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Ray Carney on Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936):

If Capra’s heroes no longer attempt to flee from the repressive forms of society into a world of the imagination and romance … it is because for the first time they recognize that the society they flee from is itself an artificial, arbitrary creation of the human imagination and that any other society they would bring into existence outside of it would be no less artificial and arbitrary. … There can be no escape from artificial relations. The fact that the outcome of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town turns not on solitary transactions between a transparent eyeball and a landscape, a shared vision, or a silent glance or romantic embrace between lovers, but on the result of public testimony in a hearing in a courtroom is Capra’s insistence that there is nowhere to run to, no “world elsewhere” outside of artificial, social, or linguistic codes of expression.

But Capra recognizes that the structuralist awakening can sanction several distinct kinds of response, as different from each other as the differences between European and American understandings of the deconstructionist enterprise. One possible response is the kind of affectless anomie or devil-may-care nihilism demonstrated by Bennett at the beginning of the film. As a reporter she has become aware of the structurality of verbal and social structures and of the pervasiveness of artificial codes, and is liberated to be indifferent to all of them. As she says at one despairing moment during the hearing: “it’s all a game”–life, language, and all expression is all only a game with codes and rules like any other sufficiently inclusive game, and consequently, in her despairing formulation, one might as well abandon all beliefs and simply, indifferently, amorally play out one’s turn. A second possible response to the recognition of the pervasiveness and artificiality of these structures might be called the Iago response, epitomized by the lawyers in the hearing room. They have seen the fictionality of the reigning fictions and they respond with cynical opportunism and ruthless manipulation. If it is all an artificial game, then one plays to win and any tactic that will succeed suffices. A third response, represented by the crowd of despondent and disenfranchised farmers who attend the hearing, is another kind of alienation or despair different from Babe Bennett’s, in which one feels oneself to be utterly powerless, shut out from any capacity of authorship within the system within which one is inexorably inscribed and trapped. Since no one authors the systems that oppress us, no one can change or affect them, and all attempts at action are necessarily futile and pointless.

It is instructive and important that Capra incorporates these three distinct responses within the dramatic structure of the courtroom scene because, if I understand what he is doing, he is articulating a fourth response in the figure of Deeds himself. It is, however, one that is so easily confused with these others that we need their simultaneous presence in order to be entirely clear about how importantly different it is. To what might be called these European responses to deconstruction, Longfellow Deeds might be said to offer a uniquely American vision, that, even as it recognizes the artificiality of all received forms of experience, offers the possibility of a performance that is neither despairingly nihilistic, manipulatively opportunistic, nor despondently alienated. Deeds offers the per-formative possibility of an optimistic aesthetic of parody, play, and artistic mastery that revels in its ability dramatically to tease fun out of the old forms and to play meaning into new forms of its own imaginative creation. As a result of the utter and absolute decentering of his world, Deeds is finally released not to despair, opportunism, or nihilism (stages that he passes through in his hour of silence), but to true creativity (which he arrives at in the courtroom in his final performance). He is able to tease and toy with forms (the forms of legal testimony in the courts, for example) as he never could if they were grounded on the bedrock of God, King, and Truth. Deeds is progressively alienated from the social and moral structures in place around him and from his own experience in the course of the film, but his alienation is converted into a joyous principle of mastery and free movement as he finally rises to address the court. Alienation is discovered to be a mode of freedom. Life and expression do become a game of sorts, but it is not a game of manipulation, anomie, or cynicism. It is an adventure in the creation of a margin of free movement to be used in maneuvering through the institutional and formal structures in place around him.

It is now simple common sense among social theorists that one cannot define a society as “unnatural” unless one assumes that there is some natural way for society to be, “inhuman” unless there is some authentic human essence, that one cannot say that the self is “fragmented” unless it would be possible to have a unified self, and so on. Since these positions are untenable—since there is no natural condition for society, no authentic human essence, no unitary self—theories of alienation have no basis. Taken purely as arguments, these seem difficult to refute. But how then do we account for the experience?

If one really thinks about it, though, the argument is much less powerful than it seems. After all, what are academic theorists saying? They are saying that the idea of a unitary subject, a whole society, a natural order, are unreal. That all these things are simply figments of our imagination. True enough. But then: what else could they be? And why is that a problem? If imagination is indeed a constituent element in the process of how we produce our social and material realities, there is every reason to believe that it proceeds through producing images of totality. That’s simply how the imagination works. One must be able to imagine oneself and others as integrated subjects in order to be able to produce beings that are in fact endlessly multiple, imagine some sort of coherent, bounded “society” in order to produce that chaotic open-ended network of social relations that actually exists, and so forth. Normally, people seem able to live with the disparity. The question, it seems to me, is why in certain times and places, the recognition of it instead tends to spark rage and despair, feelings that the social world is a hollow travesty or malicious joke. This, I would argue, is the result of that warping and shattering of the imagination that is the inevitable effect of structural violence.

—David Graeber.

[Still from Chantel Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975.]

‘The end of history’ sounded like the ‘No future!’ refrain Johnny Rotten sang a decade previously, with irony and a dim sense of hope. Fukuyama’s teleology was really an apologia for free-market capitalism. For intellectual credibility, he loosely appropriated Hegel’s philosophy of history: conflictual and contradictory history would cease, Hegel said, with the advent of the liberal bourgeois state, the absolute ideal incarnate, which would simultaneously recognise individual particularity within institutional universality. In Hegel’s shadow, Fukuyam said history had given other big ideals a chance: fascism during the 1930s, communism after 1917. Both had been doomed alternatives, Fukuyama thought, now dispatched to the dustbin of history. Only one idea stayed intact: liberal-bourgeois market democracy. Nothing else mattered; no alternative could be brooked: history had stopped dead in its tracks. It got no better than this; here we are, forever.

Not long after, this mentality reinforced itself with yet another clarion call: ‘TINA’—‘There is no alternative’; and then, hot on its heels, came George Bush Senior’s speech on the ‘New World Order’. (These mantras would soon congeal into a headier thesis: globalisation.) Once, history seemed to be opening up: now, everything perplexingly began to close down. Never had bright skies been so fast occluded by storm clouds. Suddenly, under our noses and before our very eyes, democracy was hijacked, usurped by free-market Stalinism. Meanwhile, another strange thing was unfolding: just when the Right was triumphant about its ‘meta-narrative’ of the market, the Left started to proclaim its incredulity to all meta-narratives, to all big stories about humanity and progress. Soon they’d begin to proclaim a viewpoint called ‘postmodern’. One of its ablest commisars was an ex-‘Socialism or Barbarism’ 1960s activist, Jean-Francois Lyotard, who stressed the non-foundational nature of truth. In our present ‘post-industrial’ society, Lyotard said, partial pragmatic truths—those refracted through the gaze of media lenses—are the best we can hope and struggle for. Truth, he argued, becomes like storytelling; each tale is difficult to adjudicate, because everything has relative plausibility.

Thus the paradox: the Right had set off on its long march across the entire globe, dispatching its market missionaries, spreading TINA doctrines, cajoling here, oppressing there, using heavy artillery to smash anything in its path. At the same time, the Left had embarked on an intricate philosophical debate about the meaning of meaning.

It was tough to know where to turn, or where to run.

—Andy Merrifield, Guy Debord (Reaktion Books, 2007).