The "Carnival Character" of the Present Age...cont.

Consider only that the most celebrated event in the US is now the Super Bowl party. While public celebrations and spectacles have been part of society since civilizations began, it is only in the present age when ritual gatherings and social life center on commodified pseudo-events such as to watch televised "events". Star Trek fans flock to the many "trekkie" conventions to purchase a vast assortment of Star Trek, "speak" Klingon the many varools and affirm each others fantasied self. Similarly the use of certain products/services, and even the wearing of certain kind of clothes creates " imagined communities" of coke drinkers, SUV drivers, Carribean travellers or DKNY dressers. (These communities also provide identities-see below)

Perhaps it should be also noted that we can increasing see a growing trend to virtual relationships between selves that are constructed primarily for the internet (Cf Turkle, 199 ). For example, among the major users of email and chat groups are now young women who may now carry on the same kinds of relationships with other as had happened with phones, but now they may be thousands of miles apart-time and space have been radically transformed by the new forms of technology.

While these various relationships of carnivalia may be easily criticized for being shallow and superficial, we must avoid any a priori notions of what relationship should be. Surely these carnival relationships, typically anti-authoritarian, would be preferable to the pseudo-gemienshafts of fascism. Further, they may be more limited in depth and intensity but would also allow a person to have a much broader and more varied range of friends and experiences.

3 Empowerment

As has been noted, and perhaps the Romantics were the first to make the point, but modern people increasingly experienced themselves powerlessness in the modern world. For Marx, wage labor while surely the domination over Nature has conquered time, space and even many of the secrets of life itself, and given our society unprecedented power. But the power of technology and technological logic became a basis for domination and control. The ability of individuals to control their own worlds seems to wane. The conditions of work are more likely dictated by "home" offices far away, by distant market conditions or the organization of work. The emphasis on teamwork-a benign form of group domination-make individual effort and results obscure. As technology advances and knowledge ever more specialized, our individual capacity to understand the world diminishes. The more user friendly our computers, the more limited our ability to do more than click icons.

Baudrillard once noted that in the act of turning on a light, people felt empowered, after all it was God that had power to erase darkness. But the "power" of flicking a switch-connecting your room light to a vast complex of energy production that converts fuels (water flows, nuclear energy) to electricity, networks of distribution, factories that make the cables, wires, connecters, breaker boards etc belie the illusions of power. From what has been said, on the one hand, the more the power of techno-capital, the less the power of the person to influence his/her society, its economy or governance. In earlier epochs, authoritarianism and submission to a mass movement gave a sense of power. The bourgeois character had been socialized to submit to the power of the State but the "carnival character" is more anti-authoritarian-detached from the Nation State often seen as the chief prude and censor. But this is no longer possible. Rather, the popular culture of consumption in general, and its carnivalesque realms.

Carnival culture offers a number of sites where its people can find realms of empowerment and agency, where they can determine their own life outside the realms of political economy and can in no why impact social policy. In other words, the plurality of sites provided by the mass mediated popular culture allow, indeed demand agency. I would like to suggest that Foucault’s theory of power be recast, the carnivals of consumption provide encapsulated "microsphere’s of empowerment, place where people might demonstrate competence and control, perhaps in the virtues of French wines, Mettalica lyrics or the ability to shoot alien space invaders.

For Bahktin, the carnival emerged as a form of resistance. The indulgence in the obscene, the vulgar and the grotesque provided a sense of empowerment through reversal and the movement of subjectivity from the harsh realities of feudal life to dreamworlds of empowerment and satisfaction In much the same way, the carnivals of Brazil serve to sustain the harsh inequalities of its economic system (Langman, 2000) . And some of these dreamworlds may be induced by various drugs. Thus I would suggest that while on the one hand our society is a more tolerant and open society than a generation ago, the valorization of pornography and the sex industry that includes everything from vibrators and leather accouterments to gay and TV bars or cruise ship, are forms of resistance again the dominant culture- or at least as it is often portrayed. The commercialization of the vulgar has now become a major industry, and in the case of WWF, it is now a publically traded corporation. What had once been a resistance to feudal power is now a commodity in the global market.

4 Frameworks of Meaning and Understanding

As reflexive symbol making and using beings, people are faced with at least two fundamental problems. They must in some way find their individual lives as meaningful and they do so by constructing systems of meaning an understanding. As Durkheim noted one of the most fundamental social institutions, religion provides people with beliefs and practices relevant to the sacred and the profane. These beliefs locate them in a community of meaning, rooted a long history, that makes each person's life meaningful. Further these frameworks, that began as systems of classification, give the world organization rather than chaos and thus meaning systems as assuage the anxiety that would ensue from chaos and confusion.

