Number Four

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Negations is an interdisciplinary journal of social thought dedicated to expanding the realm of discourse. Our methodological approach is to draw on directly relevant work by scholars, poets and artists from across the arts and humanities to create a wide ranging synthesis of critical assessments of the current realm of discourse and a range of proposals synthesized from the traditions and experts of the collective arts and humanities.

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Giselle Gazda

James Davenport

Weaver’s Culture Doctor 6
uring the Commodification of the Word
Roger Thompson

C. Wright Mills 18
A Political Intellectual For Our Times
Kevin Mattson

Heidegger, Technology, and Television 33
Reflections on Reception
Dan Scoggin

Consuming Beauty: Art, Commodification, 49
and the "Hot-House Babble"
Jim Bratone

The Hard Sell of Human Consciousness and the Recovery of 66
Consciousness in the Nature of Language, Part II: The Key to
Consciousness in the Trick of Language
Lantz Miller

Read today, Richard M. Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences seems to be nothing more than a harangue against liberalism. Weaver’s assertions are often ad hominem attacks on leftist agenda makers and are frequently made without any sort of significant warrant. The result is that Weaver has been virtually excluded from contemporary debates on politics and on language. Nonetheless, Weaver is important, and his significance rests in his attempts to rescue language from a certain form of de-humanizing power which he variously labeled nominalism, empiricism, and liberalism, and which he felt essentially commodified truth and divorced language from transcendental value.

In all cultural domains, Weaver believed that society was fragmented through a subtle objectification of goods and wealth which elevated those goods and wealth to the status of transcendental power. American society as a whole, therefore, had become too materialistic, and the entire globe was now a vicious market which commodified all aspects of society. The world, according to Weaver, was barbarous. Weaver’s primary concern, therefore, was "humanizing" mankind, with reconnecting man with transcendental truth and God.

Weaver felt that the primary arena that could be used to reconnect man with the transcendent was the realm of language. He felt that language theory in mid-century America had been perverted and used to commodify truth: no longer was language used to connect truth to transcendental principles; instead, rhetoric had fragmented truth and made it essentially subjective and individualistic. This paper is an exploration of how Weaver attempted to reconnect language use and truth. As such, it will focus on Weaver’s formulation of a true rhetoric and will establish that Weaver both emerges from and alters a tradition of rhetoricians primarily concerned with using language in a way which combats the commodification of knowledge and centers on the pursuit and communication of transcendental principles. Furthermore, this paper argues that Weaver’s doctor of culture is a unique formulation of the true rhetor espoused by Plato and St. Augustine and that Weaver’s "culture doctor" provides a rubric for rhetorical theory which centers on social reform and ultimately offers a rival to post-modern conceptions of language as a reformational tool.

Weaver’s critique of language must be situated within a broader view of Weaver’s skepticism of American society and politics. Writing at a time in mid-century America which was profoundly changed by World War II, Weaver was hyper-sensitive to the power of mid-century evils such as fascism and communism. Moreover, Weaver’s professional field, the academic disciplines of rhetoric and communication, were at the time steeped in studies on the malicious power of propaganda. The resulting mood in Weaver, therefore, is one of skepticism and distrust of ruling powers of American politics and culture, and not infrequently in the people being ruled as well.

This skepticism led Weaver to develop a framework with which he could explain the deterioration of American culture, and that framework he erected around the metaphor of the Giant Stereopticon. Weaver’s analysis of culture rests on this vast analogical model which demonstrates the serious doubts Weaver had concerning the cultural powers in mid-century America. Weaver describes the power of the Great Stereopticon in Ideas Have Consequences:

The Stereopticon achieves its goal by packaging information in ways which are readily accepted as truth by a consumer-oriented American public, and it works by a crafty division of labor. The Stereopticon is divided into three primary components, each of which conspire against free-thinking through packaging its view of the world into small, digestible bits of information which the American public apparently accepts as truth. The Press, the radio, and motion pictures, (and we can add by extension today the television, which during Weaver’s time was only beginning to expand its realm of influence) all participate in destroying man by alienating his thought from his action, his idea from its consequence. The Press, in particular, bears the brunt of Weaver’s condemnation: "So journalism becomes a monstrous discourse of Protagoras, which charms by hypnotizing and thwarts that participation without which one is not a thinking man." Weaver further asserts that newspapers of the time are largely responsible for the destruction of dialectic: they break down any process of rational inquiry by simply objectifying truth and conveying that truth in easily consumable bits of information. The result is a commodification of knowledge which distances man from thought and actions.

Weaver’s concern with this commodification of truth descends from his concerns as a socialist thinker early in his career. Weaver, as has been well-documented, shifted his allegiance from socialism to conservatism around the end of World War II. His shift in political thinking, however, occurred not because he disagreed with the ideals of socialist thought, but because he felt that the people who represented socialism where petty and power hungry. Despite his well-publicized conversion, therefore, his view of capitalism should be seen as cautious at best, and it should be noted that he is quick to condemn the bourgeois class of his time. Ultimately, his overriding concern that man is being de-humanized results in harsh critiques of what are often considered capitalist machinery, most notably the press with its "bourgeois righteousness" and industrialization with its anti-agrarian stance. Both are cogs in the machinery of the Stereopticon and perpetuate the materialism which Weaver disdains.

Ultimately, the commodification of information and knowledge and the separation of man from his thought which Weaver describes results from what Weaver labels nominalism. Weaver dates the advent of nominalism with William of Occam and suggests that it has slowly come to dominate world cultures, including American. Weaver believed that the result of the burgeoning of nominalism has been fragmentation (and he describes this fragmentation as a force) which leads to a sense of nothingness. Society responds to the sense of nothingness by assigning value and a sense of being to commodifiable objects. Having transferred the sense of being to material objects, society becomes obsessed with possessing anything that can be tangibly collected and quantified as proof of being. This obsession with commodification perpetuates in society, ultimately reducing even education to a cycle of fragmentation and obsession with material gain: "the prevailing conception is that education must be such as will enable one to acquire enough wealth to live on the plane of the bourgeoisie."

The cycle of materialism perpetuated by the Stereopticon leads to a culture commodifying all knowledge. The Stereopticon seizes control of truth and reality and makes it capital to be bartered; all domains of human experience become an object to be reduced and sold as a commodity. For Weaver, however, the most important domain threatened by materialism and the Stereopticon’s gaze is the domain of language. As a rhetorician, Weaver focuses many of his essays and lectures on how language had slowly come to participate in the commodification of truth. In response, he came to see his mission as rescuing and revisioning the role of language and reconnecting it to transcendental values. In language use, Weaver saw the possibility of humanizing mankind.

Weaver felt that language had been disconnected from any transcendental value, so that truth was no longer the object of communication. Instead, language had been reduced to a system which focused on personal persuasion, on providing an individual an opportunity for material gain through the power of discourse. This was an ugly rhetoric which Weaver disdained, and Weaver’s response was to offer a "true" rhetoric.

Weaver’s initial statements on the development of a true rhetoric arise from his debates with S. I. Hayakawa on the proper uses and philosophical basis for language. Weaver’s debates with Hayakawa are infamous in rhetorical circles. The debates, in fact, re-vitalized a course of study, rhetoric, which seemed at the time destined for extinction. The passion with which the debate raged salvaged the academic discipline and, more importantly, placed debates about language and language use as the primary place of conflict between Weaverian belief in transcendental principles and a liberalism which led ultimately to materialism.

In 1953, Weaver published "The Phaedrus and the Nature of Rhetoric," an essay on language which should be seen simultaneously as a direct assault on commodification of truth and a confrontation of the philosophical underpinnings of S. I. Hayakawa’s linguistic and rhetorical theories, underpinnings which Weaver felt were inescapably materialistic. Weaver contends that Hayakawa’s theories implicitly separate language from transcendental truth and commodify that truth just as the Stereopticon objectified information. Language under Hayakawa’s system was simply a packaged object to be digested by a materialistic audience instead of a dynamic system to be enacted.

Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action details the General Semanticist theory of language by which Hayakawa is known. Perhaps the most important aspect of the view of language outlined is Hayakawa’s "ladder of abstraction" which explains the process by which a thing is named and gains its meaning. The process of abstraction which Hayakawa outlines focuses on ensuring that language be rooted in material or empirical fact, so that meaning in language be derived from its correspondence to a material and empirically verifiable reality. Weaver abhorred this type of empiricist approach to language. Language, Weaver believed Hayakawa was saying, is scientifically dissectible, so that if we simply empirically account for all the elements which make language work, we will understand language. Hayakawa, Weaver insisted, failed to account for those aspects of language which are not accessible to scientific inquiry, such as human emotion. Language was not simply an object to be studied and quantified; it was an active force in human nature which functioned at times outside the realm of scientific certainty. Indeed, language escaped any type of logical systematization.

Weaver, of course, offers a counter system to Hayakawa’s, and the most detailed formulations of that system are found in Weaver’s essay "Language is Sermonic." In this essay, Weaver offers his hierarchy of argument, a hierarchy which is essentially an attempt by Weaver to reconnect language use with transcendental truth.

Weaver recovers Aristotelian topoi in forming his hierarchy of argumentation. He uses Aristotle’s "locations" of argument as a basis for making ethical judgments and adjudicating the validity of arguments. Unlike Aristotle, however, Weaver hierarchizes topoi, elevating some to reflect more ethical forms of arguments, such as definition and analogy, and lowering others to represent less ethical forms of arguments, such as arguments from cause and effect and arguments from circumstance. More importantly, Weaver connects and even conflates types of arguments with the arguers, so that those speakers who attempt to persuade from definition and analogy are considered to be more ethical than speakers who attempt to persuade from cause and effect and circumstance. What Weaver has done in formulating this hierarchy is to reconnect language with the language user and to ethical obligation. This is an attempt to connect transcendental truth to language through an ethical appeal.

According to Haskell and Hauser, Weaver’s conception of language functions as an axiomatic system, not unlike a mathematical system. As a "classical idealist," Weaver establishes a transcendental truth principle which governs his entire system. Once that principle is accepted, his system works like a mathematical system, generating new rhetorical forms which can and do correspond to that transcendental truth. Haskell’s and Hauser’s article suggests that Weaver creates a new paradigm of rhetoric which establishes a Platonic and transcendental truth and places language and rhetorical arguments as analogical forms of that truth.

