor of mass culture or the vanguard of a “war on terror”—

  again poses the question of what collective identity or cultural wholeness Americans share. As the United States looks out on the world at large, and the world looks back, who are “we”?

  James Livingston’s book provides the capstone of the series, the volume that treats “American thought and culture at the end of the twentieth century.” In the roughly twenty-five years surveyed here, the multiplicity, tension, and conflict at play throughout American history seemed to reach a high pitch in a transformation of experience and consciousness that Livingston describes as turning the world “inside out.” Historians have become accustomed to seeing the end of the twentieth century as the site of one or more profound “turns”—the “right turn” in U.S. politics signaled
by the rise of Ronald Reagan and the sudden reversal Reaganism seemed to initiate in putting “free markets” in place of “the welfare state,” as well as the “postmodern turn” that tended to undermine a trust in science, reason, progress, and moral order that was assumed to characterize U.S. culture in large part since its beginnings.

  Livingston weds these “turns” together in ways that profoundly recast what we think they meant. The political, economic, social, and cultural phenomena of the years stretching from the Reagan to the George W. Bush presidencies indicate far less than a conservative ascendancy in American life. Indeed, the apparently vehement disputes between the Left and Right over social policy as well as culture and morals more often than not mistook or masked the drift of things. In economic affairs, public authority and responsibility, as well as the social foundations of market exchange, continued to grow rather than diminish, and in the broad reach of culture, the “postmodern Left” not only secured leadership of what Livingston calls the “pilot disciplines” of academic liberal arts but also proved more in tune with popular sensibility than conservatives did—despite the common charge of “elitism” laid against cultural innovators.

  In penetrating analyses of some of the most popular art forms at the end of the twentieth century—horror movies, comics and cartoons, TV shows depicting vampires and their slayers, and hip-hop music—Livingston shows how common it has become for Americans to confront, and in some ways to accommodate, the erosion of customary barriers and boundaries that long defined the private family and the public world, masculinity and femininity, sexual norms and “deviance,” the human body and alien creatures, the nation and global affairs. All those things customarily kept apart as “inside” or “outside” the comfort zones of American experience have been shuffled together, and remarkably, American culture has gamely striven for new kinds of balance amid uncertainty. That does not mean that new and unsettling problems are easily resolved, as Livingston explains in his sober reflections on the course and coming future of U.S. relations with the wider world. But it does show that American thought and culture remains malleable and ever changing in the realm of flux it inhabits.

  Preface

  The World Elsewhere Is Not

  The title of this book is a variation on a theme found in the Old Testament—

  in Isaiah, it’s in the epigraphs—and developed in Christopher Hill’s great book of 1972, The World Turned Upside Down. The prophet Isaiah predicted what servants and slaves everywhere called “jubilee,” the redistribution of property that would change everything. The historian Hill wrote about a “revolt within the [English] Revolution” of the 1640s, which, if successful, would have enfranchised more people and more rights than resulted from that extraordinary upheaval. This movement of radicals, of Levellers and Diggers, of beggars, vagabonds, poets, and thieves—this movement, he wrote, “might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, [and it] might have disestablished the state church and rejected the protestant ethic.”

  There are no “might have beens” in this book. I write about the cultural and intellectual revolution that changed North America and the world after 1975. It was so successful—it was so formative, causative, and measurable—

  that we can take it for granted, and then look past it, to the point where some of us even argue that conservatism took over American thought and culture after 1980.

  But this cultural and intellectual revolution did turn the world inside out, in three related senses. First, it complicated the ways we could perceive the relation between our insides and all of what we normally designate as outside. The difference between private and public, for example, became a problem rather than an assumption at the end of the twentieth century. So, too, did the distinction between foreign and domestic policy get blurred when the post-Vietnam all-volunteer army rebuilt itself as a social program dedicated to affirmative action and when terrorists without state sponsors became a central feature of globalization. Meanwhile, excremental visions became the norm of performance art and the mainstream of cartoon politics as anal probes from outer space and the Santa (Satan?) from the sewer challenged Disney’s constituency—what had been expelled from our bodies somehow became the raw materials of our revised interiors, that is, the stuff of our thinking.

  To put it another way, the personal became political, and vice versa, but not just because feminists said it should—although we must attribute the original slogan and its radical connotations to feminism. We were all confused by the shifting boundaries between the so-called private sector and the so-called public sectors whether we were speaking of economic growth or the relation between our inner selves and our outward appearances. We still are. For example, we still ask, can public spending stand in for private investment? Should the government supplement or replace private enterprise? Does the specter of socialism still haunt the American imagination? We still ask, what is the outer limit of the family, a presumably private domicile? And what is a family, anyway? Where’s Dad, the family guy? We still ask, can the government invade this familial space and tell the females that they don’t have control over their own bodies?

