They call it Theory Monday

Why the insistence that “it’s not all about pop culture”, when this would actually be a perfectly sound thing for cultural studies to be about? I would have guessed that the profits from The Brady Bunch Movie alone would have paid for half the cultural studies professors in America for the last five years.

“forcing otherwise potentially useful theorists of popular culture ”

These are words I never expected to see slotted together. Useful theorists of popular culture? No, I just can’t get my head around it.

It’s not about grants, it’s about turf. Turf may help you get grants, but even if you can’t get grants, well, you’ve still got turf, and as long as you’ve got a lawn, you can yell at the dam’ kids to get offa it…

Meanwhile, as a working historian, I’d just say that cultstuds is a bunch of people doing [a rather pretentiously over-theorised kind of] history who’ve not noticed that ‘the present’ is an illusory and undefinable point in time, and that everything available for discussion is already the past…

Michael,

your comment #6 was bullshit. I’ll go read it again.

BTW, Michael, I really dig your writing. You’d make a great cultural historian.

That’s Butler not Butlet.

And the exciting possibilities for cultural studies for me at least involve developing the encounter between theory (which once belonged to the French intellectual tradition but no longer does, especially since it is decreasingly literary in its objects) and a British cultural studies whose roots actually lie in the literary critical project developed by Eliot, Richards, Leavis and Williams in their various inflections.

Hmmm, thanks, Simon — this is considerably more succinct than my “(1)-(4) plus (5) many, many more” suggestions. And this seems like a good time to throw up two more links: to the Cultural Studies Reader (2d ed.), perhaps, or to Cultural Studies: A Critical Introduction. It might bear noting, too, that Jeff Nealon’s sense of lower-case cultural studies lines up pretty well with John Frow’s remarks in this reply to you, where he writes, ” Cultural studies is a way of contextualizing texts, of any kind – of analysing the social relations of textuality; and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t include literary texts and literary regimes amongst its proper objects of knowledge. If it’s no more than the subjection of a new set of objects – say, soap operas, rock music, fashion – to the same old discourses of value and the same old pedagogic processes of cultural distinction, then it’s not worth the candle. “

I study popular culture myself, and I’d like to make absolutely sure that my work can’t be accused of “reinscribing the very cultural hierarchies it seeks to critique.” Do any of you experts out there have any tips?

Dang, I just did it again, didn’t I?

yeah, I think you’re on the ball there Michael: I totally agree that cultural studies’ great value has been in its extending the reach of serious critique and interpretation into any cultural domain whatever, even if that has sometimes (too often??) meant it has let go of its roots in anti-capitalist thought….. In terms of my own work (if I can indulge in a bit of self-promotion) my latest book Exit Capitalism (Routledge) which is out in the UK but not here yet (anyday I guess) has my own latest thoughts on the history of cultural studies and tries to connect up that history to some recent post-revolutionary but anti-capitalist theory (Badiou mainly but also post-secularism more generally)…

An honest question: I am basically uninformed about cultural studies, but would certainly like to read about its (true!) account of the succes of movement conservatism, and more importantly, how to fight it without playing the “economic equality” card. I think any insights would apply to the new European populist/xenophobic right as well. Any recommendations?

Thanks!

The subversion/resistance back-and-forth goes beyond cultural studies — I remember hearing Aihwa Ong (whose 1987 _Spirits of Resistance_ is one of the best books of this kind in cultural anthro) say in a talk a few years ago that she thought “resistance” had been overdone. And I suppose the logical corollary of an overbroad category of resistance is an overbroad neoliberalism/globalcapitalism/theMan as the thing resisted.

Thanks for writing this up, Michael. This made the question of definition much clearer to me.

There’s a very cultural-studies project in sorting out the multiple audiences whose ears prick up around this kind of debate.

Jesus, Michael, you’re just trying to piss everyone off these days. You better be producing a two-part Internet-straining essay where you take back your intimation that hot dogs are not tasty, and tout de suite, as you intellectuals say.

It strikes me as significant that the cultural studies discipline (milieu? habitus?) is being charged with caring too much about popular culture but not enough about the popular profile of cultural studies itself. I agree with this in principle as I do with much of what Michael says. But there seems to be an analytic short circuit there which arguably only cultural studies can disrupt (although whether it has done so adequately is a moot question). If you are looking for insight on this subject – or indeed, for any comprehension of the value of postgraduate education in the humanities or social sciences — from conservative and/or neoliberal pundits you are bound to be disappointed. But isn’t that exactly the point? Aren’t you kind of morbidly fascinated with the ways the cultural-military complex takes up some aspects of progressive cultural critique and spits out (or on) the rest? Is that what we’re here for? Whether you are teaching critical semiotics to undergraduates and watching the advertising industry flex its semantic muscles , or seeing progressive critiques of racism, manifest destiny and global hyper-militarism sneak into the first and most energetic half of Hollywood film scripts, cultural studies confronts its limits of at every turn. That is where it differs from PCA and all other forms of analysis that focus on bringing insight to texts. But being reflexive isn’t the same as being introverted. Objects slip away from you, and you have to intervene in the slipping process which is out there in the world and just as significant than the genealogies of theoretical mastery we tend to teach.
However, this principle of intervention is kind of incompatible with the specialization principles and profile fetishisms that organize academia. You have two different modes of circulation working against each other and both modes of circulation are being rapidly transformed. This isn’t totally a bad thing. But I wonder if cultural studies people have paid enough attention to where people are actually participating in / pushing against these transformative processes.

just a thought.

Good to see this line of argument being extended from the original essay. In my writerly peer group, there is almost no-one who wasn’t shaped by cultural studies, and almost no-one who identifies with the field in their current practice. Odd situation.

The key question I see Michael raising is about the institutionalization of a field defined neither by object nor methodology. Institutionalization of departments and programmes require resources, and cases to be made and defended. That’s easy enough if you’re a new interdisciplinary field like neuroscience where relationships with the industrial sector generate clear value in both directions: you take the money and let the biologists, psychologists etc. complain in their disciplinary sandpit. I think in cultural studies we only have intellectual capital to share, and frankly the methodological disdain shown for recent developments in English and Anthropology – to name but two important long-serving institutional precursors – strikes me as dangerous to the long-term health not only of CS, but of interdisciplinary work generally. Perhaps in the same way that Sokal set back science studies – the quality of the excellent work was ignored in a plausible narrative of “unreality”.

To second Simon’s observation – and to add to the succinct and accurate 1-4+more of Michael’s – don’t we see in Hall’s introduction to Culture, Media, Language an explicit discussion of the failings Birmingham collectively saw in the methodological orthodoxies in the humanities and the social sciences (sociology in particular)? And how a refiguration of these methods was required to engage the important issues of the day? How many contemporary cultural studies texts can engage the important methodological debates in these fields as confidently? Obviously, things are more difficult to get a handle on now for the reasons Jeff Nealon noted on CS’ success (though I’d say there were also other factors internal to other disciplines at least as important as any assaults on disciplinarity made by cultural studies). But ultimately as you say in (8), this seems like something anything calling itself a discipline needs to describe. And if it isn’t a discipline, why is it so touchy about its own reputation?

@Chris #24

Sure, ‘a theory that “all human endeavors are tainted [affected?] by the…people engaging in them, except for this one” can’t be taken seriously.’ You reiterated my point.

This is very interesting, and Michael is a superb stylist, but I’m having trouble figuring out what the takeaway message is. Seems like:

1. Cultural studies is poorly defined and includes more than a little work that really does have the problems outside critics think characterize the field as a whole.

2. This leads to attacks on cultural studies by various people (who otherwise wouldn’t)…

3. … which leads to the intellectually and/or politically useful work within cultural studies not being taken up by people inside or outside the academy (who otherwise would).

4. So if the many people within cultural studies doing work that is *not* “pop culture is fun!” or “spot the hidden resistance!” want their work to reach a wider audience, they need to be more aggressive about policing the boundaries of the field.

Is that more or less right?