Throughout human history, societies have constructed believe systems that would explain the origin of their group, the nature of the world and place of people within that world. These believe systems generally include criteria of good and evil and often specify the sanctions for deviance. In some cases these sanctions may be applied in next world. It more complex societies, with hierarchies of wealth of privilege, these explanations, typically crafted by culture specialists, literati, provided theodicies of good and bad fortune. For Weber such explanations offered justifications for the distributions of wealth as based on divine will. The elites were either gods, picked by the gods were stood in a special relationship to the gods. For most of human history, religious explanations of the world provided meanings and explanations for life, and often promises for the future. With the rise of the bourgeois classes were the bearers of reason and Enlightenment ideologies alternative explanations emerged. One of the most legacies of this moment was the rise of the notion of popular sovereignty and eventually the nation state. By the 19th-century the nation have become the dominant form of political organization and nationalism the most powerful political force. The nation state served to resolve the basic contradictions between rationally administered bureaucratic state and the need for the masses displaced and dislocated by the forces of industrialization to find a community of meaning. And thus the nation as an "abstract community" , granted its members a citizenship based identity and provided them were the framework of meaning.

For most of the industrial world religion no longer provides fundamental frameworks of meaning. At the same time the forces of globalization -- especially the mass mediation of its carnival culture and the universal distributions of its consumer goods have served to erase what had hitherto been national boundaries. Indeed in a world in which one out of five people watch Baywatch and one out of 10 have access to the Internet national differences and national identities are the process of erosion. At the same time is we have seen, a multitude of social forces have emerged to suggest that the accumulation of consumer goods and the enjoyment of mass mediated carnivals has become the dominant framework of meaning and value. Whatever might be said about religion , mercantile capitalism and nationalism they provided ethical systems and standards of virtue. But in today's world's of privatized hedonism the dominant value system of consumerism bases its ethical ideals on who has the most toys.

The "goods life"

It should be obvious that in the current era, for people to "want to act as they must act", they should want to consume the goods, services and cultural productions of carnival society. Whereas for Fromm the marking orientation saw consumption and consumerist self display as the means to gain popularity and acceptance, for the "carnival character", the underlying basis of what might appear similar behavior is the attempt to gain a sense of self and recognition for that selfhood on the basis of perhaps a connection with a powerful self object e.g. either a media star such as a celebrity or a powerful brand name.

As a number critics have noted, the desire to consume most always fall short of gratification. The promises of a gratifying identity, incorporation into a community of meaning in which the person could find agency and purpose most always deliver just enough reward that the person who maintain his/her dedication to consumption, but never enough that he/she becomes satiated. Thus one of the two major functions of carnival character from the point of view of the larger society is to insure that the consumer economy, the real heart of globalized political economy continues to flourish. As more and more of the consumption is of sign value rather than use value the pursuit of consumer based identities that realize and articulate these signs will continue to flourish.

Social Character and Ideology of Carnival Culture

Fromm was quite clear about the extent to which the acceptance or rejection of ideas depended as much on underlying character structure as class location. Ideas rested on an emotional foundation as well as class interest and thus insofar as ideas express the ethos of a culture-ideas revealed aspects of social character. Certain ideas whether the Great Chain of Being, the Enlightenment, White Mans’ burden, etc or even Fascism, democracy or consumerism have been accepted or rejected on the basis of their appeal to "social character". Thus as Fromm argued, medieval peasants saw a stable social hierarchy of land ownership as God ordained. Petty bourgeois merchant’s embraced Luther and Calvin and the German lower middle classes, circa the 20's and 30's, expressed class based character when they rallied to Hitler’s lunacy. As was earlier suggested, hegemony in Gramsci’s sense of ideological control over culture was based on fundamental conflict between the current historic bloc, the subordinated classes and those who would rule. But to Gramsci’s understanding we would now add that in order for the dominant or would be dominant class to rule, they must offer ideas and agendas with appeal to social character. Thus the Marxian understanding of the extent to which ideas were simply the products of the elites, must note that such ideas must have a psychological appeal.

So too today does the Carnival character feel disposed to certain ideas and ideologies. On the one hand, s/he is typically quite anti-authoritarian, actively rejecting even the appearance of succumbing to authority and/or even the power of the State. Further, s/he-in the pursuit of various hedonistic gratifications -which might often include various forms of "prohibited" sexuality and /or illegal drugs from snow to Ecstacy- is typically disposed to a libertarian stance. Yet s/he is not typically concerned with politics. Consumption as has been argued, fostered a migration of subjectivity from the alienating, constraining and often dehumanizing worlds of everyday life and the increasing discontents of work to the more gratifying and desirable dreamworlds of leisure and life style apart from toiling work, distant and indifferent governance, and repressive religion. As a result, the "carnival character" as a migration of subjectivity from the social to the personal is thus a crucial aspect of the waning of the political. The hegemony of TNC is not so much based on "willing consent" as Gramsci would suggest, but a general indifference rather than assent per se. This erosion of the political in general, and the left in particular, displaced by the various lures of entertainment and consumption leaves TNC without effective contestation (See Boggs, 2000). .

