Popular Media in an Age of Fracture

The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.

-Morpheus in The Matrix

Daniel Rodgers' s Age of Fracture is a remarkable and compelling account of a transformation in 20th-century U.S. intellectual life. At mid-century, Rodgers argues, intellectuals working in fields from economics to sociology shared a more or less coherent focus on the power of the social. But by century's end the world of ideas had fractured, and intellectuals were no longer certain about the importance of social structure. Rodgers's impressively nuanced argument is convincing at many levels. He shows us how economic theory moved to focus on individual choice, how race was imagined as mobile and decentered, how "culture" became an analytic category that overtook, and subtly transformed, an earlier focus on what C. Wright Mills had called "the power elite."¹ These multiple strands of late 20th-century intellectual life produced a vision of how culture and power worked that saw contingency and multiplicity where earlier commentators had seen "one-dimensional man." As Rodgers puts it: "Mental images of society became more fragmented and gated, broke into individualized pieces, and lost dimensions of power." Traveling across intellectual fields from social science to literary theory to theoretical sociology, Rodgers uncovers an irony of late 20th-century life: intellectuals' most passionate projects of liberation, including the attention to multiculturalism and the focus on cultural resistance, came with serious costs.

In the book Rodgers argues that even a thinker like Michel Foucault, perhaps the most important theorist of power in the late 20th century, developed a view so focused on the subtle, saturating, and capillary workings of power that it ultimately became unmoored from any sense of core system or structure. Rodgers unpacks the ways in which both the liberating visions of social agency that arose from the multicultural Left and the determinedly individualistic logic of the economist Right were part of a process of decentering: one that brought important insights but also masked fundamental realities about economic and institutional power.

In some ways, I'm less disturbed by this transformation than Rodgers is; I don't doubt that every intellectual framework has costs, and I'm convinced that the "fractured" vision of power put forward by someone like Foucault tells us more about the construction of our reality than the structuralist visions it replaced. Then again, it is precisely because Rodgers is so convincing that his argument is so provocative. Have our worldviews really become so blind to power structures and their operations? While Rodgers has produced an intellectual history of breathtaking breadth, I think he needs to look still further. Maybe it's not quite fair, given that the book already examines a broad range of economists, cultural theorists, novelists, and historians. Still, I wonder how Rodgers's understanding of intellectual history would change if he left the hothouse of journals and academic presses and, instead, went to the movies?

In the imagination of Hollywood "the system" is not fractured or dissipated, it is alive and well. In science fiction like Star Wars (1977) or Blade Runner (1982), thrillers like No Way Out (1987) and Mission Impossible (1996), and conspiracy films ranging from Three Days of the Condor (1975) to The Pelican Brief (1993) to The Game (1997), the last decades of the 20th century are awash in narratives of centralized power. That power might be the state run amuck, giant corporations who control the world, or the machines who have taken over, but it is there, it is legible, and it is dangerous.

What happens, then, when we take popular media seriously, as both a space of...