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Abstract
This essay stages a theoretically driven critique of Lawrence Kasdan's film The Big Chill as a productive example of a constitutive contradiction animating the liberal political imaginary. In particular, it argues that liberalism relies irreducibly on an underexamined conception of friendship to supply its model of citizenship as a distinctive, ideologically overdetermined form of sociability and demonstrates the de-politicizing effect this reliance produces on liberal civic commitment. By situating the film in relation to theoretical critiques of liberalism, capitalism, and modern forms of sociability, the essay brings into focus the ideological lineaments of the liberal politics of friendship.
Notes
1. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Palo Alto: Stanford, 1991), 209–31.
2. For example, see Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991); Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (London: Verso, 2000).
3. Wendy Brown, States of Injury (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 3–29.
4. On the one hand, in order to register as historically novel and more democratic, radically reflexive politics must explicitly differentiate itself from the “older,” more naïve or insidiously oppressive form. On the other hand, this disavowal, according to which nothing (of value) is surrendered, is experienced as deprivation.
5. A survey of the relevant literature would be interminable, but would surely include Marx's analysis of the ideological saturation of social relations; Habermas's analysis of the transformation of the public sphere; Arendt's critique of “the social”; Rancière's excoriation of political theory's effort to “police” the political; feminist efforts to rethink the public/private distinction; various and multiplying accounts of micropolitics; the “culturalization” thesis derived from the Frankfurt School and the Birmingham Center for Critical Cultural Studies; and an expansive literature on modern liberal “displacement(s)” of politics.
6. The list of noteworthy others is quite short but includes Grand Canyon (Kasdan's quasi-sequel to The Big Chill), 1969, Small Circle of Friends, American Graffiti, Flashback, and Forrest Gump.
7. For example, Vincent Canby writes, “‘The Big Chill’ is a somewhat fancy variation on John Sayles's ‘Return of the Secaucus Seven,’” while Cynthia Rose observes that “[a] direct line can be traced from [Secaucus 7's] script to Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill.” Vincent Canby, “The Big Chill, Reunion of 60's Activists,” New York Times, September 23, 1983; Cynthia Rose, “The Art of Saylesmanship,” The Guardian, 1990. Derek Nystrom of The City Pages aptly conveys the consensus view that The Return of the Secaucus 7 is “[b]est known as the movie that The Big Chill ripped off.” http://www.citypages.com/movies/detail.asp?MID = 4223.
8. Timothy Noah (“The Big Massage,” Washington Monthly, February, 1984 39–44) and Pat Aufderheide (“The Way We Were,” In These Times 7 [38] (1983): 15–6) are emblematic of leftist criticism, while Isidor Silver ably stands in for the right (“Big Chill, Big Deal,” Society 21 [March/April 1984]: 90–1).
9. James Jasinski, “(Re)Constituting Community through Narrative Argument: Eros and Philia in The Big Chill,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 79 (1993): 467.
10. E.g., Benjamin DeMott, The Trouble with Friendship (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); and Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
11. For a rich, systematic, and sympathetic account of the emergence of this hierarchy, see Allan Silver “‘Two Different Sorts of Commerce’—Friendship and Strangeship in Civil Society,” in Public and Private in Thought and Practice, ed. Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997).
12. Fredric Jameson, “The Vanishing Mediator or, Max Weber as Storyteller,” The Ideologies of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), vol. 2, 3–34.
13. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity. Though Giddens's account functions heuristically here, it is later complicated by the suggestion that the very transition from emancipatory to life politics comes into view only from the perspective of late modern liberal culture. Emancipatory politics is posited as a presupposition of fully individualized life politics, so that if it is apprehended as collective struggle, this collectivity is not opposed to, but rather conditions, later forms of “private” citizenship. Giddens should not be (mis)read as endorsing, for example, an account of the shift from the polis to the liberal welfare state or from authentic community to narcissistic atomism.
