Knowing Within the Master Narrative

By Richard Birch
STAS 2127 Research Methods & Data Analysis
This work Copyright (C) 2005 Richard Birch

“The only way of knowing a socially constructed world is knowing it from within” (Smith, 1990, p.22)

To know anything is to initially assume that which is called fact is knowledge. Thus if one claims to, in fact, know a socially constructed world, then what is factual is produced within the narrative of social experience. In other words, from a conventional, objectified sociological perspective “our knowledge of the world is given to us in the modes by which we enter into relations with the object of knowledge.” (Smith, 1990, p. 24) What we know as fact represents the interest of the institutions by which we are provided information that in turn constructs knowledge. This is where Smith develops her positionality and method of feminist standpoint. “The institutions that lock sociology into the structures occupied by men are the same institutions that lock women into the situations in which [they] have found [themselves] oppressed.” (Smith, 1990,p. 14) In other words, resisting the eventual suppression of women’s knowledge, and thus women’s knowing of the social world, is the crucial struggle of the female social scientist within the master narrative. If the social scientist endeavours to acquire true understanding of social problems and to know that which is outside the relations of ruling and thus accurately acquire an understanding of the social world, he or she must not venture towards objectified unbiased positionality. To embrace an objectified method will not produce knowledge of a socially constructed world, for that is to merely know that which is produced for and by the master narrative of social productive order. For the social scientist to begin to engage in a method of knowing the social world, he or she must assert his or her own positionality in the context of what is to be studied and acquire an understanding of social relations from his or her own standpoint.

Dorothy Smith’s method is driven by the value of knowing the social world from the standpoint of the female sociologist. Because she lives, feels, moves, works, studies, and engages in a patriarchal master narrative, her act of knowing and her actual experiential knowledge are consistently silenced. This alienation of the knowledge and any power potential that may be contained in such knowledge base is a structured format of subordination. Her account of any element of the social is alien to the master narrative and is structurally unsound to patriarchal relations of ruling. The master narrative excludes women’s experience from the record, for such “established social forms of consciousness alienate women from their own experience.” (Smith, 1990, p. 13)

To know of the ‘social’ is to have acquired knowledge of the social world. However what may be otherwise defined as social knowledge? Sociologically speaking, is not knowledge that which is extracted from what is presented as fact in the social world? Or is it that which is experiential in a world presented to us as factual? This bifurcation of social knowing and experiential knowledge urges Smith to inform the social scientist of the nature of objectivity in methods. “In the social sciences the pursuit of objectivity makes it possible for people to be paid to pursue a knowledge to which they are otherwise indifferent.” (Smith, 1990, p. 16) This differentiates the social scientist from the social thinker. The convention of social science is to train students to embark on sociological pedagogy with the intention of separating their own positionality in the context of the unit of analysis, thus focussing on what eventually must be an objectified and unbiased method of interrogation into social phenomenon. But Smith strongly questions this as being the operative method in uncovering social thought, discourse and solutions to problems. For “like everyone else, he also exists in the body in the place in which it is.” (Smith, 1990, p. 17)

Smith is very direct in elaborating to the social scientist where he or she will discover the method of which she portrays as crucial to sociology, a method based in the standpoint of the experiential social scientist. It is a place. It is a specific conceptual place where the social scientist must posit him or her at in order to engage in sociological thought. “Into this space must come as actual material events – whether as sounds of speech, scratchings on the surface of paper, which he constitutes as text, or directly – anything he knows of the world. It has to happen here somehow if he is to experience it at all.” (Smith, 1990, p. 17) This is where Smith draws a complete and direct roadmap for the social scientist so he or she can find where they must be in order to be engaged in their work.
In her essay it is clear that for once, in a social science where theory typically directs method, in this case, theory is method. Her own standpoint of working as a female sociologist is the platform of which her method has sprung. Hers is the standpoint of the alienated. Smith elaborates on the feminist standpoint in its relation to what she calls ‘master narrative’. “The gendered organization of subjectivity dichotomizes the two worlds, estranges them, and silences the locally situated consciousness by silencing women.” (Smith, 1990, p. 19) Feminist standpoint, even as method, draws the social scientist closer to the nature of the relations of ruling present in the master narrative. For even engaging in such a method plays a role in the permeation of textual relations of ruling. Smith deploys feminist standpoint in opposition to objectified sociological thought for the value of exploring alienated knowledge. There is value in making the everyday world problematic for it sheds light on “alienated knowledge of the relations of ruling as the everyday practices of actual individuals.” (Smith, 1990, p. 28) All actions people do, all roles they play, all facets of everyday life serve the relations of ruling. For the feminist standpoint, exposing the things people do as integral components to the oppression of women’s knowledge illuminate for the social scientist the problematic nature of the social world.

