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Title: Vagaries of Negation Author: John Zerzan Date: 1987 Language: en Topics: 1960s, Consumerism, education, family, history, mental health, statistics, stress, suicide, work Source: Apocalypse Culture
It wasn’t only radical intellectuals that found themselves unprepared
for the end of the 60s. Change was simply no longer in the air and it
fell to this intelligentsia, in the 70s increasingly part of the
universities they once attacked, to explain “the 60s,” its swirling
promise and its demise. Most of the professoriat who had come of age in
the struggles before the “Me Decade” Ice Age found no new framework for
understanding or reassessing their defeat circa 1970.
Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, which appeared just before the
upheavals, provided a rather pessimistic picture of consumption-
oriented citizens caught in the chains of “repressive tolerance.” With
the movements of blacks and other minorities, hippies, anti-war
students, and women, he rejoiced and became for a time more sanguine
about the prospects for the future. But by the second half of the 70s he
had become as grim as the rest of the radical intelligentsia; in his
final book (1978) Marcuse embraced art as the last refuge of resistance.
Some realized the inadequacy of the last Frankfurt School theorist but
offered nothing in his place to explain why events of the 60s had failed
to deepen into more of a challenge to the dominant culture. However,
Paul Piccone, editor of the quarterly journal Telos since it began in
1970, has tried to provide a fuller, if very depressing, schema to
account for the failure of the 60s revolts and what he sees as a triumph
of modem authority that pre-dates those revolts and rendered them
abortive.
In 1977 and ’78 Piccone unveiled his “artificial negativity” thesis,[1]
the most far-reaching and coherent model for understanding contemporary
social reality since at least the 60s. Re-periodizing recent phases of
capitalist development, it locates the decisive impact of
consumerization in the early 60s as a watershed between incomplete and
completed repression.[2] Correcting Marcuse’s “one-dimensionality”
approach as obsolete, Piccone has offered a persuasive picture of a
consumer-cultural hegemony grown so complete as to remove from its
subjects a combative intelligence essential to now-extinct struggles.
Internal opposition is necessary in order to equip the system with vital
control mechanisms; with the too-victorious stamping out of the
undomesticated, monopoly capitalism now must somehow relax its
repressive force so as to help engender a renewed negative presence.
It seems very plausible that domination today needs just such
“artificial negativity” for its future,[3] but where Piccone sees a
docile, cretinized subject, produced as the over-success of integration,
I see evidence of dis-integration, a subjectivity that, far from happy
and conformist, cries out in anguish as it begins to withdraw from the
reproduction of the social order.[4] The negative is in fact strongly
present, if not in a form useful to power. Data and commentary on the
social fabric of the 80s may suggest a clarification and
re-interpretation of the Piccone thesis.
One might have expected the alleged arrival of standardized, homogenized
consumer consciousness, with its “erosion of the last vestiges of
individuality,”[5] to also mean the evaporation of psychic turmoil.
Precisely the opposite is the case. Psychological immiserization is
increasing on all fronts, fundamental testimony that the individual
continues to register his incompatibility with the distortion and
impoverishment of life as offered by late capitalism.
With the decline of the traditional two-parent family—which is occurring
even faster in the 1980s than in the late 70s[6]—less emotional
mediation is afforded against the onslaught of everyday life. Even the
apparently successful are far from immune, as indicated in such articles
as “Life of a Yuppie Takes a Psychic Toll” and “Madness Stalks the
Corporate Ladder.”[7]
In fact, levels of emotional illness are growing, as reported by the
National Institute of Mental Health or the supermarket tabloids,[8] as
people find themselves unable to adjust to the triumphant culture. Newly
prominent maladies, such as the Epstein-Barr virus, a kind of
psychological devastation,[9] are complemented by new increases of
others, like eating disorders.[10] A federal study released in 1984
found that one in five had some type of mental health treatment,
compared to one in eight in 1960.[11] Not surprising is the fifteen
percent jump in the NIMH research budget for 1987.
