Thinking through

Transnationalism:
Notes on the Cultural Politics
of Class Relations in the
Contemporary United States
Roger Rouse

25 YEARS AGO, WE TOOK ON THE LARGEST COMPANY ON EARTH.

TODAY, WE TAKE ON SPACE AND TIME.
This time the monopoly is the map and the clock. And MCI has an astonishing plan of liberationfrom them.
Today, we inaugurate the nation5.first transcontinental Informution
Superhighway-part of an overriding vision for the next century that
bears the name networkMCI.
The roadbed for this highway is SONETfiber optic technology, with
the power to move information 15 times faster than any SONET network
available today. Coupled with SONET will be ATM switching technology, giving the network self-healing capabilities within a sub-second.
Together, they will shrink the distances between humanity with everything from broadcast quality videophones, to long distance medical imaging, to universal access to information, to worldwide Personal Cornmunications Services.
The first traveler on the New York-to-L.A. portion of this superhighway will be the Internet. MCI, in one of telecommunicationsbest-kept
secrets, has been providing Internet connectionsfor the last half deI would like to thank Arjun Appadurai, Carol A. Breckenridge and, above all, Lauren Berlant
for their considerable help.
Public Culture 1995, 7: 353-402
01995 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
0899-2363/95/0702-02$01.OO

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cade. It now empowers 20 million people to conduct a worldwide conversation with each other via computers.
What networkMCI will do is unite the human voice and data and video
image and interactive multimediafor the entire nation and beyond.
MCI, together with its partners, will invest more than $20 billion
over the next six years to create a veritable brain trust for the Information Age.
The space-time continuum is being challenged. The notion of communication is changed forever. All the information in the universe will
soon be accessible to everyone at every moment.
And all because of a dream known as the Information Superhighway
and a vision known as networkMCI.
(advertisement)

ounded in 1968, MCI has become widely known over the last decade in the
United States as a major provider of long-distance telephone services, the
principal rival to AT&T in the competitive arena created by the dissolution of the
government-supported monopoly long enjoyed by Bell. With this advertisement,
published in early January 1994, however, the company launched an energetic
campaign to amplify its profile and extend its range of influence.
MCIs immediate goal was to persuade existing and potential customers, business partners and investors that it would be a major player, indeed a catalyst,*
in what its $4 million-a-year CEO, Bert Roberts, called the new emerging markets currently being opened up by the convergence of telephony, entertainment
and the c ~ m p u t e r . To
~ this end, the company told a story that seemed to lay
out clearly its achievements, plans and aspirations. At the same time, however,
1 . The advertisement appeared in the 5 January 1994 editions of USA Today, Wall Street Journal,
and Washington Post and in the 17 January 1994 edition of U.S. News and World Report. It was
accompanied by a striking series of television commercials featuring Anna Paquin, the New Zealand
child actress from the film R e Piano (1993). The commercials, which ran until the end of May,
and the advertisement, which went through only one round of publication, differed significantly in
tone but they told the same basic story and used many of the same images. Both were created for
MCI by the advertising agency, Messner Vetere Berger McNamee SchmetteredEuro RSCG.
2. MCI Communications Corporation, 1993 Annual Report, 17.
3. MCI Unveils Long-Range Vision: networkMCI, Press Release, MCI Telecommunications
Corporation (Washington, D.C., 4 January 1994), 1 . Robertss compensation is listed in the Disclosure
on-line service.

it also sought to address what it took to be a widespread nervousness and fear

about the dizzying speed of technological change and the dramatic ways in which
such change was altering both the character of daily life in the United States and
the nation's place within the wider
So, as it told a story about itself, it
also told a more general story about the nature of these developments.
We are, the company suggested, in the midst of an extraordinary transition.
An old world, characterized by limited communications, government-supported
monopolies, large, unwieldy corporations and rigid spatial divisions has steadily
been eroded. The age of industry has been superceded by the age of information
and, in the process, new dreams have been developed. Organized around the
image of the Information Superhighway, these dreams hold out the promise of
dramatic liberation -the translation of local knowledges into the single currency
of information, universal access to this information for everyone at every moment
and, as a result, the ultimate collapse of long-existing barriers based on difference,
distance and delay. To realize this promise, however, it is not enough to dream.
It is also necessary to make major technological advances, to replace vast, monolithic companies with flexible, adaptive partnerships, and, in so doing, to transcend the limits of the national. More fully, it is necessary to adopt a different
kind of sensibility, to replace the rigidifying logics of the map and the clock with
a way of thinking that moves fluidly through space and time to make transient
connections among distant, distinct and often disparate materials.
This is, in many ways, a remarkable advertisement. Even by the generous
standards of the genre, its hyperbole is striking. And even in a medium saturated
with citation and pastiche, the range of its allusions and its capacity to blend
ostensibly divergent images and ideas stand out. Through its references to universal access, it brings the Clinton rhetoric of corporate responsibility within an
otherwise quite Reaganesque promotion of deregulated competition. Through its
references to an information democracy and the collapse of space and time, it
seems at once to echo and recode the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984) and
David Harvey (1989), two of the most prominent critics of the project it promotes.
And, more generally, through its double emphasis on story-telling and the transcendence of the map and clock, it swings wildly back and forth between the
clarities of narrative coherence and the constant blurring of its central terms.
Matters of timing and location, identity and interest seem at once quite obvious
and totally elusive.
4. From discussions with sources at MCI and Messner Vetere. See also, Anthony Ramirez,
"Advertising," New York Times, 21 January 1994.

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Yet, however remarkable the advertisement might be, it is also, and more
importantly, quite typical. In recent years, dominant sources of discursive influence in the United States - from politicians and establishment academics to government agencies and private corporations -have increasingly emphasized the
idea that the nation is undergoing a dramatic transformation. Many have argued
that a shift is taking place from industry to information; images of the postmodern
have migrated rapidly from scholarly analyses into a multitude of mass-mediated
settings; and, within the last year, Time magazine has devoted an entire special
issue to outlining-and largely embracing-the idea that the United States is in
the process of becoming the worlds first multicultural ~ociety.~
Countless appeals have been made to the notion of a new world order and, more recently,
considerable emphasis has been given to the concept of the new global economy .
Meanwhile, the same sources have circulated a wide variety of images and
narratives suggesting how this new emerging world should be organized and
addressed. While some, like Time, have sought to reconfigure models of U.S.
citizenship within the framework of a corporate-liberal multiculturalism, others
have tried to reinvigorate images of a core national culture that allow for hierarchical distinctions among different categories of person. Numerous Hollywood movies have focused on encoding the changing landscape of U.S. class relations and
suggesting how this landscape should be traversed. Workers have been encouraged to take on flexible subjectivities and consumers to see borrowing as a way
of earning and saving. While some sources have emphasized new images of
entrepreneurialism and the metaphors and practices of gambling, the Clinton
administration has sought to revitalize the American Dream by harnessing it to
the glittering promise of high technology development. And finally, just like
MCI, many corporations have stressed the importance of developing a fluid,
mobile globalism, which is responsive to the growing opportunities made possible
by the Information Superhighway.
What should we make of these images and narratives and the analyses that
frame them? Why have they become so prominent in recent years? And what
do they tell us about contemporary conditions? More importantly, how should
we understand their politics? What kinds of project do they support and what
kinds of work do they do in serving them? In an attempt to answer these questions,
I shall develop an argument that unfolds in two broad stages. First, I shall suggest
that the significant transformation which has indeed been taking place over the
last two and a half decades in the United States and in its relation to the wider
5. Cover, Time, Special Issue, T h e New Face of America, Fall 1993.

world is best understood not as a move from modernity to postmodernity, from

industry to information, or from a national to a global orientation but rather
as a shift from multinational processes of capital accumulation to the growing
dominance of processes organized along transnational lines. Against the background of these developments, I shall then suggest how the discourses I have
mentioned- and others like them -represent improvised attempts by different
sectors of the bourgeoisie to deal with the challenges to their hegemonic influence
that this shift has generated.
In elucidating the merits of a transnational perspective on the specificities of
the Contemporary United States and its relation to the wider world, I draw heavily
on recent work that has brought this concept to the fore within the field of cultural
critique. Yet, I shall modify and expand on this work in a variety of ways. To
indicate more clearly both the basic principles that will guide my narrative and
the specific nature of my contribution to these efforts, I shall therefore begin by
commenting broadly on existing work on the transnational and indicating how
I would like to extend it.
An Overriding Vision

This essay is scarcely the first attempt to develop a critical overview of the
contemporary United States. Over the last fifteen years, radical scholars have
produced a wide variety of analyses devoted to identifying the specificity of
current conditions and, in so doing, they have both countered the content of
dominant narratives and called critical attention to the changing modes of power
articulated through them. During the 1980s, the range of critical alternatives was
largely framed by two approaches, the postmodernist perspectives laid out by
Baudrillard (1983) and Lyotard (1984) that gave primary emphasis to the new
forms of knowledge/power created by the growing salience of images and information, and the marxist counter-narratives of people such as Jameson (1984)
and Harvey (1989) that argued for the need to situate these changes within broader
transformations in the character of global capitalism. More recently, however,
numerous analyses have been developed that both mediate and move beyond
these two contending views.6 Among the most significant has been a series of
accounts that give primacy to the concept of the transnational.
This concept has been deployed in many different ways. Some have used it
to challenge an analytical fixation on the nation-state in any context. Noting that
6. See, for example, Friedman(1988,1992,1993); Guptaand Ferguson (1992); Haraway (1991);
and Taussig (1992).

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nation-states have always existed in dialectical tension with broader processes

and connections operating beyond and across their borders, they have used an
emphasis on the latter to throw more fully into relief both the active, politically
charged efforts required to produce and reproduce the lineaments of the territorialized nation and those forms of experience such as migration and diaspora left
shadowy and blurred by an optic fixed too firmly on the state (e.g., Gilroy 1992,
Tololyan 1991). Many more, however, have used the concept primarily to illuminate the specificities of the contemporary moment, arguing that, in recent years,
the dialectic between the national and the transnational has shifted significantly in
favor of the latter. Most notable for my present purposes are the anthropologically
informed accounts that focus on the implications of a transnational perspective
for understanding the current situation in the United States.g Even within this
narrower corpus, one finds considerable variation in approach. But, amidst the
differences, it is possible to detect a shared narrative frame that simultaneously
parallels and challenges the story told by MCI.
According to these accounts, the major changes currently affecting the United
States and its relationship to the wider world should be understood primarily by
reference to a growing crisis in the influence and authority of the nation-state,
a crisis occasioned by both the significant increase in the speed and frequency with
which people, goods, money, information and ideas move across the boundaries of
the state and the related increase in the prevalence and salience of forms of
organization that span these boundaries and help organize the flows. These arrangements, produced partly by the activities of corporate capital but also by the
practices of ordinary migrants, their families and their friends, have undermined
both the political dominance exerted by the state and its cultural authority. Caught
up in transnational fields of action, many people have developed notions of affiliation, identity and loyalty that run counter to established ideologies of citizenship
and national allegiance. And, influenced increasingly by mass-mediated texts like
television shows, magazines and movies that emanate from sources well beyond
the boundaries of the local and well beyond the control of established pedagogic
apparatuses such as families, schools and churches, they have grown more likely
to develop ideas and aspirations that diverge from those given primacy within
7. See, for example,Annuls of the New YorkAcademy of Sciences, Volume 645 (1992); Appadurai
(1990, 1991, 1993); Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton Blanc (1993); Miyoshi (1993); and Sklair
(1991). For a recent critique of aspects of this work, see Verdery (1994).
8. The principal accounts I have in mind are Appadurai (1990, 1991, and especially, 1993);
Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton Blanc (1993); Glick Schiller, Basch and Blanc-Szanton (1992);
Glick Schiller and Fouron (1990); and Nagengast and Kearney (1990).