The significance of the hierarchy, then, is its attempt at a systemization of language which centers on truth. Weaver creates a format which he believes escapes the commodification of truth through language of which Hayakawa was allegedly guilty. Such a systemization, however, presents some problems; most significantly, the fact of its being a system works counter to some of Weaver’s primary concerns that language escapes logical systemization. Richard Johannesen, in detailing the similarities and shortcomings of Weaver in relation to General Semanticist theory, has adroitly demonstrated that Weaver’s concern with Hayakawa is at times over- reaching, that indeed Hayakawa and Weaver shared many traits in respect to the role of language in a society. Johannesen, however, fails to recognize that Weaver at least in part organizes a logical system to explain language use, that Weaver’s system of hierarchized argument parallels Hayakawa’s ladder of abstraction. Part of Weaver’s quarrel with Hayakawa was that Hayakawa’s system was overly empirical, and Weaver can clearly be critiqued for logically systematizing language use by breaking argument down into four general headings which attempt to account for all forms of ethical claims. Nonetheless, Weaver’s system cannot be characterized as logical or empirical in the same way that Weaver labeled Hayakawa’s system. Weaver’s critique of Hayakawa rests on Hayakawa’s failure to account for transcendental values so that what Weaver called logical in Hayakawa’s system was its total divorce from reference to transcendental truth. So, even though Weaver can be critiqued for a type of commodification through systematization of argument, Weaver’s system nonetheless centers on a reconnection to a source of validity unaccounted for by Hayakawa. Weaver attempts to wed Truth and rhetoric, a connection severed by the General Semanticists.

If Weaver’s hierarchy of argument topoi can be seen as participating in a type of commodification through systematization, it can nonetheless be seen as offering powerful alternatives. The most important alternative is the conception of language as sermonic. Weaver’s idea of language as "sermonic" directly contradicts the system Hayakawa offered and should be seen as both a response to semanticist conceptions of language and a response to the commodification Weaver sees in the world. Furthermore, it establishes Weaver’s primary goal to establish a true rhetoric which would remove the schism between language and truth and escape the materialism which generated the schism.

When Weaver claims that language is sermonic, he is insisting that language be intimately related to the values of the language user. As such, language carries an emotive force which is essentially impossible to account for within a semanticist framework. More importantly, language is charged with spiritual import; the language user becomes a type of priest, bound by duty to seek and communicate truth. Weaver, therefore, revives from classical rhetoric a special type of language user, the true rhetor. The true rhetor invokes classical precepts of rhetoric in a mission to cure the ills of society ; thus, Weaver’s true rhetor became the "doctor of culture." This renaming is significant because it indicates the obligation of the true rhetor to a culture. The culture doctor’s duty was rather straightforward: to communicate truth in order to change the social system of commodification. This truth-based rhetor speaks outside the realm of commodity and gestures to a spiritual realm. The doctor of culture, therefore, cures society through lifting his audience out of the realm of materialism.

To fully understand Weaver’s culture doctor, he must be situated within a long-standing tradition of true rhetors. Weaver’s culture doctor is, in fact, especially Platonic. Several critics have labelled Weaver as Platonic in terms of epistemology, both Plato and Weaver sharing the conception of a spiritual and material duality governing existence and knowledge. More importantly, however, Weaver’s doctor of culture descends from Plato’s true rhetor. For both, the search for truth and meaning is the purpose of rhetoric, and anything which falls short of the quest for truth falls into the realm of eristic babble, a babble Plato associates with sophistry and Weaver associates with political liberalism. Plato compares it to pastry baking and flattery which destroys the soul and that "wears the mask of medicine," and Weaver asserts that the loss of true rhetoric results in the illness of society. Weaver, however, diverges from Plato in his sense of obligation to reforming a culture. Plato’s true rhetor is under no obligation to work to change an entire culture; Weaver’s is. The Platonic true rhetor’s quest for truth need not expand to societal reformation: Plato’s philosopher/rhetor quests after truth, not reform. On the other hand, Weaver’s culture doctor is in every sense a missionary, sent into the world to change it. Weaver demands the doctor of culture work within a culture to sever materialism and reconnect a society to transcendental truth.

In his responsibility for the reformation of a society, Weaver’s culture doctor more closely resembles St. Augustine’s true Christian rhetor than Plato’s. Few critics have indicated Weaver’s debt to St. Augustine in the realm of rhetoric; indeed, despite common consent that Weaver’s ethical systems are Christian, no critics have explored in any depth Weaver’s connection to St. Augustine’s Christian rhetoric. Weaver’s doctor of culture, however, is a descendent of St. Augustine’s priest. Both utilize the conception of language as inherently sermonic and suggest the goal of rhetoric is to communicate transcendental values and to drive humanity away from the material realm and toward a spiritual realm. St. Augustine’s rhetor, therefore, is obligated to connect a Christian society to God, an obligation which is implied in Augustine’s guiding rhetorical principle, charity. Augustine ends each chapter but the third of his De Doctrina Christiana, his most detailed exposition on rhetoric written for the Catholic priest, with an admonition for the priest to keep in mind always the principle of charity, and even in the third chapter charity remains a guiding principle. Charity is basically the Christian duty to love others as oneself and to love God above all others, and its function is to "hold men together in a knot of unity." As a rhetorical principle, it implies a responsibility on the part of the Christian rhetor to help in a reformation of society through the guidance of God’s love. St. Augustine’s Christian rhetor must "labor in sound doctrine, which is Christian doctrine, not only for himself, but also for others." His works cannot be divorced from responsibility for social change. Though not explicitly Christian, Weaver’s culture doctor bears an Augustinian obligation to a society governed by a concept of charity. Augustine’s rhetor, more than Plato’s, has an obligation to fight the materialistic impulse in a society. He is essentially a reformer.

Weaver wrote in the hopes of reviving rhetoric as a reformational tool, one geared toward turning a society toward transcendent principles which were, in his mind, fixed and eternal. In this respect, his thought parallels Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, who saw in rhetoric the potential for changing society through transcendental appeals. The final chapter of Emerson’s small book Nature, entitled "Prospects", suggests that a true man, a poet, an eloquent speaker, is essentially a reformer. Weaver reflects this idea and transforms it into a new theory on the function and role of rhetoric.

That Weaver creates a new paradigm of rhetoric is largely uncontested; exactly what constitutes the new paradigm is a more contestable issue. For Haskell and Hauser, it is Weaver’s axiomatic and analogical system, and for Johannesen it is Weaver’s attempt to reconnect language to transcendental values. While these positions are important, they undervalue the way Weaver juxtaposed the notion of a simultaneously social and transcendental rhetoric. Weaver’s contribution to rhetoric is this wedding of the transcendental and social through his conception of a culture doctor whose guiding principle is truth and whose only tool is rhetoric.

The paradigm of the culture doctor offers an alternative vision to many post-modern social epistemic rhetorics, whose intent is to sever language and transcendentals in order to ensure social progress. Social epistemic rhetorics, such as those offered by James Berlin, intend to wed the responsibility for social reform with rhetoric, but to do so abandon the notion of transcendental principles and rely on a conception of language as inherently and completely self- referential and truth as created in process by the activity of language. Berlin even suggests that wedding transcendental principles to rhetoric results in a divorcing of rhetoric from social responsibility: "From one perspective, the postmodern theoretical turn is an attempt to recover the services of rhetoric, the study of the effects of language in the conduct of human affairs. . . . After all, the primacy of signifying practices in the formation of subject and society means that language can no longer be seen as the transparent conduit of transcendental truths."

Weaver combats this notion; he shows that transcendental principles need not be abandoned to ensure that reform be the focus of rhetoric. Weaver, like Berlin, views language itself as a social construct, but, unlike Berlin, maintains that the significance of language is that it refers to principles beyond the language system itself. Reform, therefore, becomes a social obligation of the rhetor because language’s value is wrapped up in language’s capability to communicate truth. Weaver, therefore, offers a vision of rhetoric which relies on the notion of transcendental truth in order to ensure responsibility and obligation for social reform. The culture doctor, the reformer, need not see language as solely and completely self-referential for rhetoric to maintain its social function, as Berlin would insist. Language’s reformational power rests outside its own realm; the culture doctor cures a culture by using rhetoric to gesture to some ideal outside of the domain of language.

Because Weaver’s system demands that language refer outside itself, it escapes the materiality which he feared. Language’s importance rests outside the realm of materialism, thereby ensuring that it not participate in the commodification of truth. Indeed, Weaver would undoubtedly see in theories such as Berlin’s an implicit participation in a commodity-driven culture; language comes to encapsulate knowledge and truth so that possession of language becomes the key to knowledge. What Weaver demands, however, is that language be used not as an ultimate end, that language not be seen as the key to possession of truth, but that language be used as a means to understand something greater than language, something which forever eludes the firm hold of language. This kind of Platonic slipperiness amounts to a perpetual escape from commodification: language ensures proximity or aspiration to truth, but never possession of it. What Weaver’s theories suggests about post-modern theories such as Berlin’s is that an endlessly self-referential system of language ultimately possesses truth, makes truth an object forever locked in its system, and which, despite statements from Berlin that truth becomes a negotiated objective, ensures truth becomes a certainty and thus commodified.

1)Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1948.

2)See Chapter 5 of Ideas, 92-112.

3)Ideas, 93.

4)Weaver clearly recognized the threat of commodification television posed; it simply did not yet have the power which radio and newspaper retained at the time.

5)Ideas, 97

6)A nice summary of Weaver’s political aspirations and allegiances can be found in Sonja K. Foss, Karen K. Foss and Robert Trapp, Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric, Prospect Heights, IL, Waveland, 1991.

7)Ideas, 98.

8)One of Weaver’s hobby horses is the advent of nominalism. His best description of this advent is in Ideas, 3-5, and continues with an analysis of how Locke and Darwin participated in the cultural decline Weaver called nominalism.

9)Ideas, 49.

10)Weaver does not use the term "commodify," but his concern is clearly that knowledge of any type becomes a commodity to be bartered. He calls the capitalists in charge of running the machinery of the Stereopticon, the "materialists in control" (104) who perpetuate the notion that the American dream is "happiness through comfort" (105).

11)"The Phaedrus and the Nature of Rhetoric," Ethics of Rhetoric, South Bend, IN: Regnery/Gateway, 1953. This essay contains little with explicit references to Hayakawa, but the impetus behind it is clearly the "scientistic" impulses of Hayakawa’s theories. It is important to see this essay as an early attempt to combat the General Semanticist notions of language because this essay ultimately offers Weaver’s initial formulations of a competing view of the role of rhetoric in the understanding of truth. In it, Weaaver suggests that Plato confronts and dismisses "neuter language" and "semantically purified speech;" actions which Weaver would copy in the final chapter of Ideas.

12)S. I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action, New York, Harcourt, Brace and World, 1939.

13)"Language is Sermonic", Language is Sermonic: Richard M. Weaver on the Nature of Rhetoric, Ed. Richard L. Johannesen, Rennard Strickland and Ralph T. Eubanks, Baton Rouge, LA, LSU Press, 1970. Weaver also explains his hierarchy of arguments in Ideas.

