Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Mass Hysteria
Critical psychology and media studies
Lisa Blackman
and
Valerie Walkerdine
Palgrave
© Lisa Blackman and Valerie Walkerdine 2001
Acknowledgements viii
v
vi Contents
viii
Introduction
1
2 Mass Hysteria
People power
The quote we began with from Le Bon writing in the late nineteenth
century exemplifies the key ways in which the ‘ordinary people’ were
understood in relation to the ‘mass media’ – as being more vulnerable
and susceptible to media effects. The ‘psychology’ of the masses was
found lacking, unable to engage critically or keep a distance, taken in
hook, line and sinker by the media moguls. Although this model of
mass consumption has largely been discredited in contemporary media
theory, as we will see in Chapter 3, the masses are now seen to ‘lack’ the
cultural rather than the psychological resources to engage with the
media rationally, critically and autonomously. Their mode of consump-
tion, is however, still found wanting and creates a vision of the rest of
the audience who are able to actively engage with the media and resist
its effects. This active/passive dichotomy mirrors a more foundational
dichotomy viewing the individual as one entity, ideally separate and
autonomous from the media, which can only ever influence in a
peripheral fashion. This notion of the individual as a bounded entity
existing separately and autonomously from outside influences – known
as the individual/society dualism – has been criticized for the ways in
which it views human subjectivity and psychology as being universal,
created by deep psychological structures that can only ever be
influenced by culture, history and the social. This book will examine
what happens when this approach to psychology, central to media
effects research, is replaced by a more radically social way of theorizing
what it means to be human. What then of the media–psychology
relationship and how should one understand the complexity of
practices of media consumption?
selves and possible achievements and aspirations. But what if this self is
fictional? What if the basis of our self-recognition and self-
understanding is actually the endpoint of a complex process of discur-
sive construction? What does it actually mean to say that the selves we
live ‘as if ’ they are real are actually fictional?
Homi Bhabha has talked about the development of colonial
government and the regulation of the colonial subject as conditioned
upon knowledges that claim to ‘know’ the populations of which they
speak. Scientific discourses, including the psychological sciences,
have, since their inception in the nineteenth century, played a
prominent role in the regulation of the population (Rose 1985;
Henriques et al. 1998). The discourse of ‘autonomous selfhood’
embedded within psychological theorizing and interventions has
become the target and object of wider strategies for correcting and
rehabilitating the population, including the welfare and social services
in addition to schooling and education (Rose 1985; Walkerdine
1998a). As well as being incorporated into wider governmental strate-
gies to administer, target and manage the population, the ‘psy’
discourses have become the basis of ways of understanding both our
own and others subjectivities. We ‘look inwards’ as if there is
something stable about our self-identification and make this self the
object and subject of our diary keeping and of the constant judging
and evaluation we make of our behaviour, thought and conduct. But
what if the entities we construe as being part of the self, such as mood,
emotion, personality, attitude and belief, are in fact highly historically
and culturally specific ways of acting upon and relating to ourselves
(Pfister and Schnog 1997)? How then do we evaluate representations
of those people and behaviours constructed as ‘other’ to this self,
which continually circulate in mass media representation? How is a
different understanding of the place of psychology in relation to the
media possible beyond these dualisms?
In Chapter 1 we will begin to explore some of the different theories
used to study the communication process in the social sciences and
media and cultural studies. We will explore what happens when we
move from a study of communication and language as simply
reflecting what is already there, to more semiotic approaches that view
language as producing the meanings through which we engage with
and understand our social world. If language creates meaning, what is
the status of those stereotypes of race, sexuality, madness and
criminality that continually circulate within the media? If stereotypes
are not simply misrepresentations or distortions, how can we
6 Mass Hysteria
criminals and their psychological make-up and motives rather than the
act itself (Foucault 1977). Prior to this point it was the criminal act
itself that was judged and punished according to a system of codes that
were meant to function as grades of severity; that is, if you stole, your
hand was cut off. The idea of the criminal as a psychological subject
emerged with the rise of the human sciences and especially
criminology (the science of the criminal subject) in the late nineteenth
century, human nature becoming understood as essentially comprising
the ability to be rational, autonomous, responsible and self-contained.
Justice and legal judging became concerned with the criminal person-
ality and criminals’ psychological make-up. This image of the rational
subject, which also functions as the marker of legal subjectivity is,
however, gendered, raced and classed. In the case of both Rosemary
West and Myra Hindley, one of the main questions that fuelled the
debate was whether these women were capable of acting in such a way
or whether their male partners and protagonists corrupted them. Their
actions had confounded not only normality, but also gendered
expectations about femininity and whether women are capable of
violence and aggression.
As Foucault suggests in relation to the anxiety of judging, we bring
in a psychiatrist and character witnesses, we ask the little sister if the
accused was nice, we question his parents about his childhood. We
judge the criminal more than the crime (1989: 164). Foucault goes on
to suggest that when we cannot know the criminal, when there appear
to be no motives, when we cannot infer sickness or madness within the
perpetrator, the legal apparatus breaks down:
When a man comes before his judges with nothing but his crimes, when he
has nothing to say about himself, when he does not do the tribunal the
favour of confiding to them something like the secret of his own being,
then the judicial machine ceases to function. (1988: 151)
Mass-media hysteria
The media has, since its inception, been an area of concern among
psychologists, sociologists, educators, broadcasters, government policy
makers and the general public. It is reified as a medium of communi-
cation that has been held responsible for escalating aggression and
violence in society. There are sets of fears underlying the intense
scrutiny, and the medium has warranted investigation over its possible
detrimental effects. The terms of such debates have naturalized a link
that, within a particular set of historical circumstances, made the mass
mind an object that was seen to be easily swayed, influenced and made
suggestible by external forces. The mass mind was the site of
psychopathology and became the key explanation deployed in wider
debates concerning the possible impact of television viewing on the
masses. It is no coincidence then that the main body of research on
media effects within psychology and media studies alike, has investi-
gated the effect of long-term exposure to television on adolescent boys
(cf. Milavsky et al. 1982). Contemporary media and cultural theory,
in an ethnographic move, have rejected the lack of agency accorded to
the audience in these accounts, instead seeking to find and celebrate
the creative activity and intentionality of its subjects. We are told that
even the masses can resist, that they are able to reject the media
message and critically engage with it – that they are not as stupid as we
previously thought.
Fiske (1989), for example, puts it this way:
read against the grain is located within their social background, which
does not allow them access to the cultural resources with which they
would be able to resist. The mass mind creeps back into these accounts
through the back door, linked less to developmental problems and
more to social experience. This problem, we are told, is the province of
sociology rather than psychology (cf. Morley 1992), but what often
happens is that the socially located subject has to be understood with
recourse to a psychology that assumes a pregiven, rational and unitary
subject (cf. Henriques et al. 1998). There is still anOther within these
accounts who marks out a vision of the rest of the audience as being
more autonomous and less influenced by the media. The media still has
effects; the problem is providing certain groups and individuals with
access to the cultural capital required to engage with the media as critical
and resistant readers.
This active/passive dichotomy in relation to the audience has
generated the various approaches that take the link between the mass
media and the masses and seek either to verify or to reject it (cf. Barker
and Petley 1997). This dichotomy in itself contains a historically
specific set of assumptions about the nature of the human subject and
its relation to the world in which it exists. It also understands the role
of the media through a traditional socialization model viewing the
individual as one entity with precultural attributes (usually located
within its biology), and the media or social context as a separate entity
that can only ever influence the individual in a peripheral fashion (cf.
Henriques et al. for a more detailed discussion of this point). There is
therefore always a tension between the individual and the social,
including the mass media, which may unduly influence those who lack
something prior to their engagement with the media. This approach
fails to engage with the social in any way other than through an
understanding of the personal lack or pathology of certain groups or
individuals. How then to theorize the individual in a ‘radically social
way’ without simply viewing the individual as a passive effect of the
media (ibid.: 21)?
Throughout the chapters to follow, we hope to unpack and disturb
the very terms of these debates in order to learn how to think about
things differently. There are other ways of addressing these relations
that do not view the media as one entity and the human subject as
another in its own right. We do not believe that a move to the active
audience is the way forward in this respect. It is a reaction against what
were taken to be the oppressive assumptions of media effects models,
and, as we will see, reactions are always made possible by the very
Introduction 15
concepts and terms they seek to reject. Most importantly, the idea that
the media has an effect is still thoroughly ingrained within the way in
which we think and debate the impact of the media. We have to look
at how it is that such concepts carry so much validity and credibility.
We may then begin to map out a psychology of the media that can
adequately address the complex relations between the media, discur-
sive practices such as psychology, subjectivity and the realm of the
psychological. This will entail engaging with the very basis on which
questions about the relation between the media and its audience are
posed, as well as with their historical constitution. We need theories
that do not easily reduce to a notion of the individual interacting with
the media but can fully account for the shared understandings
embedded within the media that make it as much part of us, as it is
part of the wider cultural apparatus in which it circulates.
Chapter 1
Communication breakdown
There are many theories that link stereotypes and prejudice with the
lack of particular psychological propensities, such as security and a
strong self-concept or super-ego. The work of the Frankfurt School,
and especially Adorno et al. (1950), has linked particular personality
types with prejudice and the susceptibility of persons to misinforma-
tion. What all these studies take for granted, as we will see throughout
the book, is an assumption that the mass mind or irrational mind is
more susceptible or vulnerable to media (outside) influence.
We can see then that simple communication models presuppose
particular ways of understanding the psychology of the individual. On
the one hand stereotypes are viewed as misrepresenting the
‘psychology’ of certain groups, that is, colonial subjects, people with
different sexualities and so forth, and also as creating prejudicial ways
of relating to these groups in those deemed more susceptible to media
influence. This way of approaching psychology per se again echoes the
‘essentialist’ approach to psychology that we discussed in the introduc-
tion. We are presumed to have a ‘self ’, a core, ‘inner-directed’ bundle of
needs, motives and aspirations linked to more stable entities such as
personality, attitude and belief that ‘make up’ our sense of selfhood.
This ‘psychology’ is integrated into society through the action of
certain ‘agents of socialization’ such as the media, our parents and
schools, which attempt to inculcate particular ways of making sense of
the world. Although sounding like an attempt to bridge the
individual/society dualism, these accounts cannot provide a radically
social way of theorizing human subjectivity. They all presuppose some
conception, which easily reduces to biology, of a pregiven subject, who
is then made social through encounters with significant others. The
content or specificity of the kinds of subject we aspire to be is, however,
never examined for its conditions of possibility. It is simply taken for
granted that rationality, independence and autonomy are the natural-
ized building blocks of human nature, which will unfold given the
appropriate influences (particular kinds of child-rearing practice,
pedagogy and media forms, for example).
As an example, within this model of communication and the
implicit psychological assumptions it makes, social problems such as
racism are made sense of in a particular way. The problem is located
within certain individuals who are deemed to be irrational and more
dogmatic in the ways in which they relate to certain groups. Racism is
a misperception, often related to misinformation, that occurs as the
result of an ‘error’ in a person’s cognitive and information-processing
skills or capacities (cf. Henriques et al. 1998 for a fuller discussion). It
Communication breakdown 19
for example, media and mind as two separate things, one acting upon
the other (that is, as two things rather than a single thing). These
dualisms underpin more simple communication models viewing the
mind as an information-processing apparatus separate from the world
in which it exists. Mental processes are the interface between reality
and the accurate representation of it. Sinha argues that it is very
difficult to think of representation as signification, as actually creating
(rather than simply reflecting) meanings and constituting our sense of
selfhood. These difficulties are bound up with the very sense we have of
ourselves as humans and how this humanness is thought of and differ-
entiated from the situation in animals. The sense of being human
embedded within the human sciences, especially psychology, is that the
possession of language and reason enables individuals to develop
morality and a sense of responsibility. This is what makes us human
and distinguishes us from the animals. Language represents our mental
and cognitive processes imposing a structure on an otherwise chaotic
world. Semiotic approaches view language and the structures of
language as creating the very possibility of representing the world to us
in a particular way. In order to understand what it means to be human,
we cannot look inwards but instead need to focus upon the historical
and cultural processes that make our sense of self possible.
Within semiotic approaches, therefore, the media is accorded a role
very different from the one it plays within the communication process.
In the more ‘simple’ models, the media is seen to be one site at which
the object is distorted, hindering accurate reception through the
transmission of stereotypical information. Within semiotic approaches
the media is viewed as a site for the production of meanings – a system
of signification. Instead of distorting the ‘real’ the media is seen to be
one place where particular meanings are constituted, playing a part in
actually producing and framing the way in which people come to
understand their social world.
The media is viewed as part of a wider apparatus, reproducing and
producing, through the particular organization of signs embodied
within the media text, wider cultural values and beliefs. Media texts are
‘intertextual’ (Hall 1997) in that the meanings created within the text
always contain within them reference to wider systems of meaning.
The object of media studies is not to identify a failure in communica-
tion between the sender and receiver but to examine the media text itself
and the particular organization of signifiers (words and images) and
signifieds (concepts) within the text. It is the relationship between the
signifier and the signified, known as the sign, that creates the
Communication breakdown 21
sign was also seen to exist within wider systems of meaning. Barthes
termed this order the realm of myth and ideology. He drew upon
metaphors, which invoked an idea of surface and depth, equating
semiological analysis with dream analysis. The surface of the image or
the text was the denotative level. This surface, however, itself existed to
bring into play or signify wider cultural meanings and values. Barthes
was interested in what lay beyond the signs and how they themselves
were part of wider regimes of meaning. This was the level of connota-
tion, which Barthes argued should be the object of study for semiology.
