john andrews, stagflation, virtuosity and other ambivalences

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John Andrews aa Department of Sociology, Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA

Andrews, John(2009) 'Stagflation, virtuosity and other ambivalences', Women & Performance: ajournal of feminist theory, 19: 2, 173 186

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Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory

Vol. 19, No. 2, July 2009, 173186

Stagflation, virtuosity and other ambivalences

John Andrews*

Department of Sociology, Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA

This essay investigates emotional and affective dimensions to social lifethat emerge in the early period of neoliberalism. In consideration of thefilms Five Easy Pieces; Alice Doesnt Live Here Anymore, and McCabe andMrs. Miller, I argue that negative affects such as depression, fear, anxiety,and cynicism not only reflect reconfigurations of selfhood engendered byneoliberalism but also present the possibility for new modes of sociality.Drawing on the work of Paolo Virno, I suggest that virtuosity thecapacity to perform allows neoliberal subjects to navigate the emotionalsituation emergent from dynamic changes in the economy, politics, andculture.

Keywords: affect; Alice Doesnt Live Here Anymore; ambivalence;emotional situation; Five Easy Pieces, McCabe and Mrs. Miller;neoliberalism; Paulo Virno; stagflation; virtuosity

The diner scene in Bob Rafelsons 1970 film Five Easy Pieces has become iconic

in American cinema for its portrait of youthful rebellion: Robert Dupea, played

by Jack Nicholson, wants a side-order of toast with his omelet, violating theNo Substitutions rule clearly stated on the menu. The waitress, unwavering,

reminds him that she does not make the rules and that he will have to choose from

the menu. Frustrated that she will not oblige what seems to be a rather ordinary

request, Dupea maneuvers around the rule by ordering a sandwich on toast,

requesting that she omit everything except the toast. Astonished, she asks him what

to do with the omitted chicken, to which he replies, Hold it between your legs!

Furious, the waitress asks Dupea and his friends to leave, since they have violated yet

another rule forbidding unruly behavior, posted clearly on a sign above the counter.

In a violent tantrum, Dupea sweeps the table of its dishes and silverware and they

leave the diner.The diner scene is remembered most often as symbolizing youthful revolt against

the arbitrary rules and norms of the older generation. While evocative of a social

imagination that champions resistance against injustice and inequality, I argue that

it and other films of the period presents the emotional situation of a society at

the cusp of upheavals that manifest less as social protest so much as affective

vicissitudes. For example, in arguing with the waitress over the toast, Dupea assumes

that he is entitled to his specific choices in life at his whim, ones that cannot be

*Email: [email protected]

ISSN 0740770X print/ISSN 17485819 online

2009 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/07407700903034154

http://www.informaworld.com


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delivered within the micro-economy of the diner. Resultingly, Dupea is not rebellious

so much as he is sarcastic, frustrated, cynical, angry, and finally disappointed

sentiments expressed largely by verbally bullying and humiliating the waitress.

But of course, his effort is feeble and the conflict is not resolved. He doesnt get

his toast.

This scene provides a small window into the psychic and affective tonalityof recent history. In particular, the 1970s period has become increasingly decisive

for understanding the dramatic social, economic, political, and cultural transfor-

mations of the last three decades. David Harvey cites the 1970s as the time from

which contemporary neoliberal doctrine would emerge. The notion that a well-

functioning market will deliver wealth and well-being began to reign among

academic economists, conservative think tanks, and politicians, requiring the

dismantlement of any state fetters to free trade and private property. In turn,

individuals would become free to realize their entrepreneurial potential but

would also be responsible for their personal welfare, however successful. While

Harvey and others have delineated the political, economic, and ideological historiesof neoliberalism, the affective dimensions to these histories (and to history more

generally) remain relatively under-theorized. This lack is especially curious given the

emphasis on the individual within neoliberal doctrine.

Drawing on the theoretical work of Italian Marxist Paolo Virno and his concept

of the emotional situation, my interest here is to explore how depression, malaise,

cynicism, and other negative sentiments figure into the fabric of social and cultural

life in the 1970s. I argue that these affective positions are fundamentally ambivalent,

presenting ways of thinking history that avoid both a totalizing ideological critique

or an inadvertent reproduction of the autonomous individual subject that

neoliberalism seeks to uphold and preserve. By choosing to analyze popular film,I am not interested in providing an exhaustive survey or necessarily to contribute

to film theory; rather, I read film here in order to tap-in to the mood of an era.

