Intellectuals and the Flag
I am in a writing mood tonight. Or, at the very least, I am feeling a need to be productive tonight. I haven’t written for personal reasons in a while now (since late-February or early-March, I believe, when I was in the throes of thesis and graduation panic), but it feels like a decent time to resurrect this old LiveJournal, though. At the very least, at the current moment, I want a public for my thoughts.
An hour or so ago I finished Todd Gitlin’s “The Intellectuals and the State,” a rather vehement critique of academia and its relationship to politics. Gitlin’s primary argument is that academia and intellectuals have largely retreated from the realm of politics in our current moment, instead resigning themselves to the margins of public life due to the rise of conservative reigns of power since the demise of the radical movements of the sixties and the seventies. The apotheosis (such a good word! I almost never think to use it in a sentence) of this retreat is in the apolitical populism of cultural studies and the rise of “theory” (his quotations, not mine) in the academy. If you do not know what cultural studies is, I don’t really have a definite answer for you other than simply, “It is what I do.” All of my writings about Xena and Buffy and the relationship between television and queer culture? Cultural studies. In a nutshell, Gitlin argues that cultural studies has been substituted for real political engagement as a kind of consolation prize for a diminishing American left. We have failed on the grand level of politics and democracy, so we have tried to convince others (and ourselves, according to Gitlin) that real resistance to hegemonic (conservative) powers can be found in our consumption and uses of popular culture. Or, as Gitlin puts it in a rather odd exclamation, the African-Americans are not still not equal under the eyes of the law, but at least they have hip-hop! Of course, for Gitlin, this is all just a big lie that we academics tell ourselves in order to convince ourselves that our work is important and to avoid the very real and difficult task of actually trying to change America from the inside rather than snarking at it from the sidelines in our Ivory Towers.
A sidenote. Why Ivory Towers? I haven’t been to THAT many university or college campuses in my lifetime (I could count them on both hands, with fingers to spare), but none of the ones that I’ve been to have had anything resembling an Ivory Tower. So why has the Ivory Tower been used as the symbol of everything that is wrong with academia? I’m just a little curious as to the term’s history. I’m sure I could find it in the OED, but this seemed easier.
Anyhoo. Back to Gitlin.
Suffice to say that I took Gitlin’s argument a little…personally. I mean, it was a rather passionate assault on the work of the last four years of my life (and, if I’m really lucky, the next forty). But this is academia. I’m used to things like this. And to be honest, Gitlin’s criticism of cultural studies is hardly original. It is basically a reiteration of practically every single response my family has made to my research interests. “You’re doing your thesis on Xena? Really? What’s the point?” So rather than get defensive, I want to take Gitlin’s assault charitably (certainly more charitably than he gave the entire field of cultural studies). My first problem with his claim is that cultural studies is nothing more than apolitical populism, uncritically celebrating the popular and the audience as master resisters to authority. This is, to put it mildly, a straw-man version of cultural studies. This type of cultural studies did have a lot of cultural capital in the eighties, mainly due to the work of critics like John Fiske, who was attempting to reclaim popular culture from the Frankfurt School of the 40s and 50s who saw popular culture as tools of capital to acclimate the proletariat to the rhythms of capitalism and popular culture’s consumers as cultural dupes (don’t quote me on those dates either; dates aren’t really that important to us cultural studies people; suffice to say that the Frankfurt School’s interpretation of popular culture was the dominant interpretation in the academy until the 1980s). Fiske argued that audiences were much more active than the Frankfurt School gave them credit, and basically used the artifacts of popular culture however they wanted, regardless of how The Powers That Be (you know, THE MAN) wanted them to.
Now, if cultural studies still proclaimed what Fiske proclaimed, then yes, Gitlin would be absolutely right in labeling cultural studies as apolitical populism. But you know what? That was the eighties. Today in cultural studies, John Fiske has largely been discredited. No one worth their weight in DVDs would EVER make the claim that audiences unproblematically use pop culture however they want to without being constrained at least a little bit by the forces of capitalism or the power of dominant ideology. The only times you see John Fiske mentioned nowadays is to show how the current studies differs from that assertion. Or, to put it more simply, every time I mentioned John Fiske, Dr. Edwards (my former mentor at FSU) would cringe and say, “Dude, you can’t use him.” In my own thesis, I tried to show how audiences both used Xena for empowering and potentially progressive purposes AND reproduced aspects of dominant, conservative discourses, often simultaneously. I also tried to show how this was political, in that it helped to shape a discourse on gender and sexuality (what law scholar Katherine Franke has termed the “domestinormative” trajectory of current mainstream queer politics) that has had a tremendous effect on the ways in which queer politics have been framed and defined, and how this process was informed by both structural forces (like capitalism) and more personal, individual acts of consumption and agency. Yes, that’s right, I just argued that Xena had an effect on queer politics.