If we go back to the washing powder example, we know, even on a
commonsense level, that advertising works on the premise that
products do not simply tell you what they are. They aim to reflect back
to the consumer a specific set of cultural values that they attempt to
associate with their product (cf. Miller and Rose 1997). As Barthes
shows in his analysis, washing powders aim to bring into play wider
imagery such as dirt and purification, enemy and friend, effort and
liberation, luxury, hygiene, health and happiness. They attempt to
signify these connotative meanings through fixing the sign within
wider relations of signs that perform this function; white, for example,
as a signifier signifies purity within Christian religious discourse. This
realm of myth works, according to Barthes, because it dresses itself up
as natural, thus concealing its constructed and arbitrary nature.
Another example often quoted from his book Mythologies is his
analysis of the French popular magazine Paris Match. He performed a
semiological analysis of the front cover that bore the image of a black
man giving a salute to the French flag. Beyond the denotative
meaning, Barthes attends to what he feels he is being invited to
understand by this sign – the reader position or subject position. This
issue was produced when France was involved in a colonial war with
Algeria, which it had colonized. In the context of the Algerian war and
the French involvement, he argues that this image is itself bringing
into play second-order meanings such as France’s democracy and
liberalism. It is ideological in the sense that it is constructing a partic-
ular meaning in the face of criticism and concern over France’s nation-
alism and racial prejudice.
One might of course argue that the bringing together of militarism,
with the salute and the colonial subject, signifies France’s liberalism
rather than colonialism. This is a possible reading – and indeed the
preferred reading of the text – given that signifiers can have many
different meanings. They are indexical and polysemic. This means that
signifiers both act as an index, pointing to a particular meaning, and
Communication breakdown 23
Summary
Mass psychology
There are many different ideas about human ‘psychology’ that have
been incorporated into media inquiry. Psychology is not a unified
discipline but has a range of models of human nature each specific to
the varying theoretical approaches that characterize it. Despite the
fragmentation and diversity of models, psychology as a discipline claims
that it will one day reach the so-called truth about human nature.
Psychology claims to be a science and constitutes itself as a form of
expertise able to make truth-claims about the nature and form of
human subjectivity. Part of the story underpinning the ‘psy’ disciplines
is that, with more rigorous research and the application of objective,
experimental methods, the general principles and laws of human nature
will one day be discovered. It is these ‘modernist’ ideas about human
nature that structure and dictate mainstream psychological inquiry.
Psychology incorporates this presumption into the story it tells about its
own emergence as a discipline, or what is called its historiography.
One of the most conventional or popular stories about psychology’s
emergence found in most psychology textbooks is that there was a
certain event that can be identified as establishing the origins of
modern scientific psychology. It is usually the founding by Wilhelm
Wundt of the first psychological laboratory in 1892 in Leipzig,
Germany that is viewed as the starting point of modern psychological
understandings. Psychology argues that its subject matter, the
individual or the self, has been around for time immemorial but has
been made sense of in very different ways depending on the worldview
or viewpoint popular at differing historical moments. Thus, prior to
the emergence of psychology, the self or the individual was made sense
of in relation to more supernatural or mystical frameworks of explana-
tion. Psychology, however, differentiates itself from its predecessors
26
Mass psychology 27
call for a ‘history of the present’, a use of history that investigates how
the past has mutated to produce the current situation (cf. Blackman
1994 for a more detailed discussion).
Foucault rejects the idea of a universal human nature, looking
instead, as we have seen, at the different ways we have come to relate to,
act upon and understand ourselves as human subjects. For this reason
he was interested in ‘processes of subjectification’, the processes through
which humans come to develop knowledge about themselves. Foucault
argued that the human sciences play a key role in this area in twentieth-
century society. He termed the psy disciplines ‘technologies of subjecti-
fication’ and argued that it is through psy terms, languages and concepts
that we come to develop an understanding about ourselves and others.
These writings have been developed in relation to contemporary
psychology by many of the writers who were involved in the book
Changing the Subject (Henriques et al. 1998). This work is important for
the critical psychological project we are outlining here, and has a radical
implication for how we approach the media, the communication
process and the role that psychology plays in that process.
Nikolas Rose has been one of the key writers who has developed
Foucault’s use of history to investigate the emergence of psychology or
the ‘psychological complex’ (Rose 1985). Lisa Blackman has also
utilized Foucault’s ‘history of the present’ to investigate how present
psy explanations of hearing voices are made possible (cf. Blackman
1994). We will draw on both of these accounts in the following
alternative story of psychology’s emergence in the late nineteenth
century. In this description it is important to have a knowledge of the
socio-political context of the nineteenth century in which psychology
emerged. Rose (1985) talks about debates central to this moment that
were concerned with how to differentiate humans from animals, with
what can and cannot be human. These debates took place within wider
discussions surrounding the nature of civilization and what society was
willing to accept as being part of human and hence as civilized
behaviour. These discussions were pertinent at a time that was seeing a
decline in religious modes of explanation and a move towards more
biological and evolutionary discourses of the individual.
This move is usually charted, as we saw within traditional
psychology’s historiography, as a move from irrationality to rationality,
Mass psychology 29
Social psychology
fantasies and lay the easily swayed masses open to the power of the
hypnotic suggestion of tyrants.
For example, Freud (1923) wrote that
Karl Marx
Through all this we can see that the mass mind had become a
heavily contested space, but in no account was that mind ever
presented as anything other than being in need of transformation. It
could then be argued that ‘the masses’ were created as an object with
pathology and the necessity of transformation written across their
bodies and minds.
Murderous children
39
40 Mass Hysteria
Effects research
The indications suggest that the short-term harmful effects do not last
long in normal, healthy children especially when there is wise parental
support, and a secure family and home environment. Where such basic
security is lacking, the harmful effects may last longer. (p. 165)
trial of the two ten-year-old killers revolved around two key questions –
were they victims of ‘video nasties’, or could their actions be explained
in terms of social/psychological factors? A central account created in
the media panics surrounding the killing was that the boys were ‘evil
monsters’ lacking moral integrity and responsibility (The Times, 23
November 1993). The children’s parents came under scrutiny,
condemned for their inability to guard their children from the ‘darker’
instincts once again viewed as part and parcel of childhood. Both the
killers’ families were discussed by Smith (1994) as having histories of
poverty, deprivation and constant emotional turmoil. Within the
context of these backgrounds, the watching of particular videos was also
viewed as being partly morally responsible for their evil actions. We can
see some of the themes we have already discussed setting the parameters
within which the killing and the children’s motives were discussed.
Smith (1994) identified a set of factors, discussed throughout the trial,
that were viewed as being centrally causal and responsible for the
violence that ensued. These included family background, poverty,
emotional disturbances, the boys’ school performances, low achieve-
ment, bullying, truancy, tantrums and self-abuse.
Although the videos were directly implicated as a significant cause
of the children’s later brutal killings (even though nobody was certain
that the boys had indeed ever watched such videos), there was a desper-
ation to find a ‘cause’, a cause that spoke of the present, to explain why
such a crime had happened now. Were they vulnerable, lacking the
psychological propensity to be able to judge between fantasy and
reality, good and bad, falling prey to the media’s distorting effects? Were
they mad, in need of psychiatric help, or were they simply evil? The
courts decided that they were guilty and therefore to be punished for
their behaviour rather than given psychological or psychiatric
treatment. In other words the brutal killings resulted from their badness
and not their madness. Despite the outcome, the meanings given to the
crimes firmly placed the media and its effects on the agenda.
We agree that violent videos will normally corrupt only those made vulner-
able by other influences, but we do not accept that, because video violence is
one among the many causes of violent crime, it should be ignored. We believe
that there is some evidence to support the commonsense view that videos do
have some corrupting influence on the young, which may lead some vulnerable
children into crime, and we support steps taken to deal with this issue.
(emphasis in original)
Note how all the assumptions we have been talking about are simply
taken for granted in this quote; this is what is meant by the idea of a
Studying media consumption 47
fiction functioning in truth. The trouble is that what the media theorists
in the London hotel tried to do was to criticize the validity of effects
research, but not to question its basic psychological premises or the view
of validity as timeless. In a later section of this chapter, we will see how
contemporary media researchers are moving away from what is seen to
be a narrow psychological perception of subjectivity, to be concerned less
with media effects and more with how people actively interpret and
make sense of the media. However, the ‘effects’ model, as discussed
earlier, sets the parameters by which the media is debated within the
public consciousness and is also central to decisions regarding the
censorship of violent and sexually explicit films.
tion with the content of the media. As Morley (1992) argues, the key
concern is to explore:
through the various ways in which the subject is addressed may differ
depending upon how one is positioned in relation to the norm
(cf. Chapters 9 and 10).
With the contemporary focus in British cultural studies upon the
active audience and the patterns of decoding made by a socially differen-
tiated audience, many studies have attempted to characterize the range
of readings of a media text that emerge from reception of the media
(Moores 1993). These readings in some studies are seen to emerge from
particular ‘reader positions’ related to a person’s class, race, gender and
age. The implicit reader norm within these accounts is that readers
should be able to resist or read against the dominant message or
‘preferred meaning’. Although there is a notion of the active reader, there
is also a ‘scale of difference’ incorporating the possibility of ‘readers’
receiving certain messages uncritically and unquestioningly. There are
some readers then who may yield to media influence by accepting the
dominant message of the media text. These differences in reception have
been incorporated into scales that are used to judge and classify readers
according to their relation to media influence. In many cases, such as
that described by Parkin (1971), these readings are related to a person’s
social positioning in relation to the dominant ideology.
There are problems with these accounts and the notion of
‘structural positioning’ seen to underlie readers’ ability actively to
negotiate the media. These problems will be directly addressed in
Chapter 8 where we look at attempts within discursive and critical
psychologies since the 1980s to provide an account of subjectivity in
which there is no split between the individual and the social. Despite
their attempt to move beyond the individual/social dichotomy, we will
see the way in which these still rely upon a pregiven subject – a
‘discourse user’. At this point we do not want to get into a debate over
whether the audience is active or passive, and the degree to which this
process is circumscribed by ‘structural positioning’. Instead, we want to
think about the very terms that structure the debate – the
active/passive dichotomy. As we have seen, broadly speaking within
media studies, people are seen to be either active or passive depending
upon the perspective. These terms accord a very different role to the
media in relation to its ability to influence its audience.
In both of the media accounts already discussed, the human subject
is construed as a pregiven entity. Although the perspectives differ in
how they specify this human nature, they nonetheless credit individ-
uals with certain presocial attributes prior to their immersion within
their social worlds. Broadly speaking, the human subject is either
Studying media consumption 57
Subjectivity, ideology
and representation
But who is this subject who encounters the text? For Morley, who is
well aware of the problems of replacing psychologism by sociologism,
the subject is in fact, a social one, situated in a class location, one who
59
60 Mass Hysteria
the masses are lazy and unintelligent; they have no love for instinctual
renunciation, and they are not to be convinced by argument of its
inevitability; and the individuals composing them support one another in
giving free rein to their indiscipline. It is only through the influence of
individuals who can set an example and whom masses recognise as their
leaders that they can be induced to perform the work and undergo the
62 Mass Hysteria
renunciations on which the existence of civilisation depends. All is well if
these leaders are persons who possess superior insight into the necessities
of life and who have risen to the height of mastering their own instinctual
wishes. (SE Vol. XXI: 7–8)
Fascism was already on the agenda in Europe, and Freud felt that
the masses would succumb too easily to dictatorship. For Freud, as for
many others at that time, there were the leaders and the led, each
having their own particular problems. It was the need for strong but
fair and democratic leadership that, Freud argued, was important in
taking the masses away from the easy pleasures afforded by dictators.
To understand this, Freud posited his by now familiar model of
infantile wishes and fantasies, and the move from the gratification of
the maternal breast to the production of a strong ego. For Freud,
infantile fantasies were inevitable and certainly not differentiated by
class. However, Freud stated clearly that the masses did not want to
make the move to renounce the easy pleasures (the oral, sexual gratifi-
cations that harkened back to early infantile wishes) and sublimate
these in favour of higher pleasures.
It is not difficult to see how this prefigures both later work on the
masses in terms of their greater vulnerability, because they have been
maternally deprived (cf. remarks about the vulnerability of the James
Bulger murderers), that is, that they have not received enough early
gratification, as well as the media’s view of this as easy pleasure and
gratification, pandering to early wishes that should be surpassed. The
figure of the infantile working class reappears in countless places, and
we will certainly return to it in relation to the emergence of cultural
and media theory in the 1970s. However, a group of sociologists and
social psychologists, all of them Jewish, who had been working in the
University of Frankfurt before the Second World War, and who fled to
the USA at the onset of war, took up this work in an important and
influential way.
They had been especially concerned with Freud’s ideas about the
masses and easy gratification, taking up the idea that the gullible
masses had been easily swayed by corrupt leadership in the form of the
fascism of Hitler and Mussolini. Having moved to the USA, they
turned their attention after the Second World War to the rise of the
mass market, including the availability of both consumer goods and
cheap entertainment in film and television. Using the same arguments,
they attempted to use various means to produce for social psychology
an empirical verification of what became known as Freudo-Marxism.