A friend regularly reminds me of an AA expression “You can only sweep your side of the street, other people can do theirs or not.” In political science and philosophy, people defend their one or two subfields, and sometimes only their citation cartel within a subfield. Sometimes they don’t even respect fellow department members. But they do police the subfield boundaries pretty aggressively, and somehow avoid splitting the department most of the time. Maybe what Cultural Studies needs is a set of catchy names for subfields, as opposed to just the names of people who currently work on stuff. Don’t pick names like “Culture and Film” pick ones like “Macro Socioeconomy” or Polimetrics of Cultural Phenomena” Add or subtract items, recognize that most people think of themselves as working in one, two or three of them. (Aside: it’s a simple hamiltonian problem, you don’t even need orthogonal subfield-eigenvectors, just a reasonable-looking set. Get Dsquared to solve it for you, in return for a rant about how hot dogs are especially tasty with Budweiser.) Then police the defensible boundaries of your clever-named subfield for relevance, making it known that while you might go to conferences with the more vapid members of your field, that’s about getting bulk rates at hotels. Your primary identification would be with the subfield, and boy does your team rock, legitimacy-wise.

Please, no threadjacking about the dang Sokal Hoax, please please.

And why not? In your extended quest to discover what’s wrong with the field called “Cultural Studies”, you ignore the answer given by Sokal (proven, not suggested): the stuff is crap. There’s nothing wrong with the field as an abstraction. It’s just that the people who do it suck.

I like this bit in Ira Livingston’s “What’s The Matter With Michael?” response:

http://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2009/09/23/what%E2%80%99s-the-matter-with-michael/

” …[Michael’s piece is] a familiar version of what my friend George Cunningham calls a “ritual lament.””

I hope that George has since taken Ira aside and apologized for any confusion caused by any personal usage of the concept that imparted an air of originality to it. It is hard to believe it is burdened by any contemporary ownership whatsoever, or stands in need of the sanitizing tweeze of inverted commas with which we sample dubious conceptual novelties. The Greeks had, like, five words for it, dude.

http://books.google.com.sg/books?id=UW8pteWTc9oC&pg=PA102&lpg=PA102&dq=%22ritual+lament%22&source=bl&ots=rOXWn02WZ2&sig=ZqYvfvCEme2-TWQt0og_Nbri9LU&hl=en&ei=YCjCSum8Jdj-kAWajuy3BQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2#v=onepage&q=&f=false

And at least one of these words has actually half-survived into English, more or less: elegy, anyone?

More useful, then, if Livingston had specified whether he found Michael’s piece interesting as threnos, goos, kommos, ialemos, and so on and so forth. Ahem. As you were. Please continue fighting about the Sokal Hoax.

(Just when I thought I was out, they drag me back in): “Social Text” is – and self-identifies as – a cultural studies journal. It’s self-description on the Duke UP site includes: “… a daring and controversial leader in the field of cultural studies”

So whatever reasons there may or may not be for exhuming the Sokal Hoax, it can’t be that “Social Text” isn’t relevant to cultural studies, per se.

I can’t resist: Re @32 and any others referring to the “hot dogs are tasty!” joke about cultural studies. When I was in grad school, I learned tons about thinking from the approaches that cultural studies people at the time were using. Great. But it got to the point with me that some things were active consumer-instituted subversion, and some things were but not worth discussing.

a propos of that, is this subversion? Or just creative reuse of the carp we bought at Safeway? or both? If both, to what effect? http://www.thekitchn.com/thekitchn/roundup-magazines/look-crazy-spaghetti-hot-dogs-087900
link to spaghetti hotdogs

In your extended quest to discover what’s wrong with the field called “Cultural Studies”, you ignore the answer given by Sokal (proven, not suggested): the stuff is crap. There’s nothing wrong with the field as an abstraction.

Ah, no. I have written many, many things about Sokal and his hoax. Accusing me of ignoring it is like accusing me of being ignorant of the history of cultural studies. And one thing I’ve learned over the past 13 years is that any mention of Professor Sokal brings out the commenters who say “but Sokal proved that everything you say is bullshit.” Which, lgm, you have now proven. Or, as I put it in this latest effort, “Sokal found himself hailed by legions of fans and supporters who credited him with finally exposing the vacuity of (a) cultural studies, (b) literary theory, (c) postmodernism, (d) obscurantist jargon, (e) science studies, (f) people who write about disciplines they don’t know much about, and (g) all of the above.” Also something about a water pitcher.

But change “Thatcherism” to “Reaganism” and “Britain” to the “United States” in the above, and isn’t that exactly Thomas Frank’s argument?

Precisely not. One important thing Frank does and Hall does not — and this takes us back to 2004, George, when you accused me of missing the point of Frank’s book — is that Frank insists that the cultural right is right to take offense at America’s commercial culture, and wrong only to blame it on liberal elites rather than on corporations. The other important thing Frank does (and Hall does not) is to insist that “cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends. And it is these economic achievements — not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars — that are the movement’s greatest monuments.” Ellen Willis’s reply to this was (imho) simply devastating, and very much in line with Hall’s work — insofar as she pointed out that this formulation (in which the bosses distract the rubes with debates about abortion while cutting their own taxes) not only fails to take “cultural anger” (and abortion) seriously enough but also fails (as Grossberg would say) to take capitalism seriously enough. “Like many critics of capitalism,” Willis wrote, “Frank makes the mistake of imagining that mass culture is a pure reflection of the corporate class that produces it.” That’s a bad mistake, and in my argument, it’s precisely American left intellectuals’ ignorance of Hall’s work that leads them to keep inventing this triangular wheel over and over again.

1. All physics is crap, too! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair

2. Geo, how much work are the terms “corporations” and “corporate” doing for you, and are you assuming there’s some sort of collective coherence to what organizations with that legal status do?

The Bogdanoffs are important in the history of plastic surgery too.

First, I should say that I’m not a Cultural Studies scholar, though I’m quite interested in culture, including popular culture. I’ve read some Cultural Studies work (e.g. George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads) and I’ve know the “from out of Birmingham” story for some time, perhaps even since grad school at SUNY Buffalo in the mid-70s. So, I just barely know what Cultural Studies is. I know somewhat more about cognitive science, and I’d like to make a brief comparison between the two. Let’s start with this statement of Michael’s:

But when you combine the insistence that cultural studies has multiple genealogies from a variety of locations, trajectories, and practices with the insistence that cultural studies has no specific methodology or subject matter, well, then you’ve got yourself a field that consists of pretty much anything anybody wants to associate with it.

Cognitive science is rather like that, “multiple genealogies” and “no specific methodology or subject matter.” The human mind is not a very specific subject matter, and there is no specific methodology. The term itself was coined in 1973 by Christopher Longuet-Higgins while reporting on a conference held somewhere in the UK. It seemed an apt phrase for something that had been in the air for a decade or so, and so it stuck. But it’s pretty hard to say just what it is that unites the psychologists, philosophers, linguists, computer scientists, and others who identify with cognitive science. I tend to think of cognitive science as what happened when the computer as metaphor and model hit the study of the human mind.

That’s not quite right, but it’s the best I can do in a single sentence and, in some odd way, I’m not sure that I could do much better if I used, say, 5000 words. Those words would mention lots of more stuff, but the boundaries would still be fuzzy and the center, well, it might not be there anyhow.

If you look at the field’s institutionalization, cognitive sciencehas its own association and its own journal(s), etc. However, there aren’t that many cognitive science departments. For the most part, cognitive science happens in interdepartmental programs or within specific departments and graduate students go for jobs in those traditional departments.

The upshot is that there is no such thing as the cognitive science program. There are multiple programs, some more or less mutually compatible, but there’s a great deal of tension and conflict. It is a contentious world, but, so far as I can tell, it doesn’t have a particularly negative image elsewhere in the academic world nor elsewhere. Nor does it seem to be confused with a “shadow” discipline the way Cultural Studies is confused with the Cheery Study of Pop Culture (call it Cheer) or other Intellectual Evils.

