Do We Matter? or, Do We Even Want To?

So Matt takes me to task for championing cultural studies by proxy . . . how should I respond?  Should I say that, in the tradition of Brian Eno, I too took a plastic bladder to Le Centre Pompidou and urinated in Duchamp's magnum opus?  Because I didn't.  I've never even been to France.  I've been through France.  But I've never stayed there.  (Which is sad, since after English and Italian and Latin, it's the only other language I know.  Sure, I can read German, but reading knowledge counts for dirt.)  But this post isn't about the French.  (Nor is it about the brilliant terrorists who kidnapped a French man and said they wouldn't release him until France recalled all the troops they haven't deployed to the country they haven't deployed them to.  Can you imagine the horror that hostage felt?  Not only was he held hostage . . . he had to stomach the fact that his terrorists like to hump doorknobs.) 

I'm digressing. 

Like compulsively like. 

All I want to say is that the idealist in me still believes that examining popular culture pays cognitive (and potentially political) dividends.  Teaching students how to "read" the shows and films and music they fetishize should be among a teacher's first priorities.  When anti-intellectual critics complain about university professors teaching courses on contemporary rap I can't help but think "Isn't that the role of the intellectual?  Shouldn't we concentrate on the materials our students confront daily?"  Instead we insist on introducing them to unfamiliar material about which they cogitate for our courses but don't think about daily.

Yes Yes Yes this is the old debate about whether we should uplift our students' understanding or teach them to think more good about the shit they think about anyway.  (Yes Yes Yes intentional and for effect.)  Since this question is more often avoided than answered I thought I'd re-re-re-re-repose it here.  What should we be doing?  Teaching them to "read" Titanic intelligently or teaching them to appreciate Joyce?  (Because these options are mutually exclusive,  see.  They can't coexist, see.  It's one or the other, see.)

Comments

[Matt]

Needless to say, I don't see it, Scott. Who is this "we" you are undressing? The fact of the matter is that these cultural studies Eclectics are simply destroying our English departments, and here you are recommending scholarly articles on Titanic. Not even a good bad movie, but just a bad bad movie. I mean, at least the latest Dracula had a real literary basis, plus Tom Waits!

In truth, that post you link to is probably trying to say too much at once by half, but, to state the obvious: neither am I sure its author is arguing against theorizing 'POP' (as he hints at finding Zizek useful, and the like). Then again, not everything that goes 'pop' is good for you; and some of it can make us very sick indeed, n'est pas?

Thanks for the link, oh ye blogger celebrity god of professor office sex.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Not even a good bad movie, but just a bad bad movie. I mean, at least the latest Dracula had a real literary basis, plus Tom Waits!

No truer sentence has ever been written. Waitsian fetishism aside, I don't think we should reward Coppola for his slavish devotion to a clunky text. I mean, yes, Stoker's use of multiple media was interesting, but it wasn't all that elegant and/or good. Adhering to the strictures of a crap text shouldn't win one any points, right?

To say this another way: of course everything that's "POP" isn't good for you . . . but everything that's "POP" tells you a little something about the cultural moment in which you live, and that's not useless information. I may not like Eminem (although I kind of sort of do to my everlasting shame, what with him being such an incredible wordsmith and all), but I will acknowledge that his rhymes have a greater impact than those of his betters, like say Chuck D. or MF Doom. Analyzing the popular has its place . . . and I can't believe I'm advocating this position publically. I understand why I'm doing so, given my historicist bent and the fact that I'm looking at Eminem-ish texts circa 1900, but really, I'm not the guy you want holding the cultural studies banner with his face half painted blue as he runs into battle . . .

[Stephen]

Unfortunately, though, there's a tendency for popular culture courses to become rinky dink intros to postmodern theory, mainly in order to get over the perception that these are just "bird courses." "Let's apply Judith Butler to Titanic, kids!"

[MT]

"Teaching students how to "read" the shows and films and music they fetishize should be among a teacher's first priority. .... What should we be doing? Teaching them to "read" Titanic intelligently or teaching them to appreciate Joyce?"

To my mind it's Joyce's work that's fetishized, and by "you guys," whereas the pop entertainments are just enjoyed and consumed by everybody else. I can't help suspecting that there are more professors accept and teach that Ulysses is important, than there are ones who actually ever experienced the book as scintillating.