Suicide among the young has tripled in the past twenty-five years,
following one hundred years of suicide stability going back to the mid-
nineteenth-century data studied by Durkheim. Among fifteen- to nineteen-
year-olds it is now the second leading cause of death and occasioned
formation of a cabinet-level Task Force on Youth Suicide in 1985. Late
in 1986 it was reported that after years of decline, suicide rates among
the elderly are also rising.[12]
Stress, thought by some to be perhaps only a buzz-word of the late 1970s
and early 80s, has never commanded so much attention. The literature is
burgeoning as stress-wrought damage grows.[13] The Morbidity and
Mortality Weekly Report released October 2, 1986 by the National Centers
for Disease Control declared that mental stress caused by unsatisfactory
working conditions has become America’s biggest occupational disease,
six months after a news magazine had concluded that “the American
workplace is being swamped with claims ranging from job burnout, or
mental fatigue from tedium and stress, to chronic and severe anxiety,
manic depression, nervous breakdown and schizophrenia.”[14] It has also
been recently claimed, by Dr. Thomas Robertson, that the stress of
getting up in the morning is the reason for the very high incidence of
strokes and heart attacks occurring between eight and nine a.m.[15]
The unreality of our work-and-shop existence is also viscerally felt, it
would seem, by the very young. A 1986 Cornell University Medical College
study of randomly selected six- to twelve-year-olds in New York City
found that 12% of them manifested suicidal tendencies, including overt
manifestations,[16] while a 1985 offering discussed widespread child
arson.[17]
In 1985 the American Medical Association revealed that “total outpatient
drug exposure” increased 28% from 1971 to 1982.[18] This by way of
background to 1986, the year of the cocaine epidemic and non-stop
attention to the problem, with special attention to drugs at work and
testing for drug use; several federal institutions came out for
universal employee drug tests in March, 1986, for example.[19]
Turning more directly to work, it is clear that the “productivity
crisis” is another hot topic of the 1970s that has proven its
durability. If Marxist periodicals like Science and Society and Dollars
and Sense denied its existence in the 70s, falling back in the 80s to
assert that at least the mental state of workers is no factor in the
productivity decline, those with a sincere spirit of inquiry into the
matter of faltering output-per-hours-worked have had to be more
forthright about this crisis that definitely has not gone away.
“Something important has happened to productivity. I don’t know what it
is ... but it is very bad,”[20] judged E. Dennison in the late 70s.
Baumol and McLennan concluded, more recently, that “this country’s
productivity growth performance in recent years is extremely
disquieting.”[21] After lackluster growth in 1984, it fell to -.2% for
1985[22] and is giving a poor showing thereafter.
Amid recent studies of a declining “work ethic,”[23] reactions range
from outrage, blaming “irrationalities on the level of the
individual,”[24] to sympathy, taking cognizance of the prevailing
“national malaise and personal pain.”[25] And one of the most stunning
aspects is that the productivity crisis has not been affected at all by
massive recent outlays, organizational and technological. Wickham
Skinner summed up the industrial situation thusly; “American
manufacturers’ near-heroic efforts to regain a competitive edge through
productivity improvements have been disappointing.
Worse, the results of these efforts has been paradoxical. The harder
these companies pursue productivity, the more elusive it becomes.”[26]
Also in mid-1986 came the parallel shocking news that the hundreds of
billions spent on computerizing the office have not raised white collar
productivity a whit.[27] At the same time performance in the service
sector is being questioned,[28] there is great resistance to the
neo-Taylorist monitoring of work by computers,[29] and layoffs signal to
some new declines of company loyalty, morale and productivity.[30]
Meanwhile, since its effective beginnings in the early 80s,[31]
participative management “has spread at an extraordinary rate”[32] with
the prospect of even greater growth of worker-involvement, quality of
worklife, and other democratizing of jobs.[33] More and more it is
becoming clear that “workers themselves must be the real source of
discipline,”[34] that authority has no choice but to give over more
initiative to those who are becoming more demonstrably averse to
contemporary work. At the same time, there is already evidence that
after initial temporary reprieves, power-sharing schemes are not
improving productivity or job satisfaction.[35]
Two other significant work tendencies, in passing, are the increase in
part-time employment,[36] and the refusal of the young, though often
unemployed, to accept work or to last long at it.[37] More evidence of
disinvestment in the dominant values.