The most obvious difference between cognitive science and Cultural Studies is that the latter is explicitly political while the former is not. Sure, one can find political ideology in cognitive science in the way one can find political ideology in anything, but cognitive science, as an intellectual practice, hasn’t taken on a political project. Cultural Studies has and, as I read Michael’s accounts – here, at the CHE, and at his own blog – I gather that much that is problematic is tied to the politics. Cognitive science just doesn’t register in that arena.

Nor has cognitive science attempted to study something that had previously been considered beneath the dignitive of academic scrutiny, i.e. popular culture. It seems to me that for some range of scholars it really makes no difference just how one studies popular culture, the mere study of it on any terms is sinful. I have no idea to what extend the McChesney’s of the world can be educated on this point, and so the careful differentiation between Cultural Studies and Cheer is effort well-spent, or whether the existence of Cheer just makes it easier to scape-goat any and all study of popular culture. In any event, cognitive science doesn’t have this kind of problem.

And then there is evolutionary psychology, which draws on various disciplines – psychology, evolutionary biology, ethology, anthropology, paleontology, archeology – and has no particular institutional home. And, like cognitive science, it has no explicit political project. However, because it makes claims about human nature, and because it studies social relations, it is inevitably tripping over political issues, especially in its popular expositions. Here we’ve got a real mess.

Reading Ellen Willis’ article, it seemed to me that she had just relocated the false consciousness to a different area. To her, Americans are mysteriously suspicious of ‘pleasure’, having been duped (presumably) by the religious-moral complex. The possibility that there might be legitimate reasons for seeing some forms of pleasure as bad doesn’t get a mention, even as she writes disapprovingly of right-wingers’ pleasure in aggression. I think that any attempt to argue for pleasure as a key political aim need to do a much better job at showing how the rights to pleasure we are seeking do not cause harm for others. (The gay marriage movement now seems to be doing that successfully).

Wait ’till Friday, when the eagle flies.

George @ 50: The cultural right is right to “take offense at America’s commercial culture, and wrong only to blame it on liberal elites rather than on corporations.”

This is exactly where we disagree, George, so I’m glad we’ve finally gotten to the very nub of the gist. Fortunately, I’m not one of Frank’s patsies, so I won’t say “but America’s commercial culture is good, just like those tasty hot dogs!” I really won’t waste a moment of your time or mine defending the adventures of Jon and Kate (or, before them, Nick and Jessica). Instead, I’m going to go back over the terrain you and I covered in 2004, and ask why it is that American popular culture is so much blacker and queerer than it was 41 years ago, when TV’s first interracial kiss got Star Trek banned in the South (despite the fact that (a) Kirk and Uhura were acting under compulsion and (b) the kiss happened in science fiction, which displaced it into the 23rd century). Is our culture vulgar? Yes, indeed it is, but it is much more than that, and when it comes to sexual freedoms, the left should (imho) object to the international traffic in women but should have no business endorsing the right’s lamentations about the baleful effects of abortion, contraception, gay marriage, and divorce. My larger concern here, which I discuss in my Dissent review of What Are Intellectuals Good For? (I told you I was spending my summer writing about your book, and a very enjoyable task it was), is the way the Christopher Lasch Left combines a principled anti-capitalism with a mordant cultural conservatism, especially w/r/t things like abortion, contraception, gay marriage, and divorce. So you wind up (as in your book) with an intriguing co-endorsement of Noam Chomsky and Victor Davis Hanson. (In that review, I also note your Lasch > Willis approach.) But on the narrow question of whether Frank’s analysis of the right = Hall’s, the answer is simply no. Here’s Hall:

Consumer capitalism works by working the markets; but it cannot entirely determine what alternative uses people are able to make of the diversity of choices and the real advances in mass production which it also always brings. If “people’s capitalism” did not liberate the people, it nevertheless “loosed” many individuals into a life somewhat less constrained, less puritanically regulated, less strictly imposed than it had been three or four decades before. Of course the market has not remained buoyant and expansive in this manner. But the contradictory capacity, for a time, of the system to pioneer expansion, to drive and develop new products and maximize new choices, while at the same time creaming off its profit margins, was seriously underestimated. Thus the left has never understood the capacity of the market to become identified in the minds of the mass of ordinary people, not as fair and decent and socially responsible (that it never was), but as an expansive popular system.

In The Forthcoming Book I’ve Already Mentioned Too Often, I explain why McChesney is wrong to go after those last four words. Suffice it to say that when Frank characterizes the Britney-Madonna kiss at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards as “lascivious” and as “as pure an expression of business rationality as is a McDonald’s hamburger as pure an expression of business rationality as is a McDonald’s hamburger,” he’s engaging in an exceptionally reductionist kind of cultural criticism. I call it the Great Leap Backward.

For several reasons, I am not upset by corporate America’s alleged failure to maximize profits ruthlessly enough.

“Kansas gloats when celebrities say stupid things; it cheers when movie stars go to jail. ”

How is he wrong? Really? Is it in any way meaningful to make claims like this? It makes not more sense to me than ‘Scotland likes to visit its step-sister in Miami’. This is that way marketing executives think (or pretend to when they have something to sell). It’s stupid.

@65 – I think it’s called synecdoche. Been around a while.

It may well be that the culture he lived in predisposed him to think in terms of deterministic mathematical laws of motion. But those laws of motion would not stop being true in another culture

why, oh why oh why, do people use Newtonian gravity and deterministic laws of motion as their examples of things which are true for all times and in all cultures?

Moonlighting: Right or Left?

Michael
I guess I’m in the Laschian cultural conservative camp with geo (one of the reasons I found it impossible to join the book event is that I couldn’t find anything of substance to disagree with. I should add that, unlike geo, when I say “I’m not a cultural studies scholar” I mean something like “really, really, I’m not at all”). I was struck by this:

the left should (imho) object to the international traffic in women but should have no business endorsing the right’s lamentations about the baleful effects of abortion, contraception, gay marriage, and divorce.

Really? Do we have to restrict ourselves to international traffic in women, and then treat gay marriage in the same category as divorce? Gay marriage is entirely welcome (a bit of a surprise, but no less welcome for that). The divorce revolution may be a result of something welcome, but it is not at all welcome itself, and the fragmentation of the family does not seem to be good for children, especially for children who are already among the more disadvantaged. The left should at least be willing to discuss each of these phenomena on its merits. The family values debate is much more complicated than you treat it as being here.

Mirowski’s “The Road From Mont Pelerin” comes up with a definition of neoliberalism as a serious intellectual trend. It overlaps somewhat but not entirely with the popular use of the term. What he concludes is that neoliberalism is a successor of “classical liberalism” (not welfare liberalism) which gives the state a large role in imposing freemarket principles on society, as in Pinochet’s Chile. It’s not laissez faire in the old-fashioned way.

In his book Mirowski cites the confused Wiki on neoliberalism and goes on a tirade against Wiki. On the discussion page I have suggested to the Wiki editors that they revise after taking Mirowski into account, but no luck so far.

“why, oh why oh why, do people use Newtonian gravity and deterministic laws of motion as their examples of things which are true for all times and in all cultures?”

Is this a joke that I don’t get, or is there something about Newtonian laws of motion that someone hasn’t told me? Are they suspended in Morecombe, or something?

Are they suspended in Morecombe, or something?

No, it’s just that they’re actually not true anywhere, as has been known since 1935 and the publication of general relativity. They are certainly a “useful description” of the behaviour of medium-sized objects travelling at normal speeds, but they start making large errors when you deal with things that are very small, very big, or travelling close to the speed of light.

“any world that humans can live in”

“objective non-cultural reality”

Er, yes, John. Let’s not be daft.

Incidentally it’s just the basic laws of evolution that are suspended in Morecombe. Thangew thangew I’ll be ‘ere all week.

Good lord, is it the Science Wars again?

“Cool. So did we decide if cultural studies was dead, or not?”
Depends how you look at it; but, provisionally, both.

“No, it’s just that they’re actually not true anywhere”

What you mean is that they’re not actually true everywhere.

That’s an important distinction.

And I would argue that the limitations of Newtonian physics isn’t quite the same as ceteris paribus, but that would only derail the thread further, and it’s a good thread, so I won’t do that.