14. Jasinski, 467.
15. Jasinski, 467.
16. Jasinski, 470 (my emphasis).
17. Jasinski, 468.
18. Arendt's conception of politics is both exquisitely elaborated and notoriously difficult to pin down. Simply put, commentators continue to disagree as to what “counts” as politics for her, given that the examples she offers are frequently at odds with one another, as well as with her descriptive accounts and normative pronouncements. Lisa Disch usefully distinguishes between readings advancing either “agonal” or “associative” interpretations of Arendt. While Jasinski seems to fall within the latter camp, Disch's thesis is that among Arendt's central concerns was cross-contaminating the two in order to curb the latent narcissism of the former and the oppressive majoritarianism of the latter: “Where the agonistic reading celebrates differentiation and plurality over publicity [which, according to Disch, is the criterion of politics for Arendt], the associative reading emphasizes public consensus over contestation and difference … at the cost of domesticating the public space by reinstating the norm of mutual understanding”; Lisa Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 87. Taking issue with both interpretive strategies, Disch argues that “Arendt makes solidarity conditional on publicity” (89). In other words, the “associative” dimension of Arendtian politics presupposes and derives its character from the principle of plurality, which in turn is not reducible to “agonism” but indicates the status of reality as an irreducibly social artifact. Among the consequences flowing from such an interpretation is a radical transformation of the concept of “action,” which now becomes social through and through, to the point of decentering the locus of agency from a subject to the social process of reception, interpretation, and (re)production.
19. Jasinski, 469.
20. Jasinski, 470.
21. Jasinski, 483.
22. “Liberalism” is far from univocal, and the term can simultaneously and ambiguously refer to several sometimes divergent strands of political theory, a set of institutional and juridical arrangements, and what Anne Norton describes as “the common sense of the American people, a set of principles unconsciously adhered to, a set of conventions so deeply held that they appear (when they appear at all) to be no more than common sense”; Anne Norton, Republic of Signs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 1. In Marxian terms, Norton's is a description of ideology, a term some recent theorists, in an effort to disown some of its unwieldy epistemological and polemical baggage while retaining the sense of the collective imaginary mediation of reality, have supplanted with “social imaginary.” See, for example, Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1998); John Thompson, “Ideology and the Social Imaginary: An Appraisal of Castoriadis and Lefort,” Theory and Society 11; John Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Benjamin Lee, eds., New Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
Consequently, a “characteristically liberal” feature is, here, one which has been “vindicated” by history by becoming doxa (though it may in fact have appeared in theoretical accounts only after emerging historically). Theorists may differ, as, say, Locke and Mill emphatically do, concerning the precise meaning and institutional implications of “liberty,” yet the notion remains constitutive for liberal theory, public discourse, and quotidian practice. Grasping what “liberty” effectively means today entails triangulating among these sites and the traffic between them, which therefore together comprise what I am calling the liberal social imaginary. Such is the case, too, for the very notion of “politics,” since liberal theory and practice commence with the effort and constitute the project of producing a radically new partition of social life, one in which a new zone of privacy is to emerge in contradistinction to the market and the state from which it is to be defended. What all liberal theorists share, irrespective of what may otherwise be irreconcilable differences among them, is the commitment to found the public political order on the basis of consensual relations among at least notionally “private” individuals, a commitment which has, in fact, become inextricable “common sense.” Insofar as this project is inherently contradictory, the proper locus of politics has remained a constitutive liberal concern which is reflected in, but by no means restricted to, theoretical debates. A pivotal feature of liberal cultural logic, then, is the establishment, policing, and continual renegotiation of an imaginary frontier between the private self girded by its affective attachments and the impersonal, “alienating” demands of the market and the state.
23. Jasinski, 472.
24. Jasinski, 475.
25. The allegorical reading of the film relies on the fact that Harold's faculty of judgment evolves throughout the narrative, so that it may seem unjust to hold him responsible for repugnant judgments made early on. Yet there is never any diegetic indication that Harold comes to revise this particular judgment. Moreover, the scene functions quite systematically to dissipate the guilt which, though voiced by Meg, is clearly attributable to the group as a whole—as well as, if we are speaking allegorically, the cohort for which it stands. The origins, character, and implications of this guilt are complex and controversial, and a reading arguing that the film advises abandoning the polemical exploration of this guilt in favor of a trans-political search for optimal communal norms effectively accepts the thoroughly ideological notion that nothing relevant to the practice of citizenship can be learned from either this guilt or from the polemics surrounding it. The “allegorical” shift of emphasis from political guilt to the cultivation of judgment, construed as a “faculty” and cultivated among friends, is itself eminently polemical.
26. In fact, the notion of “action” is inadequate here, for the demand imposed upon the “authentic” subject is to emit signs of authenticity, where action is only one way of doing so.
