Dion Dennis

Department of Criminal Justice, History, and Political Science
Texas A&M International University
diond@igc.apc.org

 

I. Tales of Lost Glory

 

In “American Tune,” Paul Simon gave an early if somewhat hazy voice to what is now a prolific and impassioned motif in premillennial American economic and political life. For many, “what’s gone wrong” is the sum total effect of global structural changes upon the once mighty U.S. economy. It is the mass exodus to the Third World of once lucrative manufacturing and management jobs from the U.S. and the subsequent replacement of the promise of stable and secure careers with “McJobs” (Coupland 5). Concurrently, millions of middle-management positions have disappeared below the incessant waves of corporate “downsizing.” What’s gone wrong, writes political pundit Kevin Phillips, is that:

 

People were starting to sense that the so-called middle-class squeeze was really much more: a sign of America’s declining [economic] position . . . [and] a threat to their own futures and their children’s. (Boiling Point 163)

 

And a fair number of those domestic jobs that were neither expunged nor exported across political boundaries in the ’80s and ’90s have reemerged at the American socio-economic margins–that is, at the urban core–in Hong-Kong-like or Sao Paulosque scenes, as described by Roger Rouse:

 

In a hidden sweatshop in downtown Los Angeles, Asian and Latino migrants produce auto parts for a factory in Detroit. As the parts leave the production line, they are stamped “Made in Brazil.” (Mexican Migration 8)

 

Auto parts are not the only simulated Brazilian import. As Barlett and Steele note, income stratification patterns in the U.S. between 1959-1989 show a rapid acceleration of the gap between rich and poor. This gap occurs at the expense of a rapidly shrin king and disproportionately taxed middle-class. That is, much of the middle class is economically downwardly mobile (America: What Went Wrong?). Coupland dubs this mass process Brazilification:

 

Brazilification: The widening gulf between the rich and poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes. (Generation X ix)

 

All of this is a long way from the American techno-utopian workers paradise portrayed in the famed 16mm industrial cartoon, King Joe (1949). “King Joe” was an animated factory worker whose work and leisure activities were meant to be an ideol ogical sign. They depict the average (white-male, blue collar) American “Joe” as the most productive and best materially compensated worker in world history. He was an early icon of the American Empire that emerged in the post-WWII period. According to Walter Russell Mead:

 

The basis of the American Empire after 1945 was economic. The military might that seems so awesome is the result of wealth. America rose to power because the rest of the world was exhausted. As the world recovered from the war, it was inevitable that America’s relative power would weaken. (Mortal Splendor 54)

 

Since 1973, the material equivalents of King Joe and his realm have all but vanished. His kingdom now serves as social history and the ground for parody, nostalgia and simulation. As Europe and East Asia recovered from the effects of global and/or civil wars, new or resurrected industries, many nurtured by U.S. Cold War deterrence and containment strategies, provided stiff competition in a swiftly globalizing marketplace. As rival corporations concentrated their resources in transnational mergers and a cquisitions, the feasibility of setting in motion mobile production, capital and information strategies at sites across the globe seemed as enticing as it was necessary. In the Third World, U.S., European and Asian transnational corporations (TNCs) devel oped an economic environment characterized by low wages and low corporate tax rates. Unions were absent or ineffective and corrupt. Child labor could be easily and inexpensively procured. Environmental and/or safety regulations were non-existent or of ten easily circumvented. These competitive advantages accelerated the exodus of rust-belt manufacturing jobs. And with the mobility that the digitalization of business activity provides, the New World Order can be construed as a period of shifting flows of globalized capital and migrant bodies along information highways of magnetic oxide.

 

As Main Street yielded to the Mall and Woolworth’s succumbed to Walmart, the factories that typified the heavy industry of the Northeast were shuttered. Decrepit brick automobile plants and rusting steel mills, surrounded by sagging cyclone fences and ba rbed wire, littered deserted urban tableaus as if they were the modernist ruins of King Joe. Two or three generations of Eastern European immigrants may have been steel workers or auto assemblers. But in the new international labor market, Gary, Indiana became a mausoleum for the Protestant ethic. And Flint, Michigan achieved cinematic celebrity through the sad but tough eyes of Fred Roth, a county sheriff’s eviction agent (Roger and Me).

 

In the early post-WWII period, the idea and practice of social mobility had been a simple thing. Social and economic mobility was marked by a generational and spatial event such as a move into a “better” community. Mobility meant a unidirectional move f rom the crowded tenements of the inner city outward in concentric rings to emerging bungalow suburbs. (Often, this took the form of overt and collective acts of racism known as “white flight.”) Alternatively, this notion of mobility also refers to the de population of small family farms and rural towns, as youthful and not-so-youthful labor-seeking masses, displaced by the industrial efficiencies of agribusiness, emptied into the world’s service and industrial megacenters. Migration across space was tied to aspirations of upward economic mobility or the push for survival. As Rouse points out, each of several variants of the spatial concept of migration implies the idea of movement between two well-defined communities. The migrant’s dominant allegiance is assumed, in the long run, to belong to one of these distinct communities only (Mexican Migration 10-13).

