Bricolage

At the heart of popular music is recorded music – the ability to re-create, and re-play – a song or an artist indefinitely.  Classical music was not born to a world of recorded technology.  Each performance was unique, and to take part, either as an artist or as a consumer of classical music before the age of recorded technology, one had to actually be present at a performance.  Three-minute tunes did not suffice for this kind of listening.  The effort of going to the performance venue, the expense of admission, and the purpose of presence meant that listeners wanted to be rewarded for their efforts.  Longer pieces – symphonies, operas, concert programs – were made to satisfy listeners and artists alike in a world where each performance was unique and unrepeatable.

Recorded music changed all of that.  Now, the cost of gaining access to a single performance is perhaps the lowest it has ever been in history, in part because of the industrial nature of the recorded sound industry.  Just as a manufacturer can reduce the cost of a product through mass manufacture, a consumer of music can reduce the cost of a performance by purchasing the recorded version, and participating in multiple listening episodes over time, without sacrificing the fact that she is listening to a unique performance.  The cost of attending a performance is now divided so many times that each episode becomes as nearly free as it is possible to be, while the unique quality of the recorded session remains captured technologically – stuck in a moment, to borrow a phrase from U2, that we don’t want to get out of.

Michael Jackson is one of the best examples of what I am talking about.  Millions of fans love Michael Jackson’s work.  Millions of anti-fans have for long been very critical.  For the critics, it is the very recorded nature of his music that leads to the problem.  His songs have been recorded, and played, replayed, and then replayed again so often that their cost has been reduced, globally, for all of us, to nothing.  We can hear Michael Jackson at the drop of a hat.  Like Theodor Adorno, this causes many to criticize Jackson’s music as ‘low culture” – cheap; a-dime-a-dozen music that lacks artistry, originality, or even meaning.  All of these things, his critics note, seem to have been siphoned away, or better, leeched out, because of the fact of the existence, and re-performance or, the multiple recorded copies of nearly every musical act Jackson ever engaged in.  By this logic, because of the very number of fans Jackson has, and their avid devotion to his music, he is, ipso facto, not a great artist, nor even, perhaps, an artist at all.  He is overplayed.

For fans, this overplayed reality is evidence of his greatness and originality.  His music was so unique, and so appealing in meaningful, though not always definable, ways that millions of people came to want to hear his songs regularly, and shelled out the next to nothing it cost to do so.  If millions were moved by him, and wished to replay him, there must be some human, some artistic, quality to his songs, and thus perhaps to Jackson himself.

In both cases, the real claim Jackson has to authenticity exists in both his fans and his anti-fans.  Let’s face it, the wearing of a cod-piece and and a single jewelled glove, no matter how you look at it, is an affectation – a performance.  To find meaning in that act requires a personal leap of imagination, and of identification with whatever images are brought to mind by that performance.  It is, in short, a personal choice to assign importance to a pop star.  On the other hand, to give Jackson’s performance the time of day – to notice and be critical of the gloved-one and his glove and crotch patch – is to react to his image and repetitive presence.  Indifference to Michael Jackson is an attitude almost unheard of among people 50 years old or younger, and among many older than 50 as well.  It is for this reason, not just because so many people were fans, but because so many were decidedly anti-fans, even making purchasing decisions based on whether Jacko’s name was associated with a product, that Jackson is/was famous.

Jackson’s body has died.  But Michael Jackson, the beloved gloved one, wacko-Jacko, the King of Pop, remains alive to most of us because we have invested so little in re-playing his work so often.  He speaks to us now, as he always has, through his music, his costumes, and his dancing, and our own industrial reproduction of each of his unique acts.  Like John Lennon and Elvis Presley, and Bruce Lee, Michael Jackson is alive and well and living in our iPods.

Tedlow, Richard S. New and Improved : The Story of Mass Marketing in America. New York: Basic Books, 1990.

If the business of America is business, Richard S. Tedlow would add that it is mass production, the pursuit of profit through volume, that defines American business. Tedlow organizes the book around six propositions, and proposes that American manufacturing developed this unique approach to profit over the course of three phases of business strategy development.

The six propositions include the first, above, that the unique contribution to business made by American manufacturers was the pursuit of profit through volume. Second, that successful mass marketing was always possible only through the guiding vision of an entrepreneur who could bend the firm to his vision. Third, that implementing a strategy of mass marketing required a company to achieve complete vertical integration, from control of basic raw materials through manufacturing, to marketing and distribution, and retail sales to the consumer. Fourth, that the ‘first mover,” the first company in an industry to achieve mass marketing success, was able to gain high profits, and while those high profits encouraged new entrants to the business, they also provided the first mover with the ability to block competitors’ access to the business. Fifth, that competitors’ key strategic choice was then how to attack those barriers to entrance, thus encouraging competitors to change the rules of the game. Sixth, and last, that sustained success or failure in a market was most dependent upon how a firm managed change over the course of the three phases of business development that Tedlow uses to organize the book.

The first phase was a kind of economic “state of nature” which was characterized by what Tedlow calls a multi-local, fragmented market, made so by the absence of trans-continental transportation and communication. This phase was characterized by the existence of few nationally recognized or distributed brands, and lack of vertical or horizontal integration of manufacturing concerns. During this phase, barriers to entry by firms were low. The second phase was what Tedlow calls the unification phase. As railroads and telegraph lines crossed the nation, national distribution and marketing became possible. This phase was characterized by mass production, and sales appeals based on price. The key drive of American companies such as Ford and Coca-cola, was to minimize the cost of production, and maximize product output so as to drive the price of the product as low as possible, and to use price to sell as much as possible of it, making profit on the volume. This phase included a kind of mass-produced sameness in product lines most closely associated with the Ford automobile. During this phase, Tedlow’s second through fifth propositions came into play, as entrepreneurs directed their “first mover” firms toward massive profits and control of their respective markets, and built integrated vertical structures to make and distribute their products. Smaller, less vertically integrated competitors attempting to gain access to these markets then had to find strategies for entry that made them competitive, which led to new business models that changed the rules of the mass marketing game. The Third phase was the segmentation phase, when the primary focus of marketing changed to division of the market, and products tended to attack the mass marketing approach of the second phase. Consumer choice became the key component of mass marketing as firms began to use methods of demographic and psychographic analysis to define and target specific market segments with specialized products and experiences.

Tedlow supports his thesis with four case studies of business success in mass marketing: Coca-cola was very much the product of Asa G. Candler’s personality and faith in his product, and the success of Pepsi as a competitor beginning in the 1930’s was largely due to the ability of Pepsi to create a similar organization and compete on price; Henry Ford’s systematic domination of the mass-produced car and the challenge presented to it by Alfred P. Sloan and General Motor’s Phase III style segmentation of the auto market in order to successfully compete; the story of A&P mass retailing and the competition presented to it by the advent of supermarkets and a legal challenge to its Phase II competitive power; and finally the story of Sears’s general merchandise retailing and the challenge to that company by Montgomery Ward and others who forced Sears to understand and effectively manage change at every part of its vertically integrated network.

Tedlow’s thesis, that marketing in the United States has gone through three major phases of development, and that mass production, entrepreneurship, vertical integration, the challenge presented by competitors changing the game to overcome the barriers presented by first movers’ profit and market strength, and the ability of a firm to manage change have governed the movement of companies, product lines, and even the entire economy of the United States through these phases is compelling, complex, and builds on the organizational ideas of Alfred D. Chandler, the technological histories of Thomas P. Hughes, and the histories of business development provided by others. This work is a powerful achievement. It does rely more than many are comfortable with on a sense of the power of an individual to influence history, but Tedlow argues that the individual has been the missing link in economists’ and business historians explanations of change in American consumption and production patterns over the past century. The addition that the book makes to the field is well worth the time it takes to read.

Edwards, Richard. Contested Terrain : The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books, 1979.

Richard Edwards’ 1979 book Contested Terrain argues that there have been three stages of development in capitalists’ systems of control over labor, and that these go along with the developments in American business practices over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These three stages, so-called simple control, technical control, and bureaucratic control, still define the range of control methods available to capitalists today.