27. The systematically uneven distribution of power within a society such as ours poses what may be an insurmountable challenge to Arendt's politics of plurality. While the latter notion is meant to indicate the irreducibly social or intersubjective character of reality by emphasizing the heterogeneous variety of perspectives constitutive of the “web of relationships” making up what Arendt calls “the world,” it fails to take into account the way in which power overdetermines the very field of heterogeneity. In other words, one of Marx's basic lessons concerning ideology is that not all differences of perspective or ways of being socially situated are equivalent, since some differences exercise decisive influence over what all the others will mean. It does not suffice, then, to acknowledge the situatedness of each perspective; it is also necessary to grant that some perspectives structure both the character and the salience of the others in advance. Once this is understood, democratic politics can no longer simply strive reflexively to thematize plurality; if it is to remain democratic, it must commit itself to dislodging ideological overdetermination. One of the main obstacles to such a project is that it would entail what would be experienced as the destruction—rather than valorization—of the very plural perspectives whose character is inextricably linked to the undemocratic cunning of ideological distortion. From this perspective, Arendt's poignant call to reinvent collective agency in the modern world is both tantalizingly close and infinitely removed from Marx's own revolutionary project. They agree on everything but the essentials. Moreover, the contour of this particular dilemma changes only marginally in light of “post-metaphysical” accounts of power that dispense with the notion of ideological overdetermination. Even once it is granted that no single structural feature (e.g., relations of production) can explain the power dynamics shaping a historical conjuncture, it remains the case that the dramatic differences in the agentive capacities of various social actors cannot be understood as arbitrary or idiosyncratic differences of perspective but indicate the operation of systematic and obdurate—if incoherent or incompatible—logics in “the imaginary institution of society.”
28. The feeling of guilt at once masks and betokens a range of ultimately impersonal political phenomena. The political effect of guilt is that it produces evasive strategies; its analytic usefulness is that it marks the site where the political and the personal actually intersect. Simply put, the Sixties generation had nothing to be guilty about: on the one hand, many of its projects met with considerable success; on the other hand, if these successes did not amount to a wholesale transformation in the relations of power, this is not because of failures attributable to particular persons or groups. The very fact that this nonoccurrence of revolution came to be experienced subjectively and collectively as a failure meriting guilt betokens the cunning of the liberal logic that facilitated shifting the ground of political engagement in first place.
29. Even if it were possible to secure the claim that by the film's conclusion Harold adequately embodies Arendtian judgment, it remains the case that Arendt's model of judgment in light of what she calls “plurality”—the model exemplified, not simply analogized, by friendship—fails to take into account the possibility that plurality is itself always already overdetermined by systematically unequal relations of power and/or ideological “distortion.” From this perspective, the confusion, ambivalence, and downright incoherence everywhere marking her account—effaced in Jasinski's version of it—is the product of a basic ruse of liberal social logic. In effect, friendship is paradigmatic of the form capitalist depoliticization takes, so that if we are to turn friendship into a means of re-politicization, this can transpire only if and when the “faculty” and practice of judgment is radically socialized—conceived as operating at the level of the collectivity and directed not at members of the polity but toward the conditions structuring the polity as such. In fact, Arendt can be read as advocating something like this step (cf. Disch) in her recommendation of “storytelling.” Yet because she tends to denigrate and renounce, rather than learn from, liberal/capitalist (or “modern”) “alienation” of agency, her efforts to imagine its restoration remain internally inconsistent. Once again, the “reflexivity thesis” is a useful foil here: where Arendt argues that alienation of agency in “the social” entails the misguided surrender of reflexive control over “political facts,” Beck and Giddens demonstrate that, on the contrary, late modern “alienation” is an effect of reflexivity itself, so that what causes political helplessness is the very effort to direct social life on the basis of what we learn about it. That is, even collective, multiperspectival judgment cannot produce, and in fact inhibits, the transparency of “political facts” presupposed by Arendtian politics.
Relatedly, her view that the heterogeneity of perspectives on the world, while entailing disagreement, testifies to the commonality of that world (without implying anything determinate about its attributes), does not admit of the possibility that, for example, Harold and the “scum” effectively live in different worlds. That is, ideological overdetermination means that some perspectives enjoy the status of self-evident fact while others appear illegitimate, disingenuous, perverse, antisocial, pathological, incoherent, or simply illegible, so that it is either irrational or downright impossible to entertain them as instances of plurality. Among the resulting differences is that Harold's early judgment, while ill-advised and in principle open to revision, is permitted to appear in the guise of a communicative act subject to interpretation and contestation, while the scum are from the start burdened by the self-evident fact that they have failed to engage in similarly legible communicative practices. Their criminal acts can charitably be described as un-civil yet political disobedience, but for this very reason are inadequate as civic practices. Whatever perspective on the world such acts encode must be disarticulated from the acts themselves and given exclusively linguistic form. Of course, the burden of qualifying for inclusion in this sort of political activity rests entirely on those whose criminality is an artifact, at least in part, of their exclusion.