 

But this assumption, Rouse claims, is inadequate to describe current formations of social reproduction. It fails to account for the complex impacts of major transglobal circuits on the way we produce, reproduce, transmit and circulate goods, services, im ages and information, relations of power, economic benefits, bodies and social roles. We now traverse ambiguous and conflicted sites shaped by vectors of converging and diverging economies. We are hailed by intersecting and paradoxical constructions of meaning and identities. And, in a world that is simultaneously more totalizing and chaotic (the future seems unpredictable but Coca-Cola and Disney motifs are everywhere), alienation mixes with anxiety, resentment resonates with resignation and hope bond s with nostalgia on a mostly downward socio-economic escalator. It may well be, as Christopher Lasch (The Minimal Self) and R.J. Barnet and John Cavanaugh (Global Dreams) have suggested, that entire populations are now deemed ec onomically expendable. To understand how these economic marginality effects have occurred is to grapple with complexity. This marginality is a product of an intricate and mobile hardware mix of robotics, computerization, and automation of modes of produ ction and control. It has been nurtured by the extensive use of subcontractors, suppliers and temporary workers (many of the latter comprise neo-cottage industries of ersatz “independent contractors”). Spurred by the high debt levels of the leveraged bu yout (LBO) frenzy of the mid and late 1980s, the impetus to simultaneously raise productivity, while cutting personnel and production costs, allowed for internal structural reconfiguration of businesses that maximized output per employee over the short te rm while minimizing the total number of employees. One result has been an incessant wave of layoffs across industrial and information-based corporations. Another outcome is that the application of microchip-based technologies has already transformed fie lds of power on the global economic and political stages. It has reshaped the direction and purpose of higher education. It has essentially altered the fields of work, imagination, self-expression and play in the culture industries. To understand somet hing of its genealogy is to recognize the postmodern reconfiguration of fields of work, culture and knowledge.

 

II. Fear of Losing: Security-Seeking Subjects Constituted at the Altar of Risk

 

Among the objects of the law, security is the only one which embraces the future; subsistence, abundance, equality, may be regarded for a moment only; but security implies extension in point of time with respect to all the benefits to which it is applied. Security is therefore the principal object. (Jeremy Bentham, cited in Gordon 19)

 

One Arizona State University professor, working recently with upper-division undergraduates in a course on the Politics of Social Movements, asked his students to pen their inscriptions of danger (with the idea that social movements are, in some sense, a response to perceived dangers and, by extension, shape security concerns). The excerpts below illustrate Bentham’s point:

 

(Student A): I fear that I may become a nameless cog in a corporate machine . . . that I will become a wealth creating device used by some at the expense of others . . . that I will be judged only on my ability to feed the wealthy and powerful . . . because there will be no other way to maintain a reasonable standard of living . . .

 

(Student B): The principal danger . . . is the uncertainty of my future. In a society which is dominated by change one is never able to predict or control their future with reliability. Going through proper channels and procedures no longer guarantees [anything]. . . . Will I join the quickly growing fraternity of unemployed university graduates?

 

(Student C): The major danger is the pressure to quickly graduate while there is a shortage of jobs. Loan payments start stacking, the pressure is on to land a good paying job and your parents are staring at you as if you accomplished nothing but managed to spend half their life savings. “Go to college,” “invest some time in your future through education.” What happened to the old cliché about a college degree assuring happiness and prosperity?

 

(Student D): [I fear] the immense uncertainty of facing the growing, intense competition for fewer and fewer jobs . . .

 

(Student E): I’m worried that when I finally have my degree the world will have progressed to the point where you have to have a degree to be a “ditch digger.”

 

(Student F): My danger lies in the fear of failure due to circumstances beyond my control. I have always been responsible . . . . However, when outside forces impose upon my life, I find it difficult and frustrating. (Ashley)

 

These are tangible concerns, about the extension of personal security, into the future that are largely rooted in structural changes in the U.S. economy. Although U.S. economic productivity has increased seventy-five percent since 1970, this gain was real ized with a five percent net reduction in the labor force (“The End of Jobs” 48). This growth in output has been the combined result of belated responses, such as wage and work-rule concessions on the part of unions in response to fierce global competiti on; organizational restructuring in the wake of LBOs; the entrance of Japanese firms and heteroglot capital into the U.S. real estate, financial and labor markets and the productive application of electronic and digital technologies to previously labor-in tensive tasks. And there are no signs that the inverse relationship between material productivity and employment levels will soon abate. Not surprisingly, the expectation of downward socioeconomic mobility is now widely perceived as the norm.

 

Concurrently, electronic and digital technologies have despatialized work sites while the functional divisions between a domestic residence (home) and work dwindle. All the while, U.S. workers confront vigorous transnational competition against less expe nsive skilled intellectual labor and semi-skilled product labor. Similarly, the diffusion of media ensembles and McDonaldization of the planet create struggles for the survival of pre-electronic cultures. In all these scenes, complex and visceral senses of loss, anger, disaffection, alienation and economic marginality present new problems for older and newer regimes of Security. One key alteration in the objects of Security is the shifting of risk-management and security concerns away from notions of “generalized risk” spread throughout a population toward those that reinscribe the Self as primary bearer of an individualized risk. This is the (philosophically) neo-liberal notion of Self as a unique site of enterprise (espoused by both Rush Limbaugh a nd Bill Clinton):

 

Work for the worker means the use of resources of skills, aptitude and competence which comprise the worker’s human capital, to obtain earnings [that are] the revenue on that capital. Human capital is composed of an innate component of bodily and genetic equipment and an acquired component of aptitudes produced as a result of investment in the provision of appropriate environmental stimuli such as education. Economically, an aptitude is defined as a quasi-machine for the production of a value . . . akin to a consumer durable which has the peculiarity of being inseparable from its owner. The individual is in a novel sense not just an enterprise but the entrepreneur of himself. (Gordon 44)

 

The Self becomes the primary site for continuous self-surveillance and self-construction. The notion of the Self as human capital is part of the project that globally reinscribes social reality in terms of market logics (and away from notions of race, et hnicity and group or place-based definitions, except as a demographic segment to be worked upon by the seductions of consumption). As a bicapitalized “good,” the Self circulates as a mobile commodity. Deeming the Self as the site of self-enterprise also suggests that one is constantly absorbed in self-reconstruction, self-maintenance and self-preservation (of Self as a capital investment). It is the conceptual brace for the application of regimes of oversight such as Total[izing] Quality Management (o r CQI–Continuous Quality Improvement) on self-presentations, where standardization of self-presentation is the object and goal of TQM in service organizations. It informs Bill Clinton’s calls for “permanent retraining.” It is the key assumption in the shifting paradigms of risk that hail subjects to take “responsibility for preventive care.” It resonates with Peter Drucker’s recent pronouncements on the current attributes of the corporation.

