The Politics of Knowledge Production: On Structure and the World of "The Wire"

6113 T&F Politics of HBO's The Wire:Layout 1 3 23/10/14 3:15 pm Page 59 The politics of knowledge production On structure and the world of The Wire Isaac Kamola Thematically, [The Wire is] about the very simple idea that, in this Postmodern world of ours, human beings – all of us – are worth less. We’re worth less every day, despite the fact that some of us are achieving more and more. It’s the triumph of capitalism. David Simon1 Many academics and social scientists express great admiration for The Wire, largely because of its uncanny ability to portray various commonly ignored truths about contemporary urban America. What often goes unacknowledged, however, is that the act of presenting these truths in the form of a fictionalized TV drama constitutes a fairly unique, and quite radical, critique of the existing politics (and economics) of academic knowledge production. The “academic love affair”2 with The Wire, in other words, not only indexes the show’s ability to tackle difficult empirical questions in fresh and exciting ways but also marks a deep and largely unvoiced concern among academics that maybe our forms of knowledge production are unable to tackle these same issues with a similar sense of excitement, affect, reach, and acclaim. The academic love affair with The Wire, I contend, should be read as also symptomatic of the numerous limitations shaping the production and reproduction of academic knowledge itself. It is first important to ask why The Wire captures the imaginations of so many academics, and social scientists in particular. What kind of “truth” does the show make available? In answering these questions I diverge from the general consensus that the show offers primarily an “accurate” and “authentic” portrayal of the plight of urban American. The Wire actually does much more than this: it offers a structural and economic argument that illustrates how capital shapes all aspects of peoples’ lives, while simultaneously refusing to reduce individual people to abstracted social and class categories. In other words, The Wire presents social structure as simultaneously real and all-encompassing yet not determinant in any linear, causal, coherent, or even understandable sense. The show illustrates how structure is not an abstraction or philosophical debate but rather a complex, meaningful, and lived reality. Using concepts provided by Louis Althusser, I argue that the world portrayed in The Wire is one in which individual characters are both the lived effects of complex, overdetermined structural relations and simultaneously 6113 T&F Politics of HBO's The Wire:Layout 1 60 23/10/14 3:15 pm Page 60 Isaac Kamola the producers and reproducers of this social whole. This analysis diverges greatly from the tendency among social scientists – and leftist political economists in particular – to discuss and represent the structure of capital in abstract, remote, highly specialized, and mechanical vernaculars. But The Wire does more than offer a compelling structural analysis. It also addresses the fact that the production of knowledge itself takes place within the very same structural relations under examination. The show addresses this aspect of social structure most explicitly in season 5 by illustrating the ways in which, within a conjuncture of neoliberal capitalism (and within the newspaper industry and police department in particular), the production of empirically grounded, wellevidenced truth claims are becoming less effective than faked news stories and made-up serial killers. Reading The Wire as a story about social structure, including the structure of knowledge production itself, raises the question of how those working within the neoliberal university might also approach the work of producing knowledge. I argue that rather than treating the world of The Wire as a fiction that tells a truth – consumed at a comfortable distance from the sofa – those who love The Wire should consider embracing the structural analysis it offers as a method for studying the world in general. Doing so requires making the world of The Wire our world – not necessarily in terms of its content but in terms of the politics behind its approach to structural analysis. Doing so requires appreciating the ways in which knowledge production is itself shaped by the limitations and possibilities of particular material conjunctures. In this chapter I first examine the various reasons academics love The Wire. Then, using concepts developed by Louis Althusser, I demonstrate that the most compelling aspect of the show – and one that often goes unrecognized – is its ability to provide an understanding of social structure in which individuals are both fully immersed within transformations of capitalist production, yet remain irreducible to a single position within the social whole. I then expand this structural analysis to envelop the show itself, illustrating how the show’s creator – David Simon – decided to leave newspaper journalism for HBO, a choice itself shaped by the same structural transformations documented in The Wire. I conclude by examining how this turn to fiction is not entirely politically and strategically unproblematic. Through a reading of the final montage in season 5 (episode 13), I argue that the carefully constructed analysis of a social whole offered by The Wire – a story about an imminent social structure that cannot be known from a disinterested point outside the social whole – comes undone at the moment the fictional narrative must end. Understanding the limits of The Wire is useful for social scientists who aspire to model a politics of knowledge production developed in The Wire. Rather than simply assuming that the conditions of knowledge production are given and in the background, the show asks that we strategically think about the conditions under which we produce knowledge, and prepare ourselves for the possibility that creating new, dynamic, and compelling forms of academic and non-academic knowledge might also require confronting the limits and possibilities shaped by the material conditions under which we live and work. 6113 T&F Politics of HBO's The Wire:Layout 1 23/10/14 3:15 pm Page 61 On structure and the world of The Wire 61 Why academics love The Wire We immediately intuit in today’s world that matters look differently when analyzed at global, continental, national, regional, local, or household/personal scales…Such an intuitive breakdown is inadequate, however, because it makes it appear as if the scales are immutable or even wholly natural, rather than systemic products of changing technologies, modes of human organization and political struggle. David Harvey3 During a seminar at Wesleyan University, David Harvey told an anecdote about being asked to teach a session of an interdisciplinary seminar on the topic of utopias at the City of University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. Looking over the course outline he noticed a failure to engage the question of political economy and, to remedy this, planned to have students “read Spaces of Hope and … watch The Wire and see how [they] can put that together.”4 Harvey is not the only academic who identifies The Wire as an exciting and useful analytical and pedagogical tool. The academic love affair with the show is clearly visible in the numerous academic conferences,5 books,6 special journal issues,7 doctoral theses,8 and the growing number of courses being taught on the show, including at schools like Harvard, University of California–Berkeley, Duke, Middlebury, Trinity College, and Johns Hopkins. The show’s popularity is not surprising given its “explicit political agenda” and “critiques of neoliberal institutions and capitalism” that resonate with “left-liberal academic circles.”9 One thing academics find particularly compelling about The Wire is its ability to realistically capture the complexity of life in urban America. Some scholars argue that The Wire should be considered a “social science fiction,” “an authentic portrayal of urban life” that makes it possible to tell “a certain kind of truth.”10 According to William Julius Wilson the “truth” conveyed in this television show has “done more to enhance our understandings of … urban inequality than any other media event or scholarly publication, including studies by social scientists.”11 In other words, The Wire succeeds because it “confound[s] the line between truth and fiction” by weaving together the fictional and the social scientific.12 The creators of The Wire took a number of deliberate steps to give the show a claim to authenticity and truth-telling, including: drawing characters, plot lines, and even whole dialogues from the lived experiences of its producers and writers; casting Baltimore residents in supporting roles;13 allowing actors to adapt dialogue to emphasize Baltimore dialects and speech patterns; and sprinkling the story with references to various events in Baltimore’s recent history. As a result, “The Wire somehow approaches our world, our reality.”14 As a result, The Wire successfully capitalizes on “fiction’s ability to create fully realized inner lives for its characters” while simultaneously showing “the structural conditions that constrain human choices.”15 On this account, the academic embrace of The Wire can be read as an acknowledgement of a dissatisfaction many social scientists have concerning the ability of academic articles and books to fully 6113 T&F Politics of HBO's The Wire:Layout 1 62 23/10/14 3:15 pm Page 62 Isaac Kamola capture the ways in which economic transformation is also a complex, lived experience. On the one hand, this limitation stems from the fact that most social scientific work, especially within the field of political economy, is populated with categories and concepts which, while claiming to reference a “real world,” are nonetheless highly abstracted from the daily worlds those concepts claim to represent. Rather than privileging an analysis of macro-level economic processes – using abstract theoretical terminology and highly specialized vernaculars – or, conversely, treating the economy as a series of micro-economic technical problems to be solved, analyzed and dissected, The Wire portrays the structure of capitalism as a complete and lived world; a world in which individuals and communities work, struggle, love, and survive. As such, unlike most academic genres, The Wire offers an opportunity to fully grapple with the profound, lived, and highly heterogeneous effects experienced by the many people who inhabit the proverbial streets and corners of the world economy. Unlike many social science accounts that draw stark