Arthur Kroker, Marilouise Kroker & David Cook - PANIC USA-Hypermodernism as America's Postmodernism

8/8/2019 Arthur Kroker, Marilouise Kroker & David Cook - PANIC USA-Hypermodernism as America's Postmodernism

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Society for the Study of Social Problems

PANIC USA: Hypermodernism as America's PostmodernismAuthor(s): Arthur Kroker, Marilouise Kroker, David CookSource: Social Problems, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Nov., 1990), pp. 443-459Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of SocialProblemsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/800575

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PANIC USA: Hypermodernism as America'sPostmodernism*ARTHUR KROKER, ConcordiaUniversityMARILOUISE KROKER, CanadianJournalof Politicaland Social TheoryDAVID COOK, Universityof Toronto

This s a seriesof meditationsnpanicas the dominantmoodof postmodernulture t the in-de-mil-lenium.Astechnologicalmperativesf postmodernciencemergewiththesocialdemandsf popularulture,ours s an ageofbothdeepanxiety ndgiddyeuphoria.Vibratingetweenolesof despair ndecstasy,hecentral endenciesfpostmodernityaybecharacterizeds a catastrophicmplosionfthe anguagesfmodernpower ntoa denseandhighspeedoscillation etweenmeaning ndmeaninglessness,ontrol ndchaos,n-creasedentralizationndan orbitalpin ntoabstractnddisembodiedodes f information.ndeed,entralothehuman ituationfthe ate wentiethenturystheprofoundaradox fultramodernechnologiess simul-taneously prison ouse ndapleasure alace.Wenow ivewith hegreat ecret ndequallyreatanxietyhatthetechnologicalxperiences bothOrwellian ndhopelesslytopian.But at the costof whosebodies s thispanicky ecretkept or whatparasiticalrofit?Weprobe omekeysitesof postmodernanicand trace hepolitical,conomic,ndsexual ffectsfthispanic cene n thoset envelops.Thus: anic deology;anic shop-ping)malls,panic uburbs,anicTV,panicurine,andpanicUSA.

Postmodern culture in North America is what is playing at your local theater, TV set,shopping mall, office tower, bank machine, or sex outlet. Not the beginning of anything newor the end of anything old but the catastrophic implosion of America within a whole series ofpanic scenes at the fin-de-millenium.Panic is the environmental mood of postmodern culture.This is the mood of North American culture as this "our"modern century marks its ultramod-ern end. This century has been charged by opposing social forces, pushed and pulled betweenmovements of domination and the promise of unprecedented freedom, between radical pessi-mism and wild optimism. Under the omnipresent pressure of rapid technological change, thecenter may no longer hold. But this just means that everything now lies in the panicky bal-ance between catastrophe or creation as possible human destinies (Kroker 1985). Indeed, cen-tral to the human situation of the late twentieth century is the profound paradox of ultra-modern technologies as simultaneously a prison-house and a pleasure palace. We now livewith the great secret, and equally great anxiety, that the technological experience is bothOrwellian and hopelessly utopian. But at the cost of whose bodies is this anxious secret keptfor what parasitical profit?Ours is a social time and space where the triumph of corporate science and technologyoperate as the all too real language of postmodern power. More than we might suspect, panicscience is now the deepest language of consumption, entertainment, business, politics, andinformation technology just as the oscillating mood of deep euphoria and deep despair is theruling ideology of postmodern science. Indeed, we are the first generation of humans livingin that environmental dead zone between postmodern techno-science and popular culture.As such, many of us find ourselves situated at the schizoid borders between ecstasy and fear,delirium and anxiety, and between the triumph of cyberpunk and the political reality ofcultural exhaustion.

* Correspondence to: A. Kroker, Department of Political Science, Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuveouest, Montreal, Quebec H36 1MB, Canada.

SOCIALROBLEMS,ol.37, No.4, November990 443


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444 KROKER/KROKER/COOKHere panic has the reverse meaning of its classical sense. In antiquity, the appearance ofthe god Pan meant a moment of arrest, a sudden calm, a rupture point between frenzy andreflection. Not so in the postmodern condition. Just like the reversal of classical kynicism

(philosophy from below) into postmodern cynicism (for the ruling elites) before it, the classi-cal meaning of panic has now disappeared into its opposite sense. In the postmodern scene,panic signifies a two-fold free-fall: the disappearance of the externalstandards of public con-duct when the social itself becomes the transparent field of a cynical power; and the dissolu-tion of the internal foundations of identity (the disappearing ego as the victory sign ofpostmodernism) when the self is transformed into an empty screen of an exhausted, buthyper-technical, culture. Panic? That is the dominant psychology of the fully technologicalself, living at the vanishing point where postmodern science and culture interpellate as re-verse mirror-images in a common power. Perhaps we have reached a fateful turning-point incontemporary culture when desire is fascinating only as a sign of its own negation, and whenthe pleasure of catastrophe is what drives ultramodern culture onwards in its free fall througha panic scene of loss, cancelation, and extermination.Indeed, there is an eerie resemblance between the fin-de-milleniummood of contemporaryAmerica under the sign of AIDS and Thucydides' eloquent historical account of the dark psy-chological outcomes of the plague in Athens in the fifth century B.C. In the curiously de-tached terms of the classical historian who viewed human affairs through the clinical lens ofmedicine, thus tracking the unfolding of history as disease, Thucydides noted the upsurge ofpanic anxiety within the Athenian population as a whole in response to the rapid spread of aseemingly incurable disease, the origins of which were baffling to the medical profession ofthe time, and the protections against which were non-existent. Before the dark menace of theplague (and the rumors that amplified both the numbers and suffering of its victims), therewas the immediate and almost complete breakdown of even the most minimal forms of socialsolidarity. With charity for other guaranteeing only one's own death, friend shunned friend,neighbors acted towards one another on the basis of a ruthless calculus of self-interest, andisolation became the template of the previously democratic public life of Athens.In Thucydides' historical account, a panic scene of human psychology at the end of theworld emerges: a carnivalesque mood of bitter hysteria at already living on borrowed timeafter the catastrophe, with nothing to lose because one is cheated of life anyway; and for thosefew who unexpectedly recovered from the disease, a curious, if highly unrealistic, feeling oftriumph over death itself--a sense of triumph that ultimately, and not uncommonly, foundits purchase in the ecstatic belief among the survivors of that disaster that theywould never dieof any cause.The psychological mood of postmodern America is similar to the Thucydidean account ofthe dark days of Athens in the fifth century. This scene of panic is the scene in which thefollowing meditations are written. These meditations are all about a double complicity:postmodern science as the social physics of a fading cultural scene, and postmodern culture asthe sure and certain source of the ideological theorems of contemporary science. We under-stand panic science as postmodern political theory in the intensive, but disguised form of atheory of a fading nature at the fin-de-millenium;and we read postmodern culture as explicitmaterializations of the catastrophic, but hyperreal, formulations of postmodern science at thelevels of fashion, money, liquid TV, and sex.