  Second, the cultural and intellectual revolution of the late twentieth century brought the world that was once elsewhere into the room and onto the screen where we were watching TV or sending e-mail and later Googling ourselves. Either we turned the machine off or we became citizens of the whole world, no borders allowed. There we were, face to virtual face, with every imaginable kind of person—also every imaginable kind of cyborg, vampire, angel, or demon—and what did we do? We let them into our lives and turned the world inside out. Even the difference between animals and human beings or between machines and men seemed to dissolve at the end of the twentieth century.

  Third, and this may be the same thing, all those strangers, all those Others out there—cyborgs, simians, animals, Asians, immigrants, women, homosexuals, people with disabilities, whatever—suddenly acquired substantive identities that required our very close attention and our scrupulously ethical attitude toward their prospects. The world once elsewhere had moved into the cultural space where white, male heterosexuality had long been the norm. All these believably sentient beings were close by, and they were demanding their rights, even the animals and the immigrants and the homosexuals.

  This book explores American thought and culture in the aftermath of the fabled 1960s. The argument is that the tendencies and sensibilities we associate with that moment decisively shaped intellectual agendas and cultural practices—from the Congressional Budget Office to the cartoon politics of Disney movies—in the 1980s and 1990s. By this accounting, the so-called Reagan Revolution was not only, or even mainly, a conservative event. By the same accounting, the Left, having seized the commanding heights of higher education, was never in danger of losing the so-called culture wars. At the end of the twentieth century, in short, the United States was much less conservative than it had been in 1975.

  This book takes supply-side economics and South Park equally seriously. It treats Freddy Krueger, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ronald Reagan, and Judith Butler as comparable cultural icons. In doing so, it formally recapitulates the aesthetic movement specific to the late-twentieth-century moment of “postmodernism”—when artists, writers, and intellectuals working in every imaginable medium, from movies and TV to novels and newspapers, adjourned any remaining distinction between high and low culture. In doing so, that is, by depicting this moment on its own terms, the book recaptures the complexity, the pathos, the idiocy, and the achievements of a past that is not even past.

  Everything from skeletons to sexuality came out of the closet toward the end of the twentieth century, and we’re still wondering what to do about it. This book could help us decide.

  Acknowledgments

  My principal debt in writing this book is to Howard Brick, who urged me to write it and then helped shape it with incisive comments. Thanks also to his coeditor, Le
wis Perry, whose later reading reshaped it. I hasten to add that neither would endorse all my arguments.

  I wrote this book with four audiences in mind, and I would like to acknowledge them here as components of my ideal reader. The first is the students who never got “to the present” in the courses they took in high school and college because their teachers never made it that far. The second is the baby boomers who experienced this late-twentieth-century moment as I did, but probably never got around to analyzing it. The third audience is the literate reading public that craves serious discussion of movies, music, and politics, probably in that order. The fourth is the divided fraction of the reading public that wonders why antirealist art forms like cartoons and comics have such a hold on the American imagination.

  Friends, colleagues, former students, and even relatives spent a lot of their valuable time reading and discussing the book while it was in progress. They have helped me to strike the right tone in writing for a broad, nonacademic audience, I believe, and they have meanwhile contested my conclusions, corrected my errors, and laughed at my jokes. I am very grateful, then, to Mike Fennell, Christopher Fisher, Keith Haynes, Bruce Robbins, Marc Chandler, Joan Wallach Scott, Brian Connelly, Jonathan Arac, Patricia Rossi, Jackson Lears, Shannen Dee Williams, Kristoffer Shields, Matthew Roth, Andrew Livingston, Leland Livingston, Julia Rossi Livingston, Matthew Friedman, Gregory J. Renoff, Ross Posnock, Louis Ferleger, Elise Salem, Colin Koopman, the Department of American Studies at Rutgers University, and readers of my blog, www.politicsandletters.com, where I tried out ideas and parts of chapters. My bandmate Matt Friedman also helped with the illustrations and saved me from stupid mistakes in writing about music and singing about architecture.

  I inflicted several chapters on three undergraduate classes at Rutgers University, where I teach, because college students are part of the book’s intended audience. Among the undergraduates who were quite critical, but also quite helpful, with their comments and who supplied references from their own research, are Al-Zamar McKinney, Jonathan Lackey, Tracy Dimond, Chris Mindich, Robert Knowles, Sabrina Taylor, Brian Katinas, Dan Devine, Jason Yellen, Elizabeth Jacobs, Mike Vuono, Susanna Policros, and Dylan Errickson. I am also grateful to the students in my spring 2006 course on twentieth-century American culture, who endured the spectacularly awful movie I Spit on Your Grave, or Day of the Woman, then discussed it with wit and intelligence.