14)Robert E. Haskell and Gerard A. Hauser, "Rhetorical Structure: Truth and Method in Weaver’s Epistemology," Quarterly Journal of Speech 64.3 (1978), 233-244.

15)Johannesen is by far the most significant Weaver scholar, and this article in particular is useful for an overview of Weaver’s and Hayakawa’s debates. "Conflicting Philosophies of Rhetoric/Communication: Richard M. Weaver Versus S. I. Hayakawa," Communication 7 (1983), 289-315.

16)For more of Weaver’s statements on "true rhetoric" see "The Phaedrus and the Nature of Rhetoric."

17)Plato, Gorgias, Trans. Donald J. Zeyl, Indianapolis, Hackett, 1987, 26.

18)St. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, Trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr., New York, Macmillian, 1958, 6.

19)Augstine, 169.

20)Significantly, Weaver invokes charity in the final chapter of Ideas. 154 ff.

21)Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 1836.

22)Johannesen’s concerns are certainly more far-reaching and varied han simply the reconnection of language use to transcendental principles, but I find his work generally has as an underlying theme Weaver’s exploration of the transcendent in language.

23)James Berlin, Rhetorics, Poetics and Cultures: Refiguring College English Studies, Urbana, IL, NCTE, 1996.

24)Berlin, 68.

Who reads C. Wright Mills today? Ironically, not those who consider themselves to the left of center – certainly not those in academia. Young "critical thinkers" are too busy genuflecting before postmodern theorists who write obtusely about abstract conceptions of power – not the way Mills dissected power in America. Derrida and Foucault stand out big among the names glorified by the academic left, and Mills won’t be found in books about these so-called critical thinkers. Though Mills stands as a great grandfather to the New Left, as a thinker who clearly influenced major political activities of the 1960s, there are few who seem interested in reassessing him today. We on the intellectual left ignore indigenous sources of radicalism – suffering, as we are, from a bad case of what Russell Jacoby termed "social amnesia."

There’s plenty of reasons why C. Wright Mills is ignored. Prime among them is the fact that academic sociologists consider him irrelevant. As a sociologist at Columbia University, Mills kindled early interest in two of the greatest social theorists of the twentieth century – Max Weber and the younger Karl Marx – but that does not help his case today. Academic sociologists have grown even more reliant upon statistical methodologies and increased specialization that Mills (and the thinkers he admired) detested. In fact, if Mills ever draws attention from academic sociologists, it is as a harbinger of another minuscule subset alongside the other specialized subsets of academic sociology – namely, what is called, in hackneyed terms, "radical sociology." Mills’s worst nightmare has come true: academic sociology has become a professionalized specialty that rarely speaks to bigger public questions. As academic sociology has become what it has, it has buried the scattered remains of Mills’s legacy.

We shouldn’t try to evaluate Mills from the perspective of academic sociology. That would be a classical game of apples judging oranges. Mills was much less an academic sociologist – as we understand that term today – and much more of a public and political intellectual. He wrote for publics about pressing political issues and tried to help citizens understand their world and commit themselves to changing it. This much is clear. Unfortunately, the term "public intellectual" – which has garnered a certain amount of interest today – often generates simple sermons about the good old days, providing an easy pat on the back to writers in the past who wrote without academic jargon. Certainly Mills was a public intellectual and therefore more lucid than many academics today; but the bigger question remains: In playing this role, what did Mills leave behind as his legacy? What exactly did Mills do as a political thinker that we can learn from today?

The immediate answer is: quite a bit. Mills thought hard about what a future left would look like during the Cold War – an increasingly conservative time when the expanse of American public discourse was shrinking rapidly. He evaded the drift of many intellectuals towards neo-conservative ideas but also resisted the descent into irrational rejections of the Enlightenment project (Mills criticized the "angry young men" of England and the Beats – both, to a certain extent, predecessors to the recent postmodern fads in academia). He serves as a model intellectual since the context in which he wrote parallels ours. And due to Mills’s influence on the New Left – he was often called "the big daddy of the new left" – we can reassess the wreckage left behind by that movement through a critical reexamination and reconstruction of his work. At the same time, we can rethink what it might mean to reconstruct a future left today. Mills’s work – and he would have wanted it this way – provides us with a marvelous starting point to think about our own intellectual and political possibilities – the possibilities both of radicalism and social criticism.

In order to understand the significance of Mills’s work, we must first place his ideas in context – namely, the period stretching from World War II to his death in 1962. This period of time was marked by an increasingly rigid confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, when American foreign policy focused overwhelmingly on the threat of communism. Domestically, communism crept into the American imagination, and accusations of communist subterfuge became a tired mantra – embodied in the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the devastating trial of Alger Hiss; Senator Joseph McCarthy’s manic witch-hunts; and the Hollywood blacklists which ruined the careers of many directors and actors. Alongside this obsession, Americans embraced "the blessings of prosperity," as one historian put it, as they moved to the suburbs, worked in centralized corporate bureaucracies, watched television, and seemingly became more conformist in all aspects of life – symbolized for many of us in "Leave it to Beaver" re-runs. Though Americans seemed to paint a happy face over the anxieties of living in a nuclear age, anxieties could never really disappear. This was truly a time of "mixed messages" and "many paradoxes," when, as John Patrick Diggins remarks, "suburban contentment with lawns and station wagons" grew alongside "middle-class worry about money and status," a time when "high expectations of upward mobility" accompanied "doubts about the meaning and value of the age’s own achievements."

These anxieties grew most cogently in the work of American intellectuals at the time. In the world of ideas, writers expressed deep concern with the conformity of the 1950s – concern which helped inspire much of the rebellion of the 1960s and the critical theory of Herbert Marcuse (whose "one-dimensional man" thesis echoed many of the critical voices of the 1950s). Though Mills himself would condemn the conservative tenor of many American intellectuals who worked alongside him, there is no mistaking the fact that other writers expressed anxiety about American culture during the Cold War. William Whyte and David Riesman, though conservative in some of their conclusions, fretted about the loss of autonomy among white collar workers – what Riesman called "other-directed" social behavior – and the decline in creativity and character they saw in the homogenized suburbs dotting America’s landscape. They worried about bureaucracy, passivity, and the corroding effects of economic prosperity. In doing so, they engaged difficult questions about the future of American culture.

Mills entered this world, and his intellectual work can only be understood within it. Mills held special admiration for a group of thinkers known as "the New York Intellectuals," a set of writers including Alfred Kazin, Daniel Bell, Lionel Trilling, and others. As Richard Pells describes their work, "Their essays were at once polemical and pessimistic, cosmopolitan and self-consciously flamboyant, theoretical and impatient with abstractions." Mills knew that he could never fit into these thinkers’ world – after all, his Texas background did not play well against their New York City, Jewish cosmopolitanism – but he adopted their muscular writing style and focused on many of their intellectual concerns. At the same time, he distanced himself from their rigid anti communism and remained committed to the left. This way, he followed the democratic socialist and literary critic, Irving Howe, who admired Mills’s independence (even though he eventually fell out with him over debates surrounding Third World revolutions). It was Howe who accurately described Mills as "a native American radical who could speak with indigenous accents and high sophistication."

The difference between Mills and other American intellectuals becomes clearer when examining the shifts and transitions in one of America’s most important and famous social critics during the 1940s and 1950s – Dwight MacDonald. Mills and MacDonald began as friends; in fact, Mills provided the name for MacDonald’s independent magazine of the 1940s – Politics. MacDonald eventually distanced himself from Mills by writing a scathing and unfair book review of Mills’s White Collar for Partisan Review in 1952. But the substantive difference between these two thinkers had come long before the review. By the early 1950s, MacDonald had drifted away from his earlier Trotskyism towards an assorted variety of outlooks, including anarchist individualism, pacifism, and, finally, an embrace of high culture against the sordid world of mass culture. It was this last view that he shared with Theodor Adorno – the leading thinker among the Frankfurt School of critical theorists. MacDonald found himself upholding high, modernist art in opposition to the degraded world of mass culture. In essence, culture replaced politics.

Against the neo-conservative drift towards anti-communism and MacDonald’s and Adorno’s celebration of elitist, modernist culture, Mills believed in political alternatives to the emerging mass society of modernity. Whatever differences came between them, Mills still shared some of MacDonald’s pessimism. As he assessed the political and social landscape, Mills drew up a gloomy picture. Political, economic, and military power had become thoroughly centralized – reducing democratic participation in public life. Along with Riesman and Whyte, Mills saw the new middle classes as conformist flotsam and jetsam floating passively amidst new social developments. Mass culture encouraged political apathy among large numbers of people. To add insult to injury, Mills asserted, intellectuals refused to examine the inequalities in their own society and went along with what he called "blind drift." A gloomy depiction of American society, indeed, especially since Mills, as the historian Robert Gillam shows, had given up on any optimistic notion of progress – the liberal faith that all things improve in time. But if Mills had given up on progress – a belief in objective forces beyond his will – he still thought in political terms (rather than cultural ones) and had hope – a subjective sense that things could change. He tried in his own way to reconstruct a future American left that could do battle with the political and social trends of his age.

Mills’s reconstruction of the left came largely from the way he engaged his own intellectual work. Too much has been made of Mills’s colorful personality – his gruffness, his love of motorcycles, his fallings out with women – but he certainly did become something of a lone voice crying out to shatter the Cold War stalemate (Harvey Swados, a close friend, called Mills "combatively exhilarating" in his style). By rejecting "the politics of anti-Stalinism" that had "trapped" many conservative intellectuals, he articulated an anti-anti-communism which clearly provided fertile ground for radical politics. In loosening the stranglehold of anti-communism, Mills opened doors for the future New Left. Mills declared, in "The Decline of the Left," that "we, personally, must refuse to fight the Cold War," a practice he pursued himself. In essence, Mills led by example.

He also drew from indigenous and native intellectual sources to reconstruct a future left. As Rick Tilman has made clear, Mills embraced the intellectual trajectory of pragmatism, especially the work of William James and John Dewey. In fact, Mills’s doctoral dissertation was a long rumination on the relationship between the modern university and the intellectual ramifications of pragmatic philosophy. By embracing this tradition, Mills adopted an experimental outlook which made him a reformer – not a revolutionary. It also made him open-minded but, in the end, rejectful of Marxism. Though Mills appreciated (as many social critics of this century have) Marx’s earlier works on alienation, he lambasted the objectivistic qualities of Marx’s later thought: his economic determinism, faith in class polarization, and belief in the inevitable crisis of capitalism. He stated flatly that "the model Marx left is inadequate." He then elaborated: "One can use it only with great intellectual clumsiness and wasted sophistication, and often only with doubletalk. For us today, the work of Marx is a beginning point, not a finished view of the social worlds we are trying to understand." Though Mills saw insights in other European social thinkers (especially Max Weber), he mostly drew from indigenous traditions in his own intellectual background (i.e., Thorstein Veblen) to put together a critical understanding of society and political possibilities.

