Approaching Cultural Citizenship
In one terminology, cultural citizenship is a process which takes place in the context of a specific historical relationship between the individual and the social. In what may be the most highly socialized society that ever existed, Americans tend to almost completely deny that there exists a social or cultural realm. We can speak of a situation of extreme socialization without solidarity or social integration. In a pseudo-individualized way (because what people regard as their private affair is something eminently social), there is a confused urgency to acquire what are essentially mass produced, impersonal, non-solidary, socialized symbols. Cultural citizenship is not guaranteed to anyone. It is a universal scramble in almost all areas of life to secure a place for oneself against everyone else’s pursuit of the same things. What has been called “post-modern society” is a paradoxical situation of extreme pseudo-personalization (narcissism, the non-ethos of individualistic advance, the scramble for credentials, security and positional goods) within a context extreme socialization and regulation by an abstract code of signifiers (the mass media, consumerism, reified language, money). In a “sociological” terminology, cultural citizenship can be seen as an action or pragmatics embedded in consumer culture as a system. It comprises the “strategies of the actors” or deep existential dimension of an “objective” social situation of simulation, the myth of resolution, the freezing of history, the spectacle, the star-system, etc…. Almost all objects and experiences that we desire, although appearing to be personal agencies of satisfaction, are bearers of social meaning and the shared production of a universe of values. But we experience the scramble in a more or less subjective dimension. There are aspects of this world (narcissism, the scramble for positional goods) which have been explored by previous writers. One of our tasks will be a review and elucidation of their work.
Cultural citizenship is a world of securities and protections which we attempt to construct against the world of our fears. We seek tokens of security in all domains of life: homes in the suburbs, air-conditioned cars, coziness, narratives, identification with celebrities. This is the project of constructing a coherent “subjectivity” or unified “self” in the face of its disintegration. A radio commercial for a bank presents a dialogue between husband and wife. The husband is complaining about all of his problems, his over-burdened life, and his sense of anonymity. The superintendent of the apartment building knows him only as an apartment number, and even to his own mother he is “what’s his name.” The wife responds: “I opened an account for you at the Amalgamated – it’ll be good for your ego.” The husband is soothed. The increasing fragmentation of the self, assaulted from all sides, is covered over in simple resolution rather than being faced. We live with the myth of the “I,” a constituted entity disconnected from histories and contexts beyond the isolated “personal history.” What should instead be confronted is the termination of this limited and mythical “subjectivity” and the rebirth of an historical self. The latter involves a much deeper sense of projects, truths, and commitments beyond one’s own isolation and private sphere. This historical self is a rich, chaotic reservoir of variegated and contradictory elements. As Barthes observes in The Pleasure of the Text, it is at the tangled intersection of biographical, neurotic, sociological, and historical components that the true self exists (Barthes, 1975). But the good cultural citizen prefers to present to the world a unified “self,” with all the contradictions covered over in plastic. He jumps over himself to get to those commodities and images which he is persuaded will reinstate his ego for him.
It is the way of life of the suburbs, appearing on the social landscape in the 1950s, and spreading over a course of thirty years to homogeneously cover almost all of American society, that captures most succinctly the terrain of cultural citizenship. Millions of people have now grown up from this background of private, split-level houses, shopping centers, shopping malls, donut shops, and fast-food restaurants. From such an environment, it would be hard to imagine young people aspiring to be much more than dentists, accountants, astute critics of stereo equipment, and consumers of Caribbean vacations. The possession of consumer objects is one of the most basic forms that cultural citizenship takes. As Baudrillard says, “the vital minimum today, the minimum of imposed consumption, is the standard package. Beneath this level, you are an outcast” (1981:81). Today, the “standard package” would have to include video recorder and personal computer as well as television, washing machine, etc… Juan Corradi, Professor of Sociology at New York University, suggested the case of upper- and upper-middle class Argentineans as, purely on the level of commodity consumption, an extreme case of cultural citizenship. These people, according to Corradi, spend their time arguing the relative virtues of different models of personal computers, or the difference between the 300 BMW series and the 600 BMW series. They have little relation to their own tradition or history as Argentineans. They are little else but aspiring cultural citizens of the West. They belong neither to Argentine nor to American society. In terms of a metaphor that we shall develop later, they have nothing but the “casino chips” (money) they have been given to participate in the scramble to procure cultural citizenship.
