Fallacies Intentional and Unintentional

This is my Goodreads review of The War on Music by John Mauceri. It turned into more of a summation of everything I've been churning over for the past several years.

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Scattered amongst the howlers is a story that deserves to be told. Two stars for that story, zero for its rendering here.

This review is both too long and too vague. I blame the bullshit asymmetry principle .

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There are some notes and citations at the end, but really this is a polemical work and not a scholarly one. It is a mad dash on the hamster wheel for Mauceri, who repeatedly stakes out some patch of moral high-ground only to tell on himself later. Even the digression on sour liner notes is recapitulated when, in the acknowledgments, he says, "Many peers have read this manuscript, some of whom were enraged. ... What was hated—and why—taught me a great deal." One can only hope. But for now he has merely doubled down, as any polemicist must.

Richard Maltby—The Dream Factory

Richard Maltby
Harmless Entertainment:
Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus
(1983)

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PART 3

"I'D RATHER HAVE MANDRAKE FALLS"

...

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[146]

CHAPTER 6

THE AMERICAN WAY:
THE EVOLUTION OF A POPULIST ARCHETYPE

"It is not the easy way, but the
American Way, and it was Lin-
coln's way."

Herbert Hoover, radio broad-
cast, February 1931.

"Hip Hooray, The American
Way"--lyrics of "That's Enter-
tainment"

THE DREAM FACTORY

The industry leaders, and in particular the first- and second-generation studio heads, accepted the limitations imposed on their product by the Production Code in large part because they could accommodate these limitations within their own vision of the commodity they dealt in. That vision was the product of three factors which conveniently knitted together and reinforced each other: their attitude towards their audience; their conception of their own role as mediators between that audience and the filmmakers who worked for them; and the set of social and political assumptions which they, as a group, had in common.

The "movie moguls"--the small group of men who brought "Hollywood" into being and dominated the studio system from the 1920s to the beginnings of its decline--shared a narrow perspective on the expectations of their audience. The commercial nature of their product dictated that they seek to appeal to the widest possible spectrum, and in attempting to do so they assumed that there existed a broad consensus of taste little affected by regional or class varia-

[147]

tion. Part of their marketing conservatism was the result of their low estimation of their audience's flexibility. Commercial experience, however, confirmed the validity of this assumption. Although Sticks might occasionally Nix Hick Pix, box-office failures and successes did not, in the main, vary greatly from region to region, while the available surveys indicated that movies attracted all socioeconomic groups. The economic need to appeal to the undifferentiated mass audience was reinforced by the profitable success of that appeal and, once established as a credo, it became almost impossible to challenge. The studios conducted little research into the composition of their audience because there seemed no need for it.

Richard Maltby—Story as the Cheapest Form of Novelty

Richard Maltby
Harmless Entertainment:
Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus
(1983)

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[26]

THE CANNING BUSINESS

"After all, pictures are shipped
out in cans. We're in the can-
ning business."
Sammy Glick

... "There is ever present the obligation to entertain those who pay the price for what they believe will be entertainment." [Joseph] Breen's job was to ensure that Hollywood produced "entertainment which tends to improve the race, or at least to recreate and rebuild human beings exhausted with the realities of life."

As well as this prescription, the movies were also expected to contain a number of known or anticipated ingredients, which can be characterized in several ways. In fulfilling its "obligation to entertain" the Hollywood movie had, like any other non-durable consumer product, to meet certain standards of quality. Predictable quality was indicated by the same criteria as might be employed by a manufacturer of canned food: the reputation of the producing company's brand name (MGM, Warner Brothers), and the quality of the product's ingredients (starring Cary Grant and Jean Arthur, [etc.]...) Commercially, film, like canned food, required that its customers could anticipate enjoying it by contemplating the mixture of known and reliable ingredients.

On the other hand, while one can's contents should taste exactly like another's, a film needed to present at least the illusion of being distinct from every other film. Even the most formularized B-film entailed a separate act of production and had to supply its spectator/consumers with an element of novelty to keep them engaged in its consumption, as well as the predictable ingredients which would initially lure them to the cinema. Advertising slogans often sought to make this joint appeal. ...