Rousseau argued that republics could outdo monarchies by turning the
spectators into the spectacle.[38] Today’s political spectacle is
failing because people are shunning their appointed role. “Americans are
no longer merely criticizing their political system,” asserted historian
James Bums in 1984, “they are deserting it.”[39] Turnout for the 1986
election fit, if exaggeratedly, the general tendency since 1960: it was
the lowest since 1942 despite the most massive and costly voter
registration drive ever mounted in a non- presidential year. Among those
still participating in recent years, by the way, the trend has been
toward an unaffiliated status, not a swing toward the right.[40]
The young Sartre averred that there was nothing he and his compatriots
had been told that wasn’t a lie. Illiteracy in America is vast and
increasing, prompting Jonathon Kozol to estimate that sixty million are
“substantially excluded from the democratic process” by it.[41] There is
a deep, visceral turn-off indicated here, deeper than that of
non-voting, one which refuses and reverses one of civilization’s
cardinal agencies and promises fundamental problems for a social order
increasingly reliant on self-activation. The Army found that 10% of its
conscripts were functionally illiterate in 1975; in the 1981
(volunteer-based) Army the figure was 31% and climbing.[42] At work, new
computer-mediated environments require both literacy and initiative, as
both qualities evaporate.[43] A related development is the rising high
school dropout rate, with rates of forty and fifty percent from the
central city schools now being reported.[44]
Another basic connection with this culture also seems to be loosening:
that of a sense of history, a perspectival interest in the past.
Commentators of every stripe have bemoaned a great indifference emerging
in this area,[45] the tendency to live exclusively in the present.
Ultimately, however, is this “de-memorization” so threatening? Are the
horrors of the present not a sufficient reference point on which to base
the project of emancipation—in fact, are they not the only basis? As
Baudrillard reminds us, “Each man is totally there at each moment.
Society is also totally there at each moment.”[46] Adorno closed his
Minima Moralia with the counsel to thought that it must reveal this
“indigent and distorted” world as it will one day appear from the
vantage point of liberated existence—and to achieve such a perspective
“entirely from felt contact”[47] with the world’s aspects; this proviso
seems to imply both the definitive weight of the present and the promise
that the subject is capable of measuring that present against surviving
instincts and sensibilities. This brief survey tries to suggest that the
individual does survive and tries to turn away from official living,
maintaining particularity and otherness in fundamental ways, in the face
of the demands of complicity.
It has become commonplace to reject or ignore Habermas’ early 1970s
hypothesis that “late-capitalist societies are endangered by a collapse
of legitimation.”[48] But the farther we get from the 60s the more
obvious it is that a full range of de-legitimizing potentialities has
been growing since that time. What Robert Wuthnow characterized as an
unprecedented “fundamental uncertainty about the institutions of
capitalism”[49] does not even take into account the real depth of
“uncertainty” present when emotional survival itself is at issue.
Probably no single datum could provide better ammunition for the
“artificial negativity” view of a totally passive, cretinized populace
than that of the more than seven hours of television consumed per capita
daily. But can there be much dispute that most of those so irradiated
are consciously narcotizing themselves? Drugs of all kinds are clearly
necessary simply to get through the day, and an aura of irony has never
been so strong regarding television. Further, one could point, as many
did, to the Happy Days generation of young men as they faced the
institution of pre-draft registration in the early 80s. With all those
thousands of television programs behind them, could there be any doubt
that all of them would not docilely register? Their massive
non-compliance staggered virtually everyone.
Television commericals also deserve comment. Ten years ago, it was
“Harley Davidson—the freedom machine!” and “Mustang II, Boredom Zero”;
today—along with much more attention to pain and dyspepsia relief and
alcohol and drug treatment centers—Mastercard invites us to “Master all
the possibilities,” Merrill Lynch sings “To know no boundaries,” and
eroticism becomes far more pervasive in the promotion of a great variety
of commodities. Banks, life insurance companies and other conservative
components begin to sound like the motorcycle, whiskey and fast car
purveyors of the 70s. The widely noted collapse of the commitment to
deferred gratification[50] is not without grave danger to the present
society, as more and more is offered—in terms of what can only be seen
as less and less. Consumerized society provides less a guarantee of
power’s stability than a bill of reckoning that grows ever larger by its
noticeable failure to satisfy.