Paradoxical Individualism
Within a range of literature which could be designated as ‘cultural criticism’, a few works appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s which advance toward an understanding of the extreme ‘individualism’ which now characterizes American/European society. Individualism is the plague of capitalism in its current configuration. There have been discussions of narcissism, ‘privatization’, the myth of an authentic self, the decline of morality, the alien nature of collective action to Americans. These works have aided in the germination of the concept of cultural citizenship, and we shall explore them in ascending order of the degree and depth of their contribution.
Albert O. Hirschman, in Shifting Involvements, approaches the question of ‘privatization’ in relation to the hypothesis of an unending historical cycle or oscillation between ‘public’ and ‘private’ commitments (1982). The individual, in his view, is both a consumer and a political citizen. He is perpetually divided between pursuit of personal and family ‘happiness’ and engagement in the public arena. Emphasis on one orientation or the other characterizes periods of history, as has obviously been the case in the transition from the sixties to the eighties. Hirschman believes that disappointment is at the core of human experience, and that shifts from public involvement to private concern or vice versa result from deep disillusion. People construct expectations of satisfaction in the consumer realm, and then turn to public action when they meet with frustration; or, as is more commonly the case, they withdraw to private life in response to ill-defined doubts and uncertainty.
The ‘exit’ from one set of activities to the other is in large measure impelled by well-known ideological currents. The push towards private existence is sustained by two beliefs: the promise of gratification in the sphere of consumption, and a diffused faith in the ‘invisible hand’ of the capitalist market mechanism. Since it is widely believed that the common good is best served by individuals acting in their own interests, feelings of guilt are easily sidestepped by people ‘retreating’ to projects which entail primarily a search for personal gain.
The most interesting aspect of Hirschman’s argument is his discussion of the phenomenon of disappointment. From within the tradition of the study of collective action, and through an immanent critique of economic theory, he contributes to the ripening of a theory of cultural citizenship. The dread of disappointment is an element of the complexus of fears and anxieties which nourishes the individual’s craving for a polyvalent system of protections. Following German sociologist Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, Hirschman takes note of the distinct appeal of money as an object of eminent possession: ”Insofar as money is desired purely for the purpose of accumulation… its possession is immune to disappointment” (Ibid.:26; see also Simmel [1900], 2004). Money is the quintessential token of cultural citizenship, and most perfectly embodies the unity of its antipodes: the regulation of an abstract code and the illusions of ‘personalization’ and individual freedom.
Christopher Lasch is one of the few authors in the last several decades to have had the courage to attempt a thoughtful critique of American society. He perceives a deep cultural crisis in the Western capitalist countries, which has its epicenter in the United States. In The Culture of Narcissism (1979), Lasch made a preliminary approach to assailing the myths of the ‘self’ and individuality in our society. He noted a shift from the values and neurotic personality traits associated with early capitalism (achievement, work ethic, authoritarianism, repressive sexuality, guilt) to those of late capitalism (restlessness, self-absorption, desire for immediate gratification, anxiety). This new ‘psychologistic’ or narcissistic type, appearing dramatically after the sixties, lives only for himself and in a de-contextualized present. He feels no ties with the past, concern with tradition and posterity, or deep solidarity with others. The decline of social involvement and despair of changing society led individuals in the seventies to the cults of ‘personal growth’ and ‘pseudo self-awareness’, jogging, yogurt, and astrology. Lasch also saw the decadence in private life (the ‘narcissistic anguish of contemporary America’) as coinciding with other crucial socio-historical developments. These included the degradation of work; the debasing of education, sports and play; the perverse fascination with spectacles and celebrities; the information-ization of language; and the increased dependence in public life on experts and professionals, bureaucracies, corporations, and the state. Narcissism was, in effect, the psychological dimension of a bureaucratized world.