And while I’m here, Colin @51, Sokal vs. Bogdanovs is a very poor comparison. There are much better reasons to suspect that theoretical physics is crap. (or at least crappy)

Just for the record I *don’t* think physics, theoretical or not, is crap. I was attempting a wee joke about piling big conclusions on little swindles.

But yes, academiclurker, in some places it’s always 1996! Like cowboys and indians, or cops and robbers — everyone takes a role, and the role tells you how to play.

—

Yes John E, Mirowski rulez. What I question is the reification that you get in David Harvey, among others.

“Popular media audiences are active” is now as commonplace as “hot dogs are tasty”? Maybe it is so now – with social media being the hot buzz word it has become – but in 1990, I don’t think so. What I remember from 199o is that the accepted line was more like – Television audiences are passive. So unlike books, that take active participation from the reader to create the fiction, television pumps palp into passive viewers – forces passivity onto television watchers and is making everyone stupid. Audiences of mass media actually were taking what corporate media suppliers wanted to give them and subverting it into what they wanted to get (yes this is what they were subverting it into – and why weren’t they being given what they wanted in the first place? people had thought that was what mass media was doing, but it wasn’t); this process was a worthwhile topic, one that needed demonstration and thought. I do see the point though that, now that it’s obvious, more has to be said for work to be significant.

they are true everywhere for objects over a certain size which aren’t approaching the speed of light, which is to say in any world that humans can live in

Actually, it’s pretty important in this world that humans can live in that GPS systems correct for relativity.

Wednesday’s worse already.

geo, Dana is saying it’s obvious that “popular media audiences are active”. Obvious perhaps in the sense that it’s widely accepted.

I’m with Harry@73: it seems to me perfectly possible to be (like me): pro-gay marriage and unenthusiastic about high divorce rates for straights or gays. Or fine with inter-racial marriage, but unappy about porn. I think some liberals seem to be creating a bizarre mirror-image of religious right sexual ethics, working apparently on the principle that you’ve either got to disapprove and ban almost all forms of sexual activity, or you’ve got to allow and approve of almost all forms. There may not be room for political compromise in the US, but it would be good to have some more sensible moral discussion of sexual ethics.

In particular, I think the left have done a good job in pointing out the inconsistencies and problems with traditional sexual morality, but haven’t done so well at creating a humanistic sexual ethic that goes beyond ‘anything that consenting adults do is OK’. (Feminists have done best at this, as the recent threads about lecherous lecturers show, but I don’t think anyone’s put together all the threads to make a coherent whole).

That means that a lot of people who are sympathetic to some aspects of the sexual revolution nevertheless get treated as the enemy by some leftists if they dare suggest that adultery or the ‘zipless f***’ are not admirable forms of behaviour. [I’m not being prudish here, BTW, I don’t know what the moderating software will accept]. There also seems to be a view current that if you disapprove of some sort of behaviour you must be in favour of legislating against it, whereas in many cases it may not be sensible to legislate against certain forms of unattractive sexual behaviour, but it seems entirely right to stigmatise the perpetrators. I don’t think Terence Kealey should be sacked, but I damn well would like him to be shunned at conferences, etc.

As for the arguments about the relative political priority to be given to economic v personal freedom questions, I don’t think it’s a question of abandoning minority rights, but of recognizing that they take a long time to achieve and that though you need to lead public opinion, you can’t get too far ahead of it . Two of the best things the current UK Labour government has done are introduce a minimum wage and legalize civil partnerships for gays. They could have done the former politically back in 1979 when Labour were last in power; they couldn’t have got legislation through on civil partnerships in the 1970s. Spending political capital on things that the vast majority of the country are opposed to simply doesn’t make sense.

Shouldn’t-be-necessary-but-probably-is disclaimer: which is not to say that I’m OK with every divorce or every kind of porn or Roman Polanski or Terence Kealey. I’m merely saying that Tom Frank’s outrage at MTV, and Bob McChesney’s idea that vulgarity is the result of media consolidation, are very silly things.

About the death panels for cultural studies: I try to address that question here.

Oh my. Much discussion has taken place since I was last able to check in. As I’m catching up, I’d like to clarify and add some things:

The UC Davis letter did not say that Michael Berube “should have been arguing for more support for cultural studies programs, full stop, instead of saying that cultural studies has gotten itself a bad rep in many quarters (sometimes deservedly) but should be taken seriously as a rich intellectual tradition that actually offers cogent explanations of (among other things) how hegemony works.”

Rather, we were drawn to address the essay’s narrative of decline about our field. Our letter expressed concern about how the essay represented the state of cultural studies in the U.S. As an example of this characterization, here’s the concluding sentence of his essay’s first paragraph: “Since its importation to the United States, however, cultural studies has basically turned into a branch of pop-culture criticism.”

Later, the Chronicle essay elaborates on this by saying that cultural studies “has effectively been conflated with “cultural criticism” in general, and associated with a cheery “Pop culture is fun!” approach. Anybody writing about The Bachelor or American Idol is generally understood to be “doing” cultural studies, especially by his or her colleagues elsewhere in the university.”

In follow-up comments and posts, I see Michael (may I? And, please, please just call me Ami. Using last names in this forum makes me feel like we’re spitting venom or something) emphasizing that he is concerned primarily with how the negative public image of cultural studies seriously hinders the field from being politically and scholarly effectual. I can see how the CHE essay could communicate that. He doesn’t mean that cultural studies folks take a “Pop culture is fun! approach.” That’s just how those close-minded, uninformed people see it. His use of passive voice in the passage quoted above, however, leaves his argument open to an interpretation he has repeatedly said he did not mean. Who and who is not conflating CS with uncritical pop culture analyses? Are today’s practitioners of American CS doing this in their own work? Sounds like that’s what’s being said. One might reasonably take away the message that, while the Birmingham School brand of CS was great, most CS work in the United States just doesn’t measure up.

We (UC Davis signatories) contested this picture of CS as unrecognizable in relation to the intellectual communities in which we participate. We expressed concern that Berube’s comment in the CHE did not recognize CS involvement in collaborations across the humanities, sciences, and law. We also expressed concern that, in an era of university corporatization, scholarship that analyzes power and critiques capital is especially vulnerable to defunding. Nowhere did we say that thoughtful critique was unwelcome, nor did we argue that CS is thoroughly embraced across the disciplines or by the general public. We explained that our work is not “a cheery “Pop culture is fun!” approach.” That image, which I certainly agree is commonplace in many camps, is an incorrect representation of the intellectual communities in which we participate. We were dismayed that the essay in the CHE would contribute to that negative and inaccurate image of CS in the US today, so clearly, we are concerned about several factors that coalesce in CS’s situation.

I go over all this only because the post here suggests to me that we’re still not on the same page with regards to the issues upon which members of this conversation have disagreed, I think clearing that up will make our discussion more productive in terms of figuring out how to increase the political and scholarly influence of CS. I get it: Michael didn’t mean it the way we took it.

I see that Michael meant to lament this incorrect image of CS in the US (only), turning to the work of the Birmingham School in an effort to correct the image while marking the boundaries of CS as he sees it. Clearer boundaries about what is and what isn’t CS will help fix the scholarly image, funding, public reception, and political relevance issues.

Speaking entirely for myself, I am interested in the notion that CS should be narrowly defined and the various other fields associated with it should be understood as separate, but related, communities. I can see how this could be productive in some ways. I’m not sure where that would leave many of my colleagues, though. I came to the UCD CS program because I believed – and still do believe – that my dissertation would be much better if I could experiment across a wide variety of methods and explore the insights of a wide variety of fields before I settled on how to approach my research topic and how to frame my research question. Cultural studies (at UCD) appeared to be a capacious embrace of interdisciplinary social sciences and humanities that interrogated power relations, a small but lively institutional perch for the unconventional and political. I certainly didn’t want to commit to a single discipline or method before I had read more deeply into the many fields related to my research topic. What has always mattered most to me is the quality and significance of my dissertation, and it is the amorphousness of CS that enabled me to pursue my curiosities until I became confident about which (sub) fields my project will most productively bring together and which bodies of literature would illuminate my object of study in a way that would matter both in and outside the academy. If CS is to draw stronger boundaries around subject, method, or purpose, will there be another place in the university where students can get off the beaten track to develop new questions, methods, and forms of scholarship?