 

For Drucker, corporations are now “temporary institutions.” Vigorous organizations are now inherently destabilizing (and this is a desirable state of affairs). As a Harvard Business Review abstract icily puts it:

 

The organization as well as the knowledgeable individual must acquire knowledge every several years or become obsolete. (New Society)

 

As noted elsewhere, there is an affinity between these world views, contemporary sociobiological theories and older forms of Social Darwinism (License and Commodification). Some proponents, such as Michael Rothschild, assert that hyperindust rial capitalism, with its emphasis on an information economy, is an isomorphic expression of our “natural” genetic makeup. That is, for Rothschild, capitalism is not merely a human construct but the essential expression of life itself (Bionomics xi-xii). For those on an unstable or downwardly mobile economic vector, this is a harsh judgment.

 

It is these shifts in economic, perceptual and demographic fields that have Generation Xers so worried. Is it possible, then, in the context of a hyperglobalizing economic and information infrastructure; a despatialized and derealized physical and cultur al environment; an ascending “fin de millennium” consciousness and among a demographic bulge of “Grumpies” (grown-up mature professionals) and aging baby-boomers facing economic decline and intimations of mortality, that a mythology of a “Golden Age” has emerged? For Blonsky

 

American mythology is now in transition from that of being a sense of a fresh beginning to that of looking back at a golden age. Once we lived in a shining city in a time of perfection. This is why, taking a trivial example, our ‘business books’ so emphasize quality, performance, all the other sorry signifiers. Roman Jakobson wrote that ‘a mask is not primarily what it represents but what it transforms, that is what it chooses either to represent or omit . . . or conceal.’ We always have to ask how a myth is able to deny what it is affirming while simultaneously remaining affirmative. Let there be quality, excellence, all the positivities, say the business books, meaning: there was [once] strength, there [once] was vigor, there [once] was coherence. (American Mythologies 500-501)

 

And for Barbara Stern, a marketing professor at Rutgers, this is but one expression of historical nostalgia:

 

Historical nostalgia expresses the desire to retreat from contemporary life by returning to a time in the past viewed as superior to the present. No matter whether the long-gone era is represented as richer and more complex or simpler and less corrupted, it is positioned as an escape from the here and now. (Historical and personal nostalgia 14)

 

That is, historical nostalgia is an idiom of resistance, perhaps as escape, although it is implicated in more complex and active political fields than mere escapism. Bill Clinton has groused about such resistances (as a political problem) in two October 1993 speeches. Not so coincidentally, the subject of those speeches were claims about the changing shape of security concerns:

 

We are living in a time of profound change. No one fully see[s] the shape of the change or imagine[s] with great precision the end of it. But we know a lot about what works and what doesn’t. And we know that if we do not embrace this change and make it our friend . . . it will become our enemy. And yet all around I see people resisting change, turning inward and away from change. And I ask myself why.

 

When I listen . . . I hear a longing for yesterday. But I tell you my friends . . . yesterday is yesterday. If we try to recapture it, we will only lose tomorrow. (Remarks at UNC)

 

But Clinton is not just contesting a mere politics of memory. If it were so, marketing his programs would be a much easier job. But what Clinton faces is a kind of hyper-real pastische. For example, Stephanie Coontz, in her book on 20th Century U.S. fa milies, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, describes the arrangement of those imagistic television fragments that shape her students’ perceptions of “the traditional family”:

 

[Stereotypical] visions exert a powerful pull and with good reason, given the fragility of many modern communities. The problem is not only that these visions bear a suspicious resemblance to reruns of old television series, but that the scripts of different shows have been mixed up: June Cleaver suddenly has a Grandpa Walton dispensing advice in her kitchen; Donna Stone, vacuuming the living room in her inevitable pearls and high heels, is no longer married to a busy modern pediatrician but to a small town sheriff who, like Andy Taylor of “The Andy Griffith Show,” solves community problems though informal, old-fashioned common sense. (8-9)

 

These recombinant video scripts occupy a significant part of the global cultural imagination. As such, they are active in fields of cultural, political and economic discourse and desire. The simulated world of an endless “Nick at Night” or TBS presents- –The Dick Van Dyke Show or The Brady Bunch–provide the building blocks of an active social imaginaire. As Appadurai suggests:

 

The past is now not a land to return to in a simple politics of memory [but] is a synchronic warehouse of cultural scenarios, a kind of temporal central casting, to which recourse can be had as appropriate . . . .

 

The crucial point is that the U.S. is but only one node of a complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes . . . . The imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work and a form of negotiation between sites of agency and globally defined fields of possibility. (“Disjuncture” 273)

 

The imagination, as a contestable social practice, works in complex, highly active and disjunctive spheres of cultural and political signs. These signs are consumed, altered, recirculated and their meaning is constantly renegotiated. These are fields of signification through which aspects of de facto social contracts are negotiated and renegotiated. Modifying Appadurai’s taxonomy somewhat, I call these signifying fields iconospheres. And it is in our peculiar time and space of global dreams, tr ansnational corporatist practices and technological redisciplining that the promise of a reemergent Pax Americana is extended to anxious citizen-consumers in a post-sovereign world. And these promises are constructed and circulated with those iconosphere s that form the agitated nexus for the politics of signification, of which the sign of Saturn, as a promise of plentitude and security, is a prominent example.