According to the Marxist labor theory of value, profit comes from the transformation of labor power to actual labor. In order to maximize production, and therefore profit, capitalists needed some means of control of the labor they had purchased. Therefore, the job of management in American industry has always been about controlling the labor process, rather than simply coordinating it. Over the history of the development of business from the small, individually- or family-owned shop to the monopoly corporation, different forms of control have developed to suit the changing needs of firms.

In the nineteenth century, small shops with fewer than one thousand laborers made up the vast majority of business in the United States. Those firms were privately owned, geographically consolidated, and subject to the charisma of the owner entrepreneur, who inspired and demanded loyalty. The small number of laborers in these firms and their location in a limited geographic area meant that the owner could observe their work directly and had a personal relationship with most workers. Control in this environment tended to be arbitrary and personal.

As firms got bigger after 1898, the number of employees increased to the point where the simple style of control became impracticable. Capitalists established control over workers through a hierarchal system in which laborers were supervised by foremen, who were part of a hierarchy of managers. Employees no longer had direct connection with the owners of companies. The greater organizational distance between capitalists and laborers, and the wider lifestyle gap between them led to the attenuation of personal ties to the firm and emphasized class differences. The change was not in the nature of control, but the organization of that control. In many cases, the arbitrary and personal nature of rewards and punishments distributed by the foremen meant that this hierarchical system was one of the primary causes of strikes, including the Pullman Strike of 1894, and the US Steel Strike of 1919.

The clear failure of the hierarchical system led capitalists to try other forms of control in the early twentieth century. Using welfare capitalism after 1900, firms provided specific benefits, including company subsidized housing, some health care, and pension funds to workers who broke with unions and promised not to strike. From the turn of the century to the 1920’s many firms also deployed Scientific Management, which involved time and motion studies in the attempt to design control directly into the definition of each job. Workers, though they valued corporate benefits, remained willing to slow down work or strike for many reasons, including the introduction of Scientific Management techniques, which they perceived as an attempt by management to exclude them from control of the production process.

In the first two decades of the Twentieth Century, American business conducted a process of unprecedented consolidation which led to monopolization in various industries after WWI. In order to control the even greater sized workforces now under their control, the great monopolies now turned to technical control of workers by designing production systems in which workers were only attendants at machines that were integrated into the production process. Reduced reliance upon skilled labor, meant a greater labor pool to draw from, making disciplinary threats such as dismissal very real. However, this also generalized the workforce, and encouraged the formation of industry-wide trade unions which could challenge the organization and power of the monopoly firms.

After 1920, the search for a system to replace technical control, and the growing number of nonproduction workers who also needed controlled led firms to develop bureaucratic control methods by applying institutional style policies to all employees of a firm, such that rules operated as functions of the firm, rather than of management. The establishment of bureaucratic control effectively subdivided workforces, and firms reinforced that subdivision with specialized training, an increase in supervisory jobs, and multiple pay grades and work locations. This made possible the eventual victory over mass unionism, as laborers within an industry no longer shared similar goals with regards to the firms they worked for.

The net result of bureaucratic control has been to remove the conflict between labor and capital from the shop floor to the political arena, where corporations have less control, and where they have to face what may be a decentralized opposition in the form of various social, cultural, issue-oriented and ethnic groups, but an opposition which does have a loose common interest in opposing capitalism. As in the other cases, the new method of control may have sewn the seeds of its own demise.

Jeffery Haydu of the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkely stresses that what Edwards has provided is a potential new typology for methods of control in the workplace, but he says Edwards fails to provide convincing evidence, and gives an unclear chronological structure for his argument. Haydu also disputes some of Edwards’ facts, and says that he is missing the point of view of laborers themselves.

Worster, Donald. Rivers of Empire : Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.

Donald Worster’s book Rivers of Empire posits the idea of water as the currency of the American West, foregrounding control of water resources as the story that gave form to the region’s geographic, social, and economical development. Worster’s argument is that the American West is not the center of individualism that it is made out to be, but is a hydraulic society, dependent for its current existence on the ability of a complex and expensive network of irrigation systems for its production, and thus dependent upon the capital and the authority by which those irrigation systems were built and are maintained. In many ways, this type of society was similar to that of ancient Chinese civilization, which had based its success on the efficient use and control of water. China organized its social hierarchy around agriculture, which in turn was organized around the efficient use of water through the building of irrigation systems. Karl von Wittfogel called this a “hydraulic society,” and included Mesopotamia, Persia, and pre-Columbian America among the hydraulic civilizations. These ancient civilizations, though, developed as hydraulic societies from a need to feed growing populations, whereas the people of the American West migrated there not out of necessity, but due to boosterism, and for economic and social reasons. Beginning with surveyors in the 1840’s, Americans saw the West in two ways. Either the desert was an alien beauty, to be taken on its own terms or it was an abomination that required human development. Eventually the latter view won out, and developing the desert led to a long series of experiments with irrigation schemes and water rights.

The Mormon Church in Utah established a hydraulic a hydraulic society and the church itself held authority over rights to water in Mormon controlled territory. In Colorado, two legal doctrines regarding water rights developed in opposition to each other – the right of prior appropriation mixed with a corporatist system within which groups managed water by appointing a mutually recognized central authority. California developed a combination of legal doctrines in which large ranchers claimed control of whole rivers simply by owning the land on the banks, but smaller farmers depended for their water upon irrigation created by government authorities or by real-estate developers. In all three cases, conflicts between big ranchers and smaller farmers, and the involvement of government in surveying and building irrigation systems obscured the needs of individuals for the simple reason that no individual could manage to build or maintain irrigation systems alone. Farmers and ranchers alike required vast resources to build thousands of miles of canals and ditches, and so they established associations of private capital, and these wrestled with each other for control of water. As control of the canals also led to control of the wealth of the West, a new class hierarchy was built along with the building of the canals, and abetted by the federal government, whose financing and engineering made the canals possible. The actual builders of the canals and ditches were not the owners of the land that received benefit from the irrigation systems, however. Instead, the hydraulic society of the West was built on the backs of laborers who had no say in where or how the canals were built.

The development of diverse systems of water rights management was important in two ways. It demonstrated the difficulty in sharing inadequate water resources and it encouraged the United States government to step in as a central authority in water issues in order to protect the development of farming. Thus federal regulations tended to favor large concentrations of land over small, and economic development over the needs of the natural environment or of individuals. This solidified the class and economic divisions of the West, and made it less, not more, individualistic in its social structure. As the differing laws regarding water rights in different states began to come into conflict with each other at the turn of the Twentieth Century. California’s production capacity, and its close connection to national markets through railroads made it too big to deprive of water. Other states began to have to defer to California’s needs in a developing national hierarchy in water management. The greater need for water by arid California presented a a water trap to the nation as a whole – population and economic growth required development of California, and to a lesser extent other hydraulic states of the West, which required continued appropriation of water by the government and private interests for commercial purposes. Water came in the West to have the same importance that capital had in Marx’s analysis. Control of water meant wealth and power, while lack of control meant relegation to the lower classes, struggle for existence, and a lack of individual choice. The West is not a world of rugged individuals, then but a constructed space built around engineered irrigation resources for purposes of profit-making.

Lawrence Rakestraw, the late environmental historian from the Pacific Northwest, was very critical of Worster’s work, saying that the book covers California and Arizona, with only minimal attention paid to the rest of the Western states, and that it concentrates primarily on five major river systems, almost all of which are in California, leaving out or barely mentioning major systems such as that of the Columbia river. Rakestraw saw Rivers of Empire as little more than an attempt to turn Wittfogel and Marx into environmentalists. While I do think the book was more limited than its title leads a reader to believe, and certainly has a political point of view, I do not share Rakestraw’s sense that this book has little to redeem it. Rather, it needs to be read in a larger context of books about the West.

Scranton, Philip. Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865-1925. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997.