Meanwhile, polls reflect the public belief that ability and hard work
count for almost nothing in “getting ahead”; state lotteries and other
forms of gambling emerge as the national pastime; virtually universal
employee theft promotes the use of millions of lie-detector and
psychological “integrity” tests—not to mention drug testing; new studies
show the widespread use of unemployment benefits to subsidize leisure
rather than work search; shoplifting and tax evasion figures set new
highs each year, as do the U.S. prison population numbers; an avalanche
of articles touts the desperate need for moral education; the Army,
reduced to a New Age “Be all that you can be” appeal, contends with
drug, AWOL, illiteracy problems, and a new investigation points to
“Army-wide” pilfering of all types of equipment—this list and its
documentation could be greatly extended; I’ll spare the reader.
What stands out is that “narcissistic” withdrawal on this scale means
that values dangerous to the dominant order are corroding its very
foundation. As Baudrillard put it, “Everywhere the masses are encouraged
to speak, they are urged to live socially, politically, organizationally
.. the only genuine problem today is the silence of the masses.”[51]
Modem domination is democratic; it must have participation if it is to
have legitimacy; if it is, ultimately, to function at all. This is
precisely what is being withdrawn, as the return on investing in
domination registers on the organism as zero or less. This “passivity”
is of no instrumental use to the world we must continue to endure; an
artificial negativity may well be required. But this negativity in no
way means a real one, growing more visible, does not exist. Nor, it must
be added, is it inevitable that a totally alternative consciousness will
emerge from the crucible of intensifying alienation.
[1] Paul Piccone, “The Changing Function of Critical Theory,” New German
Critique 12 (Fall, 1977) and “The Crisis of One-Dimensionality,” Telos
35 (Spring, 1978).
[2] This may be seen as paralleling Jacques Camatte’s categories of the
informal and actual domination of capital, left rather indeterminate in
The Wandering of Humanity (Detroit, 1973).
[3] Sun Oil, Bristol-Myers, and American Express recently commissioned
an Oxford study on the future of American capitalism; predicated on the
fact that the gap between the haves and the have-nots is widening—e.g.
“Is the Middle Class Doomed?” New York Times Magazine, September 7, 1986
and “Is the Middle Class Shrinking?” Time, November 3,1986—an explosion
is predicted as personal anxiety converts to social and political
tension over downward mobility: America in Perspective, Oxford Analytica
(New York, 1986). There is a kind of crude analog here to the
“artificial negativity” thesis, as American capitalism in its decline is
seen as captive to outmoded ideologies and unable to connect with the
realities of the coming crisis.
[4] Earlier contributions to what some have termed the “breakdown”
thesis by the author: Breakdown: Data on the Decomposition of Society
(Milwaukie, OR, 1976); “The Promise of the 80s,” Fifth Estate (June
1980); “The 80s So Far,” Fifth Estate (Fall 1983); “Present Day
Banalities,” Fifth Estate (Winter-Spring 1986). Available in Elements of
Refusal, Left Bank Books, (Seattle, 1987).
[5] Paul Piccone, “Narcissism after the Fall: What’s on the Bottom of
the Pool?” (Symposium on Narcissism) Telos 44 (Summer 1980), p. 114.
[6] Two-parent families declined by 751,000 from 1980 to 1985, more than
twice the decrease in any five-year period since 1970, according to the
Census Bureau (figures released November 4, 1986).
[7] “Life of a Yuppie Takes a Psychic Toll,” U.S. News and World Report,
April 29, 1985; Douglas La Bier, “Madness Stalks the Corporate Ladder,”
Fortune, September 1, 1986.
[8] A survey of Journal of the American Medical Association and Archives
of General Psychiatry seem to indicate an upsurge of interest in
depression in the literature, while the check-stand weeklies seem to
feature stress, depression and loneliness in the mid-80s.
[9] “Malaise of the 80s,” Newsweek, October 27,1986.
[10] Joel D. Killen, et al, “Self-Induced Vomiting and Laxative and
Diuretic Use among Teenagers,” Journal of the AMA, March 21, 1986. This
study of tenth- graders revealed a higher incidence of bulimia
(binge-purge syndrome) than was previously thought—13% among the 1,728
under scrutiny.