 

III. Signifying Practices, Sovereignty and the Search for Security: The Sign of Saturn

 

For most, the globalization of the U.S. economy has generated persistent and troubling socio-economic problems. One famous problem-effect has been a destabilization of durable and legitimating American myths. For example, the decline of the American Dre am (which has been declared vanished or dead in some quarters and dismantled, diminished or reduced “to a nap” in others) has become an incessant and conspicuous motif in political discourse. Electronic and print media recite narratives of recoveries and reversals. Well-heeled think-tanks formulate ideological etiologies of character, consequences and countermeasures. Policy recommendations are then routinely dispensed on the shape of education, the family, job training or enterprise zones. For TNCs a nd their governmental allies, the task has been to recover the iconography of the American Dream as a positivity in a time of dislocation and disaccumulation. More specifically, iconocrats at TNCs and corporatist-shaped administrations cultivate a claim that transborder information and production practices do not represent the death of the American Dream. In the amended account, the American Dream is resurrected, phoenix-like, in the promised embodiment of a postindustrial, information-driven, “next gen eration” form.

 

For public relations bureaucrats (iconocrats), the “problem” is how to reorganize public fields of attitudes and perception toward acceptance of this revised American Dream in a New World Order. It is about the engineering of consent.

 

Several specific PR events and corporatist retooling projects (promising economic salvation via hypertechnological deployment) are the Saturn School of Tomorrow and GM’s Saturn subdivision. These projects, in their public relations and workplace reconfig uration practices, are part of the reorganization of economic practices and public spaces yoked, by iconocrats, to an assortment of repetitively invoked signifiers. In each, the common theme is an implicit pledge of a return to an age of economic plentit ude and technological preeminence–a “Golden Age.” Collectively, the ensemble of signifiers that may be deployed, directly or indirectly, in such representational efforts form what Kristeva called an intertext. For her, intertextuality is

 

Any text [that] is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; Any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity. (37)

 

Kristeva’s initial definition does not begin to exhaust the power and range of the notion of intertextuality, which is derived from Bakhtinian notions of dialogism and heteroglossia. (Both concepts underscore the active and constant renegotiation of the denotative and connotative meanings of signifiers in changing and mutually constitutive material and semiotic fields.) In an alternate formulation, she describes intertextuality as “the transposition of one or more multiple sign systems into another,” wi th the production of new accretions of meaning (cited in Stam et al. 204). This sense may be extended to include the reader’s grasp of the relations between a text and all the other relevant past, present and future texts. As such, the intertext of an I mperial signifier such as Saturn may include all depictions of Saturn and/or any and all possible imperial signifiers within an actively and plausibly constructed intertextual chain (Stam 205). Like Barthes’ notion of the readerly text, these various fra mes of reference provide a preassembly of (conventional) signifying units. As such, a series of intertextual frames may be constructed. These units are usually intended to bolster specific sets of meanings, suture troublesome narrative gaps and mold the direction of reader’s/viewer’s inferences about the account through a series of intertextual prompts.

 

Bakhtin’s notion of a deep generating series, developed in a response to the Soviet monthly Novy Mir in 1970, delineates a typology of sign systems and signifying practices that are relevant to the analysis of historical, intertextual semioti c field (“Response” 5). For Bakhtin, a deep generating series forms rich constellations of elaborate and highly productive (political, cultural, social) signifying systems. Deep generating series have extensive histories and a profusion of meanings and usages that routinely cross cultures, idioms, representational forms and temporal periods. Conceptually mining the layers of meaning in such deep generating series is akin to a type of linguistic and cultural archeology. The sign of Saturn, with a genea logy of two dozen centuries, is just such a deep generative series.

 

IV. “Saturnizing America”: Contexts, Texts and Intertexts

 

On the morning of Wednesday, May 22nd, 1991, President George Bush was in St. Paul, Minnesota. He began his day with a tour of an experimental magnet school, the Saturn School for Tomorrow. During the walkaround tour of the refurbished YWCA building, Bu sh, a personal computer novice, seemed mesmerized as fifth, sixth and seventh graders sat at computer terminals working on assignments. As if imitating Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, Bush repeatedly uttered “fascinating” in response to the ensembles of technolog ical largess and preadolescent skill displayed for him (Johnston). With its emphasis on computerized “Personal Growth Plans,” interactive video, word processing, modems, LEGO-LOGO robotics and Hypercards, proponents claim that learning is project-based, student-centered and active. According to Saturn teacher-proponent Thomas King:

 

[We] use the ICS Discourse System (which allows the teacher to see student answers typed at their keyboards hooked to the teacher’s computer) . . .

 

Students have access to interactive integrated learning systems (ILSs) . . . . Hundreds of lessons on reading, math, writing, science . . . are always available. . . . These ILSs pre-test and then select lessons [for students]. . . . Reports are generated for staff, students and parents . . . .