For the social scientist to begin to engage in a method of knowing the social world, he or she must assert his or her own positionality in the context of what is to be studied and acquire an understanding of social relations from their own standpoint. Smith describes knowing a socially constructed world is to “experience a world of “appearances”, the determinations of which lie beyond it” (Smith, 1990, p. 27), but not necessarily do we actually see what there is beyond it. By beyond, Smith means, that knowledge that is alienated by the productive symbolic organization of the social world. “The very organization of the world that has been assigned to us as the primary locus of our being, shaping other projects and desires, is determined by and subordinate to the relations of society founded in a capitalist mode of production.” (Smith, 1990, p. 27)

Reference
Smith, D.E. (1990). The conceptual practices of power: a feminist sociology of knowledge. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press.

Inter-queer Phenomenology

By Richard Birch
Emergence of Sociological Theories SOCI 2017
February 28, 2005
This work Copyright (C) 2005 Richard Birch

The layers of experience are extremely important to understand for the method of phenomenology to effectively give light to the essence of inter-queer standpoint. My own personal Dasein provides a roadmap for looking at the duality of oppression of the gay male. Within the sexual orientation pyramid of oppression is another secondary pyramid based on a hierarchy of body image. Queer male culture is a highly stratified society in which individual classification and status are designated to members based on body type and their respective levels of masculinity. The phenomenon of which my analysis is based on is of my entire coming out period. By examining layers of my act of coming out and their relations to the social constructive fundamentals of heteronormativity, my phenomenological account of this period of my existence can be the discursive measure on which to uncover both primary and secondary hierarchies of oppression; one which was most prevalent at the beginning of the narrative, and the second which is codified in the present. To understand the phenomenon of body image within the secondary pyramid of oppression is to understand the externalized formation of a social world culturally produced on the notion of acceptable and non-acceptable male body imagery.

Primary Hierarchy Queer Standpoint
By primary hierarchy I mean the differentiation of heteronormative power potentials existent within the apparatus of ruling and productive master narratives. For much of my life I experienced oppression of Dasein capacity. For fear and worry of being discovered as queer, gay, fag and homo I managed to maintain an impression of heteronormativity in my social acts. Thus I attempted to portray symbolically the ideal heterosexual male. I was born into an affluent capitalist family. I went to predominantly white, straight, upper class, privileged, and reasonably affluent schools. I took up positions of management within the family business as was expected of my class. I dated women. I married. I procreated. I lived the heteronormal capitalist Dasein that was expected of me. However I engaged in oppressive discourse for I too through my closeted acts fulfilled the requirements of heteronormative patriarchal symbolic order.

For a time my positionality was of the upper sector of a hierarchy of sexual orientation. Phenomenologically I sensed this oppression from the outside in, for my knowledge of heteronormative ideology told me I was of the ‘dominant’ sector. As Dorothy Smith writes, “Hierarchy, power, and domination sustain the circularity of schema and data. Factual accounts do not aim at contexts of reading uncontrolled by the purposes and policies structuring their relevance.” (Smith, 1990) As I experienced Dasein through the standpoint of a closeted gay male, I experienced oppression but merely at a superficial level. Being closeted prevented me from truly taking notice and placing myself in the subjective of this primary hierarchy. Being closeted was akin to “ideological organization [which] creates a disjuncture between the world as it is known within the relations of ruling and the lived and experienced actualities its textual realities represent as ‘what actually happened/what is.’” (Smith, 1990) My goal to fit the master narrative and align my performed heterosexuality with the relations of ruling kept me from the bottom of the pyramid.

From the time I ‘came out’ as gay male, these textual realities became ever more apparent to my experiences. The severity of my oppression was deep. The necessity for exploring this phenomenon of sexual alienation became urgent. By making the everyday life problematic it clarifies this pyramid. I became conscious of my real positionality as oppressed. My consciousness of being gay became intentional where once it was intentionally suppressed. Phenomenologically my experiences as oppressed gay male uncover layers of structures parallel to this pyramid. By being of the subjective, my oppressed sexuality is ordered according to the knowledge uncovered through phenomenological analysis. As written by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, “I apprehend the reality of everyday life as an ordered reality. Its phenomena are prearranged in patterns that seem to be independent of my apprehension of them and that impose themselves upon the latter.” (Berger & Luckmann, 1966)

Sexual orientation is socially constructed. From the beginnings of industrialized society the subject of sex orientation became synonymous with silence. The aberration of the sexual mosaic in society can be adjusted to “coincide with the development of capitalism: it becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order.” (Foucault, 1978) Through my coming out activity the discourse of my sexual knowledge was a discourse of resistance for others around me. I experienced resistance from family, from friends, and from the heteronormative environment in which I existed for such a long time. I became aware that my sexual truths of coming out and of being gay were not equal to the “representation that is more or less distorted by ideology, or of a misunderstanding caused by taboos” (Foucault, 1978). My representation in the family became distorted and problematic for my parents who did not feel comfortable with my new identity. Some friends disappeared as my master status in the narrative became uncharacteristic to the productive paradigm they adopted. I no longer represented the status quo in coming out and my status in the hierarchy diminished. For a time my intentions were questioned as was my mental health by some family members. If I was now of the oppressed, and seemingly ‘by choice’ as stated by family members, then what became clear to me was that I was pathologised in my spheres of existence. More precisely what my parents charged for a time was that my mental health was no longer in order. The underlying layer within their resistance was that I embodied the antithesis of not merely non-heterosexuality, but I differentiated my existence from the institutionalized capitalist order that was so influential in my life and in theirs.