state-orchestrated forms of knowledge/power . Yet, according to these accounts,

states have not simply surrendered to the challenges but instead, have striven
actively to reestablish their authority and influence, partly by coopting transnational organizations and diverting transnational flows to their advantage, partly
by using their own, still powerful forms of pedagogy to reinvigorate and perhaps
recast old ideas about identity and national attachment, and partly by making
growing use of violence. Seen from this perspective, then, the present is a moment
marked by unresolved tensions between oppressive, ever more reactionary states
and the largely liberatory possibilities opened up by transnational forces and
arrangements.
In the process of elaborating this basic narrative, the accounts I have mentioned
have extended the work of both the critical postmodernists and their early marxist
challengers in a number of ways. They not only have situated developments
internal to the United States in the context of broader processes and relations,
but also have traced the specific connections that extend beyond the boundaries
of the state. At the same time, they have brought together analyses of class
relations and of other forms of inequality and, more importantly, have looked
carefully at how these different kinds of differences have been linked. They have
also stressed the contingent nature of the relationship between the cultural logics
manifest in mass-mediated texts and those that organize quotidian experience
and, in so doing, they have opened up the space for a careful analysis of the
ways in which these different logics interact. And, finally, they have treated the
texts less as symptoms of contemporary conditions than as crucial vehicles through
which individual and collective actors pursue specific strategies and projects.
These moves are crucial to an effective understanding of the contemporary
situation in the United States, and I shall draw on all of them. At the same time,
however, some central features of this work seem more pr~blematical.~
While
there is indeed a crisis in the contemporary United States, it is a mistake to define
this crisis narrowly as one concerning the political domination and hegemonic
influence of the state, or as one in which the state has been brought increasingly
into conflict with transnationally organized forms of corporate capital and migrant
labor. In the first place, the crisis has concerned not only domination and hegemonic control but also processes of exploitation or, more fully, the complex
9. The remarks that follow and, indeed, many of the ideas that inform the essay as a whole,
are based on a series of extrapolations from Marx's arguments in Z'he Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonuparte (1963), Gramsci's elaboration of these arguments in his writings on Italian history (1971),
and recent attempts to develop and extend this tradition in the work of scholars from the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies, in particular, Hall, Lumley and McLennan (1977); Hall (1986,
1990); and Hebdige (1988).

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relationship among all three. As a corollary, it has been a crisis not just for the
state but for the bourgeoisie in general. And, correspondingly, the state and
corporations, as institutions dominated though not totally controlled by the capitalist class, have tended overall to experience the crisis in similar ways and to work
in tandem to resolve it.
While it is important to see contemporary conditions as both the frame and
product of collective forms of agency in struggle, there are problems with defining
the key collective actors as states, their populations and the corporations that
operate within and across their boundaries. It is better to begin by reference to
class positions and, in this regard, the opposition between the bourgeoisie and
the proletariat is clearly fundamental. lo In concrete situations, however, the field
of relevant distinctions is invariably more complex. Other positions coexist alongside the basic pair, most notably those of the reserve army (people without fulltime or regular employment, whom employers can draw on during upswings in
the economy and release during downswings) and, today, the professionalmanagerial class.* At the same time, most positions are internally divisible along
10. It is, of course, impossible to resolve the complexities of class relations and processes with
simple definitions of distinct positions. As a provisional point of entry into these complexities,
however, I use the term bourgeoisie to refer to the owners and controllers of capital and the term
proletariat to refer to those who sell their labor power as a carefully calibrated commodity in
exchange for wages. The latter definition applies as much to people in remunerated service and
support activities as to those in manufacturing but it does not apply to people such as managers and
professionals who sell a more generalized disposition to perform task-oriented labor, normally in
exchange for a salary or fee. Useful discussions of the issues underlying these definitions can be
found in Bottomore and Brym, eds. (1989); Giddens and Held, eds. (1982); Scase (1992); and Wright
et al. (1989). See also Bottomore et al., eds. (1983), s.v., bourgeoisie, class,and working class.
1 1 . Following Marx (1977: 781-794), I see the creation and maintenance of a reserve army as
integral to the process by which the bourgeoisie constitutes and reproduces itself through the creation
and maintenance of a proletariat. The existence of this pool of surplus workers enables the bourgeoisie
not only to cope with fluctuations in its need for labor but also to discipline those already in work
by holding out the threat of their replacement. For a fuller definition, see Bottomore et al., eds.
(1983), s.v., reserve army of labour.
12. The concept was first outlined in Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich (1979) and has been used to
good effect in analyzing the cultural politics of the contemporary moment by Pfeil (1990). I use it
somewhat more narrowly than these authors to refer to those professional, technical and managerial
workers, normally distinguished by the possession of high levels of formal training, who provide
administrative, legal and research services to the bourgeoisie on a task-oriented basis. It is a group
that has grown markedly over the course of the present century as both business and government
have become increasingly reliant on these services but it is still much smaller than the various segments
of the proletariat and the reserve army. For analyses that characterize the same developments and
the same kind of class position in slightly different terms, see Davis (1986: 206-211) and Scase
(1992: 15-18).

lines laid down by the logic of production and the dynamics of work relations, the
most pertinent contemporary example being the distinction within the proletariat
between positions in the primary sector, where workers have been relatively
well paid and securely employed, and those in the secondary sector, where
they have been poorly paid and more vulnerable to layoffs. l 3 And, finally, these
divisions between and within classes are invariably crosscut by others organized
along culturally and politically constructed lines of difference, the most pertinent
in the contemporary United States being those of gender, race and national origin.
How might we move from delineating the formal outlines of a class structure
to conceptualizing the concrete collectivities through which people act in the
spheres of politics and culture? One can not assume that each position gives rise
directly to a concrete collectivity, for example, the bourgeoisie as monolithic
ruler or the proletariat as the revolutionary subject of history. The very idea of
first identifying fully formed, already given actors -of whatever kind- and then
seeing the world as a product of their actions is misleading. Collective political
actors (even more than individual ones) constitute and sustain themselves only
in and through their (inter)actions and it is this process as a whole that should
be made the focus of attention. Moreover, the concrete collectivities that are
created in this way are rarely if ever stable and homogeneous. What commonly
emerge, instead, are more or less contingent coalitions, hybrid vehicles of collective agency that, while often dominated by segments of a single class, link people
from a variety of positions.
These considerations suggest that it is a mistake to focus analyses of the
hegemonic process on the states relation to issues of affiliation and identity. As
I have already suggested, hegemonic influence is exerted not simply by the state
13. This distinction became significant in the United States in the years after World War Two
as a result of processes I shall describe more fully below. Put succinctly, a primary sector emerged
in industries where employers were reliant on skilled and semi-skilled workers who could not easily
be replaced, where, largely as a result, unions had gradually gained significant leverage, and where
the dominance of a few firms and the consequent limitations on competition meant that increased
costs could easily be passed on to consumers. To ensure a dependable supply of labor, employers
in these industries made an accommodation with their workers, providing them with relatively high
wages, good benefits and guarantees of job security in return for their acceptance of a tightly regulated
system of industrial relations. In so doing, they increasingly distinguished their employees from a
secondary sector in other industries where the high levels of competition meant that there was constant
pressure to keep labor costs to a minimum or where the low levels of the skills required meant that
workers could easily be replaced and, correspondingly, that unions rarely gained much influence.
For a fuller and more complex reading of this distinction and the processes behind it, see Gordon,
Edwards and Reich (1982).

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but by bourgeois-dominated coalitions or ruling blocs .14 And, while these blocs
rely heavily on the machinery of the state, they also make use of other institutions
such as churches, schools and, increasingly, the corporate-controlled mass media.
Struggles over affiliation and identity assume their full significance in the context
of efforts to shape the grounds on which particular coalitions can be formed and
held together while others are subverted or prevented from emerging. And, while
hegemonic influence is partly concerned with issues such as these, it also involves
attempts to shape peoples dispositions regarding their relationship to work, their
conduct as consumers, and the discrepancies they encounter between the promises
they are offered and the realities in which they live.15
The MCI advertisement is shaped by all of these considerations. While it
might seem simply to be an effort to promote the companys image and its products
by providing people with a better understanding of the world around them, it is
also an argument for a particular way of organizing the relationship between the
state and private capital. More fully, it seeks to foment the kind of coalition
among segments of the business world, government and the broader public that
will work best to support this arrangement. And, at the same time, it strives
to subvert the formation of opposing coalitions united around the idea that the
companys project either threatens national interests or encourages greater social
inequality. l 6 More fully still, through its emphasis on fluidity, flexibility and
improvisation, it seeks to forge subjects that will be most appropriate for the
arrangements it is promoting. Indeed, it is only when these broader considerations
are taken into account that it becomes possible to grasp the logic and import of
the advertisementsmost striking features: its hyperbolic claims, its appropriation
and blending of divergent images, and its constant oscillation between clarity
and obfuscation regarding time, location, interest and identity. Rather than delving deeper into the advertisement itself, however, I shall move in the opposite
direction, trying to show how the considerations I have outlined can be used to
construct a much broader model concerning the cultural politics of class relations
under transnational conditions in the contemporary United States.
14. The concept of the ruling bloc is implicit in Gramsci (1971: 57-61, 158-167, 177-185) and
is used explicitly in Hall, Lumley and McLennan (1977).
15. Gramsci moves most clearly towards the idea of the differential shaping of peoples attitudes
and dispositions regarding work and consumption in his essay, Americanism and Fordism (197 1 :
279-3 18), where he discusses the need to elaborate a new kind of man suited to the new kind of
work and productive process (286).
16. See Steve h h r , Data Highway Ignoring Poor, Study Charges, New York Times, 24 May
1994, A l , C5.

The Map and the Clock

In the years following World War Two, members of the bourgeoisie in the United
States significantly changed the processes and relations through which they pursued profits and accumulated capital. l Operating domestically through a variety
of shifting coalitions, they combined a growing emphasis on mass production
and consumption with heavy government investment in the economy. And, as
a key part of this strategy, they markedly restructured their relationship with
labor. Corporations that relied on a dependable supply of skilled and semiskilled
labor negotiated a social compact with the unions that provided high wages,
good benefits and secure employment in return for a more tightly regulated system
of industrial relations, thus helping to segment the proletariat into primary and
secondary sectors. And, using a similar mixture of stimulus and repression, the
government introduced subsidies that made it easier for working-class people to
buy houses while passing laws that further circumscribed their right to organize
and strike. Meanwhile, U.S. corporations dramatically increased their levels of
investment overseas and, more importantly, modified the nature of their involvement. Previously, they had concentrated largely on extracting raw materials from
peripheral regions of the world to supply manufacturing activities at home and
had directed the products of these activities primarily at domestic markets. But
the war-time devastation suffered by both the axis powers and the European allies
opened up new opportunities that U.S. firms moved quickly to exploit. With active
government support, they worked systematically to stimulate the development of
mass consumer markets in western Europe and selected Third World countries
such as Mexico, Brazil and India, and to establish a dominant presence for themselves within these markets. Supplying them partly through the export of goods
produced at home, they also moved to circumvent local import tariffs by establishing factories of their own within these regions. The net result was a system of
accumulation that found its principal institutional expression in large, multinational corporations, coordinating more or less self-contained marketing and manufacturing activities in a number of different countries. For two full decades this
system was remarkably effective, ensuring high profits for the U.S. bourgeoisie
and a significant growth in aggregate prosperity for the U.S. people as a whole.
17. In putting together the condensed account that follows, I have drawn most heavily on Berberoglu (1992); Bowles, Gordon and Weisskopf (1990); Davis (1986); Gordon, Edwards and Reich
(1982); Sassen (1988); and, above all, Harvey (1989). Inevitably, numerous important differences
between these analyses, and a great deal of their subtlety, have been lost in the double process of
synthesis and summary.