Subjectivity, ideology and representation 63
4 Science has its place, but there are many important things that can
never be understood by the human mind.
26 Some people can be divided into two distinct classes: the weak and
the strong.
29 Some day it will probably be shown that astrology can explain a lot of
things. (ibid.: 256)
The test Adorno constructed was termed the F Scale and was used to
‘produce a sound estimate of the relative amounts of fascist potential in
different sections of the population’ (ibid.: 265). This work in particular
was important in preparing the ground for two of the theoretical and
empirical orientations in research on mass media and communication
already discussed in the last chapter: effects research and uses and gratifi-
cations. In their way, each of these traditions has drawn upon the same
underlying assumptions about the mass mind and its gullibility.
Understood as liberal, if not radical, this work certainly did not hold the
media to be an unqualified good, but what was always far more
important was the understanding of the problem of the masses and the
way in which their very irrationality served as the fertile ground upon
which the seeds of capitalism, Fascism and other evils could take hold.
This work has also been important for the development of person-
ality theory and social psychology, creating a range of theories and tests
into the late twentieth century concerned with measuring those traits
which define individuals as less able to think for themselves and
therefore as more subservient to others (including the media). These
terms include the measurement of ‘voting trends’ (Campbell et al.
1960), the ‘inner-directed’ versus ‘outer-directed’ personality (Rokeach
64 Mass Hysteria
Marx developed his theories about capitalism and the oppression and
exploitation of the working classes around the same time as the
emergence of psychology as a science, that is, the end of the nineteenth
century. This means that his work belongs to the same moment of
modernity, the same search for grand theories and narratives, that
would, for example, explain the universal workings of capital, the
struggles of capital and labour.
Central to Marx’s theory was that the masses had to become the
Working Class, an historical class conscious of its own historical mission.
Class had first been proposed as a system of classification in Britain by
liberal social reformers such as Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army,
who were part of the movement to map and classify areas of cities as part
of an attempt to chart both the spread of disease and degeneracy, and as
part of the emerging strategy of population management. For Marx,
however, class was not simply an occupational category but a form of
consciousness: the realization of oppression and exploitation, and the
role of the masses in making the revolution, was what was necessary to
understand oneself as part of this universal political movement and
hence become Working Class. It follows therefore that one of Marx’s
central concerns was the fact that many working-class people did not
appear to either want or be able to take part in the revolutionary struggle
that he envisaged. His political project, however, required that they did
so, and he thus had to construct an account both of why workers were
not revolutionaries and how they could become so.
It is not difficult to see that the psychology, the mind and
behaviour, of the masses was a crucial and essential feature of Marx’s
account of working-class political action. To understand this, Marx put
forward an account both of ideology and of consciousness. He used
two different analogies to explain ideology: the first was the idea of a
camera obscura, which blocks vision, thus implying that ideology, the
ideas and beliefs of the ruling class, was something which got in the
way of the workers’ ability to see and recognize the true conditions of
their own exploitation. The model of ideology that we have given here
is, of course, necessarily crude and was refined by many left of centre
intellectuals after Marx, as we will discuss later in this chapter.
Subjectivity, ideology and representation 65
Louis Althusser
The late 1960s were years of radical ferment all over the world. On the
one hand there were the civil rights and black power movements in the
USA, and on the other there was the Vietnam War, which produced
protests on university campuses both in the USA and elsewhere. This
led to a wave of radicality and an upsurge of new ideas within the social
sciences, particularly social theory and psychology, because of the way
in which students turned to particular radical thinkers to understand
what was happening to them and, increasingly, to criticize their
education and the old-style politics of the left.
In France, at the same time, there was a massive student revolt, which
led to a huge wave of strikes in France and nearly brought down the
government. However, one of the aspects that so troubled the French
students, who were not straightforward supporters of the French
Communist Party, was that the workers did not respond as well as they
had hoped, and certainly not enough to produce the political change
that they had imagined. It was this sense of failure that fuelled the turn to
the work of the French philosopher and social theorist, Louis Althusser.
The students and others on the left were looking for some way to
understand why the workers had not taken up arms in what they had
seen as a revolutionary moment. After all, we have seen in the last
chapter that Marx had assumed that a psychological problem, a failure
of consciousness, lay behind the failure to become the Working Class.
While the blame was ultimately laid on the bourgeoisie and on the
working of capital, there was nevertheless, as we have indicated, also
taken to be something wrong with the masses. Althusser’s work was
attractive because it united the study of ideology, an explanation of the
‘ruling ideas’, with a theory of consciousness, in a Freudo-Marxist
tradition but going a long way beyond existing accounts. Because it
presented a psychological explanation, presenting subjectivity as
produced in and through ideology, it was seen as very important,
especially because it critiqued the idea of a pregiven psychological
subject, separate from a sociological account of society and a theory of
socialization that brought them together.
We will briefly describe Althusser’s approach to ideology, which is
contained in a paper called ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses’
(1977), commonly referred to as the ISAs essay. Althusser sought to go
beyond Marx’s conceptions of ideology described in the last chapter,
arguing that ideologies were systems or apparatuses that did not simply
prevent people from seeing, but instead created subjects, that is, the very
Subjectivity, ideology and representation 67
Feminism, psychoanalysis
and the media
albeit in its body, the distress of absence, of loss. Since comforting the
infant for all of this time is impossible, Freud posits this sense of loss as
an essential part of the human condition. To fill in the gap created by
this loss, Freud proposes that the infant itself fantasizes the object of
absence. He describes this as the hallucination of the absent breast. It is
in this sense that he develops the concept of wish fulfilment and
psychical reality, for if the infant is able to create in its own mind the
satisfaction of the breast, this fantasy defends against the experienced
loss. In that sense, he proposes that all subsequent experiences of
presence and absence are lived through that defensive organization.
So psychical reality becomes the way in which we understand the
world through the lens of our defences. If fantasy is inaugurated as a
defensive structure, it follows that the idea of unconscious defences
against pain, anxiety, loss and so forth are part and parcel of the
necessary way in which the human subject has to operate. Later Freud
posits that the child, as it grows up, tries to master in fantasy the
presence and and absence of the mother. He gives an example of a
child playing with a cotton reel, rolling the reel away and saying
‘gone’, then rolling it back saying ‘here’. Freud understands this as an
attempt in fantasy to control the presence and absence of the mother,
who can after all come and go apparently at will. But in addition to
this there is the issue of where she goes to. It is the sense that there is
another, the father who takes away the mother’s attention that inaugu-
rates, especially for the boy, a sense of rivalry that ends in the castra-
tion and Oedipus complexes (see, for example, Mitchell 1974 for a
fuller introduction).
Lacan reworks these concepts in a number of important ways. To
begin with, using structural linguistics, he reintreprets Freud’s ideas of
manifest and latent content. What Freud (1990) argued was that
dreams present ‘the royal road to the unconscious’ and that the dream
thoughts we remember on waking are the surface or manifest content,
the latent content, or deeper unconscious meaning, lurking beneath.
Lacan reworked this using the linguistic idea of two poles of language,
synchronic and diachronic, arguing that metaphor and metonomy
provided the basis for a linguistic interpretation of the unconscious.
Material was held in the unconscious in chains of associated signifiers
instead of chains of association, which is the idea that Freud had used.
Let us explore this by looking at an example of dream interpretation.
Thom (1981) cites the example of a dream that he argues supports
Lacan’s idea that the unconscious is structured like a language. It is a
complicated analysis and not one that can easily be presented here, but
Feminism, psychoanalysis and the media 73
To enter the Symbolic Order was for Lacan to enter the law of the
father, which is how he explained the castration complex. The law of
the father is what creates patriarchal culture, itself running on the
motor of desire. As we shall see later, Lacan believed this patriarchy to
be inevitable, so this was not a very revolutionary theory. He also
argued that since all of this rested on a fantasy of power over the
mother, the phallus was the inevitable fantasy, the signifier of
signifiers. Woman then was the central fantasy of all. Lacan was fond
of expounding how the phallus was in fact only the signifier of the
symbolic power invested in the law of the father; the phallus is a fraud,
he said. So the apparently solid power of patriarchy rests upon the
little boy’s defence against the inevitable loss of his mother and his
unfulfillable, taboo, incestuous desire to be the object of her desire.
But Lacan’s critique of patriarchal power is double edged, for the
moment he announces it to be a fraud, he also declares its
inevitability. Because he argues that signification is produced in a
patriarchal mode, with the phallus as the signifier of signifiers, he
takes the signifier, woman, to be constituted only as the object of that
fantasy, hence his infamous proclamation that ‘woman does not exist’
except as symptom and myth of male fantasy, accompanied by his
crossing out of the signifier woman. We will go into this in more
detail in due course.
In some ways the masses appear in this approach to be even more
trapped in infantile wish fulfilment (cf. Walkerdine 1997). And
indeed, as in Freud, only a move to rationality will save them. For
Lacan this means a move to the Symbolic Order, that is, the symbolic
system, a pre-established linguistic order in which all sociality
operates. This idea develops the work of Lévi-Strauss, the anthropolo-
gist who understood all social relations as being contained within laws
that govern all societies and are symbolic in nature. Although of
course Lacan was certainly no Marxist, and Althusser adapted his
theory to fit his needs, the Working Class remains a shadowy figure in
this analysis. For Lacan, all human subjects, and not simply the
working class, had to make the move to the Symbolic Order, but the
fact remains that Althusser’s reworking leaves a strong sense that, as
with Freud, the working class are trapped inside infantile pleasures
and desires (codified as symbolic laws and systems operating as both
ideological systems and unconscious processes) and unwilling to give
them up.
Around this time two important developments occurred in the
approach to media studies: screen theory and media education.
76 Mass Hysteria
Screen theory
specific to the cinema as visual performance is that all the spectators see
from the same position – everyone sees Garbo’s face as a profile – but the
point of view will be continually changing: now close-up, now long shot,
now from this character’s position, now from another’s. In other words, the
spectators look is aligned and made identical to another look, the camera’s
which has gone before it, and already organized the scene. The spectator
thus identifies with the look of the camera and becomes the punctual
source of that look which brings into existence the film itself, as if it was
one’s own look that the film unfolds before one in the cinema. (p. 100)
And it is true that as he identifies with himself as look, the spectator can
do no other than identify with the camera, too, which has looked before
him at what he is now looking at and whose stationing (= framing)
determines the vanishing point. (p. 149)
Cowie argues that, with this statement, Metz locks it all together by
arguing that the misrecognition of the mirror phase is allied directly to
the cinematic signifier in the identification with the camera – hence
the same illusion of control and mastery that presents the cinema as an
apparatus of the Imaginary.
In this sense then what people were talking about here was what
was described as ‘a theory of the subject’. Because what was being
implied was a psychological as well as a social process, the underlying
structure of subjectivity was taken to be universal. It was common to
describe the subject as being constituted or produced in the text. This
was to make a strong distinction between this version of the subject
Feminism, psychoanalysis and the media 77
and the one assuming that a pregiven psychological subject was made
social and that films and texts simply described that subject in a
truthful or stereotyped or distorted fashion. It became clear, however,
that such an account also presented a subject, which was passive and so
deeply determined that there was very little movement outside the
bounds of the text. The masses were still not making the revolution
but this time because they were trapped in the identities created in the
Dream Factory, identities that tied into their deepest infantile desires
and refused to let them grow up. Deconstructing the media texts,
however, still showed little way out except by a process of deconstruc-
tive intellectualization.
Media education
lated in psychology and the social sciences at the end of the nineteenth
century, the problem of the suggestible working class.
British cultural studies deeply opposed the idea of the passive
subject. While this had originally taken as its target effects, as well as
uses and gratification, theories in media studies, Althusser, Lacan and
screen theory also came to be understood as producing this overgeneral
passive subject. Psychoanalysis was being taken up in a big way by
some and came to be an important strand in cultural feminism, to
which we will turn in the next chapter, even if it became strongly
opposed in cultural studies itself.
Chapter 6
79
80 Mass Hysteria
One of the key stones of the new and stronger women’s liberation
movement, which reemerged in the radical upsurge of the late sixties, was
the small informal consciousness-raising group. Here women met to talk
and learned that what had previously seemed an individual problem (not
being able to cope with others’ demands, feeling powerless or depressed,
taking anger out on children) was, in fact, a problem shared by many. We
learned that these experiences were the product not of individual failure
but of the contradictory demands society makes on all women… We saw
a clear link between our personal feelings as women and the political
structure we live in. Phyllis Chesler has described how women’s liberation
was, initially, more therapeutic than therapy. Women involved in the
movement were generally happier, more confidently active, braver and
more angry. We believed that direct struggle against oppression, in the
home and outside it, together with the solidarity of other women, would
lead to rapid social change. (p. 3)
Lucia Irigaray is a French analyst whose work was first translated into
English in the pages of Ideology and Consciousness. In the light of the
above argument, it is her objections to Freud’s account of feminine
sexuality that are most illuminating. In her two volumes, Speculum of
Psychoanalysis and feminism 83
the Other Woman (1985a) and This Sex which is not One (1985b),
Irigaray famously opposed Lacan’s use of semiotics to understand the
primacy of the phallus as the signifier of signifiers. She proposed an
entirely Other semiotic, based not on the single phallus or the single
male orgasm but on a multiplicity of orgasms, lips and sexual organs.