[27]

... Campaigns mounted around a star... offered the audience a novel experience from a familiar, reliable source, an idea perhaps most concisely expressed in the advertisements for Ninotchka, which simply announced, "Garbo laughs."

Richard Maltby—The Cinematic Contract

Richard Maltby
Harmless Entertainment:
Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus
(1983)

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PART 1

THE CRAP-GAME

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CHAPTER 1

TAKING HOLLYWOOD FOR GRANTED

...

[10]

...

"MOVIES ARE YOUR BEST ENTERTAINMENT"

(Industry promotional slogan of early 1950, hastily with-
drawn when it was pointed out that its initials spelt
M. A. Y. B. E.)

What do you go for, go see a
show for?"--lyrics to Dames

entertainment is a type of
performance produced for pro-
fit, performed before a gener-
alised audience (the "public"),
by a trained, paid group who
do nothing else but produce
performances which have the
sole (conscious) aim of pro-
viding pleasure.

Richard Dyer

The American cinema was a commercial institution, and its films were commercial products. Any assessment of those products must acknowledge this economic fact of

[11]

life, and not merely because Hollywood took an industrial attitude to its own activities. Film, by its very nature, proposes a symbiotic relationship between the commercial and the aesthetic . It exists simultaneously in two states. Materially, it is a roll of celluloid, wound onto a metal spool and stored in a tin can. In use, it is a progressive series of "moving pictures, " evanescent shadow images projected onto a blank white screen. Unlike books or paintings, film undergoes a material transformation when it is viewed or experienced. This transformation is engineered by a combination of mechanical and optical processes needing complex projection equipment as well as a large space across which the magnified image is thrown. The economics of these material prerequisites forcibly encourage film to project itself before as large an audience as possible. The evolution of viewing apparatus, from the Kinetoscope and peepshow to the nickelodeon, picture palace and Cinerama, traces a history and an economic logic of larger pictures projected in front of larger audiences. The institution of the cinema is first of all a physical institution of the buildings in which it takes place.

Franco Moretti—Planet Hollywood

Franco Moretti
Planet Hollywood

in the 1920s American films were already enjoying a worldwide hegemony: what brought it to a halt was the invention of sound, which elevated language into a powerful barrier, supporting the quick take-off of the various national film industries. The abrogation of language in action films is a powerful factor in turning the tide around.

...

relatively speaking, comedies do not travel well. ...since jokes and many other ingredients of comedy rely heavily on short circuits between signifier and signified, they are weakened by translation—and indeed comic films reached the apex of their world diffusion long ago, before the age of sound.

...

we usually associate the national spirit with the sublime (et pour cause: unknown soldiers, torn flags, battlefields, martyrs . . .) yet, what makes a nation laugh turns out to be just as distinctive as what makes it cry. If not more distinctive, in fact: the same sublime objects reappear relentlessly from one culture to another, whereas the targets of comic aggression seem to be much more idiosyncratic, more variable.

...

In the mid-fifties, not a single film for children made Variety’s top twenty for the year, with the only possible exceptions of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days: both children’s films in a very dubious sense (and both drawn from nineteenth-century French novels...

Today, the top twenty routinely includes four or five children’s films, and the reason, I suspect, is quite simple: money. These films are more successful because much more money is spent on children’s entertainment. But this extra income is not available everywhere, and the result is the skewed distribution of Figure 4, where the (relative) absence of the genre tends to overlap with the poverty of each given country. ...

‘Children’s films’ is a sloppy definition, of course: it points to the audience, not the film—and to an audience which is moreover quite problematic. Children, after all, don’t usually go to the movies by themselves and, as adults must take them, a little generic paradox ensues: whom should the film be for—the adult, or the child? Faced with this problem, the fifties offered either straightforward fairy tales...or those Jules Verne novels I mentioned earlier (which were much more successful than the fairy tales: another sign of a market directed at the adult). But today the two forms have converged, blending into a hybrid which appeals to children and adults alike...—these are stories designed for a new human species of savvy children and silly grown-ups (Homo puerilis). Their god is Steven Spielberg...