Perhaps wanting a home for the odd is counterproductive to the maintenance of oddness, but I like to think that things don’t have to be all or nothing. I like having a place from which to wander about and try new things while remaining engaged with more established scholarly and public conversations. Maybe it will be harder to get people to understand what I do simply from the name of my program, but hopefully my work will speak more loudly and clearly, and that it will do so in a way that it could not have done had it been fomented in a disciplinary department.

Frank and Lasch apart, the “culture wars” reminds me exactly of the way that serious issues were ignored by bipartisan consensus during most of the period 1870–1912 (and even later), while elections were decided on the basis of Civil War sectional resentments, prohibition, anti-Catholicism and nativism.

My own most important issues are war and militarism, economic equality and social spending, and the police state and executive power, in about that order. On all of these issues the last 40 years have been disastrous. (Some might question this re: economic equality, but that’s been backloaded, so that the results of recent actions won’t be seen for five years or more.)

Meanwhile other issues have done reasonably or very well: gay rights notably (since there was such a long way to go), and to a considerable extent, women’s rights and the environment. Not coincidentally, these are issues that “moderate” hawkish, anti-union, “fiscally conservative” Republicans can support.

I don’t begrudge the winners their victory, but sometimes I overhear them speaking complacently about the last 40 years, leading me to suspect that I’m on their side, but they aren’t on mine. And they will say “You happen to think that those issues are important, whereas we think that these issues are important.” But my issues are not unimportant to the GLBT&C community; it’s not as though they are immune to the state of the economy, or don’t need health care.

Lasch traced our cultural politics all the way back to WWI (Mencken was an out-and-out rightwinger) and also noted that the Democrats (as his teacher, Hofstadter, recommended) renounced economic populism in favor of interest-group politics in the fifties, making labor, for example, just one interest group among many (and recently, one to bash). During that period the Democrats also committed themselves to top down technocratic governance, which is the truth behind the Republican “elitism” smear. (Republican populism is fake, but Democratic elitism is real).

At this time the full impact of the recent crash hasn’t been felt yet, and the future is more uncertain than anyone is willing to admit. It’s been a pretty clear case of elite malfeasance and looting by the rich, but because of the Democrats choice of an anti-majoritarian interest group strategy, and because of the success of the Republicans’ fake populism, a populist majoritarian response to the mafeasance and looting is more or less impossible.

And if it happens, the militarized police have plenty of hardware and legal leeway to crush it, as we saw recently in Pittsburgh.

One criticism of Frank, following Gelman, is that the split is different than Frank says. Roughly, in almost every state the rich are more Republican than the poor, including poor whites. A lot of the crazy right are actually upper middle class or above, and a fair proporrtion of them are educated.

At the same time, poor whites in poor states are more Republican than they are elsewhere, almost certainly for the types of issues Frank talks about.

When Republicans go after a Democratic demographic, they’re not going for 51%. They’re just whittling down the Democratic advantage. IF black Americans or Jews voted 70% Democratic, that would be a Republican triumph. The culture-war successes of the Republicans are that kind of whittling-down victory.

the split is different than Frank says. Roughly, in almost every state the rich are more Republican than the poor, including poor whites. A lot of the crazy right are actually upper middle class or above, and a fair proporrtion of them are educated.

This is a reasonable criticism of what Frank actually says. Not sure I agree — the genuinely rich are a tiny group, electorally — but it’s directed at the right target.

Also, I agree with almost everything Harry B and Geo and Magistra say. The need for our side to develop a positive ethic and vision of the good life is a particularly important point.

yeah, Michael, I think the implication that those on the left who are dubious about mass culture are all just prudes (I say implication, not direct argument)–I think this line is neither worthy of your work in general nor a fair representation of your adversaries.

Adorno said that the bourgeoisie wanted their art hedonistic and their life ascetic, but the other way around would be better. As for me, I enjoy Lady Gaga’s hypothetical penis as much as the next hipster/ironist, but when I step back, can I honestly say I’m happy with the deal?

Nick- Well yeah. In essence that’s what Berube is for, and Geo and Harry and magistra and little ol’ me are having problems with.

Michael, the second half of your comment (from “changing the subject”) makes some very strong arguments. Which I largely agree with — my numbered list was intended as a summary of Tom Frank’s views, not my own.

But it’s precisely because they *are* so strong that it’s baffling that you make these other really unsupported claims. Tom (he and I were part of the same University of Chicago crowd, back in the day; I got very drunk at his house there more than once) is not saying that the right is right in their specific criticisms of mass culture. He is saying, first, these issues are a distraction (and again, your objections on this point are clear and cogent) and, second, that while the specific criticisms are off-base it is true that much of popular culture really is ugly, degrading and stupid and that it is possible to imagine, and politically appropriate to prefer, a different kind of popular culture that would contribute to our genuine wellbeing and development as human beings. (Think DIY punk rock as a kind of Laschian artisanship.) This is the argument George has made so persuasively and that the cultural-studies approach (in both its “hot dogs are tasty!” and grim Adornian modes) more or less rules out of court.

What’s frustrating to a lot of us, I think, is that you won’t engage with this strand of argument at all. You might not, as Nick puts it, think that “all those on the left who are dubious about mass culture are all just prudes” but the prudes are the only ones you are willing to talk about, or to.

If there was ever a case of being overconvinced by an writer’s argument, this is it! After reading Michael’s case against contemporary American cultural studies, I’m trying to figure out why its continued separate disciplinary existence would be at all useful in a Rortyean sense. This is a “discipline” with no shared method, no agreed upon origin, and no consensus on content. Why do I need the imprimatur of cultural studies to read Paul Gilroy, identified as a sociologist on the dust jackets of his books? Or Michael Berube, professor of English? Or Lisa Duggan, with whom I was enrolled in a history Phd program hundreds of years ago?

You’ve even give Cult Stud a bit too much credit–or your pal, Jeff Nealon, does–in terms of situating an event in a “larger network of relations,” and thereby casting a large influence on other disciplines. This has been sop in the now not at all “new social history” for 30 years or more. Natalie Zemon Davis wrote The Return of Martin Guerre in 1983. Her earlier collection of essays on carnivals and other rituals in early modern France, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, was published in 1975. Carlo Ginzburg published his pathbreaking, The Cheese and Worms: The Cosmos of a 16th Century Miller in Italian in 1976. In cultural anthropology, Clifford Geertz famously situated Balinese cockfighting within larger networks of relations, his “Notes” first published in 1972! Is there a more widely assigned work in any humanities graduate program than the Geertz essay? Geertz didn’t need Raymond Williams to give him directions to Bali–he went there in 1958, two years before the New Left Review was founded. These are particularly prominent and influential examples from the established disciplines of what Nealon appropriates for Cultural Studies, but of course there are dozens more that preceded cultural studies and became *its* founding texts, rather than the other way around.

I’m not saying that a lot of great work hasn’t been done under the rubric “cultural studies” by American scholars. I just don’t understand anymore the point of carving out a separate discipline in order to have it done. If there was ever reason to do that, those reasons now seem contrived. The story in the UK is much different. There the link between the origin of the discipline and its ongoing work remains politically and intellectually organic. Here, for various reasons, those necessary links, to the extent they existed at all, have been severed–which doesn’t strike me as the most significant problem in the world. To paraphrase what Ted Kennedy said in a rather more grandiose context, the work goes on–so who needs the programs?

In short: no coherent method, content or indigenous origin, and even its claim to influence is probably one more borne of anxiety than deserved laurels. Why exactly are we trying to revive this corpse?

Sorry, please ignore the last two lines, which somehow got repeated.