As much as Mills rejected Marxism, he had no sympathy for liberalism. From his perspective, liberalism was a tired creed, an ideology which propped up America’s form of centralized power. Though liberalism was dominant in America – Mills called it "our official political philosophy" – it was a lifeless set of ideas, little more than a hollow and technocratic ideology. As he saw it, "The New Deal turned liberalism into a set of administrative routines..." Not surprisingly, Mills turned this general venom towards liberalism against its key representatives in politics – organized labor. Mills’s attitudes towards organized labor – which changed greatly from the 1940s to the 1950s – need to be understood, for they are more complex than many historians and critics believe. They speak to an important legacy in the history of American social criticism and radicalism.

Mills began during the 1940s squarely within organized labor’s camp. Not surprisingly, he became especially fond of the more radical, social activist-oriented United Auto Workers (UAW) led by Walter Reuther. Writing for Commentary, Mills glowed with excitement about the UAW meetings he had attended. He praised the rank and file – "home grown radicals" in his words – for how they captured "the old populist mood of the frontiersmen from the Southern and Western border states" (Mills calls up his Texas homeland in this passage). He believed the union helped form a democratic culture that grew out of meetings and discussions: "These men combine trade-union experience with political sophistication; and it is the union that supplied them with both. They carry the beginnings of a non-middle class culture: from their most attenuated self-images to the casual songs they sing when they are together, they are working-men and union men." Mills made clear that he saw unions as the institutional muscle behind any revival of the left during the 1940s. He explained the significant (if only potential) role that labor leaders could play: "The labor leader is now the only possible link between power and the ideas of the politically alert of the left and liberal publics." But at the same time that he saw the need for labor, he was not terribly hopeful that labor would live up to these demands. In fact, he saw another alternative for labor: that it would become just another special interest group, its leaders joining the rest of America’s power elite.

In fact, Mills is typically remembered as rejecting the radical capacity of labor (and thereby laying the groundwork for the new versus the old left). Certainly his writings during the 1950s justify this interpretation, for they reflect a shifting tone in his thinking on labor and politics. He wrote pessimistically in a 1954 essay, "The Labor Leaders and the Power Elite," that "the new unionists may in time become administrators of disciplined and contented workers for large bureaucratized corporations." Mills went further than this sort of institutional analysis of labor as a special interest group. Developing his critique of Marx’s "labor metaphysic" and mindless glorification of labor as the sole agency of historical change, Mills then turned it against unions. As Mills saw it, the working class had become more content with the status quo, and this required intellectuals to stop thinking of labor as the agency for political change. He explained in his 1960 essay on "The New Left" that he did "not quite understand" why some "New Left writers... cling so mightily to ‘the working class’ of the advanced industrial societies as the historic agency, or even as the most important agency, in the face of the really impressive historical evidence that now stands against this expectation." In Mills’s formula for a future new left, labor fell from the center of the picture. In fact, Mills suggested that – at times – labor might become an impediment to social change.

Mills’s critical reading of labor squares well with the recent studies of labor historians. As Steven Fraser and Nelson Lichtenstein have shown, labor faced enormous pressures from the late 1930s to 1950s. Anti-communism – embodied in the Taft-Hartley Act (1947) which required unions to purge suspected communists – pressured labor into a conservative role, as did the need to satisfy members in already unionized sectors of the economy. Union leaders settled for the prosperity of the 1950s to be thinly distributed to the already organized, and they left behind their grander visions of social democracy and the challenge of creating a more progressive voice in American politics. So in many ways, when Mills turned his back on labor, he was reacting to some very real institutional developments.

But to stop here would be to interpret Mills as completely dismissing the importance of organized labor. Clearly with his reaction against the "labor metaphysic" he did not place labor at the center of any future left. But nor did he give up all hope in labor. For Mills, the labor movement had to do two things to revive itself: organize the unorganized (and Mills included white collar workers in this category) and speak to bigger public questions. Even in the 1950s, Mills still believed that labor might be transformed into one actor – among many – working for progressive change. The historical winds could shift and realert labor to its radical potential. Mills speculated in White Collar (1956) "whether in being watchdogs over the economy, as against being merely an interest group within it, the unions will be forced to take on a larger cultural and political struggle." As he saw it, this was still an open question. And as he made clear, here was where he placed his hope: "If the future of democracy in America is imperiled, it is not by any labor movement, but by its absence, and the substitution for it of a new set of vested interests." Spotting this possibility, Mills articulated a reasonable but contingent vision for organized labor. It could not determine all of the programs and ideas of a future left, but it could work to organize the unorganized (as the United Farm Workers tried to do during the 1960s), democratize the workplace, recreate a progressive culture among its rank and file, and address wider social issues when it turned its attention to public life. In many ways, Mills argued cogently for the sort of labor movement that many still hope for today.

One reason Mills did not place an emphasis on labor – the way the old left did – was because America needed not only a progressive voice in politics but more importantly a public sphere within which that voice could be heard. The crisis of the left was one that went much deeper than just the lack of a labor movement. America needed a healthy democratic public where citizens could participate in debates and confront different viewpoints. Though Mills was certainly a "radical," it is important to note that he rarely spoke of socialism. That is because his starting point was not socialism but democracy. And to revive democracy required, most importantly, "a public as... the very forum within which a politics of real issues is enacted." As Jim Miller points out, the starting point of the democratic public was "Mills’s great ideological gift to the left..." The idea (though it was not quite as original as Miller seems to assert) showed both the complexity and power of Mills’s political thought.

The idea of the public had deep roots in American history. After all, America was remembered – in the minds of thinkers like Alexis de Tocqueville – for a tradition of town meetings and local governance. From the Puritans onwards, American citizens gathered in public to discuss pressing matters. Mills himself recognized that the idea of a public "is the loom of classic, eighteenth century democracy..." The public was to judge the decisions and actions of its leaders; that, essentially, was democracy from a classical liberal perspective. As this ideal conflicted with the institutional centralization of the modern world and the ascent of expert-based politics, it found new expression precisely in the political thought of one of Mills’s major predecessors – John Dewey. For Dewey, in his classical work, The Public and its Problems (1927), set out the primary outlines for what would become Mills’s vision of democratic publics. Mills practically plagiarized Dewey when he explained what he meant by democracy and the need for a public: "For democracy implies that those who bear the consequences of decisions have enough knowledge – not to speak of power – to hold the decision-makers accountable." Mills believed that the idea of the public stood squarely within the mainstream of democratic theory and American history.

Mills argued that something had happened historically to displace the idea of the public from democratic politics. The centralized forms of power that Mills was known for criticizing displaced local publics. Not only centralization, but also the power and influence of the mass media, a growing emphasis on "expertise" in political affairs, and an educational system dedicated less to promoting critical reflection among citizens than to vocational training – all of these forces helped diminish the role of small publics in political decision-making. Therefore, the challenge to recreate publics was not solely a prerequisite of democratic politics, it was essentially radical. Mills wrote with stinging words: "Our public life now often rests upon... myths and lies and crackbrained notions. When many policies – debated and undebated – are based on inadequate and misleading definitions of reality, then those who are out to define reality more adequately are bound to be upsetting influences. That is why publics of the sort I have described... are, by their very existence in such a society, radical." Therefore, radicals --- before anything else – needed to get busy recreating such publics.

At the same time that Mills believed publics were radical, there was a certain conservative side to the idea. Here is where the complexity of his thought becomes evident. For Mills did not call for tearing down America’s political system and unleashing anarchic forces. He was far too much of a rationalist to do this. Instead, Mills championed what contemporary political thinkers call "deliberation." Deliberation itself is a slow process since it encourages what Mills called "the free ebb and flow of discussion." This was no model of Leninist revolution; instead, it prized critical inquiry and rational dialogue. Nor was it a romantic call to participatory democracy unmediated by political leadership. Mills was no radical republican, Rousseau fanatic, or anti-Federalist. He believed in political leadership, and his idea of the public could be easily squared with representative politics. As he explained, "Two things are needed in a democracy: articulate and knowledgeable publics, and political leaders who if not men of reason are at least reasonably responsible to such knowledgeable publics as exist. Only where publics and leaders are responsive and responsible, are human affairs in democratic order, and only when knowledge has public relevance is this order possible." And as he saw it, there was still a possibility of resuscitating a public even in the face of the mass society that seemed to bulldoze it over. Therefore, Mills articulated a reformist and realistic vision for repairing the central institutions of a revitalized left. Contra Irving Louis Horowitz, Mills was no "utopian."

This idea of the public led Mills to emphasize the role of intellectuals in reviving the left. For if discussion and critical thought were now taken as radical acts, it is no surprise that intellectuals and writers needed to lead the way. Mills explained, "If men hope that contemporary America is to be a democratic society, they must look to the intellectual community for knowledge about those decisions that are now shaping human destiny." Intellectuals had an enormous responsibility to play, as Mills saw it, because they had to "combat all those forces which are destroying genuine publics and creating a mass society" and "build and... strengthen self-cultivating publics." This was no small feat, especially since so many intellectuals had become increasingly conservative or ensconced within the safe world of academia. Nonetheless, Mills grew increasingly optimistic about the potential for intellectuals to recreate a vibrant left committed to reopening American public discourse about pressing matters. By the end of his life, Mills believed that "the young intelligentsia" might just become an "agency of change." Of course, the recreation of a critical public engaging in discussion of political ideas would be their major challenge as they formed what Mills himself coined "The New Left."

As all of this makes clear, Mills’s reconstruction of the left had many elements. He battled the rigidity of his age – neither trapped by the logic of anti-communism nor cultural elitism. He rejected both liberalism and Marxism and challenged the supremacy of labor in left-wing thought while preserving a potential role for it in a revitalized left. Understanding the importance of rational discussion – for the need of a forum where left viewpoints could be heard – he argued for radicals to commit themselves to resuscitating "self-cultivating publics." Still believing in a historical agency of change, he hoped intellectuals might become such a source. Mills – in all of these ways – argued for a viable, realistic, and vibrant left.

In rethinking Mills, we rethink numerous strains of New Left intellectualism and activism – a crucial first step in reformulating what a future left might look like today. Mills’s intellectual work had a profound impact on leaders of the New left, including Tom Hayden. This line of influence is clear, but when reassessing Mills’s social criticism, we must recognize that things have changed since the time in which he wrote. We cannot hold him accountable for the changing terms of American politics and society – especially not the turbulent times of the 1960s and their aftermath. On the other hand, we can assess where his thinking went wrong and draw out some of the consequences of his ideas for practical politics. In doing this, we can reengage and perhaps reinitiate a relationship between social criticism and the American left.