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From the mid- 1960s onwards, however, these arrangements were subjected
to increasing stress, The revitalization of Germany, Japan and Italy and the
concomitant resurgence of corporations based within them significantly intensified
competition throughout the capitalist world. Growing popular protests from those
denied access to the benefits of the post-war boom, especially peasants in the
Third World and women and people of color in the United States, raised the
costs of regulation, whether in the form of military repression or conciliatory
social transfers. And the ability of some Third World countries to establish greater
control over the extraction and marketing of their raw materials increased instabilities in the costs of production, a tendency brmght vividly to a head by the actions
of the OPEC states in 1973. Indeed, gradually and with ever greater force, these
developments combined by the early 1970s to produce a thoroughgoing crisis
in established processes of accumulation and, more specifically for the bourgeoisie, in the level of its profits. And, while this crisis affected capitalism as a whole,
it was felt with particular urgency in the United States, where twenty years of
global domination had encouraged many to turn the transient privileges of the
post-war period into basic expectations.
Over the last two decades, members of the bourgeoisie have responded to this
crisis with a wide range of economic strategies whose varied implications have
been fundamental in shaping the logic and imperatives of hegemonic influence
in the United States today. These strategies have not been the products of a single
blueprint, first prepared and then consistently applied. Different segments of
the bourgeoisie have emphasized distinct and sometimes divergent approaches.
Corporations, as the principal vehicles for the pursuit of these strategies, have
clashed to varying degrees with different agencies of the state. And, as foreignbased companies have come to play a growing role in the U.S. economy, relations
within the bourgeoisie and between corporations and the state have been made
more complex still. Moreover, there has been throughout a great deal of trial
and error. Overall, however, the U. S. state and the corporations operating within
its boundaries have continued to work in tandem. And, amidst the variations and
the constant improvisation, certain general tendencies have emerged. I shall group
these tendencies under three broad headings, each one dealing with a different
element in the pursuit of profit.
One set of strategies has focused on expanding the realms of profit-making
activity. Members of the bourgeoisie have become more heavily involved in
globally oriented financial speculation. They have also, as the case of MCI makes
clear, moved energetically into activities that were previously either run by the
state, such as policing and the operation of prisons, or licensed to a monopoly

provider, such as the national telephone system. And, most importantly, they
have markedly intensified their involvement in the production and provision of
services, especially domestic services such as cooking and cleaning, medical
services and leisure, entertainment and tourism. Especially in the case of tourism,
this has meant pushing ever further beyond the boundaries of the national in
search of people and places that can be re-presented as sufficiently exotic and
authentic to feed the escalating need for markers of distinction.
A second set of strategies pursued in the last two decades - and in many ways
the most crucial-has focused on reducing the costs of labor and, above all, on
undoing as far as possible the obligations that the bourgeoisie had assumed within
the post-war social compact. Automation and the consequent deskilling of many
previously well-remunerated jobs have been common. Growing emphasis has
been given to flexible forms of labor use via subcontracting, firing and rehiring,
and both part-time and temporary employment. But the most important strategy
has been the turn to less expensive and more malleable kinds of labor. In part,
this has been pursued through the growing use of migrant labor from regions
such as Mexico and Central America, the Caribbean and southeast Asia. Often
lacking long traditions of proletarian experience, proper legal papers, or both,
migrants from these regions have been particularly attractive to employers looking
to meet the burgeoning demand for secondary sector workers that has been brought
about by the deskilling of manufacturing jobs and the rapid expansion of the
service industries. Meanwhile, a growing number of companies have transferred
parts of the manufacturing and assembly process to export processing zones in
poorer countries, where labor has been cheaper and government regulation much
less strict, Together, these strategies have not only reduced employers immediate
labor costs but also markedly expanded the pool of prospective workers and, in
so doing, undermined the bargaining power of those already employed.
Finally, a third kind of strategy has involved attempts by corporations to
increase the level of demand for their goods and services. Moving beyond price
reductions and the commercial promotion of individual items, these corporations
have made a variety of more complex moves. One has been the simultaneous
extension and intensification of a general ethos of consumerism, an attempt to
persuade more people in more profound ways that their worth as persons is
intimately linked to their capacity to acquire and consume particular kinds of
goods. A second has been the introduction of ever finer distinctions into the
semiotics of consumption. That is, people have been encouraged to attribute
significance to increasingly minute differences in the world and, in so doing, to
search more anxiously for the specific product that corresponds to their distinctive

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needs - for example, a particular kind of blue jeans to articulate a subtle difference
in social positioning or a specialized cleaning product to resolve a newly identified
problem in domestic hygiene. Finally, a third move, nicely exemplified by the
MCI advertisement, has been the growing effort by corporations to instill in
consumers a loyalty to their trademarks and their brandnames. This has partly
been an exercise in commercial parsimony, enabling the promotion of several
different products in a single campaign and it has been particularly useful for
companies that operate across a multilingual landscape. But, for foreign firms
and for domestic corporations with a strong global orientation, it has also offset
potential hostilities from customers and clients who might otherwise privilege
national allegiances.
These different kinds of strategy have not exerted their effects in an unmediated
way. Interacting with and, in some instances, contradicting one another, they
have also been absorbed, reworked, resisted and sometimes openly challenged
by the people at whom they have been directed. But, as the strategies of those
with the greatest wealth and the greatest influence over the media of dissemination
and enforcement, they have been the most powerful forces shaping the context
within which processes of hegemonic influence are currently being enacted. It
is therefore important to look closely at their implications.

+++
An important consequence of the bourgeoisies response to the crisis in the post-war system of accumulation has been a reconfiguration of the landscape of socioeconomic experience. Its strategies have increased
the speed and frequency with which people, money, goods, information, images
and ideas move across the boundaries of the United States. The efforts to expand
the realms of profit-making have sent financial capital, communications systems,
U. S.-produced films and television programs and U. S. tourists further afield, at
faster rates than ever before. Attempts to reduce the costs of labor have increased
both U.S. industrial investment in select areas of the Third World and Third
World migration to the United States. And efforts to expand consumer demand
for goods and services sold by U. S,-based companies - especially in the context
of a sustained assault on the earning power of many U. S. workers -have extended
the reach of corporate advertising into new, emerging markets beyond the borders
of the nation. Meanwhile, other closely related developments have intensified
counter-flows from other countries. Parallel strategies of the foreign bourgeoisie

The entire nation and beyond

have opened the United States more fully than ever before to outside investment
and commercial influence. And the mobile tactics of Third World migrants, under
conditions in which increasing economic uncertainty in both their home countries
and the United States has intersected with growing access to faster forms of
transportation and communications, have ensured a considerable amount of movement back and forth and a concomitant growth in their own role as conduits for
the further flow of money, goods, information, images and ideas across the
boundaries of the state.
At the same time, the varied strategies of the bourgeoisie have also changed
the manner in which these flows are organized. In the case of industrial capital, the
most influential of the elements in motion, multinational corporations, integrating
more or less self-contained production and marketing facilities in a number of
different national sites, have been supplemented and, in many ways, superceded
by transnational corporations that take a single production process, redistribute
it across sites in different areas of the world, and use ever faster communications
to synchronize the interactions of its interdependent parts. Indeed, perhaps the
most important aspect of this complex shift has been the way in which the new
information technologies have allowed an increasing approximation to simultaneous involvement in a variety of different places. This move toward simultaneity
has also been a crucial feature in the changing import of corporate-controlled
forms of news broadcasting and entertainment, allowing people in countries thousands of miles apart to participate at the same time in the same events. And, at
a more informal level, it has introduced a significant difference between the
experiences of contemporary Third World (im)migrants to the United States and
those of earlier (im)migrant groups. The tendency of the newer groups to move
between particular communities of origin and specific settlements in this country
and, in so doing, to establish important links between them is not, in itself,
particularly novel. But their growing access to telephones, electronic banking,
videorecorders, fax machines and computers has brought a significant shift, mak-

18. I use the term (im)migrants to interfere with the well-rehearsed assumptions that attend
uses of the terms, immigrants and migrants. Within the bipolar logic that informs most popular
and academic thinking about migration to and from the United States, the former suggests a process
of unidirectional movement in which people reorient to their destination, the latter a process of
movement back and forth in which they remain oriented to their place of origin. Yet matters have
rarely been this simple and they have grown steadily more complex under transnational conditions.
The term, (im)migrants is meant to evoke the ambiguity and indeterminacy that are frequently
involved in these processes. For a fuller discussion, though without use of the new term, see Rouse
(1991, 1992a).

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ing it possible for the first time for (im)migrants to operate more or less simultaneously in the different settings they inhabit.
Together, these developments have transformed the position of the United
States in relation to the wider world. Its boundaries are now more perforated
and permeable than ever before. Its capacity to move those who enter its borders
in the direction of a putative uniformity is much weaker. And, correspondingly,
the relationship between the state as emblem of the nation, the population that
resides within its borders, and the corporations that do business there is more
disjunctive than at any time in the countrys history. More corporations operating
within the United States are foreign-based, more U.S. corporations are involved
in other countries and more migrants are caught in a chronic state of divided
orientation and allegiance.
In these circumstances, it is, I think, vital to approach the contemporary United
States from a transnational perspective, to see it not as a clearly bounded and
internally coherent national space or as a global epicenter of determining trans formations but as a fluid, contested and constantly restructured site in which different
and divergent circuits of internationally organized capital, labor and communications collide with one another as much as with the increasingly tattered remnants
of local ways of life (Rouse 1991). Yet recent uses of the concept of the transnational to capture the specificity of the present might be modified in several ways.
If, indeed, the manifest flows and forms of organization commonly characterized
as transnational are, themselves, a function of changing strategies regarding the
pursuit of profit and the accumulation of capital, it seems more appropriate to
use the term primarily to describe the new system of accumulation which these
strategies have brought into being. And, in so doing, it is important to challenge
the idea that the current moment is one in which the practices of at least elements
of capital have subverted the interests of the state, for, by and large, corporations
and the state, as differently mediated forms of bourgeois practice, have worked
together. Correspondingly, if the present is to be understood by reference to the
growing adoption of a transnational system of accumulation, it is important to
stress that this has emerged not from a prior situation dominated by the national
but, instead, from a multinational system or, more fully, that a dialectical relationship between the national and the multinational has been giving way to one
between the national and the transnational.
Yet the emergence of a transnational regime of accumulation cannot be understood solely in terms of the changing processes of exchange and circulation it
has fostered. It is also crucial to look closely at the ways in which it has reconfigured class relations and the other forms of inequality to which they are linked.

+++
The distances between humanity (sic) As part of the shift from multinational to

transnational processes of accumulation, there has, in fact, been a significant

change in both the structure of class relations in the United States and their
articulation with other vectors of inequality organized along the lines of gender,
race and national origin. l 9
The post-war shift to multinational processes of accumulation helped bring
about a broadly pyramidal class structure. Between the bourgeoisie and the allied
ranks of a growing professional-managerial class, on the one hand, and the large
number of ill-paid and weakly organized workers in the secondary sector proletariat and the reserve army, on the other, there emerged a broad middle band of
relatively well-paid primary sector workers, the direct beneficiaries of the postwar social compact. Unemployment among those seeking jobs was relatively
limited and, as a result, most people in the reserve army were able to work at
least periodically, while the latent reserve army -those remaining chronically
unemployed - was fairly small.
Access to the different levels of the class structure and to the benefits of the
post-war boom was distributed in a highly uneven manner along lines of gender,
race and national origin. Almost all the jobs in the professional-managerial class
and the great majority in the well-paid primary sector proletariat-the commonly
unionized jobs that offered the prospect of steady, lifelong employment -were
held by white male citizens. Meanwhile women, people of color and foreign
migrant workers were confined largely to the ranks of the secondary sector proletariat and the reserve army and thus not only had much lower incomes but also
experienced much greater mobility in and out of paid employment. Indeed, it
was from these latter ranks that the strongest forms of social and political protest
emerged as it became evident that the benefits of the post-war boom would not
be redistributed more equitably. Yet, women and people of color did increase
their participation in the labor force during this period and the gradually extending
reach of the welfare state did help alleviate some of the hardship these groups
experienced.
Over the last two decades, however, as a function of the shift to a transnational
regime, these varied inequalities have increased. To begin with, the gap between
19. The main sources I have relied on in this section are those cited in footnote 17. For further
evidence of the changing place of women and people of color, see Amott and Matthaei (1991) and
for further evidence of growing income inequality over the last two decades, see Baily, Burtless and
Litan (1993).