In The Minimal Self (1984), Lasch tried to add subtleties and nuances to the ideas about narcissism that he felt had been misrepresented by his critics, as well as to move, in some ways, to a notion of a culture of ‘survivalism’ (Lasch, 1984) [It is curious that, in his chapter on contemporary images of the Nazi concentration camps, Lasch seems more concerned with those few who survived than about the millions who were killed]. Although much of his argument is standard radical fare, he does point in some ways to elements of the theory of cultural citizenship. People, according to Lasch, do not see that there is a sociological reality because consumer culture makes all of reality appear to be an extension of inner psychic life. Due to the omnipresence of fantasies, symbols and images, the individual comes to feel that the world only exists to “gratify or thwart his desires” (Ibid.:30). As it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish reality from fantasy, people are unable to deal with the serious problems of life. They have little sense of sustained projects or commitments, bonds with family and friends, or patience for hard struggle related to deeply held values and convictions. The self has contracted to a defensive core, and ‘life’ has become a search for psychic survival, We feel ourselves to be powerless victims, and are lost in a tyrannizing world of anxieties and compulsions. Social life is a jungle, a daily battle to survive in the land of corporations and bureaucratic organization.
In psychoanalytic terms, Lasch sees the problem as the incapacity of most Americans to deal with the reality of separation. Painfully severed from the womb and, later, the surrounding environment, the onerous task that a human being faces is the acceptance of tensions and framing of an equilibrium between self and others, oneness and separation. A genuine ‘achievement of selfhood’, for Lasch, would be “the acknowledgement of our separation from the original source of life, combined with a continuing struggle to recapture a sense of primal union by means of activity that gives us a provisional understanding and mastery of the world without denying our limitations and dependency” (Ibid.:20). To accept and live with basic contradictions would be the consummation of a healthy individuality. But this is nearly impossible in our society, since a narcissistic culture promotes regressive solutions to the riddle of separation. The technologized and computerized world, where everything seems beyond our control, generates ‘infantile feelings of helplessness’. Narcissism “seeks to restore the undifferentiated contentment of the womb” (Ibid.). In effect, Lasch sees contemporary society as a tragic wedlock of Promethean technology (the domination of nature) and Narcissistic self-absorption (the dream of symbiotic reunion with nature).
In a more emphatic language, we might say that it is the denial of history in American society which is related to the reality of relations of power and conflicts going ‘underground’. People emerge from the war-like or prison-like situations of family and school ready to burst at the seams. They are ill-equipped to cope with an adult reality because they want happiness, freedom and romantic love so desperately. The tragedies which are played out in the emotional lives of American adults are the bad patterns of behavior which are innate to Western culture, and which the Greeks warned us about: the stories of Narcissus, Icarus, Heracles, Orpheus.
Although written many years earlier, and in a simple, intuitive style, Philip Slater’s The Pursuit of Loneliness probed basic issues of American culture with insight far surpassing that of other works of the time of like genre (Slater, 1970). Exemplary of the cultural radicalism of the late sixties, Slater’s effort was directed against the fanatic individualism and privatization of Americans. Although we live in an intensively interdependent society (economically, logistically), we seek privatization of practically everything. Our individualism repudiates the interdependence on which all human societies are based. “An enormous technology seems to have set itself the task of making it unnecessary for one human being ever to ask anything of another in the course of going about his daily business” (Ibid.:7). Even within a given family, one of the designs of suburban life seems to be for each ‘member’ to have his own room, television, telephone, car. We live in fear of each other and spend enormous sums of money in maintaining ‘security’. Americans, in general, are inclined not to believe that they are part of the same species. Slater offers a humorous anecdote of how Americans would imagine the ‘fun’ they could have should flying machines or flying saucers become available as a mass product: “Americans are trained by advertising media to identify immediately with the person who actually uses the new product. When he thinks of a saucer the American imagines himself inside it, flying about and having fun. He does not think of himself trying to sleep and having other Americans roaring by his window. Nor does he think of himself trying to enjoy peace and quiet in the country with other Americans flying above. Nor does he even think of other Americans accompanying him in his flight and colliding with him as they all crowd into the city. The American as consumer rarely thinks of other Americans at all – it is his most characteristic trait that he imagines himself to be alone on the continent” (Ibid.:131).
There is, for Slater, a wide gap between reality and the images and fantasies of ‘fun’ and happiness with which we live. The mass media diffuses a whole symbolic network of fantasies which ‘trains’ us for happiness. We know what to buy or to do to be happy. We know how to smile or how to look when happy. But running on the beach or making love under the moonlight are rare experiences, When things are not going well, our sense of disappointment is intensified further by the feeling of guilt that we ‘should be happy’. Conscious negativity is taboo, but widespread disillusionment, bitterness, discomfort and deprivation are unparalleled. (The psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries would like to convince us that ‘depression’ is an ‘illness’ for which we require heavy medications. “Thank you, doctor. I feel better already!”) Romantic love, according to Slater, is also promoted as a way out of problems and hard realities. It is the easiest way to grab ‘happiness’ in the midst of unhappiness, the myth of integral love against culture. Finally, Slater has one serious glimpse of the operation of cultural citizenship when he observes poignantly that “Americans have created a society in which they are automatically nobodies, since no one has any stable place or enduring connection… An American has to ‘make a place for himself’ because he does not have one (Ibid.:110).
