Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness, and: Edie: An American Biography, and: Shiloh and Other Stories (review)

117 reviews theid is violence. Fifty percent of the babies are dying in some of the "homelands." White babies don't die, so apartheid is called oppressive, not violent. It's this perspective that Domini, Jaffe, and Petesch bring to their stories. They show us the violence and pain that underlie the comfort of us all. But Jaffe insists that we are implicated in one another's lives, everyone oppressor and oppressed. Taking this responsibility frees him to celebrate our "wild vitality," despite the pain that could tear up the world if it is not heard and answered. NANCY NEITZEL Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen. Channels ofDesire: MassImages and theShaping ofAmerican Consciousness. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982.x + 312 pp. $7.95 (paper). Jean Stein and George Plimpton. Edie: An American Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982. 455 pp. $16.95. Bobbie Ann Mason. Shiloh and Other Stories. New York: Harper and Row, 1982. 247 pp. $12.95. At first glance, the three books listed above—a work of cultural criticism, an interviewstyle biography, and a collection of short fiction—may seem oddly, even randomly grouped; yet in one major respect, their subject matter is the same. Each of these works finds its own possibility in the cultural-political situation marxists and other leftists are wont to describe as "the society of the spectacle": a society in which images, texts, and signifiers seem to have both conquered and disengaged themselves from any prior material reality or referents to which they once appeared to be subordinately attached. In such a relentlessly textualized social landscape, Marx's poetic description of the enormous energy of capitalism as a de-materializing force takes on a newly extended literalness: now, paradoxically, the sense that "all that is solid melts into air"—or has always already done so—constitutes one ofthe most basic experiences of our daily lives, a sort ofground bass of the quotidian. The Ewens' book seeks to analyze and historicize this situation, while Edie and Shiloh re-create and dramatize it as lived out by a hapless member of a particularly kinky branch of the American ruling class on the one hand, a wide collection of rural working-class Kentuckians on the other. Each book thus offers us a more or less explicit conceptualization of the textualization and spectacularization of American society, from the origins of these processes in the nineteenth century to their "great leap forward" in the sixties, and on up to the present day. Unfortunately, though, the book at least some of this review's readers might expect to contain the most adequate and cogent rendition oflife in consumer society is the most flawed and disappointing of the three. Elizabeth and Stuart Ewen have both worked long and well for Radical America, arguably the best general access leftist magazine in this country. Stuart Ewen, moreover, is the author of Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of Consumer Culture, a pioneering work of social history on advertising as a more-or-less deliberate political strategy in the first half of the century. Yet the same manipulation thesis which in that earlier work proves irrefutably true from the point of view of bourgeois elites and the advertising industry, turns into a serious mystification in a book devoted to the dialectical relationship between the mass image and its American working-class audience. The Ewens' stated project is to chart the history of the subjection of "channels of popular sensibility and desire" to the exploitative "encroachments of a marketable vernacular" (27). Yet the perspective implicit in such a formulation simultaneously scrambles and predetermines its results in advance. The fatal move here is the separation of desire from its object—a move we can no more make in any field of collective psychohistory, leftist or not, than in the analysis of any one particular troubled 118 the minnesota review psyche. Only by means of such a move, however, can the Ewens uphold the essential meritorousness of working-class sensibilities, and thus condemn the absolute perfidy of the image industry; yet the toll exacted by their strained adherence to such a crudely melodramatic scenario is high. On a formal level, it turns their book...