 

ILS is also tied to . . . math manipulative classes [and] whole language instruction. . . . Because of the assumption of passivity of textbooks, Saturn students almost never use them. (“The Saturn School”)

 

On that May morning, George Bush was still basking in the political afterglow of victory in the Gulf War. It was a military exploit that was perceived as the high-tech triumph of computer-guided heat seeking “smart bombs” and “patriot missiles” over seco nd-rate Soviet SCUDS. For Bush, the Saturn School of Tomorrow, with its routine use of high-technology in the service of pedagogy, was “a school for a New World Order.” Waxing enthusiastically, Bush declared that this pilot project was

 

breaking the mold, building for the next American century, reinventing, literally, starting from the bottom up to build revolutionary new schools, not with bricks and mortars, but with questions and ideas and determination. We’re looking at every possible way to [reinvent] schools while still keeping our eyes on the results. (MacNeil/Lehrer)

 

For Bush, just as the technology-based Gulf War victory had “finally gotten that monkey [of moral and performative doubt provoked by the Vietnam War] off our back” (Bush 1991), the application of such computerized ensembles to presumably intractable and s ystemic educational problems would provide comparably swift and productive results. Such results would dispel those open questions of moral malaise, economic insecurity and performative deficits that beset the next generation of Americans. That is, Bush ‘s sense of education is instrumentalist and techno-utopian. His notion of desirable educational horizons appears to consist of the social production of a durable political allegiance best expressed through the superior technical competence of citizen-su bjects. The idea of education as critical reflection seems noticeably absent. For Bush, war and education are but dual aspect of a single project funneled through a common technological imperative:

 

(IMAGE)

The American soldiers manning our Patriot stations perform such complex tasks with unerring accuracy. And they, along with the children in our schools today, are part of the generation that will put unparalleled American technology to use as a tool for change. (Remarks at Raytheon)

[Quicktime clip (6.0 MB)]

 

Through the matrix of Bush’s rhetoric on the relations between technology, education and war, several points are worth mentioning. Saturn, as a technologically imbued sign, is a marker of a project of self-restoration. (This is signified by the phrases of “revolutionary new schools and the determination employed in building [them].”) And, for Bush, the Saturn School of Tomorrow is a desirable and innovative prototype for securely anchoring the project of civic rejuvenation in schools. (This is signifi ed by the positive connotation of “mold-breaking.”) Furthermore, in the second excerpt (from the Raytheon Speech) Bush, in his lavish praise of American techno-competence, condensed the identities of soldiers and schoolchildren (“soldiers along with chil dren”) as mutually engaged in the service of the patriotic by way of the technological. The intertext formed by these statements is meant to signify a redemptive recouping of American might through manifestations of techno-efficiency. (This is signified by the phrase “[they] deployed Patriot missiles with unerring accuracy.” In doing so, they “put unparalleled American technology” in service of the “next American Century.”) And who are they? Soldiers and children, exemplars of institutionally docile and technically efficient Patriots (all of them–citizens and missiles).

 

But Saturn, as signifier, is part of a larger, more complex and intricate intertextual system. For example, the Saturn signifier adopted by the school was transposed from General Motors’ highly visible and expensive project to reinvent its behemoth corpo rate practices and redress its well-deserved negative public image. As an early participant in the Saturn School for Tomorrow project explains:

 

A planning committee met for a three-year period beginning in 1986 to envision a new schooling process. A major catalyst was American Federation of Teachers’ (AFT) president Al Shanker’s exhortation for a ‘Saturn project’ to re-tool American education, just as General Motors’ Saturn automobile project was to invent a ‘quality team’ approach to challenge [the] Japanese. (MacNeil/Lehrer)

 

By appropriating the signifier Saturn, Shanker tacitly acknowledged that the public schools had common ground with GM. That is, both have been widely perceived to be competitive product and market failures with bloated bureaucracies and negative public i mages. Like GM, the schools needed extensive reform to reduce costs and increase productivity in a New World Economic Order. But GM had funded Saturn Corporation, its symbol of self-transformation, with a capital investment of 3.5 billion dollars. Satu rn’s first seven years were devoted to intra and interorganizational negotiation, the development of infrastructure and the implementation of new labor and management practices. AFT’s President Al Shanker was calling for an infusion of money on a similar scale, similar processes of negotiation and a similar request for patience. In return was the promise of reshaping administrative and pedagogical practices toward corporatist “quality” circles and reinscribing students as “customers,” “consumers” or “cl ients.” This is consistent with what David Payne, a teacher at the Saturn School, said about how the goals of the project were shaped:

 

What we’ve done at [the] Saturn [School] is we’ve looked at what the futurists, what the business leaders, and what the education leaders say people are going to be able to do in order to be successful in the 21st Century. (MacNeil/Lehrer)

 

For a variety of tactical reasons, educational bureaucracies eagerly absorbed the intertext of GM’s Saturn signifier, shaping it and being shaped by it. But GM’s Saturn is a only one point of emergence for the sign of Saturn. In the next section, we con sider how GM’s Saturn signifier relates to relevant past Saturnian texts.

 

V. The Long and Winding Road: Saturn as GM’s Bid to Rescue a Moribund Empire

 

By the early 1980s, the threat to General Motors’ long-term future took a complex but identifiable shape. One facet of the threat was the substandard quality of its vehicles and the (then) well-deserved reputation that followed. By 1985, the Chevrolet C elebrity, Citation and Chevette, Oldsmobile Ciera, Buick Century and Pontiac 6000 were legendary for a myriad of serious and endemic manufacturing defects. The sheer number and frequency of factory defects across GM’s cookie-cutter divisions was a major public relations embarrassment.

 

Another menacing threat to the once proud flagship of “the industry of industries” was structural. For example, a January, 1992 article in Fortune Magazine claimed that despite improvements in quality, mammoth capital investment

 

and even with massive cutbacks, [GM] lagged behind major competitors in almost every measure of efficiency. By some key standards–how many worker hours it takes to assemble a car–GM was an astounding 40% less productive than Ford. In 1991 GM lost, on average, $1500 on [each] of the more than 3.5 million [vehicles produced] in North America. It ended [1991] with 34% of the U.S. market. In 1979, [its share of a larger U.S.] market was 46%. [Reform efforts] had been crippled by middle-management . . . and the UAW.

