The Hitchcock Symptom: Duster Flight Patterns around “Production Values.” A response to Griffiths

 
A bon mot of my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter: She was watching a video of The Nutcracker ballet, of which she’s a great fan, and she said, “There’s Drosselmeyer!”—that is, the mysterious, wizard-like friend of the family who brings the nutcracker doll and the other toys to life and who, in most productions (and in the E.T.A. Hoffman tale on which the ballet is based) wears a patch over one eye. “How do you know?” I asked. She replied, in that tone of explaining the obvious that even three-year-olds can adopt with their parents, “Because he’s wearing a disguise!” That’s it! We recognize the character not in spite of the disguise, but because the disguise itself is the mark of his identity.
 
Something of this logic seems to inform the practice of theory today in general and the position held in theory by Alfred Hitchcock in particular. Why does Hitchcock occupy such a privileged place for theoretical analysis of all kinds? There are 726 entries for Hitchcock in the MLA Bibliography. John Ford gets 617; Godard, 459; Fassbinder, 328; Welles, 302; Truffaut, 212; Kurosawa, 160; Douglas Sirk, 112; Sam Fuller, 31. We recognize Hitchcock because he is always, obviously, in disguise. A disguise enables us to interpret it, and there is also pleasure in disguise itself. But why Hitchcock? Why not Ford? Why not Sirk? In Ford, the ironies and ambiguities are too straightforward. It turns out that there’s no disguise after all. And in Sirk, there’s too much opera, too many arias, not enough movement.
 
When one looks at Hitchcock—at least as much of the Hitchcock industry sees it—one sees not a commentary on America, on the functioning of American ideology, but an exemplar in miniature of America in its totality, in its processes. At the same time, the Hitchcock style—its disguise which is also its essence—detaches the film from the social whole to which it refers. It stands beside the whole, or in a privileged space within it, working its small formal engines in ways that replicate cultural energies. It is both metonymy and synecdoche: the part standing for the whole, the perfect analogy standing just beside the unwieldy original. What is extraordinary is how perfect the correspondence. All that we always wanted to know (it is said) is contained in the magic box, or statuette—and Žižek didn’t know the half of it. And the apparent insouciance, read as self-reflection—the self-reflection of disguise—is the measure of its authenticity.
 
This has long been a hermeneutic strategy. In modern literary criticism, Erich Auerbach’s close readings reproduced the coherent world-views motivating the texts of an astonishing range of historical periods. More recently, New Historicist readings took a particular text or historical anecdote as emblematic of the social relations of its moment. The metonymic-synecdochic approach makes for beautiful, compact readings–with the somewhat paradoxical benefit, especially for the New Historicists, that a method that stresses the importance of the fragment and the ruptured character of historical narrative finally produces compelling accounts of the social whole, however dirempted, and makes its alterity readable.
 
Most of us profess a hermeneutics of suspicion. Do we need also a suspicion of the suspicion? Has our suspicion become credulous? Do we seek out what seems most obviously in disguise, and say, “There’s the key; the social totality must be there in miniature”? Perfunctory suspicion is exerted toward the working of the dominant ideology—the subject, gender, capital, empire—but the assumptions and terms of the methodology proceed unaffected. Analysis of the text—taken as part, as index, as symptom, as performer or enactor, as formal analogy—renders the professional truth of the historical moment. But how do we know this? We must have some sense of the truth of the historical moment in order to believe that the text in question is indeed rendering it, and this prior understanding of historical truth often comes primarily from contemporary theory. The truth drawn from the cultural text—call it “Hitchcock” —confirms what we already know from the theoretical texts of Jameson, Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari, et al. What we know about the past, in this process, is what we know about the cultural text as reconstructed in disguise by ourselves, and we are drawn to those texts whose disguises are most clever and most obvious. To return briefly from the field to the landing strip, my point of departure and eccentric orbit in these comments is the essay “Production Values: Fordism and Formalism in North by Northwest,” which reads Hitchcock’s North by Northwest as a coded representation and partial enactment of certain codes of capitalism at a moment of transition from a Fordist economy of production to a post-Fordist economy of the sign and of flexible accumulation. This essay provides much insight and knowledge. Its elucidation of secondary literatures is impressive. Its discovery of and commentary on the excised scene where the corpse falls out of the car on the assembly line is in itself pricelessly entertaining and illuminating. The essay deserves to take its place as Hitchcock entry 727 in the MLA Bibliography.
 