Given this, my three texts (Five Easy Pieces, Alice Doesnt Live Here Anymore, and

McCabe and Mrs. Miller) were not chosen to be representative of all of 1970s film

or necessarily to be in dialogue with one another, but again to lend insights into how

affects figure in to the fabric of recent history.1

Stagflation

Five Easy Pieces presents an affecting portrait of unhappiness and dissatisfaction.Robert Dupea toils daily in the Southern California oil fields, escaping the drudgery

of his life with booze and womanizing. We soon discover however that Dupea hails

from a family of classical musicians in Washington State and that he too was once

a promising young pianist. When Dupea learns of his fathers impending death

and decides to visit him, the film unfolds as a series of contrasts between his two

lives. His working-class world of manual labor, bowling allies, and loose women

diverges starkly with the bourgeois, intellectual life of his family. He is ashamed

of his sweet but ditsy waitress girlfriend Rayette after becoming enamored with

his brothers fiance e, the sensitive and sophisticated Catherine. Most saliently,

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the deafening noise of traffic jams, industrial equipment, crying babies, and blasting

televisions as well as the twang of Tammy Wynette songs fade away into classical

music and the quiet serenity of the familys pastoral estate. After visiting his father

one last time, Dupea hitches a ride with a trucker to Alaska, abruptly leaving behind

his car, his clothes, his girlfriend Rayette, and the rest of his life.

Although it appeared several years before the end of the Vietnam War, the

Watergate scandal, or the economic recession precipitated by the OPEC embargo,

Five Easy Pieces captures what Virno calls the emotional situation of its era. For

Virno, the emotional situation refers to pervasive feelings emergent in multiple

contexts, the ubiquitous tonality of sentiments that connect work, leisure, and

politics, in addition to individual feelings (see Virno 1996 and 2004). What is striking

most about Dupeas depression in the film is that it is not predicated on loss or lack;

he has no external constraints consigned by the state or market. Rather, his life is

characterized by the surfeit of possibilities given to him in life, an option to reject

love, opportunity, or stability in favor of constant movement. As described above,

even the famous diner scene in which Dupea maneuvers around the no-substitutionsrule in attempt to get what he wants (a side-order of toast) showcases not rebellion

against arbitrary authority so much as brazen entitlement.

Dupeas malaise stems from his desire for individuation, but also from the very

openness and flexibility that he is afforded to realize himself. While he possesses the

capacity and freedom for self-actualization, he finds himself only suffocated and

confused by it. This sort of ambivalence anticipates the emotional situation of the

economic and political landscape indexed today in theories of late capitalism, post-

Fordism, and neoliberalism. David Harvey, for instance, cites the early 1970s as

a key moment when the existing economic order began to break down. Along with

a general recession in production, the abandonment of fixed exchange rates andthe OPEC oil embargo rendered old modes of capital accumulation increasingly

obsolete. Whereas post-war capitalism had flourished through steady expansion,

coupled with social safety nets to smooth out business cycles, the extraction of

surplus for capital in the 1970s begins to thrive on flexibility with respect to

labour processes, labour markets, products and patterns of consumption (Harvey

1990, 147), the ability to produce and cater to rapidly changing and individuated

tastes, and even risk and unpredictability in financial markets.2 In this context of

generalized flexibility, discourses of freedom collapse individual life choices into

a seemingly unburdened, economic calculus for self-realization.3

A key concept for interpreting the emotional situation of this period is stagflation.Predicted by Keynesian economic theory,4 stagflation describes the economic malaise

of stagnant production coupled with high inflation and unemployment.5 The term

was politicized in the 1970s not only to explain why the economy was flailing but

also to mobilize numerous courses of action. In economics and politics, stagflation

doubles as a diagnostic and as an open container for marking multiple events.

It signifies impending crisis but also becomes the political alert to such crisis,

accumulating compounded meanings as its own event unfolds. More generally,

stagflation is simultaneous activity and paralysis. Read through the character

of Robert Dupea, stagflation could be utilized here to think about a kind of

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unhappiness, depression, and dissatisfaction that is characterized by indeterminacy

and excess. Dupea is not depressed about any one thing, but rather becomes

depressed by living.

Developing this thought around the affective components of stagflation may

seem a capricious use (or misuse) of terminology. It is worth noting here, though,

that one of the primary ways that the set of policies and production practices

identified with neoliberalism and post-Fordism has come into place is through the

work of private think tanks and academic economists who could successfully

bracket the economy into a relatively discrete, technologizable category. Critics

such as Lisa Duggan demonstrate that a significant consequence of this has been

to impart authority to specialized experts for addressing what appear to be the

technical (rather than political, social or cultural) issues of economic life (Duggan

2004). Whats more, she points out, is that left-oriented politics often reproduces

this notion of the autonomous economy by battling internally over the universalism

of economic inequality versus the particularities of gender, race and sex. Even as

perceptive a critic as Harvey participates in this dead-end discourse by going sofar as to suggest that identity movements narcisstically contributed to neoliberal

hegemony by obscuring in the 1970s and 1980s the real reconfigurations that

were taking place around class (Harvey 2005). By opening up for consideration and

analysis the affective currents that link up production, emergent knowledge

formations (in fields like economics), and lived history, I hope to integrate

explicitly the economic and the cultural so that we can further understand and

demystify the important social transformations that have taken place since the

1970s and continue to trouble us today. It is in this context that I am employing

the term stagflation.

