Reading rape is an exploration of representations of rape, of what I have come to call the rhetoric of rape, not an analysis of rape as a social fact. Since I do hold, though, that we experience the real by way of its various representations, I want to begin by calling back to mind a prominent case of real rape.1 On April 20, 1989, a twenty-nine-year-old white female jogger, an investment banker, as it turned out, at Salomon Brothers in downtown Manhattan was found in Central Park, near 102d Street, her clothes torn, her skull crushed, her left eyeball pushed back through its socket, the characteristic surface wrinkles of her brain flattened, her blood reduced by 75 percent, her vagina filled with dirt and twigs: the victim of a beating and gang rape of utmost brutality by six black and Hispanic teenagers. Crucial in this context is not the incident itself. There were thousands of rapes reported that year, some of which lacked nothing in brutality, including one, a week later, involving the near decapitation of a black woman in Fort Tryon Park (Didion 255).2 What’s more: the sociology of real rape is not my trade. Instead, what is significant for me about the Central Park case is the prominence to which it advanced and the discourse it generated, a rhetoric aptly exemplified by news headlines such as The Jogger and the Wolf Pack or Central Park Horror (qtd. in Didion 255).
[C]rimes are universally understood to be news, Joan Didion writes in Sentimental Journeys, her brilliant reading of the case, to the extent that they offer, however erroneously, a story, a lesson, a high concept (25556). The story offered by the Jogger Rape Case is an old and well-established one: rape, we are assured, is an encounter of total strangers in public parks. Accordingly, media coverage did not center upon the (gender) issues involved in the sexual violation but, as Didion emphasizes, interpreted the case as a conflict between two parties clearly distinguished by race, ethnicity, and class: on the one hand, whites, affluent enough to keep the citys realities at a safe distance, to whom the violation of the young urban professional signified the loss of sacrosanct territory; on the other, African Americans who considered the treatment of the violators as yet another lynching campaign, a kind of rape. The discursive scene of the crime thus draws upon a whole cultural register generated in the course of late-nineteenth-century interracial conflicts and national identity formation. Specifically, it invokes what W. J. Cash in the early 1940s labeled the Southern rape complex,3 according to which the presumed sexual violation of white beauty by black beast figured the rape of the South during Reconstruction and legitimized retaliation through lynch violence. At the same time, this complex inflicted a fear of rape that, like the threat of lynching, kept a subordinate group women just in the process of fighting for suffrage subjugated (Hall, Revolt 153). Cited and recontextualized one century later, this registers rhetoric frames present conflicts by past interpretations and reinforces solutions such as segregation. More than that: since the metonymic drift of the paradigm of rape and lynching, as I will show, has dominated the discourse on sexual violation at and of the borders of race, class, and ethnicity, the objects of such violations are left behind in the debris of displacement.
Whatever my own qualms about the academic left, then, I do not want to be saddled with positions I have not taken: I do not claim that cultural politics isn't a "real" politics, nor would I claim that struggles over popular culture are unrelated to struggles over public policy. To quote an influential theorist I've been reading lately, "it is simply not possible to refocus this nation's public policy debate through electoral politics alone" (87); moreover, "the left has been very successful because it understands the importance of the culture - of framing the debate and influencing the way people think about problems" (88). For those of you who don't recognize the prose style, that was Rush Limbaugh. I think he's got a point, and I think there are many reasons why the academic left devotes so much of its attention to culture. Not least important of these, I submit, is the fact that most citizens of the United States devote more of their attention to culture than to politics; it is no exaggeration to say that most Americans live their relation to the political by way of the cultural, as was amply demonstrated by last year's public debates over films like Forrest Gump and The Lion King. And, as I've argued elsewhere, cultural criticism is ubiquitous on the American political landscape, particularly the kind that proceeds from figures like Michael Medved, Cal Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, William Bennett, and Christina Hoff Sommers, not to mention Peter Collier and David Horowitz. Finally, there's the eerie fact that the realm of popular culture often seems to offer wiser and more bracing analyses of post-Fordism and the crisis of the American worker than anything ordinary people can find in the political realm. My favorite example here comes from The Simpsons, from an episode in which Homer and a co-worker are representing the company in the state capital, and decide to order room service at their hotel and to put it on the company tab. No sooner do they do so than a red buzzer goes off hundreds of miles away in the office of Mr. Burns, the CEO, whereupon Smithers, Burns' assistant and sycophant, remarks, "Someone's ordering room service, sir." Burns then orders Smithers to release the winged monkeys, and in a brilliant citation of The Wizard of Oz, Burns cackles, "Fly! Fly, my pretties!" But the monkeys crash to the ground almost immediately, provoking Burns to mutter that the program still needs more research. I want to point out that my then 7-year-old son enjoyed this surreal scene every bit as much as I did, which leads me to believe that when it comes to depictions of the post-Fordist economy in which obscenely wealthy CEOs cook up draconian schemes for employee policing, we can say of The Simpsons what Augustine said of the Bible: that its surface attracts us like children and yet its depths are stupendous, rendering its meaning copiously in so few words.