If there is a “New Labor History” that takes into account the lives of workers and their families and social class outside of factories in the United States, then Philip Scranton has written a book that would fit squarely within a “New Business History” that similarly takes previous narratives and seeks to contextualize them in the larger world of American business experience. In Endless Novelty, Scranton was determined to correct what he saw as a major shortcoming in American business history; namely, that it concentrated on the development of big business to the exclusion of all else. This concentration on the growth, business and organizational models, and attempts to control the market – the visible hand of management ala Alfred D. Chandler – was at its root only a part of the story, and yet historians such as Chandler had told it as the whole of the story, leading to the use of the criteria for evaluating business practices for such core firms as the de-facto criteria for the evaluation of all business – a fundamental analytical error.

In fact, Scranton named five different analytical problems with the familiar narrative of the history of big business, including the fact that such a narrative came from a fallacy of composition – that the questions and answers given within it did not come from a comprehensive review of all American business realities, and so could not hold for generalizations on American business history; that such a narrative was effectively teleological, circumscribing research efforts and conclusions through deterministic and functionalist views that privileged big business strategies as the goal of all; that it ascribed a fundamental rationality to the ways in which core firms emerged in the course of history, creating a an ever-deepening path of pseudo-analysis, or redescription, which disallowed other points of view, and finally, that this narrative limited analysis of the diversity of the processes of emergence even for core firms.

Instead of a single movement toward mass production, American business developed during the “Second Industrial Revolution” in four primary approaches, because not all products had similar end uses nor all customers identical needs. Those four different approaches to manufacturing included custom manufacturing, in which products whose market was not constant, predictable, or large were manufactured to specification by hand; batch manufacturing, or the making of various items in small groups to fit a certain market demand, and often involving some customization of the goods in question; bulk manufacturing, which was a process using general purpose machines to manufacture large amounts of various differing products for sale in a large quantity; and mass or flow production, the system that constituted the core industries’ use of economies of scale, and high levels of throughput and required a stable, consistent market. Each approach was different, and suited differing product and consumer needs. Each also had its own impact on the American economy, on solutions to manufacturing techniques, and even on the development of manufacturing within urban areas. One of the best examples of custom production is the building of railroad locomotives, which employed thousands of workers, but could not be undertaken on a mass production basis because the engines themselves were so large, because demand was unpredictable and stock was impossible keep.

The differences in size, manufacturing approach, product market, and numbers of employees meant that specialist companies employed different strategies from those of the core firms that have traditionally been the focus of business historians. Those strategies included differentiating products, the use of general purpose machines which could easily be re-purposed for the making of many different products, giving a manufacturer some product flexibility, a focus on quality of product or to meet complex specifications that allowed price to become a secondary consideration for customers, differentiating marketing strategies to help find a niche for specialty products, and the cultivating of skilled workers with shop floor problem-solving abilities that kept the manufacturing process nimble and maintained quality. As the specialist companies developed these business strategies, they also developed management techniques that helped to keep them profitable. These specialist companies often cultivated personal relations between management and employees, rather than the bureaucratic style of the large core firms. They also had to develop systems for tracking orders and itemizing costs because of the greater diversity of goods they manufactured. Marketing frequently required close contact with clients, and the process of manufacturing a final product might involve several smaller firms, making location within industrial districts preferable for reasons of communication and transportation.

Scranton looks at industries as diverse as book printing, engraving, locomotive manufacture, and machine tools. The geographical range of the study is impressive, too, taking into its view most of the American Northeast. This is an important book in the field of business history because it calls into question the dominant narrative in the field and elucidates a new set of strategies and structures for historians to consider while analyzing business history in the United States, opening the field for new and useful work.

Nostalgia is a search that is rooted in the exile from traditional cultural forms that is symptomatic of late capitalism. In this search are all tourists in a global empire of signs, unmoored and reading images of other pasts and alternative pasts as floating signifiers which help us to appropriate romanticized experiences that never were. Nostalgic memories are comforting, and are often triggered by encounters with nostalgic things – objects or ideas that bring to mind comforting memories. Yet, nostalgia is often imagined and so does not have to be moored to real events. The nostalgia in the film Tonari no Totoro is an excellent example of a series of signifiers that can easily be appropriated by viewers. In particular, Tonari no Totoro provides all of us, as tourists, with multiple view points on the way to our own generalized longing for childhood and the countryside. What is ironic about this film as a location for the generalized global nostalgic is that it does not have the ‘odorless’ or mukokuseki quality discussed by Joseph Tobin in the edited volume Pikachu’s Global Adventure – in fact, Tonari no Totoro is redolent of Japanese culture. In effect we are touring an idealized place and period in Japan. Still, the nostalgia that it creates works for non-Japanese audiences as well as Japanese. This is primarily because the film is not about being Japanese. It is a tour for those of us who live the experience of modern urban life and feel alienated from tradition and culture. As tourists, we view Totoro in search of those traditions and cultures which we no longer have ourselves.

The sense of nostalgia that the movie creates is based on this feeling of exile from anchoring cultural forms and the desire to return to those forms. As a tourist looks for hints of a ‘true culture’ in places where it can’t exist, tourists of nostalgia look for a personal past in a romanticized general human experience. Anthropologist Kathleen Stewart has defined nostalgia as dependent not on the reality of memory, but on a series of practices which read cultural images and code them instantly as the play of forms, the traces of interpretive strategies by which individuals craft meaning, rather than as acts participated in and remembered.[1] According to Stewart, our viewing of cultural artifacts which we read as nostalgic is akin to the practices of tourists, the difference being only that the practice of nostalgia is a touring/looting of the global past, and of culture. We collect images, signs, which we read as disassociated memories – floating signifiers of a romanticized, timeless past that we appropriate as a longing for connectedness in the disconnected cacophony of the marketplace of late capitalism. Totoro works as nostalgia on this level. In fact, Totoro is imbued with nostalgic devices from multiple memories, times, and even places.

The film even has a nostalgic frame of reference with which we can circumscribe our tour of Japan’s idealized past countryside and of Japanese childhood. This frame is important for the feeling of nostalgia, because it creates a liminal space within which we can reinvent ourselves through the reformulation of our generalized memories. That frame of reference has to do with time. Tonari no Totoro was produced by Studio Ghibli in the 1980’s. This was the time of bursting urbanization and the real estate bubble. Roland Barthes went to Japan and declared it the world’s first truly post-modern society: an ‘empire of signs’ by which he meant the urban world of Japan was a world of floating signifiers, disconnected from anything but the meaning invested in them at the moment by those relating to them. But the film is set in the 1950’s. The family does not own a car, and there is no telephone in the house. The rural roads are surfaced with dirt, and the bus is an old 1950’s snub-nose. There is no automation, so the bus must have a conductor at the door. It is ironic that the period in which the movie is set, and the period in which it was actually made sit on opposite ends of the income-doubling policy of the Japanese government, and the period of high economic growth, in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and the economic bubble of the 1980’s. To watch the movie in this frame of reference is like looking backwards through a long tunnel to the beginning of a journey. The film was made in the 1980’s urban world that Satsuki, Mei, and their father come from, and is about the rural, childhood, nostalgic world of the 1950’s. For this reason, although it is a kind of convenience that children can get a thrill from viewing the movie, it seems that the content of Tonari no Totoro is coded for consumption by adults.

These adult consumers of Tonari no Totoro are tourists of the countryside. The countryside presented in the movie is Japan’s inaka in the 1950’s, before the period of high growth and income doubling. But it can stand for a generalized countryside, outside of modern urban life, simply because it is the countryside. The journey of Satsuki and Mei, and their father to the old house at the beginning of the movie can be read as a migration from the modern city to the “unchanging” countryside, and is analogous to the nostalgic journey undertaken by the audience watching the film. The house they move into is old, and ready to fall down. It looks very much like a Meiji-era western style farmhouse, and that is no surprise, since producer Hayao Miyazaki has admitted a “nostalgia” for what he has called “pseudo-Western-style buildings.”[2] The fact that the house is in terrible condition, and that it is probably haunted, all make Satsuki and Mei a bit scared, and somewhat excited. The very oldness of the house, and the fact that it has been made home by soot sprites makes it at once a place of apprehension, and of magical comfort for the two main characters. All of these things are a part of its existing in the countryside. They are also signs of the haunting which consumers of the film read into their own immediate experience, as they can draw up their own nostalgia for the countryside through the ‘ghosts’ of the film characters, and the quality of dreams that is so common in the world of Japanese anime.