More than any other recent writer, it is the economist Fred Hirsch (1976), in Social Limits to Growth, who anticipates the theory of cultural citizenship. Hirsch is primarily concerned with examining the myth of growth in the so-called ‘affluent’ societies. Like Hirschman, he focuses on the phenomenon of disappointment, and wants to unearth the reasons why the fruits of economic advance, when finally achieved, rarely meet people’s expectations. His discovery is that there is a ‘paradox of affluence’ related to social factors and the social or environmental ‘conditions of use’ of any good or experience which people desire. The more people attain to a certain level of professional or vocational education, the less value that education has in the scramble for jobs. The more people acquire homes in the suburbs (because of the simultaneous proximity to the city, offering access to jobs and entertainment; distance from the city, offering escape from urban problems; and proximity to the country, offering open space and fresh air), the more the suburbs are transformed and gradually attract all the problems and blight of the city. The more tourists flock to an engaging or unique locality, the more that locality takes on the environmental qualities of universal tourism, and loses much of what it was. In short, Hirsch argues that ‘conditions of use’ tend to deteriorate as use becomes more widespread. The satisfaction returned from a car or a suburban home depends on the conditions in which they are used, which is strongly influenced by how many others have them. The search for cultural citizenship, on this level, has limits, and becomes involved in paradoxes of overuse.
What Hirsch defines as the scramble to ‘maintain position’ or acquire ‘positional goods’ is not far from one aspect of what we have called the pursuit of cultural citizenship. Positional goods are “goods, services, work positions, and other social relationships” that exist in contexts of scarcity, congestion, or crowding (Ibid.:27) What makes the contemporary situation particularly self-defeating is the predominance of exclusively individual channels through which positional goods are sought. We live in a culture of individualistic advance which has step by step eroded any social conventions or morality which may have counter-balanced the frenzy of self-interested behavior. Adam Smith, according to Hirsch, assumed the existence of a complementary social morality as an integral part of the equilibrium and success of the ‘invisible hand’ economy (Ibid.:137). But modern society has become “a system that depends for its success on a heritage that it undermines” (Ibid.:12).
In an economy which is increasingly ‘positional’, steeped in a culture of individualistic advance, people become excessively preoccupied with money and monetary gain. They are more likely to take uninteresting, high-paying jobs than interesting, low-paying jobs. More and more cash income is needed to maintain status. Time is purchased with money. More and more activities are drawn into the cash nexus. People speak more and more about money in everyday Conversation while economists rewrite the discourse of citizenship into one of consumers and stakeholders.
In a world of individualist calculation and the scramble, sociability and friendliness tend to vanish. They are too time-consuming. Truth, obligation, restraint, responsibility and trust also go on the endangered species list. Much of the playfulness and human contact which remains is in the realm of ‘leisure’ and is sold to us in the form of packaged commodities. “Increasingly, social contact, relaxation and play become bought commodities.”34 Hirsch has clipped from an Oakland, California newspaper – already in 1973 – a magnificent description of a ‘total security environment’ of cultural citizenship: “Only residents with special keys can drive through the four entry gates. Once inside, private underground parking is available. Visitors park outside and enter through lobby doors which are controlled by intercoms to each apartment. The front door of each apartment is equipped with two locks, including a high security deadbolt. Inside the complex, residents and their guests can enjoy nearly four acres of privacy. Islanded in the centre of the lake is a spacious recreation center containing saunas, gym, steam room, tanning-rooms, billiards, fireplace lounge, lockers, color TV, stereo system and a kitchen” (Ibid.:90 n.).
The aspiring cultural citizen has boxed himself into a corner. In indiscriminant pursuit of his own affairs, he has inadvertently constructed a society of the desert. He achieved this dubious feat without knowing too well what a society is or that he was constructing anything.
