Passage 2
　　[A] Certainly commercialism generates a fair amount of regularity. For example, when a non-commercial or anti-commercial movement or organization emerges, it is immediately scanned as a business opportunity—for the sale of legal services, counseling, gear, memberships, and material exploitable by the news and entertainment industry. Money-free zones are hard to find in the social landscape, only features more saturated or less saturated with commercialism. To take another example, booms and busts occur repeatedly. Booms involve overconfidence in technology, loose credit, excess capacity, manipulation and swindling, gold rush fever. Busts involve loss, bankruptcy, unemployment, and panic. Safeguards are installed too late to prevent busts and removed too soon to prevent booms. It's the way we do things.
　　[B] The short answer is no. Americans are predictable, very predictable, in their social behavior but erratic in justifying it. This could be interpreted in several ways. All theories, including Foucault's, tend to come up short against reality. America is too crude to suit a European model. And so on. It is more interesting, though, to explore the native pattern in its own right.
　　[C] As you may have heard too often already, the French historian and social theorist Michel Foucault posited an iron law of cultural hegemony. Local contests and assertions of power, according to him, feed into networks. Cliques, coalitions, institutions, regimes, and social classes channel the friction and flatten orbits into overall strategies of domination. Social structure is power consolidated, including control of wealth. To sustain power, elites are said to create a thick cultural overlay, "hegemonic discourse," that shapes what will be thought and expressed. Its purpose is to make what goes on seem correct. When it is working well, this nefarious process fills people's consciousness with myths, images, spectacles, codes, bodies of knowledge, and assignments more beguiling than the raw power formation they mask.
　　[D] On balance, however, Americans are poor at mystification. Cover stories on a par with those developed where the cultural overlay was thicker-say afterlife, courtly love, wheel of dharma, proletariat—are hard to come by. Economics, thoroughly mathematized, is indeed mystifying, comparable to priest craft. Yet when economists lapse into ordinary language, they could be mistaken for comedians. Given the recurrence of booms and busts, their term “market efficiency” borders on facetiousness. In any case, the lay audience for studies of booms and busts only seeks clues to timing. Given a chance, they intend to run through the cycle again, this time jumping in sooner and pulling out earlier.
　　[E] The United States is a business society and always has been. Does it fit Foucault's model—regularity of social relations interlocked with a sophisticated mystique?
　　[F] Certainly too there are, in some areas of American life, mystifications such as Foucault had in mind, regarded as sacrosanct without awareness of their background. The American lawn, for instance, began with the rich trying to imitate English estates in the wrong climate, whereupon the merely well-to-do took it up in a wave of second hand snobbery The U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Garden Club of America, real estate dealers, landscaping firms, and zoning boards then pushed the lawn farther down and across the class system. Today about $25 billion per year changes hands for seed and fertilizer, pesticides and water, mowing equipment and gasoline. By weight, grass clippings make up the nation's biggest crop. Multitudes, oblivious to origins, profits, and waste, now identify lawn care with civilization.
　　[G] Thus in the United States a home grown model has to be substituted for Foucault's linkage of power and well-wrought symbolic culture. Behavior is closely attuned to the mobility of capital but haphazardly combined with an uneven cultural overlay.

发布日期：2022-07-13

题王网让考试变得更简单

扫码关注题王，更多免费功能准备上线！