 

Perceptive managers see a company that is building better cars . . . but has yet to confront enormous structural problems: Says one: ‘There is a monumental challenge ahead. We can make great products. But can we do that and make money?’ (Taylor et al.)

 

Since 1953, when then GM President “Engine Charlie” Wilson uttered the notorious aphorism that “what’s good for country is good for General Motors” and vice versa, GM has become something of a synecdoche for the U.S. economy. And it is in the context of confronting an external threat (the “rising sun” of Japanese economic power as signified by automotive imports) with a deteriorating base of productive power (the “setting sun” of U.S. economic power as signified by GM) that the sign of Saturn surfaced. A ccording to one account:

 

Saturn was conceived [in 1982 as] an all-out, all American effort to beat the Japanese in the small car market. Starting from scratch, Saturn would slash costs and boost quality by using the best technology and organization . . . show[ing] GM how a car company should be run in the 21st Century. Roger Smith set the stakes when he formed Saturn as an independent subsidiary, proclaiming it “the key to GM’s long-term competitiveness, survival and success. (Taylor et al.)

 

In giving their small-car project the code-name of Saturn, GM’s public relations unit invoked a chapter in the history of the Cold War. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first orbiting satellite, the Sputnik. For the U.S. government, electr onic and print media and public opinion, complaisant in an assumption of technological superiority, the reaction to Sputnik’s success was alarm, panic and paranoia. Newspaper and magazine headlines issued dire warnings about Soviet superiority in space. Frenzied prophecies about the likelihood of a Soviet nuclear attack from orbiting satellites were in wide currency. Sputnik’s success was seen as the dominant threat, in technological form, to U.S. sovereignty and national security. The federal governm ent mobilized resources as if in a national emergency. Congress created NASA and funded countless science and technology initiatives on multiple institutional levels.

 

In the 1950s and 1960s, both the Pentagon and NASA were fond of naming their technological projects and specific pieces of hardware after mythological Greek and Roman gods or characters. For example, early intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) were christened as the Atlas or Titan series. NASA’s space ventures were designated as the Mercury and Apollo projects. In line with this, a set of rockets deployed in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, the Saturn series, marked those technological events t hat soared past early Soviet space accomplishments, never to look back. The Saturn project became the symbol of an ideological triumph made possible through a successful recouping of technological preeminence. Deployed at the height of economic and mili tary dominance, the Saturn project became a signifier for an epic narrative, one in which a resourceful redeployment of technological talent repelled a perceived threat to sovereignty and security.

 

By the time of GM’s inauguration of its Saturn project in the early 1980s, the globalization of social, political and economic arrangements had already recast U.S. socio-economic practices. In its legitimating narrative, the neo-conservative movement had already constructed an American mythology that roughly corresponded with GM’s symbolic move to reappropriate elements of a certain moment in American history, through the redeployment of the sign of Saturn. That moment was 1962-1963. It was just before the tragic tide of assassinations, just before a massive escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and just before the significant expansion of transfer payments and entitlement programs initiated by the “Great Society.” It was just before the onset of urban riots and campus demonstrations. It was just prior to psychedelia and the widespread burnings of flags and draft cards. It was at the dawn of an environmental movement that soon exposed long-term toxic consequences of unregulated industrial and ag ricultural practices. And it was just before intensive and novel forms of business regulation were set in motion. The fiscal budgets for the years of 1962-1963 were also the first to employ, in a very measured way, the practice of federal deficit spendin g. As Walter Russell Mead notes:

 

The art of economic management was, people believed, nearly perfected. . . . The Kennedy tax cuts nipped a recession in the bud, giving a classroom demonstration of effective government management. . . . The so-called Kennedy round of tariff cuts resulted in the closest approach to pure free trade that world had ever known. . . . Economists believed that [key] economic problems had been solved. (Mortal Splendor 44)

 

This was the zenith of the Pax Americana. Quickly idealized as Camelot (1964), this is the proximate, if somewhat variable (1955-1973), temporal referent for prolific narratives of “a Golden Age.” GM, by transposing the profuse threads of social history , imperialist nostalgia and contemporary security concerns onto the Saturn Car Corporation, seemed to be saying, to workers, commodity markets and potential customers (in a deliberately intertexutal way): Participate in this reinvention of socio-technolog ical fields and we (implicitly) promise a return to a stable and secure Saturnian order (“the golden happy age” Webster’s). Even at this layer, the sign of Saturn is a productive and revealing intertextual site. But it is only one of a prof use series of intended and unintended intertextual meanings. These are discussed below.

 

VI. The Sign of Saturn as a Metonym for the Imperial 60s: Intertexts of Dominance, Domesticity, Dissent, Decadence and Danger

 

Common to these various sites, signs, and practices associated with the sign of Saturn is the promise of a new “Golden Age.” Saturn signifies both the result and the means under which this (mythological) Golden Age effect will reappear. A confident, ord erly and recognizable domesticity will reemerge and flourish by means of intensive digitalization of social fields. The contemporary function of the scientific and ideological success of the Saturn rocket in the early ’60s was to serve as a symbolic cent er for a remembrance of a still reclaimable politics of dominance and a restoration of economic security. Whether it is invoked by a U.S. President, a pilot educational project, a President of the American Teachers’ Federation or General Motors, the depl oyment of the sign of Saturn, in this way, is a conscious public relations gesture designed to tap into current public habits of historical nostalgia and the abiding American creed of techno-utopianism.