Some of Irigaray’s comments are clearly tongue in cheek, but in terms
of a swingeing critique of phallocentrism, they are deadly serious.
Indeed, if Lacan can propose that the whole of language is founded
upon the phallus, from which woman is excluded and can be only the
object rather than origin of discourse, why should Irigaray not posit an
entirely other feminine language based on the duality of the lips of the
labia. Women, she says, have sex organs just about everywhere. For
women then, language and pleasure are not contained or understood
singularly, in terms of one zone. Instead, language and pleasure are
multiple and fluid, fluid like mother’s milk and menstrual blood.
Women’s pleasures and fantasies are thus not described by an Oedipal
analysis or by a singular linguistics.
In this analysis women can have fantasies of their own, and it is this
which breaks the patriarchal law of the father because it constructs
those fantasies in anOther, forbidden language, a language that we
barely know how to speak yet which is written over the body of
woman. The feminine in this analysis is not simply a matter of
deconstruction to reveal the constructed nature of the fantasies
through which femininity is formed; it is the potential construction of
anOther way of thinking: a different metaphysic. It is this that Irigaray
discusses at some length.
Her opposition to Lacan was to propose not that women were
trapped within the patriarchal Symbolic Order but that there was
another possible basis to signification, that of multiplicity and fluids
rather than the single phallus and single orgasm upon which Lacan
bases his entire theory of both language and the unconscious. This
approach sounds very attractive because it presents women with a way
out of the conundrum that Lacan presents. It was, however, strongly
opposed by many women, who understood it as being essentialist
(Plaza, 1978), not solving the problem but simply substituting one
body for another. This move towards an account favouring women’s
bodies and attempting to problematize the masculine has characterized
the work of many, but by no means all, women within psychoanalysis
(see Mitchell and Rose 1982 for a very partial review.) However, the
theme of women’s bodies was continued by other French work, which
we will discuss below.
84 Mass Hysteria
Clement and Cixous together wrote a book called The Newly Born
Woman (1986), in which they develop the concept of écriture feminine,
or feminine writing. It can again be seen how this acts as a critique of
Lacan’s assertions about the phallocentrism of language. Clement and
Cixous base their analysis on the idea of the girl’s experience of her
mother’s body as a positive force, allowing the possibility of ‘writing
woman’ and therefore of a different account of representation.
The debates about this work surfaced most forcefully in relation not
to film but to fine art. While Lacanian-inspired artists such as Mary
Kelly (1983), for example, argued that, because of the male gaze, it was
possible for feminist artists not to present women as objects of art but
only to portray them as the fetishes of ‘woman’, others, such as Nancy
Spero (1989), were hailed as producing an artistic version of feminine
writing – feminine painting. Spero did not desist from presenting
images of women and indeed, in one piece of work, she copied figures
from Greek friezes in which women carried huge phalluses, as if to make
a clear statement about what she thought of Lacan and all his talk of the
phallus. Thus, the debate came to consider whether it was possible to
present women’s bodies in a way that could not be recuperated through
a patriarchal gaze. Some artists and film makers, for example, argued
very strongly that women’s bodies were so fetishized that it was
impossible to show them, while others tried precisely to invent new
ways of writing, presenting.
Again and again these women try to specify a difference from Lacan
in terms of the issue of the possibility of femininity. And in each case,
they conclude that femininity is multiple, dispersed and non-unitary. It
does not take long to recognize that these characteristics are the very
ones ascribed to subjectivity in postmodernity. Such concepts of
femininity then blow open the phallocentrism of European rationality.
They offer a profound challenge to a Lacan who, while claiming that
the phallus was the biggest fraud and fiction of all, could not counten-
ance that there could be anything other than the law of the father, even
given its profoundly fictional and defensive status.
Women’s pleasure
wanted to find another way to talk about women’s pleasure, one that
did not understand it as a reactionary force that had to be gone
beyond. Such was the antipathy to psychoanalysis that developed in
response to Mulvey and Lacan that some women wanted a return to
sociology, to clear ethnographically based empirical work, which
related to textual analyses of film and televisual texts. To look at
women’s pleasure, they argued, it was necessary to examine what
women actually did, what they watched and the meanings that they
created, actively, through interaction with the texts. In this work then,
there was a rejection of the idea that subjects were created in textual
relations themselves, and a movement towards a critique of the idea
that such overdeterminism could actually describe what happened to
all women when watching. This view has a lot in common with the
position of Morley, which we described in Chapters 3 and 4, and, more
generally, with the anti-psychologism of cultural studies.
It is, however, important to note that this work attempted to engage
with specificity in that it tried to read off the subjectivities of actual
viewers from the film or television text. In that sense it was very
important. In addition to this it attempted to counteract the pessimism
of the pro-Lacanian position that all representations of women were
necessarily a problem for women. In that sense it could also be argued
that it moved away from a grand totalizing theory of femininity towards
the idea of specific gendered subjectivities within cultural locations.
This move is extremely important and cannot be overestimated in
its critique of overgeneral theories. However, as we have been at pains
to point out, the rejection of screen theory does not mean either that
psychological issues become redundant or that psychological theorizing
is absent from the assumptions made by these writers. They are at pains
to construct a social subject, but they are in danger of bringing back
the pregiven psychological subject by the back door. The work is both
important and voluminous, and cannot be adequately covered in a
volume such as this. Nor would it be fair to suggest that all of the
writers neglect the realm of the psychological. It important to point
out that screen theory allowed the crucial exploration of socially and
culturally located subjectivities, a necessary step, but that the hopes of
these writers cannot be accomplished without an understanding of the
psychological discourses and practices within which psychology is
inscribed, which aid the production of those situated subjectivities. It is
this baby that these writers tend to have thrown out with the bathwater
of screen theory. We are at pains to begin to point towards a way in
which that psychological work might be accomplished.
86 Mass Hysteria
90
Postmodernity and the psychological 91
French theory was very important to the British left but, in this
case, particularly to psychology because, among other things, it stressed
the importance of theoretical work. Critical psychology in the Anglo-
Saxon tradition had struggled with the consequences of a strong
equation between scientificity and empiricism, and a scepticism in
relation to theoretical work. This work was profoundly theoretical (and
could indeed be criticized for its lack of attention to empirical detail)
and, what is more, took theoretical debate seriously. At that time it was
simply not possible to publish a theoretical discussion in a mainstream
psychology journal. It is important to note therefore that one of the
impacts of this work was that, fifteen years later, journals such as
Theory and Psychology actually make theoretical work the object of
psychological work, which is itself a huge advance. However, the
continental tradition also challenged the enormous Cartesian
influence, the dualism of which we spoke earlier.
The impact of psychoanalysis was perhaps equally spectacular.
Unlike the case in France and indeed the USA, psychoanalysis was not
a strong influence in Britain, and it was certainly not taught on
psychology courses, except only very marginally. Yet Althusser’s use of
Lacan produced a huge burgeoning of interest in psychoanalysis, which
not only led to screen theory, but also related to feminist interest
following Juliet Mitchell’s famous Psychoanalysis and Feminism in 1974.
Sociology and social theory courses started to teach psychoanalysis, and
there was an unprecedented interest in psychoanalytic training among
left and feminist academics. Latterly, many postgraduate degrees in
psychoanalysis have been set up, and psychoanalysis is now taught on
at least some undergraduate psychology courses.
This is of more than academic interest because it has meant taking
very seriously the kinds of critique of the rational unitary subject that
were mounted in the 1970s, and it means that the sorts of question we
are addressing find a wider and more informed discussion. Before we
move on to consider the relationship between postmodernity and
psychology, we will explore some of the more general assumptions
made by postmodern theorists, who on the surface appear to take issue
with traditional psychology.
This present of the world or material signifier comes before the subject
with heightened intensity, bearing a mysterious charge of affect, here
described in the negative terms of anxiety and loss of reality, but which one
could just as well imagine in the positive terms of euphoria, a high, an
intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity. (Jameson 1991: 27–8)
1. The culture of the image dominates, so that all is surface and there
is no depth. Indeed, for Baudrillard, all images are simulated and
are not representations of actual objects; that relationship has been
eroded by methods of electronic imaging that can create works that
are not dependent on copying some pregiven real but construct
hyperreality within the culture, for example. He calls this ‘the
simulacrum’.
2. There is a weakening of historicity and the distinction between
public and private space.
3. A fragmentation of subjects occurs, with no sense of continuity and
a lack of origin or home since so many people are hybrids. Space
takes on a different sense, and since people can be at other ends of
the earth within twenty-four hours, there is a sense of dislocation,
the concepts of home and community being broken down.
4. The classical bases of theories of ideology, criticized by Althusser,
are taken further by the removal of any pretence to an underlying
cause ‘in the last instance’. What is created in signification is all that
there is. Distinctions between authenticity and inauthenticity no
longer have any significance because there is no underlying real or
authentic person or concept.
5. The distinction between signifier and signified: they do not simply
reflect each other; we are in the logic of the signifier, first proposed
by Lacan (see Chapter 5). All is surface.
Note the way in which Baudrillard develops the idea of the masses as
having certain characteristics, a mass psychology, in fact. While his
work takes the Frankfurt School’s blend of psychoanalysis and
Marxism to a particular conclusion – autism not alienation, cool not
hot Fascism – the account mirrors accounts made in the early decades
of the twentieth century by showing the same fascination with what
the masses will and will not do, guided by their psychological state.
It is very interesting to note precisely how much Baudrillard
depends upon psychology, using terms such as ‘autism’ and
‘melancholy’ (melancholy being a term used by Freud in his discussion
of failure to mourn, this leaving the subject trapped inside a fantasized
longing for things to be as they were without emotionally working
through the pain and anger at the loss and moving on). For a person
who claims that there is no depth, he certainly uses terminology that
100 Mass Hysteria
Critical psychology
sion (Adorno et al. 1950; cf. Chapter 2). It is this triad that, as we have
discovered throughout the book, has set the parameters within which
the relationship of the media to subjectivity is understood.
Let us now unravel some of the assumptions made about the
‘psychology of the individual’ by outlining in more detail the moves
within critical psychology that seek to displace and challenge the claims
of psychology to be a ‘science of the individual’. This will allow us
radically to rethink the relationship between the media and subjec-
tivity, and to signal a new project for examining this relationship. Some
of the tools and concepts central to poststructuralist thinking that we
will utilize have been discussed in previous chapters. We will show in
this chapter how they share both continuity with and retain a signifi-
cant difference with respect to the more postmodern psychologies
reviewed here. We will discuss various debates about discourse within
social psychology and examine their implications for a study of the
media. We will then be equipped to think through some of these
important theoretical and epistemological issues in relation to studies
of criminality, madness, race and sexuality in Chapters 9 and 10.
Many writers have over the past decade problematized the assumptions
surrounding the nature of knowledge and social reality embedded
within traditional psychology. There are certain concepts – truth,
objectivity and progress – that psychology uses to warrant its privileged
position in making claims about the nature of subjectivity. Psychology’s
perspective on the nature of knowledge and social reality is realist – it
assumes that there are stable, enduring psychological capacities
waiting to be discovered through the application of the scientific
method. These capacities are ahistorical, untainted by culture, and lie
beyond language and signifying activities. One good example for our
purposes is psychology’s reliance on the concept of human nature,
which broadly encompasses, depending upon the perspective, all those
essences taken to define the human subject. These essences are taken to
be presocial and prediscursive, existing prior to the ways in which we
give them meaning in our sense-making activities.
Psychology adopts a particular historiography or version of history
telling when talking about its own emergence as a discipline
(cf. Chapter 2). The historical tale that psychology tells about itself is
one of an emerging scientific discipline progressing towards the truth.
Critical psychology 103
The crisis
sense of and understand the world in which they live. This process of
sense making was dependent upon the very language(s) subjects had at
their disposal. The use of language was a key definition of being a social
being, and language itself was considered to be a human and cultural
product. The argument hinged upon the insight that subjects could
only come to know their worlds through social action and negotiation;
there was nothing innate or predetermined about human sense-making
activity. This reinterpretation of the nature of psychological inquiry
involved the development of research methods enabling the study of
human sense making. These methods were interpretative rather than
statistical, qualitative rather than quantitative. These more ethnogenic
approaches (Harré and Secord 1972) prided themselves on their basis
in an image of human life that revered and reflected the diversity,
subtlety and complexity of human behaviour (Fox 1985). The research
process no longer relied upon the illusion of the objective, detached,
neutral observer. Instead, the relationship between the researched and
the researcher was viewed as dialectic, a process of mutual construc-
tion, between the subjects’ or co-researchers’ own understanding and
meaning(s) of their own and others’ experience. This research became
known as new paradigm research, encompassing a range of interpreta-
tive methods such as hermeneutics, participant observation, dialectical
methods, feminist methodologies and so on (cf. Reason and Rowan
1981). Research was done with rather than on people.
The image of human life underpinning those approaches to emerge
from the crisis was therefore based on a particular understanding of
subjectivity, which rather than viewing subjects as automatons now
saw them as having a sense of responsibility for their actions (Shotter
1974). This was viewed as a much richer conception (ibid.: 54), which
drew upon microsociology and the philosophy of social action. The
underlying principle was that, first, human activity is always social
activity, which is, second, bounded by shared cultural resources.