In many ways, this is reminiscent of the way in which Japanese culture adopted the Tales of Tōno, an early 20^th century attempt at recording the folk stories of the Japanese countryside before it disappeared through urbanization and westernization. Author Marilynn Ivy has found that the social process of popularizing the Tales of Tōno involved the experience of an unusual (virtually indecipherable) dialect of Japanese that came to be associated with the inaka, or countryside, along with a kind of fascination with the primitive and almost brutal nature of the stories, and the simplicity (Ivy often reads it as poverty) of life in the Tōno region. But, as she notes about the idea of hometown, or furusato, the existence of Tōno as an idealized, sentimentalized referent for a Japan that has passed into history and a “Japaneseness” that has somehow been lost in the mad rush of modern development was only possible through the viewing of Tōno from afar. Those to whom a place is actually home do not need to refer to that place as the place of their origin. As Stewart noted, the nostalgia is not for a real experienced past, but a practice that calls up the trace of that past that exists within its absence in a scene drawn from a parallel experience in a foreign culture. The same is true for urban Japanese looking for a sense of their cultural origins – those for whom Tōno culture is a part of daily existence do not think of it as more than their daily routine. Those who look from afar for signs of traditional culture, though, see Tōno as a place where traditional culture is performed on a daily basis, and adopt the Tōno culture as a sign of their own lost moorings to earlier Japanese cultural authenticity.[3] Miyazaki, by showing the traditional trappings of the Japanese countryside, including the rice fields worked by hand by family groups of farmers, the natural rhythms of the countryside (time in the movie is marked exclusively by weather, and consists of months as the smallest unit), mountain shrines, old trees, dirt roads, and old-style vehicles probably obsolete even by the 1950’s is calling up the ghosts of viewers’ pasts by showing them the ‘ghosts’/characters in the film, and the spectral landscape which they can haunt. For foreign viewers this constitutes an opportunity to reflect upon the scene of supposed Japanese cultural nostalgia, and recall the nostalgic past that exists through its absence in the scene being watched. That is, they are touring the episodes in Totoro and assigning meaning that they wish to assign – a nostalgia for nostalgia.

These tourists of the countryside, though, are also tourists of childhood. As tourists seek to become temporarily, vicariously, members of the culture they are visiting, but must always remain on the outside, viewers to this movie can relive childhood through Satsuki and Mei, but can always and easily return to their adult world. Once again, it is the absence of child-ness which allows these viewers to imagine their own childhood through the main characters of the film. The nostalgia for childhood that this movie evokes is complex and provides many opportunities through multiple layers of signs for viewers/consumers to appropriate for the purpose of reading a generalized nostalgia of their own experience onto it. First, the simple fact of having been a child in or before the 1980’s – the scenes of outdoor play, the excitement of exploring a countryside wonderland, and the idea of walking to school with friends all can be appropriated by adult viewers as generalized memories of childhood. In addition to the basic relation that adult viewers might make to the characters, the use of film techniques to emphasize characters’ feelings and situations is masterfully done in order to create a sense of sympathy, which can also often trigger nostalgia. Frequent close ups of Mei and Satsuki in intense emotional situations, as when the film cuts to a shot of Satsuki’s beat-up feet, bruised and blistered from running in sandals for hours, or a close-up of the goat that tries to take Mei’s ear of corn lead us to recognize the desperation of both characters at crucial points in the narrative, and to relate through the characters’ facial expressions to their own childhood experiences of pleasure, pain, fear, and excitement.

Second, the plot of the movie is driven by the childhood fears that go with moving to a new place, to the idea of a haunted house, the difference in dialect and behavior between country and urban people, and the foreignness of the countryside. I have noted before how all of this is similar to the journey taken by the audience in the process of viewing the movie. Further, a kind of vicarious titillation at re-experiencing the pain and fear of a child whose parent is not well helps us to explain the overdone nature of the characters emotions of fear for their mother. The vivid sequences of Totoro flying, and the cat bus parting the woods give a sense of the wonder and mystery of the world that exists when one is a child. The clear linkage between the blowing wind that makes Satsuki drop the firewood she is carrying on the first night in the new house, and the inability of the adults to see anything but wind when Satsuki and Mei pass them riding in the cat bus provides adult viewers with a gateway into the magic of the world of children, as does the way in which Mei first discovers Totoro. This movie provides an unambiguous opportunity to temporarily return to a generalized childhood. This invitation works on so many levels of consciousness, it is difficult to refuse.

In fact, there are also some very specific elements involved in the movie that provide nostalgia that could be related directly to the personal experience of some viewers. For instance, the movie itself evolved from a 1970’s era television anime by the same producers (Takahata and Yamazaki) called Pandakopanda, the art and storyline of which is very similar to Totoro, though the main character is a panda. Adults who viewed the original TV series will find Totoro to be quite a nostalgic experience, with a similar cast and art reminiscent of the Pandakopanda series.[4] When they watch Totoro, it is entirely possible that they will be transported back to memories of life when they watched Pandakopanda as children, even though the story of Totoro has nothing to do with their memories. Nostalgia, then, allows us to fill space between the film and our own suspension of disbelief in the reality of animated characters with personal experience and memories. These memories need no direct relation to what we are watching. They can be triggered by the situation on-screen. Watching, we recognize a situation analogous to our own that constitute the memories of an unknown other. We transfer our nostalgia to the scene we are witnessing, relating ourselves to the characters, and filling in the interstices of the character’s experience and the situation we are witnessing with our own memories. By giving the character our own memories and thoughts, we appropriate the character, and so inhabit the character as ourselves within the scenes of the movie. This process of nostalgia-creation is what makes Tonari no Totoro so successful, even in an international context, and even without deodorizing.

In this way, a large part of the success of nostalgia in Tonari no Totoro is the fact that the main characters, Satsuki and Mei, are young girls (shoujo), yet their childhood experience stands for the childhood experience of all viewers. Shoujo are commonly androgynous in appearance, and that is certainly the case with Satsuki, whose hair is short, and somewhat unkempt, and who, despite her skirt, frequently looks like a boy. Satsuki’s androgyny is also reflective of the Japanese popular aesthetic of the bishonen – loosely translatable as the beautiful young boy, who is also androgynous, and who exhibits characteristics that are sometimes more relevant to female behavior than male, such as easy tears, smooth, feminine facial features, and relationships with other characters that are non-sexual in nature, but show much caring from the heart. Both Mei and Satsuki are constructed such that they are clearly female, and yet their differences with males are somewhat effaced. Satsuki is clearly somewhat of a ‘tomboy’ – willing and able to play games with the boys, and not shy about sticking her tongue out at her classmate and neighbor Kanta when he bothers her. But she is also distinctly female. She carries Mei at the bus stop while waiting to give an umbrella to her father. She makes bento lunches for everyone in her family in the absence of her mother, and she is clearly flattered by her mother’s comment, during the hospital visit, that her hair is just the same as her mother’s was when she was a child. Satsuki’s foil in this role is the coarsely male character of Kanta, whose stereotypical male behavior sets off the androgynous Satsuki as female. Satsuki’s curiosity is combined with courage, as in the scene in which she charges up the stairs despite her fear of the ‘dust bunnies’ living in the attic, and takes a look around before opening the window. She clearly has motherly instincts. She is willing to run for hours searching for Mei, despite the bruises, dirt, and blisters on her feet. But she can be aggressive like a boy in scenes like the one in which she stops the motorcycle by jumping in front of it. As an androgynous female, Satsuki is effective as a kind of ‘every child’ with whom both males and females can relate.