Depends, D2, on what you’re calling ‘popular culture’. If it’s getting hammered and going looking for a fight on a Friday night, reading Richard Littlejohn [UK cryptofascist newspaper shithead, for US fans], thinking Clarkson et al are funny when they have a go at ‘pikeys’, and wishing death on brown people; then all that’s “ugly, degrading and stupid”, and it’s all, as much as anything is, firmly part of ‘popular culture’.

Keeping up allotments, walking on the beach, Sunday morning footie, weekends in Blackpool, all that’s fine. All that, and a commitment to establish community-based cooperatives to regenerate neighbourhoods through environmentally-sustainable industries, then we’d be talking… ;-)

Carlo Ginzburg published his pathbreaking, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a 16th Century Miller in Italian in 1976

I’ve just read this and it’s great.

On the topic of “What’s The Matter With Kansas”, the argument would be stronger if there was any sign that the hypothetical Kansans stopped watching TV (and consuming the rest of mass culture) in their outrage, or restricted themselves to the 700 Club and improving books. You have to take into account the prevalence of synthetic outrage – every political movement, in part, runs on the ability of people to switch on outrage when they think it desirable. This includes the Left. Everybody, at times, likes to pretend that their own yelling is the sound of a mighty crowd behind them.

Otherwise, the logical conclusion is that – guess what? – the optimal strategy for the US Democratic party is to make concessions to exactly the most dogmatic and aggressive strand of conservatism in the hope they’ll eat us last (or possibly, first). Where on earth have I heard that one before?

Making concessions without the expectation of reciprocity is not usually an optimal strategy, at least not when you’re dealing with Tom DeLay.

I have to admit I’ve never understood the distinction between cultural studies and cultural theory.

I read English at Cambridge and thought Raymond Williams was God. I was thinking of doing an MA in Cultural Studies, until I went to a CS conference and found that everyone was talking about Habermas (which I found deeply boring) and no one was talking about how the inherent contradictions of the conditions of collective production of meaning were articulated in the novels of Josephine Tey, or whatever (which I would have found interesting).

I’ve looked around a bit since then, and I’ve come to the conclusion that Cultural Studies in the Williams vein has basically come and gone. Cultural historians do some of what Williams did and “new historicists” in Eng Lit do a bit, but I don’t see much work produced as Cultural Studies which has Williams’s combination of historical materialism and close reading. Without that, Williams’s really exciting – and quite theoretically challenging – vision of reading culture from the standpoint of the production of common meanings within capitalist society seems to have got lost. (And me, I teach Criminology.)

D^2 – the classic quote on compression was Joe Strummer’s “I don’t know what that is, but I don’t want it!” I don’t think the link between ‘authenticity’ and ‘recording what it actually sounds like’ is particularly obscure, though.

“Essentially, the problem with cultural studies is often the lack of specific disciplinary skills: a literary theorist without proper knowledge of philosophy can write disparaging remarks on Hegel’s phallogocentrism, on film, and so on. What we are dealing with here is a kind of false universal critical capacity to pass judgements on everything without proper knowledge.”

I would have thought this was a pretty good argument that Zizek is doing cultural studies. Namely, whatever its virtues may be – and presumably he could pick those up on the job – he’s got it’s problems down pat. That’s his whole schtick.

There seems to be a continued confusion here between social descriptions and political tactics at various levels. Firstly, do we have empirical evidence for whether Kansans (for example) are socially ‘conservative’ (for want of a better word)? Because if so, liberals need to decide what to do about that. Thomas Frank’s book apparently reckons that they are socially conservative and therefore liberals need to downplay cultural issues in favour of economic ones. Ellen Willis’ view seems to be either that Kansans aren’t social conservative or that they shouldn’t be.

If you think that Kansans (or any other group) are socially conservative, but that cultural issues should be kept on the political agenda then you have to decide how you deal with the social conservatives. You can either tell them that they are bigots or you can try and see if you can persuade them to change their views. (Funnily enough, telling them that they are bigots and then trying to persuade them to change their views is not a very successful tactic).

Several people on this thread seem to be concluding from the fact that some social conservatives have unchanging views that therefore engaging with any social conservatives is a waste of time (because they are all just Dinesh D’Souza clones). It may be quite reasonable to conclude that you cannot engage productively with a particular group of conservatives (say Republican Senators). That does not mean, however automatically ruling out the possibility that your neighbour who thinks feminists are all lesbian Nazis might not be persuaded to think otherwise if you reveal you are a surburban mother but nevertheless a feminist. Barack Obama talked about how during his Senate race he modified the language on his website about abortion in response to a letter from a supporter. Obama didn’t change his views, but because he decided not to call those who were anti-abortion evil woman-haters he got a vote from someone he might not have got it from otherwise. Practical politics is about building alliances and co-operating with people whose views you don’t entirely share. It’s both more satisfying and more principled to rail at the people who don’t agree with you 100%, but it’s not often effective as a tactic.

Hidari (#82) and Soru (#84) illustrate the point in Sokal’s hoax. We have a reference to an authority figure (Nancy Cartwright) that sheds no light. We have a whole lot of writing that doesn’t mean much (positivism/realism?). We have an apparent conflation of Einstein’s relativity principle and “cultural relativism”.

Then Berube writes (#102): “reading comprehension not your strong suit on that one” That’s actually true. I’m a slow reader. That what makes it so frustrating to work through so many words only to discover that they have no purpose — that the writer has no point to make. I reread your stuff and stand by “gardening”. Your point seems to be that people doing literature studies are allowed to have relaxed standards of argument — standards that do not seem to include that what they’re saying is true, or even make sense.

steven – you seem to be confusing “those X who did Y could justify it using Z (which may X believed)” with “all X did Y because all X believed Z”. I’m not making the latter statement (about punk or anything else).

geo @ 124:

He does not think we should pretend to agree with the Kansans about the depravity of popular culture.

Frank, What’s the Matter with America? (UK edn. of …Kansas?), p133:

Ordinary working-class people are right to hate the culture we live in.

‘Hidari (#82) and Soru (#84) illustrate the point in Sokal’s hoax. We have a reference to an authority figure (Nancy Cartwright) that sheds no light. We have a whole lot of writing that doesn’t mean much (positivism/realism?)’

Excuse me? I wasn’t referring to a an ‘authority figure’ (i.e. in the way you were implying: in other words, I wasn’t arguing ‘NC says it therefore it’s true). And ‘positivism’ and ‘realism’ not the arcane, ‘occult’ words you seem to think they are. They are very clearly defined. Google them. You will quickly find that you simply cannot be a positivist and a (metaphysical or what Wikipedia terms a ‘scientific’) Realist at the same time. That’s just a fact, and anyone who claims otherwise is misusing those terms, or doesn’t understand what they mean.

It should now be possible to put together a progressive majoritarian (or populist) attack on finance and the Republicans and their corporate sponsors, but it isn’t. Why? The culture war is a big part of the answer.

Yes, but the culture war isn’t some factor external to and easily separable from progressive majoritarianism.

I think Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God and Wal-Mart tells this history quite well, and she helpfully wrote an essay for Powell’s, Culture War on Aisle 5?, summarizing the argument.

Basically, the notion that the Left or the Democratic Party can simply assert the distinction between the cultural conflict and economic conflict flies in the face of a history in which the two have been understood, and lived, as arising from the same place. The economic left, Moreton argues, must reckon with not merely that many lower and middle-class folks have turned to cultural conservatism in the face of economic insecurity, but that in fact a personal and communal ethic of market-life has been an inextricable component of cultural conservatism for decades.

I think this is a useful supplement to the claims of Hall that Michael has been citing above – modern conservative movements, and the changes in popular culture which have accompanied the growth of modern conservatism, are complex and contradictory, not simple and contradictory. They are contradictory not in a way that spells their immediate doom, but contradictory the way all human events and movements tend to be.

Or, better, because I don’t think Frank is saying that the alliance of cultural and economic conservatism is “immediately” doomed – it is contradictory not in a way that points unambiguously toward which strategies will lead to is dissolution.

alex — not at all; it is clear that Frank agrees with the Kansans that the culture is depraved; he just wishes they would realize who is really depraving it (ie not liberals but, on his account, “business”).