Power is what gives structure the ruling relations of sex. Textual realities on sexual discourse are staged on the premise that “sex is placed by power in a binary system: licit and illicit, permitted and forbidden.” (Foucault, 1978) Heterosexual activity is licit, and thus, clearly, homosexual activity is illicit according to mainstream ideology. Power prescribes a directive for sex that operates as a tool for intelligibility. My coming out as gay, my public denouncing of the textual realities of heteronormativity and my being of the antithesis of productive order, produced a socially constructed intelligibility of my own personal Dasein for those in my circles. Phenomenologically when I look within my subjective experience of coming out to my inner circles, the structure of oppression affected not just my own part in the narrative but everyone else’s.

Secondary Hierarchy Queer Standpoint: Ideological Coding of Inter-queer Stratification
When I read articles in queer publications and journals, when I watch television shows that are designed and programmed for the queer audience, when I shop in clothing stores in certain parts of the city that are marketed to the gay-male consumer, and when I walk through the ‘gaybourhood’ district of Toronto with my friends, I experience external symbols of queer culture. I am also experiencing the essence of the community I am engaging in and thus I am participating in discursive activities. Everywhere in this microsocial structure are what Dorothy Smith calls “mediated texts” or “T-discourses” (Smith, 1999). T-discourses are “skeins of social relations, mediated and organized textually, connecting and coordinating the activities of actual individuals whose local; historical sites of reading/hearing/viewing may be geographically and temporally dispersed and institutionally various.” (Smith, 1999) When engaged in this symbolic discourse as it were, I take in, I absorb, and I experience the essence of the milieu. However it becomes clear that from my phenomenological standpoint queer cultural textual realities surround no other than I in my own discourse of oppression. For as I become internal within the experience of the community I also am of the subjective of cultural mediated textual relations of ruling. Everywhere are symbols of the ever-present master narrative of productive order. Among these symbols are beautiful images of digitally constructed ideals of masculinity on billboards and street-publication covers. The commercial aesthetic comprises ‘hot-bodies’ posed in gender-explicit shirtless forms of mechanical cyborg-like perfection on billboards promoting same-sex couples travel and cruise packages to the Caribbean. Installed over street corners are large black and white signs with a handsome, white, fit, male model in his late 30’s selling Botox injections with the slogan “Now It’s Time To Level the Playing Field”. Gay telephone cruise-line and personal advertisement website posters are stapled to light posts by the hundreds with images of young, smooth, hairless, thin, boyish features embodying a strategic form of quasi-femininity in the young gay-male ideal of masculinity.

All of these symbols of textual reality help in creating what Smith terms an “ideological code” (Smith, 1999). This code, though not simply formulaic in nature, provides a template for the social construction of the relations of ruling within queer culture. To be even more exact, the codification of what I call inter-queer body-image ideology as a textual reality of oppression is something that has become increasingly evident to me as a student of the social sciences since my first ‘coming out’. I have many times wondered, why does a society like the gay-male community, which has suffered, greatly, for centuries at the expense of capitalist productive symbolic order, include stratas of its own within its social composition? Why would a system of oppression exist within a culture that seemingly throws a public and very political image of appropriative desire? Phenomenologically the essence of this question turns towards the standpoint of the alienated in my personal experience. For as one who experienced alienation of identity within heteronormative society for much of his life, my Dasein of alienation is not a new form of phenomenon to make an account of. My personal senses are attuned to the nuances of alienation. Alienation from social hierarchy based on sexual orientation, alienation from those who are thin and who embody male physical desire, as well as alienation from being of the valued consumer in a capitalist productive order.

