Don’t Know Much About Politics: Tough Questions About the UC Walkout and the Cultural Studies Debate

(x-posted to The Valve)

In the course of a single week, we have seen academics making noise on several different fronts related to politics. First of all, here in California, there has been a large-scale effort to protest against the drastic budget cuts affecting students, workers, and faculty at University of California campuses. All sorts of mainstream media covered the story: some classes were cancelled, some classes were converted into teach-ins, most campuses held rallies attracting hundreds to thousands, and the University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE) went on strike. It is now Monday; the main lingering protest appears to be the occupation of the Graduate Student Commons by students at UC Santa Cruz, who Marc Bousquet interviewed here.

Meanwhile, Michael Berube was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education to the effect that cultural studies has not been a powerful enough political force in the university and the society at large. Berube argues that cultural studies has not produced much change in the way that the humanities are taught, nor has it been much of an ally for progressive political causes. His article incited some bloggers to write passionate retorts, while others, like the Valve’s Andrew Seal, took a more moderate and reflective approach.

Both of these highly visible controversies concern the relationship between politics and the academy, and more specifically between politics and the humanities, since humanities departments will be hardest hit by the cutbacks at the UCs. They are natural outgrowths of assumptions in place for decades now — namely, that the study of the humanities ought to be a political endeavor, and that because (at its best) it is political work, it makes students and faculty politically knowledgeable and effective.

There is no doubt in my mind about the first thesis. Work in the humanities is political; all knowledge work is, by its nature, inextricably bound up with ideological positions that bear on political issues. I have been, however, greatly disappointed by the fruits of this week’s labor. The protests were — are, in the case of the UCSC occupation — ineffectual. The discussion around cultural studies has been muddled. This is because of a failure to distinguish the differences between political activism and the dissemination of knowledge. Until we academics recognize and navigate this (seemingly obvious) difference, we will not be politically effective. We will not even have earned the right to claim a deep understanding of “the political.” We have to ask tough questions not only of UC President Mark Yudof but of ourselves, and this is not being done.

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Political Activism Is Not A Seminar Discussion Or A Lecture Class

In a seminar discussion, words themselves carry weight. They are the signs of understanding. If numerous students come to new epiphanies and a new sense of clarity about assigned texts, that is enough — it is, in fact, quite wonderful. For activists, however, words are vehicles for demands. They are part of an ongoing battle that one side must lose by capitulating to the demands of the other.

The protests Thursday did not significantly disrupt the operation of the University. Students and workers will capitulate to the demands of the California government and the UC administration by paying higher tuition and accepting layoffs and furloughs. The building currently being occupied by UCSC students, the Graduate Student Commons, is non-essential to the operation of the campus, which is why these students have not been arrested.

The whole structure of the protests virtually guaranteed that they would not have an effect. They were not ongoing — Friday was business as usual. They were not consistent in mode: if every class was cancelled, or if every class was converted into a teach-in, that would have been noticeably disruptive. Instead, each faculty member and teaching assistant was urged to do “something” in solidarity, and could pick and choose what that something might be. I am not suggesting that the organizers could have persuaded all teachers to participate; rather, the problem was that even those who did participate did so in a diffuse and various manner. Again and again, people involved in planning the protests agreed to take a “decentralized” approach at the cost of efficacy.

The idea of producing a coherent set of non-negotiable demands became equally lost in the shuffle. Read Bousquet’s interview with the students at UCSC. Considering the demands they have listed, how could they ever call off the occupation? At what point could they legitimately claim victory? They are protesting not just problems at the university level, but problems with K-12 public education. They are not just concerned with California; they are concerned with the nation as a whole. Their public document seems to be protesting against Adderall and frat parties in addition to budget cuts. The humanistic modes of freely associative thinking and heterogeneous action, which have their place as desirable educational outcomes, simply do not work as forms of targeted activism.

Furthermore, the protests did not do enough to put those most affected first. The people most affected by these cuts are undergraduates and workers, including those represented by the UPTE. Unfortunately, the most audible voices were those of the faculty, including tenured faculty. The structure of the protests thus repeated existing power hierarchies by making students into recipients of knowledge and bodies to be counted up at the rallies.

Seminar Discussions Are Not Political Demonstrations

Let us be clear about the kind of “political intervention” cultural studies was supposed to represent. It was first an expansion of teachable materials to include popular culture and other kinds of marginalized productions. It was also heir to efforts by the Frankfurt School to produce new, more complex, less reductive kinds of Marxist cultural criticism. At bottom, the link between these two different goals had to do with the ways that Marxist ideals would justify the inclusion of “lower” forms of culture, either because popular culture represented the ideas and contributions of the masses, or else because it demonstrated forms of ideological control over the masses. The odd result was that hostile readings of Dickens became part of the “culture wars,” and so did appreciative readings of Madonna. Berube describes this as a lamentable conflation that happened to “cultural studies” when it was annexed by “cultural criticism,” but it was really a natural result of writers like Theodor Adorno being willing to include essays on jazz and film as long as he was allowed to denounce them unequivocally. Eventually somebody else started writing essays on jazz and film who begged to differ with Adorno about their value — and so on all the way to modern essays about American Idol.