One of the grounding principles of Mills’s reconstruction of the left – his critique of liberalism – becomes problematic when put to examination. In certain ways, Mills shared more with the intellectuals of his time than he thought. Like Louis Hartz, Daniel Boorstin, and Richard Hofstadter, Mills believed American history exhibited a one dimensional tendency towards classical, property rights-based liberalism. Mills and these other thinkers were certainly right to see America as a country which lacked the conservative tradition of thought that we associate with Edmund Burke and de Maistre. As Mills pointed out, that was precisely because America had no special elite or aristocracy that could serve as "natural" leaders. Mills argued that in America "the middle classes have been predominant – in class and in status and in power. There is one consequence of this simple fact that goes far to explain why there can be no genuinely conservative ideology in the United States." In addition, Mills was right to assume that the Republican Party had, during the 1950s, made its peace with the New Deal welfare state. Conservatives seemed quite content with the liberal presumptions of regulated capitalism.

But Mills was wrong in asserting that liberalism served as America’s "official political philosophy." That liberalism was prominent was certain, that it suppressed all other political languages was not. After all, the dominant form of anti-communism during much of the 1950s was not that of the New York intellectuals – those trapped by what Mills termed "the politics of anti-Stalinism." Rather it was that of Joseph McCarthy who was clearly an opportunist but no liberal. More importantly, as recent history shows, America might not possess a tradition of classical conservative thought, but that does not mean it lacks a set of ideas that threaten liberalism. Pure market libertarianism has done just fine recently; so has a certain form of Social Darwinism espoused by conservative intellectuals (i.e., the ever-influential Charles Murray) who have successfully argued against our meager welfare state. Mills mistakenly believed that liberalism would always be around and would deserve the brunt of his critique – serving as America’s "official political philosophy." New Left thinkers continued to make this mistake when they focused most of their attention on "corporate liberalism" as the primary enemy of radicalism. Once the heyday of the 1960s passed, it was no longer clear that liberalism would be around for such criticism.

At his worst, Mills caricatured liberalism. Mills might have been right to argue that the New Deal turned liberalism into a technocratic and administrative ideology. But this ignored the moral dimension of modern liberalism: its belief in social justice, civic responsibility, and political equality – ideas which undergirded the American welfare state and ones that many philosophers have recaptured today in debates over political theory. Even in the political thought of Mills’s liberal contemporary – Arthur Schlesinger – can be found a sense of morality that transcended administrative technocracy. Schlesinger – a devote and celebratory historian of the New Deal – called for a "sense of humility" and an understanding of human evil (embodied in Hitler and Stalin) to inform the liberal spirit. Mills could understand this tradition of Calvinism and Puritanism and its tragic sensibility – a tradition stretching from Jonathan Edwards to Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King – solely as defeatism. Mills denounced "the development of a tragic sense of life" as "a personal reaction" on the part of intellectuals "to the politics and economics of irresponsibility." This was simply too pat of a response to a long and complex intellectual tradition, and it illustrates Mills’s cursory reading of the moral depth of modern liberalism.

What Mills missed in liberalism was not solely its moral language, it was the necessary relationship between liberalism and the sort of radicalism he tried to rejuvenate. Liberalism should not be conceptualized as an enemy of radicalism – as Mills and the New Left critics of "corporate liberalism" argued. In fact, liberalism provides a necessary moral starting point and fertile ground for a more radical critique that stresses the need for social and political equality coupled with democratic participation on the part of regular citizens (not simply political administrators). Without liberalism, as we have found out recently, radicalism falls off the map of political possibilities – appearing as pure fanaticism or simply academic marginalization. By aiming his critique against liberalism and assuming that liberalism had a staying power it simply did not, Mills began an unhealthy tradition – picked up by New Left intellectuals – between liberalism and radicalism. Today, we need to rethink what this relationship should be; unfortunately, Mills’s ideas do not help a great deal here.

If Mills made mistakes in thinking about liberalism, he also failed to make clear why he believed the "young intelligentsia" could displace the proletariat as an "agency of change." Unfortunately, Mills articulated this hope close to the time of his death, so he did not have the opportunity to explain it more fully. Nonetheless, on first appearance, the idea suffers from numerous problems. First, this concept – which was taken up by New Left intellectuals in some of their arguments for students as a "new class" capable of waging revolutionary struggle – promoted intellectuals to a status they simply did not deserve. Though Mills was clearly a small-d democrat, when he invoked the "young intelligentsia" as an "agency of change," he veered towards a form of vanguardist Leninism. By making knowledge and educational background the key determinants in forging a new agency, Mills set a dangerous precedent. What would check the power of the young intelligentsia? Why would it not become just another self-interested group – a vanguard for its own power? Mills never thought through what it meant to see the young intelligentsia as the future agency of change.

This raises questions about the concept of historical agency in and of itself. By retaining an interest in locating a new agency of change, Mills became too quick to pass the torch to groups purporting to represent radical possibilities. Not only did he place his hope in a young intelligentsia, he also cited Third World revolutionaries in Cuba as leaders of new things to come. In identifying Castro’s revolution as a third way between Soviet communism and democratic capitalism, he projected his wishful hopes which – as history bears out – were undeserved. Logically, the idea of agency forced Mills to identify actors who deserved the mantle of liberation. Here Mills ignored another intellectual option: that of his intellectual predecessor, William James. For in opposing the Spanish-American War (1898), as Mills came to oppose American imperialism later, the great pragmatic philosopher focused his attention not on the revolutionaries fighting American expansion but on what imperialist expansion had done to America’s culture and intellectual soul – arguing that it made America "puke up its ancient soul." He called for Americans to learn tolerance, but he did not call for them to extend open arms to new revolutionary actors. This sort of stance seems to come closer to the "politics of truth" that Mills himself hoped to practice.

The tendency to retain faith in agency led directly to Mills’s taking some bad intellectual paths. And down these same paths went many New Left intellectuals who searched for new agents during the late 1960s – choosing among Black Americans, women, the lumpenproletariat, and Third World revolutionaries. For example, in One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse – another guru of the New Left – argued along Mills’s lines that "‘the people,’ previously the ferment of social change, have ‘moved up’ to become the ferment of social cohesion." After this clear swipe at the working class growing comfortable in the suburbs, Marcuse cited "the outcasts and outsider, the exploited and persecuted of other races..." as the future "opposition" that could become "revolutionary" and unleash "the great refusal." Mills’s mistake became Marcuse’s mistake. What these thinkers did was to impute universalistic qualities – the ability to achieve justice for all members of a society – from proscribed identities. Entire strata of people were crammed into a conceptual framework projected by intellectuals. In the case of Marcuse, residual Hegelianism backed him into this corner; in the case of Mills, it was the desire to find an agency to replace the older proletariat. Unsuspectingly, these thinkers laid the groundwork for the bad form of identity politics – the tendency to prescribe roles based solely upon a person’s ethnicity, race, or gender – that has emerged in our own times. The error of "agency" left numerous problems for radical intellectuals. Mills was best when he gave up on agency and simply evaluated the role different actors could potentially play in progressive change – resisting the pressure to make one group the force of salvation.

If Mills showed weakness in relationship to questions of liberalism and agency, his central conception of a democratic public also suffered from problems. The idea of a public was central to Mills’s social thought, and it fortunately prevented full-fledged vanguardist tendencies since it decentered intellectuals, making them one set of players in a larger circle including citizens and political leaders as well. But it was unclear just why Mills’s had any faith in resuscitating the sort of publics he hoped for. After all, Mills often had a negative assessment of the American public – seeing it composed mostly of "cheerful robots" suffering from political apathy. He explained, in sweeping terms, "If we accept the Greek definition of the idiot as an altogether private man, then we must conclude that many American and many Soviet citizens are now idiots." But somehow, while believing this, he hoped for the revival of publics – for some miraculous turn away from idiocy towards civic engagement. This seemingly contradictory stance extended to Mills’s thoughts on intellectuals. Mills argued that intellectuals themselves were proletarianized – divorced from the means of broadcasting their viewpoints to others as the mass media became more centralized and universities more bureaucratized. At the same time, he called on intellectuals to become "independent craftsman" and renew a meaningful commitment to public life. At times, Mills sounded like he was setting up great hopes for the future that he himself already believed were impossible.

The recreation of a democratic public – the central task of any future left in Mills’s mind – became, at times, almost existential. While Mills showed how limits were placed on human beings by social and political institutions, he nonetheless had faith that people could will a different future. But rarely did he set out what sort of counter institutional possibilities existed for his prescriptions, arguing that if leaders, citizens, and intellectuals wanted something, they could have it – an odd sentiment on the part of a social critic such as Mills. For instance, after dissecting academic conformity and the stifling power of the "mass market" which stressed entertainment over critical thinking, Mills would suddenly berate his fellow intellectuals with these words: "If we want to, we can be independent craftsmen.... [We] are free to decide what [we] will do or will not do in [our] working life." But these sorts of declarations contradicted his previous analysis of the proletarianization of intellectual life – which, as he showed so astutely, limited intellectuals’ options. Just how could publics be recreated when the mass media was so centralized and bent on commercialized entertainment? Just how could a public of citizens rise again if so many citizens were idiots? Mills’s resort to existentialist revolt is bizarre when placed alongside his thorough institutional analysis of power and apathy.

Rarely did Mills speak in concrete institutional terms regarding the creation of democratic publics. Only when pressed by the situation did he speak in this manner. For instance, in a speech for the Center for the Study of Liberal Education for Adults, Mills stated that the adult school should serve as an institutional basis for the formation of a critical public. He explained, "In the absence of... publics, these schools ought to become the framework within which such publics exist at least in their inchoate beginnings..." Unfortunately this sort of remark on the part of Mills seems haphazard – sparked by the occasion and little else. Why, after all, didn’t Mills look for other possible institutional sources of a reenlived public? For instance, he rarely spoke of the civil rights movement and the ways citizens forged new public institutions within that movement. Nor did he spot any institutions that could seriously be expected to counteract the increasing power of the mass media.

Mills therefore seemed comfortable having the central linchpin of his future left – a democratic public – remain vague and unfixed. Perhaps his pragmatic temper prevented him from defining the solution too tightly. Perhaps his historical period simply did not offer enough institutional sources of renewed publics. Perhaps he believed citizens and political leaders should be the ones to create new institutional possibilities while social critics like himself simply waited off stage. Whatever the case might be, Mills’s weakness on this count represented a broader problem: he did not define the contours of the future left well enough. Instead, he left many intellectual problems behind – an overburdening critique of liberalism which assumed liberalism’s staying power, a search for new historical agents that could easily devolve into identity politics, and an ill-defined and almost existential call to recreate democratic publics.