Therefore the knowledge that the human subject develops about him-
or herself is a product of the social and historical background (Harré
1974). Harré argued that the human subject is a competent manager
and interpreter of the social world, and the theories that he or she
develops should be the object of psychological study. He termed these
the plans or rules of human life, arguing that these provide the field of
potential open to the subject (ibid.: 245). An account of social action
should therefore take account of why one particular cultural option
rather than another was played out. Harré equated the role of the social
scientist to that of a grammarian, studying the rules of language that
Critical psychology 107
exist within the social world. He argued that this level of analysis
should reside at the level of semantics or meaning, and not form or
syntax. Experience was seen to be an effect of prewritten cultural plots
or narratives that individuals utilize to make sense of themselves and
others. However, despite Harré’s apparent commitment to the
conditions that make individual experience possible, his approach is
still firmly grounded in the meanings that individuals give to social
activity. He does not explain how these meanings come to exist in the
first place and the conditions of possibility of their emergence. The
individual is the central analytic unit to which new paradigm research
retreats to explain the existence of the social world. The aim was to
make psychology more social and not to examine how individuals are
constituted through the social domain (cf. Henriques et al. 1998).
Although the new paradigm was considered to be a progressive
reinterpretation of the general mores of psychological inquiry, it was
still trapped within the individual/society dualism. Rather than
individuals being assumed to be automatons, they were now credited
with specific pre-existing or prediscursive psychological capacities. A
more sophisticated form of subjectivity was introduced without
explaining how individuals come to relate to themselves as if they were
selves of a particular type. The psychology or subjectivity underpinning
new paradigm research was based upon an image of life to include
agency, intentionality and responsibility. This psychology is remarkably
similar to the image of life embedded within audience perspectives,
which we explored in Chapter 3. New paradigm research relied upon a
pregiven subject or psychology without explaining the process(es)
through which subjects were formed and form themselves in relation to
particular images and regulatory ideals. The social world existed as a
function of the way(s) in which individuals represented or made sense
of it. The approach therefore assumed an implicit voluntarism,
focusing upon the fluidity and flexibility of sense-making activity
rather than the processes through which subjects come to see
themselves as if they are selves of a particular kind. Because this research
was formed in opposition to realist or positivist psychology, it failed
adequately or radically to rethink the relationship of the human subject
to the discursive field in which he or she exists.
Morss (1990) has termed new paradigm research one of the first
waves of criticism of orthodox psychology. More recent critiques have
evolved from these debates and have come to be known as discursive
or postmodern psychologies. Despite their differences they all share a
commitment to the central role of language in constructing human
108 Mass Hysteria
It is suggested that methods of making sense are the key to any kind of
explanation of the self, as people’s sense of themselves is in fact a conglom-
erate of these methods, produced through talk and theorising. There is not
Critical psychology 113
We can see from the above quotation that this particular discursive
approach to psychological knowledge relativizes these theories of the
self, seeing them as possible linguistic practices. One consequence of
this analysis is that if the ways in which people talk about phenomena,
including their own relation to self, can be changed, new forms of
social relation and ways of being can be created (cf. Shotter 1993).
Potter and Wetherell (1987: 104) argue that cultural analysis that
approaches subjectivity in this way has important ethical and political
consequences, that is, that each method of constructing the self
positions the self and others in specific ways, producing subjectivities
that may be negative, destructive and oppressive as well as liberating.
This is a rather idealist position rooted in the prioritization of language
as the primary site of subjectification. As we have already discussed,
regulatory ideals and images of personhood organize social practices
and are bound up with governance and regulation. We need to talk
about discursive practices that are both linguistic and technical (cf.
Rose 1996a), material and discursive (Walkerdine 1997).
Other writers also sought to expose the autonomous self as false and
to show how this concept was actually seen to function as a way of
reproducing particular social arrangements as natural and inevitable. It
is viewed as culturally specific (Gergen 1985) and bound up with the
maintenance of capitalism and Protestantism (Sampson 1971).
Despite its emergence within certain historical events, it has become
part and parcel of what Shotter (1990) terms liberal humanist thought
and is constructed, sustained and managed through commonsense
conversational practice (Shotter 1993). Harré similarly argues that we
have inherited this way of speaking about ourselves from Judaeo-
Christian civilization, which has become reified through its rootedness
in the language-games we use to account for ourselves and others. All
these writers share a commitment to language as a textual resource used
by the human subject to position him- or herself and others in specific
ways. Much of this work has its ancestry in the theories to emerge from
the crisis, as well as from the seminal ideas of Potter and Wetherell
(1987) and their particular strand of discourse analysis. It is worth
going into this work here in more detail as it has had a significant
impact on the development of discursive and critical psychologies.
114 Mass Hysteria
The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the first line and the
last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form,
it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, it is
anode within a network. (p. 23)
Going critical
In this section we will review some of the discursive approaches that are
more concerned with the materiality of language (Burman 1990), and
its embeddedness within wider power–knowledge relations. These
approaches draw their inspiration more from poststructuralism,
feminism and Marxism rather than from the Anglo-American
approaches characterizing discourse analysis. Parker and Spears (1995)
distinguish their critical discourse analysis from the approaches already
reviewed through their analytic focus on the way in which forms of talk
serve social, ideological and political interests. As Parker highlights,
certain discourses define certain kinds of experience as abnormal – as
madness, for example (Parker et al. 1995) – thereby reproducing certain
institutions and societal relations as being natural and inevitable. He
aligns his work more with the intellectual ancestry drawn upon in the
work of the authors of Changing the Subject (Henriques et al. 1998) and
especially with the writings of Michel Foucault. Along with the authors
Critical psychology 117
of this book and the writings of Nikolas Rose, he views the psy complex
as being part of a particular regime of truth that governs and regulates
individuals in modern society.
This work argues that it is important to historically locate talk by
identifying the historical conditions that make individual discursive
activity possible. Discourse analysts such as Wetherell and Potter (1993)
do recognize this dilemma, and in a post hoc fashion have linked individ-
uals’ use of language with their reproduction or repudiation of wider
social structures. In their work on racial discourse, for example, they link
a racial account (racist) to changing social, economic and political
relations. As Wetherell and Potter suggest, we can see history as having,
from this perspective, a direction of domination, that direction being
intimately linked to the fortunes and interests of a certain group. In this
manner the analysis examines subjects’ ways of talking and how these
reinforce and perpetuate dominant discourses, those discourses which
are viewed as ideological and linked to the interests of certain dominant
groups within society. The analysis that we are developing in this book
allows us to consider the relationship between truth, power and subjec-
tivity other than by relying on analytical concepts such as ideology, social
control and social interests.
Discourses are not discrete entities that function for certain
interests. They are made up of shifting networks of associations, bodies
of knowledge, expertise, agencies and problems. Discourses do not
merely legitimate and perpetuate particular realities but constitute
ways of thinking and acting – inciting and inducing desire – and a
subjective commitment to particular ways of understanding and acting
upon ourselves and others. Power does not merely repress or margin-
alize certain modes of existence but comes to structure those very
existences and the resistances against them. It produces our desires and
subjective commitment to certain discourses by aligning our wishes
and fears with the objectives embodied within discursive practices. It
acts on and through our actions within a discursive field of possible
actions and choices (cf. Blackman 1994, for a fuller discussion; Rose
1989; Burchell et al. 1991).
the psy complex, regimes of meaning such as the media and popular
culture and subjective realities cannot be reduced to ideological
interests. Rather than decentring the subject and replacing it with a
more sophisticated discursive actor, we need to examine how popular
cultural representations invite us to reflect upon ourselves in certain
ways and how these addresses or subject positions relate to those
embedded within wider discursive practices. We need to develop a
materiality of semiotics (Haraway 1997) in which we explore how
certain objects of knowledge-practices, such as the psy disciplines,
circulate within regimes of meaning such as the media. This goes
beyond the idea of semiotic analysis as being concerned merely with
symbolic systems of signs and begins to explore the way in which signs
are embedded in and articulated with technologies, institutional and
technical practices. The argument we are making relies upon a partic-
ular approach to the nature of experience, which we will elaborate here
and distinguish from more postmodern approaches to the nature and
form of subjectivity.
Being-in-relation
He acts out the anxiety of our age; a schizophrenic self lost in a labyrinth of
imagined impulsive identities… The historical unity of the human self is
liquefied and lost in an ethereal play of possibilities and momentary selves.
(p. 141)
Did Peter Sutcliffe have a diseased mind at the time of each of his killings,
or was he a ‘sadistic, calculated, cold-blooded murderer who loved his job?
(The Times, 20 May 1981)
122
Criminality and psychopathology 123
Systems of exclusion
Until now, it seems to me that historians of our own society, of our own
civilisation, have sought especially to get at the inner secret of our own
civilisation, its spirit, the way it establishes its identity, the things it values.
On the other hand, there has been much less study of what has been
rejected from our own civilisation in terms of its systems of exclusion, of
rejection, of refusal, in terms of what it does not want, its limits, the way
it is obliged to suppress a certain number of things, people, processes,
what it must let fall into oblivion, its repression-suppression system.
(Foucault 1989: 65)
By then it was too late. On the morning of December 23rd, Findley took
a bus to Carlisle. The streets were bulging with people with that present-
hunting look in their eyes. Findley also appeared frantic, but his hunt was
of a different nature. Voices were telling him to kill someone – anyone. As
it happened he selected a 67-year-old pensioner, walked up to him and
stabbed him 32 times.
Voices thus signify that people are out of control, outside of the
normal bounds of ethical conduct. They are no longer responsible to
themselves and others, and are unable to maintain the requirements of
citizenship. They are other to those capacities taken within the psy
disciplines to define normality. Within the psychiatric nosography the
hearing of voices is taken to be a first-rank indicator of a discrete
disease entity – schizophrenia. It is a sign of illness, disease and
abnormality, the voices being presumed to be symptomatic of the
person’s internal pathology, usually located within a biochemical
imbalance or structural disease of the brain. Within this approach to
the nature and form of subjectivity, a normal/pathological distinction
operates to understand, problematize and administer experiences and
forms of conduct. Those which are located within the sphere of
pathology and abnormality are taken to be signs that normal
functioning, that is, that taken to circumscribe human nature, has been
interrupted, distorted or thwarted. Psychiatry intervenes on the basis of
this clinical discourse by calculating risk and danger – the degree to
which the patient has succumbed to disease – and administering to
individuals accordingly.
The administration of risk is, however, less linked to the so-called
disease process and more to the imputation of danger or the threat that
the individual may pose of expressing violent and unpredictable action.
In the same article, entitled ‘Fear on the Streets’, the psychiatrist Victor
Schwartz has argued for a ‘scale of dangerousness’ against which to
gauge potential risks according to agreed criteria (Guardian, 5 February
1992). To adopt a term deployed by the psychiatric user movement,
the person is ‘psychiatrized’, deemed to be constitutionally lacking in
the propensities that enable people to live and react to life within the
realm of the normal and natural. Thus the ability to cope with the
stresses of everyday life is seen to be a function of a person’s biology.
Rose (1996b) describes how the idea of coping has changed the way in
which madness figures and is acted upon. He argues that:
128 Mass Hysteria
Where madness is inability to cope, cure reciprocally becomes restoration of
the capacity to cope, and the role of therapeutic professionals undergoes a
parallel transformation. Professionals now are required not so much to cure,
as to teach the skills of coping, to inculcate the responsibility to cope, to
identify failures of coping, to restore to the individual the capacity to cope,
and to return the individual to a life with which he or she can cope. (p.12)
Ordinary madness
The trial focused upon whether Sutcliffe was bad, and therefore
culpable for his actions, or mad, and hence not responsible. If he were
deemed mad, his actions would be located in the disease process seen to
130 Mass Hysteria
You were telling your wife on January 8th that you were expected to get 30
years in prison but if you could convince people you were mad, then it
would be 10 years in a loony bin. (13 May 1981, quoted in Hollway 1981)
Hollway (1981) examines within the trial of Peter Sutcliffe how certain
explanations of Sutcliffe’s motives were ignored or silenced. As we stated
earlier the trial focused upon whether Sutcliffe actually heard voices or
was pretending to in order to absolve himself of responsibility for the
horrific killings. Within this context, the hearing of voices signified that
Sutcliffe was out of control and could not be held responsible for his
actions. Hollway explores other discourses circumscribing the discussion
of Sutcliffe’s motivations that were simply taken for granted and not
accorded any significance in making sense of his actions.
Sutcliffe killed female prostitutes, and it was this act which was made
sense of through assumptions concerning the nature of masculine
sexuality. Hollway highlights those patriarchal discourses deployed
throughout the trial that assume that men have a naturally aggressive
sexuality that is provoked by women. Implicitly, and often explicitly,
throughout the trial, a split was made between good women (madonnas)
and bad women (whores), who provoke men’s natural arousal and
subsequent gratification. It was never explained why the voices that
Sutcliffe heard told him to kill women (prostitutes). As Hollway argues
Criminality and psychopathology 131
the trial did not focus upon the ‘problem of masculinity’ but placed
some of the blame squarely on the unfortunate victims, who had in
some cases mocked Sutcliffe’s sexual potency. Interestingly, Sutcliffe’s
wife was also presented as a domineering woman who overwhelmed him
and drove him to the crimes he committed (Hollway 1981: 38).