There is no direct relationship between any of this and what I refer to above as “targeted political activism,” any more than a copy of The Communist Manifesto in a bookstore is a sign of an imminent revolution. If students can be taught to analyze novels, they can also be taught to analyze concept albums, and since pop music is a valid aesthetic form it is worth their while to do so. There is no reason for us to respect Stuart Hall’s irritation with new analyses of Madonna or of The Sopranos any more than we would respect a Renaissance scholar getting tired of new books about Shakespeare. Yet his comments strike a chord because of the persistence of drearily repetitive forms of political analysis within these manifestoes on pop culture. Because many scholars of cultural studies treat the aesthetic validity of “low culture” as conditionally dependent upon the critic’s Marxism, a lot of pop culture analysis takes the form of an awkward dialogue between the capitalist ego and the Marxist super-ego of the critic, who is trying to persuade himself and us that he only enjoys what he is watching because it educates him about the newest forms of false consciousness. Berube’s division between “cultural studies” and “cultural criticism” enables him to claim that “cultural studies” hasn’t affected American thinking about economics, but all he is really saying is that American economists aren’t Marxist and haven’t been converted to Marxism by cultural studies. The problem is that most cultural studies scholars haven’t been converted to Marxism either, the proof being that their work shows (as Berube correctly notes) remarkably little solidarity with anyone besides a now non-existent Old Left, and bears scant relation to their actual lives. Of course, into that vacuum of revolutionary poses comes enthusiasts like Malcolm Gladwell, who writes one bestselling piece of cultural criticism after another.

Cultural studies has been extremely successful at opening up humanities classrooms to popular culture and analysis of popular culture. It has also been, pace Berube, co-eval with new forms of the transmission of knowledge, especially the arrival of online discourse, where conversations about popular culture constantly take inspired critical turns — even in (for example) the comments appended to YouTube videos.

However, the cultural studies movement has also been successful in drastically undermining the prestige and political relevance of the humanities classroom. This has redounded on cultural studies itself, which is why its success appears to Berube as a failure. Because of its insistence on treating culture as “all one thing” produced by oppressive capitalist ideology, teachers began to lose track of why a class teaching the Sopranos might not also spend a week on Fox News and the rhetoric of George W. Bush’s war on terror. After all, maybe showing students the parlor tricks behind Bush’s rhetoric would help convince them to vote for Kerry instead. This had a range of effects:

1. It alienated students from their teachers and lent a certain amount of justification to campaigns mounted by people like David Horowitz.

2. It helped disguise the transition from teaching content to teaching skills, such as the conversion of English classes into “rhetoric and composition” classes. Teachers were willing to accept skills-based classes as long as they could teach political content, but this was a devil’s bargain, as the content was of course now practically irrelevant except as raw material to be operated on in the name of more grammatical sentences and smoother transitions between paragraphs.

3. It alienated students and teachers from the curriculum itself. The “boom” period for English departments in particular, and the humanities in general, was the 1960s, when a song like “A Change’s Gonna Come” was considered to be a sort of cultural ally of the Civil Rights Movement, and a book like Eros and Civilization or The Birth of Tragedy could actually be considered part of a large-scale attempt at achieving new freedoms. The purely negative stance toward cultural products old and new, epitomized by texts like The Novel and the Police or Nation of Rebels, backed teachers of culture into a position of real self-loathing and undergraduates into passionless imitation of that self-loathing. If all you learned was that your teachers, who knew a lot about culture, apparently liked it less than you did, you certainly didn’t need to major in it. The more aesthetics and enjoyment became conversations for hobbyists, the less important it was to have professionals analyzing culture.

There should be classes on political rhetoric, which would do well to analyze people like Glenn Beck, and there should be classes on aesthetic categories, including pieces of popular culture where appropriate. Departmental divisions and differences should remain within the over-arching umbrella of the “humanities,” rather than collapsing into one uber-class on hegemony. It is a sorry testament to the way modern academic understandings of “the political” have inhibited political work that academic outsiders like Greil Marcus have produced some of the best and most enduring works of “cultural studies” — books like Lipstick Traces that are much better than the canons of founding fathers such as Stuart Hall, and have no difficulty remaining in print. I agree with Andrew Seal that merely “complicating” existing pictures of neoliberalism and the political economy, as Berube proposes, is not doing enough. That sounds like embroidering a fundamental resignation with colorful, distracting dissent. But there isn’t another, better word out there, because the study of culture cannot begin with a set of political demands. It has to begin with intellectual curiosity and a sensitive ear for what individuals and institutions are trying to express, letting that access of understanding speak to issues of immediate political concern how it will.