As a concept and an event, stagflation connects the material and the affective.For example, economists theorize that stagflation occurs when a supply shock of

a vital resource drives up the cost of production, in turn slowing output and raising

the overall price of goods. Of course in the period of the 1970s, the October 1973

OPEC embargo bottlenecked as economists say the supply of oil. Importantly,

images of oil bookend Five Easy Pieces: in the opening scene of drills and pumps in

the oil fields, and in the final, lingering shot of the gas station where Rayette has been

abandoned as Dupea heads to the final frontier of Alaska. And while Dupeas

reality is consistently framed by oil in some way (at work in the fields or in traffic

and on the road), the significance of oil as a source of energy especially one

that is imminently exhaustible points to how vitality, vigor, inertia, fatigue, orreplenishment become affective dimensions to stagflation. In a key scene toward the

end of the film, Dupea confesses to his dying father that: I dont know if youd be

particularly interested in hearing anything about me, my life doesnt add up to

anything much to the kind of life you would approve of. . . I move around a lot. Not

because Im looking for anything really, but because Im getting away from things

that get bad if I stay. Auspicious beginnings, you know what I mean? Dupea

understands that his life is about stopping and starting up again, depletion and

ignition, a kind of stunted-ness that is paradoxically exemplified in movement.

Dupeas father, however, doesnt exactly approve or disapprove here, since his

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multiple strokes have rendered him incapable of speech. It is an entirely one-sided

conversation.

Although he perceives his life as so very difficult and trying, the other people

in Robert Dupeas life his buddy Billy; Rayette, his brother; Catherine view his

series of auspicious beginnings as merely easy choices for him, ones in which the

consequences of his action (or non-action as it may be) seem negligible. He is, after

all, a virtuoso, just one who refuses to perform. Yet for him, this virtuosity this

capacity to perform is also a source of his depression, the reminder that he is not

performing or only successfully in bowling, cards, and ping-pong. For Virno,

virtuosity is a key category for understanding the post-Fordist emotional situation.

He describes virtuosity as an activity which finds its own fulfillment in itself, but

one requiring the presence of others (Virno 2004, 52). In other words, virtuosos

need an audience because there is no specific end product to their performances.

As ability to perform but an ability that is indeterminate, virtuosity becomes

the individual (and collective) capabilities that refuse or exceed constraints like

stagflation stagflation as both an abstract economic condition and an individuallylived feeling.

Virno uses the term virtuosity to characterize the nature of flexible and

immaterial labor, but also to suggest how sentiments themselves are put to work.

In Five Easy Pieces, Dupeas depression represents an ongoing labor, in which he

must occupy and move around between multiple, often divergent roles the blue-

collar Joe, the classical pianist, the good son, boyfriend, and brother. Significantly,

this virtuosic labor happens in the film as a series of interactions with and often

abuse of women. For example, his girlfriend Rayette gives him love and concern,

returned by him with sarcastic remarks, cheating with other women, hiding her away

in a motel room while he visits his family, and ultimately abandonment. As she saysto him, I am not a piece of crap but you treat me like a wife. In later scenes, the

young, lesbian hitchhikers who rant about the filth and vulgarity of modern existence

admire Dupea for his rebellious behavior at the diner, but again he only dismisses

their views on life and even their approval of him. His sister Partita attempts to

reconnect Robert with the family but he only seems to resent that fact that she has

succeeded in becoming a recording pianist failing to recognize that she is clearly

overworked, frazzled, a little unstable, and the object of scorn to her more successful

brothers. Indeed she is accused more than once by them of penis envy. Yet at the

same time Dupea inserts himself into her private life, disapproving of her sexual

relationship with their fathers male caretaker, a relationship he sees as sadistic.He also falls in love with his brothers fiance e, Catherine, who tries to understand

why he doesnt play the piano anymore. When he does play for her, she complements

his performance, yet, again, he rejects the compliment by noting that he merely

chose the easiest piece he could play. Later, he chastises her for surrounding herself

with mean, unreliable people like his family a clear projection of his own feelings

about the family and himself.

Virno writes: Opportunism, cynicism, and fear define a contemporary emo-

tional situation marked by abandonment to finitude and a belonging to uprooting,

by resignation, servitude, and eager acquiescence. At the same time, they make



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that situation visible as an irreversible fact on whose basis conflict and revolt might

also be conceived (Virno 1996, 33). As an embodiment of the emotional situation

of the 1970s, Robert Dupea embraces an existence of constant uprootedness, a kind

of individual stagflation marked by the capacity for activity within a life that

doesnt add up to much. Dupea performs his virtuosity through navigating women,

suggesting perhaps how the economic crisis in the 1970s staged a re-assertion

of (white) male privilege re-asserted in this case affectively. Dupeas depression

makes visible the series of auspicious beginnings past thresholds of no return, the

impossibility of going back. Not lack, his depression also signifies a refusal within

a social milieu where affects increasingly connect the cultural and the economic, and

make political the lived-ness of the everyday.