Panic IdeologyIn his "Theses on the Philosophy of History,"Walter Benjamin (1969:257) wrote that "astate of emergency" is the rule rather than the exception in bourgeois existence. Now, morethan ever, Benjamin's prophetic insights appear as an early diagnosis of the unprecedentedthreat to civilized life presented by the politics of the new right. The election of George Bush,


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Panic USA 445this too-perfect organ grinder for multinational corporate interests, and the systematic playingout through the late 1980s of a merciless American foreign and domestic policy, point to thesurfacing, not only in Europe this time (in the guise of "popular capitalism" in Thatcher'sBritain, Kohl's West (East?)Germany, and in technocratic France) but also in North America,of the beast that is at the heart of the western mind. In the face of this state of emergency, it isimpossible to be silent. For this is an authoritarian politics that is as relentless in its assaultson democratic struggles in Central America as it is pitiless in its "reality therapy" for the poor,for children, for the aged. We thought Spencer was finally dead, only to discover in the slo-gans of "supply side economics" the birth anew of social Darwinism.Just as the New Left defined the political agenda of the 1960s, in the 1980s the politicalcycle finds its completion in the hyper-collectivism, the politics of emotional needs, of thenew right. Indeed, towards the end of his life, Herbert Marcuse (1979:23)made this propheticcommentary: "The tendency is to the Right. The life and death question for the Left is: Canthe transformation of the corporate state into a new-fascistic one be prevented?"

Marcuse's analysis addresses the possibility that the emergence of a rightist tendency is aborn-again movement of the authoritarian personality, of what Theodor Adorno described asthe renewal of the "potentially fascistic personality." The dominant fact about the politicalright today is that it is no longer contained within the terms of a normal political oppositionor of an orthodox economic strategy. Without doubt the right expresses politically the strate-gic economic aims of dominant corporate interests. The nostalgic and Walrasian panegyric tothe sovereign market-place, even as conservative economic theorists, like Milton Friedmann,stand in front of the sweat shops of Hong Kong, is a radical attack on the wage earnings ofworkers and the dispossessed. And political economists, from J.K. Galbraith to Robert Reich,are not mistaken in noting that the economics of neo-conservative regimes-aimed directly atrelieving the tax burden of the upper middle-class at the expense of public services-is reallya barely disguised class struggle of rich against poor. The political slogans of the new right-the "disciplinary society," "waste in public regulation"-are not ineffective appeals aimed atresolving the contradictions of the welfare state in favor of organized private interests. Eco-nomically, the politics of the new right points to the existence of an economic crisis that hasbeen displaced to the social sphere (Habermas 1979).But over and beyond the strident political vocabulary of the new right, something else ishappening. The new right is so potentially dangerous because it represents a broader awaken-ing of an "ideology in waiting" (Neumann 1957). And this newly surfacing ideology has itsbasis in the nihilism of a middle-class gone authoritarian. In the end fear of loss of privilege,impotence in the face of overwhelming power and despair over the failure of the liberal con-sensus produce a psychological "readiness"for the therapeutic of the authoritarian state.It is no secret that the conservative assault spills beyond the political realm, narrowlyconceived. Attacks on gay rights, demands (in Bloom's America) for the return of disciplinaryand elitist education, juridical offensives against women's rights (calls for the legal subordina-tion of women's bodies to the power of the state in the new wave of cases surrounding fetalappropriation), and nostalgic appeals for the defence of the family, neighborhood, and work-place-indicate the emergence in the politics of the late 1980s of a personality type that is thepsychological fuel of conservative political discourse. The "moral majority" is really a notunsubtle appeal to a politics of emotional distress.In an excellent analysis, "Anxiety and Politics," the theorist Franz Neumann (1957)-who was, incidentally, one of the first of the critical thinkers to be deported from Germany bythe Nazis-discussed the psychological basis of the authoritarian personality. Neumannclaimed that the bourgeois individual lives today under the strain of two unresolvable sourcesof tension: an "outer anxiety" and an "inner anxiety." The outer anxiety expresses the ever-present dangers of the public world; the inner anxiety reflects the unresolved oedipal tensionsof the bourgeois self. Desires for self-punishment, objectless feelings of guilt, a lack of confi-


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446 KROKER/KROKER/COOKdence in the survival capacities of the self-these are the legacy of the inner anxiety. Neu-mann claimed further that the tensions represented by the outer and inner anxieties turnauthoritarian, and thus, potentially neo-fascistic, when under the pressures of external eco-nomic crises and a more silent inner crisis, the outer anxiety meets the inner anxiety.

The externaldangerswhich threatena man meet the inneranxietyand arefrequently xperiencedas ever moredangerous hanthey reallyare. At the same timethosesame externaldangers nten-sify the inneranxiety. Thepainfultension which is evokedby the combinationof inneranxietyand externaldangercan express tselfin two forms:n depressiveorpersecutory nxiety (Neumann1957:275).Politically, depressive anxiety may express itself in despair and resignation-it is the sureand certain source of the otherwise inexplicable suicides that come to dominate the mental