But, according to Gitlin, popular culture is hopelessly determined by the market, and that real art is motivated, at least partially, by non-market concerns. These concerns usually revolve around providing us insight into the human condition. Good culture teaches us to think critically about the world, and “hold(s) powerful lessons for public conduct” (p. 120). Popular culture like television programs or Top-40 radio cannot possibly do this, since popular culture is designed primarily to provide fleeting, shallow sensations. He even goes as far to write: “It is better to study The Brothers Karamazov than to study General Hospital. There is more to be derived from a production of Hamlet than a production of Desperate Housewives” (p. 120). Because the former inspire us to deep contemplation of the human condition, while the latter is simply just popcorn for the mind.
To the three or four of you who may be reading this right now, Gitlin probably seems so obviously wrong right now. While I will grant that popular culture is primarily designed to entertain, rather than educate and inform the citizenry (I am not a naïve populist after all, and I will readily affirm that the market plays a huge role in shaping popular culture), this is not the only role that popular culture plays. Whether by accident or by some sort of subversive design on the part of frustrated writers, pop culture can and does frequently inspire public, political action. Television shows like Xena, Ellen and, later, Will & Grace, have been credited with softening the American population’s attitude towards alternative sexualities, and have certainly influenced how we think about gays and lesbians in our current moment. Now it is impossible (and unjustifiable) to state with anything resembling authority that gays can now marry in Massachusetts and California because of Xena. But I can suggest with some authority, I think, that programs like Xena and inspired by Xena helped to shape and promote certain ideologies that were sympathetic towards gays and lesbians, and that the popular consumption of these ideologies helped to shift American perceptions of gays and lesbians that, in addition with a variety of other factors (predominantly the perception of gay men as privileged consumers and arbiters of taste), informed queer political trajectories. Television programs help to both reflect and shape discourses, and discourses have material, political effects. I’m not arguing that Xena was decisive in this respect. But it played a part. American popular culture, especially television programs, works on both a national (and increasingly global) scale, but also on a personal scale, and to say that that does not matter is simply, unequivocally untrue. Moreover, scholars of the past four decades in everything from english and anthropology to biology and chemistry have compellingly and convincingly demonstrated that “High culture” or “canons” or those works designed to “educate” and “shape” good “citizens” are not value-neutral. In fact, they usually reproduce the values and concerns of a very, very specific and specialized group. Namely, the white, heterosexual, middle-to-upper-class, Northern, Western male ((this really originated with the works of those feminist scholars working in the academy during the seventies, but was quickly adopted by critical race, postcolonial, and [even later] queer studies). It is no coincidence, I think, that Gitlin pitted Hamlet and The Brothers Karamazov against General Hospital and Desperate Housewives. The latter are predominantly soap operas (in form, at least) and are immensely popular among women and gay audiences. Why can’t they produce the same complexity of refelction and insight into the current American condition as a sixteenth-century British play and a nineteenth-century Russian novel? Because they were hopelessly produced according to the concerns of the market, while the others were produced in an atmosphere free of market concerns? If Gitlin really wants to argue this, then he is astoundingly ignorant of the cultural and economic milieus in which both Shakespeare and Dostoevsky were writing. No culture, high or low, is free of the concerns of the market. The market is immanent to our lives and informs (to varying degrees) everything that we do. I am not arguing that it completely determines everything that we do (as Marx tried to argue). Simply that it does have an influence on everything. Other things have an influence too. Discourses, social relations, cultural structures, political structures, free will (if such a thing exists; I think it does), all play a part in shaping the course of our lives. Cultural studies chooses to focus on how cultural structures like television programs and pop songs shapes this course. Gitlin prefers to think about politics. Both worthy pursuits. But Gitlin is trying to argue that politics has a particularly privileged relation to the course of our lives. He should. But he is also trying to argue that this relation is so privileged as to make the study of any other relation shallow and worthless by comparison. The only reasoned, logical response that I think is worthy of this assertion is “bull puckey.” I choose to think that all expressions of culture are worthy of attention, are worthy of study, are worthy of respect. All shape and inform us as citizens to varying degrees, and