In my reading of Five Easy Pieces and its protagonist Robert Dupea, I have

made some references to Dupeas ambivalence. In its psychoanalytic formulation,

ambivalence of course refers to the simultaneous and inseparable merging of

opposites stemming from the egos originary process of narcissistic auto-cathexis of

the life drive onto itself. As the drive is later directed to an external object by the ego,the transformation of the content of the instinct into its opposite results in the

ambivalence of simultaneous loving and hating, a process Freud believes organizes

numerous spheres of psychic and social life for the subject (e.g. life/death, internal/

external, desire/reason).6 Further, Freud argues that ambivalence is a driving force

behind social progress. In his narration of the primal horde, the brothers hate the

father but also love him and later feel remorse for killing him.7 This guilt serves a

repressive function within the psyche in the form of the superego, but consequently

it is very conceivable that the sense of guilt produced by civilization is not perceived

as such either, and remains to a large extent unconscious, or appears as a sort

of malaise, a dissatisfaction, for which people seek motivations (Freud 1961, 99).For Ropert Dupea, ambivalence dominates his life throughout the film: ambivalence

between Rayette and Catherine, between playing the piano and working in the

oil fields, between his sense of class entitlement and his belief in equality, etc.

Ambivalence also serves the repressive function of assuaging Dupeas unconscious

guilt of abandoning his father, his class privilege, and talent a guilt manifest as

individual malaise and dissatisfaction.

The classical formulation of ambivalence is a useful interpretative tool here.

I would like to advance another understanding of ambivalence that does not operate

as just a binary simultaneity (e.g. love/hate, life/death, conscious/unconscious).

Returning to Virno, the ambivalence that he calls the ambivalence of disenchant-ment is inherent to the post-Fordist emotional situation. It describes not only

an affective simultaneity (such as opposition and hope, cynicism and fear) but also

suggests a politics of time, what he calls the irreversibility of the emotional

situation a constant, pressing mutation of the here and now (Virno 1996). In the

economy for example, stagflation does not just happen and then get fixed;

it accumulates symptoms and triggers a multiplicity of discourses, ultimately

transforming the economy itself and indeed what is meant by the economy.8

Similarly, in Five Easy Pieces, Robert Dupeas journey never culminates and

concludes in personal self-realization, it remains open. Thus, by merging a portrait

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of negative affects such as depression, malaise, and dissatisfaction with a technical,

politicized, economic concept like stagflation, I hope to make evident the

ambivalence of the emotional situation of the early 1970s an ambivalence that

is, as Virno writes, open to radically conflicting developments.9

Virtuosity

Ambivalence and depression permeate 1970s cinema. Consider Alice Hyatt (played

by Ellen Burstyn) in Martin Scorceses 1974 film Alice Doesnt Live Here Anymore.

Long gone from her idyllic childhood in Monterey, California, shown in the opening

scene an orange-saturated homage to Dorothy in Kansas Alice now lives in

Socorro, New Mexico, with an unappreciative, verbally abusive husband and their

precocious son Tommy. When her husband suddenly dies in a car accident, Alice

decides to leave her boring but comfortable life and relocate back to Monterey where

she had had a brief but successful stint as a lounge singer. En route, Alice andTommy stop in Phoenix so that Alice may make some money for the remainder of

their trip; and after a shaky start, she lands work singing at a bar. However,

discovering that the job pays very little and that her younger, smooth-talking

new boyfriend is married and physically abusive Alice and Tommy head down

to Tuscon where Alice takes a waitressing job at a greasy-spoon diner next to

their motel. Initially very humbling for her, Alice soon finds camaraderie in her

co-workers as well as a handsome, stable new boyfriend, David (who is a nearby

farmer). However, Alice remains uncertain and unable to make any decision around

her career, her boyfriend, her son Tommy, or returning to Monterey culminating

in a fight with David after he spanks Tommy. When David declares that he is willing

to give up his farm and follow her to Monterey, Alice ultimately decides to settle in

Tucson, since she can be a singer anywhere after all, and Tommy has grown to like it

there as well. The film closes with Alice and Tommy walking along a commercial

road toward a tacky hotel lounge called Monterey undoubtedly signifying her

newly adjusted Oz.