Ironically, Mills’s weakness was also his strength. For what he failed to accomplish remains our challenge today. He left behind not only intellectual quandaries but also living demands that should reawaken us to the project of social criticism as it relates to practical politics. If we take Mills as a starting point and face up to our own day and age, we are presented with the most pressing questions for any future left. How can we create institutional possibilities for progressive decentralization to counteract the conservative tendency of devolution? How can we ensure both democratic participation on the part of citizens and equity across different communities at the same time? How can we truly engage citizens in community-problem solving – the essence of John Dewey’s form of politics that Mills adopted – while not overburdening communities or relinquishing the need for social equity and a fair distribution of resources? How can we recreate publics and a progressive voice in American politics? Mills started to ask these questions, and in doing so, he left to us a live, though unfinished, project.

Mills showed us the promise of radical democracy. He made clear that a social critic needed to do two things at once: analyze the way power and inequity operated and point to possibilities for political reform and sources of radical hope. Rejecting the easy paths of neo-conservatism, cultural elitism, or academic comfort and irrelevance, he tried to spell out what could be done to make American society more democratic. By speaking to publics about pressing matters, he tried in his own way to reenergize such publics against the increasing pressures of mass society. He understood that the most important element for progressive change was the creation of a public sphere in which dialogue and debate could be heard. That demand still exists today – even more so as the mass media grow both in power and superficiality. Though he failed at times to make clear just how this recreation could in fact take place, Mills deserves our praise for making this the central challenge of any future new left. It is up to us to see if we can find ways to live up to the challenge that Mills left us – the challenge of radical democracy.

Martin Heidegger suggests, in a lecture titled "The Thing" (1949), that the atom bomb is "the grossest of all gross confirmations" of modern technology’s destruction of the essence of "thingness." Speaking at the advent of the nuclear age, Heidegger claims that the universal implications of the bomb represent the historical culmination of technology’s erasure of an older form of Being maintained by the nearness of earth and its objects. Despite the philosopher’s use of apocalyptic language in reference to such a singular threat –language that leads some to misread Heidegger as engaging in a reactionary rebellion against technology–he is not suggesting that technology is some sort of objective evil. The bomb itself is not the threat. Rather, an older order of Being is challenged by the universal implications underwriting the bomb’s very existence, a form of human perception that is wholly modern.

Now fifty years later, we should reexamine Heidegger’s subtle reading of technology by keeping in mind his emphasis that the "greatest danger" may not figure as an atomic flash, but concerns our day-to-day approach to the things around us. On the one hand, the current phenomenon of television, with its privileged status as a cultural event, serves as an excellent example by which to explore Heidegger’s complex notion concerning how technology becomes intertwined with our Being. On the other hand, we can start to unravel the complex existence of the event of television today by returning to his notion of Enframing (Gestell)–which proposes that the essence of technology is not technological, but a way of life. In either case, the first step of bringing Heidegger and television together involves an overcoming of the instrumental logic that suggests that television is best thought of as a home appliance, a window to the world, a marketplace, a piece of furniture, a companion, or something fully human. After all, if we label technology as either neutral, evil, or outside human thinking altogether, Heidegger warns, we are handed over to its powers in the "worst possible way" (TQCT, 4).

The value of Heidegger’s theory of technology consists in its ability to offer us an alternative way to conceptualize a rupture between a technological past and present. The user friendly ease of today’s most advanced mediums–from the internet and CD ROM of home computing, to CAT scans, MRI imaging, sonograms, and computer-enhanced photography–lead many users away from a reflection on the mechanical sources that underwrite their existence. Yet Heidegger stresses in his landmark essay of 1955, "The Question Concerning Technology" ("Die Frage nach der Technik"), that it is nonetheless important for us, when thinking about the seeming dislocation of the technological present, to recognize that the destiny of technology was set in place long ago: "That which is primally early shows itself only ultimately to men. Therefore, in the realm of thinking, a painstaking effort to think through still more primally what was primally thought is not the absurd wish to revive what is passed, but rather the sober readiness to be astounded before the coming of what is early" (TQCT, 22). In terms of our discussion, then, television exists within the "destiny" of technology, and is thus the latest object to embody the paradox of his insightful claim that "technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology" (TQCT, 4). The viewer’s unparalleled desire to see through the medium of television, which reinforces our inability to interpret its essence, is itself a part of the enduring (and often troubling) connection between techne and knowledge in Western metaphysics.

Our reflection begins with an awareness of the switch from film to television. Christian Metz, an influential media philosopher, points out how the older order of film involves a unique (but symmetrical and systematic) interaction between viewer and screen. Because the viewer both projects his or her gaze onto the movie screen and introjectively receives the screen’s projection, Metz describes the viewer (in this case himself) as the symbolic equivalent of the camera: "Releasing it [the film], I am the projector, receiving it, I am the screen; in both these figures together, I am the camera, which points and yet which records." The equipment of cinema–camera, projector, film-strip, screen, etc.–becomes then a metaphor (as well as the real source) for the mediation involved in the mental process of film. Clearly, however, at the heart of television’s appealing revision of its more fixed, technological predecessor (i.e. the introduction of home viewing, self-timed watching, the remote control, and a spectrum of channels) is a new sense of subjectivity which advertises the removal of the mediation of content by a technological (or necessarily ordered) engagement. One contemporary philosopher, Avital Ronell, for instance, describes the transition from film to television by comparing it to the symbolic move from the polite formalism of the Bible’s Old Testament to the image-laden intimacy and personal revelation of the New.

Although the medium is always ready to stress its interactive translucence, we must remember that television is a more complex technological proposition than film. In different contexts, several critics of the medium notice that television’s complex extension of its event restructures the nature of viewing habits and awareness. Fredric Jameson remarks how turning the television set off has little in common with the grand finale of a feature film, when the "lights slowly come back on and memory begins its mysterious work." The steady glow of television’s "attenuated visual data" does not "haunt the mind or leave its afterimages" in the manner of the great moments of film with its more leisurely sense of viewing combination; rather, it invites a certain amnesia regarding its own process. Not only does television watching often lack demarcation from other events, according to Ronell, "it is a sight of evacuation, the hemorrhaging of meaning, ever disrupting its semantic fields and phenomenal activities of showing." Perhaps Stanley Cavell summarizes a variety of critical remarks about television best when he says that, in television, "meaning is dictated by the event itself." The sum of these various insights into the process of television watching suggest that the event of television does not remove the mediation of images, but dissembles it; in short, the meaning of television is intensely determined by a highly technological (and thus increasingly ordered) interaction between viewer and the screen’s flow of images.

How can we better comprehend this undercutting of the awareness of an event by its very extension? Although Heidegger only momentarily touches upon the television in his writings and speeches, I would like to show how the medium’s present function serves to destabilize some of his basic philosophical categories while, at the same time, his commentary on technology serves an illuminating reflection on the palimpsest of reception. Heidegger’s understanding of the essence of Being, Dasein ("being-there"), suggests that the possibility of meaningful human existence is contingent upon the individual determination of the being of entities and how they are originally "revealed" (brought into a position of human judgment). In translating Heidegger’s two key terms of Sein and Seinde as "Being" and "entity," Michael Zimmerman illuminates a crucial dimension of Heidegger’s ontology.

For Heidegger, Sein meant the event in which an entity reveals or shows itself. Hence, "to be" meant not an eternal metaphysical foundation or first principle, but instead the "presencing" or "appearing" of a thing. Such presencing or appearing, so Heidegger argued, could not take place without the "clearing" which constitutes the essence of human existence. Without humans, entities would be unable to reveal or display themselves; in this sense, they would not "be."

Our rationale for labeling Heidegger as an existentialist philosopher becomes most apparent when we examine his idea of "the clearing." The presence of entities is dependent upon the subjectivity of human perception, while, simultaneously, the very content of human existence is made up of these entities. As Hubert L. Dreyfus writes, "...the understanding of being creates what Heidegger calls a clearing in which things and people can show up for us. We do not produce the clearing. It produces us as the kind of human beings that we are."

But what occurs when the ontological categories of a so-called existentialist philosopher are challenged by a technological extension of visual and auditory images? What happens when a philosophy of awareness is threatened by heightened sensation itself? Following the terms of Heidegger’s ontological equation, television complicates (and brings to a crisis) a long history of representation: entities originally "reveal" or display themselves while the viewer is engaged, contractually, so to speak, in the dynamics of reception. If television, in a sense, explodes a basic understanding of the "clearing" by both expanding the horizon of visibility and limiting vision to a rectangular space, it will be up to us to determine if Heidegger’s ontology can be extended in order to incorporate this shift, thus bringing this privileged modern genre back within the scope of Dasein and the being-at-hand of Being.

Of technology is truly a destiny for the West, as the philosopher claims, how does the event of television retain the old with the new? How does the philosopher’s theory of technology step in to speak when his basic ontology cannot? Perhaps we can answer these questions by keeping in mind Heidegger’s etymology of technology. "The word stems from the Greek," he writes. "Technikon means that which belongs to techne ... techne is the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman, but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Techne belongs to bringing-forth, to pöiesis; it is something pöietic" (TQCT, 12-13). Akihiro Takeichi clarifies the connection Heidegger is making here between pöiesis and modern technology: "The function of setting-up in ‘enframing’ (Gestell) is derived from the functioning of setting up in poiesis in ancient times. The functions of these settings up are essentially related, because they are both revealing (Entbergung)." Both techne and technology figure as negotiations, then, of the clearing, manipulations, both physical and perceptual, of the things around us. As an event of technology, television, despite its relative newness in terms of the technological, holds within its essence the sense of the original techne–"the activities and skills of the craftsmen." In fact, the newness of television’s "revealing," and it presentation of interactive translucence, is also, ironically, a return to what is oldest, craft and art. The viewer, for instance, does not just flip on the set to watch what Raymond Williams calls television’s "total flow," although this is certainly a part of television’s appeal, but as Umberto Eco noticed, the viewer often uses the "incontrollable plurality of messages" evoked by the event of television "to make up his own composition with the remote control switch." By channel surfing the viewer intimately participates in a technological sketching of his or her own environment; often eschewing a fixed content, the viewer is given the tools to engage in a process of artistic creation.

As such, the format of television has a long history as a mode of pöiesis and revealing. However, to the extent such a format combines the old with the new, reception overtakes the awareness of the "open space" of techne’s revealing because in television, techne is put at the service of the medium’s fresh, technologically advanced flow of images. In effect, the viewer is forced to aggressively push-on with the craft of television instead of stopping to see what he or she has evoked via the hand-held remote control. Surfing the channels with the remote control is both a creative process and mentally benumbing; it is an expression of televisual boredom or restlessness and the moment when the viewer takes reception most forcefully in hand. In this way, the older, interactive sense of techne is increasingly handed over to the maintenance of television’s technologically advanced reception, its dissembling of mediation.