My dusting of the essay concerns its premises and method, which exemplify a tendency in contemporary critical writing: first, to take a cultural text as perfect exemplar of a social totality; second, to base knowledge of the social totality of a past historical moment on theoretical writings of the present. I am not arguing that North by Northwest does not perform many of the particular tasks that Griffiths attributes to it, just that it seems suspect to me that it does so as neatly, that there exists such seamless correspondence between text, culture, and theory—and that these must consequently be conceived as formal totalities in order for such correspondence to occur.
 
One pressing form these problems take in “Production Values” is that of anachronism, in, I think, two senses. As Griffiths acknowledges on a couple of occasions, the post-Fordist flexible accumulation economic model that the essay argues is presented in North by Northwest had not yet begun in the late 1950s. The film must be, as the essay notes, prescient. Indeed, flexible accumulation is something of a tease, because although North by Northwest “foregrounds an awareness of the political economic order of flexible accumulation” and “limns a pre-emergent post-Fordist terrain,” it is not Griffiths’s “contention that North by Northwest reveals an already post-Fordist landscape, especially because the film precedes the transformation to post-Fordist modes of flexible accumulation as [David] Harvey’s chronology would have it” (Griffiths). What then is the prescience? It is in part a matter of form. Hitchcock’s noted valorization of style over content renders the codes both of capital and of film as “signs to be consumed in their own right, traces whose ultimate form and reference is to profitable spectacle” (Griffiths). This last point seems to me valid, but it is not descriptive of flexible production which, as Harvey writes in a passage partially cited by Griffiths,
 

rests on flexibility with respect to labour processes, labour markets, products, and patterns of consumption. It is characterized by the emergence of entirely new sectors of production, new ways of providing financial services, new markets, and, above all, greatly intensified rates of commercial, technological, and organizational innovation. It has entrained rapid shifts in the patterning of uneven development, both between sectors and geographical regions . . . It has also entailed a new round of what I shall call ‘time-space compression’ . . . in the capitalist world – the time horizons of both private and public decision-making have shrunk, while satellite communication and declining transport costs have made it increasingly possible to spread those decisions immediately over an ever wider and variegated space.
 

(147)

 
Flexible accumulation does not do away with production, nor with industrial labor. Global markets of labor and consumption, and the instant mobility of capital, doomed many of the assembly lines of Detroit, but certainly did not end the assembly line or the sweatshop worldwide. North by Northwest may be prescient regarding the obliviousness of American economic policy to these developments, but it is certainly not prescient as to the developments. Nor does Griffiths argue that it is. The argument takes a different course, which I discuss below, yet flexible accumulation, or its “pre-emergence,” remains a point of reference. It is a consequence, I think, of imagining a cultural text synecdochally, as standing for a totality. In this case, the totality is not only of its own historical moment, its “Zeitgeist” (a problematic term itself which must be examined), but also includes our contemporary relation to that moment. A cultural text will reflect the way cultural relations are understood. It will assume the prescience grafted onto it. It is important that the text be contemporary, yet it cannot know what we know. Fifty years separate North by Northwest from us, but we want it to teach us what we are. Historical knowledge rebounds against the historical text and returns as instruction. The theorist exports a terminology to the past, deposits it into the genetic structure of the text under examination, and when the text, under repeated readings, reproduces, it has mutated and now speaks our language.
 
The conjuring of a “Zeitgeist” through the exportation of theory across time is the first anachronism. Griffiths as much as acknowledges this in his reference to Derrida on the fictitiousness of any unitary notion of capitalism. But if the “pre-emergence” of flexible accumulation is something of a McGuffin in “Production Values,” the principal direction of the argument presents a second anachronism. Griffiths mainly describes the way North by Northwest indicates a shift in American capitalism from the primacy of production to that of consumption, the role of advertising in accomplishing this transformation, and the increasing commodification of the sign in both economic and political realms. Again, Griffiths claims that North by Northwest provides a “glimpse” into these matters. And again, I would argue, this glimpse should be seen as the transmitting and translating of contemporary theory—in this case, Deleuze and Guattari’s work on the codings of capital—onto Hitchcock’s text. This constitutes a structural anachronism that seems to me typical of much contemporary academic writing. But this move gives rise to a specific empirical anachronism as well.
 