Bathos On The Big Screen: Jurassic Park and Sons of Anarchy

(x-posted to PopMatters and The Valve)

Years ago, I remember my father saying that he had managed to watch Pulp Fiction because it was a “comic book.” I hadn’t been able to make it all the way through, because I was sickened — I mean physically, not in some abstract moral sense — by the violence and cruelty. My father pointed out that when Uma Thurman is revived from her drug overdose, and hears somebody ask her to “say something,” she says: “Something.” In other words, at one of the most dramatic and visceral moments in the film, a line of dialogue is inserted to prove that it’s all pretty much a laugh.

Dramatically, this device is known as bathos, a term Alexander Pope invented and which applies to his own writing, above all to his wonderful poem “The Rape of the Lock.” Without wishing to dwell on too many different examples, I would suggest that contemporary film and television are deeply, continually bathetic. Why should this be the case? In what unexpected ways does it reveal cracks and faultlines in our own relationship, as individuals, to our society?

I was reminded of the Pulp Fiction conversation recently when I turned on the television and started watching Jurassic Park. As you might remember, during the scene where Sam O’Neill and his family are being chased by a Tyrannosaurus Rex, the dinosaur appears in the rear-view mirror, above a clearly legible notice that says “Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.” The entire dramatic momentum of the scene is interrupted for this joke, which is there to remind the audience that it’s only a movie, after all. The same pattern recurs later in the film, when O’Neill’s son is electrocuted and falls unconscious to the ground. He had been holding on to an electric fence and counting to three. When he wakes up, he opens his eyes and says “three,” just like Thurman in the Tarantino film. Again, whatever sympathetic investment we may have made in his well-being is mocked by the film.

One could find never-ending examples of this move in a contemporary television comedy like Weeds. To me, it’s even more interesting to track bathos in a show like Sons of Anarchy, which is supposed to be a serious, intense, and gritty biker drama. When the show begins, the biker gang is at risk because one of the bikers forced two Mexican women to fellate him while they were imprisoned in an arms warehouse. (They are illegal immigrants, paying for passage to the United States.) The women are burned alive when the warehouse burns down, and the gang worries that DNA evidence from ingested semen will incriminate the gang. So they arrange to distract local law enforcement and dispose of the bodies. When several of the men return to the grisly sight of the burned corpses, one says “Tell me they looked better than this when they were going down on you.” Rimshot! In a later episode of the show, a friend of the gang has a bullet wound in his buttocks, and a biker has to keep his finger in there to avoid having the man bleed out. This leads to an extended discussion about whether or not the finger in the ass is gay. Hilarious!

Yet as anyone will tell you, the reason to watch the show actually has little to do with the specific one-liners that flow staunchlessly from these various subplots, any more than the reason to watch Weeds is to find out whether or not a small suburban marijuana dealership will survive. Instead, we watch S. O. A. to see three main characters wield power — Gemma, Jax, and Clay — and we watch Weeds to see Nancy Botwin wriggle and writhe her way out of difficult situations. The laughs are a chaser. All of these shows are about getting paid: in Jurassic Park and later in shows like The Wire, characters are paid for being competent professionals, and competency is the point. The incompetent park developer and the incompetent computer guy (Wayne Knight, Seinfeld’s Newman) are juxtaposed with skilled hunters, hackers, chaos theorists, and so on down the roster. Meanwhile, in shows like Weeds, people get paid just for being who they are. Nancy Botwin possesses an almost magical competence regardless of whether she is running her own operation, working as somebody else’s drug runner, or doing a normal job as an assistant for Matthew Modine. Modine actually hires her because she has faked the work experience on her resume. It shows initiative. We might also link characters like Nancy Botwin to supernatural characters like vampires (Twilight, The Vampire Diaries, True Blood, etc.) or True Blood’s Marianne, who have plenty of money and little to do other than to be celebrities of a sort, impressive in the eyes of others.

In a film like Ocean’s 11, you can see both sides of this dynamic. Some of the characters are there because they have special skills (e.g. the Chinese acrobat), and some are there because they are specialness incarnate and can do anything (Mr. Ocean). Not surprisingly, this divide often falls along racial and ethnic lines, as it does in Soderbergh’s film: the Puerto Rican member of the Sons of Anarchy is the resident hacker, and the accented Scotsman is the medic, while Ron Perlman’s Clay Morrow is simply the President.