 

But both the social history of the 1960s and the intertext of Saturn exceed these attempts to denotate and domesticate both social history and the range and meaning of Saturn, as a sign of an imperial period. As Bakhtin says:

 

No living [sign] relates to its object in a singular way: between the [sign] and its object, between the [sign] and the speaking subject, there exists an elastic environment of other, alien [signs] about the same object, the same theme, and this is . . . the specific environment that the [sign] may be individualized and given stylistic shape.

 

Indeed, any utterance finds the object at which it was directed already overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist, entangled . . . [and] enters a dialogically agitated and tension filled environment of value judgments and accents [that] weave in and out of complex interrelationships . . . . This is the social atmosphere of the [sign]. (Dialogic 276)

 

And this is true of the sign of Saturn. Even a quick glance at Websters’ delineations of several aspects of the word Saturn is revealing:

 

a. Saturn n., L. Saturnus, connected with Serere, to sow. 1. in Roman mythology, the god of agriculture and husband of Oops, the goddess of the harvest, identified with the Greek God Chronos. . . . 3. in alchemy, lead (the metal);

 

b. Saturnian, adj., from Saturnius, of Saturn. 1. pertaining to the Roman god Saturn, whose reign was called “the golden happy age”–hence, prosperous, contented, happy and peaceful;

 

c. Saturnine (Fr. Saturnien, sad, sour) 1. heavy, grave, gloomy, morose, glum, phlegmatic;

 

d. Saturnalia (L. belonging to Saturn) excess, orgy, orgiastic rituals (performed in times of the Roman Empire at the Winter Solstice). (1611)

 

That the generative intertextual series of Saturn is deeply embedded in the Pax Romana is almost too obvious to mention. General Motors’ use of the sign is eerily resonant of several connotative intertexutal aspects of the deep generative series of Satur n. For example, GM’s Saturn complex, at Spring Hill, was built in the midst of Tennessee farmlands (agriculture). The Saturn Car Corporation, with its innovative technological arrangements and reshaped labor/management social fields, was intended, at S pring Hill, to sow the seeds (serere) that would lead General Motors, in time (Chronos), from the current Saturnine period (phlegmatic, gloomy) with its bloated workforce and inefficient management practices to a Saturnian period (prosperous and happy tim e). One evocative connotation is that GM, through the sign of Saturn, intends to (metaphorically) conjure up a social and economic alchemy (of practices) that will transmute (dense, dead weight) lead into gold (Saturnian).

 

General Motors’ iconocrats, conflating the (older) deep generative series of Saturn with the political and economic dominance of the 1960s (represented by the Saturn rocket), covered all the major connotative fields but one. That omission is the signifie r of excess, the Saturnalia. And that was, undoubtedly, an intentional exclusion. But the self-described “counterculture,” of the 1960s, as a sign of excess, was the arational twin, the alternative face of the American Empire–a drugged-out Nietzschean Dionysus shadowing the rationalizing technocrat Apollo.

 

These Saturnalian aspects were rendered by Tom Wolfe’s chronicle of the Merry Pranksters (Acid Test). These were the “summers of love” and protest and of sexual promiscuity and recreational use of marijuana and hallucinogens. There was a si gnificant revival of interest in pagan practice and ritual. Drugs, anti-war demonstrations, riots and the sense of revolution were an integral part of daily life on urban streets. As one popular chronicle stated, it was a time when, out of hubris, anger , indignation, idealism, impatience, curiosity or noble sentiment, many were “storming heaven” (Stephens).

 

These activities are now often portrayed as self-absorbed and part of a treacherous rounds of excess. The panoply of the dead rock ‘n roll icons of the period–Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison–routinely signify the deleterious effects of dang erous orgies of sex and drugs–a Saturnalia. In retrospect, it is likely that some of the behavioral excesses of the ’60s were the result of (then) emerging technological deterritorialization. The onset of commercial jet travel, the invention and expans ion of television and satellite communications, the construction and expansion of the interstate highway system that hastened enormous changes in the demographics of the urban core and the northeastern industrial belt, all of these generated novel express ions of desire and opened up new forms of physical and psychological mobility. It was these fields of desire and mobility that became the objects for our current round of intensive reterritorializations. According to Deleuze and Guattari:

 

Capitalism constantly counteracts, constantly inhibits this inherent tendency [of the mobility of bodies, consciousness and information] while at the same time allowing it free rein; it continually seeks to avoid reaching its limit while simultaneously tending toward that limit. Capitalism institutes or restores all sorts of residual and artificial, imaginary or symbolic territorialities attempting to recode, rechannel persons. . . . Everything returns or recurs: states, nations, families. That is what makes the ideology of capitalism “a motley painting of everything that has ever been believed.” There is the twofold movement of decoding or deterritorializing flows on the one hand, and their violent and artificial reterritorialization on the other. The more the capitalist machine deterritorializes, decoding and axiomatizing flows . . . the more its ancillary apparatuses . . . do their utmost to reterritorialize. (Anti-Oedipus 34)

 

For public and corporate administrators in the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam era, the paroxysm of events characteristic of the late 1960s required the invention of new wrinkles on a Benthamite techno-political problematic of governance. In the face of unr uly generational “mobs” and ersatz liberation movements, the technical issues focused on how to redesign, redeploy or invent architectural and informational regimes to fix and intensify the surveillance of movement and activities of those bodies, identiti es and allegiances that escaped a normalizing gaze. In a general sense, the social construction of danger inscribed and ascribed to those who would “turn on, tune in and drop out” on the streets of San Francisco, circa 1969, resembles the way English pau pers were portrayed (as a threat to social order) in the early and mid-19th Century:

 