landscape of today. Persecutory anxiety is the classic basis of neo-fascistic movements. It isthe psychological fuel that produces a mass-based politics of emotional needs, referenda onhappiness as the essence of electoral politics, and scapegoatism of vulnerable out-groups. Itmay also result in the projection of private anxieties of impotence, fatalism, and inferiorityonto what Neumann describes as the "Caesaristic eader," who charismatically sums up in hispersonality the spontaneity, the violence, the passion of the "dark side" of the modern mind.As the epicentre of the meeting of the outer anxiety and the inner anxiety, the bourgeoisindividual is envisioned as suffering a dramatic loss of ego and abandoning himself to states offantasy, delirium, and illusion. For Neumann, the bourgeois self was almost destined to movefrom the private experience of fantasia to the stronger medicine of the cult, the evangelicalreligion, and then to active support of a mass politics of emotional needs. Voting analysts nowcall this phenomenon "mood politics."We would follow Neumann in noting that the politics of the 1980s, and principally thoseof what Kathy Acker (1988) has described as the "American empire of the senseless," aretypified for the individual by the meeting of the outer anxiety, the public crisis, with theinner anxiety. The outer anxiety today is a crisis of political economy. The inner anxiety isan existential crisis: The socio-psychological basis of new right politics is the fusion of theouter and inner anxieties; the meeting of the existential crisis and the political crisis. Theouter crisis that the individual meets, this external danger that activates an interior, neuroticanxiety, has been eloquently described by a number of theoreticians, including JurgenHabermas, Claus Offe, and Sheldon Wolin, as a classic erosion of trust in liberal-democraticinstitutions. Liberalism, in Wolin's (1988) terms, is the ideology that strips public life of anybasis in substantial concern with justice, equality or democracy (Wolin 1988). The anti-demo-cratic sentiments of the new right are, in part, the end-product of liberalism's reduction ofpolitics to a barren struggle of interest against interest. Here, the decline of the public realm istraceable to the bourgeois individual's concern with using the public world only to advance,through manipulation, a narrowly calculated self-interest. And Michael Weinstein (1989:21)in an essay entitled "TheEclipse of Liberalism" notes that the decline of an authentic politicsin the United States is symbolized by a breakdown of the "general will" as the basis of thesocial contract;and by the consequent development of a strong desire to neutralize the menac-ing face of public life by "contractualizing" all social relations (Weinstein 1989:21). Weinsteinsays that Rousseau's "general will" as the basis of public life has now given way to the moremonadic principle of the "will of all." In a situation of economic triage, the return of analmost Spencerian survival ethic pits individual against individual. In addition to an erosionof confidence in political life, the inevitable economic crisis is such that the individual isunder a constant threat of a loss of privilege, position, and status. An "outer anxiety" thusgrips the bourgeois self, inflation is the economic cancer that erodes the discretionary incomeof the middle class, and this class cannot rest easy in the absence of contractual commitmentsguaranteeing a secured distribution of public goods.Under the pressure of a "loss of privilege," of a daily anxiety over loss of confidence in the


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Panic USA 447credibilityof the politicaleconomy of the liberalstate, the bourgeoismind oscillates to theother extreme. There is a retreat from public life, massive and willful in character, nto aprivateinner experienceof fantasyand illusion. Reasongives way to privatepassion. In theabsence of a securepublicrealm,the individual tries to establisha privatezone of emotionalsecurity, symbolizedby the ideal of the Spencerianego: privative,survival-oriented, nd ex-ploitative. Max Horkheimer 1978:17) oncluded n DawnandDeclinehat this is an era typi-fied by the appearance of monadology as an active principle of social life. It is notunpredictable hat the social counterparts f the outer anxiety are nostalgia,the return of a"mythof innocence,"and a retreat o the family,if not to the body,as the last barrieragainstapublic world vergingon stasis. It is equally predictable hat the deflatedbourgeoisego findsits most eloquent expression n, on the one hand, the almost surrealistic earchfor the radonfree house and, on the other, in a simplisticfaith in the return to "classical"ducation.Unfortunately, he private zone of emotional stillnesssought by the bourgeoismind isitself illusory. One lesson of the hegemonictendencies of the technologicalorder s that thesocial as well as the psychoanalytical oundations of identity have alreadybeen colonized.What C.B.Macphersonhas describedas "possessivendividualism"--thesense that the mod-ern "self"has been transformednto a properties spectof the economic order-is a hauntingimage of contemporary imes. In flightfrompublic life, the individual encountersan innerself whose laws of psychicalaction resemble the catastrophe heoremsof the outer world.The individual leaves behind the anxieties of the publicworldonly to discoveran inner selfthat borders,on one side, on the return of beastialismand, on the other,an absorption ntothe socio-psychologicalmperativesof the corporatepolitical economy. This is the beginningof the crisis of the Spencerianego;the source of inner anxiety. Daily,the suspiciondevelopsthat it is impossibleto survive on the terms of the Spenceriancompact. CulturalDarwinismhaving left in its wake a vacated ego, the deflated self finds its inner resourcesunder thecolonial rule of the social order.Thepoliticalformulaof the nihilisticpersonalitymightbe envisagedas a ceaselessmove-ment of the bourgeoismind between an ambivalent attitude to public life and deep anxietyover the survival capacitiesof the self (Weinstein1989:9). It is this restless movement be-tween the delegitimatedself and the underauthorized tate that providesa base of politicalsupportfor the harsher economicstrategiesof the new right.Thebourgeois ndividualretreats romparticipationn publiclife becauseof deepdistrustof political eadership,but needs,for economicself-interest,o secure the politicalarena. Andthe bourgeoismind needs to affirm he self as the basis of an individualistic urvivalethic,butis hauntedby the suspicionthat the self will not prove adequate o the task. The individual sthus caught in a classic psychologicalcontradiction. The outer anxiety increases; he eco-nomic crisis threatens actual loss of privilege. The inner anxiety intensifies;and the innercrisis,the need to affirm he self as the basis of survivalin a "hostileworld," s intensifiedbythe externaldanger.Classicalsymptomsof the failure of the bourgeois ndividual to resolve the tension be-tween "retreat rom public life"and a "loss of confidence" n the survivalcapacitiesof theindividualego are,in part,the appearanceof sporadicand highly symbolicviolence,and themovement of religion into the politicalrealm. In religiousfundamentalism, he existentialcrisis of the self is resolvedby a flight beyond the individualego to immolation in a groupmind. In symbolicviolence, thereis found the signatureof the returnof the collectiveuncon-scious. What CarlJung describedas the dark anima of the Shadow returns to haunt publiclife. This is an age in which criminals become once again truth-sayersof the normalimagination.Politically,the resultof the psychic explosionthat occurs when there is a meetingof thepoliticaland existential crisis is the productionof persecutoryanxiety;a displacementof thecrisis nto a style of politicsthatprovidesa therapeuticorboth actual threats o the self's zone