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the top and the bottom of the structure has grown larger as wealth has increasingly
been concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie and their associates in the upper
levels of the professional-managerial class. More importantly, substantial sectors
of the population have begun to experience a steady decline in their real incomes.
Meanwhile, the pyramidal class structure has come to look increasingly like a
rocket. The growing emphasis on professional services and the coordination of
global production processes has led, at least until the very recent past, to a steady
expansion in the ranks of the professional-managerial class. The attempts to
undermine the terms of the social compact and the position of its beneficiaries
have eroded the previously thick middle band of people in the primary sector
proletariat, and the growing emphasis on service work and deskilled manufacturing has encouraged a vast expansion of the ill-paid secondary sector proletariat.
Growing recourse to flexible modes of labor use, allied to the increased volatilities
of the economy, have led to a sharp growth in the reserve army and temporary
forms of employment. And, finally, and most savagely, employers increasing
unwillingness to hire certain kinds of citizens, particularly young men of color,
has significantly expanded the ranks of the chronically unemployed.
In terms of other inequalities, there has, of course, been a token improvement in
the distribution of women, people of color and (im)migrants across this changing
structure of positions, with all three groups gaining at least some representation
in the growing ranks of an increasingly diverse professional-managerial class.
This has led to a gradual narrowing of the gap in average earnings, at least
between men and women, and a growing convergence in forms of work experience. Overall, however, the situation of most people in these categories has not
improved and, in many cases, it has worsened. White male citizens continue to
dominate the upper levels of the class structure. The great majority of (im)migrants, most women and many people of color remain within the ranks of the
secondary sector proletariat and the reserve army, increasingly distanced from
the few who have experienced upward mobility. And it is people of colorparticularly young African-American and Chicano men -who predominate
among the ranks of the chronically unemployed. Moreover, the inequities of this
distribution have been heightened by the deteriorating pay and work conditions
in the lower ranks of the class structure and by cuts in welfare payments. Indeed,
the narrowing of the gap in average earnings that has taken place between men
and women and the convergence in work experience have both been largely a
result of the redistribution downward of white male citizens consequent on the

steady erosion of the primary sector jobs that they once dominated. In general,
then, the shift to a transnational regime of accumulation has involved not only
a reconfiguration in the landscape of socioeconomic experience but also, and
largely as a result, a marked exacerbation of social inequalities.

+++
Best-kept secrets The evidence suggests, that in economic terms, the varied strategies adopted by the bourgeoisie have served them well. The real incomes of
those at the top of the class structure have grown fast and profit levels have
begun to rise again.*O Yet, in the process of resolving its economic problems,
the bourgeoisie has generated many others related to its hegemonic influence.
Established logics of coalition-formation have been undermined as the growing
significance of transnational corporations, some of them foreign-based, has
changed the relationship between capital and the state and as modifications in
the class structure have altered the relative influence of different classes and class
fragments. At the same time, the efforts of ruling blocs to generate a broad consent
to their dominance have been problematized as the rapid shift to transnational
arrangements has eroded confidence in discourses of national integrity and global
leadership and as the decline in job security and the exacerbation of social inequalities have fostered a growing sense of uncertainty and frustration.
Yet these are not the only aspects of the hegemonic process that have been
imperiled. As I mentioned earlier, hegemonic influence also concerns the production of subjects, the shaping of peoples attitudes and dispositions so that they
will act in ways that members of the ruling bloc consider appropriate to their
interests. And, while the shaping of peoples ideas about affiliation and identity
is an important aspect of this process, the bourgeoisie must also emphasize the
shaping of peoples dispositions regarding work, influencing their conduct as
consumers and modulating the relationship between their aspirations and the
realities they confront. Moreover, all of these processes are carefully tailored
to the imperatives of specific systems of accumulation.

20. Berberoglu suggests that total net corporate profits more than doubled in real terms between
1970 and 1988 (1992: 64-66). Bowles, Gordon and Weisskopf note a sharp surge in profits after
1983, though they also point out that profit levels have remained significantly lower than in the 1950s
and 1960s (1990: 43-45, 157-163).

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The recent shift in the workings of accumulation has thus meant that ways
of producing subjects developed during the post-war years have been rendered
increasingly inadequate. This is not to say that such problems have been brought
vividly to the surface. They have, in general, remained latent and hidden, the
best-kept secrets of a system ostensibly in order. Yet they have played a crucial
role in shaping the current strategies of different bourgeois-dominated coalitions
regarding the maintenance of cultural control. Before considering these strategies, it is therefore important to bring the nature of the problems more clearly
into view.
If domination is enacted primarily through coalitions, it follows that the efforts
of different sectors of the bourgeoisie to establish and maintain their rule are
focused at least partly on fomenting alliances they consider beneficial while undermining others that might threaten their ambitions. Consistent with this logic,
the greatest fears of ruling groups are often directed less at specific subaltern
populations than at the prospect that they might develop dangerous alliances
with people occupying other positions in the class structure. Correspondingly,
members of the bourgeoisie have long placed considerable emphasis on influencing the conceptual and experiential ground on which struggles over coalitionformation are played out. In particular, they have striven energetically to shape
ideas about how the social field should be divided and about the distribution of
interests, loyalties and affiliations within this field. And they have commonly
sought to fortify key lines of difference and to influence the kinds of interactions
that take place across them by regulating the ways varied groups are distributed
in space and through the structure of available occupations.
In the two and a half decades following the Second World War, these efforts
were more or less effective. Cold War images of a global struggle between
capitalism and communism reinforced the idea of an overriding national interest
in capitalist arrangements and, more specifically, encouraged the notion that
corporations operating on a multinational basis were working for the national
cause. The continued emphasis on race and ethnicity as crucial forms of difference
impeded the development of wide-ranging social solidarities, particularly among
those in the lower reaches of the class structure. And these two developments
further marginalized critical understandings of class relations that had still been
prominent during the inter-war years, especially in segments of the labor movement (Fantasia 1988: 3-24). Meanwhile, various forms of spatial ordering worked
to reinforce the key distinctions. Suburbanization and the selective distribution
of housing subsidies broke up inner-city neighborhoods where people occupying
a variety of class positions had often lived side-by-side and helped separate the

growing primary sector proletariat from other segments of the working class.
These developments and related forms of de jure and de facto segregation reinforced the boundaries between whites and people of color. And immigration
policies that further tightened entrance requirements and directed Mexicans primarily to agriculture limited the interactions between citizens and foreigners,
reversing the tendency towards growing interaction that had been taking place
in major U.S. cities during the first half of the century. Finally, the maintenance
of white male domination in the middle and upper reaches of the class structure
ensured that, even as women and people of color increased their levels of labor
force participation, members of these different groups often worked in different
places and held different kinds of jobs.
Over the last twenty-five years, however, bourgeois economic strategies associated with the shift to a transnational regime have challenged these dividing
practices in a number of ways. The force of U. S . nationalism has been undermined
not only by the sudden end to the Cold War but also by the ways in which
transnational corporations have increasingly sought to offset the pull of national
allegiances among both employees and consumers. One of the most striking
features of recent advertising by such corporations has been the tendency to
encourage the idea of a relationship between individuals and companies on the one
hand and the global context on the other that is largely unmediated by references to
the national or appeals to its emotive force.
More importantly, bourgeois strategies have brought together many populations that were previously kept apart. While the end of de jure segregation has
done little to remove the physical isolation of most African-Americans (Massey
and Denton 1993), the growing use of Third World migrant labor, especially in
the urban service industries, has meant that people with different national and
racial identifications, and often occupying different class positions, have come
to interact much more than they did during the post-war boom. Meanwhile, token
forms of upward mobility for women and people of color and the redistribution
downward of white men have brought increasing convergences between these
groups regarding where they work and the kinds of jobs they do. In some cases,
of course, these forms of increased interaction have exacerbated tensions between
the groups involved. Backlash forms of sexism, racism and xenophobia have
grown markedly over the last decade and the level of workplace violence has been
escalating fast. But the widespread reshuffling of the topographies of difference has
also presented ruling blocs with the possibility that people might develop new
forms of mutual understanding and, correspondingly, build broader and more
effective kinds of counter-hegemonic coalition.

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Meanwhile, the shift towards a transnational system of accumulation has also

created difficulties for the bourgeoisie concerning the shaping of work-related
subjectivities. Ruling blocs have always sought to influence not only the material
conditions that frame the relationship between employers and employees but also
peoples attitudes and dispositions toward work. Moreover, they have generally
done so in a differentiating manner.21Given the importance of both maintaining
a reserve army and limiting the frustration of those within its ranks, ruling blocs
have worked hard to make a segment of the population accept and even find
value in moving intermittently in and out of paid labor and, in this process, a
key role has been played by gendered ideologies regarding the importance of
domestic obligations and other ideologies that have stressed for urban migrants
the merits of periodically returning home. At the same time, those directed towards steady and sustained employment have been encouraged to develop attitudes
and understandings specific to the niches in the class structure that they are deemed
most likely to fill. People thought destined for professional-managerial activities,
for example, have been equipped with attitudes to time and space, persona and
sociality significantly different from those impressed upon people directed towards
wage work (Rouse 1992a).
During the years of the post-war boom, the high demand for labor meant that
most people, including many destined for the reserve army, were equipped with
a basic set of work-related dispositions. The expansionary dynamic of the economy and the significant growth in both the primary sector proletariat and the
professional-managerial class meant that many in the lower ranks of the class
structure were encouraged to envisage stable, lifelong work trajectories and,
often, steady upward mobility. And this, in turn, meant that emphasis was placed
on providing people with work-related attitudes and understandings that they
could build on and transform as they moved from one niche to the next.
Over the last twenty-five years, however, the shift to a transnational system
of accumulation has made most of these procedures increasingly archaic. The
logic of instilling a work-related orientation throughout the population has been
undermined by the growth of chronic unemployment. And the logic of inculcating
durable dispositions has been challenged by the growing flux and volatility that
almost everyone has experienced regarding work. Companies growing assaults
on the ranks of the primary sector proletariat, their growing reliance on flexible
forms of labor use, and their growing emphasis on downsizing have made secure
access to sustained employment much less likely at every level of the class struc2 1. See Gramsci (1971: 279-3 18) and Althusser (1971).

ture. And they have made periodic downward mobility a much more common
prospect (Ehrenreich 1989; Newman 1989: 20-41).
At the same time, these developments have created difficulties regarding the
production of disciplined consumers. The bourgeoisie has always sought to shape
the ways in which people use the money that they earn and it has done so with
growing force as it has turned increasingly to the promotion of mass consumer
markets. In part, of course, this has involved a continual injunction to spend and,
more generally, to find self-worth in the capacity to do so. Yet these incitements
to consume have always been channeled in particular ways. People have been
encouraged not simply to spend but to focus their spending on those goods and
services produced by capital, especially the major corporations. Correspondingly,
they have been discouraged from spending their earnings on illicit goods and
services such as drugs, gambling and prostitution. This has been partly motivated
by the desire to regulate the energies of workers and to limit unregulated and
potentially threatening forms of social interaction - especially across lines of class
division. However, the fact that governments and corporations have, at various
times and in various places, been involved in marketing prostitution, gambling
and a variety of harmful drugs suggests that regulation has also been motivated
by the desire to channel profits in approved directions. Moreover, there has
always been a careful concern to modulate the relationship between the injunctions
to consume and peoples capacities to pursue such activities, to ensure that the
seductions of advertising do not turn into vehicles of bitterness and frustration.
And these two forms of channeling have been related to the extent that illicit
objects of consumption have often seemed more appealing, both as a medium
of money-making and a source of satisfaction, when the capacity to enter the
approved circuits of exchange has been frustrated.
In the two and half decades following the Second World War, there was a
marked growth in the promotion of consumerism. Yet, for most people, the gap
between the promises of advertising and their capacity to realize them was kept
within reasonable bounds. The emphasis on mass production for a mass consumer
market meant that many of the commodities being sold were inexpensive. Meanwhile, the general rise in real incomes and, especially, the growth in the ranks
of the primary sector proletariat, meant that many people were able to envisage
buying them. In this context, a relatively homogeneous set of mass consumers
operated in a largely shared market. The general growth in real incomes also
limited the appeal of illicit sources of income and consumption.
With the shift to a transnational regime, however, much of this has changed.
The promotion of consumerism has continued to expand; and, more importantly,

