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OUR WORLD IS FILLING UP WITH DIFFERENCES. And this is a good thing, for some of these differences advance
the cause of human dignity. Plenitude embraces those who would
otherwise be persecuted for their difference. Better, plenitude
dispenses with "permission."
No one needs the liberal generosity of the mainstream to exist.
It is enough merely to stake out a social space and to occupy
it. Plainly, this is to the good.
But plenitude should also give us pause. It has a darker side,
as we have seen. It is capable of creating horrifying aberrations.
Plenitude allows (encourages?) the "mustering" of paramilitary
groups who cultivate their own deeply skewed notion of the world.
It forgives (encourages?) a world so decentred, so without powers
of withering, that even the bombing of federal office buildings
in Oklahoma City can seem plausible. Plenitude permits (encourages?)
the monstrous.
We have a choice. Plenitude can create the glorious or the monstrous.It
depends on what we do with difference. It depends on what difference
becomes for us.
Traditionally, difference has been a path to identity paved with
hostility and antagonism. It has given us a "sharpener" of identity
and a recipe for action: find the odd man, the odd group, the
odd nation, the odd culture, and then: mock, repudiate, assault,
and, too often, exterminate. (Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Amin, Pol Pot
eliminated difference by eliminating people, tens of millions of them. They made our century a slaughterhouse.)
This approach to difference has used it to sharpen identity through
contradistinction. We are what the other is not. Worse, our path
to definition may be found through acts of differentiation, antagonism,
and hostility against the other. By this reckoning, things look
rather grim. More difference can only mean more antagonism. If
we are filling up with differences, we will find ourselves surrounded
by otherness and increasingly called upon to challenge it. New
and emerging identities will put our own in question. Our identity
will depend upon the defacement of their identity. Plenitude's
world has the potential to make us smaller, meaner, more loathing,
and more loathsome. And we are the God-fearing folk. It will be
worse for others, the bigots and the hatemongers.These people
will find themselves so provoked by the rising tide of plenitude
that any act of opposition will seem tolerable (and psychologically
necessary). In the small scale, they will persevere in "fag bashing."
On the large, they will target still more federal buildings. |
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Oklahoma City |
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Pol Pot |
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But there is another use for difference. In this case, we use difference
as a definitional opportunity. We say of otherness, "Wonder what
that's like?" We venture out and try otherness on. This has always
been the spirit of Mardi Gras and other liminal moments. But I
think there is good evidence that our entire culture is shifting
in a transformational direction. More and more, we are prepared
to try on difference, to test it out.
This is a radically new approach to difference, one that completely
shifts the field of assumptions. In the old sharpening model,
we use difference to push off against. We are not what the other
is. In this new transformational model, we use difference as a
definitional opportunity. We use it as a shape to try on and act
out. Our most fundamental reflexes are rewired. When we see a
new species of social life (Dennis Rodman, say) we no longer say,
"Weirdo! Get 'em!" We say, "Um, that's pretty strange. What's
it like to be like that?" We move from difference as contradistinction
to difference as definition. We move from difference as sharpening
to difference as shaping. Difference is less and less for "pushing
off," and more and more for "trying on." |
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Dennis Rodman |
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This "tilt towards transformation" is the topic of book 2 in the series.
I will develop it in detail there. Here I want merely to note
a double possibility. As plenitude takes hold of us, we can move
in two quite different directions. We can pursue the old course,
the one that uses difference as cause for alarm, hostility, and
contest. We can pursue the new course, the one that uses differences
as cause for transformational opportunity. Almost certainly, we
will pursue both. And this too will prove, as everything seems
to, yet another engine for our plenitude.
There is a second reason to be frightened. Plenitude challenges
our most fundamental ideas of social and political association.
What be-comes of the "common good" in a body politic that has
precious little in common? What happens to the "community" when
it fills up with differences? How can we hope to act in concert
when we are speciating so intensively and so extensively?
I wish I had a clever answer. I have what is merely a sneaking
suspicion.There is a common culture that unites the world of plenitude.
It is, I think, and this will please no one, the marketplace.
This is the great lingua franca of the contemporary world. As
long as we can meet somewhere in the exchange of something for
the benefit of someone, we have a foundation that can sustain
plenitude.
I understand that this is a provocative Color position, and, for
some, a lunatic one. There are those who say the marketplace is
the enemy of plenitude and of the realization of human potential.
Those who can endure the marketplace insist that capitalism is
the problem. And those who will endure capitalism say that it
is the consumer culture that is at fault. This last culprit is
said to narrow choice, falsify needs, poison consciousness, blunt
creativity, and block the real exploration of humanness that plenitude
might otherwise make possible.