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448 KROKER/KROKER/COOKof privilege and to its feelings of emotional inadequacy. In The AuthoritarianPersonality,Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswick, and others (Adorno et al. 1950) traced out the political implica-tions of the authoritarian character-type. Their work, completed in the 1950s, reads like ananticipatory diagnosis of the politics of the contemporary decade. It indicates that in thepolitics of the new right we are dealing, in part, with a broader distemper. As a working-outof a personality type that has "no pity for the poor," the bourgeois mind goes for itself, under-mining the consensual basis of the liberal-democratic polity. The class-hidden and power-disguised foundation of the social contract dissolves. A surplus-class of the dispossessed ap-pears that is forced outside the system of political administrative relations. In brief, the outeranxiety of the authoritarian personality is met with political sadism. The inner anxiety, theexistential crisis of the frightened and melancholy bourgeoisie, is resolved through masoch-ism. Political masochism involves the application to the self of harsher and more punitiveforms of self-expression and self-censorship. All of this to sustain a "spurious inner world"that will act as a censor against outer reality. The therapeutic of political sadism finds itsanalogue in the politics of cynical self-interest. The principle of economic triage is applied tovulnerable out-groups. Political violence, domestically and internationally, is viewed as onestrategy among others to sustain economic privilege; or, in the analysis of TheAuthoritarianPersonality,where stereotype works as a certain kind of corroboration of projective formulae.In short, the new right organizes into an authoritarian politics, a "freefloating distemper" thatis the essence of contemporary North American politics. In the end, projection and displace-ment are the psychological tools of a middle class that has radically severed public from pri-vate existence and that finds itself torn between a deauthorized state and a mutilated self.

"Gangsters trutAroundLikeStatesmenon the Stage of History"The critical tradition has always acted on the basis of a dialectical understanding of crisis.The present crisis, typified by the return of the authoritarian personality, vanquishes human

hope in the dispensation of history. But the sheer imminence of this danger, this rebirth offascism in comfortable middle class guise, also provides opportunities for the new solidaritiesand, ironically, in this time of great turbulence with the possibility of creating a vision ofsocial utopia in the development of a more democratic polity. The gap between the real andthe ideal, the gulf between our actual condition of immiserization and the possibility of a freesociety-this gap, this wound, never closes. But the intellectual responsibility of thinkers to-day is with Adorno, Benjamin, Sartre,and others to address, on behalf of a suffering human-ity, the "wound" of history.

Standing at the Spanish border in the early 1940s, Walter Benjamin chose suicide ratherthan surrender his person, his vision of culture, the "angel of history" itself, to the torturersofthe Gestapo. In the same way that Artaud wrote of Van Gogh, Benjamin was a man suicidedby society. It is the same authoritarian tendency, this natural face of the postmodern order,which after Benjamin has driven Poulantzas, Artaud, Aquin, and Phil Oaks-the best mindsof our generation-to the stillness of madness, to the despair of suicide. Remember againAllen Ginsberg (1956:23) in Howl:

I saw the bestminds of my generationdestroyedby madness,starving,hysterical,nakeddragging hemselvesthroughthe negrostreetsat dawn lookingforan angryfix... who passed throughuniversitieswith radianteyes hallucinatingArkansasand Blake... lighttragedyamongthe scholarsof warwho wereexpelledfromthe academies orcrazyandpublishingobscureodeson the windowof theskull.We cannot forget, we must not forget, that now when history has turned bleak again,


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Panic USA 449when as Brecht said, "gangstersstrut around like statesmen on the stage of history"-that we,the survivors are the only links between past and future, between a past of critical rebellionand a future of utopia.We serve the past best by keeping alive the act of remembrance, but also by seizing thefuture, by insisting in an uncompromising way on the practical possibility of the ideal. Surelythe present is a dead-zone of politics: it is a killing ground for the right. For today who in thetradition of the critical imagination does not stand with Benjamin at the Spanish border, withthe choice of suicide on the one hand and history in the form of the new right, of the comingagain of the beast first seen by Nietzche, on the other.Sartre, the philosopher who remained loyal to the free human subject, said finally, withirony, "Man is a useless passion." But Camus replied for those who survive: "I rebel-there-fore we exist."

Panic (Shopping) MallsLiquid TVShopping malls are liquid TVs for the end of the twentieth century. A whole micro-

circuitry of desire, ideology, and expenditure for processed bodies drifting through the cyber-space of ultracapitalism. Not shopping malls any longer under the old sociological formula ofconsumption sites, but future shops where what is truly fascinating is expenditure, loss, andexhaustion.

Shopping malls act like electro-magnets, attracting into their force field all the surround-ing community activities. They involve a double movement of recuperation and dispersion.Recuperation in the sense that malls provide a temporary unity for an otherwise chaotic,random, and undetermined field of activity. And dispersion in the sense that, when the en-ergy is shut off (life outside the mall), the force field, vectored around desire, ideology, andexpenditure, immediately dissolves into its constituent particles.

Shopping malls call forth the same psychological position as TV watching: voyeurism.Except this time, they do it one better. Rather than flicking the dial, you take a walk fromchannel to channel as the neon stores flick by. And not just watching either, but shoppingmalls have this big advantage over TV, they play every sense: smelling, tasting, touching,looking, desiring, fantasizing. A whole image-repertoire that, when successful, plays the bodyinto a multiplicity of organs, all demanding to be filled. But, of course, the shopping mall, justlike all the promises of ecstasy and catastrophe before it, fulfills what it promises only virtu-ally; and the shopping body, caught for one instant in the force field of the commodity asimage-repertoire, sags back into the routine of life outside the field.

Shopping malls are the real postmodern sites of happy consciousness. Not happy con-sciousness in the old Hegelian sense of a reconciled dialectic of reason, but happy conscious-ness, now, in the sense of the virtual self-a whole seductive movement, therefore, between awilled abandonment of life and a restless search for satisfaction in the seduction of holograms.Or, is it that the self now is a virtual object to such a degree of intensity and accumulation thatthe fascination of the shopping mall is in the way of a homecoming to a self that has been lost,but now happily discovered. The postmodern self as one more object in the simulacra ofobjects. Shopping malls, therefore, are sites of possessive individualism par excellence.