Griffiths’s primary interlocutors or authorities in his discussion of the shift from an economy of production to one of consumption and the concomitant growth of the importance of media are Deleuze and Guattari and the tradition of thinking about capitalism and representation in which they write: that is, the primarily European line of thinking that, after Marx, would include Heidegger on technology and the “world picture,” Horkheimer and Adorno on the culture industry, Debord on the “society of the spectacle,” Baudrillard on the political economy of the sign and on simulation, and American writers in conversation with these, most prominently Jameson. I do not for a moment contest the power and importance of this intellectual line. But in taking this particular tendency as definitive, focusing on Anti-Oedipus, this reading sees North by Northwest as the premonition and incarnation of contemporary theory. But in fact, an almost obsessive concern with the power of advertising and mass media is not recent. It was pervasive in mainstream American sociology and popular thought from the mid-1950s through the early 1960s. A short list of works concerned with the power of advertising in this period includes Marshall McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride (1951), C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite (1956),Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957), John Kenneth Galbraiths’s The Affluent Society (1958), Daniel Boorstein’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), and McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964). Subsequently, a scholarly historiography of advertising emerged in work by Michael Schudson (1984), Roland Marchand (1985), Jackson Lears (1994), and Thomas Frank (1997). And one point historians make consistently is that advertising had already achieved an ideological force in the U.S. by the 1920s.
 
Hitchcock’s thematizing of the ad industry and the consumer society circa 1956, then, is very much of its time. It is not prescient, nor is poststructuralist theory the first place one might look to describe or contextualize it. I would ask, then, two questions that seem to me less anachronistic than those posed in “Production Values.” First, what is the dialogue between North by Northwest and its contemporaneous discourses of advertising, consumption, and capitalism, and what does the film add to these discourses? And secondly, what can Hitchcock tell us about poststructuralist theory? If there is to be dialogue between Hitchcock and Deleuze and Guattari, it must go both ways and not be a mode of ventriloquism and projection. Are there things that Hitchcock knows or performs that Deleuze and Guattari do not or cannot? Otherwise, Hitchcock’s text just confirms what we already think we know. Or, in terms proposed by Raymond Williams, how can we improve on methods of cultural analysis “expressed in variants of correspondence or homology” (or, as I have put it here, of synecdoche) which must “depend on a known history, a known structure, known products“? (emphasis added, 106).
 
I would start from the premise that I don’t know what “late capitalist style” is and that I don’t even know if there is such a thing. If there is a late capitalist style, or styles, I don’t know what relations they have to the ways that the capitalism of their time functions. These terms and relations remain to be explored. I would be skeptical of analyses that propose some homogeneity among the cultural-political-ideological products and forces of an historical moment. If analysis of a given text reveals such homogeneity (and with the text as its synecdoche), I would wonder what is being omitted or obscured. We should invoke the powers of criticism’s anti-trust division and break up the Zeitgeist. But can we then create larger structures of understanding and not be left just to cull through documents and remnants in a pulsion of agnostic empiricism? And can we analyze resonant texts like North by Northwest to rethink what makes them resonate?
 
I believe we can, and have sketched out a few suggestions already: to construct dialogues among contemporaneous texts (e.g., between Hitchcock and contemporaneous critics of advertising); to consider professional historiography in contextualizing cultural products; and to engage in two-way dialogues between contemporary theory and historical artefacts. In doing these things, the cultural artefact may not confirm our presuppositions, but may surprise us, exposing gaps and contradictions in our senses both of the artefact’s historical field and of ours. I speak from my own presuppositions, of course, which echo Marcuse’s argument against homogenous readings, that the “inner logic of the work of art terminates in the emergence of another reason, another sensibility, which defy the rationality and sensibility incorporated in the dominant social institutions” (7); or, as Derrick Attridge puts it, “that which is, at a given moment, outside the horizon provided by the culture for thinking, understanding, imagining, feeling, perceiving” (19). There are texts that do these things more than others. If an historical moment is relatively lacking in such texts, or if the most significant texts of that moment do not appear to exhibit these features of cultural alterity, that would be noteworthy in itself and should be a subject for analysis. Is this in fact the case with the 1950s or with Hitchcock? And if a relative homogeneity can indeed be demonstrated, how can it be explained, for it should not be considered a norm but an aberration. That may be my own projection, based on my love for a certain poetics of cultural history.
 
Am I calling for, or recalling, a materialist approach to cultural critique? I’m not certain. The terminology has so much history that I’m not sure where I would enter it. I want to invoke a variety of texts from different historical moments—I’d be happy to call it a “constellation.” I want to see the cultural artefact embedded in its time and also arguing with other historical moments, and especially with us, whenever we may be listening, which, of course, is always “now.” The work of art is a muscular node. It is impressed and presses back. It is a site of conflict for the ideological tendencies of its time, neither necessarily affirmative nor subversive, but active, knowing on many levels and also not knowing. Seen in this sense, North by Northwest might be in a position to show us something that we don’t know rather than confirm something that we imagine we do.