Unlike Dorothys trip down the yellow brick road, though, Alices through the

American southwest is not one of benign, phantasmal adventure but rather a series

of losses and humiliations. In Socorro, New Mexico, Alice loses her husband, her

house, best friend, and the implied stability. Living out of motels and toiling at

joints become a constant source of shame the loss of her dreams and a self-ideal

constantly deferred. Alice oscillates between perky optimism and grief, frustrationand anger, sarcasm and honesty indicating most her deep ambivalence of what do

with her life. On the one hand, there is the possibility of a happiness and success back

in Monterey, California; alternately she finds herself met with the realities of an

unforgiving job market, raising a son with paltry resources, and the desire for

companionship. Even by the end of the film, Alice confesses to her co-worker Flo

that despite what she had always thought, she really cannot live without a man after

all and that she really has no idea what to do with herself. Throughout the film

even before her husband dies Alices conflict is represented as a binary decision of

living either with or without a man. It later becomes apparent that Tommy, with his



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adult language and uncanny (but also undisciplined) maturity, functions and has

functioned as a surrogate companion. Flo advises, Honey, you gotta figure out

what you want, and once you know . . .jump in there with both feet and let the devil

take the hindmost. And of course, we are led to believe that Alice chooses to stay in

Tuscon with David who, though imperfect, is a decent man with an established life.

In her analysis of self-help books, Micki McGee finds that such texts addressed to

women in the 1970s emphasized two ideals: avoidance of codependence with men

while imagining ones self as living a creative adventure (McGee 2005). In reality,

however, such ideals were rarely efficacious as womens entry into the workforce

seemed only to impoverish them. As McGee states, the harder women worked at

having it all, the greater their losses were becoming (McGee 2005, 82). Indeed,

as symbolic of the 1970s woman who wants it all, Alice becomes increasingly poor

in the course of her adventure, ultimately abandoning it in favor of a man and

stability.10 However, the possibility of pursuing her dream of being a lounge singer

remains open in the end, though only in a shoddy simulacrum of her home in

Monterey. It would seem then that Alices ambivalence is one that trades betweenman and career, and one which throughout the film demands from her a constant

flexibility and adjustability that is capable of mediating, if temporarily, the ups and

downs of her material and emotional life.

The title of the film suggests too another kind of ambivalence that I am interested

in exploring. The ambiguity of here and anymore in the statement Alice

doesnt live here anymore could allude to Socorro, New Mexico, as easily as it could

to Monterey for the unspecified speaker referencing Alice in the third person.

Socorro is never really Alices home but her husbands, representing all the trappings

of a mediocre, unfulfilling marriage. As she puts it Socorro Sucks!, and indeed,

Tommy goes so far as to say that The whole state is shit! On the other hand, as herboyfriend David reminds her several times, Alices life in Monterey was a very long

time ago and perhaps just an idealization of a childhood home. Alice is neither

here nor there; she is in-between, liminal, or as Virno might say she belongs to

uprooting. Such a belonging is irreversible in other words, there is no going back,

no going home yet at the same time this uprooting presents new social possibilities.

By the end of the film, Alice does find belonging with her diner co-workers and

customers, a relationship subsequently developed for eight seasons on the popular

television series. She also finds love with a man who respects and admires her,

a departure from the string of selfish and abusive men she had previously

encountered. Because of this, she is able to be a better mother to Tommy inso far as she does not burden him with her own problems. While I do not want to

suggest that the conclusion to Alices journey is not a conservative one after all,

she remains a waitress in order to stay in Tuscon with her man I think it is

important to recognize how ambivalence here functions not just as an either/or,

both/and emotional ambiguity but as social potential.

This potential is fundamentally political too, since the individual-becoming is

also the multitude-becoming. For Virno, the multitude represents a political entity

of individuals, a collective conceptually opposed to the homogeneity implied by

the liberalist people. The process of individuation (individual-becoming) then is

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precisely the making of the multitude as a network of singularities and difference

rather than a unified, cohesive whole. Yet, the process of individuation is always

incomplete, it never concludes. Rather, the subject emerges in the entangled space

between pre-individual (bodily, linguistic, perceptive) capacities and their ongoing

and indeterminate individuation. The subjects performance of her capacities and

faculties is virtuosity, which recall is an activity which finds its own fulfillmentin itself but one requiring the presence of others (Virno 2004, 52). Language

especially is without end product and thus every utterance is a virtuosic

performance, since utterance is connected (directly or indirectly) to the presence of

others (Virno 2004, 55). Language and vulgar, foul-mouthed language in

particular plays a special role in Alice.11 The opening scene of Alice as a little girl in

Monterey is a picture-perfect scene of nostalgia, that is, until she tells the audience

that anyone who would interfere with her dream of becoming a singer can blow it

out their ass! Tommys overly-adult, smart-aleck language is a constant frustration

for Alice: he mouths off to his father and her boyfriends; he rebels against her

attempts at tempering his obnoxious speech; but most embarrassingly he is aconspicuous reflection of her own foul mouth. Alice initially avoids Flo too, whose

loud, sexualized vulgarities repel Alice (perhaps because Flos coarseness reminds

Alice of her own downward mobility); yet Flos potty-mouth ultimately draws in

Alice, and the two become close friends. Alice affirms to Flo, Boy, you really need

someone to talk to, even if it is, as suggested, with foul language. Such foul

language for Alice does not signify any one sentiment it may alternately reflect

anger, nervousness, happiness, sadness, shame or even all at once but it is

consistently a way of relating with others, a way of becoming. Indeed, foul language

here presses the limits of signification the point where virtuosity becomes affect.