Or, maybe it's something very different. Not shopping at all and certainly not the will topossession, but the whimsical act of looking at objects as being seductive-the pleasure of thegaze as it plays fictionally with the possibility of possession takes on and discards whole iden-tities associated with objects, and then moves on. The look as a new type of flaneur: not,however, as Benjamin had it, moving through the streets of Paris, but the flaneur moving


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Panic USA 451Panic Suburbs"Thesky above ... was the color of television,tunedto a deadchance."WilliamGibson,NeuromancerMost of all, it is the lawns that are sinister. Fuji green and expansive, they are visualrelief to the freeway and its accompanying tunnel vision. Even ahead of the golden arches,they are welcoming as the approach of a new urban sign-value. The frenzy sites of a decayingChristian culture where reclining lawn chairs, people in the sun, barbecues, and summer-time

swimming pools can give off the pleasant odors of an imploding Calvinist culture, playingpsychologically at the edge of the parasite and the predator.And the Fuji green lawn? That has already been chemically sprayed to prevent thereturn of the animal kingdom. And why not? The suburban lawn can be so pleasantly ma-levolent because it is the aesthetic playground where three bourgeois ideological values inter-sect: a happy celebration of private property values; the ascendant sign-value of leisure timeactivity as the prime morality of post-liberal society; and the principle of exclusivity (fromsexual relations to family recreation) as the rising star of Christian culture at the end of thetwentieth-century.Indeed, in the old days, lawns were only for English aristocracy who could afford theirmaintenance. Today, all of this has been swiftly reversed, and we all do obedience to thelawn, that is if we have not paved it. This is a nice irony given the history of paving stones inthe struggle for bourgeois freedom. In the suburban suicide sites--on those chemically glow-ing lawns-the struggle has been won. In advanced capitalist society, the majority of us livein suburbs. Effectively, this relegates the old sociological paradigm of city/country, alongwith the fortress mentality, to the trash can.The postmodern suburb ushers in the new (cosmetic) style of "real imitation life." Itsappearance was signalled by the movie, TheInvasionof theBodySnatchers,where progressivelythe pods grow the physiognomy of the everyday American, complete with the cloning of theshopping mall mentality. Here each comes equipped, at least nominally, with a Harlequin lifeprogrammed to Scot Peck's TheRoad Less Traveled. Each person in his or her own way "bornagain," the better to imitate the Way. Not that the Way need be religious or fundamentalist,but rather a way of life that grows on you, feeds from you, parasites you. It's the postmodernsuburb, therefore, as a perfect ideological screen: lasered by flickering TV images, inscribedby shifting commodity-values, and interpellated by all of the violence, love, and bickeringvoices of Mommy-Daddy-Me.In these pleasurable sites of indifferent suicides, mutant biology also explodes into vacantfields transforming them into social networks on the grid pattern of urban development. Themeasured lawns indicate a new social cosmology reflecting the changing face of the suburban-ite. Lawn care, a real growth industry, replicates the same economic activity as the cosmeticsindustry a decade earlier. Keeping America beautiful now requires the cosmetics' approach tospace, as the mirroring of the cosmology of the lived experience of the self. The fusion of thelawn care specialist and the beautician creates the "unconsciousness" of post-hoc suburbanlife. The aestheticization of all the post-lawns as the ruling metaphysic, then, of the newmiddle class.

Politically, the impact of the shedding of the city by the suburb has led to the practicalabolition of resistance and rebellion. Where modernity linked urban centers by communica-tion routes, postmodernity differs through the creation of suburbs as sites of minimal power.As a low intensity field, the suburb has multiple points of entry and exit, making it invulnera-ble to attack by any conventional political means short of bureaucracy. Biologically driven,the suburban epicenters appear much like weeds in a field, constantly bleeding the centralclaims to power whether this be of a capital or of a garden. Having permanently left the cityfor a safer site, power can only be reconstituted in the absences by media holograms. Having


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452 KROKER/KROKER/COOKlost any legitimate claim on the real, the city is forced by the suburb to engage in fictive andhyper-aesthetic claims as a way of governing the imitative process.

Ultimately, the origin of the suburb could be traced to the demos in classical thought.The country, or what is outside the city, has successfully appropriated the political posture ofdemocracy, changing forever how citizens and assemblies are constructed. No longer the par-ticipatory democracy of the New England town assemblies, but now, suburbandemocracyorlife outside the class-ridden town or city of former times, as a gyroscope to political activity.Similar to the reaction one gets to the request to load the dishwasher, local suburban politicshas a dampening effect on life. Having shed class politics, suburban democracy also has littleneed for interest-group politics. Here, politics has to do with the aestheticization of lifestyle:boundaries (roads),waste systems (sewers), education and recreation for the young, and theprevention of the wholesale invasion of private property-continued small invasions of theproperty principle being acceptable. True to the spirit of indifference, the suburbanite onlycalls for a limited immune response to a parasitical intrusion.The political stability of the suburb comes from the large number of cloned, constitutedspaces such as plazas, which ensure that the organism will replicate and be preserved. Thegenotype is easily recognizable through the sequencing of fast food restaurants, car dealer-ships, gas bars, carpet outlets, and discount stores. Of course, there are no politics here. Infact, there is nothing to do other than to grow. This biological metaphor is pursued vigorouslyin other growth areas: tennis, bridge, bible study groups, and exercise classes.From the beginning, TV producers have recognized that their edge is in furthering andexploiting this boredom. Thus, the initial success of the soaps and of TV itself. Without thesuburbs, TV would not have so easily displaced other forms of cultural activity. So completehas been the suburban cultural victory (entertainment as the growth industry) that culturecould only turn to TVthrough the PBS(Public Broadcasting System), which emerged from themutual desperation (for suburban attention) of the centralized state and of equally centralizedcultural organizations. This cultural foray against the spreading indifference of green lawnscannot compete against the postmodern "rural idiocy" (Marx), or as William Blake has it,"vegetable consciousness."The future of the United States may or may not bring a black President, a woman Presi-dent, a Jewish President, but it most certainly always will have a suburban President. APresident whose senses have been defined by the suburbs, where lakes and public baths mu-tate into back yards and freeways, where walking means driving, where talking meanstelephoning, where watching means TV, and where living means real, imitation life.