This is the real source of our investment in what’s happening on screen. The characters in Jurassic Park deserve to survive the rampaging dinosaurs not because people, generally speaking, deserve to live, but rather because we deem them, in that memorable economic phrase, “too important to fail.” The dinosaurs are a test of their competence, just as the burned corpses are a test of the biker gang. The bathetic sabotage of our sympathies helps to free us from the uncomfortable bonds of compassion, and from enmeshment in a common social order, in shared problems of quality of life. Oscar Wilde eerily predicted our modern situation when he wrote that “it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell.” If The Old Curiosity Shop were produced for television today, a premier actor such as William H. Macy would play Daniel Quilp, and critics would applaud Macy’s “riveting performance” as the Machiavellian hero of the story — who, they would warn us, “only grows more complex” by Season 2. Anxiety is a selfish affliction, and it has a right to be, since it comes from an instinct for self-preservation. Yet in post-industrial societies where the economy has been basically hollowed out, and where the perpetual anxiety of having the wrong skill set is compensated by the hope of being paid simply for being oneself, the dominant mythic narratives come to reflect a frightening loss of sympathy, and a desperate attempt to make sense of ugly things by turning them all into opportunities for excellence. We don’t, personally, want to be dismissed with a chuckle, but objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.

Veteran Rapper Grizzly Bear Releases New Street Epic “Veckatimest”

It seems like 2006 was ages ago, doesn’t it? Back then, when semi-unknown thug Grizzly Bear released his first big hit single, “Knife,” it was easy to read the lyrics as a double-edged sword, referring both to his own struggles for survival in Brooklyn (clashing with Jay-Z in a notorious loose-leaf teahouse brawl) and to the excesses of cruelty taking place in Iraq: “with every blow / comes another lie.” This was, after all, seemingly only a minute since Grizzle had dropped his first street mixtape, Horn of Plenty, which had NYC headz bobbin’ but went mostly unnoticed elsewhere in the country. Staring up from a life of grim desolation, G.B. (which sometimes stands for Great Bellower or Gangsta Brawler, depending on when you ask Mr. Rossen) was the self-proclaimed “deep sea diver” who rhymed “a car, a house, and a dog / you got everything that I want,” and sounded ready to take those things by force.

You couldn’t get away from “Knife” in 2006; it had one of those enormous, dancefloor filling Beach Boy harmonies that brought the kids out in droves, whether they were living in the suburbs of Ohio (as I was, a mere struggling columnist for the Dayton Star Review) or riding in low-slung urban vehicles. He got his house — three houses, actually, including a yellow one for his mother, after which the album is named — and the cars and the dog. He was the epitome of cool, the untouchable street poet ready and willing to be the most famous man in America. But you could sense the tension seething in every line, the yearning for something already lost and left behind on the streets: “cords in a bind / knots that we make / fatal mistakes / let’s recreate an easier time.” “Easier,” the second single, was a disappointment commercially but an artistic triumph, a pure slice of the prophet still searching for that “easier time.” Little wonder that he stood in front of an enormous crowd at the Pitchfork Music Festival, saying “you are my people, sing this with me now” and then tearing through a savage cover of the Wu’s “Can It All Be So Simple.”

On his new album, though, atop glittering beats by DJ “Ed” Droste, Grizzle peers out from behind the windows of his fame and fortune to see a world that is passing him by. He sounds curiously resigned on tracks like “Two Weeks” (the period of time it takes to sell a pound of heroin) when he raps “Save up all the days / A routine malaise / Just like yesterday” to an old sampled recording of 4,000 people playing “The Blue Danube” on violin. This inevitably detracts from the force of the album — even when El Griz is back for another swing, full of braggadocio and proclaiming without regrets that “what I did I did,” he is still just going through the motions: “I’m gonna take a stab at this…checking it off my list.” It’s a long way from the visceral immediacy of his earlier stabbing songs, and by extension all the excesses of his “Knife” period: “Can’t you feel the knife?” or, even earlier, “A bear’s teeth extra sharp / that’ll cut you in the heart.”

In the strange, subterranean way of American wordsmithing, which is always re-forging of what has come before, we can hear a weary Grizzle echoing the words of that older, weary traveller, Robert Frost: “I trek alone back home / Shall I trek in the snow?” He is no longer channeling the rage of the streets; rather, he is looking to make an “About Face” in which the “fight for one” can be transformed into “faith with all.” But the bloody lessons of his youth can hardly be unlearned so quickly; he does, indeed, have miles to go before he sleeps. The album’s closing number, “Foreground” begins with a sample of Robert DeNiro yelling “They called me an animal. I’m not an animal!” While the kids may tune out the man behind the bear, Veckatimest shows a way, way more mature Rossen coming to grips with the cyclical nature of violence, which is only a “foreground” to the real villainy happening in his beloved city, behind the scenes, where the streets are bought and sold by those who will gladly “take on another Shaft” (“Foreground”) just to watch him die.