One might say that in relation to techne, television plays out the following paradox: television will not let the viewer hold onto (visually or otherwise) what he or she has made because it demands that you see within the domain of the already-made. Heidegger warns us of the danger involved in such a setting, one which marks the transition from techne to technology: "What is dangerous is not technology," he writes. "There is no demonry of technology, but rather there is the mystery of its essence. The essence of technology, as a destining of revealing, is the danger" (TQCT, 28). The revealing that takes place at the hands of the event of television is forced not only to occur within the modern domain of re-presentation, the medium sets such re-presentation technologically in place by, so to speak, institutionalizing liveness. The medium’s event often advertises its freshness by portraying itself as the modern embodiment of techne’s two primary features–interactive creation, and the original being-there of craft– but this experience of techne is made possible by a technological reification, the "destining of revealing" involved in television’s materiality and its flow of re-presentation.

Heidegger writes in "The Age of the World Picture" that "To be new is peculiar to the world that has become picture" (WP, 132). In terms of television, the dissemination of the message of newness and liveness only occurs when seeing is especially destined. Because of the continued importance of techne to Being, when revealing becomes re-presentation, the medium quite logically presents itself as translucent, a broadcasting window to a world of constant liveness. As if to denote how far we have come from techne’s original revealing, Cecilia Tichi remarks that the "The screen shape is culturally naturalized, no longer the face of the cathode ray tube but an inscription of safety and security [an electronic hearth] to be deployed throughout the culture."

Despite modern technology’s overwhelming connection with the past, Heidegger suggests that a strange and different spirit pervades the present. "The essence of modern technology," he writes, "shows itself in what we call Enframing."In one of his most succinct moments in "The Question Concerning Technology" he defines Enframing ("Gestell") as "the way in which the real reveals itself as standing-reserve" (TQCT, 23). This essence is our new way of perceiving the world as orderable, the way in which the natural and manufactured sum of the corporeal environment is understood as instrumental parts (a "standing-reserve") of technological progression. Heidegger provides an example of this modern brand of perception. He states that in former times the Rhine was conceived of as a river in the landscape, but now the river is understood in the context of the "interlocking process pertaining to the orderly disposition of electrical energy," or the river is imagined "in no other way than as an object on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the vacation industry" (TQCT, 16). What is different, then, about the environment of Enframing, as opposed to earlier times, is this notion of a larger process, the very possibility of environment and constellation. Heidegger uses the term Enframing, as opposed to techne, to describe the state of affairs in the modern epoch because the revealing of the "standing reserve," as almost exclusively a form of perception instead of an act of creation, has become mysteriously intertwined with our Being. Within a picture-frame perception, one forgets the earth as an abode for the spontaneous interaction between one’s self and things, an open space for Da-sein’s Being there. The earth is perceived for ordering’s sake, or as Heidegger puts it "everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct" (TQCT 27).

The sacredness of careful revealing–the erecting of a statue in the temple district (TQCT, 21), to use Heidegger’s example–is replaced by the modern desire to watch all possibly orderable things come into existence, a misperception that does indeed make modern revealing fundamentally different. The interplay between an aggressive, perceptual stance towards the world and the consequences of the material presence it brings forth into "unconcealment" turns out to be technology’s true essence. In taking Heidegger’s logic to its final destination, what comes to pass is that Enframing, as a new form of technological perception in which the corporeal world is comprised of a standing-reserve only of objects, ironically, blurs, and ontologically confuses, the foundation of the current environment that it makes possible. In simplest terms, technology cannot think technology. "Enframing is the highest danger in this fundamental respect," John Sallis writes, "in that it threatens most radically to deny man’s entrance into a domain in which can be heard the call which, withdrawing from man, sends him on his way. The forgotteness of Being reaches here its highest point."

How does the television, as a highly technological object, take part in this modern mystery of Being? To ask such a question, to move beyond reception to reflection, we must first fathom what is involved in calling the television technological. On the most basic level, the encased materiality of the television itself is an outcome of the "challenging ordering." Its material structure (plastic, glass, circuitry, and electricity) could only be fashioned when various countries achieved a certain stage in technological advancement. As Raymond William remarks, "The invention of television was no single event or series of events. It depended on a complex of inventions and developments in electricity, telegraphy, photography, and pictures and radio." Hence, television was unavailable until 1936 in Britain and 1939 in America because a material network of successive inventions (one dimension of Heidegger’s concept of a "standing-reserve") was not ordered enough for it to be "challenged-forth" until this time. Yet the television’s encased materiality is only one dimension of the television’s identity as technological. At another important level, the material process of making a television show represents the subject’s aggressive stance (stellen) towards the environment. For instance, cameras, actors, scripts, sets, and props are all perceived as orderable parts, and indeed themselves forged, in the complex process of "challenging-forth" a televisual image. Moreover, it is here, at the point where the technological and the standing-reserve move into a heightened engagement with the visual and perceptual, that one can glimpse the mysterious link between the technological and the essence of technology. Through the subject’s new, aggressive approach to "the real," the televisual image is the "revealing," both visually and technologically, of the Enframing of the standing-reserve itself. Because the viewer sees through the liveness and living color of the technological object (while the object seen is dispersed both here, there, and elsewhere), the event of television figures as a "revealing of the real as standing-reserve" while, on another important level, such seeing is simultaneously an orderable, technological part of television’s "total flow." In dissembling its mediation by, in effect, setting-up a mediation of the way we see, television becomes an indispensable component of the viewer’s supposedly uncensored perception of a world of orderable parts, while at the same time, television’s images are technological, and thus a part of the dissembling process they help perceptually inform.

In prophetic tone, Heidegger states in "The Question" that "Man stands so decisively in attendance on the challenging-forth of Enframing, that he does not apprehend Enframing as a claim, that he fails to see himself as the one spoken to, and hence also fails in every way to hear in what respect he exists..." (TQCT, 27). A reflection on television offers a way for us to better understand what Heidegger means by the split between simply being "spoken to" and the self awareness of listening and comprehension. I have already suggested that the viewer’s inability to apprehend Enframing as a claim is based in his or her attendance and fixation on the technological content of the medium’s images. But what is the character of television’s content? Not only does the viewer unavoidably participate in a technological language while watching television, in addition, the content of the medium–from talkshows, to sports, to sitcoms–is made up of an endless stream of human images. In the event of television, we watch ourselves and the viewer is literally "the one spoken to." If we apply Heidegger’s reflection on technology to this phenomenon of a stream of human images, the content of television may present us with the situation in which human beings may simultaneously exist as both the subject and object within Enframing: we stand as both the perceiver of technological images and the material of them. (In a very reduced formula, we "challenge-forth" ourselves in perceiving human images as another portion of the real that is revealed as standing-reserve; in other words, we become what we perceive technology to be.) Heidegger refers to such a danger as the summit of Enframing as a destining:

The nature of television accelerates this perceptual sequence. The human engagement with Enframing taking place in the event of television may be the "point" where human beings "will have to be taken as standing-reserve" because the television "no longer concerns man" as the object "television," rather, it interests the viewer as the flow of human images that make up the standing reserve of the medium’s material discourse. What Heidegger calls the "objectlessness" of this advanced point of Enframing is exemplified in the current inability to understand what television is because of the uninhibited stream of images that come out of it.

In response to the rise of objectlesness, Heidegger forges a counterpoint in his philosophy between earth and world. Michel Haar remarks that, for Heidegger, the earth is the "unfathomable and untamable background of a meaningful historical structure...a [place where] thinghood is there gratuitously, for its own sake." Yet when Enframing reaches the point where things are perceived of in terms of technological becoming, the older thingness of earth fades away into the objectless totality of world. As such, Heidegger uses the term world to denote the totality of environment; the earth is abolished when the thingness of the technological is liquidated and dissembled in a receptive state of mind.In his essay "The Turning" Heidegger describes the results of Enframing’s attempt, as a human endeavor, to bring the world constantly closer in technological picture-making: "Enframing disguises the nearness of world that nears in the thing. Enframing disguises even this, its disguising, just as the forgetting of something forgets itself and is drawn away in the wake of forgetful oblivion" (TT, 46).

By dissembling its mediation, the event of television often portrays itself as a utopian move beyond the restrictive layers of distance. This overcoming of the fields of older space relations has been a part of the medium’s identity from its inception. In the initial DuMont advertising campaign in the mid-1940s television was described as "the biggest window in the world," the "magic carpet ride," "university," and a "gift: the answer to man’s ageless yearning for eyes and ears to pierce the barrier of distance." However, from a Heideggerian perspective, the human desire to see far–a desire denoted by the "tele" of television, and the "Fern" of the German Fernsehen–is linked to the mistaken assumption that television is a pure conduit in the viewer’s perception of world.

In the first of his two brief treatments of television, Heidegger addresses the dangerous state of "objectlessness" that such far-seeing produces. At the beginning of his essay "The Thing" (1950) Heidegger states,

In his work on technology, Heidegger calls the human desire to overcome distance the "challenging revealing." In the case of the event of television, which he illuminates for us here, the medium threatens presence and nearness because it concerns itself with the challenge of revealing as "real" what is continually further away. Bringing always live (but always re-presented) television images into the home in this world picture-making only forges an objectless distance regarding what is truly near. As suggested earlier, one might say that with the rise of an aggressive re-presentation, the event of television takes away the essential proximity to things that allows us to see through them nothing less than their being as entities. In the paradox of the dissembling of mediation, the viewer is unaware of the arrival of "remoteness," the forgetting of what is near.

But what is the primary object lost in far-seeing? In his other treatment of television–an address to the Schwartzwald peasants in 1955–Heidegger connects the dangerous inversion in distance that television undertakes, and its mysterious "objectlessness," with the destruction of the home and habitat of earth:

In this passage Heidegger dramatically asserts that the television, and other ubiquitous modes of modern communication, threaten the German homeland even more so than the dislocation brought about by the Second World War. Dreyfus points out that Heidegger’s statement lamenting the appearance of television antennae on rural dwellings mistakenly suggests that the philosopher is "a Luddite who would like to return from the exploitation of the earth, consumerism, and mass media to the world of the pre-Socratic Greeks." But there is a philosophical message here deeper than a simple longing for what has passed away. We should note Heidegger’s specific association of the inversion in distance generated by television’s dissembling, "the illusion of a world that is no world," with the passing away of earth and home. Heidegger’s two treatments of television taken together suggest that the medium’s preoccupation with far-seeing disguises its being-at-hand, and thus allows the domestic space, formerly thought of as a retreat from overwhelming technological progress, to move into the forefront of human naturalization to the ordering of the technological. Consequently, television’s hand-held remote control is an emblem of how the world is "ordered to stand immediately at hand." More precisely, in terms of the Heideggerian paradox described above, the nearness of home is dissembled by the (home-sick) remoteness at hand.