Along with that fact, the unmediated way in which Satsuki and Mei, two urban children relocated to the countryside, take in life in their new surroundings can remind parents of a romanticized childhood self. The pain of the possibility of mother’s death, along with the thrill of flying with Totoro, and of participating in a magical tree raising ceremony, however much it might be a dream, can lead to a sensation of longing for the unproblematized experience of a child experiencing life for the first time. In this way, as Stewart says, adults watching Tonari no Totoro become tourists of an experience that they cannot have had, but from which they can code a nostalgia for a generalized experience of childhood and feast on the longing that such an imaginary provides.

The movie Tonari no Totoro, then, is itself an act of nostalgia. It provides a space where adults and many children can find traces of a past that is less than a memory, and therefore, common to all. Satsuki and Mei act as signs that we read as ourselves, as bakemono tour guides taking us away from the busy, urban, modern life that we live to a generalized mythical countryside in which we find ourselves, once more, children – not the children we were, but the children we want to have been.

In Water Boys, Shinobu Yaguchi’s film about high school boys who put on a synchronized swimming demonstration for their high school festival, ideas of masculine identity are a site of play through which Yaguchi explores with the audience the meanings of being young, male, and on the edge of adulthood. The movie is a comedy, and that format allows the director to create a liminal space, both for the characters and the audience which allows for play as the audience and the characters redefine themselves within a space at the edge of their existence up to this point. Through being drawn into the identity negotiations experienced by the characters in the film, Yaguchi also helps his audience take part in the discourse of gender formation. We are able to see that as with the construction of fragile selves that teens go through in this period of their lives, their construction of their own and others’ gender identities is performative, constantly undergoing change and emerging anew, and contingent upon the social milieu and general context in which they perform it.

Arnold van Gennep has defined liminal space as a situation of transition, in which a person undergoing transition exists in between the reality of the past and the reality to come. In this transitional space, van Gennep says that anything is possible, and the subject redefines themselves in ways not predictable before the transition began. The film Water Boys sets up this kind of liminal space in two ways: first, the boys who are the main characters of the film are seniors in high school, with only a short time to go before becoming legal adults, they find themselves in the midst of an academic, emotional, and social transition to adulthood, but not having finished school, they are not yet adults. They are thus free to redefine themselves in the course of the film. But the film itself provides a liminal space for the audience to watch the transition of the boys in the film, and to vicariously redefine ideas of youth, and of gender, while observing. This liminal space is therefore a discursive site for the negotiation of gender identity, among other things, both for the characters and for the audience.

Joan Scott has suggested that gender is discursively constructed knowledge about sexual difference, and that it is one part of identity, which itself is a constructed notion. Gender and identity are constructed, according to Scott, and Judith Butler, through a process of constituting the self through repetition of acts that embody certain ideas, as Scott says, knowledge, about sexual difference.[1] Gender is, then, as Butler says, performative. It is constantly reified through a reflexive process in which the gaze of others who recognize certain kata, or regularized cultural patterns, within the performance of an individual identify those patterns as appropriate acts for either males or females. However, as Scott notes, gender disguises itself as a set of binary opposites – male and female are frequently thought of as being opposite from each other, and so clearly delineated from each other in expected, and acceptable, behavior and norms. But such an opposition is not, in fact, possible. To be recognized as masculine, for example, requires the negation of feminine behavior. But this assumes that heterosexual behavior is the norm by which gender is defined – as Butler puts it, “the sexist claims that a woman only exhibits her womanness in the act of heterosexual coitus in which her subordination becomes her pleasure.”[2] So gender is not necessarily directly related to sexual practice. Instead, gender consists, at least in part, of a series of performances of roles based on male or female binary stereotypes, but existing not as binary opposites, but in a range in between and on either side of those binary normative descriptors. Those performances serve both to reify normative gender ideas, while denying them in the process of constructing individual and social group identities. This means that gender, and so masculinity, which belongs to one of the poles of the false binary of gender, is always emergent in the case of individuals, or of social groups, that it is always contingent upon circumstances, and circumstances change, and that it reifies itself through frequent reiteration of performance.

Gender, if it is not directly related to sexual practice, is then a social construct. If it is a social construct, and not a matter of natural physiology, it must also be performed in order to be realized. In Water Boys, the performance of gender along a wide range of possibilities that provide space for thinking about masculinity is a major theme. We can see the performance of masculinity perhaps most clearly in the character of Sato, the former basketball player who joins the swim team, he says, because he likes the looks of the new coach. Sato begins the film with hair in an afro, and an attitude that he really belongs to the elite basketball club, but has come out in order to watch Mrs. Sakuma. He performs the role of a heterosexual male jock, until we learn that he did not quit the basketball team, but was kicked off because he never made it to practice. Once it is clear that he is a case of failed masculinity – rejected by the male teammates friendship with whom he had claimed as the hallmark of his power in the school, Sato becomes the quitter that he thinks he is, drifting away from the synchronized swimming team into a punk band, then leaving that as well. Ironically, when he is confronted late in the movie with the knowledge that he is the object of Saotome’s affections, he does not have the extreme masculine reaction one might imagine. He is stunned, but takes the news calmly, and even accepts a public hug from Saotome during the final phase of the ‘sychro’ performance. By the end of the movie, Sato’s, and the audience’s, feelings about this have been changed by the performance of Saotome, and by the performance of masculine bonding among all the members of the team.

If we see Sato as becoming less and less the afro-end basketball jock, and more and more an average boy with problems, we see the main character Suzuki in his own series of problems as well. Suzuki is captivated by synchronized swimming as soon as he first sees it, and the film makes it clear that he is interested not in the high school girls all watching by juxtaposing the possibilities of girl-watching (short skirts, girls in swimsuits) with Suzuki’s obviously exclusive interest in what is going on in the pool. He is clearly less strong, and less athletic, than Shizuko, who becomes his girlfriend. He regularly leaves Shizuko behind in small acts of loyalty to the male members of his ’synchro’ team. Suzuki’s performance of gender is very neutral, and his masculinity is as much in limbo as he is in liminal space throughout most of the movie, until at the end, he dances exclusively for Shizuko, and unabashedly wears a tiny swimsuit that she has sewn for him with “Love” printed in pink across the front. His final performance for her leaves him, for the moment, in the masculine camp for the simple reason that he has made a normative heterosexual choice of partner.

Saotome, on the other hand, is clearly performing homosexuality from the moment we meet him. There is no question that during the first swim practice he is watching one of the other boys rather than the coach, though which boy it is remains a matter for speculation. The boys go to sell tickets to the show in order to raise money for refilling the pool, and Saotome cries in happiness when the transvestite hosts and their female clients buy them out. He cries again on numerous occasions. When Suzuki begins reconstituting the team after visiting Sea World, Saotome is found in a greenhouse tending a small flower garden. He is given stereotyped actions that function as kata to make his homosexuality obvious from the beginning.

Less obvious is the gender of Ohta, whose behavioral kata are sometimes quite male, as when he goes with Sato to peep at Saotome and Suzuki on the beach late in the movie. At other times they are quite ambiguous or at best gender neutral; for example his dancing in a G-string to the all-male (all G-stringed) aerobics video, and his clear mastery of rhythm on the Dance-Dance Revolution game. Boys don’t dance – or do they? Ohta performs an ambiguous gender identity that leaves us guessing all the way to and beyond the end of the film, even though we come to be fairly clear about what his likely sexual preference is.

So gender is constituted through performance, and reiterated through constant continued performances. Since performance requires and audience, at least in part, one’s gender is determined by the way in which the audience reads the performance and reacts to it. But as it is performed, the audience does not remain static. Changes in audience and situation lead to changes in context and performance. Therefore, gender is also fluid, in the process of being constructed – emergent.