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as a function of the growing penetration of the mass media into peoples daily
lives, it has exerted its influence more widely and more thoroughly than ever
before. Children, for example, have increasingly been interpellated directly as
consumer subjects. Yet, at the same time, as real incomes have stagnated for
large segments of the population and declined for many, the ability to approximate
the increasingly inflated definitions of self-worth projected in the commercial
mass media has steadily been undermined. And frustrations over this exclusion
have led to a growing use of illicit goods and services, both as ways of earning
money and as alternative sources of pleasure.
Finally, and more generally, the shift to a transnational regime has exacerbated
problems concerning the regulation of peoples aspirations and desires. In any
hierarchical social system, there is a gap between the realities that most people
experience and the promises they are offered. This gap works to reconcile people
to the difficulties of daily life by holding out the prospect of a better future. For
those who dominate, it is a space that must be wide enough to encourage people
to act in the ways that are demanded of them but not so wide that people grow
frustrated. As a result, the cultural politics of domination always concerns the
regulation of desire, the careful modulation of the relationship between the promises that are made and the prospects of achieving what they offer. And, in this
context, ruling groups have often promulgated images and narratives that both
explain the gap and offer plausible accounts of how it might be bridged.
In the first twenty-five years after the Second World War, the dominant modes
for reconciling reality and aspiration were the American Dream, the immigrant
narrative of intergenerational incorporation and advancement, and the broader
stories of global modernization under U. S . leadership. In emphasizing unilinear
processes of progress, growth and development, these modes portrayed the gap
between reality and promise as temporary and suggested that success was almost
certain for those who worked hard and loyally in a sustained way. However
illusory their promises, the credibility of these images and narratives was sustained by the steady expansion of the U.S. economy and the rise in peoples
standard of living. More specifically, the existence of a thick middle band of
well-paying proletarian jobs encouraged many at the bottom of the class structure
to believe that, with sustained effort, they or their children would eventually
move upwards.
Since the early 1970s, however, the material bases for these images and narratives have been steadily eroded. The United Statesbrief moment of unquestioned
global hegemony has passed. Real incomes have stagnated or declined for large
segments of the population, the primary sector proletariat has been pared away,

and job insecurity has increased throughout the class structure, especially in
recent years. And, in these circumstances, fulfillment of the post-war promise
of progress in return for patient and sustained hard work has come to seem
increasingly elusive.

Self-healing Capabilities

In a multitude of minor ways, then, members of the bourgeoisie in the United

States have been facing over the last few years a secret but significant crisis
regarding the maintenance of their hegemonic influence. But they have not responded passively. Moving rapidly, anticipating problems as much as reacting
to them, they have striven energetically to reshape peoples attitudes and dispositions and, in so doing, to seal over the wounds that their own activities have
opened up. They have used a wide variety of techniques. Non-discursive modes
of influence, directed most immediately at peoples bodies and their actions,
have played a significant part.22Growing emphasis has been given to state-based
violence and repression, especially in relation to the burgeoning ranks of the
reserve army. Policing has become more intense and imprisonment an increasingly common tool of social control. Meanwhile, continued reliance has been
placed on less dramatic processes of quotidian habituation that work by instantiating basic principles and distinctions in the organization of space and carefully
regulating the ways in which this structured space is used. A complex cultural
politics has been concretized in the reorganization of urban landscapes and the
refinement of techniques for policing peoples movements through them. But
discursive forms of influence have also played a crucial role. In the face of
the problems I have outlined, members of the bourgeoisie have developed and
disseminated a plethora of images, narratives, programs and prescriptions better
22. There are many, of course, who, following Foucault, see the discursive as involving both
written and oral communication on the one hand and the physical shaping of actions on the other.
I agree that, in the end, these must be seen as integrally related but I am wary of using terms such
as discourse and the discursive to mark this unity. Their long, ordinary language association with
the verbal exchange of ideas and the expression of thought via speech and writing (Websters
Ninth New CollegiateDictionary, s.v., discourse)encourages scholars not only to ignore the physical
shaping of actions in a particular analysis (as I do here) but to forget its significance altogether and
thus make the examination of written and oral communication and the texts through which it is
articulated seem sufficient in itself. In the spirit of both Althusser (197 1) and Bourdieu (1977, especially
87-90), I therefore consider it important to maintain at least an analytical distinction between the
discursive (articulated modes of communication at a distance) and what, for brevity, I refer to as
the non-discursive (direct action on peoples bodies and their actions).

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suited to producing the kinds of subjects they desire. It is these discursive strategies
on which I shall focus here.
As with the economic strategies that I described earlier, I do not mean to
imply that a single class agent has been pursuing a single, integrated project.
Different segments of the bourgeoisie have worked through different coalitions.
And, more complexly, they have used their varied discourses as much to bring
particular coalitions into being and sustain their fragile unity as to transform the
attitudes and practices of others. Nor do I mean to imply that these different
coalitions have necessarily created brand new discourses designed specifically
for their current needs. They have often taken dominant images and narratives
from the post-war years and retooled them for contemporary use or appropriated
and rechanneled idioms first developed to oppose their own positions. There has
been a great deal of improvisation and considerable trial and error. Moreover,
the discourses they have developed have rarely served simply to address a single
kind of problem. Commonly, they have exerted their influence across a wide
variety of overlapping issues and concerns.
Yet, amidst these numerous complexities, it is possible to tease out a number
of general trends and patterns. I can do this most effectively by relating discourses
that have become prominent in recent years to the varied problems regarding
hegemonic influence that I outlined in the prior section.

+++
Think of it as economicfuel injection. At Toyota, were committed to
building in America. . . . From our manufacturing facilities to our U.S.
research and design centers, our operations here provide more than
16,000jobs and give an economic boost to communities right across
America. Investing in the things we all care about.
Toyota advertisemenP3
Resituating the national In the face of the growing threats to the national as both
a focal field of action and an object of emotional investment, and in the light of
growing doubts about the compatibility of a global orientation and a commitment
to the national interest, different segments of the bourgeoisie have responded in
divergent ways. Yet this has not involved a simple struggle between politicians

23. National Review, 21 February 1994. In this and subsequent references, I cite the location
in which I first came across the advertisement in question. This does not necessarily mean that it
appeared first, or solely, in the context cited.

and agencies of state who want to uphold the national, and globally oriented
corporations who want to transcend it. Many corporations have been loathe to
offend the national commitments of crucial political allies and of key groups
among their actual and potential customers. Many politicians have been sympathetic to the global orientations and engagements of corporations. And members of
the bourgeoisie, while increasingly oriented to worldwide forms of profit-seeking ,
have remained attentive to the hegemonic benefits involved in fostering a sense
that there are unifying national interests and that their own activities work to
uphold them. As a result, the most common tendency in recent years has been
to argue that a global cosmopolitanism and reconfigured forms of nationalism
are, in fact, compatible and, indeed, in many cases, reciprocally reinforcing.
This was very much Bushs position during the 1992 election campaign, when
he claimed constantly that his close attention to developments in the world at
large not only distinguished him from Clinton but was vital to the national interest.
The world is in transition, and we are feeling that transition in our homes, he
told the Republican National Convention in 1992. The defining challenge of the
90s is to win the economic competition, to win the peace. We must be a military
superpower, an economic superpower, and an export superpower. In this election,
youll hear two visions of how to do this. Theirs is to look inward and protect
what we already have. Ours is to look forward, to open new markets, prepare
our people to compete . . . to save and invest so we can win. Yet the same
ideas have informed both Republican and Democratic rhetoric in support of free
trade agreements that make national boundaries more permeable to capital and
commodities. And, in Clintons hands, the continued force of nationalism in the
context of a global orientation has been given added impetus through the mixing
of an active promotion of free trade with a strong rhetorical and symbolic emphasis
on restricting both the influx of undocumented (im)migrants and the exodus of
jobs.
At the same time, related rhetorical strategies have been used by many globally
oriented corporations. While some, like Chrysler under Iacocca, have pretended
a pure nationalism that actively effaces their overseas engagements, many more
have used their advertisements and commercials to claim that, by operating on
a worldwide basis, they are much better placed to serve domestic interests and
concerns. In the MCI advertisement, for example, the company uses its involvements with the Internet, a system that empowers 20 million people to conduct
a worldwide conversation with each other via computers, to present itself as
24. Los Angeles Times, 21 August 1992, A8.

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particularly well-equipped to serve the interests of the entire nation and beyond.
Interestingly, however, the connection has been emphasized most explicitly by
foreign-based transnationals anxious to offset nationalist antipathies within their
U. S. markets. Toyota has designed an advertising campaign that draws attention
to its $5 billion investment in America, its American research and design
centers, its U.S. manufacturing plants, its use of over 400 American suppliers, and more generally, its commitment to giving an economic boost to communities right across America.* And, in a recent advertisement, the French bank,
Credit Lyonnais, described itself as An American Success Story. After five years
of record growth, capped by our most successful year, our recognition as a partner
to American business is confirmed. . . . Our strength is no longer simply the
power of a global bank. It is diversity. It is adaptability. Qualities that are truly
American.26As in many other areas, then, the transnational has not so much
displaced the national as resituated it and thus reworked its meanings.

+++
. . . there is no going back: diversity breeds diversity. It is the fuel that
runs todays America and, in a world being transformed daily by technologies that render distances meaningless, it puts America in the forefront of a new international order.
Time2
Reinscribingdifference While working energetically to relocate the national in the
global, members of the bourgeoisie have also acted to reshape peoples ideas
about the relationship between the national and its internal lines of difference.
In particular, in the face of growing challenges to the post-war mechanisms by
which taxonomic distinctions of gender, race and national origin were instantiated
in modes of spatial and occupational segregation, they have launched a variety of
efforts to reinvigorate and recast the divisive power of the taxonomies themselves.
Here, the unifying theme has been the rapid growth in a generalizing discourse
of identity. Introduced into the social sciences in the United States during the
1950s, this discourse initially moved slowly into popular usage. Over the last
fifteen years or so, however, it has become ubiquitous, the most vivid idiomatic

25. Drawn from advertisements that appeared in Time, 3 January 1994; Newsweek, 10 January
1994; and National Review, 21 February 1994.
26. Business Week, 31 October 1994.
27. Special Issue, The New Face of America, Fall 1993, 9.

symptom of the anxieties and opportunities that the recent challenges to the old
topographies of difference have brought about.28Yet, within this shared idiom,
contending bourgeois coalitions have promoted approaches that are in many ways
quite different. The most prominent of these have been what I shall call conservative monoculturalism and corporate-liberal multiculturalism.
Articulated clearly in the campaign rhetoric of both Reagan and Bush and
much of the literature advocating tighter controls on immigration, and illustrated
nicely by a recent issue of the National Review devoted to demystifying multicult ~ r a l i s m , conservative
~~
monoculturalism has been used both to solidify a rightwing coalition and to garner support for it primarily-though not solely-from
whites, and especially white men, increasingly unsettled by the growing challenges to their long-held privileges in both politics and the workplace. However,
its treatment of divisions according to gender, race and national origin has been
strangely double-voiced. In their dominant voice, proponents of this approach
have actually argued for the need to break down such divisions in order to create
an unmediated relationship between generic individuals and a national society
that is the bearer of a single culture and identity. Jettisoning old appeals to natural
hierarchies based in biology, they have claimed to seek a system in which people
are judged and rewarded solely according to their character or, more fully, in
which the only differences that count are differences of degree between individuals, gauged by the extent to which their personal qualities approximate the attitudes
and values enshrined within the national culture.
Proponents of conservative monoculturalism have sought to make sense of
the growing problems currently experienced by people at the bottom of the class
structure by telling a particular story of national development and crisis. According to this story, the nation has, since its inception, been organized around
a set of core values. In his 1992 convention speech, Bush stressed individualism,
patriotism, hard work, a belief in God, loving ones neighbors and a commitment
to the lasting, two-parent family.3oFor many years, immigrants willingly and
successfully assimilated to these values, learning through the medium of education
that they must shake off subcultural affiliations in order to take full advantage
of the promise that the nation offered. In a context of steadily increasing equality
28. For histories of the growing use of the term, identity,in the social sciences and in popular
discourse, see Gleason (1983) and Weigert, Smith Teitge and Teitge (1986). For fuller reflections
on the politics of such developments, see Rouse (1994).
29. National Review, 21 February 1994.
30. Los Angeles Times, 21 August 1992, AO-9.