As Virno says (following French philosopher Gilbert Simondons thought),the relation between the pre-individual and individuated is, in fact, mediated

by feelings (Virno 2004, 78). In other words, feelings, passions, and affects connect

the subject to political, social, and cultural world-making. In light of this,

ambivalence for Alice does not just represent opposing internal sentiments but it is

also the very performance of virtuosity: the development, modification, and

realization of ever-changing capacities that connect and mediate self and the world.

Cynicism

Alices adventure highlights how the desire to realize ones goals and dreams oftenfails to match up with the reality of increasing constraints, a contradiction intrinsic

to neoliberal ideologies of self-empowerment and opportunity (and one especially

significant for women). Yet these external constraints and ideologies can be

productive of (new, old, forgotten, suppressed, repressed, pressing) modes of sociality

and praxis. This is what I believe Virno suggests in his use of the term ambivalence.

And of course, this ambivalence can play out in numerous ways in film narratives.

John McCabe in McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) shares much in common with Five

Easy Pieces Robert Dupea and Alice Hyatt from Alice Doesnt Live Here Anymore.

Like Dupea he is both confident and stunted; like Alice he is frustrated by his work



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and confused by love. But McCabe also considers himself a real businessman and

entrepreneur. And, shortly after arriving in the nineteenth-century Northwest mining

town he does in fact manage to buy property and start up a saloon in spite of his

questionable past. Indeed, we are never quite sure if he is an entrepreneur as he

claims or if he is (as rumors suggest) Pudgy McCabe, a notorious (and possibly

once overweight?) gunfighter. Regardless, it becomes apparent that McCabe is not

such a great businessman after all: he refuses to partner with another local bar owner

and resists the advice of Mrs Miller, with whom he later partners. Although he

affects a man of sound business sense with his smooth talking and deal-making,

his primary desire is for self-efficacy and control over his own life and affairs; or as

suggested in his theme song, McCabe is just a tired stranger, a Joseph looking for

his manger. The conflict between his desire and the realities of the expanding

frontier market escalates as he refuses the offers made by a powerful mining

corporation to buy him out. After a feeble effort to bargain with the company-hired

bounty hunters, he realizes that the mining company will stop at nothing to obtain

his property. In attempt to defend himself, McCabe kills the bounty hunters (perhapshe really was a gunman once), which makes little difference to the corporation

anyway, since McCabe himself gets shot in the process (but maybe not a very good

gunman).

Mrs Miller of course is the real entrepreneur. Uninterested in McCabes double-

sided ledgers or conservative managerial techniques, she understands that youve

got to think big; youve got to spend money to make money! Not only is she

a master negotiator (she quickly convinces McCabe to put up the capital for a new

bathhouse and brothel), she also knows how to develop a market to introduce

consumers to new commodities and cultivate their tastes unlike McCabe who is

skeptical that the surly mine workers will pay the high prices for her more refinedprostitutes. Mrs Miller instructs her girls that what they perform is labor earning

their bed and board, just as any wifes role is that of laborer. Indeed, she continues to

charge McCabe her hefty $5 fee even after they have become partners and he has

obviously fallen in love. With her leadership, McCabe is able to build up the saloon

and bathhouse even before the church (for which the town is named Presbyterian

Church) is complete. Mrs Miller is a virtuoso; yet her virtuosity is often performed

through McCabe. However, like him, Mrs Millers goal is not accumulation of wealth

so much as independence and self-sufficiency, to someday run a legitimate business

in San Francisco. Furious that McCabe has refused a capital gain offered by the

corporation (and scared too that he will die for it), Mrs Miller finds that herentrepreneurial spirit and desires for freedom are squashed simultaneously by the

irrationality of patriarchal norms embodied in McCabe and by the burgeoning

power of centralizing and concentrating capitalism.

McCabe and Mrs Miller might both be seen as dispossessed. While both

characters practice an ethic of entrepreneurialism in hopes for self-efficacy,

as amateurish proto-capitalists they are no match for the mining corporation

whose imperative for expansion, literally, dispossesses them of their property or as

David Harvey has coined it accumulation by dispossession. More importantly

though, they are both dispossessed of their spirit even if it is a desire to be alone or

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tired which leads in the final scenes not to the loss of life, but of life taken away.

McCabe freezes to death, unnoticed, stuck in time. Mrs Miller disappears into the

smoky interior of her opium addiction, the final shot closing in on the glassiness

of her eyes emptied of feeling. Strangely, though, neither McCabe nor Mrs Miller

offers a stable or consistent point of identification for the viewer.12 McCabe is a

sympathetic character in that he is bullied by the mining corporation and that

his sincere affections are thwarted by Mrs Miller. Yet his hapless arrogance and

nave stubbornness make him seem more like a buffoon than a hero. Mrs Miller is

a savvy and visionary entrepreneur; yet her coldness appears as brazen cynicism.