contrasts between structure and agency (or base and superstructure in the Marxist tradition), the world portrayed in The Wire is not a world in which structure and agency are analytically differentiated. Rather, within this world all characters uniquely struggle against, and within, changing social structures, yet these structural relationships are not rigid and determinist but rather shape each individual life in diverse, multiple, fluid, and contradictory ways. Social structure, in other words, is not portrayed as some external force but rather as the stuff of each character’s lived social practices, the institutions in which these social practices are inscribed, and the effects these practices have on other characters. The deindustrialization of Baltimore, for example, is presented as both a particular moment in the structural transformation of capital, but also a reality lived in heterodox ways that play out differently across fields of race, class, gender, and orientation, not to mention individual characters and profound layers of contingency. While The Wire examines how social institutions are shaped by changing structural conditions, it is instructive to note that one of Baltimore’s largest industries – higher education – is notably absent from the show.16 This absence is substantial given that Baltimore’s sixteen colleges and universities provide the city $17.2 billion dollars in annual economic impact and employ 162,000 people17 – a substantial number for a city of 620,000 and a metro area of 2.7 million people. Johns Hopkins alone counts for $4 billion dollars of “economic output,” is the city’s largest single employer (hiring 49,170 people), and purchases $335 million in goods and services from local companies annually.18 Given the prominence of higher education in the social fabric of Baltimore, one could easily imagine a season populated by indebted college students, striking Aramark employees, unemployed graduate students, and contingent adjunct professors all trying to eke out a living within the broader context of the fraught relationship between Johns Hopkins and the impoverished East Baltimore neighborhoods that abut the the school’s vast medical complex. Even as 48.7 percent of residents in Baltimore’s Middle East and Perkins neighborhoods die prematurely due to a lack of the same quality medical care found in the city’s affluent neighborhoods,19 Hopkins is 6113 T&F Politics of HBO's The Wire:Layout 1 23/10/14 3:15 pm Page 63 On structure and the world of The Wire 63 expanding its medical campus into these same neighborhoods, building a 1.5 million square foot “full-service corporate research campus” to house “early stage companies, growing firms, large established life sciences companies, and related institutional research.”20 Like the corner, school, and newspaper, the university faces the same sort of structural transformation The Wire powerfully documents.21 The relative absence of the university within the show is not entirely coincidental, however. On the one hand, David Simon expresses a deep skepticism about the social worth of academic and social scientific research in general. In a memorable exchange in season 4 (episode 13), shortly after finding out that his funding gets pulled, the fictitious sociologist Dr. Parenti sums up the academic project as “we study the problem, we propose solutions. If they listen, they listen. If they don’t it still makes for great research” and will “get a lot of attention … [f]rom other researchers.”22 To this Bunny Colvin vocalizes what many academics sometimes express only in private (or after a long day cooped up in a stuffy conference hotel) replying with exasperation: “Academics? What, they gonna study your study? When do this shit change?”23 This implicit critique of the limits of social scientific knowledge production is not the only thing to learn from the absence of the university in The Wire. The absence of the university is also productive, making it possible for academics to read the show as “authentic.” Because The Wire documents an otherwise unknown world “out there” and “on the street” it becomes possible to speculate on its authenticity. Like the banality of daily life on the corner, a season on faculty meetings, seminar discussions and publishing deadlines would have to undergo profound fictional transformation to make the world of higher education into good TV.24 With this in mind, it is important to read The Wire as less an authentic portrayal of a world “over there” than as a highly theorized demonstration of an alternative practice of knowledge production. Overdetermination and social structure The Wire is, first and foremost, a story about social structure. At the formal level, the show unfolds over five seasons through a process of revealing deeper and deeper levels of this complex structure. As Fredric Jameson points out, the show starts with the police realizing they know very little about the criminal world except “the neighborhoods and the corners on which the drugs are finally sold” – that is, the police only know the “appearance of the reality, the empirical or sensory form it takes in daily life” and nothing about the “ultimate structure” which remains “too abstract for any single observer to experience.”25 The show, like the police themselves, then engages in a process of unfolding the underlying structure of the drug trade. In subsequent seasons it greatly expands this method of analysis to include larger and larger dimensions of the social whole. The social structure The Wire makes visible is one in which sprawling and interconnected relations and tensions affect various social institutions and individuals but without a determining master variable holding the whole structure together in any coherent or meaningful way. There is no single contradiction but 6113 T&F Politics of HBO's The Wire:Layout 1 64 23/10/14 3:15 pm Page 64 Isaac Kamola rather a rich and vibrating world of ever-changing contradictions and tensions. The view of social structure presented in the show shares much with the structuralism of French Marxist Louis Althusser. At the center of mid-twentieth century debates in France over humanism, capitalism, and the failure of Stalinism, Althusser developed a Marxist account that both prioritized the role of capitalism in organizing social life while also recognizing that the dogmatic reading of Marx as describing a single contradiction between the bourgeois and the proletariat could not account for either the complexity or the subjective qualities of contemporary capitalism. While Althusser remains a controversial figure,26 his analysis provides a compelling vocabulary for understanding the world of The Wire. Rather than a series of character-driven events, The Wire offers – in Althusserian language – an analysis of the social whole27 as comprised of various social registers28 and particular apparatuses,29 including: the corner, the police, the school, the media, the union, the city government, the drug gang, and the justice system. Viewers witness these apparatuses riddled by their own internal contradictions while also bolstering – and competing against – one another. While Baltimore is the nodal focus of the show, the local incarnations of these apparatuses are linked to apparatuses extending far beyond the city. The Wire further situates the particular structural transformations taking place within Baltimore as immanently linked to structural transformations at the national and international registers – as seen by the ways in which individual characters and institutions are forced to adapt to changes taking place in state and federal governments, the FBI, New York drug cartels as well as international changes in trading patterns, de-industrialization, terrorism, and shifting circuits of drug and human trafficking. Therefore, each character personifies not only various elements, or moments, within this complex, sprawling, immanently structured landscape of Baltimore but also stand in for points on a horizon of vastly interconnected social relations expanding far beyond the city. Baltimore, in other words, is just one paradigmatic site within the social whole. In this way, one might think of The Wire as offering a more complex, detailed, and critical account of how capital, institutions, individuals, etc. constitute a common world that today is popularly (and problematically) framed in terms of “globalization.” The Wire, in contrast, presents the world not as divided into “global” and “local” registers but rather as a social whole. Furthermore, The Wire’s characters are not liberal rational economic actors, or abstracted categories playing out a pre-scripted social function, but rather individuals that embody the effects of compiling contradictory and overlapping institutional layers and social registers. The fact that each season has different institutional and social emphases, even as the story unfolds in a linear and cumulative fashion, means that characters never drive the story, but rather each character is an opportunity to explore some aspects of the social whole which is itself the actual main character. Examining the social whole through dissecting various apparatuses and registers in this way means that over the course of five seasons viewers come to better understand and appreciate actions taken by characters in previous seasons. For example, while season 1 dissects the mutually constitutive relationship between the police and the corner, season 2 situates the 6113 T&F Politics of HBO's The Wire:Layout 1 23/10/14 3:15 pm Page 65 On structure and the world of The Wire 65 corner within the social context of industrial decline, political corruption, declining union power, and international criminality.30 Season 3 places the same characters, as well as the newly introduced characters, within the expansive circuits of urban revitalization and social service provision.31 In a similar way, season 4’s analysis of the school makes it possible to retrospectively understand the motivations driving various characters inhabiting the corner during the first season, even though most of these particular characters have exited the narrative.32 Season 5’s analysis of the media places various fleeting moments in season 1 – such as McNulty’s efforts to plant a newspaper story about the Barksdale gang – into greater relief.33 Althusser’s concept of overdetermination34 offers a useful way to theorize the complexly structured world portrayed in The Wire. Seeking to develop a structural Marxist theory absent economism and structural determinacy, Althusser argues that the traditional metaphor of an economic base determining the superstructure is insufficient.35 Rather, he presents the social world