In one film after another...Spielberg has not only chosen stories in which children and adults are somehow involved together, but where the ambiguities so typical of (adult) life are defused by the (child’s) desire for polarization so well described by Bruno Bettelheim.

Linda Nochlin—The Paterson Strike Pageant

Linda Nochlin
"The Paterson Strike Pageant"
(orig. 1974)

in

Making It Modern: Essays on the Art of the Now
ed. Aruna D'Souza
(2022)
pp. 368-376

[372] A combination of visual spectacle and dramatic performance, the pageant can weld together two seemingly disparate forces, the subject and object of the dramatic metaphor. In reenactments like the Paterson Strike Pageant, the "actors" remain themselves yet at the same time play their roles as symbols of broader issues. In the same way, the farm laborers in Hitler's Nuremburg Rally of 1934 played—and were—themselves but at the same time stood for the masses of agricultural workers throughout the country. In like manner, the vast crowds that reenacted in Moscow in 1919 the storming of the Winter Palace were revolutionaries themselves yet also played the role of vaster revolutionary Russian forces.

For leaders of revolutionary movements, as well as for ideologues consciously or unconsciously intent on maintaining the status quo, the pageant was a potent weapon in forging a sense of communal identity for the hitherto inarticulate and unselfconscious lower classes. A pageant could function in the realm of participatory dramatic action rather in the way Diego Rivera's Mexican murals did in the realm of public visual art: to
[373]
forge a sense of contemporary purpose, self-identity and social cohesion out of a vivid recapitulation of historical fact heightened by symbolism.

But the pageant was also a unique political instrument in another way: the effects it had on the performers were as important as those it had on the audience. This can be said of no other performance art form.

I know not which esoteric usages are appealed to by effects, important, and performance art form, but this appears on its surface to be an absurd statement. Some effect is all but assured by most any performance. The question is not one of evidence or absence of effect; rather it is a question of control, of what in admin-speak has come to be known as Measurable Outcomes, without which not even another Paterson Pageant could get the attention of either the institutional art world or the "radicals" who ostensibly aim to countervail its power.

In the case of the Paterson Strike Pageant, the choice of significant incidents—...and the dramatic simplification and compression of events which may have been unclear when experienced in actuality—all made the striking workers conscious of the meaning of what they had lived through.

Later, Golin would emphasize this point even more forcefully. But he insists with equal vehemence that events were hardly unclear to the workers as these events were experienced in actuality.

At such a distance, now, from these events, and thus relying on "secondary" sources to form a yet more tenuous "tertiary" account, the distinction between general morale boosting and making people conscious of the meaning of what they had lived through could be meaningless. It may be lost to history. That much being granted, Intellectual history is both more amenable to continual revision and closer to my own concerns here anyway. And so as a matter of nothing more or less than Intellectual History, this drift from morale-boosting to consciousness-raising does seem worth noting.

This is above all an epistemological concern: often we realize only too late what we should have said or done; but also, we distort memories beyond any semblance of truth pretty much from the moment they are formed. Literary thought elevates the clarifying potential of hindsight to the status of an unquestioned and unquestionable virtue, of an assured result (think control again); but it fails to reckon (quite willfully, I think) with the distortive streak. It is often unclear, at least to me, just what it is that distinguishes the quotidian distortion of memory (surely a "motivated" distortion) from the production of "literature," aside from the packaging.

This is how activist litterateurs make their own beds and then become reluctant to lie in them. It is less literature itself than the activist imperative overlaid on it, here and elsewhere, which forces the epistemological issue; this because the concrete purpose of the activist demands concrete methods rather than experimental ones. And it is the dissonance between the thesis that workers were the strike leaders, on one hand, and the thesis that events may have been unclear to workers as they were unfolding in real time, on the other, which indicates, in fact, a substantial difference in interpretation even where the later author has exalted the earlier author and turned to her for support.