to dismiss any expression of culture as beneath another is frequently motivated by racist, classist, heterosexist, or misogynistic beliefs (or any combination thereof) and we should always approach any such dismissal with extreme caution and skepticism. I am not arguing that cultural studies is a valid substitute for sustained, public political engagement. But I do want to argue that politics is influenced by culture, by the attitudes and ideologies reflected and shaped by popular culture, and to ignore popular culture is to ignore an extremely significant (especially today) influence upon the American citizenry, an influence that is both positive and negative, progressive and conservative. It is the influence that has played a large role in my life, at least. Television programs have frequently challenged me to think deeply about certain subjects and aspects of American life at the turn of the century. They have helped to shape how I see myself, and how I see my relation to other people, to my communities, and to my nation. If that isn’t art by Gitlin’s definition, than what is? It is all in how the audience uses the product. Gitlin and I both agree on one thing, at least. We can encourage our students to look at our cultural artifacts critically and deeply. We can try to train the next generation to question received knowledge, whether it comes from Hamlet or from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Hamlet does not inherently encourage us to think deeply about life. The only reason Hamlet is difficult to read right now is because it was written in the sixteenth-century vernacular. It’s plot and themes are actually rather simple (which makes them all the more rich). Fast-forward four hundred years and how easy will it be to watch Xena? In fact, Xena and Hamlet have far more similarities than differences. But because one is “popular” and the other one isn’t, the unpopular one must necessarily be more challenging and deep? This is a false assumption.
When I sat down to write this an hour ago, I did not intend it to be a four page response to Gitlin. But that’s what writing does, I guess. It goes where it wants to go. Despite what it may sound like, I actually did enjoy reading Gitlin. He posed a serious challenge to me. But what surprised me is that I had a response to him. Every argument he made (or nearly every argument he made) I had a response to. And not just a response. An educated response. An authoritative response. A response not based on my gut reaction of defensiveness, but on the past four years of work that I’ve done in cultural studies. And that made me feel really good. It helped me to clarify my stance. It helped me to think through why I do what I do for a living, for a life. And moments like those…well, this is what intellectuals live for. This is what intellectuals do. As Gitlin argued, academia and higher education is one of the only spaces left that forces its participants to face the opposition and consider their responses. And I think I just showed to myself that I may just belong there after all. Even if I study Xena.
An hour or so ago I finished Todd Gitlin’s “The Intellectuals and the State,” a rather vehement critique of academia and its relationship to politics. Gitlin’s primary argument is that academia and intellectuals have largely retreated from the realm of politics in our current moment, instead resigning themselves to the margins of public life due to the rise of conservative reigns of power since the demise of the radical movements of the sixties and the seventies. The apotheosis (such a good word! I almost never think to use it in a sentence) of this retreat is in the apolitical populism of cultural studies and the rise of “theory” (his quotations, not mine) in the academy. If you do not know what cultural studies is, I don’t really have a definite answer for you other than simply, “It is what I do.” All of my writings about Xena and Buffy and the relationship between television and queer culture? Cultural studies. In a nutshell, Gitlin argues that cultural studies has been substituted for real political engagement as a kind of consolation prize for a diminishing American left. We have failed on the grand level of politics and democracy, so we have tried to convince others (and ourselves, according to Gitlin) that real resistance to hegemonic (conservative) powers can be found in our consumption and uses of popular culture. Or, as Gitlin puts it in a rather odd exclamation, the African-Americans are not still not equal under the eyes of the law, but at least they have hip-hop! Of course, for Gitlin, this is all just a big lie that we academics tell ourselves in order to convince ourselves that our work is important and to avoid the very real and difficult task of actually trying to change America from the inside rather than snarking at it from the sidelines in our Ivory Towers.
A sidenote. Why Ivory Towers? I haven’t been to THAT many university or college campuses in my lifetime (I could count them on both hands, with fingers to spare), but none of the ones that I’ve been to have had anything resembling an Ivory Tower. So why has the Ivory Tower been used as the symbol of everything that is wrong with academia? I’m just a little curious as to the term’s history. I’m sure I could find it in the OED, but this seemed easier.
Anyhoo. Back to Gitlin.