Because voice hearing and male sexuality were both presented as a
problem of biology, there was no discussion of the content of the voices
and Sutcliffe’s apparent misogynistic relation towards women. Hollway
offers a psychoanalytic interpretation of Sutcliffe’s motivations,
exploring how Sutcliffe divided women into those who were ‘guilty’ of
sexuality and those who were innocent. Sutcliffe both needed women
and hated them, ‘splitting off ’ his hostile feelings towards women and
projecting them onto prostitutes, whom he could then seek revenge on
and punish. As Hollway highlights the discursive production of women
as sex-objects is reproduced culturally through advertising and pornog-
raphy. The relations between masculinity and femininity are constructed
as predatory, women arousing men’s naturally aggressive sexuality. In this
sense, as Hollway argues, we can offer explanations of Sutcliffe’s actions
that are produced by those gendered discourses when taken to their
extreme. The voice then that Sutcliffe obeyed ‘was the voice, not of God
or delusion, but of the hoardings on the streets, of newspaper stands, of
porn displays and of films. It is the voice which addresses every man in
our society and to that extent, as the feminist slogan claims, “all men are
potential rapists”’(Hollway 1981: 39).
their own and others’ selfhood and subjectivity. The examples we have
discussed all examine the relationship between psy truths, media
representation and the way in which people experience and live in the
social world. As we discussed in the previous chapter, it is this
relational aspect of a subject’s sense of self in which Foucault became
interested in his later work. It is not so much then that psy truths are
historically specific but also that they are regulative. They are central in
shaping how people judge, problematize and enact their own
behaviour and actions. We saw earlier the way in which psy truths had
become techniques of self-understanding in how people were making
sense of and acting upon their own distress. We want to explore in this
section the way in which these ‘truths’ are also producing their own
reverse discourses or spaces of resistance by focusing on voice hearers
who are managing their own experiences outside institutions of
psychology and psychiatry.
We have seen how the mad are continually represented in the media as
a danger and threat – an object of fear and loathing. The Hearing
Voices Network (Hvn) is a national and international group of voice
hearers whose aims are to challenge not only the status of psy explana-
tions of voices, but also media representations in which the mad are
continually portrayed as being ‘dangerous to know’. Psy modes of
explanation construct a particular relation to voices in which the voice
hearer is required to deny their existence and view them as meaningless
epiphenomena, having no other function than as signifiers of disease
and illness. The Hvn rejects this assumption and instead encourages
voice hearers to accept the voices, focus on them, recount what they are
saying, record them, document them and integrate them into their
lives. In short, the techniques and practices of the Hvn transform the
person’s relationship to their voices such that the voices signify not as
signs of disease but as a normal variant of behaviour, much like left-
handedness (cf. Blackman 1998a for a fuller discussion).
What is interesting for our discussion is that this transformational
process produces very different affective and emotional experiences of
the voices. The psy relation to the voices creates feelings of shame, fear,
guilt, anxiety, terror and confusion, the voices being viewed as random,
uninvited and raging an uncontrollable assault on a person’s psycholog-
ical functioning. Through taking up very different relations to the
Criminality and psychopathology 133
I’ve tried – I mean I’ve always tended to go for the telepathic explanations
so I tend to kind of direct what I listen to and I’ll listen in certain
directions to try and hear certain people and sometimes I try and speak to
my Grandmother who’s dead and usually – it doesn’t always work, but
usually, if I direct, if I get something from that direction like I can usually
get my Grandmother’s voice, and I can sort of get to know things about
people I want to know things about even if I can’t actually speak to those
people so it’s – I must admit though it’s not nearly as good as it used to be.
I mean when I was off depixol and on next to no medication I mean I
could well I could almost go anywhere in my mind and hear almost
anyone and you know, have no problem contacting anyone whatsoever.
Now it’s all a bit hit and miss and sometimes I just get tired of listening
and fall asleep. (Hearing Voices Conference, September 1991)
As we can see from the above example, and despite the fact that,
within the cultural space, there are heterogeneous practices through
which people enact, judge and problematize themselves, producing the
possibility of very different emotional experiences, psy truths are still
central to modern subjectivities. One of the arguments we have been
exploring in this chapter is how the fiction of the ‘autonomous self ’ is
upheld through the way in which difference signifies as ‘Otherness’
within media portrayals. This fictional identity is regulative because it
organizes social practices such as the legal system and is promoted as a
‘desired image of self ’. In this section we want to explore some of these
arguments further by examining a CD-ROM by the artist Graham
Harwood, who has collaborated with a group of ‘mentally disordered
offenders’ at Ashworth Hospital. The CD Rehearsal of Memory aims to
problematize and critique modern psychiatric and cultural
understandings of mental distress.
Many of those who have taken part in the artwork have killed or
maimed, being represented in the media imaginary as ‘Insane Killers’,
‘other’ to those values most exalted in western culture. The artwork is
based upon an interactive computer program, which visually
represents a body that is the embodiment of the skins, the physical
traces, of the six inmates involved. The body is covered in tattoos and
other images, which, as the user navigates around, can be ‘clicked on’.
Once this is done, the user may be confronted with text – a hidden
story – relating to one of the inmate’s lives. These are stories of sexual
abuse, emotional abuse, torture, humiliation and accompanying
feelings of hate, anger, frustration, guilt and depression. These stories,
which usually function as ciphers for illness, disease and deviancy,
embody the burden of pain that has accompanied these lives. As one
man says:
When I was younger I didn’t like myself and I still don’t. The reasons for
this were because in some way I blamed myself for what had happened to
me and my sister. My Father was, and is, a monster.
Criminality and psychopathology 135
My Dad’s always been handy with his fists… And if he couldn’t get his
own way by talking, the fists start coming.
November 1995), reporting the Fred and Rosemary West case, deploy
these concepts when discussing the trial:
The court heard tapes of Fred West talking in a very glib fashion about
things that would seem to ordinary people utterly disgusting, yet he was
able to do that.
Rose West was caged forever yesterday.
The merciless monster poured out a series of grisly confessions, before
hanging himself in jail last New Year’s Day.
The marriage of Fred and Rosemary West was described as a ‘marriage
made in hell’ – a union so intense that all restraint and decency were
overwhelmed. In the warped enclosed world of No. 25 they fed on each
other’s fantasies.
She [Rosemary West] wanted to spend her retirement ‘indulging in sexual
activity’.
In the last quote we can see the way in which West has become symbol-
ically aligned with Hindley, another evil monster existing on the social
periphery yet symbolically central in how she confirms through her
own Otherness a particular image of normality. Hindley, involved in
the horrific child killings known as the ‘Moors Murders’, carried out
with Ian Brady in the north of England in the 1960s, has become
synonymous with evil and sadism. She is usually represented with her
‘cold, staring eyes’ as a sign of her lack of the so-called normal
femininity that made her compassionless and evil. Femininity is
aligned with nurturing and caring, so Hindley, by disturbing these
limits, has to be excluded and contained, a repository of those fears
which are defended against through believing ourselves to be a certain
type of person.
We are not commending these horrific crimes but simply stating
that the way in which they are understood and made sense of, the
meanings ascribed to them, is made possible by a particular ‘psycholog-
ical complex’ (Rose 1985, 1989) or way of making sense of the human
subject. In the above alignment with Hindley, we can see that the
normative image underpinning these representations is also gendered.
Criminality and psychopathology 137
Only if she had been out of control – the subject of such emotional distur-
bance operating upon her mind so as for the time being to unseat her
judgement to inhibit and cut off those censors which normally control our
conduct – might she have been found not guilty of the charge. Premedita-
tion therefore signifies here the rationality of a subject who knows her own
mind, Ruth Ellis is a woman who knows too much. (p. 9, emphasis added)
Rose discusses the way in which Ellis and Margaret Thatcher are
two women who symbolically threaten those discursive limits by which
the social world is defined and regulated. Margaret Thatcher, the ‘Iron
Lady’, represented supreme rationality. She was ‘more than a woman’, a
superwoman. In interviews with Thatcher it was repeatedly established
that she only needed three hours sleep a night. She made light of her
femininity, equating her role as a woman with keeping the purse strings
of the nation intact. As Rose argues the two women ‘present the image
alternatively of an acceptable and threatening form of reason in excess’
(1988: 17). They are both socially disturbing and symbolically threat-
ening because they not only challenge the discursive limits secured
around the relationship between femininity and irrationality, but also
make these processes more visible. They challenge what we are willing
to accept about ourselves with respect to the basis of those very
divisions and relations through which we come into being.
Other murderers have been called evil. Rose West is different from all of
them. Even from Myra Hindley. Unlike Hindley she did not dye her hair
blonde and wear blood red lipstick. She did not present herself as a femme
fatale. She was obsessed with sex but did not flaunt herself. She was
anywoman, anywife, anymother. Mrs Ordinary. (Daily Mirror, 23
November 1995, emphasis added).
The Public remains as fickle as ever. Love of Di may last no longer than her
looks and age catches up with everybody. (Observer, 26 November 1995)
of us’) that channelled the outpourings of grief people felt and touched
people’s psychical realities at this time. This was reflected in her saintly
representation as the ‘Queen of People’s Hearts’ (cf. Chapter 11). She
was extraordinary because she was so ordinary.
Many writers have begun to explore the role of ambivalence within
the way in which we identify with those people and experiences marked
out as ‘other’ within the symbolic. We will explore these in more detail
in the next chapter when we look at representations of race and
sexuality. Here we just wish to signal the role of ambivalence in
constructions of madness, and how ‘we’ may identify with these images.
In an article entitled ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, written by Julia
Casterton (1997), who has worked in a psychiatric day hospital
running a writing workshop, the author explores the way in which the
staff ’s fantasies of the patients involve an identification with the
patients’ suffering while simultaneously disavowing it. Casterton talks
about the way in which ‘the mad’ can also signify a romantic ‘letting
go’, a loss of social constraint and the responsibility and struggle that
accompany it. This construction involves a certain envy and desire of
the ‘mad’, who are seen to be cushioned from the world and who
cannot be shouted at or punished. As she comments, ‘Wouldn’t we all
like to be wrapped in such cotton wool?’ (ibid.: 502).
This mode of identification allows one to acknowledge certain
desires and wishes within oneself while at the same time banishing
them or fixing them in the place of the Other. In other words ‘we’ can
identify with a desire to ‘let go’, lose control and so on contained
within the ambivalent images of the mad as Other, while maintaining
the normal/Other distinction through the way in which we can also
deny it; that is, it will only happen to the Other, not me. This allows
the identification with those experiences constituted as Other without
the penalties. Thus we can through fantasy take the place of the Other
and gain transgressive pleasure, while leaving the other fixed in what
Fuss (1995) terms a murderous and violent gaze.
To complicate matters further, if the person positioned as Other
identifies with their Otherness – that is, my madness is a disease, there
is nothing I can do, I am not responsible – and celebrates it, are they
being objectified or actively understanding their experiences in a way
that allows them to place the other outside of themselves? That is in the
hands of the ‘experts’. We will finish with a quote from Casterton’s
(1997) article, which highlights the ethical consequences of the
different meanings attached to the Other, depending upon whether it
is the self or other appropriating the image:
Criminality and psychopathology 151
In the last chapter we began to explore how the ‘Other’ forms the basis
of media representations of psychopathology and criminality. The way
in which we analysed these representations is similar to Bhabha’s
concept of the ‘colonial stereotype’. The ‘stereotype’ does not denote a
misrepresentation or distortion of a pregiven reality. Instead, it is given
a semiotic and productive role in which the ‘Other’ as a sign repeatedly
signifies in a particular way. The same old stories about racial difference
as pathological are endlessly told and retold… We feel that how
Bhabha uses the concept of the stereotype is useful when thinking
about the status of representations of psychopathology and criminality,
especially within the mass media.
If we consider psychopathology and criminality as signs, we can
start to explore the relations between signifiers and signifieds, and the
conditions that govern these relations. If we take the signifier –
criminality – there is a semiotic chain of associated concepts that give
the signifier its meaning as a sign. As we have seen, the following
meanings are usually associated with the signifier ‘criminality’
constantly underpinning media representations. It is significant that
these meanings are usually characteristics taken to define the criminal
as a character or personality type: impulsive, loner, maladjusted,
deviant, immoral, no regard for others, irresponsible, irrational,
animal-like, aggressive, violent. The relations between the signifier and
the signifieds is the sign.
Bhabha (1993) approaches the signs governing the ‘colonial stereo-
type’ as ‘Other’ and explores the role that the Other plays in processes
152
Post-identities: sexuality and the colonial subject 153
The range of mental powers between the highest Caucasian and the lowest
savage – but between the greatest and least of English intellects is
enormous. There is a continuity of natural ability reaching from one
knows what height, and descending to one can hardly say what depth. I
propose in this chapter to range men according to their natural ability,
putting them into classes separated by equal degrees of merit, and to show
the relative number of individuals in the several classes. (p. i)
It is significant that Galton uses the term ‘merit’ which also implies or
connotes social worth. Those who were placed lower down this
developmental sequence were viewed as being more primitive and
savage, expressing a degenerate constitution. They were constituted as a
threat because of the fear that their supposed moral and physical
disorders would be passed on to the population at large. The species of
the world were portrayed and differentiated according to a set of
arguments placing western rationality at the pinnacle of human
behaviour. People were seen to differ in their innate potential, which
was seen to determine the development of rationality and morality.