as a constantly shifting and immanent assemblage of semi-autonomous social registers (and their effects) such that the organization of any particular social formation (or conjuncture36) at any given moment is “absent cause”; that is, irreducible to the sum of individual apparatuses and registers. In his primary example of overdetermination, Althusser argues that the Russian Revolution was not simply determined by the single contradiction of a proletarian class rising against the bourgeoisie (i.e. the story of linear of economic causality) but instead was a structural change occurring when a “vast accumulation of ‘contradictions’ comes into play in the same court.”37 Understanding the Russian Revolution as a conjunctural event means looking at the whole assemblage of overdetermined registers of contradiction including those produced by “capitalist and imperialist exploitations,” contradictions between capitalist production and a medieval state, and class struggle within the ruling class (between Tsarists, rebellious nobility, industrialists, liberals, petty bourgeoisie, and anarchists) in addition to a series of “exceptional circumstances” including the presence of a sophisticated “revolutionary elite” and the support of the French and British who were also interested in overthrowing the Tsar.38 The Wire’s fictional conjuncture of contemporary Baltimore can similarly be understood as a moment made possible by “a vast heterogeneity of circumstances, currents, and contradictions (local, international, class and nonclass).”39 This account, however, is not one in which all social relations affect the social whole equally. While Althusser rejects the claim that the economy solely determines all aspects of life, he nonetheless insists that economic relations are not simply one set of relations among many. However, unlike traditional Marxist accounts that often reduce political, cultural, religious and social relations to mere effects of prevailing economic relations (i.e. the base determining the superstructure) Althusser argues that the economy is only determinant “in the last instance …in the long run, the run of History.”40 In other words, while the economy influences all aspects of the social totality, social relations are simultaneously overdetermined by all other aspects of the semi-autonomous superstructure such that, at any given instance, the economy may or may not be most relevant to determining the contours of the present conjuncture. Furthermore, the social 6113 T&F Politics of HBO's The Wire:Layout 1 66 23/10/14 3:15 pm Page 66 Isaac Kamola production and reproduction does not just take place within the economic realm but throughout the social whole. Viewed in this way, The Wire similarly depicts how the structural transformation of the capitalist economy shapes all aspects of social life, without simply reducing the complex world to economic relations. For example, both illegal enterprises like drugs and prostitution as well as legitimate capitalist practices like property development and speculation are inscribed within changing capitalist relations.41 These particular capitalist economies are themselves situated within a general tendency towards the neoliberalization of the economy,42 a change that affects everyone – from dockworkers, schoolteachers, police detectives, politicians, drug dealers, users, and reporters – in similar ways, yet radically different ones as well. However, while The Wire shows “the eviscerating effects of globalization and corporatization,”43 no character can simply be reduced to their class demarcations, or even their particular intersectional ordinates along a matrix of race-class-gender. Furthermore, in many instances, economic relations recede as legal, political, racial, educational, and familial registers overdetermine and contradict underlying class relations, and in doing so redefine what class means. Stringer Bell, for example, personifies these contradiction within capitalist accumulation as he constantly vacillates between fostering liberal markets but enforces them through violence. He aspires to legality but gains his capital illegally; he studies Smithian capitalism while depending upon primitive accumulation.44 In presenting a social whole in which the economy is determinant in the final instance, the world of The Wire is nonetheless inhabited by highly original characters possessing unique talents, insights, passions, practices, idiosyncrasies, and habits. The streets of Baltimore are populated with characters who, despite being products of a transforming social whole, cannot themselves be reduced to any single structural position. For example, the character Bubbles is both clearly a product of racialized poverty as well as the drug trade (itself an overdetermined effect of urban poverty, international drug importation, political bureaucracies, etc.) but nonetheless conducts himself as a unique character within this social whole. Because The Wire presents characters as particular articulations of an immensely contradictory social whole it becomes possible to simultaneously have sympathy for the drug addict, the stick-up boy, the homicidal “muscle,” the corrupt politician, and the drunken police detective. Absent the transcendent morality underwriting the liberal individualism of most crime dramas (and political culture more generally), The Wire asks its audience to evaluate various characters not according to transcendent values of “good” and “bad” but rather according to how creatively they live within the limitations and possibilities of the social structure: that is, how well they “play the game.” The social totality portrayed within The Wire is even more compelling in its refusal to represent the social whole from the perspective of a disembodied outside. Except in the final montage at the end of the series (discussed below), no character is positioned to grasp all dimensions of the social whole simultaneously – there is no “heroic exit,” no objective observer standing outside the social whole. Even potential points of narrative exit, such as the credit sequence and the opening 6113 T&F Politics of HBO's The Wire:Layout 1 23/10/14 3:15 pm Page 67 On structure and the world of The Wire 67 epigraphs, are drawn from images and dialogues that, as they appear throughout the season(s), become devoid of any deeper meaning and instead reinforce a sense of radical, and expansive, interiority.45 Furthermore, the absence of episodic narrative arcs, omniscient narrators, introspective flashbacks, interior monologues, and even centripetal characters prevents the show from coalescing around a single narrative trajectory; the story is always dispersed and fragmented allowing the audience to access many different (and often competing) worlds of meaning within a larger social milieu. As such, “there is no ‘other’” since “different voices and discourses of different social groups are not presented to us in isolation but intersect.”46 While the story is centered on Baltimore, the absence of an exterior point of reference makes the world of The Wire both particular to Baltimore, and even urban America more generally, but not limited to these nodal locations. Rather, Baltimore is simply one conjuncture in which the contradictions of the social whole are particularly visible and visceral. One could, in other words, recreate the structural analysis offered in The Wire by examining completely different conjunctures, composed of different cities, institutions, peoples, nations, transnational networks, and so on. These stories of the social whole would differ from The Wire in terms of their particularity but would still be rooted in a similar politics of knowledge production – namely, documenting to the vast lived worlds that constitute the production and reproduction of the social whole. While Althusser’s concepts of social whole and overdetermination help make sense of the world of The Wire, it is important to recognize that David Simon – the show’s creator and most prominent spokesperson – has, on a number of occasions, explicitly refused to label himself a Marxist. He refers to himself as a social democrat and maintains a commitment to the belief that capitalism – especially when constrained by robust social and political institutions – provides the best avenue for human wealth creation and prosperity. Recognizing that “it is possible to accept some of the Marxist critique of capitalism,” he remains critical of the revolutionary and potentially violent implications of Marxist analysis.47 However, adopting Althusser’s analysis of overdetermination it becomes possible – in a classically Althusserian move – to argue that Simon is actually more Marxist than the caricatured Marxism he pushes back against. For Althusser, a reading of Marx never yields a position of revolutionary exit from which a total social transformation is conceivable (a position he explicitly criticizes the Soviet Union for embracing). Rather, in Althusser’s reading, Marx offers a method for comprehending society as a complex, immanently interconnected, and contradictory whole. The very apparatuses of knowledge production are themselves shaped and structured by the social whole. This means that for Marxists actively engaged in the production of knowledge the political aim is not to establish a position of revolutionary exit but rather to identify how the material conjuncture shapes what knowledge is produced. Understood in this way, it becomes possible to use the argument of The Wire to examine Simon’s own embrace of television as a particular medium from which to produce and circulate a kind of story not possible from within other apparatuses of knowledge production. 