Suffice to say that I took Gitlin’s argument a little…personally. I mean, it was a rather passionate assault on the work of the last four years of my life (and, if I’m really lucky, the next forty). But this is academia. I’m used to things like this. And to be honest, Gitlin’s criticism of cultural studies is hardly original. It is basically a reiteration of practically every single response my family has made to my research interests. “You’re doing your thesis on Xena? Really? What’s the point?” So rather than get defensive, I want to take Gitlin’s assault charitably (certainly more charitably than he gave the entire field of cultural studies). My first problem with his claim is that cultural studies is nothing more than apolitical populism, uncritically celebrating the popular and the audience as master resisters to authority. This is, to put it mildly, a straw-man version of cultural studies. This type of cultural studies did have a lot of cultural capital in the eighties, mainly due to the work of critics like John Fiske, who was attempting to reclaim popular culture from the Frankfurt School of the 40s and 50s who saw popular culture as tools of capital to acclimate the proletariat to the rhythms of capitalism and popular culture’s consumers as cultural dupes (don’t quote me on those dates either; dates aren’t really that important to us cultural studies people; suffice to say that the Frankfurt School’s interpretation of popular culture was the dominant interpretation in the academy until the 1980s). Fiske argued that audiences were much more active than the Frankfurt School gave them credit, and basically used the artifacts of popular culture however they wanted, regardless of how The Powers That Be (you know, THE MAN) wanted them to.
Now, if cultural studies still proclaimed what Fiske proclaimed, then yes, Gitlin would be absolutely right in labeling cultural studies as apolitical populism. But you know what? That was the eighties. Today in cultural studies, John Fiske has largely been discredited. No one worth their weight in DVDs would EVER make the claim that audiences unproblematically use pop culture however they want to without being constrained at least a little bit by the forces of capitalism or the power of dominant ideology. The only times you see John Fiske mentioned nowadays is to show how the current studies differs from that assertion. Or, to put it more simply, every time I mentioned John Fiske, Dr. Edwards (my former mentor at FSU) would cringe and say, “Dude, you can’t use him.” In my own thesis, I tried to show how audiences both used Xena for empowering and potentially progressive purposes AND reproduced aspects of dominant, conservative discourses, often simultaneously. I also tried to show how this was political, in that it helped to shape a discourse on gender and sexuality (what law scholar Katherine Franke has termed the “domestinormative” trajectory of current mainstream queer politics) that has had a tremendous effect on the ways in which queer politics have been framed and defined, and how this process was informed by both structural forces (like capitalism) and more personal, individual acts of consumption and agency. Yes, that’s right, I just argued that Xena had an effect on queer politics.
But, according to Gitlin, popular culture is hopelessly determined by the market, and that real art is motivated, at least partially, by non-market concerns. These concerns usually revolve around providing us insight into the human condition. Good culture teaches us to think critically about the world, and “hold(s) powerful lessons for public conduct” (p. 120). Popular culture like television programs or Top-40 radio cannot possibly do this, since popular culture is designed primarily to provide fleeting, shallow sensations. He even goes as far to write: “It is better to study The Brothers Karamazov than to study General Hospital. There is more to be derived from a production of Hamlet than a production of Desperate Housewives” (p. 120). Because the former inspire us to deep contemplation of the human condition, while the latter is simply just popcorn for the mind.