147: I don’t get your point, I guess. I was stating the problem and a goal, not asserting a solution. I also specifically wrote off the crazified 30%, pointed out that a lot of cultural conservatives are in fact prosperous, and pointed out in terms of electoral politics we’re really talking about getting back 5% or 10% of certain demographics (the white poor, especially Catholics or Christian.

The fact that people have been talking about this problem for a good long time without solving it isn’t exactly proof that they’re wrong. It is indeed a fact that a lot of people have been successfully resruited by cultural conservatives, so that we’re not starting from scratch with them, but would actually have to work pretty hard even to get them to neutrality or centrism.

I also don’t accept the apparent belief that we cannot say that some people are deluded. The things teapartiers are saying about health insurance and a lot of other things are erroneous and hysterical.

a personal and communal ethic of market-life has been an inextricable component of cultural conservatism for decades.

I don’t know what this means.

Finally, the fact is that for the last forty years cultural liberals have been winning and economic liberals have been losing. Is the message that economic liberals should just shut up about this? Because it’s a fact that a lot of cultural liberals have pretty much bought into neoliberalism.

They actually do care less about their own concrete interests than about cultural shibboleths, even when the choice is explicitly placed before them.

This is true only of the most committed. Media-propagated disinformation and distraction is a key part of the conservative effort. Most people depend on TV for their news, all of the outlets except MSNBC are factually inaccurate. Even the Times and the Post have increasingly become conduits of misinformation. A lot of people believe things about the Democratic proposals, poor as they are, that are flatly false, and likewise about Canadian, French, British, and Swedish health care. (Again, if media studies people say that it’s a copout or other error to blame the media, I don’t care. )

To stick with cultural liberalism just as it is even if economic liberalism tails along far behind, which seems to be Berube’s strategy, amounts to giving up on economic liberalism.

To stick with cultural liberalism just as it is even if economic liberalism tails along far behind, which seems to be Berube’s strategy, amounts to giving up on economic liberalism.

I had understood the argument and strategy differently. I thought it was

(a) denouncing “the culture” in broad terms or deciding not to talk about cultural-liberal issues any more will have real, and negative effects on the lives of people – you know, folks who aren’t white, straight males – for whom cultural issues are issues of real and immediate import, and
(b) even if we determine that advances for various minority groups can be put on the back burner because economic majoritarianism lifts all boats, this new strategy of just talking about economic issues won’t work nearly as well as it is claimed.

I’m not saying that the Democratic Party or the Left has already happened upon its ideal strategies, and I agree with you that economic leftism has lost real and significant victories, and this is a really really big problem. But I have not been convinced either that the culture produced during ascendant cultural liberalism is particularly at fault in the decline of the economic left, or that a political strategy which ignores or downplays cultural issues is the strategy the left and the Democrats should take up.

That’s Francis Mulhern.

Answer: because no one in either the Democratic or Republican Party gives a flying f*ck what the people want.

We’re ruled by two increasingly centralized parties which get the vast majority of the money they need from big business, and give most of the money they get to enormous media groups which also get most of their money from big business. “The audience is not the consumer; the audience is the product”. Advertiser and propagandists pay the media for access to the minds of people who depend on free and cheap media.

Sorry if it sounds Chomskyian, but isn’t it true?

On what they think are the big issues, the two parties are mostly agreed. For example, both President GHW Bush and President Bill Clinton said that “free trade” was their main accomplishment. Many Democrats also were more than willing to go along with deregulation and the tax cuts.

Whatever the subjective feelings of Kansans and the gay community, those are the big, important kinds of thing that government does. Those are the kinds of things that people who know what’s going on really care about.

In order to get a free hand to do the things they agree upon, the two parties stage fights on things that they don’t care about much. Hopefully they’ll figure out a way to get the country about evenly divided on these throwaway issues, because that way the two more or less equal parties can work out “compromises” on the big issues, and neither one will have to take sole responsibility.

At my link my review of Walter Karp,’s “Indispensable Enemies”, which I originally found out about in Geo’s book, if I’m not mistaken. Karp’s main point is that the parties and the individuals working for the parties have their own interests and have no intrinsic interest in the country’s needs, the voters’ desires, or even their candidates’ needs, but calculate everything in terms of their need to keep control of the party. They’re not opposed to doing the right thing in principle, they’re just not really interested in doing so.

I’m doing a series on OL about the American party system, the Democrats, and the miscellaneous third parties, dissident factions, and independents that basically did all of the work in American politics between 1870 and 1940. Everything’s at my link.

On what they think are the big issues, the two parties are mostly agreed.

Only for very strange values of “mostly”. Or have you not been paying attention to the last several months of one party accusing the other of conspiracy to mass murder?

There is a de facto third party of centrists which is de jure part of the Democratic Party, so if you don’t look closely enough, you can believe that there’s no real difference between Democrats and Republicans or that Democrats have 60 seats in the Senate.

But when the Democratic wing of the Democratic party starts putting things like universal health care on the agenda, then those illusions go out the window. *Those* Democrats are quite different indeed from Republicans, but it’s hard to get the centrist wing of their own party to go along, let alone the actual Republicans. Making a deal with the centrists shouldn’t be confused with sharing their agenda, and the outcome of a Democrat-Centrist coalition (which is de jure not a coalition but just the whole Democratic Party) is observably quite different from the outcome of a Centrist-Republican “bipartisan” coalition (even though neither one is the pure liberal agenda, unsullied by compromise).

I agree with you about the mass media, mostly. But in order to sell the audience they first have to draw one, so at some level, they are still constrained to giving people what they want so that they’ll stick around long enough for the media to sell access to their brains to advertisers. The thing is, some people want something to be righteously indignant at, and someone to validate their anger.

Also: dictating who can and cannot get married is a pretty big and important thing that government does in fact do. The gay community’s desire for government to take a somewhat different approach to how it does this thing is not just a “subjective feeling” that it is important. Heterosexual conservatives have no concrete interest in the gay marriage fight, but gays really do.

There is a de facto third party of centrists which is de jure part of the Democratic Party, so if you don’t look closely enough, you can believe that there’s no real difference between Democrats and Republicans or that Democrats have 60 seats in the Senate.

And the centrists run the show. Obama insisted on bipartisanship and never intended even to have a public option, which is already a big step down from single payer, and the Democratic leadership never even thought about passing a bill with 51 votes, the way the Republicans passed bills. If we do get a public option, it will because a lot of unelected Democrats who are not part of the party organization will have succeeded in defeating Rahm Emmanuel and Barack Obama.

And the Republicans are whining and screaming, but they’ll be happy enough with the Baucus bill if that’s what we get, and the insurance companies will be ecstatic. The whining and screaming was theater intended to bully the Democrats into passing a weak bill, and Obama played to the Republican strategy.

I suppose that you can say that the difference between the two parties (under present leadership) is that the Republicans wanted a weak bill or not bill, whereas the Democrats wanted a weak bill. (And by “the Democrats” I mean the party as an entity. There are lots of individual Congressmen and a few individual Senators who are in the right place, but they normally lose the way the electorate normally loses.)

So I don’t see the strangeness.

Just to underline my point, while Clinton was President there was no significant difference between the two parties in free trade, regardless of what the majority of the Democrats in Congress may have thought. And Clinton thought that this was his most important accomplishment.

Michael and Steven: I would bet good money that if a crap-o-meter were attached to all three of you, and you were all exposed to a wide variety of pop-cultural products, from the mass-market to the cutting edge, your crap ratings would be nearly identical.
By and large, you two would find the kind of stuff Frank is referring to in that paragraph @152 just as objectionable as he does (and for the same reasons), and he would find the stuff you like just as cool as you do. That is to say, assuming you agree on the domain of “American culture” or “our culture” or “the culture that surrounds us,” I’ll bet the three of you would agree very closely on what percentage of it is crap. Which is why I maintain that your quarrel (and Willis’s) with Frank is based on a misunderstanding.

it’s not quite so simple as that
99.99 percent of the time someone says this, no one ever said it was.