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of opportunity, differences in material outcomes were largely the result of choices

that people made (women preferring domestic life to full-time work, for example),
or, more commonly, of differences in individual character and education. In the
view of the monoculturalists, the current growth in poverty and hardship is therefore partly the result of declining moral standards at the bottom of the social
order. But they also see it as stemming from the recent immigration of people
whose cultural attitudes and values diverge from the national standard to a much
greater degree than those of previous immigrant groups. And they argue that
this has been made much worse by the ways in which liberal multiculturalists
have encouraged both citizen minorities and many of the new immigrants to
develop or maintain subcultural identities, thus interfering in the processes by
which they acquire the basic national values. As the contributors to the National
Review issue repeatedly suggest, the solution to these problems lies in establishing
tighter controls over immigration, breaking down the mediating foci of identity,
enabling everyone to receive an education in the same, shared set of values, and
thus assimilating them to a single, overarching American identity.
In fleshing out this narrative, however, the conservative monoculturalists have
spirited back in all the distinctions and hierarchies that they claim to have rejected.
They have generally characterized the national culture as white (or AngloSaxon, European or Western). Correspondingly, when representing the practices
and attitudes they consider antithetical to this core white culture -collectivism,
subcultural loyalty, laziness, welfare dependency, drug use, violence, crime and
single-parent families -they have commonly coded them as black or alien,
elaborating a vivid demonology around more or less explicitly racialized figures
such as the young male gang member, the female welfare queen and the illegal
alien. And, more fully, when plotting individual deviation from the national
norm, they have often broken up this spectrum by reference to taxonomies of
racial and geopolitical difference that rank citizens hierarchically from AfricanAmericans, to Hispanics, to Asian-Americans, to whites, and recent immigrants
from Hispanics in general, to Cubans, to Asians. Most crucially, they have
frequently turned differences of degree into differences of kind, arguing that it
is necessary to draw a sharp line, both conceptually and physically, between
those who are committed to acquiring the national culture and abiding by its
moral standards and those who have refused its terms. With a multitude of images
from the rapist Willie Horton to the AIDS-infected illegal immigrant, they have
built a discriminating, panic-driven picture of a virtuous core increasingly imperiled by a horde of dangerous others who must insistently be kept at bay. Wrested
from biology, disarticulated from identity, translated into signs of difference,

terms such as black, Hispanic and Asian continue, through this rhetoric,
to dissect the landscape of the social and to reinforce distinction and divergence.
The discourse of corporate-liberal multiculturalism has been in many ways
quite different. Articulated in the campaign rhetoric of Dukakis and, in qualified
form, in the language of the Clinton administration, manifest in a host of university, corporate and governmental diversity programs, and nicely illustrated by
the special issue of Time devoted to delineating The New Face of Ameri~a,~
it has been used both to build a center-right alliance that incorporates the more
cosmopolitan members of the professional-managerial class and to solicit support
for this coalition primarily from those women, people of color and new immigrants
long disadvantaged in relation to the majority of white male citizens. Yet it, too,
has been interestingly double-voiced in its approach to internal lines of difference.
In its dominant voice, corporate-liberal multiculturalism seems to have taken
up and amplified left-liberal arguments for affirmative action and multicultural
diversity, providing a vital challenge to conservative arguments about the causes
of growing hardships at the bottom of the contemporary class structure. Its proponents have told a story that begins with a nation united not around a single set
of substantively defined values but instead around a series of formally defined
political processes and procedures that promised people equal rights under the
law. Yet historically, they argue, the country has failed to live up to its promise.
Women, people of color and many immigrants have been denied these rights,
and the hardships that so many of them endure today are primarily a result of
the continued prejudice and discrimination with which they - and, in many cases,
their distinctive ways of life-are treated. The solution to such problems therefore
does not lie in eradicating these mediating sources of affiliation and their attendant
cultural forms. Instead, it requires enabling people in subordinated groups to
develop a knowledge of and pride in their particular identities, encouraging people
in the country as a whole to appreciate the vital role that such groups have already
played in contributing to the nations history and progress, and ensuring that
every group receives full and equal representation in both politics and the workplace. While Bush, in his 1992 convention speech told delegates, We believe
that now that the world looks more like America, it is time for America to look
more like
Clinton countered by arguing that he was more concerned
to produce an administration that looks like America.33
3 1. Special Issue, The New Face of America, Fall 1993.
32. Los Angeles Times, 21 August 1992, A8.
33. Quoted in Time, Special Issue, The New Face of America, Fall 1993, 1 .

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When seen in contrast to conservative monoculturalism, corporate-liberal

multiculturalism clearly offers a less draconian vision. Yet, it should not be
confused with the left-liberal arguments it seems to echo. It has significantly
reworked these arguments, refracting them not only through a business idiom
that increasingly stresses the value of diversified investment but also and more
importantly through a social Darwinism that emphasizes the adaptive advantages
of diversity in gene pools. Indeed, when Time refers to the endless and fascinating
profusion of peoples, cultures, languages and attitudes that make up the great
national pool and to the ultimate cultural immersion of interethnic marriage,34
it is clear that an ironic shift has taken place. The slippery idioms of biology
have been cast aside by conservatives only to be taken up enthusiastically by
members of the liberal center-right. In addition, while issues of justice have
figured to some extent within this discourse, its primary focus has been on questions of efficiency. If the nation is to succeed, the argument goes, it must take
advantage of the full range of talent that is available to it and, in so doing, it
must recognize cultural diversity as a strength, not a weakness. Moreover, while
valid at any time, these considerations have been made more compelling by recent
changes in the workings of the world. The United States must increasingly operate
and do business in a global environment characterized by the growing interpenetration of different groups and cultures. Meanwhile, at home, the recent rise in
immigration is dramatically transforming the landscape of internal difference,
multiplying subcultural distinctions and pushing towards a situation in which,
by the middle of the next century, white citizens will themselves be a minority.
Under circumstances such as these, the continued admission of immigrants and
the fostering of cultural diversity are simply expedient.
Finally, while corporate-liberal multiculturalism echoes many of the idioms
of affirmative action, it has clearly appropriated and diverted their more radical
impulses. Both corporations and universities have used an emphasis on diversity
much less to engage the problems suffered by citizens of color, especially those
from the lower reaches of the class structure, than to license the creation of a
cosmopolitan professional-managerial class by recruiting researchers, managers
and academics from a global pool of talent. And symptomatically, when Time
characterizes the new (im)migration, it passes relatively quietly, quickly and
apologetically over the poor workers who form the great majority of the (im)mi34. Special Issue, The New Face of America, Fall 1993, 3, 9 .

grants to focus on the doctors, the artists and the entrepreneurs, the acceptable
faces of multicultural mixing. 35
Moreover, while the differences between these two forms of dominant discourse are important regarding both the kind of bourgeois-dominated coalition
that rules and the material conditions of people at the bottom of the class structure,
the discourses also have a significant amount in common. At a time when the
image of the nation and the emotive pull of nationalism have become increasingly
blurred, they both focus attention on the national. As old taxonomies of difference
and division have become increasingly problematized by changing patterns of
residence and work, these discourses reassert the primacy of taxonomic differences along lines of gender, race and national origin and amplify the distinguishing
force of these taxonomies by suggesting that they are matched by differences in
ways of life. They both attribute the material deprivations of those at the bottom
of the contemporary class structure primarily to the ways in which differences
in identity and way of life have been handled in political terms. And, as a result,
however different the substantive solutions they propose, they both look principally to educational and political reforms that will foster the protection of imperiled cultural identities, whether of the nation as a whole or of its subsidiary
constituencies.
Indeed, the greatest significance of conservative monoculturalism and corporate-liberal multiculturalism lies in their relationship of complementary opposition. Always offering at least the illusion of significant choice, they have seemed
fully to exhaust the field of imaginable alternatives and, in so doing, they have
endowed their commonalities with a powerfully constraining force. Crucially,
of course, by focusing attention on geopolitical and corporeal identity, they have
continued and intensified the processes by which people have been discouraged
from bringing issues of exploitation to the fore alongside questions of prejudice
and discrimination as well as from organizing across established lines of difference
to address these varied problems.

+++
The point is theres a gulf in this country, an ever-widening abyss between the people who have stuff and the people who dont have shit. Its
like this big hole has opened up in the ground, as big as the fucking
35. Special Issue, TheNew Face of America,Fall 1993,6-7. Time made very similar arguments
in an earlier special issue on immigrants published 8 July 1985.

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Grand Canyon, and whats coming out . . . of this big hole is an eruption of rage, and the rage creates violence, and the violence is real. . . .
Theres so much rage going around, were damn lucky we have the movies to help us vent a little of it.
Davis, the producer in the Jilrn, Grand Canyon (1991)
Reconceptualizingclass The marked growth in idioms of identity has not totally
displaced and silenced discussion of class in the contemporary United States.
The term class has, in fact, been used quite frequently in reference to the
middle class(es) and, increasingly, the underclass .36 Indeed, the growing use
of these two terms, and especially the latter, is symptomatic of the anxieties that
surround the processes they mark-the erosion of the primary sector proletariat
and the rapid growth of the reserve army and, especially, the chronically unemployed. But people have been encouraged to think about these class positions
solely in terms of the phenomenal forms through which class is commonly expressed: occupation, income, patterns of expenditure and, more broadly, lifestyle-the people who have stuff and the people who dont have shit. This
has been particularly manifest in the attempts to provide general models for
conceptualizing both the changing nature of the class structure and the kinds of
interaction and alliance that should take place within it. Once again, these models
have been disseminated via a wide variety of media and there has been a great
deal of variation in the images and narratives used. Here, however, I shall focus
on commercial films and, in so doing, highlight three models that have been
particularly prominent.
In one model, laid out in movies such as Robocop (1987) and Blade Runner
(1982) (and echoed in a great deal of political rhetoric concerning the fate of the
middle classes), the social landscape currently emerging from recent economic
transformations has been re-presented as a tripartite field. In this field a ruling
elite relates to a proliferating underclass ,often coded as ethnically or nationally
diverse, primarily through the mediation of an increasingly eroded middle sector
whose position has been dramatically undermined by the emergence of new,
computer-based technologies. Layering moral evaluations on this basic framework, the elite has been characterized as a mixture of the corrupt and the wellintentioned; the underclass as largely dangerous; and the middle sector as both
honorable and vital to the interests of the elite. Commonly in this context, it has
been suggested that those in the middle must reach some rapprochement with
36. For an instructive history of this concept, see Katz (1989: 185-235).