The 19th CenturyTownas a PostmodernSite"Thenewest idea in planningis the nineteenth-centuryown. That'swhat is really selling."AndresDuany,AtlanticMonthlyBut which suburbs? AtlanticMonthlyrecently reported on the surging development in theUnited States of the nineteenth-century town as the newest reflex in suburban development.Influenced by romantic images of pre-twentieth-century America, developers are now con-structing built environments for towns that never existed in actuality. Just like Grant Wood'sAmerican Gothic,which was originally painted as a satire of the American spirit but that hasbeen flipped into its opposite-a glorification of the pioneering American personality, so too,the avant-garde theorists of the suburban dreamscape are now building fake 19th century

towns, pastiche both in form and color, for neo-suburbanites who wish to flee the city (andmodernist suburb) in ruins. Like the pattern of frontier settlement where the advance edge ofthe population always moved on, abandoning what was behind, the neo-suburbanites arenow recapitulating American history, but this time the territory explored is fantasy.The simulacrum of the nineteenth-century town, therefore, as a postsuburban site for the


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PanicUSA 453American city in ruins. Here, Dante's "rings of hell" find their urban equivalents in a newtriptych: an inner city that oscillates between the impoverishment of primitive capitalism forthe homeless and opulence for the ruling class; the old modernist suburbs that, with their fastfood outlets and shopping malls based on consumerist lifestyles, have become the new citiesfor working and middle class people; and now, the postmodern towns as memory elementsfor a city that never existed. Here, there is a perfect mediation of city and suburb: the archi-tectural dream of the nineteenth-century town and the ultra-suburban reality of intense polic-ing. Postmodern towns, therefore, as a maximal fulfillment of speed and the city: dream sitesthat collapse into purely symbolic sign-systems.And the old inner city? Well, in Detroit at least that has already reverted to an earlierstage of primitive agriculture. Recently, Detroit city politicians began talking of a newscheme whereby the deserted inner city would be converted into agricultural farmland, com-plete with homesteading for those now unemployed workers who originally fled the south forthe car factories of the north. It's the old city center, therefore, as the new rural countryside-back to sharecropping. Suburbs become the new modern city (after all this is where most ofthe jobs are located at the end of the 20th century). And the new 19th century towns becomethe last American (postmodern) frontier for the rich.

Panic TVMax Headroomas the First of the Cyber-BourgeoisieThis is Max Headroom as a harbinger of the post-bourgeois individual of aestheticizedliberalism who actually vanishes into the simulacra of the information system, whose facecan be digitalized and fractalized by computer imaging because Max is living out a panicconspiracy in TV as the real world, and whose moods are perfectly postmodern because theyalternate between kitsch and dread, between the ecstasy of catastrophe and the terror of thesimulacrum. Max Headroom, then, as the first citizen of the end of the world.

QuantumPoliticsIn quantum politics-where TV is the real world of political experience-Weber's classi-cal formulation of "charisma"as the driving force of historical change has now been replacedby what particle physicists like to call "charm." In the age of politics before TV, charismacould be so important as an element of leadership because it was the rare ability of leaders to

inspire loyalty and faith in the legitimacy of their authority solely by virtue of an intangible,mysterious, and rare quality of personality: what the Christians used to describe as being in a"state of grace." In TVpolitics, however, charisma as an intrinsic property of political person-alities has long been eclipsed by charm as a designer property of political images. In quantumpolitics, there are no political personalities per se, only spectral images of political leaders-each packaged simulacra of the latest tracking polls and subliminal advertising techniques,and each given a certain media spin cut overnight to the latest shift in public moods. Here, itis no longer charisma as a sign of a political leader "with grace,"but charm as a certain sign ofthe presence of media grace.This is not to claim, however, that force of personality is absent. Quite the opposite. Inquantum politics, it is just the intersection of biography and history in the simulated form ofdesigner images that produces charm as one of the elementary political particles. Some mediaimages possess it, and others do not. And while the presence of charm is instantly recogniza-ble by the frenzied scene of media fascination it evokes, there are, just like in quantum phys-ics, positive and negative states (numbers) of charm. So, for example, while Gary Hart in hisfirst appearance as a presidential candidate in 1984 could prosper immediately under the


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454 KROKER/KROKER/COOKsunshine sign of positive charm, in 1988 his reincarnated image (complete with tweeds) couldinstantly attract the same fascination, but this time to read all the polls and count the votes itwas the dark and deadly fascination of a politician with negativecharm. The very same withOllie North: that rare intersection of biography (militarized) and history (a TV-subordinatedCongress) that produced a political image charged with hyper-charm. But to read all thetracking polls that blipped out a steady staccato of negatives, Ollie's charm, just like Gary'safter him, was not sunshine charm but dark charm. It was the ability to fascinate in a TVworld that requires periodic disturbances to achieve escape velocity and to evade its ownimplosion into the inertial drag, but that, in the end, just like in particle physics, has as itshighest value the necessity of aesthetic (political) symmetry.In a TV mediascape that always verges on the immobility of stasis, the production ofcharm, positive and negative, and its assignation to a floating scene of political images is anabsolute survival technique. TV also produces, then, a whole rhetorical theater of predatorsand parasites, each signified with either sunshine or dark charm, to momentarily disturb themedia field, and to incite flagging interest in the postmodern fiction called the audience.

Slime TracksMost television networks and some newspapers conduct nightly "tracking polls." In 1988, ex-pectations are measured against last night, not last week ... voter preferences are volatile nightto night. The nternational eraldTribuneThe bubble chambers of quantum politics are the technology of tracking polls. In experi-mental physics, bubble chambers are instruments in which the ionized path of small, invisi-

ble (elementary) particles moving under intense pressure through a liquid mixture can betraced and photographed, with the most minute deviations in their direction of decay ratesimmediately calibrated. So too in quantum politics, tracking polls follow on a nightly (andhourly) basis a tiny sampling of voters with the intention of providing a political microphysicsof the timing and direction of key transformations in voters' perceptions of candidates. Andjust as bubble chambers in physics never measure the phenomenon itself (because of its ultra-speed, elementary particles always escape detection), but only the after-traces of elementaryparticles as they move across the liquid screen, so also, tracking polls provide information-sensitive photographs of the electoral after-shocks of significant changes in the daily politicalscene. A whole turbulent technology of politics: TV debates; the injection of negative adver-tising (about political opponents) into the circulatory system of the mediascape; the propaga-tion through intensive advertising campaigns of new leadership images instantly styled to thegraphics of last night's tracking poll; the inoculation of the simulacrum with emotionserums,ranging from misinformation about the personal qualities of opponents (and their families) todemographically upbeat mood advertisements about themselves.Of course, the effectiveness of the technology of tracking polls rests on the outstandingfact that in quantum politics, TV is not only the real time; it is the only time.