The fact that Nochlin is utterly unafraid of inviting comparison with Nazi and Soviet productions is at least a welcome preemption of the most tenuous, puritanical, animistic objections that might be raised against certain performing arts. But it also railroads us into judging these "participatory" artworks by our agreement or disagreement with their political orientation, and by little else. This is indeed a new kind of art, though there has been political art before. And it is only now, I think, with the long-awaited penetration of the mainstream entertainment industry by an activist ethic that is self-conscious, totalizing, and surface-oriented, with a supersession of unspoken ideology by loudly proclaimed ideological stances, it is only now that we can have an informed rather than merely speculative conversation, beyond the thick walls of academia or the paper-thin ones of industry, as to whether this is something that we really need or want; of whether we are better or worse off (or perhaps merely the same!) this way. I expect that "epistemology" will continue to play no role whatsoever in these discussions, and that this will be the reason why they continue to go nowhere helpful. But epistemology is the question here, and unlike history's lost secrets it will not disappear simply for not being spoken of.

Lasch—Theatrical Possibilites

Christopher Lasch
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(1991)

[336]
The social conditions that generated the syndicalist explosion in Europe—the imposition of industrialism on economies still dominated by small workshops, a highly combustible mixture—had their nearest American equivalent in the West, where the traditions of the mining camp, the logging camp, and the bankhouse came face to face with corporate capitalism in its most ruthless, predatory form. The IWW was the direct descendant of the Western Federation of Miners, a union that ap-
[337]
pealed to the same sense of manly independence and the same love of combat to which syndicalism appealed in France and Italy. Here too, workers experienced industrialism and the wage system not only as a decline in their standard of living but above all as a drastic infringement of their control of the workplace, of their very status as free men. The company towns that sprang up in the mining states seemed to make "wage slavery" a literal description of the new order, not just a rhetorical analogy. The company controlled not only the workplace but housing, credit, and all the other necessaries. The worker who could remember life as a prospector or cowboy now found that he owed his soul to the company store. He felt literally sold into slavery, and he embraced the philosophy of "direct action" as the only way out.

While social conditions in the West bore some resemblance to those created by the early stages of industrialism elsewhere, the cultural tradition that workers were trying to defend obviously differed from those that underlay European syndicalism. In the American West, the ideal of independence was associated not with the small proprietor's control over his household, his land or shop, and his tools but with the wandering life of the unattached male. It was not surprising that the IWW glorified the hobo, the drifter, the "nomadic worker of the West," in the words of its newspaper, Solidarity. The West was still a "man's country," according to Charles Ashleigh, an English radical who emigrated to the Pacific Northwest and became a "hobo and a Wobbly," like the hero of his novel, Rambling Kid. Ashleigh admired the "reckless rambling boys who despised the soft security and comfort of a dull city-paced existence." Ralph Chaplin, the Wobbly poet and songwriter, was attracted to the movement by its "glamorous courage and adventure," which he too associated with the West. Those who admired the Wobblies from a distance likewise emphasized its western origins. The Lawrence strike was a "western strike in the East," Lincoln Steffens wrote; "a strike conducted in New England by western miners, who have brought here the methods and the spirit employed by them in Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada.

European syndicalism was informed by an austere ethic of thrift and self-denial. In America, the syndicalist movement came to be associated with an ethic of self-expression and defiant irresponsibility—the new "paganism" of Greenwich Village. Literary intellectuals saw the Wobblies as cultural outcasts like themselves, free spirits, rebels against re-
[338]
spectability. They sensed the affinity between their own ideal of the emancipated individual, unburdened by the cultural baggage of the past, and the hoboes and migratory workers glorified by the IWW. Having absorbed from modern literature an image of the "beauty of the essentially homeless and childless and migratory life," as Floyd Dell put it, they recognized the Wobblies as soul mates. "Anarchism and art," said Margaret Anderson, editor of the Little Review, "are in the world for exactly the same kind of reason." Hutchins Hapgood, the personification of the bohemian intellectual, called anarchism the fine art of the proletariat. He compared the Armory Show, which brought modern art to New York in 1913, to a "great fire, an earthquake, or a political revolution."