Masculine identity, because of its constructed nature, is always emergent. It is re-formed after each new situation in which one participates, and exists in the making as an improvised performance of the moment in which one reacts to the immediate situation informed by the trace of one’s conceptions of self and gender present only in the immediate past. Each new act is then an act of re-creation of gender identity in which the trace is subsumed into the performance of the present. In Water Boys, the premise of the movie provides a good example of this kind of emergent identity. At Tadano Boys’ High School, sports dominate the boys’ extracurricular lives, and for Suzuki, the demise of the swim team, on which he was a less-than-stellar performer, is a kind of loss of identity. In the early part of the movie, he learns about the new swim coach as he is trying to retrieve his goggles and swimsuit from a derelict locker on the deck of a run-down pool – an image which is meant to convey the way he is feeling mentally at the prospect of the demise of the swim team, and of his chances to redeem himself as an athlete in his senior year. This is the end, and he now has to look for a new beginning. His inability even to get rid of the tiny stray dog who defends the pool as his territory is a testament to the liminality of the situation – Suzuki is confused and unable to decide what to do or how to do it. Still, he has no choice but to reinvent himself. This reinvention begins almost the moment he meets the new coach, the very feminine Mrs. Sakuma. But Suzuki is confused. His reinvention of self involves a rebuilding of his own performance of gender identity in the way in which he views and behaves toward the coach. Still, his masculinity in this scene is also ambiguous, brought into question because of the fact that Suzuki is the only legitimate member of the revitalized swim team. His legitimacy comes from that reality that he is the only swimmer who was previously involved in the sport. The new recruits to the team have come to ogle the new coach. Their performance of expected masculine heterosexual interest reflects on Suzuki in two ways. First, their single-minded interest in the coach, not the sport, highlights the fact that Suzuki is not there only to gaze at a female body. He wants to swim, but this duality of purpose to some degree emasculates him in comparison with his more single-minded teammates. When the entire team discovers that the coach, Mrs. Sakuma, wants to turn the team into a boys’ synchronized swimming team, Suzuki’s prior commitment to the coach to stay on the team further emasculates him. Further, he actually likes the idea sub-consciously, having been attracted to synchronized swimming by accident in the first scene of the film, and this repressed desire to do “synchro” reduces his masculinity even more. Each event, and Suzuki’s reaction to it, has a deep effect on the way both the audience and Suzuki perceive his masculinity.

But masculinity as a part of identity is contingent, as well. Each new context brings self-mage into new focus in contrast to people and events around oneself. We learn immediately after the new coach arrives, for example, that heterosexual interest in the female coach is not the only reason many of the boys have joined the swim team. Kanazawa, a brainy, but nerdy, math wiz joins because he needs exercise. His interest in the coach as a woman is clear, but he is not by any stretch the athletic type. At one point as the team begins to practice for their synchronized swimming event, Kanazawa can be seen holding on to the pool wall and practicing his kick. His masculinity is in question here, since he is an un-athletic member of a school devoted to athletics. Sato, it turns out, is a former member of the basketball team, but is unwilling to work hard in practice, and so quits the team. The fact that he is perhaps the most stereotypically masculine member of the core group of boys hides the fact that he does not have the work ethic, or the drive to win, that might define him as the man’s man role that he performs might require. Saotome is clearly homosexual, and so is not there for the coach, but is there for ogling – one of the other primary male characters. This comic portrayal of a nerd, a failed jock, and a gay guy show that performance of masculinity is contingent upon the situation and the immediate audience for one’s gender performance. When Sato suggests that Saotome is in love with Suzuki at that first practice at the pool, Suzuki’s response is rejection of the very idea. Later, when Suzuki has to explain that in fact, Saotome has confessed his feelings for Sato instead, the boys deal with this new fact with some sensitivity – in spite of the fact that they had come expecting to find some romantic developments in the relationship between Suzuki and Saotome. Having gotten to know each other, the boys don’t stop thinking, or joking, about gender, but they do come to realize that each is dependent upon the others for some of the identity he is constructing, including understanding of gender. Masculinity, therefore, is contingent upon the situation, and the audience that one is performing for.

Gender, then, is a discursive construction, part of the construction of self which is also produced through discourse within a social context. As one pole of the normative (heterosexual) gender duality, masculinity is also constituted through performance, and often the possibilities for performance of masculinity, and its reification as ‘the norm’ in human gender choice through performance of its perceived opposites, can be explored well through entertainment products such as films. Water Boys director Shinobu Yaguchi does a wonderful job of exploring these possibilities in this humorous film, which pulls few punches in its portrayal of masculinity, and masculine confusion, among high school boys in Japan. If anything, the best we can get from this film is to see the falsity of the gender duality mentioned above. Masculinity, as a subset of gender, clearly has its own subsets of behavior all of which appear most clearly in contrast to each other. Through his adept framing of the movie, Yaguchi has been able to create a liminal space through which we can view a range of masculine possibilities in Japanese culture, and the very changing, contingent, and performative nature of those possibilities. They seem to be as fleeting, experimental, and dramatic as the high school senior year experienced by the Water Boys themselves.

Apparently, this rural bus stop claims to be the place where the nekobus stops…

Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974/1998.

Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital was both the most difficult, and the most Marxist, book I have read this semester. As that reading list includes selections from Karl Marx’ Capital, Vol. I, I have to add that I do not think saying this is an exaggeration. Braverman, a laborer by experience with an intellectual and socialist bent, intends to document the decline of labor in a number of senses – the reduction of work to the lowest level of skill, and its reduction as much as possible to the status of automated mechanical activity. But Braverman is also interested in how these reductions tend to cause reduced wages, reduced job satisfaction, and the reintegration of lost craft skills within the machines that do the majority of work in twentieth century industry. The object of interest is the subjection of all facets of work to the needs of the capitalist. Braverman’s book in fact follows many of the key themes in Capital but expands upon them to include changes occurring in the 20^th century, and Braverman seems if anything more ardent than Marx about the need for workers to understand these changes and act upon them. He discusses the failure of unionism, and the concomitant failure of Marxism because it became tied up with unions. He is fascinated with the increasing use of the worker as automaton. He is also interested in the way that capital hides the deskilling of labor under a blanket, allowing only minimal glimpses at work and its meaning, even by those who perform it, by literally removing work as a meaningful part of a laborer’s life.

As Marx made so clear, one of the key problems with the relationship of labor to capital is that “[the] technical subordination of the worker to the uniform motion of the instrument of labour…gives rise to a barrack-like discipline…thereby dividing the workers into manual laborers and overseers, into the private soldiers and N.C.O.s of an industrial army,” and that while an individual craftsman makes use of tools, “in the factory, the machine makes use of him.”[1] Braverman takes this idea beyond Marx’s comments, claiming that the process of “deskilling” labor results not just from the use of machines, but from the nature of management in a large corporation. His primary target here is “Taylorism,” the theory of Scientific Management developed in the United States in the early 20^th Century in which even the movements of workers were scrutinized in order to find the one best system which minimized movement and time on task, but maximized the results – productive work.

Working off of Marx’s idea that work is purposeful, and conceptual as well as transformative of nature, Braverman says that “Labor that transcends mere instinctual activity is thus the force which created humankind, and the force by which humankind created the world as we know it.”[2] Work is the prime creative force that makes us human. Thus the reduction of work to mere process – the deskilling of work in the industrial factory and the modern corporation, which is what Taylorism aims to do, is also the process of dehumanization.