Panic Urine

BodyMcCarthyismLastwinter,we received a letter froma friend who had this to say about the prevailingobsession n the USAover cleanbodilyluids:Do you remember loyalty oaths? When I was growing up in the U.S., teachers were required to sign


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456 KROKER/KROKER/COOKlogical, and this because never has power been so deeply subjective and localized as the bodyis now recycled in the language of medieval mythology. Not sin this time, however, as a signof the body in ruins, but a whole panic scene of media hystericizations of the secreting, leak-ing body: the rubbergloves the Washington police force insisted on wearing before touchingthe bodies of gays who were arrested at recent AIDS demonstrations in Lafayette Park acrossfrom Reagan's White House; the sexual secretions n contemporary American politics wherepresidential candidates, from Hart to Celeste, are condemned out of hand by a mediawitchhunt focussing on unauthorized sexual emissions; and routine esting, he Reagan Admin-istration's bureaucratic term for the mandatory policing of the bodies of immigrants, prisonpopulations, and members of the armed services who are to be put under (AIDS)surveillancefor the slightest signs of the breakdown of their immunological systems.

Ultimately, the politics of Body McCarthyism, which is motivated by panic fear of viralcontamination, is steered by a eugenic ideology (William F. Buckley, in an outbreak again ofthe fascist mind, demands the tattooing of AIDS victims); it responds to a double crisis mo-ment-the external crisis as the breakdown of the immunological order in economy (panicmoney), culture (panic media), and politics (panic Constitution);and the internal crisis as theexistential breakdown of the American mind into a panic zone when the realization growsthat Lacanian misrecognition is the basis of the bourgeois ego (the substitution, that is, in theAmerican mind at its mirror stage of an illusory, fictive identity for a principle of concreteunity); it focuses on the illusory search for the perfect immunity system; and it calls up for itssolution a whole strategical language of cellular genetics, from AIDS research to Star Wars.The perfect mirror image of Body McCarthyism is provided by the striking relationshipbetween the medical rhetoric surrounding AIDS research and the military rhetoric of StarWars as parallel, but reverse, signs of fear about the breakdown of the immunological order ofAmerican culture. The rhetoric surrounding both AIDS and Star Wars focuses on the totalbreakdown of immunity systems: AIDS can be perceived in such frightening terms becauseits appearance indicates the destruction of the internal immunological system of the body (thecrisis within); while the rhetoric of Star Wars creates, and then responds to, generalized panicfear about the breakdown of the technological immunity systems of society as a whole (nu-clear exterminism as the crisis without). Both Star Wars and AIDS are theorized in the com-mon research language of cellular genetics, where missiles are viruses and invading antigensbody missiles. In both cases, the strategic aim is for the immune system B-cells (lasers in StarWars; retroviruses in AIDS research) to surround invading antigens, whether within or with-out, in preparation for their destruction by cystoxic T-cells or killer cells. Both AIDS researchand Star Wars deal with ruined surfaces (the planet and the body); both operate in a commonlanguage of exterminism and suppression, and both work to confirm the thesis, first formu-lated by Michel Foucault in TheHistoryof Sexuality,that power, today, is principally a productof biological discourse because what is ultimately at stake in power and its applied technolo-gies is the life and death of the species itself.

Panic USAAmericaas a PostmodernScreenPanic USA? That is Dan Rather in America. Not America operating any longer under theold biblical sign of a "city on the hill" and certainly not America now as a replay in fast

forward of the Roman republic of classical antiquity, but something very different.Panic USA as a postmodern screen-a spectral image-onto which are projected all ofthe violent yet ecstatic symptoms of culture burnout at the fin-de-millenium.Like a giganticsuperconductor in solid state physics in which all of the molecular switches have suddenlysnapped open at a certain warming-point, America is now an empty, transparent, and rela-


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Panic USA 457tional medium-a perfect postmodernmediascape-for processingat hallucinogenicspeedsall of the dying energiesof the social.Indeed, in America,science can be the reallanguageof power because here theoreticalphysics is both an experimental,objective descriptionof an outer physical nature and anactual physical descriptionof American social nature generally, and specificallyof thepostmodernAmericanmind in all of its brillianceanddecayunderthe flashof the year2000.LikeMichelFoucault's arlierdescriptions f the clinicalpracticesof medicine andpenol-ogy as instances of a political power that functions under the sign of surveillance,Americanscience now operatesas a pure socialcosmology. Whether n the mathematical languageoffuzzysets,in the physics of brownian motionand worldstriptheory,in the genetic languageof retroviruses nd killer T-cellsor in the computermaginganguageof virtualtechnologyandvirtualbodies,Americanscience is a direct read-outof USATodayas a hyper-technologicalsociety par excellence.America as an empireof technology ncreasingly eeds(parasitically)n the aestheticiza-tion of its own screen memories. Energized rom within by the instanton/instant off strate-giesof mediafibrillation Bush's"readmy lips,"Ronnie'sprostrate,Ollie'swink, Casey'sbrain)that are blasted across the otherwise empty world strip of the Americanscreen, the USAimplodes into the dark and dense nebula of its final existence as an aesthetichologramofscience as the Americanway.It is postmodernAmerica, herefore,as what the quantumphysicistsandcomputer cien-tists like to call a virtualworld,a worldthat has no realexistence,only a hyperrealand simu-lated existence. ProcessedAmerica, then, as an afterimageof its own violent and excessiveimplosioninto a technologicalhologram.Notingthat the United Stateswas one societywith no historybefore the age of progressand thus free to commit itself fully to the liberal and secularvision of technologicalprogressas freedom,the social theorist TalcottParsonsonce remarked hat the Americanpolity wasformed on the basisof a fatefuland unique fusion of religionand technology. Parsonscouldintimate that the true religionof America was America because here the dynamicvision ofthe fully realizedtechnologicalsociety (technologyas the horizon-enucleatingAmericanem-pire-where technologyis understoodas freedom,never deprivation)harmonizedperfectlywith even the most fundamentalistof religiousclaimsthat,at theirdeepestand most inspir-ing moments, are loyal to the collective idea of Americaas the productionof a new holycommunity.In its fully measuredand classically iberalexpression, he fusion of religionand technol-ogy aroundthe makingof Americaas a new holy communitywaspoliticallycoded and ener-gized by a seriesof key antinomiesin the American,that is to say, in the moving forwardedge of the advanced liberal mind. Not only the classic social antinomy of a progressivistvision of socialjustice-skewed in the directionof natural aw-versus absolutist undamen-talist movements;but also the politicaldualismin the American mind between the will todemocracy internally)and the will to empire (externally);he legaldualismbetween contrac-tual theories of justice and constructionist heory;and even, as FrancesFitzgeraldhas sug-gested,a deep schizoid tension in the contemporaryAmerican mind between the very termAmericawithits missionary nvocationof the U.S.fate as somehow coeval with world histori-cal destiny)and the USA(asa politicalcodefor the federalistconstitutional ompromise truc-turingthe Americanway).