I have suggested earlier in this essay of a secondary pyramid of oppression based on a hierarchy of gay-male body image. Ideological codification threads this secondary hierarchy into the primary hierarchy of sexual orientation by a mimicking process of gender differentials and pyramids of oppression found in heteronormative sexism. As social order is a construction of social reality, so is the social phenomenon of gender performativity, a concept that lends itself to the structures in place within gay-male stratification. My experience of queer-male body image stratification is of temporal non-mobility it seems. It is if the very constructive qualities of body-image stratification are aligned with the premise of gender performativity. Judith Butler writes, “Gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts.” (Butler, 1996)

Through my coming-out process it became very clear that I was to assume a class identification of: masculine, feminine, twink, bear, or chub. Similar to heteronormative textual reality, the patriarchal master narrative of everyday life requires one to be identifiable as male or female, masculine or feminine, top or bottom. Before you can even give your head a shake from the time you first declare yourself as ‘gay’, the social pressures within inter-queer society are immense. To declare yourself of one classification is the automatic disclosure of your ‘gendered’ performance within gay culture. To be ‘bear’ represents male. ‘Chub’ represents female. Masculine is as thus, masculine, and ‘twink’ is as furthermore, feminine. It could be comparatively argued that all queers are transgendered in nature. It seems one could easily assume any gender as a constructed identity.

But as for my existence, this is not the case. For my classified identity has been socially constructed for me. It became quite clear from the descriptions I received from friends in the gay male community that I embody lower gay-male stratas. My physique, weight, mannerisms and interests identify me as such within a codified ideology of oppression. I am an overweight gay male. I am a middle-aged gay male. These two characteristics have served to promote without any influence of direction of my own, that I am not of the upper stratas of gay male body classification. Coming out to the gay male community in postmodernism has not been an easy process. Because of my physical appearance, I provide no function in an inter-queer system of stratification other than to be subordinated based on a value system of physical beauty. More importantly, my being the overweight gay male represents no historical possibility of ‘fitting in’.

As Judith Butler elaborates, “the body is understood to be an active process of embodying certain cultural and historical possibilities.” (Butler, 1996) In other words, the essence of my physical composition, as obese, as non-‘twinkie’, and as of a stratified unit of commercial and social oppression, corresponds in its codified nature to performative characteristics of gender constitution within the theatrical context of patriarchal and capitalist productive order. Consider body image as an act, or as Butler also terms, a “corporeal style” (Butler, 1996). When I remove my preconceived notions of what I romanticize and idealize gay culture to be about, and when I attempt to open up my senses to my Dasein of everyday life as a gay male, it is clear my physical corporeality is performative in textual relations of ruling. My existence as obese gay male is performative as subordinated when I roam the bookstore, shopping district, clothing stores or social nightclubs. My account of such experiences or of one of my strata are erased and of non-disclosure. There is very little to account for in the bear. There is nothing of commercial or social value or importance for the chub. The sales clerk in the clothing store on Church Street pays little or no attention to me, as I do not fit the ideal gay male consumer. My personal interests in gay culture, deeply rooted in consumerist ideology, are void. Even though I am of the account of which I create in my interactions with those who I would call members of my community, my alter-physicality permits no account to be formulated and realized within the culture.

Comparatively this alienation phenomenon can be aligned with Dorothy Smith’s suggestion of master narrative discourses of patriarchy. “Hence the established social forms of consciousness alienate women from their own experience.” (Smith, 1990) Whereas Smith’s phenomenological method shows that her account of experiences as a woman is erased by master narrative textual realities in patriarchal society, the overweight gay male account of oppression is also as thus erased in a male-beauty coded ideology paralleling patriarchal hierarchal structures. A patriarchal code of sexism replicates and imprints itself in gay culture. A “narrative structure fitting the schema of tyranny is replicated.” (Smith, 1999) My experiences as the subordinated gay male are predetermined and predefined by this replicative codification of ideology. For example along this same comparison, an account of femininity to be recognized in social order it must fit master narrative paradigms of patriarchal domination. Thus accounts of female beauty that are mediated textually are of consumerist value. On fashion magazines such as Vogue or Vanity Fair the homogenized ideal of femininity and feminine worth are exemplified by the phallic woman, the über-sexualized woman, and more importantly and aggregately, the commercially constructed female embodiment of consumer and industrial dependency. In gay culture, the gay male of obese distinction is also non-existent. Queer magazine covers such as Fab, Out, Xtra and The Advocate supply no notion of the existence of the over-weight gay male ideal. Month after month, photographs and cover materials provide the same masculine, butch, hard-bodied and Adonisient archetypical images that help to permeate the secondary pyramid of oppression.

Developing a phenomenological sociology for the inter-queer subordinated gay male requires further motion into the textual mediation of capital. Smith defines wealth sociologically in the following way: “Capital as a social form is not just wealth, it is wealth perpetuated through time as a capacity to generate wealth.” (Smith, 1999) Gay culture in its recent upsurge of mediated and textual appropriation is very much a result of the growing corporate recognition of it’s capital potential. The new gay market as it were comprises a multi-billion dollar market share for the tourism, financial, educational, food, and drug industries collectively. A “hyper-reality” (Smith, 1999), which is a simulation of capitalist productive textual relations of ruling, is codified on such a paradigm. The ‘hyper-reality’ of gay male consumerism as thus seemingly and increasingly appropriated by rational consumer-productive ideological practices in Western society has found its place in mainstream culture as functional to conventional consumer marketeering.