[Adam Roberts]

Stephen's right, up to a point, I think. I used to teach a course on popular culture for the Postmodernism MA we used to have at my university (it's been amalgamated with the Modernism MA we used to have and beefed up with some 80 degree proof Post-Colonial stuff; that's probably a sign of the times, right there). Anyway, when Stephen says 'popular culture courses [tend] to become rinky dink intros to postmodern theory' he's describing my old course exactly: though I'd hope for my own sake that this wasn't 'mainly in order to get over the perception that these are just "bird courses".' Forced to justify myself I'd say it was because the main barrier one faces teaching 'POP' is getting the students to stop responding like fans and start responding like critics. There's nothing wrong with fans, mind: they're usually highly knowledgeable about their discourse, often creative and witty in response to it; but their responses are value-judgmental, usually in a polarised 'best episode/worst episode ever' way. Critics needs a broader range of responses to texts than this. Covering some of the other ways we can read texts means spending a lot of time on Theory.

But I never doubted the worth of teaching popular culture. All the big important Cultural stuff of the last 50 years has been low, rather than high, cultural: most importantly of all pop music, cinema/TV and computer-culture [the three biggest innovations in human culture], but also in literary modes [genre trumps 'mainstream' almost all the way along], and I'd argue (but I could be wrong here) in the other visual arts.

This expresses a broader truth about human culture, I think. Shakespeare was derided in his day as a 'popular entertainer'; the literary establishment, such as it was, thought that lengthy abstruse poetry was the thing. But they were wrong. Keats was slammed as a cockney poet with vulgar crowd-pleasing ways; Walter Savage Landor thought that writing poetry in Latin was the bees knees. No prizes for guessing who made the right call as far as those two are concerned. Read Trollope's Autobiography to discover how Thackeray was regarded the Big Novelist of his day, where Dickens was seen by those 'in the know' as a mere clown, Mr Popular Sentiment. If we’d asked two early 20th Century Musicologists to judge which composer was likely to be the more influential by the century’s end, the Russian Alexander Scriabin on the one hand, the American Robert Johnson on the other, how likely do you think it that they’d have guessed right?

Of course there’s good POP and bad POP; there’s good and bad, as somebody once wrong, in everything. But the good POP has more going for it, by and large, than the good 'high culture'.

PS on Shakespeare: are Hamlet or Macbeth not as invested in excess as is Jackson's big simian? I paraphrase a 17th-Century Charlie Brooker : 'I went to see Macbeth againe, and bethought myself that if that Scotsman were to visit ye privie in Mr Shakspere's theatre, would it not proceede thus?--item, stab fortie-thousand soldiers with the point of his derick whilst unbottoning his breches, item, wipe his fundament after with the dead bodies of 75 children and women, item, wash hands in bloode.'

[Matt]

Yes, and don't forget the latest Titus Andronicus (if it's Senecan brutality mixed with a little Passion for the Real, you're after). Julie Taymor is certainly no dummy, though one might not agree with everything she thinks she's saying.

Adhering to the strictures of a crap text shouldn't win one any points, right?

No, but it does make it more interesting, textually speaking. And perhaps more conducive grounds on which to discuss how an interpretation inevitably transforms what it interprets (no two repetitions being ever the same, and such).

That said, I have little hope for my nieces ever reading the original Narnia series, let alone Tolkien.

[Beth Black]

Ah, but to digress (which, as we were taught in LJ 20 is a good thing), Scott's class is continuing to study pop culture even though the class officially ended in December. We're all sitting in the old classroom, even now, hunkered over an ancient TV set (defined as, "not flat screen") that Zack and Zach have dragged in. We're living on stale popcorn strings from Christmas and watching reruns of "ER" and "Lost" while secretly hoping to have two of the "Lost" stars break into Scott's office and recognize it for the cheap hotel it has become. Ge, our resident Republican, has a new laptop because he can afford one, and we're all following these postings together while continuing to await the final ode Scott promised us.

[Kevin Andre Elliott]

I've engaged in this debate a lot lately with my peers. I'm beginning to wonder if we are not all missing the point. Here's my background:

When I first began teaching, the powers that be attempted to convince me to teach a cultural studies class. I refused, arguing that I "do" literature, not TV. Consequently, the first book that I taught was Dubliners. My students hated it. They especially hated all of the close reading, symbolism, and analysis. To them, they were just a bunch of stories some dude wrote. That's it.