Cyber-AmericaWhile modern Americamay have been politically coded and internallystructuredbyclassical dualisms of the liberalkind, PanicUSA-postmodern America-is just the reverse.The violent implosionand cancellationof the old liberaldualisms n the Americanmind is, in


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458 KROKER/KROKER/COOKfact, the realparasitical ontent of postmodernAmerica. No longer,therefore,progressivismversus fundamentalist onceptionsof justice,liberalismversusconservatism, echnologyver-sus culture,or democracyversusempire;but the simultaneousschizoid existence of all thereferents to the hyper. America as a hyper-bible country and a technologicalsensoriumdriven forwardby its own (simulated) ecoveryof primitivemythology;Americaas a techno-democracyandthe empireof cyberspace; esignerpersonalitiesand the fibrillated tate. Notthen a real Americanpolitical ogic,but rather,randomflashesof mediaenergyfromall thedying referents.Nota dualisticAmericanmind any longer,but Americaas a cyberspace hatcan absorball of the energiesof the violent, disaccumulative, nd excessivetimes at the endof history. And not even the semiologicaldualismof America/USA,but now a robo-America:a gleaming,beamingUSA thatoperates n the liquidsign languageof its own mythic,primi-tive energies. Finally, postmodernAmericaas a blanksignof the actualdisappearance f thehistory,culture,and economyof the USA into its own technologicalafter-image.Post-catas-tropheAmericaas a cyberspace.Thatempty spaceof the fully realizedtechnological ocietywhere, as Michael Weinstein has remarked: the ailing father dragshimself throughtherooms of the empty house, muttering,"Mychildrenmay have fled and the house might beempty, but it's still the best goddamn family in the whole wide world."

Allan Bloomas theJudge Borkof AmericanAcademiaSymptomsof culture burnout are everywhere. In cinema,River'sEdgecan be so evoca-tive because t is all aboutthe implosionof the grandnarrativesof modernAmerica. The filmbegins with a brief image of the interferencepatternon television as if to signal that this isone workof the cinematic magination hat is all aboutthe processingof America hrough hesimulacrum. Here even the corpsesare confused. Sometimesthe young woman'sbody is

representedas an aestheticized,spectral image;sometimes as detritus that won't go away;sometimesas a languidobjectof sexual curiosity;and even as a dead screen-memory ntowhich areprojectedall of the anxieties, contradictions, nd guiltless eelingsof the teenagers.And why not? River'sEdgeis about the missing Americanfamily, where the mother an-nounces,in the firstof the semiologicalrenunciation, hat she is no longera mother. It is alsoabout the missing Americanpsycho, when Dennis Hopper(who portraysa real, nostalgicpsychoin the old Americanmold of spurned ove and fetishobjects)becomesthe executionerof the new Americanpostmodernpsychowho, justas Sartrepredicted,killsjustfor the fun ofit and who, anyway, in a perfectapotheosisof existentialism n the postmodern cene,has noaffectivity. And, finally,River'sEdge s even about the missingAmerican brother. ("Youdoshit; it's done, and then you die.")In Americankitsch philosophy, there never was Allan Bloom'sAmerica that appearsfictionally n his book,TheClosingftheAmericanMind.Bloom,as the JudgeBorkof Americanacademia,suffers he samehowling spiritof revengeand grislyresentment owardswomen,the young, and the poor. No, never Bloom'sAmerica,but NormanO. Brown'spenetratingvision in Closing ime.when he predicted he postmodernmind moving towardsrandomdis-organizationand the ecstasyof burnout as it lives out the dying days of aestheticized iber-alism under the twin signsof passiveand suicidal nihilism.TV as the Fourth Branchof AmericanGovernmentAnd finally,in U.S.politics,Max Headroommay have been suddenlycancelledas a tele-vision series,but that is probablybecause,as the first of the cyberpunkTVseries,the showwas too transparentabout the realityof Americanpresidentialpower politicswhere all theDemocraticcandidates, rom Dukakis o Hart,Biden,and Schroeder,know to their bitter re-gret that TV is the real world; where "publicopinion"can be stampededelectronicallyby


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PanicUSA 459instant TV polling; where power, which works now in the language of media lasers, has be-come liquid and fluid; and where, anyway, TV has now insatiated itself as the ultimatebranch of American Government: with its own politics (hierarchical and elitist); its own my-thology (the defense of the free press as the ruling ideology of a cynical media system); andwith its own strategic objectives (the parasiting of the political process by a cyberspace thatonly it controls).Television, then, in the age of postmodern politics is a remarkable fusion between theexterminist tendencies of hyper-communication and the most deeply mythological senti-ments of the American individual. Or as we hear each evening: "Thisis the CBS News. DanRather reporting." Just perfect for America as a postmodern screen, or as Bataille would mur-mur, and Nietzsche would nod his assent, panic USA as a postmodern scream.

ReferencesAcker,Kathy1988 Empireof the Senseless. New York: GrovePress.Adorno,TheodorW., ElseFrenkel-Brunswick, anielJ. Levinson,and R. Nevitt Sanford1950 The AuthoritarianPersonality.New York:Harperand Row.Benjamin,Walter1969 Illuminations. New York:SchokenBooks.Gibson,William1989 Neuromancer.New York: Ace Science Fiction.Ginsberg,Allen

1956 Howl. SanFrancisco:CityLights.Habermas, urgen1979 "Conservatismnd capitalistcrisis." New LeftReview 115:73-84.Horkheimer,Max1978 Dawn and Decline. New York: TheSeaburyPress.Kroker,Arthur1985 Technologyand the CanadianMind. New York: St. Martin'sPress.Marcuse,Herbert1979 "Thereificationof the proletariat."CanadianJournalof Politicaland SocialTheory3:20-23.Neumann,Franz1957 TheDemocraticand Authoritarian tate:Essays n Politicaland LegalTheory. Glencoe,Ill.: Free Press.Weinstein,MichaelA.1989 "Theeclipseof liberalism."Department f Sociologyand Anthropology,PurdueUniversity,WestLafayette,nd.Wolin,Sheldon1988 "The deaof the state in America." Humanities3:51-168.

Documents

Arthur Kroker, Marilouise Kroker & David Cook - PANIC USA-Hypermodernism as America's Postmodernism