6113 T&F Politics of HBO's The Wire:Layout 1 68 23/10/14 3:15 pm Page 68 Isaac Kamola A conjuncture for fiction Given the number of academics and social scientists who embrace The Wire for its truth-telling capability, it is important to think critically about why David Simon – a respected and acclaimed journalist and non-fiction author – ultimately decides to tell the story of structural overdetermination in the form of a fictional TV show. After all, while the content of The Wire is drawn from David Simon’s personal experience as a journalist (as well as those of his co-producer Ed Burns) and the recent history of Baltimore more generally, the storyline of the show is explicitly modeled after works of fiction. Simon hired leading novelists and playwrights (George Pelecanos, Richard Price, and Dennis Lehane) to write the script, and has routinely compared The Wire to works by Balzac and Dickens who both wrote sprawling and complex narratives with large casts of characters, and similarly published their work in serial form.48 Elsewhere Simon talks about the show being a modern-day Greek tragedy.49 Like many academics writing on and teaching The Wire, fellow journalist Mark Bowden contends that Simon’s turn to fiction stems from fiction’s formal ability to tell a certain kind of truth: The essential difference between writing nonfiction and writing fiction is that the artist owns his vision, while the journalist can never really claim one, or at least not a complete one – because the real world is infinitely complex and ever changing. Art frees you from the infuriating unfinishedness of the real world. For this reason, the very clarity of well-wrought fiction can sometimes make it feel more real than reality…Fiction can explain things that journalism cannot. It allows you to enter the lives and motivations of characters with far more intimacy than is typically possible in nonfiction. In the case of The Wire, fiction allows you to wander around inside a violent, criminal subculture, and inside an entrenched official bureaucracy, in a way that most reporters can only dream about. And it frees you from concerns about libel and cruelty. It frees you to be unfair.50 This fairly typical distinction between the diverging narrative possibilities of nonfiction versus fiction assumes that Simon simply arrived at fiction in response to creative license. Bowden contends that, while both journalism and fiction are capable of capturing “reality,” an author chooses the format that corresponds closest to her personal vision, aesthetic commitments, and pragmatic concerns about access. An Althusserian reading of The Wire, however, requires that we also take seriously the ways in which Simon’s turn to fiction is not simply a personal and artistic choice, but rather a strategic engagement within a particular conjuncture. After all, Simon’s turn to television is itself overdetermined (but not determined) by the changing conjuncture of contemporary cultural capitalism. Biographically, Simon joined the Baltimore Sun after college, and worked as a police reporter from 1982 to 1995. Motivated by Watergate, he started with an idealistic view of the newspaper and its social function, calling it “God’s work.”51 After a protracted 6113 T&F Politics of HBO's The Wire:Layout 1 23/10/14 3:15 pm Page 69 On structure and the world of The Wire 69 labor strike at the Sun in the late 1980s he became disillusioned, taking time off to write Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991) followed by The Corner (1997) with Ed Burns (the eventual co-creator and co-producer of The Wire). These book-length nonfiction accounts allowed Simon the ability to tell the kind of longform stories that were becoming increasingly difficult to write at the Sun. David Simon got his introduction to TV when, again on leave from the Baltimore Sun, he went to work writing for the gritty NBC cop drama, Homicide: Life on the Streets (1993–9), adapted from his book. This experience gave Simon the access and contacts he needed to adapt his second book into the award-winning HBO miniseries The Corner (2000). Simon often credits his transition from newspaper journalism to television as the result of economic changes within the newspaper industry. In an interview with Baltimore’s City Paper, Simon describes his decision to leave journalism as a direct result of a transition at the Baltimore Sun from a family-owned company to one owned by “out-of-town management:” I got out of journalism because some sons of bitches bought my newspaper… The newspaper that I left just presented the employees who work there with a new contract that eliminates 401(k) contributions towards their pension and asks them for 45 percent of their medical costs … I’m not just singling them out. The people at Beth Steel are losing their pension, and the guys down at the port gave back stuff in [labor] contracts only to see the container business nonetheless go to Norfolk [Virginia].52 These changes constituted a profound remaking of the conditions of knowledge production – including more rapid deadlines and greater editorial interference – compounded Simon’s growing skepticism about the viability of doing good journalism.53 This experience forms the backbone of his blistering critique of the newspaper industry in season 5 of The Wire. Less commonly recognized, however, is that Simon’s switch to television is also made possible by the successes of HBO within the same neoliberal economy that was dismantling the once revered Baltimore Sun. HBO is the largest premium cable channel in the world, owned by the massive media conglomerate Time Warner. During the period The Wire was on the air, Time Warner owned two dozen major magazines, the world’s second largest publishing house, a number of prominent film studios, movie theaters, theme parks, retail stores, cable television channels (including CNN), not to mention major equity shares in Viacom, Sony, News Corporation, NBC, and many other major media corporations.54 Time Warner earned $26.9 billion in revenue during 2011.55 While best known as a premium cable channel, HBO’s primary business is not the production of innovative new shows like Oz, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, and The Wire but rather the purchasing and distribution of existing content to untapped niche markets around the world – often in ways that undercut local content providers.56 HBO’s success is largely due to the fact that it merges “the organized, centralized, inflexible [version of] post-Fordism” that comes with 6113 T&F Politics of HBO's The Wire:Layout 1 70 23/10/14 3:15 pm Page 70 Isaac Kamola “a huge conglomerate’s vertical integration” with the “disorganized, decentralized, flexible post-Fordism of contemporary cultural capitalism;” the latter relying on a large army of contingent workers “many of whom do not have tenure and benefits” or who work for small companies that “sell their labor to the giant corporation of Time Warner” at unfavorable terms.57 In the United States, HBO charges a premium for its original content to a largely white, educated, and relatively affluent population who constitute the primary audience for the “post-TV” cultural commodities like The Wire. Because HBO shows need to be watched in sequence, their audience is primarily composed of cable subscribers, those purchasing HBO box sets ($129.99 for all five seasons of The Wire),58 those who purchase content through online vendors, and those savvy enough to illegally download files from the Internet. As a consequence, the audience of The Wire is “(comparatively) affluent, middle-class, white Americans.”59 As such, the differences between the worlds inhabited by the typical HBO consumer and the worlds represented in The Wire are actually quite stark. This gulf is beautifully illustrated by Columbia University sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh, a scholar of inner-city gangs, who watched the show with some of his “gangland acquaintances” in New York. He thought that the gang members generally found that the show did not ring true at all. For example, the gang members could not accept that Bunk was not “on the take” (“He’s too good not be profiting”), that Prop Joe did not kill Marlo after he challenged him at a co-op meeting (“But white folks always love to keep these uppity [characters] alive”), nor the show’s general absence of strong, inner-city female characters (“women have the power in the ghetto. This show totally got it wrong when they made it all about men”).60 Furthermore, unlike The Wire’s targeted consumers, television is generally “not an important medium in the gangsters’ everyday consumption habits” since they “only have fleeting exposure to television, usually in the background in public spaces such as bars and clubs.”61 In addition to being directed at a predominantly white, affluent, HBO-consuming audience, The Wire also specifically targets a highly educated demographic, namely “postgraduate students, young academics, and those who can be identified as members of the creative classes.”62 In fact, the well-educated are actually the show’s intended audience,63 given David Simon’s general disdain for the typical TV consumer; a point made visible in his much-repeated outburst – “Fuck the average viewer” – during a 2008 interview on the BBC’s Culture Show.64 In fact, it is precisely the opportunity to produce for this selective and elite market – rather than the average TV or newspaper consumer – that Simon finds most attractive about working for HBO. The station gives Simon the creative freedom to tell more complicated stories without limiting his vision due to the economic imperative to attract advertisers – what Simon calls “selling the intermissions.”65 Taking into consideration the structural conditions that overdetermined Simon’s switch from journalism to TV production helps foreground the ways in which all forms of knowledge production cannot be disaggregated from the conditions in which it is produced. For Althusser, all aspects of how a particular text is read, by whom, and for what purpose are shaped by the conjuncture in which it was 6113 T&F Politics of HBO's The Wire:Layout 1 23/10/14 3:15 pm Page 71 On structure and the world of The Wire 71 produced. Regardless of their respective ability to document social reality, newspapers, TV shows, and even academic articles are first and foremost commodities.66 And while the market for news media is experiencing a profound contraction and disruption within the present conjuncture, these same transformations simultaneously open up new possibilities for those working within other structured sites of knowledge production, including television.67 With this in mind, the desire among academics to treat The Wire as a “social science fiction” that accurately portrays the reality of urban life should be moderated by the sober recognition that the very material conditions for Simon to create and produce The Wire at HBO – a story no longer possible within the world of journalism – is itself marked by the restructuring of the present conjuncture, including a transformation of the apparatuses of knowledge production themselves. On the other hand, within an Althusserian analysis, The Wire – as with journalistic and academic writing – cannot simply be reduced to the economic conditions that make its production possible. Precisely because the show is produced within a complex and contradictory social whole, comprised of many different registers the show exists as a worldly object that retains the contradictions and tensions that shape its production and circulation. As such, Simon’s ability to turn to fiction should be understood neither as the result of an individual aesthetic sensibility nor as simply an