[11] Michael Waldhoz, “Use of Psycotherapy Surges, and Employers Blanch
at the Costs: the Anxiety of Modem Life,” Wall Street Journal, October
20, 1986.
[12] CBS Evening News, November 12, 1986. Too recent for further
documentation, but see “Suicide by the Elderly Up,” Jet, September
1,1986.
[13] A tiny, representative sampling: Gary Evans, ed., Environmental
Stress (New York, 1982); “Stress!” (cover story, complete with
contorted, screaming face) Time, June 6, 1983; Diane McDermott,
“Professional Burnout and Control,” Journal of Human Stress, Summer
1984; T.F. Riggar, Stress Burnout: An Annotated Bibliography
(Carbondale, Illinois, 1985); Naomi Breslau and Glenn C. Davis, “Chronic
Stress and Major Depression,” Archives of General Psychiatry, April
1986.
[14] Muriel Dobbin, “Is the Daily Grind Wearing You Down?” U.S. News and
World Report, March 24, 1986. In Oregon, where I’m writing this article,
42% of all Workers’ Compensation claims filed by all employees in 1985
were based on “mental stress.” Alan K. Ota, “Claims for Stress
Increasing,” The Oregonian, October 24, 1986.
[15] Associated Press report of paper presented by Dr. Thomas Robertson,
annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology, March 11, 1986.
[16] Donald Ian Macdonald, “Can a 6-year-old Be Suicidal?” Journal of
the AMA, April 18, 1986.
[17] Wayne S. Wooden, “Why Are Middle-Class Children Setting their
Worlds on Fire?” Psychology Today, January 1985.
[18] Carlene Baum, et al, “Drug Use and Expenditures in 1982,” Journal
of the AMA, January 18, 1985.
[19] For example: “Panel Proposes Drug Screening in Work Place,”
Associated Press, March 3, 1986; “Drugs on the Job” (cover story), Time,
March 16, 1986; Irving R. Kaufman, “The Battle Over Drug Testing,” New
York Times Magazine, October 19, 1986; Michael Waldholz, “Drug Testing
in the Workplace: Whose Rights Take Precedence?” Wall Street Journal,
November 11, 1986.
[20] Quoted in Marion T. Bentley and Gary B. Hansen, “Productivity
Improvement: The Search for a National Commitment,” Daniel J. Srokan,
ed., Quality of Work Life (Reading, Massachusetts, 1983), p. 91.
[21] William J. Baumol and Kenneth McLennan, “U.S. Productivity
Performance and Its Implications,” Baumol and McLennan, eds,
Productivity Growth and U.S. Competitiveness (New York, 1985), p. 31.
[22] David T. Cook, “Why U.S. Workers Built Fewer Widgets per Hour Last
Year,” Christian Science Monitor, February 2, 1986.
[23] For example, the Aspen Institute’s late 1983 Work and Human Values
report.
[24] “On the Manageability of Large Human Systems,” editorial. Human
Systems Management, Spring, 1985, p. 3.
[25] Perry Pascarella, The New Achievers: Creating a Modem Work Ethic
(New York, 1984), p. x.
[26] Wickham Skinner, “The Productivity Paradox,” Harvard Business
Review, July-August, 1986, p. 55.
[27] William Bow, “The Puny Payoff from Office Computers,” Fortune, May
26, 1986.
[28] Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, “Shake, Rattle, and Clonk,” Forbes, July
14, 1986.
[29] See William A. Serrin, “Computers Divide A.T. & T. and Its
Workers,” New York Times, November 18, 1983; Beth Brophy, “New
Technology, High Anxiety,” which discusses “guerilla warfare in the
ranks,” U.S. News and World Report.
[30] “The End of Corporate Loyalty” (cover story), Business Week, August
4, 1986.
[31] See John Zerzan, “Anti-Work and the Struggle for Control,” Telos 50
(Winter 1981–82).
[32] Henry P. Sims and James W. Dean, Jr., “Beyond Quality Circles:
Self- Managing Teams,” Personnel, January, 1985, p. 25. Also Peter R.
Richardson, “Courting Greater Employee Involvement through Participative
Management,” Sloan Management Review, Winter 1985.