While party politics in industrial societies is still largely based on coalitions of class based interest groups, the power of such groups has been rapidly eroding in the face of the power of global markets and its regulatory institutions such as the WTO, World Bank, IMF etc. as well as the extent to which regional groups have diluted the power of citizens such as has been the case with the EU, NAFTA, or MERCOSUL. As the power of the local wanes, the growing power of the TNC is clearly shown in terms of 3 moments.

1 The Politics of TNC

The "differences" between the agendas of political parties in the industrial societies is getting harder and harder to discern as conservative and liberal parties have basically shifted to a neo-liberal center which has well served the economic elites-at the costs of plant closings, retrenchments, downsizing, stagnation of incomes for the majorities and massive retrenchments of entitlements and benefits to the larger population. The contraction of the welfare State, especially in the US and England, as a harbinger of the direction of 21st C politic.

2 Telepolitics as Entertainment

It has long been noted that one of the essential factors in the movement to the globalized political economy and the carnivalization of its culture was television. It would only be a matter of time, 1960 if you need a marker, that electoral politics would increasingly depend on images and that the elections of political leaders would increasingly resemble the marketing of toothpaste or deodorants. But as image came to replace substance and amusement replaced agenda, electoral politics has become a form of entertainment (Postman, 1986). Politics in general and elections have moved from political contests to a form of amusement and entertainment -a game show in which "stars" compete for ratings By the 1990, the carnivalization of politics had reached new levels with the election and exploits of Clinton. When he first appeared on the Arsenio Hall show, and he did play sax on that show, to and through the various episodes of "As the White House Turns", with its cast of bimbos, fellators and con artists, and the great tragi-comic epic of Puritans Strike Back, Clinton’s popularity was consistently high (See Langman, 2000). And thus electoral politics has waned as a locus of political debate to a form of home entertainment-ideally suited for spectatorship of those are increasingly indifferent to an increasingly irrelevant politics.

3 Politics of identity

As the nature of the political power shifted away from Nation states to growing power of globalized capital, party based interest group politics has waned as most mainstream parties have converged. But so too has interest group politics been challenged from directions, identity politics with includes various interests in life styles and New Social Movements. Identity politics in which hitherto thwarted subaltern groups such a women, gays, marginal minorities, especially people of color seek to valorize their identities and so gain recognition and dignity. Quite often these groups demand laws and agendas to redress past injustices and address current grievances. The women’s movements have had major impact in changing discrimination policies and employment opportunities. Gays have been successful in reducing discrimination and harassment and funding AIDs research and treatment. In similar ways, the NSMs have made the world aware of pollution, environmental degradation etc.

While most NSMs have been progressive and indeed have laudable goals, I would raise important caveats concerning identity politics. More often than not, such movements ignore the underlying role of the political economy in sustaining sexual discrimination or pollution. Further, one of the most important consequences of identity politics has been to fragment what few progressive force there are that yet endure in the globalized world. To a great extent, many of the NSM’s, like the culture industries, offer "micro-spheres" of empowerment that have marginal impact on the larger world.

It has now been 100 years since Erich Fromm was born. At the turn of that century, the world was facing enormous changes in the growth and organization of industrial capital, finance capital, growing nationalist movements etc. From the luxury of hindsight we can now see how these factors would lead to the war of industrial nations that would not end all war but plant the seeds of the next. But how do we make sense of this history and incorporate its lessons into a progressive agenda to realize a more sane society, a rational society where people could control their own destinies and fulfill their potentials, relate to each other as equals in loving caring relationships. This utopian dream born of the Enlightenment informed Marx, Freud and in turn Erich Fromm.

In our globalized age, a decentralized network society in Castells’ term there is no winter palace to storm. There are a cacophony of often contradictory progressive agendas that would transform capital. But these many agendas typically suffer from two major shortcomings. They generally fail to fully consider just how much modern capital has changed, how its class formations and dynamics are radically different. While its relations of exploitation remain unchanged, the classical labor theory of value little explains the proliferation of e-commerce in an interconnected world. But perhaps the most important problem of most progressive agendas is their failure to consider the role of "social character" in fostering progressive change or reactionary atavism. Until and unless these factors are considered, I much doubt the possibility of a genuine, humanistic society. But to address this question, as this century begins, I would suggest we again consider the lasting value of Erich Fromm.