30. In a peculiar sense, Harold is quite right: neither Meg nor any of the friends is guilty of any personal lapse. Their guilt has an enigmatic character insofar as it gives psychic form to a thoroughly impersonal phenomenon—the re-signification of politics itself. If Meg and the others took steps inconsistent with their political commitments, it was because the ground shifted beneath their feet, as it were. Thus, for example, it must have become impossible for Meg to generate a rationale—a “story,” in Arendt's parlance—according to which continuing her work with the “scum” still had a meaningful political dimension. From this perspective, her sense of guilt is misplaced: she experiences as a personal failure of political imagination her acceptance of a forced bargain in which no real alternative ever existed. The experience to which Meg's guilt testifies is therefore precisely the experience of alienation decried by Arendt. Yet it is an experience that appears only obliquely in the film, in a scene which actively endorses the notion that guilt is misplaced, while simultaneously—and by the same, highly condensed rhetorical token—discouraging any investigation of this guilt's actual genesis. Meg is acquitted not because a structural transformation made what had seemed like political agency magically disappear, but because she had been mistaken all along.
31. This is one of Arendt's chief complaints regarding the “rule of no one” characteristic of “the social”—what Tocqueville calls the “benign despotism” to which American—that is, liberal—democracy is prone. Implicit in this complaint is the “agonistic” Arendt, for whom politics is not confined to negotiation over communal norms but presupposes irreducible differences no set of norms can finally mediate. It is only on condition of this irreducibility that action, power, and a durable public world are possible at all. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
32. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (New York: Prometheus, 2000).
33. Significantly, the lesson Harold learns when Nick rejects his offer and Sarah upbraids him for this misguided act of generosity has nothing to do with the political implications—however bourgeois—of the juridico-economic trespass involved. Rather, it concerns the breach of Nick's autonomy and the risk to the merger itself. That is, Harold's error consists in pursuing what could become a self-defeating course of action; it is a pragmatic miscalculation, not an ethico-political one.
34. See Lisa J. Disch “On Friendship in ‘Dark Times,’” in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 285–312.
35. Though Karen has a different instance of symmetry in mind, her comment applies equally well here.
36. This is not to say Sarah does not feel goodwill toward Meg. On the contrary, Sarah's love for Meg is precisely the alibi securing her misrecognition of her own motives.
37. Though the term was famously coined by Oneida commune founder John Humphrey Noyes, as a lay philosophy and political project of the Sixties counterculture, the doctrine of “free love” derives from interpretations of Freud by such figures as Herbert Marcuse and, notably, Wilhelm Reich. In The Sexual Revolution: Toward a Self-Governing Character Structure (completed around 1930 but appearing for the first time in English in 1945) and The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), Reich took Freud's account of the libidinal structuration of the psyche to indicate that the behavioral norms expressed in moral strictures and social institutions presuppose the repression of an otherwise spontaneous sexuality. A Communist until his expulsion from the German Party in 1933, Reich argued that the capitalist structures that produced, and were reproduced by, bourgeois morality constituted an ongoing threat to psychic and social health and psychic freedom. Bourgeois sexual repression produced widespread neurosis, and true revolutionary emancipation could be achieved through the cultivation of an active, guilt-free sex life. Pursuit of sexual pleasure outside the confines of bourgeois norms would result in the dismantling of the socioeconomic structures which relied on the sublimation of libidinal drives. If Reich is a father of the Sixties’ “sexual revolution,” it is in this, explicitly political sense. Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution: Toward a Self-Governing Character Structure (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971); Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980).
38. The silent interlocutor evoked by the effort to sharpen the distinction between Eros and philia is Herbert Marcuse, perhaps the most prominent theorist and a vocal advocate of the “new social movements” of the Sixties. It was Marcuse who identified the peculiar form of libidinal blackmail by means of which “total administration” came to assume the form of apparently total personal freedom. The key to “one-dimensional” or post-dialectical society is the advent of “repressive desublimation,” or the gradual removal of various prohibitions aimed not at liberating the individual but at enslaving her all the more effectively. See Hebert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), and One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).