Though as DD pointed out, maybe no one even believes the Democrats any more on the economic issues, and perhaps for upper middle class gays and lesbians these issues really aren’t important.

And the most painful irony of all, of course, is that those “upper middle class gays and lesbians” who have supposedly contributed to steering the Democratic Party in the wrong direction are getting sweet FA for their trouble. As with Clinton.

And that’s where Frank’s thesis falls apart for me.

Seriously, the gay community has done better than any Democratic constituency (except big business) during the last 30 years or so, though as I said, it’s because they started from almost zero (Stonewall was 40 years ago).

Steven.

When someone says “I don’t like X,” X being a pretty large and woolly catch-all sort of term, and then goes on immediately to specify what he doesn’t like about X, then I think it’s only reasonable to understand him as saying “I don’t like this and this about X.”

In any case, Frank has written several previous books and edited a long-running magazine, The Baffler, which pay very considerable attention to popular culture, trying conscientiously to discriminate the good from the crap, unlike, say, Hilton Kramer or Gertrude Himmelfarb, who regard it as all crap.

Seriously, the gay community has done better than any Democratic constituency (except big business) during the last 30 years or so, though as I said, it’s because they started from almost zero (Stonewall was 40 years ago).

I can’t argue with that, John, but I was thinking specifically about the Democrats in Washington when I wrote that. Of course the gains have been enormous in many places at the state and local level–and yes, to the extent that the two parties were involved, it’s almost always been the Democrats fighting the good fight. But in terms of Clinton and Obama, it’s another story entirely. So I take your point, with that qualification.

geo — your trust analogy doesn’t seem at all plausible to me. The thought usually goes: “Well, he was dishonest about X so he is not trustworthy [in general].”

He doesn’t mean that they would be right to hate everything about American popular culture

And yet he wrote: “They are right to hate the culture we live in.” Then he gave some reasons why he thought they were right to hate it. And nowhere did he mention any parts they wouldn’t be right to hate.

On your rules of interpretation, indeed, it would be impossible for him ever to actually say that they would be right to hate everything, because he wouldn’t be able to itemize every possible reason to hate the whole culture, so you would always be able to plead that the things he didn’t mention might well meet with his approval after all.

Still, as I said, I am happy to accept your reading of what he probably intended, taking into account external evidence of his attitude to popular culture elsewhere, but it still isn’t what he actually wrote in this passage of …Kansas?.

geo writes, upthread, that the critics of Frank

“would find the kind of stuff Frank is referring to in that paragraph @152 just as objectionable as he does (and for the same reasons), and he would find the stuff you like just as cool as you do. That is to say, assuming you agree on the domain of “American culture” or “our culture” or “the culture that surrounds us,” I’ll bet the three of you would agree very closely on what percentage of it is crap.”

–this, I think, is a fundamental misunderstanding. one can believe that most of the products of mass culture are crap without believing in a totalizing argument about mass culture. most sonnet sequences suck, as do most epic poems. is Elvis’s “Baby Let’s Play House” not better than 99.9% of all sonnets ever written? I’m prepared to believe that most German tragedies really were sickly and stupid. the question, it seems to me, is rather about the manipulation and creation of desires, about what commodity culture, as a relationship (alienated?) we experience to our own creative powers, might being doing/have done to us…….

a totalizing argument about mass culture

What is the totalizing argument about mass culture that Frank is supposed to be making? Isn’t he just saying that (as you also imply with your remark about “commodity culture”) much of mass culture is phony, manipulative, coarse, and patronizing toward Middle Americans, and that Middle Americans are therefore right to hate it, but should recognize that it is, for the most part, the product of commercial rather than liberationist impulses, and ABOVE ALL, that the Republicans are merely exploiting their cultural grievances in order to pick their and our pockets?

I don’t think it is fair to argue that mass cult is as insulting of the values of the value voters as Frank and other intend. It is often vulgar and horrid but it is vulgar and horrid in multiple directions. I find almost all mass cult vulgar and horrid but don’t hate it in any meaningful sense. I don’t watch or listen to it, or when I do I regret the waste of time and vow to avoid what ever it was in the future. I also think that lots of the complaints I have about mass cult are of the “all you kids get off my lawn” variety and, consequently, bemoan culture’s collapse a bit ironically. To argue that the hatred some of the value voters crowd feel toward mass cult is justified is to argue that narrow minded bigotry is justified. There are plenty of pro middle brow middle class middle whatever the heck stuff out their. The value voters crowd, however, want it all their way. The existence of alternative cultures, i.e., cultures other than theirs, offends them.

I agree with Tom Bach @187 regarding the heterogeneity of mass culture, and everyone’s tendency to pick the most objectionable-to-them piece and rail against it.

But I don’t agree much with John Emerson @188. The idea that mass culture presents “a semi-official way of life” is laughable. Mass culture presents hundreds or perhaps thousands of ways of life; which of them is semi-official exactly? I hope it isn’t the Sopranos.

Assuming for the sake of argument that “for children younger than a certain age TV has authority”, maybe households with children that young shouldn’t have TVs in rooms accessible to the children, or should only have them hooked up to a DVD player with parentally-approved content, or using parental controls and a restricted list of parentally allowed channels/shows.

If you want someone other than you (or your spouse/co-parent/etc.) to be the gatekeeper between the world of adult ideas (which includes TV and the Internet) and your child, you are going to be disappointed. Who else would you trust with that role anyway? Your standards for what you want your child exposed to are different from other parents’ standards and society can’t enforce all of them at once.

It sounds to me like you want the effects of policing your children’s access to media, without actually doing the policing; someone else should do that for you, never mind the effect on adults who want to communicate to other adults something you judge unsuitable for your children.

That *is* a free speech issue whether you like it or not — trying to reduce either TV or the internet to the lowest common denominator of child-safe-ness would amount to destroying them as media of idea exchange among adults, and at least in the U.S., the government is banned from engaging in any such project (and nobody else has the authority over the whole medium — even owning 90%, creepy as it would be, would be insufficient as the producers of content banned by the majority would take refuge in the other 10%).

You have the right and authority to take (and keep) your children away from that conversation (at least until they grow up). But you don’t have the right or the authority to stop the conversation.

P.S. If you don’t want television dominated by advertisers, do you donate to the Center for Public Broadcasting or something similar? Do you support political candidates who want to fund it or increase its funding?

Which leads me to the other thing: when someone like Frank complains about “vulgarity,” what kind of cultural vulgarity are we talking about?

Where might there exist mass culture virtuous enough to meet with approval?

geo @ 185–hmmm, I was unclear. if it’s a “culture industry”, if Frank takes that Frankfurt School term seriously, the problem is not just that most of its products suck; the problem is with the way cultural production is organized at a particular state of capitalism. I presume Frank is taking the term seriously, given his earlier work–but maybe he isn’t?

just saw your 192, which this also answers. Berube and Frank may agree on 95% of all particular value judgments while still having a very different stance re. the validity of the “culture industry” as analytic description.

P.S. If you don’t want television dominated by advertisers, do you donate to the Center for Public Broadcasting or something similar? Do you support political candidates who want to fund it or increase its funding?

Man, you’re swinging wildly. The answers are no and yes, but this is actually a serious question, not a referendum on the CPB. Quite throwing kitchen sinks at me.

@194-5: on that specific point, see http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/10/02/the-bbc-is-good-for-household-debt/

I like this thread. I think that Frank’s wording was “wild” because he was trying to make a point, and I think his wording was wild — and not that he “hates all mass culture”, really — precisely because he was trying to write a book about something else in an environment that is charged emotionally. How do you take people seriously when you — and even they, when they become engaged in a particular subject more deeply — realize that it doesn’t serve their “actual, social and economic needs? That’s a tough one. And you can either call crap on their views and values, assuming that if they could focus more and learn more they’d wise up; or you can go back against the argument itself, and assert that there’s not really that much wrong with it. There is, I think, little question that both things are going on here, no matter where you fall on Frank’s “actual, existing, and well-articulated and properly constrained opinions.”