In my phenomenological experience this ‘hyper-reality’ though functional in this perspective, thwarts any means of acquiring similar master status within the narrative of gay male consumer appropriation. When I look for it, I find no mainstream magazines for the overweight gay chub. When I ask for it, I am hard pressed to find promotional material designed to offer information on where to obtain health and fitness products for the overweight gay male. Yet there are a growing number of advertisements for my fit and market-palatable counterpart. My classification of gay male embodiment holds no capital generative properties within the master narrative. The essence of my Dasein is not included within the capitalist productive schema of gay interest appropriation through market potential.

My experiences of oppression in both primary and secondary hierarchies are connected and separate it seems. As a closeted gay male living the façade of the heteronormal capitalist my Dasein was of both the oppressor and the oppressed. I served the master narrative from which institutionalized oppression attempts to hold down the interests of queer society. My true Dasein as gay was oppressed and my reaction to this oppression was fear and heterosexual performativity. My early-closeted heterosexual performance shows the social construction of my sexual orientation within this primary hierarchy. A phenomenological account of my experience within a secondary hierarchy as overweight gay male shows my sexual orientation is now socially constructed on the parameters of inter-queer stratification. I have been designated a master status of bear and chub for my physicality will not permit any other classification in gay male society. My stratum within this inter-queer hierarchy is of the subordinated for it does not fit the ideological code of beauty and consumerist perfection as originating in patriarchal capitalist productive order. As such, the oppression of gay male sexuality is experienced in many layers, all-threading back to a singular ideology of capitalist productive symbolic order.

References:
Berger, P. L. & Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise In The Sociology of Knowledge. New York, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Butler, J. (1996). Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. In S. Case (Ed.), Performing Feminisms (pp. 270-282). Baltimore, MA: John’s Hopkins University Press.
Foucault, M. (1978). The History Of Sexuality: Volume 1 An Introduction (R. Hurley, Trans.). New York, NY: Random House, Inc.
Smith, D. (1990). Women’s Experience As A Radical Critique of Sociology. The conceptual Practices Of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge. (pp. 11-28). Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press Incorporated.
Smith, D. (1999). Writing the Social: Critique, Theory, and Investigations. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press Incorporated.

Public Enemy Number One? A Phenomenology in Propaganda Cultivation

Richard Birch
Media Profile Assignment
Media and Culture 2 SOCI 3077
February 28, 2005
This work Copyright (C) 2005 Richard Birch

The advent of the propaganda film is certainly one of the most profound phenomenons in Western society. To fully understand the scope of importance of which the propaganda film is as a medium, one must engage in asking of certain aspects of the very nature of the message in propaganda as structured phenomena of ideological codification. All ideologies are codified. All codification is subjective, and of which this subjectivity is intrinsic to the medium of propaganda film as the purveyor of knowledge, as well as a propagator connected to textual realities of ruling. For the purposes of tying this notion of propaganda to ideology of ruling relations, textual realities, and social synergies of power and oppression one must experience film as not merely a medium, not merely as a component of mass media, not only as an element of a mass mediated agent of socialization, but I project that film, in essence, is a sociology in itself. Film, television, radio, internet, print, and all other media possess the capacity to embody what is crucial for master narratives of social ruling. The propaganda film as medium is designed as such to be experienced, taken in, absorbed, processed, and realized for it’s political and social rationale. By using the sociological method of phenomenology one can engage in the discovery of the very nature, the very impact such a medium, such a sociology can have especially when placed contextually as problematic to social milieux. Furthermore, the medium of propaganda film can be compared and explored in its direct relationship to contemporary issues of objectivity and the press.
In this essay I have chosen to make a phenomenological account of two important films in pop culture and in the cult feature film genre, Reefer Madness and The Atomic Cafe. Both of these films embody the phenomenon of propaganda film as a medium and exemplify how the medium can be utilized through a process of cultivating social attitudes based on master narrative principles and textual realities of ruling.

Reefer Madness
The film Reefer Madness, originally titled Tell Your Children is very much a phenomenology in itself. There is a strong tendency to supply accounts of what happens to those experiencing the phenomenon of marijuana use, or more importantly, accounts already socially constructed by master narratives of power and control. The film originally released in 1938 was designed to be a film intended to frighten the youth of America to not use the “dreaded scourge” marijuana (Reefer Madness [Motion Picture], 1938). The very essence of the film draws and plays on the social attitudes already in place during the time of its release. This is an important characteristic to propaganda film as a medium. For example, what the propaganda films of World War Two proved was that they would be successful when narratives were based on already pre-existing opinions, and of course, fears in society (Jowett & O’Donnell, 1986). During the 1930’s America was on the verge of social and political paralysis from its fear of drugs, alcohol, and other ‘deviant’ behaviour depicted in the media. Hollywood as a model of deviant social discourse had been viewed as for some time to be the embodiment of cultural decay, ethical disorder and the indoctrination of anti-conservative principles which would fuel the creation of the Hollywood Production Code or otherwise known as the Hays Code, a set of strict narrative and production content guidelines that would control the face of the Hollywood screen for approximately three decades (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/beyond/hollywood.html).