The Culture of Resolution
A television commercial for Whirlpool washing machines and dryers shows a woman going through the extremely difficult tasks of her daily life. From dawn ’til dusk she has barely a moment of repose. “Sometimes, it seems like the day never ends, and your chores are never done.” She is weary, with a haggard look on her face. The ad arrives at its denouement: “That’s why Whirlpool made its new series of washers and dryers for you!” In other words, the same society which gave you such a hard life then sells you products ‘to make your life easier’.
Fearful of thinking for ourselves, unable to face anxiety, uncertainty and the truth that life is to be invented, we look everywhere for answers and resolution. The culture is only too willing to provide these ‘solutions’. “Objects, and the needs that they imply, exist precisely in order to resolve the anguish of not knowing what one wants” (Baudrillard, 1981:205). My life is reconciled, it has a solution, because I bought “x”. Consumer goods, of course, are exhibited to us under the guise of ‘choice’. But as Derrida notes incisively, “today we are in a region (let us say, provisionally, a region of historicity) where the category of choice seems particularly trivial” (Derrida, 1968:293).
The tragedies and social disintegration represented during the TV news are interrupted by commercials: a catchy jingle, a sexy voice, a stylized presentation, buy this product (or, as a minimum, consume these images) and the problems will be resolved. Products are sold in the name of America (one of our supreme signs of reconciliation). “Buy this Dodge Omni, because America loves it.” The enactment of the news is itself already permeated with resolution. Much of it is concerned with the world of stars, celebrities, new gadgets. The depiction of violence in the city – murder, rapes, subway crimes, heart attacks – is also a form of resolution: as if the malaise of society could be symbolically captured by specific and coded infractions. The presentation of chaos also strengthens and reinforces the viewer’s dependence on the ascribed ‘coherence’ of the media.
The acquisition and accumulation of money as a goal in life is obviously the epitome of a search for resolution. Consider the trajectory of many young people in the seventies-eighties. After exploring many alternatives or ‘paths’, one arrives at the summation: “Well, there’s no answers there. I’ll make money instead.” I study literature, art history, political science, etc … I travel in Europe for a couple of years, work part-time, etc … Heck, I’ll go to Law School. Heck, I’ll go to Dental School, like my father who is a dentist.
Television
The study of television and consumer culture could be revived through the introduction of the concepts of cultural citizenship and the myth of resolution. The mere possession of a television set is an act of cultural citizenship. Baudrillard: “As a certificate of citizenship the TV is a token of recognition, of integration, of social legitimacy… this can be seen in middle (and lower) class interiors, where the TV is enthroned on a sort of pedestal, focusing attention on it as an object” (Baudrillard, 1981:54). Television commercials also offer a vast and largely unexplored territory for cultural critical investigation. All of human history can be resumed and distorted in any five minutes of TV commercials.
Television is also one of the cardinal axes of the contemporary myth of communication. Many people are inclined to believe that television provides immense possibilities of communication. According to Desaulniers, on the contrary, what is offered is a wide diversity of contents coupled with an extreme homogeneity of forms (Desaulniers, 1982). Although the subjects always vary, the forms of presentation remain the same. The heterogeneity of content is routinized. In the United States, television fashions a very strict time-narrative: a cycle of morning shows, afternoon soap operas, ‘reruns’ in the late afternoon, local news, national news, evening ‘prime-time’ shows, late movies, etc… There is also a rigid weekly cycle, and a seasonal cycle (13 weeks of new episodes, followed by ‘reruns,’ etc…) Desaulniers refers to these as ‘cycles of redundancy’. “Television will sell politics, the family, sports, love songs or games, in short, just about anything, provided that it symbolizes communication as the ultimate value of the social” (Ibid.:34). Goethals adds the interesting point that calamities, tragedy and grief are only consistently depicted in serials about the super-rich (Dallas, Dynasty, etc…). In shows about middle-or lower-class families, difficulties in life are tempered by humor and accessible resolution (Goethals, 1981:53).