imposed retreat in the face of monolithic changes in neoliberal capitalism. Rather, like the characters he represents, Simon’s turn to fiction is a vibrant strategy for adapting to the changing, lived, structured, and overdetermined world. It is not insignificant, therefore, that the show itself wrestles with the politics of knowledge production in general, and the place of fiction in particular, in season 5’s twin storylines of McNulty’s invented serial killer and Templeton’s fabricated newspaper stories. Season 5 and the strategy of fiction Season 5 of The Wire does something substantially different from previous seasons. In addition to examining the social whole through an investigation of specific institutions and apparatuses (adding the news media to its analysis), this season also poses a more fundamental question about the composition of social structure – namely, how knowledge is produced. In particular, this final season examines how, under contemporary structural conditions, it becomes more useful – even necessary – to employ fiction rather than non-fiction when representing the world. In this season The Wire is, in effect, arguing that within a conjuncture in which institutions like the newspaper are driven to become profitable, and government institutions (such as the police department) face profound austerity, it becomes impossible to assume that accurate, well-documented information is sufficient to achieve the desired political ends. What both McNulty and Templeton discover is that, under neoliberal conditions of knowledge production, the truth of one’s claims becomes radically disaggregated from their effects. In both cases, continuing to describe the empirical world in non-fictional terms becomes insufficient to attain one’s otherwise modest personal and political objectives – be they doing basic 6113 T&F Politics of HBO's The Wire:Layout 1 72 23/10/14 3:15 pm Page 72 Isaac Kamola police work or advancing one’s personal career within an otherwise failing industry. In counter-posing the ways in which Templeton and McNulty strategically turn to fiction, The Wire asks the viewer to think about both the perils and opportunities that follow from deploying fiction as a possible strategy for adapting to the structural limitations placed on knowledge production. In particular, the show raises the possibility that the political desire – and material ability – to produce knowledge with meaningful effects might actually require turning away from nonfiction and fully embracing fiction. This is clearly an unsettling proposition for Simon who, after all, continues to think of himself as working in non-fiction: “I never feel like a TV writer–producer. I’m still a newspaperman. I just don’t work for a newspaper.”68 Season 5, however, demonstrates a deep concern about the possibility that – ethical questions aside – under current regimes of knowledge production fiction seems to have greater political efficacy than well-researched and empirically verified forms of knowledge. While the show clearly does not argue that either McNulty’s invented serial killer or Templeton’s faked new stories are commendable, justified, or even good politics, it does broach the question of their efficacy. On the one hand, the moral indignation expressed by detectives Greggs and Moreland about the importance of “good, old-fashioned police work” offers a compelling argument about the need for traditional standards of knowledge production.69 Similarly, the show’s visceral outrage at a newspaper that would encourage Templeton’s fraudulent reporting in the name of churning up more sensationalist stories, speaks to Simon’s personal steadfast commitment to a vision of journalistic ethics. However, despite a clear moral concern with Templeton and McNulty’s turns towards fiction, in both instances, the show recognizes that fiction actually achieves its desired outcomes. Despite ending his police career and seeing Marlo walk free, McNulty’s invented serial killer nonetheless creates the conditions for prosecuting the majority of Marlo’s crew.70 The fact that Carcetti lets the investigation continue even after he knows about the serial killer hoax, and later takes credit for the drug arrests that follow, illustrates the multiple ways people benefit from McNulty’s fiction. Similarly, Templeton – in the final montage – is seen receiving a Pulitzer Prize for his fictional account of McNulty’s serial killer, while the two reporters most committed to non-fiction (Gus Haynes and Alma Gutierrez) are demoted or transferred.71 What the season seems to argue – a point not entirely divergent from Simon’s own biography – is that a turn towards fiction is not just a personal and aesthetic decision but rather one informed by the structural conditions of knowledge production. And, given these constraints, it might even be possible to think of some forms of fiction – including McNulty’s invention of a serial killer – as “totally ethical and brilliant.”72 The issue of the political efficacy of fiction within the neoliberal conjuncture poses an interesting quandary for academics, and social scientists in particular, who find in The Wire a compelling representation of the real world. Like the police detectives and newspaper men and women in The Wire, we also work within institutions ostensibly committed to understanding the “real” world as it “actually” is. Even after the culture wars, universities still gain much of their legitimacy by 6113 T&F Politics of HBO's The Wire:Layout 1 23/10/14 3:15 pm Page 73 On structure and the world of The Wire 73 claiming to be the last bastions, and brightest beacons, of truth. However, within the present conjuncture, universities across the United States and around the world face profound austerity, political attack, and greater adoption of profit-oriented management. Within this conjuncture, what political possibilities for academic knowledge production remain available? As the university undergoes the same kinds of overdetermined structural transformations documented in The Wire, what strategies are available for academics – particularly those on the left – to tell the stories we want to tell? Answering this question should start with an analysis of how Simon’s turn to fiction both enables but also limits an ability to tell a story of social structure. The final montage and the limits of fiction In the final scene of The Wire, McNulty is driving back to Baltimore after retrieving the homeless man he has placed at the center of his story concerning a fictional serial killer. He stops on the side of the freeway and, leaning on his car, looks over the Baltimore skyline with the row houses behind him. As the camera zooms into his face the theme music starts and, as in the montages at the end of the previous four seasons, the viewer is transported to a series of vignettes showing the lives of various characters throughout the show. This portion of the final montage plays out a tragic theme as some characters come to replace others: a new crop of drug dealers replaces Stanfield, Michael replaces Omar, Duquant replaces Bubbles, Pearlman replaces Judge Phelan, Daniels replaces Pearlman, Valchek replaces Commissioner Burrell, and so on.73 Furthermore, unlike montages at the end of previous seasons which take place in a shared temporality, the montage at the end of season 5 clearly jumps between temporal registers; at one moment Carcetti is celebrating his election of governor, in another he presides over the ceremony in which Rawls becomes Maryland State Police superintendent. As such, the construction of the montage claims that, while The Wire only dealt with some sub-set of possible lives and institutions, those positioned in the audience can understand these stories as transcending space and time because they are both circular and universal. In social scientific terms, the particular findings of The Wire are widely generalizable. The second half of the final montage also differs from previous montages in that it broadens into an increasingly rapid series of general street scenes, including: police arresting a small boy, kids playing basketball in an ally, juveniles throwing a rock at a new police surveillance camera,74 corner shots, industrial factories, commuter trains, people moving through the courtyard of the low-rises, a radio car patrolling the docks, a police boat traveling through the harbor with a factory billowing smoke in the background, a homeless man eating from a trashcan, police busting a corner, all interspersed with various other street scenes that come so rapidly that they flow into one another. The shot then returns to a close-up of McNulty’s face, as if the montage just played out on the screen of his mind. Getting into his car he says to the homeless man, “Larry, let’s go home.” As they drive off the camera stays still, capturing the Baltimore skyline in the background and the freeway traffic passing in the foreground. 6113 T&F Politics of HBO's The Wire:Layout 1 74 23/10/14 3:15 pm Page 74 Isaac Kamola This final montage reveals the limits of studying structure through fiction, namely the formal need to obscure the distance between an object of knowledge and the conductions under which it is produced and consumed. In the final montage it becomes evident that the world of the audience is actually radically distanced from the world of The Wire. Up until this moment the show more or less successfully obscured its outside. In this final scene, however, the audience and McNulty merge into the same all-seeing figure standing on the proverbial highway overpass. McNulty seems to join the audience on the sofa for a moment as he knowingly surveys the complex and overdetermined social whole. The audience becomes visible as the credits roll and the house lights come back on. This final montage, in other words, forces the uncomfortable recognition that, in fictional narratives such as this one, the real outside is always already the audience who, because of their socio-economic status, education, and racial composition, is substantially different from those inhabiting the worlds they have been observing and consuming.75 We realize that the great joy of watching The Wire actually comes from a smug satisfaction of being able to see the social structure in its totality. As such, this final montage effectively reveals the major limit of Simon’s analysis, a limit not resulting from any methodological failure but rather from a practical and formal need to “wrap the story up.” In bringing a fictional story to a close, the show itself has to face the recognition that the audience does not actually inhabit the world of The Wire. What the final montage actually reveals is what In what Slavoj Žižek brilliantly