Braverman asserts that the conceptual function, as well as the coordination function, that belonged to skilled craft workers is transferred to management workers in industrial capitalism.[3] This is an interesting extension of the production process model of labor which is often discussed by Adam Smith and by Marx, and which is a fundamental component of Taylorism – namely that the separation of tasks in industrial capitalism not only separates workers according to function, but also adding managerial workers to the functional process by giving them a separate piece of the puzzle – the conceptual piece. This certainly would only add to the process of deskilling labor. Braverman shows this by giving a history of the development of management, and concentrating on the change in the goals of capital from, in line with Marx’s theories in Capital, the goal of purchasing and owning labor completely, “in the same way he bought his raw materials: as a definite quantity of work, completed and embodied in the product” to a preference for the purchase of labor power – the direct hiring of laborers, the control of which gives the ability to wring more value from the labor, particularly through the device of management – a further division of labor that provides a brain to operate the warm bodies on the production floor.[4]

Braverman goes further in his discussion of the division of labor, however, making another very Marxist argument that while a “social division of labor” is common and natural to human societies, the breakdown of specific industrial processes into constituent parts is not a natural process, but one unique to the capitalist mode of production. He illustrates this with Adam Smith’s famous pin-making example, showing how even simple manufacturing processes can be made more productive through a division of labor into its constituent parts. He then makes the point that Smith and others make about division of labor: “in a society based upon the purchase and sale of labor power, dividing the craft cheapens individual parts.” This is thus the goal of capitalism – as Marx outlines in Capital – to increase the value of the product through the creation of excess value by increasing the productivity of workers. Braverman calls this the “general law of the capitalist division of labor.”[5]

When he directly confronts Taylorism (or Scientific Management), Braverman makes the point that Scientific Management is not concerned with technology, nor is it really scientific, but is simply the application of the needs of capital to the process of controlling work. It takes as a given the idea that management and labor exist in opposition to each other, and does not attempt to resolve that tension, despite its claim to approach work from a humanistic point of view. Taylorism, according to Braverman, is only a new way to gain excess labor from the workforce. Taylor, he says, had two categories into which he slid management practices. The first he called “ordinary management” – the control of the general conditions of work, and the second, “scientific management” which was the control of every phase of the work process. Management should, he said, plan out each act in the work process precisely. One goal was to remove the thinking process from work. The job of management was to reduce craft knowledge to a set of tasks and rules and time tables, and return it to the worker as a decided plan which only needed to be carried out physically. This is the deskilling process that modern management in large industrial corporations carry out in the name of improving productivity by reducing the cost of labor.[6]

The results of this division of labor in capitalist society are a persistent and inexorable loss of skill among workers, and, moreover, Braverman says, the loss of craftsmanship and the place in society of the craftsman that went along with it. Braverman gives the example of the rise of the profession of engineering – engineers, who connect technology–and science in their work – came into existence, he says, because the deskilling of the labor force took that position, and capacity, away from craftsmen, who were in the past the group within society who bridged science and work through their intimate knowledge of their crafts. This contributes to an acute level of dissatisfaction for workers, and a great loss to society.

The dissatisfaction of workers, primarily because of the increasingly de-humanization of working conditions, has been ameliorated by modern industry, according to Braverman, by the manipulation of the labor force, both through modern personnel techniques that accept labor conditions as a given and profess to help workers adjust to “reality,” and through the use of pay, benefits, and other parts of work that make it desireable, (Braverman uses an example the institution of the $5 day at Ford Motor Co.) to help workers accept industrial conditions as reality and limit protests and strikes. This is the primary function of personnel and human resources departments in large corporations.[7]

Along with labor, science has become the most important item employed by capital to create excess value. Braverman makes some interesting observations while discussing how science began as what can essentially be called invention (the steam engine probably contributed more to science than science did to the steam engine, he says), but became systematically integrated into large industrial firms as a part of the means of production itself. Science and technology became a commodity that added value to the production process, and therefore were sought after by corporations attempting to increase the value of their capital and products.[8]

Combining his ideas about the tension between management and labor, and the increasing importance of automation and machinery, Braverman then moves into perhaps his most original and most important argument. Machinery, what Marx called the “instruments of production” are improved to the point where they are no longer controlled by the worker, but instead actually do the work of the worker, and control the worker as if he/she were part of the machine itself. Moreover, the machines in the twentieth century actually reintegrate the labor process, so that the division of labor, which cheapened work, and deskilled workers, created a mass of low-paid, low-skilled workers who come only to operate machines. This completes the dehumanization process, because it removes thinking, skills, and even production from the workers, and then reintegrates all of those things within machines, asking the workers only to operate the machines at the pace, and according to the rules, set by management. There is no more of the humanizing process of work that Marx, and Braverman, say is what defines us as human beings.

I found Braverman’s analysis to be very compelling. It updates Marx so that his theories, developed in the mid-nineteenth century, can be seen to be applicable to modern industry and work. His argument that clerks and office workers are new skilled workers, but that there work is being controlled, deskilled, and divided as well, and that the vast majority of workers are thus dissatisfied with their jobs, goes far toward the conclusion that de-humanization is a trend of modern industrial society. I found here a critique of a number of other works that I have read, including journalistic accounts of labor, and capitalism, that is compelling and useful.

Like Marx, though, I think that Braverman has a blind spot. He is a proletarian intellectual. He has no place in his analysis for intellectuals, however. At one point he mentions the profession of engineering, but really only in passing, and only as an example of the deskilling of crafts. Academic pursuits, and knowledge-based careers do seem to me to be on the rise over the late part of the Twentieth Century. However, as the introduction and the preface note, this may not – is probably not – enough to offset the loss of skills and satisfaction in industrial labor.

If Braverman were writing today, I think that he would find the growth of the service sector in the American economy, and the increased economic importance of the financial services industry in particular, to be further proof that the trends he identifies – deskilling of the labor force, increasing domination of the economy by capital, and increasing levels of job-dissatisfaction throughout the United States.

Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974/1998.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Penguin ed. 3 vols. Vol. 1. New York: Penguin Books, 1867, 1976. Reprint, 1976.

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Hughes, Thomas P. American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989, 2004.

Thomas Hughes’ book American Genesis is a foundational work in the area of American Technological history. Hughes’ primary thesis is that the United States is a nation of inventors and system builders, rather than a nation of business. America is the original “modern technological nation.”[1] For Hughes, the business of America is not business, but invention of systems for control of the natural and human world. Hughes hopes to look at the work of inventors in three major stages of American History: the era of independent inventors, from 1870 to the First World War; the era of the scientists, from World War I to the Great Depression and World War II, and the era of government supported invention beginning in World War II and running to the counter-culture era of the 1960’s.[2] The goal, ultimately, is to take an academic approach to the history of American inventiveness and to dig deeper than the hagiography so commonly found in literature on the subject. Hughes wants to know what the inventors have in common with each other in terms of method, choice of problem, and sources of funding. To some degree, Hughes seems to hope to explain why, as he says, America has been the most inventive nation in history through this work.

The book is remarkably disciplined in its approach and organization. Hughes has given a relatively simple thesis, and supported it with numerous generalities about the state of science and invention in the industrializing West, in order to put American inventiveness in the context of world culture. His assertion that Americans are the most inventive nation on earth seems at first to be a very subjective statement, but he does provide some examples to support the idea. The distribution of chapters and their content is, though, well done, easy to read, and helps the reader to follow Hughes argument easily. The book is also written well, and is very interesting. It is one of the few academic books that seem well suited for the trade market as well.

The first two chapters are maybe the most fascinating of all for readers used to the vast collection of hagiography on American inventors. Hughes’ academic approach does not concentrate on the genius of these people, but rather looks for similarities in method, and in choice of problems to solve, and links those to the ever-present problem of finding funds to support their work. He sees this period as the “American genesis” – launching the United States on the trajectory of great inventiveness he wants to claim as its historical legacy. Still, he does not make that claim based on un-measurable claims of intellectual brilliance. Instead, he explains, and then takes on, the measure of success that most of these inventors used themselves – counting patents. Hughes provides some amazing statistics in this regard. Edison, for example, produced more than 1000 patents over his inventive lifespan.

In these first chapters Hughes delves into what these inventors did and finds patterns. They often worked in scientific style using experimentation. They uniformly conducted research into the problem and earlier attempted solutions. They rarely worked alone, but instead almost always had assistants who were craftsmen and could turn their ideas into models and real prototypes. Finally, most had private laboratories, libraries, and large inventories of equipment so that whatever might be needed in the heat of experiment was easily found.