the new technologies that have undermined their earlier position. But, more
importantly, it has also been argued that the well-intentioned members of the
elite must recognize how much they depend on the people in the middle to help
them deal with both the dangerous masses at the bottom and their rivals at the
top, and that they should therefore work more energetically to bolster and support
this rapidly eroding group. Only through alliances between these two segments
of the class structure will their common virtues triumph over the criminality,
venality and corruption that has suffused the bottom of the system and found at
least some reflection at the top.
A second model, laid out in Grand Canyon (and frequently invoked in the
grand-paternal rhetoric of Clintons presidential campaign), has re-presented
the social landscape as a fundamentally dichotomized arrangement in which an
essentially respectable group, associated primarily with the professional-managerial class, has become separated by a widening abyss from the growing population of the poor, generally represented by people of color and by (im)migrants.
Yet, in this model, the poor itself has not been presented as a morally homogeneous
group. While made up partly of people who are indolent and often dangerousa segment commonly represented by those lacking formal employment and thus
dependent on the underground economy -it also contains others, commonly represented by members of the proletariat and petty bourgeoisie, whose character
and aspirations are in fact much closer to those of people on the far side of the
divide. From this perspective, members of the prosperous professional-managerial class and those who share their values among the poor should work together,
over and against their common enemies in the underclass, and, in so doing, come
to join one another on the same side of the abyss.
Finally, in a third model articulated in films otherwise as varied as Afer Hours
(1985), Blue Velvet (1986), Something Wild (1986) and Kalifornia (1993) (and
in a great deal of tabloid television and the campaign rhetoric of Reagan and
Bush), the dichotomizing tendencies of the second model have been extended to
suggest the existence of a landscape in which only two groups are significanta small and relatively prosperous population, commonly associated with the professional-managerial class, and a large, poor and criminally inclined underclass,
associated not only with the chronically unemployed but with a much more broadly
defined working class. Under these circumstances, members of the former group
are clearly meant to keep as distant from the latter as they can and to maintain
vigorously the boundaries that divide them. Yet their capacity to do so is represented as constantly threatened by their own moral flaws, ranging from inappropri-

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ate curiosities through libidinal desires to the abandonment of domestic obligations. These weaknesses lead them either to allow members of the underclass to
enter their carefully protected spaces or, more commonly, to leave these spaces
for the forbidden realms of underclass experience. And these actions not only
expose them to extreme brutality but also put them at least temporarily beyond
the reach of the privileges and protections on which they normally depend, especially those provided by the police. Thus, even minor peccadillos begin a process
in which, in the absence of a mediating middle, a single step beyond the boundaries
of privileged respectability precipitates a tumbling descent into a realm of pure
horror. From this perspective, then, it is necessary for members of the professional-managerial class not only to avoid any kind of cross-class interaction and
alliance with those below them but also, and more urgently, to maintain as
vigorously as possible the crucial lines of moral difference. What is particularly
interesting in these movies (in relation to both the other kinds of film and the
dividing images informing most conservative monoculturalism) is that, in every
case, the underclass is coded as white, suggesting that it is meant to stand less
as the emblem of a totally alien other than as a reminder to members of the
professional-managerial class of what they might themselves become if the vital
process of repression were to stop.
The differences between stories such as these are certainly significant but,
once again, their commonalities are equally important. In every version, the
occupation of particular positions within the class structure has been both marked
and made explicable by reference to cultural factors -to peoples character, their
attitudes and values, and, more generally, their way of life. The increasingly
polarized character of the current class structure, dramatic enough in itself, has
been recoded in even more exaggerated terms. Yet the boundaries between these
positions have been represented as chronically at risk and therefore in need of
constant reinscription. Certain kinds of cross-class interaction and alliancebuilding have sometimes been encouraged, almost invariably on the basis of
commonalities in moral orientation and commitment. But all of the models have
assumed the existence of an underclass whose way of life is so deeply pathological
that those in other class positions should both actively avoid its members and
willingly sanction their control through state-based forms of violence. Ideas about
where the line should be drawn vary, but the notion that it must be drawn somewhere is a constant. And, finally, the underclass has often been represented with
such broad strokes that the models have often seemed both to impute to it a
dangerous amorphousness and to demonize the working classes as a whole.

+++
Flexibility is the main qualification in todays job market: the ability to
do one thing well and then, if need be, shift swiftly to another.
Parade37
Recasting work While reshaping understandings of the class structure, members
of the bourgeoisie have also tried to recast peoples attitudes and dispositions
regarding their relationship to work so that they will be better suited to the
demands of a transnational regime. Most notably, in the face of growing volatility
and uncertainty regarding work experiences and trajectories throughout the population, they have placed a widespread emphasis on promoting what I shall refer
to as flexible ~ubjectivities.~~
They have encouraged people not only to expect
and accept sudden and often unpredictable changes in their relationship to work
but also, and more positively, to find self-worth in their capacity to anticipate
and cope with these changes. More specifically, they have promoted the capacity
for rapid and dramatic processes of self-transformation, for synthesizing and
recombining disparate elements and forms of personhood, and, above all, for
moving fluidly back and forth between markedly different modes of experience
and arenas of activity.
These qualities have been urged on people partly through explicit discourses
about the changing nature of work itself, promulgated by both the educational
system and mass-mediated forms such as popular magazines. A November 1993
Time cover story asked, What ever happened to the great American job? and
it answered first by asserting that (t)he rules of the game have changed forever
and then by suggesting what the new rules should be.39 In the process, readers
were urged to (Qorget any idea of career-long employment with a big company.
. . . They have discovered that it is more efficient and profitable to operate as
contracting centers . . . [and] even within the central core, there will be much shifting
around, more hiring of people for specific, temporary assignments. In this new
world, cybercowboys will ride the information superhighway, not working
regularly for anybody but contracting with one corporation after another to do
specific, limited jobs. The magazine also urged people to (1)ook to small and
medium-sized companies and, in so doing, to be prepared to take on simultaneously a variety of different tasks. And finally, it emphasized the need to (k)eep
37. Michael Vermeulen, What People Earn, Parade 26, June 1994, 4.
38. The relationship between the concept of flexibility and the specificities of contemporary
conditions is explored at length in Harvey (1989) and Martin (1994). See also Rouse (1992~).
39. Time, 22 November 1993.

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upgrading your skills . . . some analysts say workers can expect to change careersnot just jobs, but careers-three or four times during their working lives. That may
be extreme but experts say that a high-tech worker must be ready to go back to
school and learn new skills . . . a minimum of every five to ten
A flexible approach to work has also been promoted somewhat less explicitly
through other channels, especially the entertainment industry. The capacity for
rapid and dramatic self-transformation has been encouraged not only through
educational emphases on retraining but also through the appropriation of religious
discourses that stress the notion of sudden spiritual rebirth and through the increasingly pervasive heroization of celebrity figures who have fallen and then remade
themselves. The ability to recombine disparate forms of personhood has been
promoted through the growing attention in comics and in movies to characters
that manage to achieve a mix of animal and human qualities or, more commonly,
a cyborg synthesis of person and machine. And the capacity to switch back and
forth between markedly different modes of experience and arenas of activity has
been promoted through images of fictional women such as Murphy Brown who
manage to move freely, if with difficulty, between professional success and the
numerous demands of homemaking, through toys and cartoon figures like TransFormers that change instantly from everyday objects into well-armed warriors,
and through revitalized modern heroes such as Batman and Superman who now
slide cinematically back and forth between the human and the superhuman.
Moreover, members of the bourgeoisie have tried to inculcate flexible subjectivities not only through the content of these mass-mediated texts but also through
their form. Many analysts have drawn attention to the growing dominance in
recent years of an aesthetics of montage, collage and pastiche, of mixing and
matching, cutting and pasting, sampling and recycling, but few have linked this
more directly to the imperatives involved in shaping work-related attitudes and
values. Yet it seems important in this regard that, in placing increasing emphasis
on radically disjointed, disorienting and unpredictable modes of presentation,
contemporary texts have required their readers and viewers to become skilled
in dealing with rapid and unexpected change and, more specifically, with the
sudden combination of disparate and ostensibly incongruous materials and possibilities. And it also seems important that the magazines, television shows, advertisements and commercials that have most commonly emphasized these devices
have been aimed principally at children, people entering the job market for the
first time, and those still acclimatizing to its demands.
40. George J . Church, Jobs in an Age of Insecurity, Time,22 November 1993, 37-39.

In some ways, then, the bourgeoisie has increasingly tried to inculcate in most
workers the kind of subjectivity that it previously sought to foster solely among
people in the reserve army. Yet this is not the only change that it has made.
Under circumstances in which a growing segment of the population has been
condemned to chronic unemployment, the bourgeoisie has also abandoned the
idea of preparing everyone in the reserve army for the possibility of paid work,
partly to avoid unnecessary costs and partly to avoid arousing expectations that
cannot be met. The cultural politics surrounding the latent reserve army has
therefore come increasingly to focus on legitimating- both to those threatened
with long-term unemployment and to the population at large -the fact of their
abandonment, especially under conditions in which employers continue to draw
on (im)migrant workers. Here, of course, the principal move has been to emphasize the moral failings and problematical attitudes of those at the bottom of the class
structure. But, as I indicated earlier, differences of degree regarding estimates of
character and commitment have increasingly been turned into differences of kind
by arguments that suggest the need to distinguish sharply between those who are
capable of redemption through education and those who are not.
Yet knowing where to draw this line has been difficult, particularly under
conditions in which color and national origin have come to be treated more as
signs of a detectable character than as markers of an already known identity, in
which outward appearances are no longer considered a dependable guide to inner
qualities, and in which the capacity for self-transformation and for switching
back and forth between divergent ways of being has received such emphasis.
Considerable anxiety has thus developed around the process of distinguishing
the innocent from the culpable, the acceptable from the dangerous. It has been
played out vividly in recent press coverage of child crime and violence, activities
that blur the comforting division between childhood innocence and adult responsibility. It has also been manifested in a variety of recent films about the difficulties
of knowing peoples true class position, among them the little-known Chameleon
Street (1991) and the more popular Six Degrees of Separation (1993). Both films
address the growing sense that signs of professional qualification and social savoirfaire that now mark the boundaries between the bottom of the class structure
and its upper reaches are so readily simulated that they cannot act as effective
criteria of distinction. And both focus these issues around the deceptive mobilities
of young black men, the most common symbols of the chronically unemployed.
More recently, this anxiety has been played out with particular force in media
coverage of the O.J. Simpson case. Once lauded as the paragon of selftransformation beyond the constraining signs of race, as someone who had man-

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aged to leap from the ghetto into the heart of corporate America, Simpson has
now become a lightning rod for all the doubts I have described. Correspondingly,
several attempts have been made to restore him to his rightful place whether
by reassembling the details of his biography to suggest that he was, in fact, a
false transformer, someone who had never really left the ghetto and its violence,41
or by darkening his face, resolving the ambiguities of race-marked social difference by recasting him as unambiguously black.42

+++
Just use the Ford Citibank Card for everyday purchases and in no time
youll be showing off a new car. . . . You could save hundreds even
thousands of dollars. . . . Use the Ford Citibank Card at Hertz or Texaco and earn 10% in Rebates. . . . No other card gives you savings like
these with names like these. So start earning 10% in Rebates toward the
purchase or lease of any new Ford, Lincoln or Mercury. . . . Get the
card that gets you the car.
Ford Citibank Card advertisement 43
Retraining consumers While reshaping attitudes regarding work, members of the
bourgeoisiehave also tried to modify the ways in which people approach consumption. In the face of the growing gap between injunctions to find self-worth through
the acquisition of commodities and the distribution of the earnings necessary
approximate this goal, they have responded in several ways.
First, they have launched a powerful assault, discursive as much as physical,
against what they consider to be inappropriate forms of consumption. Through
the rhetoric accompanying the War on Drugs and other, related programs, they
have vigorously attacked those forms of illegal spending that threaten the disciplined working body. Through the increasingly intense vilification of the street,
they have attacked those kinds of collective consumption that offer the prospect
of unregulated social interaction, especially across established boundaries of class
41. Newsweek, 29 August 1994. .. .the man remains a mystery of his own making. The onetime
gang member re-created himself as he conquered football and corporate America, even taking diction
lessons to sound more white. Behind the facade was a hard partyer with a taste for white women
and a growing penchant for violence. An inside look at his double life (3). As a child in the Potrero
Hill housing project of San Francisco, he learned the importance of disguising his inner life, and
it was a lesson he never forgot (43).
42. Time, 27 June 1994.
43. Drawn from two advertisements for the same card on successive pages in People, 24 October 1994.

and race (Rouse 1992b).And, through these and other rhetorics, they have striven
to redirect the money that people spend into the regulated circuits through which
capitalist profits can be made. Moreover, while their varied attacks have largely
been aimed at people at the bottom of the class structure, reinforcing arguments
about the relationship between material hardship and moral failing, they have
also served as powerful messages to the wider population about the dangers
involved in consuming inappropriately.
At the same time, as a way of enabling people to bridge the growing gap
between the incitements of consumerism and the capacity to participate, they
have placed growing importance on the use of credit. Largely displacing an earlier
emphasis on thrift, they have encouraged consumers to borrow heavily in order
to fuel the machinery of consumption. Here, a crucial development has been the
massive growth in the provision of credit cards. But just as important has been
the rhetoric shaping how these cards are understood. Instead of casting them as
means of borrowing, the companies making them available have stressed the
convenience and security that they provide, at least partly by intensifying the
sense of chronic vulnerability to mugging and to theft. And, ironically, they have
increasingly couched them as forms of earning and saving. Numerous card
providers now offer the prospect of earningfree airline flights and other services
and products and of saving via discounts and the right to rebates.
Most importantly, there has been a growing effort to reduce peoples horizons
of aspiration and desire. In place of the earlier emphasis on mass consumers
operating in more or less undifferentiated mass markets, increasing stress has
been given to creating more narrowly defined nichesso that the gap that people
experience between the injunction to consume and their capacity to respond does
not come to seem impossibly wide. Here, the most important technique has been
the use of differentiating modes of interpellation within advertising. Even when
commercial messages reach an ever wider audience, they are increasingly tailored
so that only segments of the audience will feel that they are being addressed. At
the same time, there has been a growing emphasis on fragmenting the media
through which the messages are delivered. The move away from three main
television networks to a plethora of more specialized channels has been a key
development in this regard, as has been the rise in niche-specific magazines.
And, finally, there has been a similar fragmentation of the sites in which a great
deal of shopping, and reciprocal comparison, takes place. Downtown department
stores and large-scale malls that once catered to a wide range of customers have
increasingly been supplemented and to some extent supplanted by more specialized spaces; Sears and Montgomery Ward have steadily been challenged by elite

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stores such as Nieman Marcus on the one hand and discount stores like Target
on the other.