As a dislocation of awareness, Enframing threatens the essence of humanity; Heidegger writes: "where Enframing reigns, there is danger in the highest sense" (28). A profound feature of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology, however, involves the reversal of this "danger in the highest sense." Despite his claim that Enframing is an inescapable part of life in the modern period, Heidegger believes, nonetheless, in the possibility of human freedom, and an overcoming of the restrictive logic of reception. In many of his essays on technology Heidegger cites a passage from Holderin’s hymn "Patmos":

By suggesting that the "saving power" grows where Enframing’s danger is greatest, Heidegger emphatically avoids all connection with the technological. John Sallis explains this argumentative reversal by relating it to the back-and-forth movement that pervades all of Heidegger’s reflections on technology. The question behind Heidegger’s "Question Concerning Technology," his ambiguous refusal to state exactly what technology is, figures as a reversal of the instrumental revealing of Gestell. In other words, Heidegger’s claim that the saving power grows where the danger is highest (his shunning of a determinist definition of technology as an unavoidable danger) confirms his careful avoidance of receptionist thinking. As such, his incessant questioning is a turning away from the "productionist metaphysics," to use Steven Heine’s phrase, that established the destiny of technology long ago.

Yet what is this "saving power"? The "saving power" is the purity of human thought. Heidegger closes his essay "The Age of the World Picture" with an invocation that illuminates his use of Holderin:

The questioning embodied in reflection is the "saving power," the bringing of the "clearing" back into focus. While the receptive thinking of Enframing involves the naturalization and deshaping represented by the standing-reserve, genuine reflection recovers an awareness of the strangeness of the technological. The "saving power" is then a return to the "between" of Da-sien’s Being-at-hand. But why does this "saving power" emerge at the height of Enframing and its dangers? It is found here because in reflecting on the reception which pervades Enframing, the subject awakes a "stranger amid that which is." The "saving power" grows where the stakes of reception are highest, so to speak, because of the possibility of a resounding reflection which may revive the essential difference "between" Being and the technological. In a very important sense, Heidegger is directing us to the emotive path of spiritual conversion. As he writes elsewhere:

In terms of television, the detection of the dissembling of mediation emerges as a heightened realm of awareness. Seeing the strangeness of our attachment to television’s glowing event emerges as an unparalleled opportunity to see into the essence of Being, what the television set is not. For we should recall, in the spirit of the "saving power," that the stranger in a strange land prophetically knows what is lacking.

Cavell, Stanley. "The Fact of Television." In Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984.

Dreyfus, Hubert L.. "Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology." In Technology @ The Politics of Knowledge. edited by Andrew Feenberg and Alastair Hannay, 97-107. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.

Heidegger, Martin. "The Question Concerning Technology." In the Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt, 3-35. New York: Harper Torch-books, 1977.

__________. "The Age of the World Picture." In the Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt, 115-154. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

__________. "The Turning." In the Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt, 36-49. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

__________. Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.

__________. Discourse on Thinking, translated by John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. New York: Harper and Row, 1966.

Heine, Steven. "Philosophy for an ‘age of death’: The critique of science and technology in Heidegger and Nishitani." Philosophy East and West 40.2 (1987).

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier. Translated by Cecilia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.

Ronell, Avital. "Video/Television/Rodney King: Twelve Steps Beyond the Pleasure Principle." Differences 4.2 (1992): 1-15.

Sallis, John. "Toward the Movement Of Reversal: Science, Technology, and the Language of Homecoming." In Heidegger and the Path of Thinking, edited by John Sallis, 161-192. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1970.

Takeichi, Akihiro. "On the Origin of Nihilism–In View of the Problem of Technology and Karma." In Heidegger and Asian Thought, edited by Graham Parkes, 175-186. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987.

Taminiaux, Jacques. "Heidegger and the Earth." Diacritics 19.3-4 (1989): 76-81.

Tichi, Cecelia. Electronic Hearth: Creating an American Television Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Williams, Raymond. Television. New York: Schocken Books, 1975.

Zimmerman, Michael E.. Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Avital Ronell, "Video/Television/Rodney King: Twelve Steps beyond The Pleasure Principle," Differences 4.2 (1992) , 2.

Martin Heidegger, The Thing. Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971) 166, 170. Heidegger originally delivered this essay as a lecture at the Club at Bremen on December 1, 1949. "Das Ding" was presented, with three other lectures, under the title "Insight into That Which Is."

Quotations from Martin Heidegger’s works are cited in this essay using the following abbreviations:

TQCT: "The Question Concerning Technology." The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays , translated by William Lovitt, 3-35. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

WP: "The Age of the World Picture." The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays , translated by William Lovitt, 115-154. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

TT: "The Turning."The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays , translated by William Lovitt, 36-49. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

PLT: Poetry, Language, Thought, translated Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.

DT: Discourse on Thinking, translated by John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. New York: Harper and Row, 1966.

Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 51.

Ronell, "Video/Television/Rodney King," 10.

Jameson, Postmodernism, 70-71; Ronell, "Video/Television/Rodney King," 6; Stanley Cavell, "The Fact of Television," in Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984), 258. Related to Jameson’s notion of historical amnesia is the fact that in television, unlike movies, there is less the sense of there being masterpieces. Raymond Williams notices that "We do not say: ‘I saw the best newscast that I have ever seen last night.’ We usually just say that ‘we watched television,’ rather than that we watched ‘the news’ or ‘a play’ or ‘the football’ on television." Comprehension and demarcation of event is exactly what the whole or total flow of television prevents. Raymond Williams, Television (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 74.

Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, xxii.

Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology," in Technology and the Politics of Knowledge, edited by Andrew Feenberg and Alastair Hannay (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 100.

Akihiro Takeichi, "On the Origin of Nihilism –In View of the Problem of Technology and Karma," Heidegger and Asian Thought, ed. Graham Parkes (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987) ,181.

Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986),148.

Tichi,Electronic Hearth, 29.

John Sallis, "Toward the Movement of Reversal: Science, Technology, and the Language of Homecoming,"Heidegger and the Path of Thinking, ed. John Sallis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1970), 167.

Williams, Television,14.

Jacques Taminiaux, "Heidegger and the Earth,"diacritics 19.3-4 (1989): 79. This article is a review of Michel Haar’s Le Chant De La Terre: Heidegger Et Les Assises De L’Histoire De L’etre (Paris, L’Herne, 1985).

Tichi, Electronic Hearth, 13.

Hubert L. Dreyfus, "Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology," 98.

John Sallis, 161-167.

Whether involved in the controversies surrounding Warhol’s Campbell Soup can paintings and Brillo boxes of the 1960’s, or Jeff Koons’s framed Nike posters of the 80’s, commodification has been one of art’s most contentious issues. ¹ In the post-war boom years, elements of mass culture grew into what was considered a kind of virus blanketing the industrialized world. Artists and writers attempted to immunize themselves against this virus by initiating a lively discourse about the commodification of culture. A central aspect of this discourse was their asking, in effect: can or should art resist commodification, and if so, how? This inquiry remains as pertinent today as ever, though no longer pursued in the hope of definitive solution. Grasping the historical development of this discourse and its questioning is necessary before one can begin even the most tentative answer. These questions are particularly relevant now that ‘commercial’ artists such as Norman Rockwell and Thomas Kincaid ("The Painter of Light"ä ) are the subjects of serious analysis and praise by respected critics.

Things were fairly simple once; for modernists, art and other ‘elevated’ pursuits were to be preserved against even the slightest taint of commercialism. Those still clinging to this notion tend to regard the fusing of culture and the marketplace with concern.

But upholding the modernist conviction that there be a sacrosanct oppositional realm to bourgeois culture, including commodification, is no longer a simple matter. Such sights as an MTV camera crew eagerly interviewing a kid screaming "MTV sucks!" become commonplace; the feedback loop between ‘reality’ and ‘marketing’ grows so rapid and finely tuned that the two appear to blend into one. The most eccentric ‘outsider’ art or music of today can always end up seamlessly incorporated into a Madonna video tomorrow. In response to this shifting cultural terrain, postmodernism has taught us to problematize all hierarchies; the boundary between high and low cultural registers and the fine and popular arts has consequently blurred, if not vanished.

The dialogue about art’s relation to the market can be approached through the writings of four men: the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Herbert Marcuse, and the art critics Leo Steinberg and Dave Hickey. Kant is now widely recognized as one of the founders of modernist aesthetics. Steinberg and Marcuse, who were both in the modernist tradition, criticized the tendency within capitalist societies of the commercial to absorb the cultural sphere. Steinberg diagnosed the penchant, at least in the United States, to reduce art to an economic instrument. Using Marxian analysis, Marcuse conceived of art as having an innate capacity to transcend its commodity status. Contemporary art critic Dave Hickey, unlike the previous three thinkers, strikes an inclusionary stance as he encourages a freewheeling, promiscuous merger of art and commerce.

Hickey stands at the vanguard of a growing number of writers and artists challenging us to rethink the whole problem of ‘art’ and ‘commodity’. He is as adept at exploring the allures of Titian as of low-rider car culture; his prose is fluent in both historical erudition and a hip 1990’s patois. ² In his passionate support of Norman Rockwell, Hickey is no doubt playing agent provocateur; low to middlebrow art, he implies, can be a handy tool for tunneling under the barricades of the Art Institution. The premise is that commercially successful art is often more alive and in closer touch with desire than its publicly funded, anemic counterpart. For Hickey, art must ‘win it in the streets,' where he foresees little bands of artists and art fans gathering to create neighborhood galleries, free of the deadening grip of the university and museum, the foundation and government agency. He argues for a bottom-up approach in which artists find support in freely formed ‘communities of desire’; these artists would then later be institutionally enshrined, after ground-level constituencies have taken root. The current situation, Hickey argues, is exactly the opposite, a top-down power flow in which institutions pick the ‘winners’ a priori, whether or not such artists have any public support.³ For Hickey, commodification is the inevitable turbulence a vital art leaves in its wake. Though flawed, his advocacies represent a healthy challenge to entrenched notions about commercialism and its impact on art.

For most artists and critics, commodification no longer poses the monolithic threat it once did. A growing number have self-consciously embraced it, most notably Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons. For many contemporary artists, the commodified environment is a raw given - it is simply more ‘stuff’ appearing on the phenomenal screen. Even when an artist, such as Agnes Martin, avoids any hint of mass-culture influence, the work is still defined negatively, in terms of what has been renounced. Most serious artists, however, are in the world of commodity values but not of it; these values are often placed in artworks that involve personal and highly ambiguous attitudes toward mass culture.

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