calls the show’s “Lion King moment,” the audience becomes aware that the distance between the world of the audience and the world of The Wire means that, when all is said and done, all that remains is a resigned wisdom that the “circle of life goes on but what can we do.”76 The ability to arrive at this tragic insight, itself a result of the considerable gulf between the audience and the world of The Wire, is also why we love the show so much. On the one hand, the show’s proximity to Greek tragedy in this moment is not entirely coincidental given that the show is very much modeled on this literary genre. At a lecture at Baltimore’s Loyola College Simon announced that the writers of The Wire simply “ripped off the Greeks: Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides … We’ve basically taken the idea of Greek tragedy and applied it to the modern citystate” in which the “fated and doomed people” were victims of “postmodern institutions” rather than “indifferent gods.”77 The tragedy of The Wire, however, is not only in the particulars of the show’s content and storyline, but also in the form itself. What the final montage reveals is that, within a fictional TV drama, there is no space for either the show’s producers or its audience to also inhabit the social whole that they have just enjoyed consuming. Instead, the world that we love – a fictional world – simply comes to an end in this final scene. It is important to note that this finalizing distance is less present in other texts produced by David Simon and Ed Burns. For example, in the “Authors’ Note” at the end of The Corner Simon and Burns insist that “[t]his book is a work of journalism” and simultaneously recognize that in the process of writing it they nonetheless quickly abandoned the “policy of nonintervention” and often actively 6113 T&F Politics of HBO's The Wire:Layout 1 23/10/14 3:15 pm Page 75 On structure and the world of The Wire 75 participated in the lives of the people around them, bringing them to detox clinics, offering rides (and documented themselves into the story as “hired cars”), and engaging in all aspects of life on the corner.78 Similarly, the HBO mini-series based on The Corner concludes with an interview between the director and the people whose lives actors portray in the show.79 In both instances, author and audience are required to come face to face with their own uncomfortable positionality within the world being represented. And again in both instances, this confrontation is possible because The Corner (as book and miniseries) is staked in non-fiction. What, then, would it mean to produce academic knowledge in ways that both adopts The Wire’s powerful structural analysis but rejects the tragic gulf between the world and the various practices of producing and consuming knowledge about the world? Doing so, I argue, would require fully embracing the vision of structure presented within The Wire but recognizing this structuralist argument not as a truthful representation but as a strategic politics of knowledge production.80 On the one hand, most knowledge produced in the social sciences also depends upon tragic moments of heroic exit similar to the one made visible in the final montage. Most social science is predicated on an assumed and clear distinction between an audience, engaged in scholarly observation, and the object of study existing “out there” in the “real” world. What would it mean, however, to instead produce knowledge about social relations – including the production of the Baltimore Sun and knowledge itself – as radically immanent with the social whole? Doing so would have to include a recognition that the material apparatus of the university, like HBO for Simon, shapes the very conditions for knowledge production. Reading The Wire for its politics of knowledge production means taking seriously the fact that even academic knowledge is structured by the overdetermination of many different social registers, including the increasingly hierarchical, exclusionary, and precarious political economy of higher education. As such, what we write and teach, and how we spend our lives – not to mention what knowledge we produce, publish, and consume – are all overdetermined by the economic (and non-economic) registers of the very same social whole we seek to document. Seeing academic work as an engagement with the material conditions of its production makes it possible to avoid the tragic circularity and objective distance, such as plays out in The Wire’s relationship to its audience. As the university becomes the Baltimore Sun, academics ought to also rethink the assumption that, within this conjuncture, the social sciences can continue to simply rely on traditional methods of knowledge production. The Wire contains within it an argument about the urgent need to document the growing structural and economic inequalities in meaningful ways, while also confronting the fact that these structural arrangements also inform how our own production of knowledge is shaped. In the conjuncture of the university, the search for a heroic exit from which academics can look down upon society seems only one variation of the tragic vision of a politics “over there” that accompanies the strategy of fiction. Therefore, following and building upon The Wire’s analysis, 6113 T&F Politics of HBO's The Wire:Layout 1 76 23/10/14 3:15 pm Page 76 Isaac Kamola it might be necessary to engage in the unsavory and difficult task of confronting the situated politics of academic knowledge production in order to find ways in which to strategically adapt to, and combat, the neoliberalization of the university itself. In conclusion, we should be skeptical when academics and social scientists claim that the merits of The Wire stand on the show’s ability to tell a certain kind of truth. After all, McNulty’s final moment of total comprehension on the overpass – like an academic’s comprehension of the economy as a totality – is actually only a fictional possibility. All knowledge is always already shaped by the conjuncture in which it is produced, and therefore contains its contradictions, tensions, limitations, and possibilities. The Wire reminds us that the impossible task of analyzing the social whole is both compelling, political necessary, and something social scientists currently do not do very well. As such, embracing The Wire as a political argument about how to produce knowledge about the social whole means taking seriously the fact that not even college faculty and students are outside the game. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Shirin and Jonathan for their hard work putting together this edited volume, along with sincere thanks to those who contributed to the lively discussion at the Western Political Science Association panel in San Antonio (2011), where the paper on which this chapter is based was first aired. I’d also like to thank Wesleyan University’s Center for the Humanities for housing me during the period when I wrote most of this chapter. The chapter benefited from the vibrant intellectual community at the Center, and many of my initial thoughts were first tried out on Jill Morawski, Joseph Fitzpatrick, Nima Bassiri, Matt Garrett, and Sean McCann. For their intellectual support and friendship I am most sincerely grateful. Thanks also to Alex Livingston and Sam Chambers, whose extensive conversations about both The Wire and the great city of Baltimore have enriched this piece. Thanks also to Serena Laws, who watched every episode with me from start to finish, and start to finish again, and again. This project was completed with generous financial support from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) New Faculty Fellows program and the institutional support of the Johns Hopkins University Political Science department. Notes 1 2 3 Quoted in: Megan O’Rourke, “Behind The Wire: David Simon on Where the Show Goes Next,” Slate (December 1, 2006), www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/ interrogation/2006/12/behind_the_wire.html#page_start (accessed August 9, 2014). Drake Bennett, “This Will be on the Midterm. You Feel Me? Why so Many Colleges are Teaching The Wire.” Slate (March 24, 2010), www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/ 2010/03/this_will_be_on_the_midterm_you_feel_me.html (accessed August 9, 2014). David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 75. 6113 T&F Politics of HBO's The Wire:Layout 1 23/10/14 3:15 pm Page 77 On structure and the world of The Wire 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 77 David Harvey, Lecture, Seminar at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Humanities, Middletown, CT (October 12, 2012). For example, “Heart of the City: Black Urban Life on The Wire,” University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI (January 19 and 30, 2009); “The Wire as Social ScienceFiction?,” Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, University of Leeds (November 2009). C. W. Marshall and Tiffany Potter, “‘I am the American Dream’: Modern Urban Tragedy and the Borders of Fiction,” in The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television, edited by Tiffany Potter and C. W. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2009), 1–14; R. Sabin and J. Gibb, How TV Crime Drama Got Read (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011). “The Wire Files,” Darkmatter 4, Ash Sharma (ed.), May 2009, www.dark matter101.org/site/category/journal/issues/4-the-wire; “The City America Left Behin’: Baltimore, The Wire and the Socio-Spatial Imagination,” City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action, 14(5), Simon Parker (ed.), October 2010; Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, Robert LeVertis Bell and Paul M. Farber (eds.) 53(3&4 (Summer/Fall 2010). Todd Michael Sodano, “All the Pieces Matter: A Critical Analysis of HBO’s The Wire,” Ph.D. thesis, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY (2008). Ash Sharma, “Editorial: ‘All the Pieces Matter’ – Introductory Notes on The Wire.” Darkmatter 4 (2009), www.darkmatter101.org/site/2011/04/29/editorial-all-the-piecesmatter-introductory-notes-on-the-wire (accessed August 9, 2014). Ruth Penfold-Mounce, David Beer and Roger Burrows. 