[It is indolence] intensified to the level of social danger: the spectre of the mob; a collective [and] urban phenomenon. It is a composite and [ominous] population which ‘encircles’ the social order from within. . . . It is a magma in which are fused all the dangers which beset the social order, shifting along unpredictable, untraceable channels of transmission and aggregation. The definition [of hippies?] does not work essentially through economic categories . . . images put the stress on feelings of fluidity and indefiniteness, on the impression, at once massive and vague [of menace]. (Procacci 158)

 

Then, as Procacci asserts, and now, as I claim, social morality is often equated with the idea of order: “The moral element is order, that order which liberal society [embraces] as [the] vital need” (159). That is, order as morality, grafted onto the eco nomic and all summed up in the term “Personal Security,” is the rationale for ongoing projects of reterritorialization. And these modes of postmodern reterritorialization–the commercialization of public space represented by the mall and the New American City, the intensification of digital regimes of surveillance, the commodification and licensing of information and icons formerly external to direct market logic and the renarration of the 1960s as a reclaimable Apollonian project–are all activities of governance (except the last) whose emergence predates the 1960s but whose organizing principle remains consistent with both cold-war-era themes of security and the newly emergent objects for novel security concerns (such as enforcement of a convertible ab stract intellectual property rights of the TNCs).

 

VII. Conclusion

 

Gilles Deleuze has depicted historical configurations of governance, including the nation-state, as specific, localized and variable “immanent models of realization” of mobile global capital formations. He makes a persuasive argument that modern nation-s tates are but one of several possible modes of territorialization (A Thousand Plateaus 454). For Deleuze, capitalism may develop an economic form of governance that would render the State superfluous. He says that:

 

capitalism is not short on war cries against the State, not only in the name of the market, but by virtue of its superior deterritorialization. (454)

 

The dispersion of commodities (Coca-Cola, Levi’s), transnational cultural iconographies (Disney, MTV) and technological ensembles of hyperindustrial capitalism (satellite dishes), are highly effective, in certain moments and sites, at “authorless” tasks o f nation-state deterritorialization. Often, the result is a subsequent reterritorialization of identity and desires, primarily recognizable within global consumption circuits such as malls, suburban housing configurations or televised home shopping netwo rks. Generally, this is accompanied by local stylistic adjustment while stroking the population through the propagation of a reassuring ideology of a free, secure and stable domestic identity, heroically reaffirming itself through repetitive acts of comm odity consumption. Within U.S. national technocratic circuits, I argue that the sign of Saturn functions in a similarly Janus-inflected way. As a signifier for a promise of a return to a “happy and prosperous” Pax Americana, it is deployed as a pledge ( rooted in highly selective constructions of memories of an Imperial 1960s) that functions to discipline potential and acutal discontented U.S. subjects in an era of disaccumulation and downward mobility. To do this, iconocrats had to re-encode the stream s of desires, dissent, death and excess that the late ’60s represented. They emerged as streams of consumables, as “lifestyles,” or as new and more finely attenuated “market segments” within reinvented realms of collectively marketed but privately consum ed pleasures. Or, other practices, the Saturnalia, have been reinscribed, as in the age of AIDS and the War on Drugs, as cautionary moral tales. Collectively, many remember the fate of those humans as a series of cautionary tales about the effects of su ccumbing to dangerous, corrosive and indolent practices.

 

There are many aspects of the 1960s that, at different points in time, embody more than a single connotative aspect of the sign of Saturn. Often, a denotative construction of an icon of the 1960s exorcises personal history or political programmatic from an officially sanctified (and sanctifying of the present) remembrance. For example: The passage of a National Civil Rights Day, to honor the selective reconstruction of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., elevated a pre-Selma (1965) iconography of King as proof that “the system works.” The historical reality of the last years of King’s life, which was spent in critical reflection and action in response to an emerging transnational corporate order (1965-1968), has been all but completely erased (Smith). There is a lesson here: States, and the icons that legitimate states, are absorbed into the order of TNCs. But they are given new economic, iconic and policing functions. They become a bureaucratic tool for a corporatist reterritorialization. (Think about Fo rtune 500 sponsorship of PBS programming or the still unfolding effects of NAFTA and GATT.)

 

Likewise, the sartorial and sonic styles of the period have become the object of nostalgic aestheticization, even among those (nationally and globally) who longingly gaze back to a world they have never lost. This is also a postmodern irony that Appadura i characterizes as “nostalgia without memory” (“Disjuncture” 272). Much of the electronic social imaginaire is tied to a memory of a nation-state empire that obscures full reflection on the effects of corporate transnationalism. Regardless of the sophistication of Saturnian promises, it seems unlikely that the cultivation of a national hypertechnical competency will dent these transnational flows in favor of the reconstitution of the economically-predominant nation-state, at least in the near ter m. Already, forty-seven of the world’s one hundred largest economies are TNCs (Barlow).

 

The iconography of global dreams and a New World Order dominated by the repetitive commercial simulacra of TNCs is reminiscent of Foucault’s characterization of pre-Cartesian discursive regimes. Like the four similitudes that shaped representational fiel ds in the Middle Ages, the video, audio, and digitized products of the infoconglomerates could be characterized by

 

First and foremost, the plethoric yet absolutely poverty-stricken character of this knowledge. Plethoric because it is limitless. Resemblance never remains stable within itself; it can be fixed only if it refers back to another similitude, which then, refers to others. . . . For this reason, this knowledge will be a thing of sand. (The Order of Things 30)

 

Whether this type of judgment will be visited upon our ways of knowing and doing is still unclear. But it will be up to us to reflect upon the consequences of these regimes of distraction and consumption. It will be up to us to decode their products and imagine, from a conceptual space outside of these effects, thought and representational possibilities that will resist and exceed the material and semiotic poverty of these practices.

 

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