The film from the first frame projects itself as an instruction of the sociological issues of marijuana use by giving accounts of so-called actual experiences and actual knowledge. However what the film sets out to achieve is a creation of notions of deviancy, delinquency and behaviour correlated to the antithesis of American values. What the film does in this respect is begin to socially construct what sociologist Dorothy Smith terms an ‘ideological code’, a “constant generator of procedures for selecting syntax, categories, and vocabulary in the writing of texts” (Smith, 1999). In this case, a codified structure of ideology can be utilized, as structural to permeate textual realities. Texts of which the film concretes are what I call performative essences of deviancy. These essences, or structural texts to the master narrative of the film’s purpose as propaganda, are aligned with specific notions of social discourses and behaviour on which alienation is positioned on female sexuality and homoeroticism. The film utilizes such performative essences of deviancy and associates their contextual derogatory meanings attributed to the use of marijuana and narcotics in general.

From the beginning of the film female sexual imagery is automatically associated with drug use. A woman, Mae Colman, who embodies sexual disenfranchisement and slavery, manages the environment where the drug pushers operate their business. She is unwillingly controlled by her male business partner, Jack Perry, to supply and fulfill her obligation to the ideological codification of social deviancy in the narrative. The audience is exposed to exceedingly long shots of her dressing, pulling up her stockings, putting on phallic shaped stiletto shoes, constantly lighting cigarettes, which are another phallic symbol of male sexuality and femininity in masquerade. Another female character that is strategically placed in the narrative is Blanche (no surname is ever given for this character) who embodies the sexual enticement of marijuana. She is the seductive siren of destructive forces to which the story’s teenage male protagonist, Bill Harper, will eventually succumb to in his acquired addition to the weed.

The use of homoeroticism in the film is also equally rampant and strategic in cultivating deviancy through association. The main ‘victims’ in the film are young men, teen boys who are lured onto the ‘siren’s’ rocky shore of addictive seduction not merely by elemental female sexuality but through their own homoerotic association. Their hidden desire, a desire to know the weed, the desire to experience the phenomenological essence of social deviancy is paralleled to the female sexual discourse they are trapped by in the story. Their ‘gayness’ is in short their entry into female seduction. Their homoerotic tendencies are the passport to their social destruction. The homoerotic performative nature of the male characters is directed by the male antagonist, Ralph, the male friend to all who brings the young men into Mae’s and Blanche’s den of addiction.

Critical Phenomenological Review
In viewing and experiencing this film as a format of sociological sensory exploration, subjective interpretation of the film puts light on the performed female sexuality and homoeroticism as socializing acts on which relations of ruling in relation to attitudes of deviancy and control are cultivated. It is here where George Gerbner’s Cultivation Theory can be utilized to show how the associative interplay of sexual misjudgement is aligned with the time period’s universal fears of drug use. The film creates a constructed world of deviancy on which to posit its mandate on knowledge. For, “this created version of the world entices [viewers] to make assumptions about violence, people, places, and other fictionalized events which do not hold true to real life events” (Greunke, 2000). The film produces associative synergies between sexual deviancy, social attitudes towards femininity, patriarchal relations of ruling, and drug use. Knowledge is a construction, and even more so in the medium of propaganda film. Cultivation of knowledge is achieved through bringing the viewer into the subjectivity of the narrative and constantly fostering notions of social deviancy and behavioural misjudgement, both of which can impact on the viewer’s subjective Dasein (See Appendix One).

When watching this film, the viewer obtains a sense that what is shown on screen is not necessarily the essence of the fear of drug addiction. Analyzed deconstructively what is crucially at stake in the narrative if the film is that the deviant behaviour depicted, whether through the introduction and on screen utilization of narcotics, or of the sexual deviancy of the connected characterizations, is in actuality the notion of deviancy against capitalist productive order.
Propaganda is a social construction. Propaganda as a filmic medium provides textual realities of ruling under the guise of objectivity. As Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann point out, “the reality of everyday life appears already objectified, that is, constituted by an order of objects that have been designated as objects before [their] appearance on the scene.” (Berger & Luckmann, 1966) The viewer receives information on the screen and is absorbed under the assumption that the texts supplied are realities. However, what Berger and Luckmann wish to say is that knowledge is not based on objective realities, but on subjective facticities of socially produced legitimations. As a viewer of film, I wish to believe what I see on film is of real context as it were, for my desire for such knowledge is in my mind, justified. Yet what we only receive in such a display of mediated texts is the knowledge produced through power relations. The on screen texts that the audience are exposed to, textual in the form of the characterizations and their performative social deviancies serve hierarchies of oppression and the symbolic productive order and master narrative. Marijuana is not the deviant player. The weed does not act onto itself. The addiction portrayed by the socially skewed characters is not that of social misconduct. It is the misconduct of their actions against capitalist production, which is deviant. Their addiction textually makes them stray from their connectivity to the symbolic, and thus if they are not of the symbolic, they do not have desire to be of productive ordered society. The use of marijuana is irrelevant. Their social acts however show their activity in denouncing their place as oppressed and subordinate to capitalist power in American society.