[33] Irving H. Siegel and Edgar Weinburg, Labor-Management Cooperation:
the American Experience (Kalamazoo, 1982). “Such collaborative activity
will continue to expand and flourish ...” p. vii; Susan Albers Mohrman
and Gerald E. Ledford, Jr., “The Design and Use of Effective Employee
Participation Groups; Implications for Human Resource Management,” Human
Resource Management, Winter, 1985.
[34] David N. Campbell, et al, “Discipline without Punishment—At Last,”
Harvard Business Review, July/August 1985, p. 162.
[35] Sar A. Levitan and Diane Wemke, “Worker Participation and
Productivity Change,” Monthly Labor Review, September 1984; Anat
Rafaeli, “Quality Circles and Employee Attitudes,” Personnel Psychology,
Autumn 1985. Also Robert Howard, Brave New Workplace (New York, 1986).
[36] Thomas J. Nardone, “Part-time Workers; Who Are They?” Monthly Labor
Review, February 1986; “Measuring the Rise in Part-time Employment,”
Business Week, August 18, 1986.
[37] Sylvia Nasar, “Jobs Go Begging at the Bottom,” Fortune, March 17,
1986; Albert Rees, “An Essay on Youth Joblessness,” Journal of Economic
Literature, June 1986; Harry Bacas, “Where Are the Teenagers?” Nation’s
Business, August 1986.
[38] J.J. Rousseau, Lettre a M. d’Alembert sur les Spectacles (Geneva,
1948), p. 168.
[39] James McGregor Bums, The Power to Lead (New York, 1984), p. 11.
“People are staying home as a conscious act of withdrawal” (also p. 11).
[40] John A. Fleishman, “Trends in Self-Identified Ideology from 1972 to
1982: No Support for the Salience Hypothesis,” American Journal of
Political Science, Vol. 30, No. 3 (August 1986); Thomas Ferguson and
Joel Rogers, “The Myth of America’s Turn to the Right,” The Atlantic
Monthly, 1986.
[41] Jonathon Kozol, Illiterate America (Garden City, N.Y., 1985), p.
23. Also, Ezra Bowen, “Losing the War of Letters,” Time, May 5, 1986,
and “The Age of the Illiterate,” The Economist, September 27, 1986.
[42] David Harmon, “Functional Illiteracy; Keeping Up in America,”
Current, September 1986, p. 8.
[43] Shoshana Zuboff, “Automate/Informate: the Two Faces of Intelligent
Technology,” Organizational Dynamics, Autumn 1985; Amal Kumar Naj, “The
Human Factor,” Wall Street Journal, November 10, 1986; Irwin Ross,
“Corporations Take Aim at Illiteracy,” Fortune, September 29, 1986.
[44] Gary G. Wehlage and Robert A. Rutter, “Dropping Out: How Much Do
Schools Contribute to the Problem?” Teachers College Record (special
issue on school dropouts), Spring 1986; Robert Marquand, “High Dropout
Rate Contradicts Official Report of School Progress,” Christian Science
Monitor, February 28, 1986.
[45] William Bennett, “Lost Generation: Why America’s Children Are
Strangers in Their Own Land,” Policy Review, Summer 1985; Diane Ravitch,
“Decline and Fall of Teaching History,” New York Times Magazine,
November 17, 1985; Christian Lenhardt, “Anamnestic Solidarity,” Telos 25
(Fall 1975).
[46] Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production (St. Louis, 1975), p.
166.
[47] Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (New York, 1974), p. 247.
[48] For example, Jürgen Habermas, “What Does a Crisis Mean Today?
Legitimation Problems in Late Capitalism,” Social Research, Winter 1973.
[49] Robert Wuthnow, “Moral Crisis in American Capitalism,” Harvard
Business Review, March-April 1982, p. 77.
[50] Michael Rose, Reworking the Work Ethic (London, 1985), p. 104.
[51] Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majority ... or the
End of the Social and Other Essays (New York, 1983), p. 23. However,
Baudrillard explicitly eschews any negative, liberatory potential for
the “mass,” which he sees as voracious, irrational, and dumb, simply a
black hole which may swallow the system but not thereby provide
deliverance. True to post-structural obeisance to an eternal, frozen
reality, for Baudrillard the individual is extinct and negativity a
meaningless term.