[...] What I'm saying in this regard has in fact been said before, most notably by Tony Bennett in an essay entitled "Putting Policy into Cultural Studies." But it is symptomatic of our uncertainty about the politics of intellectual work, I think, that Bennett's essay would have gotten so hostile a reception from so political a theorist as Frederic Jameson, who wrote in his Social Text review of the Routledge Cultural Studies collection that Bennett does not "seem to realize how obscene American left readers are likely to find his proposals on 'talking to and working with what used to be called the ISAs rather than writing them off from the outset and then, in a self-fulfilling prophecy, criticizing them again when they seem to affirm one's direst functionalist predictions'" (29). It is when I read passages such as this that I begin to fear the creation of an academic left whose only function is to analyze and interpret the formation of the hegemonies that are actually being formed by our counterparts on the right; I fear an intellectual regime in which cultural studies is nothing more than a parasitic kind of color commentator on the new authoritarian populism of the Age of Gingrich, too busy explaining the rise of the postmodern eugenicist-libertarian-cybernetic-fundamentalist Right to be of any use in actually opposing it. If you look at Mr. Limbaugh's See, I Told You So you'll see something of a looking-glass version of what I'm talking about; the passage I quoted earlier, in fact, appears in a chapter in which Limbaugh laments that all the liberals are reading Gramsci (would that this were so) and are engaging in a "war of position" against traditional American values. What Limbaugh cautions his readers against, needlessly but always strategically, is a world in which the left has all the tools to wage wars of position and the right is only belatedly trying to understand how the left so thoroughly dominates the nation; and I don't think it's paranoid or defeatist to suppose that at the moment, the reverse is much more nearly the case in the United States.
Razsa was one of the Harvard students who, in the Spring of 2001, participated in a sit-in to protest the University's wage standards.
Salon: How did you respond to critics who said, "These janitors don't have to work at Harvard. If they don't like their wages, why not let someone else take the job who actually wants the $8 an hour"?
Razsa: You have to counter that by asking, why are people working two or three jobs? Are they foolish? Have they just not thought about all their options? If they thought they could get more money somewhere else, they'd have gone somewhere else.
Look at what's happened to low-paid workers around the country over the last 15 years. The minimum wage hasn't kept pace at all with the cost of living, so people end up working two or three jobs just to get by, whereas a single job as a janitor 15 years ago was much closer to being a professional position. You could make $40,000 a year as a janitor.
One criticism we heard was borrowed from the minimum wage debate. People would say if you start paying people more, there'll be a different educational and racial makeup in the workforce -- you're fucking with the perfect invisible hand, and there'll be unexpected consequences. We usually countered that Harvard is the largest employer in the state of Massachusetts. It isn't overwhelmed by market forces -- in fact, it has the power to decide who it hires, and what their educational and racial makeup is.
Salon: Tell me how the actual sit-in began.
Razsa: About an hour before we went into Massachusetts Hall, we gathered one by one in a basement next door. We had been very secretive: We had a number of false communications on our university e-mail accounts, and set up Yahoo accounts to do our real planning. We had received information that the administration was reading and monitoring our e-mail. In fact at one point a school guard actually showed us an e-mail of ours that had been printed out and used in preparation for a protest we were going to have. So we were fearful that they'd discover the plan and we wouldn't be able to get into the building.
AL: In The Mezzanine and The Fermata you have focused on the lives of office workers. What is the interest there?
NB: In Vox too, I would say that they're professionals of some kind, with office jobs. To say something about "Temps."--the notion of a person who is part of a situation but isn't engaged the way everyone else in it is, linked up for me the theme of the book. When you have the power to drop into the fold or create a fermata, you can be part of a situation, that isn't going on at all. You can think about it at the same time as it's suspended in the state of almost happening. Of course the temp is the lowest on the totem pole, the least promising character, the one with the least amount of power; he is the equivalent of the earplug or the shoelace. It turns out that he has all these thoughts, disturbing and objectionable.