I acknowledge this argument with reservations. After all, say
what you will about the marketplace, capitalism, and the consumer
culture, they have got us this far. They have allowed for the
great Cambrian explosion we see around us. Some will say that
some plenitude has happened in spite of, in the very teeth of,
capitalism and consumerism. Others will argue that there may be
a place where the consumer culture "runs out" and that the next
stage of plenitude demands its collapse. (We might argue that
the "alternative movement" in contemporary music and art is best
read just this way. )
But the striking thing from an anthropological point of view is
that capitalism is a little like plenitude. For a great many purposes,
it doesn't care (or specify) what must happen, just that something
does. There was a time in the history of computers when we talked
about how small was the "kernel" that a program demanded. We wanted
something small and generative that could manage with as little
memory as possible. In a sense, capitalism is like this. It demands
relatively little space. From relatively few assumptions any number
of outcomes prove possible. It is, forgive the pun, so "economical." |
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There was a period of confusion in the history of capitalism when this
was not clear. In the 1950s in particular it appeared that the
marketplace could only work if producers and consumers participated
in monstrous acts of conformity and containment. But the 1960s
demonstrated the falsity of this assumption. Capitalism doesn't
appear to need certain kinds of conformity. Indeed, as we enter
the 1990s, capitalism appears happiest and most productive when
certain conformity rules do not apply. Things that seemed essential
in 1955 (e.g.,what the neighbours thought) turn out to be "things
indifferent."
From another point of view, one that I do not wish to obscure,
this is all perfect nonsense. The economistic mentality contains
a toxin that puts plenitude at risk. As long as the entire enterprise
depends on a "means-end" rationality and an instrumental logic,
there are certain acts of imagination and invention that may not
be allowed to happen. Just as clearly, the true creative powers
of the species are held in check. The expressive potentials and
the instrumental imperatives of capitalism are daily at odds with
one another. They collide every time creative teams in Hollywood,
Madison Avenue, Broadway, or Burbank sit down with "suits" who
demand deference to the monarch ROI (as "return on investment"
is called usually without a trace of irony). To this extent,
the marketplace is the enemy of plenitude. It is reductive, diminishing,
and antiplenitudinous. As the phrase has it, it all comes down
to money.
I accept this but I cannot ignore the fecundity I see around me.
Capitalism has endured, enabled, perhaps provoked the speciation
we see around us. It is, as we have noted, particularly unparticular.
It doesn't care what it does. It doesn't care what we do. The
strangle-holds of hierarchies and elites count for less and less.
And capitalism is nothing if not transformational. It is capable
of astonishing cultural transformations, including, for instance,
turning labour into soap, soap into solicitude, solicitude into
gender, gender into society, and society back into soap.And it
is restless, inventive, and novelty seeking. (Or is this just
the modernism within? More on this in book 3.) It throws off innovations
ceaselessly. The consumer culture is a cause and a consequence
of plenitude. Certainly, there are some cultural and social arrangements
it will not allow. Just as certainly, there is a truly breathtaking
array it will. As the phrase might have had it: it all comes up
from money. |
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rules |
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Madison Avenue |
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I do not solve this issue. But I do wish to show, in a way that social
scientists (even under the influence of Simmel and Polanyi) normally
do not, that capitalism is not always the villain of the piece.
I wish to show that it is as often as much the agent of plenitude
as its enemy. This is especially important to grasp when we are
wrestling with our options in a society fully captivated by plenitude.
For it is clear that as our speciation goes forward we are going
to need something imperfections, warts and all. Capitalism may not be a baby
we can afford to lose with the bathwater.
We see already that capitalism reaches across cultures quite successfully.I
do not want to ignore the horror of colonialism only to observe
that Japanese and American businessmen now routinely conduct mutually
satisfactory business deals without necessarily undoing the cultural
differences that exist between them. Once more, capitalism does
not care about these differences they are truly "things indifferent."
What works across the cultures appears to be workingwithin cultures
at least within the culture of commotion. As our own species
multiply, we continue to have something in common. Capitalism
provides the few and unspecific instructions that allow discourse
to happen without specifying, within certain limits, what must
transpire there.
We have reason to be frightened of the world that plenitude is
constructing for us. But it is also true that there may be a net
to catch us when we fall. Plenitude will continue to spin off
more, and more different, species of social life, but that does
not mean that we are headed to Lasch's Hobbesian war of all against
all. It doesn't mean that we are headed towards a postmodernist
world in which meanings collapse, evaporate, or collide. It doesn't
mean that commonality cannot be fashioned. It doesn't mean that
these very different species cannot work out some system of mutual
recognition that leaves their differences uncompromised. The marketplace
is not a perfect solution.It is never a pretty solution. It is
rarely a just solution. But it is rather better than the alternative
a tyranny or tower of babel we can none of us survive.
Finally, I think the thing we most have to fear is amnesia
our well-practised ability to forget what we know about ourselves.We
come to terms with one part of the culture of commotion (what
is happening to gender, say), but we forget this when we take
up another part (what is happening to spiritual belief). And we
forget both of these when we sit down to contemplate the tremendous
innovations taking place in the worlds of scholarship, business,
or art. By systematically forgetting what we know about the disparate
pieces of our society, we never have to come to terms with the
revolution that is taking place throughout it. Huyssen has called
us a "culture of amnesia," and we are especially that when it
comes to reckoning with the plenitude in our midst.
The real danger is that by insisting on the partial view, by selectively
forgetting what we know, we need never come fully to grips with
the new realities of our world. And it is this amnesia that frightens
me most. Plenitude is upon us. It will not go away. It will continue
to transform everything about us. It is time to see it whole. |
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warts |
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Grant McCracken's Plenitude, (from which the accompanying piece is excerpted), can be downloaded
directly from www.cultureby.com in Adobe Acrobat format. A printed and bound edition of this
fascinatiing book can also be ordered at the Plenitude web site. |
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Grant McCracken |
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