The Wobblies did not object to this assimilation of art and revolution. They too saw themselves as artists. "I have lived like an artist, and I shall die like an artist," said Joe Hill before his execution for murder. Bill Haywood allowed himself to be lionized by Mabel Dodge and other members of her famous salon. He regarded the Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913—the fruit of his rapprochement between the IWW and Greenwich Village—as the high point of his career. Conceived by Mabel Dodge, the pageant was intended to dramatize the workers' exploitation by capitalism, but it exposed them to a more insidious kind of exploitation by turning radical politics into entertainment. "Life passed over insensibly into a certain, simple form of art," said Hapgood. ". . . That is the great thing about it, the almost unpredecented thing." Papers opposed to the IWW gave the pageant enthusiastic reviews: what was condemned as politics could be savored as theater. Both Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the IWW's most flamboyant orator, had earlier turned down invitations to put themselves on the lecture circuit or stage. In her case, the offer came from no less an impressario than David Belasco, who could see the theatrical possibilities of revolutionary activism as clearly as John Reed. At the pageant, Reed led the Paterson strikers in a song he had written for the occasion, "The Haywood Thrill." Haywood thus resisted the lecture agents only to fall into the clutches of the avant-garde, leaving Flynn to wonder whether the distractions of the pageant had not contributed to the defeat of the strike itself.

Two Thoughts on Woke Casting

(1) A special complication arises from the conceit to establishing vocational role models by showing the target audience actors who "look like them" in those roles: flooding film and TV with Black actors also reinforces the message that entertainment careers are more open to Black people than are other kinds of careers, which is one of the oldest and most pernicious "messages" American culture has been sending to Black people this whole time.

(2) Casting is and was always inherently unfair. Woke casting is not more or less fair than casting ever was. What's different about woke casting is not its fairness or unfairness but the fact that it is talked about openly and virtuously, even in the eye of the hurricane. For those thus located, this makes it divisive on a day-to-day, person-to-person level. (I am relating past and ongoing experience here, not conjecture.) So, whatever new society we're birthing this way, it seems the talent won't be sharing in it. Seemingly arbitrary acceptance or rejection is, as it turns out, a far stronger basis for esprit de corps. Arbitrariness is a kind of rugged equality, hardly the ideal kind, but closer to it than what is unfolding right now.

Facts and Fancy

(from my Goodreads review of Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 by Nicholas Sammond)

The overall posture and style of this study are so self-consciously disinterested and relativistic as to read like a caricature of postmodern academic writing. This pastiche has lost not merely its sense of humor but its sense of purpose too. The fear of letting a stray value judgment slip out seems to have stultified the author's analytical capabilities. And yet values per se are largely what the study is about. The superficial irony of this is plain enough, but I think it is more than ironic. It is at least mildly disingenuous. In some respects it is cowardly.

The disinterested empirical scholar is discouraged from bringing their own values into the mix because disinterested empiricism cannot, by its own inner logic, operate that way. This book stumbles its way into a subdiscipline where disinterested empiricism is thought to be especially de rigeur but where it is actually quite inadequate. Sammond repeatedly invokes something like "the dominant presence of members of the white, Protestant, progressive middle class in the study of childhood." (7) He repeatedly names and specifies these agents of institutionalized moralization, repeatedly inviting us to consider them by profession, race, and class. Their work, he tells us, was profoundly shaped by classbound values. The fact of classboundedness and the identity of the classes in question are unequivocally named and reiterated. But Sammond seldom names the values themselves, and when he does name them I found it difficult to conjure much righteous indignation.