As a black critic of racial liberalism, Loury rose rapidly in Republican public-policy circles. In March 1987, he was offered a position as under secretary of education to William Bennett. On June 1, 1987, however, Loury's life veered off-track. He withdrew his nomination, citing ''personal reasons''; three days later, those personal reasons became public: Loury's mistress, a 23-year-old Smith College graduate who had been living, at his expense, in what Boston papers called a ''love nest,'' brought assault charges against him. (She later dropped all charges.)
Loury's meltdown had just begun. After the scandal, his trips to Dudley Square became all-nighters. He was staying out on the street until 2 a.m. and venturing into ''some really rough spaces.'' He began freebasing cocaine and picking up women, spending much of his time in public housing projects. ''It was pathological,'' he says. ''I was castigating the moral failings of African-American life even as I was deeply caught up in it.'' All the while, he managed to maintain appearances at Harvard -- according to colleagues, he was lecturing more brilliantly than ever -- and to keep his other life a secret from his wife.
''I was bridging the extremities of two worlds,'' he recalls. ''Nobody at the Kennedy School could have known about this other world, and nobody in that world where I was a familiar character because I came regularly with a pocketful of money could have imagined the sophistication and power of the society of which I was a part. So you achieve a kind of uniqueness moving back and forth between those worlds. It was fun. There was a sense of power. There was a real rush. You weren't just breaking the rules. Rules didn't have anything to do with you. This was new territory.''
For Loury, the most important stereotypes are those that are “self–confirming.” By this he means that their popular acceptance negatively affects the stereotyped group to such an extent that it gives them reason to respond in ways that conform to the stereotype. Thus, if Xs are widely thought to be, say, cheap, lazy, and mistrustful, then Xs may find themselves in such economically and socially constrained circumstances that it becomes reasonable to hoard what resources they can accumulate, to give up on trying to advance themselves through effort, to be suspicious, and so on. In short, they may become cheap, lazy, and mistrustful. In this way, the stereotype’s widespread and lasting acceptance gives its victims a practical reason to admit to it—thus providing, in turn, evidence of the stereotype’s truth, even if such evidence was originally lacking. What starts out as merely irrational prejudice can thus become more rationally warranted.
We should take note of something unsettling in this line of thought, however inventive it may be. That is, it seeks to explain how a stereotype can come to be rational rather than questioning the appropriateness of stereotyping as such. There is simply something distasteful in seeking to explain the truth in ethnic stereotypes—why, for example, Jews are cheap, blacks are indolent, whites are bigoted, Midwesterners are boorish, and so forth. Instead, we should try to explain why people believe these things, even though they are false and unsupported.
The central theme of Loury’s book is that the main obstacle to advancement for black Americans today is less overt discrimination than the looming “stigma” of inferiority that whites impose upon them. Loury repeatedly refrains from describing this as “racism” per se. Rather, he notes that human beings tend to cast their thought about others according to generalizations, along the lines of the paradigms that, according to Thomas Kuhn, both drive and limit scientific inquiry.
[...] When Loury writes that the behavior of the underclass in the ghettoes of America is a result of “structures of human development that are biased because of a history of deprivation and racial oppression,” he implies that the violence, illegitimacy, crime, and desolation of today’s inner cities can be traced back directly to slavery and Reconstruction. Yet as he surely knows, the poor black ghettos of pre–1965 America were largely stable communities. There were certainly drugs (as depicted in Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land, for example), but they hardly dominated and decimated the inner cities until the 1970s. Loury considers Orlando Patterson’s linkage of inner city illegitimacy rates to patterns etched under slavery as “persuasive.” But the two–parent family, while by no means universal, was the norm even in poor black communities until the 1960s. Meanwhile, black employment rates nationwide were on the rise in the 1960s, before welfare policies were expanded.
Loury is certainly aware of these facts. But his new ideological commitment seems to have distracted him from what these facts indicate: that the unique horror of today’s inner city is due less to slavery’s legacy than to the rise of the New Left in the 1960s.
Goffmania is a weblog dedicated to the influential American social psychologist Erving Goffman.
Who's responsible? Neel is a college student in eastern Pennsylvania. Jason is a writer in the Midwest. Sue has driven a school bus in Wisconsin for 34 years.
A sociologist well-known for his analyses of human interaction, Erving Goffman relied less on formal scientific method than on observation to explain contemporary life. He wrote on subjects ranging from the way people behave in public to the different "forms" of talk, and always from the point of view that every facet of human behavior is "significant in the strategy and tactics of social struggle, " a Times Literary Supplement critic says. Roy Harris, in another Times Literary Supplement review, calls Goffman "a public private-eye. . . forever on the lookout for candid-camera evidence which might lead to divorce proceedings between ourselves and our social images."