+++
Our world is getting smaller. Global information is immediate. Business
fluctuations are constant. Security and peace of mind are requirements.
Our need to know is imperative. For the business person. For the working parent. For the young and their future. For everyone in this country
who moves and has a need to communicate. We're what you need to
know.
MobileComm. A BellSouth Company advertisement 44
Finally, in the face of the growing loss of faith in images
and narratives of a broadly shared, inexorable progress such as the American
Dream and the story of U. S.-led global modernization, members of the bourgeoisie have striven energetically to come up with others that either redefine the
routes by which existing promises might be realized or, more commonly, redefine
the promises themselves.
A common tendency has been to take established images of entrepreneurialism
and retool them for the population as a whole. Stressing the unpredictability of
the current environment, a multitude of accounts have suggested that people are
much more likely to confront sudden and often dramatic changes and have therefore placed a premium on the ability to recognize openings as they fleetingly
make themselves available and to move quickly to exploit them. Correspondingly,
they have given a great deal of importance to the willingness to take risks and
the need for luck. Indeed, one of the most significant concomitants of this imagery
has been the growing prevalence of commercial discourses that promote gambling
as both metaphor and practice.45 Since the early 1980s, almost every state has
adopted some kind of lottery. Considerable effort is currently being devoted to
the opening of casinos on riverboats and Native American lands, often in areas
where the erosion of the primary sector proletariat has been most pronounced.
And, over the last decade, Las Vegas, long the nation's focal point for pilgrimRestructuring desire

44. American Way (in-flight magazine of American Airlines), 1 September 1994.

45. For a brief but interesting set of remarks on this phenomenon, see Martin Walker, "A secure
future is a mirage when life becomes a lottery," The Guardian (Manchester, England), 7 September 1994.

gamblers, has sought to extend the appeal of the practices it enshrines by promoting itself as a site of family entertainment. Around these developments, a variety
of discourses have been generated that cast life in the contemporary United States
as a lottery and, more fully, suggest that the gap between present hardship and
future prosperity is more likely to be traversed in a single lucky leap than through
steady, patient labor.
Images and narratives of progress such as the American Dream and the story
of U. S.-led global modernization have not been entirely cast aside, however.
The Clinton administration has attempted to breathe new life into these narrative
frames by associating them with high technology production and, more specifically, with the beckoning image of the Information Superhighway. Gore, Reich
and Clinton have all argued that a national effort to develop new information
technologies and the skills to use them will simultaneously refortify U.S. leadership in the global economy, restore the relatively well-paid jobs that have been
disappearing from the middle sections of the occupational structure, and thus
help generate a widely shared recovery (Reich 1991). On this basis, they have
urged people to continue to believe in the possibility of gradual advancement
achieved through education, hard work and a sense of personal responsibility.
And, as part of a more general rhetoric of corporate commitment to the national
cause, they have emphasized that companies developing and deploying the new
technologies must invest heavily within the United States and make the communication infrastructures they are building accessible to as wide a range of people
as possible.
Meanwhile, however, the information-oriented companies have been telling
a story that is subtly different. (Their story is particularly important because,
catapulted into the vanguard of economic restructuring, these companies have
become some of the most prominent sources of images and narratives about the
changes both within the United States and in its relationship to the wider world.)
While endorsing the idea that information technologies provide the key to future
success, they have recast the terms of their promise. Instead of emphasizing
shared prosperity across the class structure, they have stressed visions of increased
freedom, mobility and security. And, in so doing, they have reworked images
of the routes by which this promise might be realized. Instead of the Clinton
vision of a compact between the government, corporations and the people, they
have emphasized the Reaganesque idea of deregulated competition, a primary
focus on the needs of elites and ill-defined notions of benefits gradually trickling
down to the population as a whole. And correspondingly, they have put less

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emphasis on steady, patient labor than on the ability to concert lateral solidarities
by making connections across space and time- between friends and family, dispersed offices of the same company and different corporations seeking to work
together.
An Astonishing Plan of Liberation

Much could be said about the empirical inaccuracies of the varied discourses I
have been considering. In this essay, however, I have been more concerned to
examine the kinds of work they have been doing and the interests they have served.
I have therefore concentrated largely on developing models of the contextualizing
processes in which these discourses have emerged and the forms of agency involved in their production and deployment.
Here, several general points have been fundamental to my argument. Most
broadly, these issues should be related to the dialectical interplay of changes in
capitalism as a whole and developments within the United States. That is, analyses
of the United States should begin not by focusing on developments internal to
the country but instead by seeking to identify the historically specific character
of the national/global dialectic. At the same time, in understanding the workings
of bourgeois privilege and power within this frame, it is necessary to attend
equally to exploitation, domination and hegemonic influence and, above all, to
explore the historically specific nature of the relationship among the three. Analyses of cultural politics that fail to give close attention to the workings of exploitation are as inadequately one-sided as analyses of exploitation that either ignore
cultural and political issues altogether or treat them simply as expressions of an
underlying base.
Within this organizing framework, exploitation should be examined by reference to both the dominant processes of capital accumulation and their attendant
forms of class-related inequality. Domination should be understood less as the
rule of a single and already-given class agent than as a constant set of struggles
on uneven ground regarding the creation and maintenance of particular coalitions
and the subversion of others. Hegemonic influence should be seen as involving
not only efforts to influence coalition-formation and to generate a broad consent
to specific forms of coalitional rule, but also attempts to produce the kinds of
subject deemed appropriate to prevailing economic and political arrangements.
And the production of subjects should be viewed as addressing peoples attitudes
and aspirations regarding their relationship to work and their activities as consumers as much as the ways in which they conduct themselves as citizens.

Building on these general propositions and distinctions, I have introduced a

series of more specific images and concepts that are meant to make it easier to
grasp both the particularity of contemporary conditions and the processes through
which they have been forged. In recent years, I have argued, the national/global
dialectic in the United States has shifted significantly in the direction of transnational arrangements. Most crucially, a major shift has taken place in processes
of accumulation from a regime organized around a national/multinational axis
towards a new one dominated by a nationaZ/transnationaZ dialectic. This has
been accompanied by a significant reconfiguration of the U.S. class structure, as
manifest in occupational distinctions and income levels, from a broadly pyramidal
arrangement to something that is shaped more like a rocket. And, while these
developments may have helped the bourgeoisie in economic terms, they have
simultaneously produced a secret crisis in the nature of its hegemonic influence.
Most notably, the kinds of subjectivity developed to shape practices of citizenship,
work and consumption within a national/multinational regime characterized by
a pyramidal class structure have become increasingly inadequate for conditions
that involve the combined emergence of transnational arrangements and heightening social inequalities. Against this background, the discourses on which I
have focused can be seen as expressing a multitude of improvised attempts by
bourgeois-dominated coalitions to reshape peoples attitudes and dispositions and
thus seal over the wounds their own activities have helped open up.
This story, even when fleshed out with substantiating evidence, has been
limited in several ways. It has concentrated on the strategies of the bourgeoisie
and their allies and, in exploring their hegemonic practices, has focused solely
on discursive forms of influence. It has teased apart complex simultaneities in
the relationship between hegemony, domination and exploitation, and laid them
out with a linearity that might seem to reassert the causal priority of the economic.
And, for all its emphasis on the dialectical complexities of structured collective
agency, it has often used a language that implies the underlying presence of a
unified, coherent bourgeois class. A fuller account would give more attention
to the crucial role of state-based violence and repression in shaping peoples
attitudes and dispositions and, in so doing, open up for study further ways in
which the state and private capital work largely in cooperation to reproduce
contemporary arrangements. Such an account would also look much more closely
at the actions and reactions of people in different subaltern positions. Bourgeoisdominated rule has never been forged in isolation; it has always been shaped by
the daily attitudes and practices of the groups on which it works. Greater attention
to these attitudes and practices, to peoples varied forms of challenge and resis-

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tance, and, more generally, to the interactive nature of the relationship between
rulers and ruled would therefore enhance the analysis considerably. At the same
time, closer readings of more narrowly defined cases would make it easier to
keep the simultaneities of cultural, political and economic influence in play, to
identify the processes shaping the attitudes and dispositions of those in power
and to explore the detailed processes through which coalitions are produced and
reproduced, modified and changed.
Despite these limitations, a schematic understanding of current forms of power
offers specific benefits. The political implications of peoples everyday activities
can be discerned only by first identifying the kinds of domination and oppression
that they face. And, given the complexity with which power operates, it is impossible to identify the nature of its workings without holding at least a few things
still, quite knowingly reducing the fluidities, hybridities and contingencies in
certain areas to relative fixity and uniformity so that those in other areas can be
brought more easily into view. Objectification becomes reification and narrative
allegory only when analysis forgets to reinsert the objects it has grasped and
the characters it has conjured into the processes from which they have been
momentarily drawn.
More importantly, it is only possible to develop effective challenges to these
kinds of power when one understands the ways in which they operate. My analysis
offers several suggestions along these lines. Given that exploitation is central to
the workings of cultural and political domination and is the process that this
domination strives hardest to obscure, it is vital to develop modes of opposition
that make it a central focus of concern, not in a way that displaces other aspects
of oppression but in a manner that brings their articulations more clearly into
view. Given that power works through the medium of cross-class coalitions, it
is crucial to work simultaneously to undermine the ties that link subordinate
members of dominant coalitions to the bourgeois groups that form their cores
and, more constructively, to foster alternative coalitions across established lines
of difference. Because the bourgeoisies capacity to intensify domestic inequalities
depends at least in part on the changing nature of its international engagements
and the growing use of transnational forms of organization, it is crucial to aim,
at least ultimately, to build and orchestrate coalitions on the same scale. And,
finally, given that ruling coalitions secure their privilege and power at least partly
by telling big stories about the changing nature of the world and offering broad
prescriptions about how to deal with the changes, radical critics must not flee
from such accounts but seek, instead, to develop alternative ones. Armed with
such stories, the fluidities of domination and exploitation can be more easily

grasped and people differently located in relation to such privilege and power
can more readily appreciate the overlapping nature of their interests and their
capacity for cooperation. However partial and schematic my analysis, these are
the goals I have been trying to advance.
Roger Rouse teaches in the Department of Anthropology and the Residential College at the University of Michigan. He is currently completing a book on the
experiences of Mexicans involved in migrating to and from the United States.

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