I do not wish to suggest that there actually is a universal morality. That is not what I believe. I don't think you have to believe it, though, to trip up on the idea that "truthfulness" and "unselfishness" are "middle-class virtues" (85) which cannot be reasonably expected of other classes. To me that sounds a lot like, say, reading being a White thing. Sammond himself probably believes no such things, but he is not allowed to say so, because this is scholarship and mere opinions aren't worth anything. The hubris of progressive sociologists, on the other hand, is an objective fact which can be presented as such, for if there is no universal morality then all progressivism is just a stillborn moral fallacy. Even "truthfulness" cannot mooch a provisional exemption. Truthfulness!

Naturally, the chickens of relativism roost in the hencoop of hypocrisy. What are the moral implications of accommodating the actions of a dishonest or selfish poor person? Does this help them or hurt them? Is it justified merely by the fact that they are poor and you are rich? By the right to cultural self-determination? Liberty? Consequentialism? Echoing overzealous committees everywhere, Sammond could claim that these properly philosophical questions are beyond the scope of his social-scientific study. I agree that they threaten to explode any such study into an unwieldy interdisciplinary patchwork; but I would strongly disagree that they are, literally, outside his scope. His own methods have made these questions essential to his scope and he makes no effort to acknowledge or address this. Instead, the really important takeaway is that most of the reformers were white, Protestant, progressive, and middle-class, whereas not all of their objects were these same things. As it turns out, this is not quite worth writing a book about.

Reformers of any slant in any area of human endeavor are vulnerable to the charge that they have put forth their own values as universal ones. Without this fundamental arrogation there can be no collective social action of any kind. The mere fact of arrogation is endemic, background radiation to the perceptible heat and light of social and political life. The arrogation of reformers is not an urgent sociological issue. What is urgent, I think, and what could have been pursued more doggedly here, is a compelling chronicle of the dynamic interaction between values and institutions. Strictly speaking, the thesis that "discursive circuits constructed around and through media-effect arguments sell products and build careers" (360) does describe a dynamic process, but it begs a lot of questions too. My sense is that Sammond forbid himself as a matter of methodology from opining, judging or blaming, and that by proscribing these things he railroaded himself into a static account rather than a dynamic one. (When your first order of business is to name the race and religion of the principals, it's hard to say much of anything more without offending.)

I also am not convinced, either by this account or by others, that the interaction between the Disney Studio and the reformers Sammond identifies was truly dynamic until quite late in the period he covers. In amongst all of the imbrication and commodification, I noticed that the dates, types and sources of the documents he reproduces throughout the book support my skepticism. Concerned parents created the market and Disney, eventually, seized on it. But Disney already had an enormous market, and progressives had a lot of ideas which were oblique to Disney and to media generally. Following academic convention, Sammond takes a laser-focus on the tiny area of overlap. It turns out there is not nearly as much for him to write about as the length of the book would imply.

If you don't already know something about the reformers Sammond chronicles, you still won't have much of an idea of what their values actually were after reading his book. He detects that the progressives have unduly assumed at least one non-working, stay-at-home parent, a luxury which many working class and immigrant families didn't enjoy; and he points out that child labor has persisted in agriculture (and disproportionately among children of color) long after progressives had more or less succeeded in abolishing it for white children. These are sobering reminders for white, middle-class readers; they are nonetheless quite underwhelming in the role Sammond has carved out for them here, where the towering monoliths of American Sociology, Enterprise, and Entertainment have collided in a giant orgy of...what exactly?