This year, I'm teaching a course on the trickster figure in American literature and culture. While we spend most of the course reading African-American and Native-American folk tales, we also read Huckleberry Finn and Sula. Surprisingly enough, the students were much more willing to analyze the texts in this context, but not too much, mind you. This course was different for me, though, because I also taught popular culture (Bugs Bunny, I Love Lucy, Marx Bros, Ali G. etc.). Here's the rub: for them, it's just TV. Analyzing Bugs as anything more than a silly rabbit was equally as silly. In other words, I think that many students today view all culture, whether high or low as simply there. It is what it is and that's that. That's what I see as the real problem here. To quote Richard Rorty describing the humanist intellectual: "Their idea of teaching -- or at least of the sort of teaching they hope to do -- is not exactly the communication of knowledge, but more like stirring the kids up." In other words, getting them to move beyond the "it is what it is" mentality and into the realm of thinking about the world critically.

Having said that, I must also admit that the course I'm teaching is a writing seminar and not a strict English class, so there is necessarily a somewhat different approach that has to be taken. I do tend to agree with Matt that "these cultural studies Eclectics are simply destroying our English departments." It's not that I think the teaching of cultural studies is inherently bad for higher learning, I just find myself irrationally protective of literature as a distinct discipline.

How's that for fence-sitting?

[Luther Blissett]

Wholesale condemnations of "teaching pop culture" are absurd. Many intellectual traditions have covered versions of "pop culture," and we have to be specific about what we are doing when we are doing pop culture. For example, there's the Adorno school of "mass culture" studies; but then there's the American 50s/60s sociological version of "mass culture" (as seen in the important collection, aptly titled *Mass Culture*). There's McLuhan-esque media studies. There's Birmingham School/New Times Cultural Studies, and there's American poststructural cultural studies. And then there's what various folklorists have been doing since the 19th century. There's folk culture, popular culture, mass culture, lowbrow culture, middlebrow culture, nobrow culture. Each of these terms refers to very different cultural objects; and when their Venn diagram circles overlap, they represent the shared objects in very different ways.

This is all obvious, but it tends to be forgotten when arguments like this start up. When Adorno looked at mass culture, he wanted to show how the principles of fascism and capitalism ideologically function. There are few more "highbrow" dudes in the 20th c than Adorno; but politically, he thought it essential to attend to what the masses were fed. When American cultural studies folks come around, they want to basically reverse the work of critics like Adorno, to show that the "masses" never passively consume, that they often creatively adapt the very things snobs believe are dominating or sheepifying the masses. Each of these views eventually becomes a meat-grinder: Frankfurt School cannot imagine an art that has mass appeal and liberatory potential (see Adorno on jazz); and 90s cult studs can't imagine a mass product that isn't potentially reworkable or a mass audience that isn't at some level "counter-hegemonic."

Too often, though, work on popular culture errs on one side of another binary: the formal versus the sociological. We get critics who basically do close readings of The Troggs with no sense of the social or historical background; and we get critics who look at the distribution and consumption patterns of hiphop without ever attending to the formal or thematic levels. New critics or Bourdieu. Rarely do we get something like, say, the work of anthropology in pop culture, where the formal aspects of a mass performance can be seen as mirroring or mediating different social contradictions or tensions. For me, that's how all culture must be read, whether it's a *The Waste Land* or "Under the Bamboo Tree." These are rituals, social performances, stylized and repeatable (and consumable) experiences, and there's no reason why a critic shouldn't attend to both works in similar ways, paying close attention to the formal aspects and tying the individual works of art/craft to their social functions. That seems like something that scholars of literature, history, anthropology, and sociology can all agree on. Call me Pollyanna.

[Jamie Bodie]

People can only be awoken if they choose to give relevance to what is said to them. Or, often as a student, what is said at them. The main problem I see being an undergrad now, albiet older than most, is the lack of discourse in general. I often find most of the students in class reticent to even answer when called upon, let alone discuss a subject in depth, for fear of being wrong. So even if the subject is something they may be comfortable with because it is current, it doesn't mean that they want to engage in it on a more sophisticated level, or that they even know how. The real question is how do you teach someone to not be afraid to learn? How do you encourage a more independent search for relevance and deeper meanings? Our current cultural climate, while at the height of instant gratification, still retains a yearning for depth. One only has to look at the more underground music and art scenes, literature, or young political movements to see that there is still passion. Perhaps if the idea is to introduce more current literature, the question should become, what type of current literature do you introduce? But before that question is even addressed I think a more foundational one needs to be acknowledged. What is lacking for many kids are the tools necessary to break away at the insecurity and commercialism that is so pervasive and suffocating. So then it's been said, the idea is to inspire and then allow individual inspiration and desire to develop- in whatever context it can be cultivated.