She celebrates the idea of independence to her girls but is paradoxically dependant

herself: on McCabe for capital and economic legitimacy; and on opium for

emotional and physical coping.

Paolo Virno says that cynicism is a primary affect in the post-Fordist emotional

situation. Cynicism emerges from the dangers and fear of losing stability, a job,

privileges, and ones place in the world, of having to adjust and constantly

reconfigure oneself. For Virno and in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, cynicismstructures action within available opportunities and the sets of fear associated with

the potential loss of opportunities. McCabes overconfidence gives way to fear when

the mining company bounty hunters mock his attempts to bargain. And in spite of

her good business sense, Mrs Millers cynicism strangely enables her to connect with

McCabe as her affection for him grows. Cynicism and fear are undoubtedly

negative sentiments and they provide ways of confronting dominant norms and

institutions, yet they are also ways that the emotional situation is embodied. In the

frontier West, entrepreneurialism, initiative and vision should be efficacious; yet

cynicism and fear make conscious the realities of an economy that does not deliver

on its promises.But still, cynicism and fear have the potential to forge new social connections.

This is probably most evident not in the secondary identification with

the figures of McCabe or Mrs Miller but with the primary identification with

the film as a whole, an identification which is indeed ambivalent.13 Within the

conventions of the referenced genre, McCabe and Mrs. Miller departs pointedly from

older westerns that celebrated the American spirit of benevolent expansionism and

justice. Set in the wet and chilly northwest, punctuated with British accents, and

scored with a melancholic track by Leonard Cohen, the film not only lacks the

signature of a trustworthy (male) hero typical of its predecessors but more

importantly the security of moral resolution. In this sense, a uniquely Americangenre becomes dispossessed of its traditional evocative spirit. This comes to bare

most hauntingly in the films final sequence a would-be good guy/bad guy shootout

that is the signature of a traditional western. McCabes confrontation is of course

hardly typical. The films ending spread out over 20 minutes (rather than a quick

shootout), set in an unrelenting blizzard, and absent of any witnesses reflects the

playful auteur meddling with generic conventions. Yet more than just ironic, the

ending redefines the sociality and morality of the American western, one not

dependant on good guys and bad guys. For the townspeople, the final drama lies

not in the conflict between McCabe and the three bounty hunters but in the crisis



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of the burning church which had caught fire during the shootout. And indeed

everyone comes together to save it. So when McCabe dies and Mrs Miller retreats

into the opium den, its almost inconsequential to everyone else; the crisis has

renewed a social connectivity that was present prior to McCabes and Mrs Millers

arrival. And by working beyond identification with a hero/heroine or vilification of

the big bad corporation, Altmans appropriation of the western transforms andreinvents the genre for a generation of audiences who are increasingly uncertain in

the future of its institutions and cynical of easy morality.

* * *

The economic crises of the 1970s inaugurated numerous and often paradoxical

transformations in the United States and abroad. During the last 35 years, ideologies

of self-reliance, independence, responsibility, and freedom propelled attacks on state

welfare programs and safety nets, growing class inequalities, the dismantling of

market restriction and regulation, and unfettered economic liberalization abroad

culminating in the current economic crisis and the return of stagflation as a topicof public interest.14 More than just economic, these changes represent a backlash

(both discursively and materially) toward women, peoples of color, and the gains

that they made politically and economically during the 1960s and 70s. The relegation

of the issue of social inequality to the cultural in the name of social equality is

a direct outcome of neoliberalism (Duggan 2004). Going further, I suggest that

negative affects including but not limited to fear, anxiety, rage, shame, cynicism,

and depression mediate the economic and the cultural not only as outcomes of

the social changes described in theories of neoliberalism but also as nodes, moments,

and openings for truly novel political possibilities.

In my readings of Five Easy Pieces, Alice Doesnt Live Here Anymore, and

McCabe and Mrs. Miller, I have depicted the emotional situation of a time at the

cusp of dramatic transformations in the economy, culture, and politics, ones that

we are still trying to interpret now but that also continue to unfold in present and

future world-making. Rather than representing one pervasive mood, the emotional

situation is indeterminate, connecting the past and future, and linking interiority and

the social that challenges prevailing notions of successive history or the discreteness

of the individual psyche. Above all, the emotional situation is ambivalent, manifest

as Virno writes as a form of consent as often as it can as form of conflict, as often

with the characteristics of resignation as with those of critical unease (Virno 2004,

84). Analysis of the affective, that is the capacity to affect and be affected, provides

us with ways of bringing together history and politics that challenges well-worncritical vocabularies and more importantly the tyrannical here and now of reigning

political imaginations.