"Truthfulness" and "unselfishness" arise in the discussion of Disney's Pinocchio. It is the natural film for Sammond to discuss, since its overbearing didactic moralism stands out even in the Disney oeuvre. Yet transparent texts can be difficult to handle, and Sammond breaks everything he touches. With so much threadbare symbolism sitting right on the surface (Stromboli is literally a puppetmaster), Sammond cannot possibly work his way back to "middle-class values" without committing an act of interpretation. He has previously been too vague about values, whereas this film is explicit about them. Sontag warned us about this: "to interpret is to impoverish." Disinterested empiricism has taken him as far as it can, and now it is his turn to recapitulate in reverse the error of media effects crusaders by projecting upon the text the social location of those most eager to consume it. Consumer eagerness now engulfs the text from without, metastasizing into its organs of content and meaning. Suddenly it is not Edward Filene or Walt Disney but Sammond himself who has elevated consumption to a moral value! Buy a film and you become its content! And its content you! It's cheaper than the naming rights to a distant star or atoll! Hence a fleeting indulgence in armchair criticism is the precise moment when things go off the rails for good, whereby "truthfulness" becomes "middle-class," whereby poor people's untruthfulness is locked away in the black box of cultural self-determination, whereby Pinocchio cannot reflect the values of a solitary poor person unless all of the other poor people are also lining up to view it. Not just a filmic text is impoverished this way but also the "virtue" of everyone who is not "middle-class." That is quite an accomplishment.

I'm not a critic or a sociologist, but I feel like there has to be a better way to go about this. Fromm defined ideologies as "socially patterned rationalizations." Say we take those three concepts, pair them into three dyads, and then study each dyadic nexus; each one generates a limited but salient field of material which is relevant to our topic, and also a sprawling field of extradisciplinary connections. Given the organic limits of human cognition and the profusion of published research, each of the outward-facing fields is functionally unbounded; but they are perfectly finite in number (there are three of them), and this makes it possible at least to momentarily stare into each abyss and admire what makes it unique from the others and from the original topic. Then we return to the inside, reassemble the triad, and look for the triadic nexus. A geometric analogy to planes, dimensions and wormholes suggests itself. This is just silly stuff I think about, but it seems to me that this book has done none of this nor anything remotely resembling it. It is not even a one-dimensional sociology, because it has not even the first prerequisite for the dimensionalization of sociological thought, namely a sentient authorial being. The strict repression of authorial slant in this area of scholarship is quite ironic given one of Sammond's key takeaways from the inconclusiveness of Media Effects research: even children do not simply swallow whole everything they are told or exposed to. I think we can assume this of readers of scholarly publications as well. A profusion of value-oriented scholarship could actually be the best way to achieve the "parallactic" ideal that some postmodernists have put forth, whereby observation from a variety of angles permits a clearer view than any single one of them can alone. The first step towards that ideal is not to give up on fixed moral positions but rather to stake them out. A moral position can be the second point which defines a line of inquiry. This poses methodological challenges, to be sure, but there is a payoff for surmounting those challenges, a payoff with which studies like Sammond's cannot compete. Fromm and Maccoby made a blind stab in this direction which is simultaneously comical and profound: they constructed numerical scales of psychoanalytically-defined traits by which to measure the Mexican villagers they studied, they took the measurements (basically they made them up), and they performed some conventional statistical analysis of these figures to look for Results. To a self-loathing postmodernist this looks like pure arbitrary slant, the methodological equivalent of intentionally exceeding the speed limit at first sight of a cop. My contention is that if hundreds or thousands of diverse minds were to construct their own numerical scales and take their own "measurements," the aggregated results would be as meaningful as the minds are diverse. (This diversity would need to be more than skin-deep.) Against this backdrop, Sammond's approach looks like another fruitless search for perfect objectivity, distance, disinterest. If the slant is always there anyway, we might as well turn it to our advantage.

At great semantic and rhetorical pains, Sammond does eventually work his way around to some interesting big-picture theses about commodities and the social construction of childhood. For reformers and parents alike, the erroneous belief in strong media effects

"smoothes over some unpleasant contradictions in the construction of personhood and identity in democratic capitalist society. Quite simply: the child as susceptible to commodities stands in for the child as commodity-in-the-making...[whereby] persons must be simultaneously and impossibly unique individuals and known quantities." (360)

Ay, that's the stuff! But by this time the sins of omission are piled high, reflected in the endnotes by a veritable profusion of beyond-the-scope apologias which I literally lost count of. I'm reasonably sure I have never seen so many in one place, actually, and I think that is a singularly meaningful reflection on the nexus of topic and method here.