2011. “The Wire as Social Science-Fiction?,” Sociology 45(1) (2011), 154 (italics in original). Quoted in Penfold-Mounce et al., “The Wire as Social Science-Fiction?,” 152. Marshall and Potter, “Modern Urban Tragedy and the Borders of Fiction,” 8. Ibid., 10–11. For example: Pryzbylewski – a policeman turned teacher – follows a career trajectory very similar to co-writer Ed Burns; the actual detective Jay Landsman plays the character Dennis Mello while “actor Delaney Williams plays a character called Jay Landsman”; former Mayor Schmoke plays a Baltimore Health Commission giving advice to the fictional mayor; a Grand Jury Prosecutor is played by a former Baltimore police lieutenant; musician Steve Earl, a recovering heroin addict, plays Whalon, a recovering heroin addict; “Ed Norris, Baltimore police commissioner from 2000–2002, plays a homicide detective in the show, who is also called Ed Norris”; Felicia “Snoop” Pearson – formerly incarcerated as a juvenile for homicide – plays one of Marlo’s most feared enforcers of the same name; the community leader (“the deacon”) is played by a former drug kingpin who Burns put in prison while working as a Baltimore police detective; and so on. See Lisa W. Kelly, “Casting The Wire: Complicating Notions of Performance, Authenticity, and ‘Otherness’,” Darkmatter 4 (May 29, 2009), www.darkmatter101.org/site/2009/05/29/casting-the-wire-compli cating-notions-of-performance-authenticity-and-otherness (accessed August 9, 2014) for an excellent essay on how the casting of Baltimore locals in supporting roles enhances the show’s claim to “authenticity,” even while the main characters are played by established (and in several cases British) actors. H. Hsu, “Walking in Someone Else’s City: The Wire and the Limits of Empathy,” Criticism 52(3–4) (2010), 513. Wilson, quoted in Bennett, “Why so Many Colleges are Teaching The Wire.” While the university appears as a background setting, it never receives the same critical examination as the other institutions Simon engages. The few minor instances when the University makes an appearance are: the scenes of Stringer Bell attending 6113 T&F Politics of HBO's The Wire:Layout 1 78 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 23/10/14 3:15 pm Page 78 Isaac Kamola Baltimore City Community College, John Hopkins withdrawing its offer to make Bunny Colvin the head of security after the Hampsterdam scandal, and most prominently the fictional University of Baltimore’s sociology professor Dr. Parenti who engages in a study of repeat violent behavior among students at Edward Tilghman middle school. Baltimore Collegetown Network, The Brains Behind Baltimore: How Higher Education is Driving the Region’s Economic Future (Baltimore, MD: Baltimore Collegetown Network, 2008), 1. Appleseed, Johns Hopkins Lives Here: City of Baltimore (New York: Appleseed, Inc., 2011). Alisa Ames, Mark Evans, Laura Fox, Adam J. Milam, Ryan J. Petteway, and Regina Rutledge, Neighborhood Health Profile: Perkins/Middle East (Baltimore, MD: Baltimore City Health Department, 2011). See “Science + Technology Part at Johns Hopkins,” http://scienceparkjohns hopkins.net/about (accessed April 2013). Marc Bousquet, “After Cultural Capitalism,” EduFactory Webjournal (2010), 74–89. Marc Bousquet, for example, argues that The Wire documents the spread of “quality management” strategies that prioritizes, quoting James Poneiwozik, “bottom-line, lowmargin society, whether they work for a city department, a corporation of a drug cartel. A pusher, a homicide cop, a teacher, a union steward: they’re all, in the world of The Wire, middlemen getting squeezed for every drop of value by the systems they work for.” Bousquet argues that this same logic is now omnipresent within America’s universities and colleges. See also Sheila Slaughter, and Larry L. Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2008); Jennifer Washburn, University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education (New York: Basic Books, 2005). David Simon, The Wire (Baltimore, MD: HBO, 2002–8), season 4, episode 13. Ibid. For example, on a tour of Baltimore’s Dundalk Marine Terminal (May 2013) with my class, when asked, the dock official serving as our guide emphatically denied that season 2 of The Wire has any resemblance to what actually takes place on the docks. Fredric Jameson, “Realism and Utopia in The Wire,” Criticism 52(3–4) (2010), 361. Robert Cox, “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory,” in Neorealism and its Critics, edited by R. O. (Keohane, NY: Columbia University Press, 1986), 214–15. Critics often accuse Althusser of being overly theoretical and unhelpful in explaining “real” political issues. Robert Cox, for example, argues that – unlike historical materialists like Hobsbawm, Gramsci, and Marx – the structural Marxism of Althusser retains an “ahistorical, essentialist epistemology,” which is little more than a “study in abstractions” and therefore ill-equipped to shed light on “concrete problems.” For the most prominent critiques, see E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory: Or an Orrery of Errors (London: Merlin Press, 1995); Jacques Rancière, Althusser’s Lesson (London: Continuum International, 2011). For a historical account of these debates, see François Dosse, History of Structuralism: The Sign Sets, 1967–Present, vol. 2 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), chapters 16 and 17; Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Post War France: From Sartre 6113 T&F Politics of HBO's The Wire:Layout 1 23/10/14 3:15 pm Page 79 On structure and the world of The Wire 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 79 to Althusser (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 340–60; Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). With the exception of a few glimpses within a handful of essays (e.g. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001; For Marx, New York: Vintage Books, 1970, 87–1993), Louis Althusser does in fact offer few insights into how his theoretical project might be used to analyze empirical and historical questions of social transformation. This absence does not mean, however, that the theoretical concepts and abstractions he develops are not useful to explain the complex, multi-sited, vastly unequal, subject-forming and increasingly knowledge-based conditions of the present conjecture. I have argued elsewhere that, despite its very real limitations, Althusser’s theoretical apparatus is nonetheless highly useful for thinking about how contemporary capitalism continues to shape – but not determine – all aspects of social life; see Isaac A. Kamola, “The Global Coffee Economy and the Production of Genocide in Rwanda,” Third World Quarterly 28(3) (2007), 571–92; Isaac Kamola, “US Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations (2012), www.academia. edu/1796435/U.S._Universities_and_the_Production_of_the_Global_Imaginary (accessed August 9, 2014). For Althusser, social whole is the material expression of social relationships and their effects. The social whole is the mode of production and can be analytically divided into different registers that overdetermine each other. The social whole, however, cannot be seen or known in itself because the production of knowledge about the social totality is itself also overdetermined; there exists, in other words, no Archimedean vantage point transcending the social whole. Because knowledge is always produced immanently within the world, the social whole cannot be represented except as an abstraction, itself socially produced. See also Samuel Chambers, Bearing Society in Mind: Theories and Politics of the Social Formation (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015). Althusser uses the language of registers to explain and identify the semi-autonomous elements of the superstructure that overlap, intersect and overdetermine each other. The social whole is comprised of cultural, ideological, juridical, political and economic registers that intersect in multiple and contradictory ways. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (Notes Towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 96. Apparatus describes the material instantiations of social registers. In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus,” Althusser provides a provisional “empirical list” of the ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) he believes should receive greater analytical attention, including: the religious, educational, family, legal, political (“the political system”), trade union, communications (“press, radio and television, etc.”) and cultural ISAs. This list contains many of the apparatuses examined at great length in The Wire. The Wire, season 1 and season 2. The Wire, season 3. The Wire, season 4. The Wire, season 5. Ben Brewster, “Glossary,” in Althusser, For Marx, 253. Althusser uses overdetermination to “describe the effects of the contradictions in each practice constituting the social formation on the social formation as a whole … More precisely, the overdetermination of a contradiction is the reflection in it of its conditions of existence within 6113 T&F Politics of HBO's The Wire:Layout 1 80 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 23/10/14 3:15 pm Page 80 Isaac Kamola the complex whole, that is, of the other contradictions in the complex whole …” In other words, “overdetermination” explains how the semi-autonomous registers overlap and contradict each other at any given moment, or conjuncture (see below). Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus,” 90–92. Althusser’s examination of the social structure is an effort to break with the spatial metaphors that predominate most analyses of social structure. He argues that economistic Marxism reduces the “social whole” to the superstructure and an all-determinant economic base. While the spatial metaphor of a house built upon a foundation reveals many important things about the structure of capitalism (such as the fact that “the base… in the last instance determines the whole edifice”), it is necessary to “go beyond” this descriptive metaphor and instead adopt “the point of view of reproduction.” For Althusser social structure includes all aspects of the economic base as well as the many, competing aspects of the semi-autonomous super-structure. Brewster, “Glossary,” 250, 253. Althusser argues that politics – including the politics of knowledge production – takes place within particular structured material sites. The conjuncture, drawn from Lenin’s concept of the current moment, “denotes the exact balance of forces, state of overdetermination of the contradictions at any given moment to which political tactics must be applied.” Althusser, For Marx, 100. Ibid., For Marx, 94–7. J. K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 28. Althusser, For Marx, 112. Jason Read, “Stringer Bell’s Lament: Violence and Legitimacy in Contemporary Capitalism,” in The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television, edited by Tiffany Potter and C. W. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2009), 122–34. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Stephen Lucasi, “Networks of Affiliation: Familialism and Anticorporatism in Black and White,” in The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television, edited by Tiffany Potter and C. W. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2009), 136. David Simon writes (in The Wire: Truth be Told, edited by R. Alvarez, New York: Grove Press, 2010, 6) that in Baltimore “the brown fields and rotting piers and rusting factories are testament to an economy that shifted and then shifted again, rendering obsolete whole generations of union-wage worders and their families. The cost to society is beyond calculation, not that anyone ever paused to calculate anything. Our economic and political leaders are dismissive of the horror, at points even flippant in their derision. Margaret Thatcher’s suggestions that there is no society to consider beyond the individual and his family speaks volumes in the clarity of its late-twentieth-century contempt for the ideal of nation-states offering citizens anything approximating a sense of communal purpose and meaning.” Read, “Violence and Legitimacy in Contemporary Capitalism.” Erika Johnson-Lewis, “The More Things Change, the More they Stay the Same: Serial Narrative on The Wire,” Darkmatter 4 (May 29, 2009), www.darkmatter101.org/ site/2009/05/29/the-more-things-change-the-more-they-stay-the-same-serial-narrativeon-the-wire (accessed August 9, 2014). Sophie Fuggle, “Short Circuiting the Power Grid: The Wire as Critique of Institutional Power.” Darkmatter 4 (May 29, 2009), www.darkmatter101.org/site/2009/05/29/shortcircuiting-the-power-grid-the-wire-as-critique-of-institutional-power (accessed August 9, 2014). 6113 T&F Politics of HBO's The Wire:Layout 1 23/10/14 3:15 pm Page 81 On structure and the world of The Wire 81 47 See, for example, the comment thread at www.davidsimon.org/omits-and-edits as well as interviews with Simon at www.progressive.org/david_simon_interview.html and www.vice.com/read/david-simon-280-v16n12 (accessed April 2013). 48 Sharma, “Editorial: ‘All the Pieces Matter’”; Marshall and Potter, “Modern Urban Tragedy and the Borders of Fiction,” 10. 49 Nick Hornby, “David Simon” Believer 46 (2007), www.believermag.com/issues/ 200708/?read=interview_simon (accessed August 9, 2014); Margaret Talbot, “Stealing Life: The Crusader Behind ‘The Wire,’” The New Yorker (October 22, 2007), 150; Marshall and Potter, “Modern Urban Tragedy and the Borders of Fiction,” 10. 50 Mark Bowden, “The Angriest Man in Television,” The Atlantic (January/February 2008), www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/01/the-angriest-man-in-television/ 306581 (emphasis added). 51 Cynthia Rose, “The Originator of TV’s ‘Homicide’ Remains Close to his PoliceReporter Roots,” Seattle Times (February 18, 1999), http://community.seattletimes. nwsource.com/archive/?date=19990218&slug=2944857 (accessed August 9, 2014). 52 Bret McCabe, 2003. “Under The Wire.” City Paper (May 28, 2003), www2.citypaper. com/bob/story.asp?id=3336 (accessed August 9, 2014). 53 Jesse Walker, “David Simon Says.” Reason.com (October 2004), http://reason.com/ archives/2004/10/01/david-simon-says (accessed August 9, 2014). 54 Edward Herrmann and Robert McChesney, Global Media: The New Missionaries of Global Capitalism. (New York: Continuum, 2001), 78–9. A decade later Time Warner remains one of the largest media conglomerates. See www.freepress.net/ownership/ chart (accessed May 2014). 55 David Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries, 3rd edition (London: Sage, 2013), 195. 56 Sara Taylor, “The Wire: Investigating the Use of a Neoliberal Institutional Apparatus and a ‘New Humanist’ Philsophical Apparatus,” Darkmatter 4 (May 29, 2009), www.darkmatter101.org/site/2009/05/29/the-wire-investigating-the-use-of-aneoliberal-institutional-apparatus-and-a-new-humanist-philosophical-apparatus (accessed August 9, 2014). 57 Toby Miller, “Foreword: It’s Television. It’s HBO,” in It’s Not TV: Watching HBO in the Post-Television Era, edited by edited by Marc Leverette, Brian L. Ott, and Cara Louise Buckley (New York & London: Routledge, 2008), ix–xii. 58 New on Amazon.com, April 2013. 59 Marshall and Potter, “Modern Urban Tragedy and the Borders of Fiction,” 9. The parody website and book Stuff White People Like sums this point up quite humorously when it claims that “white people” like a TV show “if it is: critically acclaimed, lowrated, shown on premium cable, and available as a DVD box set.” They can “order it from Netflix and tell their friends … ‘I watched ten episodes in a row in the weekend. I’m almost caught up.’” See Christian Lander, Stuff White People Like: A Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions (New York: Random House, 2008), 108–9. 60 Sudhir Venkatesh, “What Do Real Thugs Think of The Wire?,” New York Times Freakonomics blog, www.freakonomics.com/tag/the-wire (accessed April 2013; quotes from “Part One” and “Part Nine”). 61 Sharma, “Editorial: ‘All the Pieces Matter.’” 62 Taylor, “The Wire: Investigating the Use of a Neoliberal Institutional Apparatus.” 63 In fact, Simon claims that in order to fully understand The Wire “you basically need to take very careful notes … and maybe a couple of postgraduate courses” (quoted by Taylor, ibid.). 6113 T&F Politics of HBO's The Wire:Layout 1 82 23/10/14 3:15 pm Page 82 Isaac Kamola 64 Sharma, “Editorial: ‘All the Pieces Matter.’” 65 David Simon, “Introduction,” The Wire: Truth be Told, edited by R. Alvarez (New York: Grove Press, 2010), 2. 66 The major publishers of academic journals regularly see profit margins around 40 percent. George Monbiot, “Academic Publishers Make Murdoch Look Like a Socialist,” The Guardian (August 29, 2011), www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ 2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist (accessed May 2014). 67 It’s instructive to note that, at a time when HBO seemed hesitant about investing in The Wire, Simon argued that the show was a smart market strategy for HBO because it would directly undermine the market share of competing channels whose “bread and butter” were “the basic dramatic universe of politics, law, crime, [and] medicine.” The Wire, in contrast, would ensure that “no one who sees HBO’s take on the culture of crime and crime fighting can watch anything like CSI, or NYPD Blue, or Law & Order again.” See David Simon, “Letter to HBO,” in Alvarez, The Wire: Truth Be Told, 36. 68 Rose, “The Originator of TV’s ‘Homicide.’” 69 The Wire, season 5, episode 6. 70 The Wire, season 5, episodes 9 and 10. 71 The Wire, season 5, episode 10. 72 Slavoj Žižek, “The Wire or the Clash of Civilizations in One Country,” lecture, Birkbeck College, University of London (February 24, 2012), http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2012/02/slavoj-zizek-the-wire-or-the-clash-of-civilisations-in-one-country (accessed August 9, 2014); see also David Haglund, “Slavoj Žižek and Fredric Jameson on The Wire,” Slate (March 1, 2012), www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/03/01/ the_wire_slavoj_i_ek_and_frederic_jameson_weigh_in_on_the_hbo_series.html (accessed August 9, 2014). 73 The first shot is of Freamon working on a piece of dollhouse furniture, as his wife Shardene approaches the camera pulls back and we see a domestic scene including a dollhouse set on a radiator (referencing a conversation in season 1 when Shardene asks Lester if he also made dollhouses to put his pieces in). The next scenes are of: Hauk ordering a round of drinks in a rowdy bar, Templeton receiving his Pulitzer prize, Vondopoulos meeting with the next generation of drug dealers as The Greek reads his paper from the bar, Carcetti celebrating his victory in the governor’s election, Haynes at his desk flipping through the paper with his “Support our Staff” sign prominently displayed, Valchek accepting his position as police commissioner, Duquan shooting heroin in the stable, Pearlman recusing herself from the judge’s bench because Daniels is the defense attorney, Chris Partlow meeting with Wee-Bay on the prison grounds, Governor Carcetti congratulating Rawls for becoming Maryland State Police superintendent, and Bubbles climbing the stairs to join his sister and daughter at the dinner table. 74 This shot is a circular return to the image from season 1 (episode 4) when drug dealers throw rocks at a previous generation of security cameras – the only image to be repeated all five seasons’ opening credits. 75 It is not coincidental that McNulty is the one who translates this heroic exit. In “a show that features a predominantly black cast and which deals with various problems occurring in black neighborhoods” the closest person to a main character is a white police officer. McNulty is “offered to white viewers as a ‘way in’ to this black world” (Kelly, “Casting The Wire”). 76 Žižek, “The Wire or the Clash of Civilizations.” 77 Talbot, “Stealing Life: The Crusader Behind The Wire,” 10; Paul Allen Anderson, “‘The 6113 T&F Politics of HBO's The Wire:Layout 1 23/10/14 3:15 pm Page 83 On structure and the world of The Wire 83 Game is the Game’: Tautology and Allegory in The Wire,” Criticism 52(3–4) (2010), 373–98; Chris Love, “Greek Gods in Baltimore: Greek Tragedy and The Wire,” Criticism 52(3–4) (2010), 487–507. 78 David Simon and Edward Burns, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (New York: Bantham Doubleday Dell, 1997), 537–43. 79 Thanks to Alex Livingston for pointing me in this direction. 80 While I do not have time to make the argument here, I should note that Althusser himself attempts a form of “heroic exit” in his turn to science, a move which gives him the position from which to claim that only he reads Marx as Marx was actually meant to be read. I argue that rereading Althusser within the conjuncture of the neoliberal university entails reading this problematic distinction between science and ideology as a limit in Althusser’s own thinking. Reading Althusser in his limits offers a chance to discover what Althusser actually produces – a politics of knowledge production that takes an engagement with the present conjuncture as its philosophical problematic. Bibliography Althusser, Louis. For Marx. Translated by B. Brewster. New York: Vintage Books, 1970. Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001. Ames, Alisa, Mark Evans, Laura Fox, Adam J. Milam, Ryan J. Petteway, and Regina Rutledge. Neighborhood Health Profile: Perkins/Middle East. Baltimore, MD: Baltimore City Health Department, 2011. Anderson, Paul Allen. 2010. “’The Game is the Game’: Tautology and Allegory in The Wire.” Criticism 52(3–4) (2010), 373–98. Appleseed. Johns Hopkins Lives Here: City of Baltimore. 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