39. Notable here is the homology between the ideologically deceptive desire to experience “pure” pleasure in the absence of a supporting “perverse” substrate and the desire to experience a “pure” relationship untinged by “pathological” cathexis. Both are dialectical responses to an ideological constraint which they only reproduce, since the very promise of purity generates the desire it proposes to fulfill.
40. Silver “‘Two Different Sorts of Commerce’—Friendship and Strangeship in Civil Society.”
41. See Lauren Berlant, “The Theory of Infantile Citizenship,” in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Raleigh: Duke, 1994).
42. “Objective” is, for Marx, not a positivist category but rather the designation of the way certain features (say, of the commodity) actually or effectively appear to subjects even when the subjects do not think that these features appear this way. This form of objectivity has a structure homologous to that of Arendt's “world,” which we cannot directly locate “out there” but which also is not reducible to our own subjective fantasy or illusion.
43. Jasinski, 478.
44. See Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997).
45. James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). The reference is Jasinski's, 467.
46. Berlant, “Infantile Citizenship.”
47. When Harold haughtily defends this friendship by insisting that the cop “happens to be one heck of a guy,” his warrant for this claim is that “he's twice kept this house from being ripped off.” Nothing in the film more clearly evinces the logic of “selling out”: here is a cynical pseudo-friendship rationalized as necessary to protect one's private property from “scum.” It is a textbook example of bourgeois ideology as Marx described it, from the subjective investment in property sustained by the distorting capitalist system of incentives, through its self-deluding rationalization and the endorsement of anti-democratic state policies, all the way to the paradoxical consequences—the debasement of the very forms of sociability supposed to be secured by private autonomy founded on property. The cop appears to be a friend only insofar as both he and Harold are entangled in a system of relations distorted by capital. Yet even within this system both sense their unsurpassable mutual alienation, an alienation bound to push them toward hysterical over-investment in the system that creates it: Harold comes to see the underclass as “scum” and financial success as responsible social membership; the cop develops paranoia toward strangers and a naïve identification with television detective-heroes.
48. For a discussion of mediated intimacy-at-a-distance, see John Thompson, Political Scandal (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 39–40.
49. At issue here is the problem of distance within intimacy. As Arendt imagines the intercession of “the world” formed by the friendship relation into this intimate space, this raises the question of the always already mediated (linguistically, socially, ideologically, juridically, etc.) nature of any intimacy—as well as the equally pressing question of mass-mediation posed by the reflexivity thesis (Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000); Beck; Giddens). That is, when Arendt imagines restoring distance to a space that appears to lack it—and thereby fails to achieve the spaciousness (openness, publicness, etc.) proper to it—she is asserting a counterfactual model of intimacy as it exists in the modern world she critiques. The erotic(ized) closure of intimacy is itself a (late- or post-) modern fantasy, sustained by the mediatized “in-between” as a promise of its own collapse.
This, in turn, brings us to the numerous (re)markings of mediation within the filmic diegesis: Michael, the writer for People magazine (we might linger briefly over the apt choice of People, a “respectable” gossip rag vaguely appropriating the visual rhetoric of news weeklies and named for the indeterminate mass subject to which it is devoted and to whom it addresses itself—the “people” it is about and the “people” who read it: a more perfect emblem of the reflexive circuit of modern mediated stranger sociability could not have been adduced) has even reflected in print about his friend, Alex; Sam, the actor whose image as fictional detective circulates on TV and in magazines, is thereby able to mediate a juridical conflict between Nick and a diegetically real policeman into a sociable relation; Nick, the former radio therapist, is disgusted with the misprision of stranger sociability in the context of (already reflexively staged) psychotherapeutic intimacy; the repeated use of the video camera as a diegetic device for staging self-consciously ironized confessions; Sarah's comparison of Harold to the fictional TV character John Beresford Tipton; and even the very genesis of political disappointment. When Meg reflects on her disillusionment with the “scum” she once defended in court, the very possibility of this disillusionment is a function of the source of her initial political motivation—mass-mediated images and narratives of social injustice and its victims. No wonder that when asked if she thought she'd be defending Grumpy and Sneezy, Sam jumps in with “No—Huey and Bobby.” These names indicate not only the political nature of the group's erstwhile orientation but also the mediated nature of their political imaginary. The latter can be glossed by citing two first names as if they are brand logos on a conceptual par with fictional characters—which, of course, they are.
50. Jacques Rancère, “Ten Theses on Politics,” Theory & Event 5, Issue 3.