To the three or four of you who may be reading this right now, Gitlin probably seems so obviously wrong right now. While I will grant that popular culture is primarily designed to entertain, rather than educate and inform the citizenry (I am not a naïve populist after all, and I will readily affirm that the market plays a huge role in shaping popular culture), this is not the only role that popular culture plays. Whether by accident or by some sort of subversive design on the part of frustrated writers, pop culture can and does frequently inspire public, political action. Television shows like Xena, Ellen and, later, Will & Grace, have been credited with softening the American population’s attitude towards alternative sexualities, and have certainly influenced how we think about gays and lesbians in our current moment. Now it is impossible (and unjustifiable) to state with anything resembling authority that gays can now marry in Massachusetts and California because of Xena. But I can suggest with some authority, I think, that programs like Xena and inspired by Xena helped to shape and promote certain ideologies that were sympathetic towards gays and lesbians, and that the popular consumption of these ideologies helped to shift American perceptions of gays and lesbians that, in addition with a variety of other factors (predominantly the perception of gay men as privileged consumers and arbiters of taste), informed queer political trajectories. Television programs help to both reflect and shape discourses, and discourses have material, political effects. I’m not arguing that Xena was decisive in this respect. But it played a part. American popular culture, especially television programs, works on both a national (and increasingly global) scale, but also on a personal scale, and to say that that does not matter is simply, unequivocally untrue. Moreover, scholars of the past four decades in everything from english and anthropology to biology and chemistry have compellingly and convincingly demonstrated that “High culture” or “canons” or those works designed to “educate” and “shape” good “citizens” are not value-neutral. In fact, they usually reproduce the values and concerns of a very, very specific and specialized group. Namely, the white, heterosexual, middle-to-upper-class, Northern, Western male ((this really originated with the works of those feminist scholars working in the academy during the seventies, but was quickly adopted by critical race, postcolonial, and [even later] queer studies). It is no coincidence, I think, that Gitlin pitted Hamlet and The Brothers Karamazov against General Hospital and Desperate Housewives. The latter are predominantly soap operas (in form, at least) and are immensely popular among women and gay audiences. Why can’t they produce the same complexity of refelction and insight into the current American condition as a sixteenth-century British play and a nineteenth-century Russian novel? Because they were hopelessly produced according to the concerns of the market, while the others were produced in an atmosphere free of market concerns? If Gitlin really wants to argue this, then he is astoundingly ignorant of the cultural and economic milieus in which both Shakespeare and Dostoevsky were writing. No culture, high or low, is free of the concerns of the market. The market is immanent to our lives and informs (to varying degrees) everything that we do. I am not arguing that it completely determines everything that we do (as Marx tried to argue). Simply that it does have an influence on everything. Other things have an influence too. Discourses, social relations, cultural structures, political structures, free will (if such a thing exists; I think it does), all play a part in shaping the course of our lives. Cultural studies chooses to focus on how cultural structures like television programs and pop songs shapes this course. Gitlin prefers to think about politics. Both worthy pursuits. But Gitlin is trying to argue that politics has a particularly privileged relation to the course of our lives. He should. But he is also trying to argue that this relation is so privileged as to make the study of any other relation shallow and worthless by comparison. The only reasoned, logical response that I think is worthy of this assertion is “bull puckey.” I choose to think that all expressions of culture are worthy of attention, are worthy of study, are worthy of respect. All shape and inform us as citizens to varying degrees, and to dismiss any expression of culture as beneath another is frequently motivated by racist, classist, heterosexist, or misogynistic beliefs (or any combination thereof) and we should always approach any such dismissal with extreme caution and skepticism. I am not arguing that cultural studies is a valid substitute for sustained, public political engagement. But I do want to argue that politics is influenced by culture, by the attitudes and ideologies reflected and shaped by popular culture, and to ignore popular culture is to ignore an extremely significant (especially today) influence upon the American citizenry, an influence that is both positive and negative, progressive and conservative. It is the influence that has played a large role in my life, at least. Television programs have frequently challenged me to think deeply about certain subjects and aspects of American life at the turn of the century. They have helped to shape how I see myself, and how I see my relation to other people, to my communities, and to my nation. If that isn’t art by Gitlin’s definition, than what is? It is all in how the audience uses the product. Gitlin and I both agree on one thing, at least. We can encourage our students to look at our cultural artifacts critically and deeply. We can try to train the next generation to question received knowledge, whether it comes from Hamlet or from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Hamlet does not inherently encourage us to think deeply about life. The only reason Hamlet is difficult to read right now is because it was written in the sixteenth-century vernacular. It’s plot and themes are actually rather simple (which makes them all the more rich). Fast-forward four hundred years and how easy will it be to watch Xena? In fact, Xena and Hamlet have far more similarities than differences. But because one is “popular” and the other one isn’t, the unpopular one must necessarily be more challenging and deep? This is a false assumption.
When I sat down to write this an hour ago, I did not intend it to be a four page response to Gitlin. But that’s what writing does, I guess. It goes where it wants to go. Despite what it may sound like, I actually did enjoy reading Gitlin. He posed a serious challenge to me. But what surprised me is that I had a response to him. Every argument he made (or nearly every argument he made) I had a response to. And not just a response. An educated response. An authoritative response. A response not based on my gut reaction of defensiveness, but on the past four years of work that I’ve done in cultural studies. And that made me feel really good. It helped me to clarify my stance. It helped me to think through why I do what I do for a living, for a life. And moments like those…well, this is what intellectuals live for. This is what intellectuals do. As Gitlin argued, academia and higher education is one of the only spaces left that forces its participants to face the opposition and consider their responses. And I think I just showed to myself that I may just belong there after all. Even if I study Xena.