Acknowledgements

I am privileged to have learned from many talented thinkers during the writing anddevelopment of this essay. Stanley Aronowitz, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Patricia Clough,Lisa Duggan, Heather Lukes, Ricardo Montez, Jose Mun oz, Ann Pellegrini, Jasbir Puar,Jeanne Vaccarro, and Jerry Watts are among many present in this work. Molly McGarrydeserves special mention, not only because she pointed me to the historical import and

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implications of stagflation, but even more so for her brilliant and ongoing engagement withmy project. Lastly, I want to acknowledge that this essay came directly out of a graduateseminar with Anna McCarthy whose intellectual direction and support continue to nourishand challenge my thought.

Notes on contributor

John Andrews is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the Graduate Center,City University of New York. He is currently working on a dissertation that explores affectdimensions to the economy.

Notes

1. Within affect theory, there are many (often competing) notions of what is meant byaffective, and how it is distinguished from and related to emotion. While I do not towish to engage this debate at length here, I will note that my present discussion ofnegative affects diverges from theorists who consider a qualified affect (qualified as

negative, positive, happy, sad, etc.) to be an emotion rather than affect. Like Sianne Ngai(2005), I use affect, emotion, and sentiment more or less interchangeably as terms.However, I want to emphasize that the negative affects, emotions, and sentimentswhich I elaborate in this essay are not confined to any single individual, character,or person, nor do they necessarily involve a linear action/response as historical forcesor variables. My engagement with Virnos concept of the emotional situation hashelped me to think about how affects frame specific economic and political milieuxepistemologically (in this case the period of early neoliberalism), but also how affectsoperate within those milieux discursively, ideologically and emotionally.

2. For example, see Martin (2007) for a discussion of financial capital and risk.3. While I do not discuss them at length in this essay, numerous social and political

transformations were occurring alongside changes in economic production in the early1970s, including: the conclusion of the war in Vietnam; varying responses to the CivilRights movement; the womens liberation movement; and the growing visibility of theGay and Lesbian rights movement to name a few.

4. Stagflation is a portmanteau word that blends the words stagnation and inflation.While he never utilized the term, John Maynard Keynes theorized the possibility ofa stagnant economy with increasing prices in his 1919 pamphlet The EconomicConsequences of the Peace (Keynes 1920). In it, he argued that the harsh penaltiesdirected toward Germany by the Treaty of Versailles would force it to become a heavyborrower and a net importer, thus driving up prices, discouraging production, andrendering Europe as whole overly sensitive to shifts in demand, decline in Americanlending, or any unexpected economic change. More generally, Keynes believed that eventhe most robust (capitalist) economy would eventually sink into stagnation withoutproper governmental policy and intervention.

5. Special thanks to Molly McGarry for reminding me of the importance of stagflationin the 1970s.

6. Instincts and their Vicissitudes, 957 (Freud 1963). Note that I am using drive (Trieb)and instinct interchangeably.

7. Layed out first in Totem and Taboo (Freud 1952) and extended here in Civilization andIts Discontents (1961).

8. That stagflation is a portmanteau word is not insignificant here. Portmanteau as usedto indicate a blending of two heterogeneous words first appeared in Lewis CarrollsThrough the Looking Glass and was later examined by Gilles Deleuze (1990). Deleuzeobserves that portmanteau words are more than mere blends of two or more wordsbut are also disjunctive blends, and as such perform an infinite ramification ofcoexisting series (47). For him, portmanteau words have a unique capacity to



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accumulate meaning. Thus stagflation does not merely describe simultaneous stagna-tion and inflation, but contains and triggers potentially infinite meanings. In this sense,stagflation could be seen as ambivalent in Virnos usage.

9. Virno 1996, 32. It is important to note that Virno does not idealize negative sentiments asradical political potentials. Indeed, he emphasizes that negative sentiments often becomepart of the system, de-politicized, and even made to be productive for capital.

10. Like the Alice referenced in Teresa De Lauretis Alice Doesnt (1984), Alice signifiesmore than just a single character, but also the unqualified opposition of feminism toexisting social relations, its refusal of given dominations and cultural values; and at thesame time to affirm the political and personal ties of shared experience that join women inthe movement and are the condition of feminist work, theory and practice (vii).

11. Just as Alice navigates the linguistic games, the sense and nonsense of her adventuresThrough the Lookinglass, Alice Hyatt must traverse the confusing, often hostile journey tofashion a new life after her husband dies. As De Laurentis observes, language . . . is morethan a game. The argument begun by feminism is not only an academic debate on logicand rhetoric . . . [it] is also a confrontation, a struggle, a political intervention in insti-tutions and in the practices of everyday life (De Laurentis 1984, 3). Alice Hyattsvirtuosity stems directly from this confrontation with the realities of her everyday life.

12. In the cinematic theory of Christian Metz (1975), identification with a particular star orcharacter refers to secondary identification.

13. For Metz (1975), primary identification is that with the cinematic apparatus itself thepossibility of a whole and complete vision.

14. In a December 2007 speech, former Fed chair, Alan Greenspan, warned that the economywas beginning to show signs of stagflation.

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