Stocks and Bonds
In traditional political theory (John Locke, Thomas Hobbes), the idea of landed property and property rights included the notion of possession and appropriation as media for one’s completion as a subject. Property rights were an extension of the self and an arena of individual expression. Today, property has been largely socialized or has passed into the hands of large corporations. The closest we can get to it is through the simulation of buying and selling ‘shares’ on the stock market, trying to anticipate the moves that the majority of other traders and investors will make. One feels no special attachment to the stocks and bonds in one’s portfolio, and the decision to hold shares in a given company has little to do with personal valuation, pride of ownership, or solidarity with other shareholders. People who actually attend annual shareholders’ meetings are usually regarded as eccentrics. We see numbers rearranged on our monthly statement (like on our banking and credit card statements), and feel more secure when the numbers are larger. Simmel perceived the attraction of money as a pure potentiality that has not been actualized, the anticipation of ownership which comes to have its own attraction as abstract form (Simmel. 1900:326-28). But in the era of computerization, we are even a step beyond this abstraction. Like in casino gambling, where the chips ‘belong’ to the player only in the dimmest of ways, credit systems remove the individual from any tactile relationship to money used in an exchange. Transactions take place internally between the computer systems of two or more organizations.
Getting Physical
As private property in the traditional sense recedes and shrinks from view, there is a corresponding inflation of the body (and the psyche) as a semiotically charged arena of meaning and personal salvation. Citizenship, participation, property, solidarity and sociability are all disappearing in favor of a much more confined and restricted variant of self-possession. The contours and limits of one’s estate are now the boundaries of the body and the mythified ‘personal history’. The well-known ‘psychologization’ of society and super marketing of therapies testifies to the decline of any sense of an historical-sociological self. Even the practice of psychoanalysis, which was supposed to bring the individual back into contact with a history larger than himself, has tended to enter the logic of techniques of salvation and the culture of resolution. Its contemporary bent is towards the project of saving the individual from his supposedly demented personal history and restoring the ‘functionality’ of a constituted personality. There is much emphasis on the ‘transference’, and little recognition of traces, absence, and the open structuring of memories as a text. The truth is that the ‘individual’ is little else but history, society, and his family which are inside him as his neuroses, and what he needs is critical consciousness in order to grasp this. Unfortunately, most attempts by the analysand to think critically rather than free associate are dismissed as defenses or ‘resistance’. In spite of growing awareness of the issue of ‘narcissism’, American psychoanalysis has yet to interrogate the myth of the ‘I’ and the confinement of our notion of self within asocial and ahistorical boundaries. Stripped of so much territory, the ‘patient’ is sent out with his patched-up psyche and body to compete in the universal scramble.
In Season Seven episodes of Dallas, Lucy Ewing (Charlene Tilton), grown older and more cunning, has adapted some of the character traits of her notorious uncle, J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman). After a series of disappointing love affairs, Lucy is gradually learning that her natural sweetness and generosity are insufficient capital resources for securing what she wants. She has become more pugnacious and manipulative in the competition for the man she desires. Not only has money become a weapon (like J.R., she offers to ‘keep’ the sexual partner she is wooing), but she has discovered new manipulations of the body. Her poses, her movements, her gaze, her shapely blonde hair, are now all harnessed in a strategy of procurement. Her body has entered the arena of the scramble in full ascendance.
This is an evolution entirely acceptable to the viewers of Dallas. Since J.R.’s finesse and craftiness were the show’s main attraction for years, it is only natural that a female version of him should come forth and that she should be a ripening member of the Ewing clan. Lucy Ewing’s slow discovery of the social uses of the body marks her entrance into the culture of signifiers: in this case, the models of functional eroticism and seduction.
Our bodies are one of the most important fields for the skillful management of citizenship strategies. My body appears to be my private property, just as do my car, my personal computer, and my bank account. The ethos of individualistic advance (Hirsch) is founded on the assumption that the relationship between a person and his physical objects of possession is one solely of property, and not of implication in matrices of social logic and meaning. As a member of this society (a contestant for cultural citizenship), my body is not really mine. It, and my sexuality, belong to a tangled collective history. My body resists or conforms to cultural codes on all levels. I want to look like the actors, actresses, and models on TV, in order to be attractive to others, and to be professionally and sexually ‘successful’.
In an episode of Dallas, Jena Wade (Priscilla Presley) and Rinaldo (her Italian ex-husband who has kidnapped her) are physically struggling in a motel room. Rinaldo desires sexual contact and Jena is resisting. The motel manager, overhearing the sounds of the struggle, comes beating on the door. Immediately, Rinaldo ceases his aggression, approaches the door and informs the manager that everything is all right. He has left the code of conflict and entered the code of a pretended resolution. We are then switched to a commercial for “Sure,” the underarm deodorant: “Be confident! be confident! be dry and secure! Be confident! Raise your hands if you’re Sure!”