The Atomic Cafe
The Atomic Cafe is a documentary originally released in 1982. It was produced and directed by Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader and Pierce Rafferty. The film is powerful through its use of various Cold War newsreel footage acquired from government archives of the 1940s and 1950’s. It highlights the propaganda newsreel footage of the period in its depiction of the dark side of the Cold War. The documentary’s purpose is to embody the social currents of fear and paranoia typical of the period in American social and political history and blends this with dark humour constructed through editorial satire. It creates a ‘nuclear Reefer Madness’ in a way. The documentary shows how military and government propaganda enticed the American public into believing, for a time, that possessing the bomb was a good thing for aggregate democratic freedom and liberty. The threat of Communist invasion could be thwarted if possession of the bomb was in the hands of those who had God’s approval. This is a strong characteristic in many of the government educational propaganda films that encapsulates the political construct of nuclear militarism of the period. The documentary shows several scenes in which policy makers and public opinion exemplified the belief that the Americans believed they had God’s approval to use the bomb. In a traditional Calvinistic sense, the American public were coerced into accepting the notion that World War Two ended because the bomb was “God’s answer to their prayers; ” (The Atomic Cafe, [Motion Picture] 1982).
Further atomic testing throughout the 1940’s and 1950’s was sold to the American public on the basis that this “destructive force” would be something good for mankind. Propaganda films were utilized for the purpose of constructing a campaign to implement the nuclear militarism of the period. The government had to create consent within in the American public for such militaristic achievement. But in order to do so, a balance of fear of nuclear devastation with commercial pragmatism intrinsic to American culture had to be achieved. The Atomic Cafe is a composite montage of the media campaign Hollywood and television was enlisted to help socially construct. It was a campaign designed to posit social knowledge of the benefits of possessing nuclear militarism. By possessing the bomb, they were not only protecting the American public from the ‘commies’ and the international threats of God Sanctioned democratic ideology, but they were also protecting American culture from itself. This is the phenomenological account of the film. When experiencing it as a filmic sociology, the underlying tone of the propaganda footage of the period was not that the Russians, or the Chinese, or North Koreans, or any other international entities were the real threat to American social order. The threat that such films engaged in trying to avert was any potential internal menace to capitalist ideology that could be remotely existent in the US. The ‘reefer-ed madness’ of communism was the primary component to American social unrest of which consent to codify as deviant was obtained from the public through the utilization of propaganda imagery.
The film raises important questions as to if this was ultimately achieved in the public landscape. Private ownership vs. Communist ideology is a debate never fully answered or carried through in the genre of Cold War propaganda. Both concepts are interlaced with social constructive methodology. The films of the period had to construct the social ‘truth’ that to betray the democratic commercial ideology and way of life is to face death. Not just death in the literal, nuclear annihilation sense, but death in the capitalist ordered sense. A phenomenological experience of this film enlightens the viewer that fear, consent, and the desire to maintain the status quo by the ruling relations was paramount in the formation of such a filmic sociological method of solving the social problem of convergent capitalist and Marxist ideologies in the first half of the twentieth century.

Overview
In 1941 a prominent Hollywood producer, Walter Wanger saw the potential for motion pictures as a propaganda tool for the upcoming involvement in World War Two. He believed films should be used ‘to clarify, to inspire and to entertain’. This platform of legitimation was a highly successful selling strategy, a notion presented to policy makers in Washington that the medium of film can be utilized to make significant contributions to national morale” (Jowett & O’Donnell, 1986). From 1947 to 1965 “the American film industry was actively solicited by the U.S. government to make commercial films that pointed out the dangers of communism.” (Jowett & O’Donnell, 1986) Again we see the motion picture as a highly effective form of information dissemination in the performative sense. What the producers of Cold War propaganda films came to master, especially those aired in television during the 1950’s, 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, utilized ideologized messages through constant exploitation of the fact that people no longer “entertained the naive concept that global conflict could be won or lost by conventional means, for now the frightening power of nuclear destruction loomed menacingly over the international scene” (Jowett & O’Donnell, 1986).