Galton proposed eugenics strategies as a measure to protect the nation’s
intelligence. These governmental strategies involved the detection and
identification of ‘Otherness’ in order to prevent further destruction.
The working classes and colonial subjects were seen to breed differen-
tially and were targeted by strategies of sterilization and segregation to
curb their supposed inherent threat.
The ‘Other’ within this account functions in the various ways in
which Bhabha discusses the ‘colonial stereotype’. First, it is based on a
Post-identities: sexuality and the colonial subject 155
These ideas and the quasi-evolutionary view of the human subject that
underpinned them are still central to contemporary debates and
practices within psychology. Sir Cyril Burt, first writing in the 1940s,
constituted intelligence to be an innate, inborn potential that differed
according to class and race (1966). Burt was highly influenced by
Galton, but more than that, he reproduced the biological and
evolutionary discourses so central to psychology’s approach to the
nature and form of subjectivity. Burt became a media celebrity in the
1970s when he was accused of scientific fraud. The twin studies on
which he had based his conclusions on class, race and intelligence were
found to have been invented. This did not lead to a questioning of the
very premises on which these relations were based but fuelled further
research and investigation. The ways in which intelligence was framed
remained the same, its discursive constitution gaining its currency and
plausibility from the wider discourses of the individual already histori-
cally in place.
Hans Eysenck, who until his death was a professor at the Institute
of Psychiatry in London, has again told the same stories about the
relation between class, race and intelligence. He made an interpretation
of a finding by an American psychologist, Arthur Jenson, in 1969,
reproducing the same nineteenth-century discourses. Jenson found
that American blacks scored on average fifteen IQ points lower than
American whites on what was taken to be a standard IQ test. IQ tests
purport to measure and quantify innate intelligence through a series of
questions. Eysenck argued again that this was evidence of blacks’ lower
innate potential for intelligence. As recently as 1996 a psychology
156 Mass Hysteria
lecturer, Chris Brand, made a similar claim that blacks have a lower IQ
than whites. The book was withdrawn by publishers, but this shows
how these discourses are still very much in place over a century later
(cf. Guardian, 9 November 1996).
Since the 1970s, with the entrance of more black psychologists into
the discipline, there has been a huge resistance to the assumptions of
IQ testing and their apparent racist discriminations. This resistance
argues that IQ tests do not measure innate potential at all but acquired
knowledge. The questions measure knowledge gleaned via particular
cultural, social and educational backgrounds and are therefore unfair,
biased and culture bound. They simply reflect the beliefs, values and
knowledge of the test constructor and cannot be used as measures of
any claim to a universal rationality or intelligence. The following
questions are typical of IQ tests that would be described as culture
bound and therefore discriminating against those disadvantaged
through educational background. They also show the absolute cultural
relativity and specificity of IQ tests claiming to measure a universal
definition of intelligence:
saying ‘I think therefore I am’ and see this as capturing the essence of
human existence. However, the idea that rationality is a universal,
unchanging structure is itself ethnocentric and historically contingent.
This presumption has been borne out on an empirical level, where it
has been found that rationality and reasoning mean different things
depending on the context and wider social-historical background
(Cole and Scribner 1974).
The very meaning of concepts such as reason and rationality are
produced differently as signs if we examine their specificity in
educational and domestic practices (Walkerdine 1988). This examina-
tion of reasoning and cognition cogently shows how there is no one true
universal definition of rationality, or a unitary category that can be
uncovered by science. Reason itself is always historically and culturally
produced (Sahlins 1976; Hollis and Lukes 1982; Rabinow 1996).
Hacking (1982) illustrates this view, focusing upon the different ‘styles
of reason’ specific to other cultures that cannot be easily translated or
judged for their truth/falsehood or irrationality.
It has also been demonstrated by one of the authors that the way in
which rationality is specified and constituted in the present differentially
positions and judges girls and boys. Walkerdine (1988) for example,
argues that it is the gendered constitution of what counts as rationality
within mathematics, education discourses and practices that defines
girls’ good performance within school mathematics as inadequate and
boys’ poor performance as no indication of lack of ability. We can see
this clearly in the following examples of teachers’ comments about two
ten-year-olds:
very, very hard worker. Not a particularly bright girl… her hard work gets
her to her standards (this is of a girl who did very well in class).
can just about write his own name… not because he’s not clever, because
he’s not capable, but he just can’t stay still, he’s got no concentration…
very disruptive… but quite bright. (pp. 97–102)
subject has become part of those ‘truths’ that organize the present. This
concept acts as a regulatory ideal organizing social practices such as
schooling and education, in which our behaviour and action are
judged in relation to the supposed truth of the human subject. This
regulatory image is cross-cut by class, gendered and racial differences,
which act as markers of the limits of this supposed natural rationality.
Black psychology
rather than argue that black people are totally psychologically unique, it
would seem that our experience with – and management of – key psycho-
logical concepts, as they pertain to the handling of contradictions, role of
the hero, language systems, the meaning of work, and a healthy sense of
suspiciousness differ profoundly as we compare the black experience with
the white anglo experience. (Jones 1991: 8)
become part of the way in which racial difference is then lived and
experienced by both the colonizer and the colonized. The following
extract taken from Fanon’s writings illustrates how fantasies about the
Other shape social relations and forms of ethical conduct:
The above quotation, from Fanon’s text Black Skins, White Masks,
illustrates how the colonial subject is lived through the colonizer’s
fantasies. These fantasies construct the colonial subject as the object of
fear, hate and derision. The Other is to be feared, to be hated,
constantly threatening to take the colonizer’s place. The latter fantasy is
what Fanon termed the ‘paranoid fantasy of primordial dispossession’,
which structures the white ‘man’s’ encounter with the black ‘man’
(quoted in Read 1996: 15). We can see then that, for Fanon, there is
never any one way direct perception of difference or indeed another
person. This relation is always lived through a complex set of what
Fanon termed ‘fears, phobias and fetishes’, which structure and set the
parameters by which experience is located and embodied. In line with
poststructuralist thinking, these ‘fears, phobias and fetishes’ are
themselves discursively produced through the way in which the Other
is made to signify. In other words, symbols and images of difference lie
at the centre of colonial experience and form the basis of fantasies of
Otherness (Bhabha 1983; Butler 1993; Walkerdine 1997).
The negro is, for Fanon, fixed by the way in which racial difference
becomes an object not only of fear, but also of desire. The look of the
colonizers, or the place or location from where they look, is structured
also by more erotic, desiring fantasies. This is the ambivalence of the
look that Bhabha develops in his writings on the contradictory images
of the other that circulate within the cultural sphere and that we started
to explore at the end of the last chapter in relation to madness. The
colonizer is thought through a chain of significations that link together
certain signifieds to construct the meaning(s) of racial difference. The
Post-identities: sexuality and the colonial subject 161
erotic fantasies of the other include the way in which the skin of the
black man can not only signify degeneracy but a rampant, potent
sexuality. This is where, as Fanon argues, the black man becomes a
penis, is penis. As Fanon argues in Black Skins, White Masks when
exploring some of the fantasies of his white psychiatric patients, ‘One is
no longer aware of the Negro, but only of a penis: the Negro is
eclipsed. He is turned into a penis. He is a penis’ (quoted in Mercer
1992: 5).
As Hall and Du Gay (1996: 16) argue, this is reminiscent of the
way in which the scopic drive was seen to underpin the gaze that fixed
certain people as objects of that look. We have seen how this scopic
drive was seen to be part of the way in which Hollywood film
functioned to objectify women as the passive objects of an active,
controlling male gaze. This is the main way in which psychoanalytic
concepts have been deployed within screen theory to analyse the role
the gaze of the cinema plays in processes of subject formation. As we
have seen in Chapter 5, women were seen to be objectified and
eroticized on the screen, where they are noted to be marked by either
lack or excess. The excess of the feminine identity is usually one that
fetishizes the female body to cover up for its lack in relation to
masculinity. We saw how this fetishization is actually seen to be a
defence against a deep psychic fear in the masculine subject that he too
could be castrated, as the woman already is.
Within screen theory the look or gaze is structured according to
binary oppositions between the male/female, active/passive, which are
argued actually to structure the spectating or reading positions
available to actual viewers or subjects. The female spectator can take
up either a masochistic or sadistic subject position within the film
text, which is seen to tap into earlier psychic processes of subject
formation. As we discussed in Chapter 5, this is where psychoanalysis
is used to analyse the relations within the filmic text whereby the
spectator is seen to be inserted into the text according to a desire for
scopophilia or voyeurism.Within Fanon’s work the binary oppositions
are structured in relation to black/white, colonizer/colonized,
resulting in similar problems when we try to address the complexity of
the relationship between the colonial experience and actual subjectivi-
ties. Fanon’s work also engaged with the way in which the colonial
subject internalizes how racial difference signifies as Other, that is, as a
sign of degeneracy, which results in a certain inevitability and passivity
when addressing the relation between discursive divisions or positions
and actual subjectivities.
162 Mass Hysteria
relation of the self to the self is cross-cut by racial, gendered and classed
divisions that produce certain subjectivities as abject and pathological.
In relation to the above argument, Mercer argues that
Mapplethorpe’s photographic images of the black male nude embody
and confront the spectator with the ambivalence that lies at the heart of
processes of subjectification. He describes the ‘doubling effect’
produced through these images, which confront the spectator with the
‘fears, phobias and fetishes’ that circumscribe white ethnicity. He
focuses upon a specific image, ‘Man in a Polyester Suit’, which shows a
flaccid but enlarged black penis protruding through the fly of a suit, as
an example of the ‘shock-effect’ produced through being confronted by
this ambivalence. He argues that this image of a black man (penis) in a
suit embodies and disturbs those erotic and abject fantasies at the heart
of colonial fantasies.
We are confronted with a fear of the threat of the black man’s sexual
prowess to the white master and civilization itself, alongside a desire for
the black man whereby his skin becomes the object of an erotic and
exotic gaze. Mercer argues that these images have a homoerotic
dimension amplified through the look or gaze, which puts the
spectator into an active and controlling position in relation to them.
This gaze is one usually reserved for women within western cultural
practices. It is at this point that Mercer underlines the importance of
the biographical and autobiographical in the range of differential
readings made possible by the text.
A politics of transformation
Different sexualities
the sex act was scrutinized, compared, judged and administered, but in
specific spaces and sites, such as the doctor’s consulting room. A
semiotics of sex was established that was structured according to
medical and psychological distinctions claiming to be based on the
‘truth’ of sex. Sex had become an object of a medical–clinical discourse
functioning as the true discourse on pleasure (1979: 71). Sex had been
put into discourse through divisions made between the normal and the
abnormal confessed to authoritative figures such as the psychiatrist,
sexologist and doctor. Within these regimes of truth, there was seen to
be a range of peripheral sex acts, which were taken to be deviations
from reproductive sex – the invisible norm. These deviations or perver-
sions became the object and target of discourses such as sexology,
which, as Foucault highlights, was a ‘science of aberrations, perver-
sions, exceptional oddities, pathological abatements and morbid
aggravations’ (1979: 53).
What was particularly interesting was the transformation in ethical
and social relations that emerged from these discourses. Sexual acts
became linked to the truth of one’s being or destiny, particular acts and
choices acting as markers of pathology, of the deviant character type.
Sexuality thus became linked into a chain of associated concepts that
marked out particular groups of people as Other, expressing degenerate
constitutions. Their sexuality was governed by the concepts of risk,
danger and, above all, disease and illness. These groups were taken to
be marginal yet in their marginality functioned to confirm reproduc-
tive sexual relations (heterosexuality) as being normative and natural.
The target of sexologists was thus the ‘sex of children, madmen,
women and criminals’ (Foucault 1979: 38). It is difficult then, given
the wider socio-political context that we have already interrogated, to
see the constitution of sexuality separately from the wider government
and management of the population.
As with race, madness and criminality, the ‘Othering’ of sexuality
became part of wider processes of subjectification concerned with
confirming, producing and maintaining a particular image of the human
subject as normative. This supposed unified subject – the universal
subject – was, as we have seen throughout the book, sexed, raced,
gendered and classed. As with the processes we explored in relation to
the colonial subject, any difference from this normative image is
disavowed and located within the Other. This is a violent denial of
difference that we have shown produces ambivalence at both a psychic
and a social level. It would seem then that, as with the black man in
relation to the white man, the heterosexual is defined in relation to the
170 Mass Hysteria
To moviegoers of the 1950s and 60s no star better represented the old-
fashioned American virtues than Rock Hudson. [But] last week as Hudson
lay gravely ill with Aids in a Paris hospital; it became clear that throughout
those years the all-American boy had another life, kept secret from the
public… he was almost ardently homosexual. (quoted in Myer 1991: 275)
It would seem then that Aids and the way in which it had been made
to signify embodied a set of fears about the threat of the homosexual
‘mode of life’ to the sacredness of heterosexual relations. Hudson had
disturbed the fantasies of hetero-masculinity – the fantasy of the man
172 Mass Hysteria
who could offer the woman wardship and protection. This had been
particularly identified as a fantasy of masculinity by women who had
invested Hudson’s images with a set of wishings and longings for
someone to look after them and protect them – somewhere where they
could be safe in the gaze of a man. As Ruth Wertheimer told Playboy
magazine:
I feel sad for all the thousands of women who fantasized about being in
Rock Hudson’s arms, who now have to realize he never really cared for
them. (ibid.: 279)
This fantasy had been shattered by the leaking out of the truth of
Hudson’s desire, the new terror of homosexuality and its metonymic
link with Aids, that is, you cannot necessarily tell whether someone is
gay (just as you cannot, as we have already discovered, tell whether a
housewife is a murderer). This covered over an image of the family
threatened and made vulnerable by the homosexual ‘mode of life’. Aids
and homosexuality had become constituted as an alien Other. The new
terror of Aids was the way in which it would remain invisible,
undetectable until the final inscription of its fatal secret, when the
body would turn in on and attack itself. It is this chain of associations,
played out in a set of Health Education Authority advertisements for
Aids, which McGrath (1990) considers. One of the advertisements
presents the face of a woman and asks readers to consider how they
would be able to tell her HIV status. The reader is then presented with
the identical image to underline its inherent invisibility.