Chapter two is specifically about the way in which the inventors chose the problems they were going to work on. Here, Hughes tries to make the point that they were always attempting to solve problems that were already identified and the subject of study by others. They also studied these problems intently, often combing through former patent applications, studying prior proposed solutions deeply to try to identify their weak points, then choosing to work on them. But, the problems were inevitably big ones. For the most part, independent inventors like Edison, Sperry, and Tesla were not interested in improving systems that already worked, but in creating new inventions that were generative of such systems. The first Hughes takes pains to identify as “innovation” – the improvement and distribution of a new solution to a problem, whereas the second Hughes calls “invention” and defines as the creation of a new solution to a major problem.

In Chapter three, Hughes identifies the military industrial complex as existing long before World War II. In fact, he pushes it back to the turn of the twentieth century, and notes that in the search for funding and practical use of their inventions, even such lionized inventors as the Wright Brothers hoped that the military might be the first and most important purchaser of airplanes. Others, such as Maxim, and even Edison and Tesla identified the U.S. Military as the most likely entity to be interested in the practical applications of many of their inventions, and often lobbied hard to get the military to see the utility of inventions. After 1911, this lobbying began to pay off as the Navy began to fund testing of inventions intended for its use.[3]

This leads Hughes into the era of World War I, and the beginning of the era of scientist inventors. Hughes paraphrases Raymond Aron in The Century of Total War in introducing this new era of inventions by remembering World War I as a war of technological surprises.[4] Concerns about American preparedness for war led the United States to look to its inventors to help with innovation as well.[5] To do this, Edison was recruited (he practically asked for the job) to head a “Naval Consulting Board.” Edison conceived of this board’s responsibilities as helping to modernize the United States military by preparing it to use labor saving machines in the “factory of death” that he conceived the modern battlefield to be.[6] In the end, the creation of this board, and Edison’s exclusion from it of academic scientists led to a wartime competition between the independent inventors and the scientists to determine who was more the source of innovation.[7]

In Chapter four, Hughes returns to his separation of “invention” from “innovation”, and makes the case that because the independents’ stock in trade was invention of new systems to solve new problems, they became less important in the postwar world, where the need of the government and manufacturers was for new designs to improve systems already in operation. This conservative approach to invention, what Hughes calls “innovation” was exactly what the academic scientists were good at. In addition, the profits brought by improvements in existing systems became the battleground for inventors claiming patents on their improvements, or control of patents that improved basic systems they had built. The legal and business implications of invention and patent became more byzantine, requiring more organization. In addition, often the improvement of a patented system brought more profit than the original system as invented. Thus inventors came to require more organization, and more capital.

Hughes locates the beginning of corporate invention in Bell Telephone’s establishment in 1894 of an engineering department, which was responsible for improving systems, but eventually became the company’s research and development arm.[8] Discussing AT&T, General Electric Corp., and du Pont, Hughes comes to the conclusion that the major changes in the invention landscape do not include the complete loss of place for the independent inventor. Instead, corporate laboratories prove to be good at “routinizing invention” – providing large sums of money, and large numbers of minds, for concentration on innovation in existing systems. Corporations like du Pont, found this when they attempted to develop new technologies in the dyestuffs industry internally, but overinvestment and lack of return eventually forced them to follow the AT&T pattern by acquiring smaller companies that already had the knowledge and patents to allow them to move forward with diversification plans.[9] The upshot of this chapter is evidence of the current assumption that while big business can and should do research and development, only the independent inventor (called, today, an ‘entrepreneur’, combining business and technological invention in a single term) is nimble enough to come up with the really new ideas.[10]

In his fifth and sixth chapters, Hughes elaborates on the idea, discussed in the introduction as a part of his thesis, that invention in the United States has not been limited to machines, or in mechanical and electrical solutions to problems. Instead, Hughes wants to think of invention as having to with the invention of systems that ultimately come to create and control a kind of built environment that is separate from and in control of nature. In other words, inventions are only parts of ever-larger systems, and the American genius has been to invent these systems. To show how this works, Hughes first discusses Taylorism, or “scientific management” – the idea that humans should be a part of the manufacturing process, rather than apart from it, making humans, in a way, part of the machinery. This is the source of the title of the chapter: “The System Must Come First” – the idea being that in the past, production and technology existed for the service of people, but in the modern invented world, the people exist for the system. These systems include manufacturing, such as the system for Midwestern power distribution created by Samuel Insull, including the systematic way of understanding load and profit maximization, and the system for automobile manufacture created by Henry Ford at his giant River Rouge plant.[11] This service of people to the system, and the ever-increasing size and integration of systems in society – is the essence of American modernism for Hughes. That essence of modernism is what, he claims, is of interest to the Soviet Union, and to Weimar Germany, when they began adopting, with mixed success, the manufacturing processes, scientific management, and integration of industrial systems of the United States after World War I.

In the seventh chapter, Hughes claims that the invention of systems, industrial, social, economic, and political, in the United States was a cultural transformation, and that this transformation was better recognized from outside the United States than by those taking part in it. Americans saw the transformation as technological and industrial, but Europeans came to see it as cultural.[12] Hughes supports this point by discussing the futurism of people like Louis Mumford, whose predictions of a “neotechnic” society where future technology and manufacturing processes would exist in small, de-centralized factories operated by highly skilled technicians amounted to a prediction in change of culture characterized by a retreat from the massive centralized factories and cities and an expansion into better lifestyles, less population congestion, and better, more efficient use of communications technology and natural resources.[13] Hughes also locates cultural change in the connection of art to the invented technology of the day, celebrating the order and precision of the systems, from mechanical to social, of inventive America. Art celebrated inventions, and inventions and innovations became art.[14]

In Chapter eight, Hughes takes on the third phase of his thesis, discussion the era of government supported invention. The key difference here from the support of government in the era of the two world wars is that, beginning with the Great Depression, government harnesses its support of invention and innovation not only to military technology, but also to civilian uses, and not only to mechanical innovation, but also to social engineering. The point of the entire chapter can be captured in the way Hughes uses the Tennessee Valley Authority to represent the New Deal. The Tennessee Valley Authority is shown to be a model of technical innovation, but at the same time an effort in social engineering, used to put people to work, re-build the economy of a large local area, and transform the political and social, as well as economic and technical, climate of the nation.[15] In many ways, this chapter gives us a microcosmic view of continuation of the cultural change Hughes discussed in his previous chapter.

As Chapter eight ends, appropriately, with the Manhattan project – the design and construction of the most destructive weapon ever made, Chapter nine begins with the assertion than since World War II, Americans have come to increasingly distrust technology, industry, and system-building.[16] Here, Hughes brings attention to the perception, exemplified by Rachel Carson in her book Silent Spring, for example, that over-enthusiasm for technological change and development has caused us to destroy, or lose touch with, many parts of the natural world and the past which we may not be able to reclaim. Returning to Mumford, this time Hughes tells us that he came to see the scientific and technical world as a “sterile wasteland.”[17] Jacques Ellul, says Hughes, came to see modern humans as selling themselves as slaves for a plethora of goods and services.[18] In the end, though, Hughes sees modern humans as unable to wean ourselves from technology, and perhaps at the edge of a new fascination with it.

I found this book fascinating, and Hughes’ organization lends itself well to his thesis. There are two weak points which I think deserve some attention, though. First is Hughes’ claim that the United States is the most inventive nation in history. By some of his criteria, including number of patents granted, and perhaps sheer number of inventors, this estimation may work. But it is such an un-provable proposition that it almost smacks of American exceptionalism. For such a well-organized and well-researched book, and one that claims to turn the discussion of inventors into an academic discourse, this seems a somewhat unhelpful claim to make. Second, it seems, looking over Hughes’ timeline, that the three stages he wants to claim in the history of American inventiveness really occurred almost simultaneously, or at least overlap each other to a degree that makes the claim that they are successive stages somewhat difficult to support.

In all, however, this book seems to me to rank with those of Thomas Kuhn, as seminal in the way it looks at the history of a society and at the history of a phenomenon – the process and effect of invention and inventiveness. The book is well worth reading, and the more one reads, I suspect, the more one will find.