It is theorized that by regularly showing messages and socially constructing information about divergent political, cultural, theological, and institutional values in other cultures, this phenomenologically can produce feelings of hostility toward the ‘opposite’ divergent culture and nation (Jowett & O’Donnell, 1986). The performative nature of the drop and cover films of the period were more to do with the propagation and development of divergent Communist Russian images on American media. Through constant reinforcement of negative and derogatory mediated images of Communist Russia, China and other nations the public become active players in this performance of ideology. Socially constructed beliefs on what divergent political and cultural identities are grounded and thus override the actual political and basic definitions of such political paradigms and theoretical frameworks.

Distortion of social framework through distortion of performative variables in visual media is fundamentally the basis for both The Atomic Cafe and Reefer Madness because they are of performed social frameworks in themselves. The Atomic Cafe depicts the antithesis of American conservatism and democratic ideological platforms of domination as evil, derelict, and debase in the performative socially constructed sense. Reefer Madness performs adolescent drug culture as the antithesis of American values, goodness, and righteousness. The underlying thread between both films as is that both performative cultures depicted as derogatory, communism as culture, and marijuana as culture, is that both upset capitalist productive symbolic orders in American society. Is it false to claim that the intention of preventing drug use and addiction among the youth of America is the primary or sole purpose of Reefer Madness? Does the film in itself have the values of ‘goodness’ and ‘social harmony’ and American prosperity in its true narrative? Or, is there another element to the master narrative of this film? Is there an underlying and systemic fear of the loss of something else in the foreground?

Textual relations of ruling have as much to do with the medium of film as does directing, producing, writing and acting. Films are in essence knowledge. Films are also in essence stand-alone subjective sociologies. Sociology as a thing, a unit of analysis, a basis of knowledge is what is at question in relating propaganda film as problematic in the social milieux. Textually we are all of the relations of ruling and these relations rule us all. Knowledge is of the ruling relations of social synergies that cross the emotional and political ideological pathways that create social facts. Film is the perfect visual and ideological metaphor of the social fact. But what is a social fact? Are social facts based on knowledge? What is then, in essence, knowledge? Is knowledge that which is propagated to us by the textual relations of ruling? If it is so, then could not all propaganda films arguably be fact? It could be measured as fact – as knowledge if the objective account of ideological discourse in film could be quantitatively empirical.

However, film is neither objective nor is it based on empiricism. For film and media at large is purely of the subjective. All media are sociologically subjective in nature. One cannot experience the medium of film without being in the subjective. Objectivity in the press as parallel to the phenomenon of propaganda is also as such impossible, for the creation and creators of such a media are never able to remove themselves from their own subjective commercial interests which rule their textual realities. To engage in the production of filmic propaganda is to engage in the subjective of ruling knowledge and accounts. The production of such phenomena as propaganda can never be a labour of objectification for the means to create such cultural productions is also inherent to capitalist relations of ruling and oppressive structures of power. Too view and experience film, as is to experience propaganda film is akin to experiencing the world. As Dorothy Smith writes, “The only way of knowing a socially constructed world is knowing it from within.” (Smith, 1990) But since a socially constructed world is culturally produced textual realities of ruling, so are the methods of control maintained by such ruling relations. A propaganda film is a sociological concept controlled, cultivated, fostered, and subjugated by those in power and who desire to maintain control of knowledge. “To control concepts, theories, and ideology and their dissemination in public text-mediated discourse is an important source of power in a society largely organized by text-mediated relations” (Smith, 1999).

Appendix 1. Dasein: A German term for “being there”, or “being” in the subjective sense. A concept important to the sociology of phenomenology. Originally developed by German philosopher Martin Heidegger in his study of the unique self-conscious existential lives human beings possess. Dasein is a component of the phenomenological alysis method originally conceived by philosopher Edmoind Husserl who claimed there is a “pre-predicative stratum of our experience, within which the intentional objects and their qualities are not at all well circumscribed” (Schultz, 1970).

References:
Berger, P. L. & Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in The Sociology of Knowledge. New York, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Greunke, L. (November 2000). The Cultivation Theory: George Gerbner. Fort Collins, CO: Colorado State University. Retrieved February 20, from http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/Speech/rccs/theory06.htm
Hirliman, G. (Producer) & Gasnier, L. (Director). (1938). Reefer Madness aka: Tell Your Children [Motion Picture]. San Diego, CA: Off Color Films.
Jowett, G. S. & O’Donnell, V. (1986). Propaganda and Persuasion. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE Publications Inc.
Loader, J. (Producer & Director), Rafferty, K. (Producer & Director) & Rafferty, P. (Producer & Director). (1982). The Atomic Café [Motion Picture]. Hollywood, CA: The Archives Project, Inc.
Schultz, A. (1970). Alfred Schutz on Phenomenology and Social Relations. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Public Broadcasting Service. (n.d.). Hollywood Censored: The Production Code. Retrieved February 20, 2005, from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/beyond/hollywood.html
Smith, D. (1990). The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press Incorporated.
Smith, D. (1999). Writing the Social: Critique, Theory, and Investigations. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press Incorporated.