Marshall (1990) describes how that, prior to the Aids ravages, there
had been a scarcity of images of gay men in the media. There had always
been the usual gamut of representations signifying perversity, illness and
disease, such as the image of the gay man as a child molester. There were
also occasional images of the gay man as spy, not to be trusted with
national security. Alongside these of course there had always been the
Other ambivalent images of gayness – the outsider, alienated,
sometimes even creative and insurgent, that is, literary representations
such as Oscar Wilde and Jean Genet. With the Aids crisis, homosexu-
ality and a killer disease have, as Marshall argues, become inseparable in
the public imagination. In the symbolic representations of Aids, sexual
undesirables and social undesirables have become thrown together.
In an article in the Guardian on 20 August 1994, debating the rights
and wrongs of supplying heroin users with methadone, there is an
implicit judgement that drug users, cigarette smokers (lung cancer
Post-identities: sexuality and the colonial subject 173
sufferers) and Aids sufferers have brought about their own suffering.
There is a guilty/innocent dichotomy that structures moral judgements
made in relation to the ethics of medical care. Although this division is,
in this article, rejected on humanitarian grounds, it nevertheless remains
as the division that gives the article its intelligibility. Why, asks the
article, ‘should we care about a few chronic heroin addicts with self-
inflicted problems?’ The article answers its own question with the
assertion that ‘there are good reasons for caring, and caring passionately,
even on elementary humanitarian grounds. To not care is the equivalent
of denying treatment to an Aids sufferer or a smoker with lung cancer.’
As we know from the range of media representations of Aids
sufferers, there is a sliding from the sufferer as innocent victim – an
object of pity – to the sufferer as being guilty – an object of contempt,
fear and scorn. Marshall considers the cost of these representations,
especially for the gay man who positions himself in relation to them.
We have seen recent examples of confessions by gay men talking about
the price paid for sexual freedom. The lauding of Oscar Moore, the
British gay man who regularly wrote for the British newspaper the
Weekend Guardian about the day-to-day inevitabilities of living with
Aids, and his nostalgia for the pre-Aids days of sexual freedom, were
documented until his death at the end of 1996. Although we can see a
gay man becoming a subject rather than an object of these representa-
tions, there is still the danger that they reproduce and tap into those
regimes of meaning and truth which have historically constituted the
meaning and reality of Aids (cf. Watney 1994).
Although the Aids crisis and critical analyses of its symbolic function
have highlighted the fixity of these stereotypes, the responses from the
gay community have highlighted the struggle and resistance at the
level of signification to these meanings. This alternative politics of
representation has attempted, through arts, photographic and alterna-
tive media projects, to resignify the meaning and reality of HIV/Aids.
The Quilt Project is perhaps one of the most startling in the Aids
imaginary. This quilt contains panels representing the lives of
hundreds of thousands of people who have died with Aids. Friends,
family and lovers are invited to contribute a panel that personalizes
and individualizes the reality of the life lost. The examples below show
174 Mass Hysteria
We can use our framework to explore the place of Diana in the psycho-
logical and political project of civilizing the masses and the role of the
latter in understanding the relation of her to the ‘ordinary’ people who
mourned her.
The other side of the ‘mass hysteria’ and its evocation of those
restless antisocial crowds is the spectre of revolution and people power.
As in debates about active and passive audiences, we can argue that
they are two sides of the same coin. One invokes the people to behave
like rational subjects; the other demands that they rebel and invokes a
discourse assuming that they must, at last, have had the ideological
blindfolds removed from their eyes or their consciousness in order to
see things as they really are. The attempt to understand and control the
masses, whether by left, right or centre, has had at its heart a problem
with understanding ordinary people as being anything other than
psychologically lacking, be it by virtue of their irrationality or their
inappropriate consciousness. The psychological project that was
marshalled to make them into appropriate citizens or revolutionary
foot-soldiers indeed produced the very people who rebelled in such an
unexpected way and whose very mourning and protests were still to
shake and worry the chattering classes. If the people were doing it all
on their own, how could it possibly be all right?
This ‘revolution’ embodied pain, love and loss rather than rage and
was not, in the main, perpetrated by angry young men – not by the
traditional agents of revolution but by the very people who would
usually be regarded as deeply conservative. Add to this the fact that
many of these people included in their mourning the invention of new
spiritual rituals garnered from ‘New Age’ practices and you have all the
elements to suggest that ‘the people’ had cracked. But that is because
many commentators had failed to engage with what the lives of
ordinary people had been like except to comment on the new media
communities of soaps or the absence of sociality.
Indeed, the problem goes further than this. The form assumed by
any revolution, uprising or mass movement from below is always a
surprise and cannot be contained within pre-existing discourses.
Psychological and sociological discourse cannot contemplate ordinary
people as agents of transformation, except in and through a theory of
government and hierarchical leadership that privileges political action
and whose inverse is the hysterical mob that does not know what it is
doing. In these traditional discourses, social change is always described
as political transformation. These theories of the social in which the
state has a central place contain an implicit notion of hierarchically
Conclusion: Princess Diana and practices of subjectification 189
It was ordinary women who knew more than others about the
dreams of self-transformation, who lived in marriages where princes no
longer stayed forever and often left for a younger model, leaving them
to bring up children alone while struggling to earn a living. It is these
women, who, throughout the Tory 1980s and 90s, struggled to hang
on to ‘love’, caring and kindness against a Thatcherite tenet of self-
promotion. No wonder then that Diana’s confessions left them feeling
that someone had at last articulated just how bloody hard it was to
Conclusion: Princess Diana and practices of subjectification 191
It was perhaps the hit film The Full Monty, released in 1997, that first
captured the mood for popular culture of what had been happening
for some time in Britain and elsewhere. The manufacturing base of the
country had been eroded during the 1980s, leaving the industrial
heartland as a wasteland, supplanted by financial industries, which,
along with the communications and service sectors, became the
mainstay of the British economy. Traditional male working-class
occupations dried up, and, as the film graphically shows, many
working-class men struggled to find new forms of work, having to
cope as they did with the rise in women’s employment and economic
power, although many women were of course still employed in low-
paid, part-time work.
192 Mass Hysteria
rial labour market at precisely the time at which the status of professions
in particular are changing. Adonis and Pollard (1997) argue that:
the thirty years since the mid-1960s have seen the rise of the Super Class –
a new elite of top professionals and managers, at once meritocratic yet
exclusive, very highly paid yet powerfully convinced of the justice of its
rewards, and increasingly divorced from the rest of society by wealth,
education, values, residence and lifestyle. It is a seminal development in
modern Britain, as critical as the rise of organised labour a century ago,
and rivalled in contemporary significance only by the denigration of the
manual working class. (p. 67)
These authors argue that the professions now have far less status
and are paid far less than this new élite in the financial and multina-
tional sector. Woman are thus being allowed entry into professions at
precisely the time when these professions are being devalued and high-
flying men are going elsewhere. It is this new, largely male, superclass
that eighteen years of Tory rule allowed to flourish and that witnessed
the huge changes in gender and class relations that we have mentioned.
This period then is one of massive transformation for the social
fabric of Britain, but a transformation that leaves patterns of inequality
no less stark but differently organized. Hence, the terror of those
working in the public sector concerning the loss of security, status and
salary, the loss by most people of any sense of job security, the
uncertainties meeting young people with low or no qualifications,
which have so dramatically changed the patterns of gendered employ-
ment. All this is occurring in a context in which Britain is witnessing no
absence of wealth, especially in the South East. Indeed, the media are
full of stories of executives on million-pound bonuses enjoying a
spending spree. In all of this turbulence, a longing for love, kindness,
caring and stability is hardly surprising.
Such momentous changes have certainly not destroyed inequality
but they have changed it, so that the old certainties of community
support in traditional working-class areas have been badly dented. In
this scenario, constantly remaking oneself is a necessity for all, no
matter where their social location. The loss of jobs for life has affected
all sectors of the working population, and in the realm of consump-
tion, late capitalism in the west operates saturation marketing
techniques that attempt to create demand for marginal goods and
services. These marketing techniques use refined emotionality to feed
an ego desperate for self-invention and convinced of the need for
Conclusion: Princess Diana and practices of subjectification 195
197
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Bibliography 199
A civilized 28
abuse, cycle of 145 human behaviour 28
academic psychology 90 see also aggression; violence
active audience 51–4, 57, 163–4, 181 behaviourism 49, 53, 95
active/passive dichotomy 3, 14, 56, Bhabha, Homi 23–4, 119, 152–3
58 bipolar disorder 128
Adorno, Theodor 63 black experience 158
aggression v. white experience 159
media violence and 43 black men, as objects of fear and
see also violence desire 163–4
Aids 170–5 black people 119
film projects 175–7 and IQ tests 155–6
alienation 97–8 black psyche, v. white psyche 159
Althusser, Louis 66–7, 69, 70, 182 black psychology 158–9
on ideology 66–7, 69, 91 Brady, Ian 9–10, 12, 147
animality 35 Braidotti, Rosi 86, 88, 89
animals v. humans 28 Bulger, James 37, 41–2
antiessentialism 67–8 Burt, Sir Cyril 155
antihumanisms 90 Butler, Judith 86, 87–8, 88
anti-realism 109
antisocial behaviour, media as cause of C
39–40, 43, 45 castration complex 72, 75
audience catatonia 100
active 51–4, 57, 163–4, 181 chat shows
active/passive dichotomy 3, 14, 56, and co-dependency 103–4
58 and self-control 41
and cultural resources 52 children
empowerment of 57 aggressive behaviour 43
audience research 51, 52–3 development process 40
authenticity 97 murderous 37–8
authoritarian personality 63 working-class 41
autism 98, 184 cinema, see films
autonomous self 4–5, 113, 115 Cixous, Helene 84
fiction of 4, 104, 115, 123, 134 class 41, 191–5
see also self race and intelligence 155–6
autonomous selfhood 5 Super Class 194
ethic of 125–6 see also working class entries
Clement, Catherine 84
B co-dependency 103–4
Barthes, Roland 21 cognitive mapping 95
Baudrillard, Jean 96–7, 97–100 cognitive psychology 53
behaviour collective mind 32
antisocial, media as cause of colonial stereotype 7, 23–4, 152–3,
39–40, 43, 45 154–5, 159
207
208 Index
colonial subject 158, 160 dangerousness, scale of 127
colonial subjectivity 23 Darwin, Charles 29
communication decentring of the individual 112–13
breakdown of 16–25 defences 72
media distortion of 17 delirium 96
message content 16 de Saussure, Ferdinand 71
models 16, 17, 18 desensitization 40
noise in 16 desire, unfulfillability of 73
process of 16 desired self 103
see also language; meanings; media detachment, politics of passionate
companionship, media as 49 detachment 82
connotation 22 developmental psychology 32
consciousness Diana, Princess of Wales
constructed nature of 68 mass hysteria? 186–8
and Marxism 64–5 media representation 142–3,
consciousness raising 79, 80 143–4, 147–50
coping, madness as inability to cope self-invention 186, 195
127–8 self-transformation 189–91, 192
criminality 122–51 dictatorship 62
associated meanings 152 diminished responsibility 130
media portrayals 124–6 discontinuity v. continuous
criminal personality 129, 135 progression, alternative
criminals historiographies 27
characteristics 6 discourse(s) 25, 117
as psychological subjects 11 psy discourses 103, 104–5, 110,
critical polytextualism 115 119, 124
critical psychology 55, 93, 101–21 racial 117
crowds 1, 31–2 self-discourses 112
characteristics of 186 discourse analysis 54, 114–15
collective mind 32 discursive psychology 107, 108
contagion of 32, 35 diversion, media as 49
oversuggestibility of 31, 32, 33, drag 88
35, 38 dreams 72–3
revolutionary 187–9 interpretation of 72–3
see also masses; mass mind drugs 172–3
Cullen enquiry 123 Dunblane 123
culpability 135
cults 36 E
cultural backgrounds of viewers, and economy, feminization of 192
media text 52 écriture feminine 84
cultural studies, importance of ecstasy 96
psychological issues 59–60 education, media education 77–8
cultural theory, postmodernist, effects theories v. Marxism 65
psychological concepts in 93–5 Ellis, Ruth 141, 142
cyborg 89, 111, 185 empowerment, of audience 57
cycle of abuse 145 escapism, media as 49
essentialism 18, 88
D ethic of autonomous selfhood 125–6
Dallas fans 86 ethnomethodology 54
Dance with a Stranger (film) 141 exclusion systems 124
Index 209