Four Minutes (To Save the World)
I haven't said anything about the EMP conference here because I've had something of a hard time figuring out how to organize my thoughts. While there were excellent presentations, particularly J.D. Considine's and Todd Burns', I came away with a general sense of unease, but without anything specific to hang it on. Specifically, I was uneasy about many presenters' understanding of the conference's theme: politics.Now, though, I think I've found a good example of what troubled me in a post by a conference attendee, Carl Wilson. I don't want to seem like I'm picking on Carl here--I really am just trying to get at a persistent point of view that irks me. Most critics who espouse that point of view are unreadable, at least by me, and so I wouldn't be able to find an example in their work because I don't read them. Carl, on the other hand, I am happy to read, and consistently do. He is a very good writer who occasionally wades into this stuff and makes me cringe. I don't think it makes other people cringe, though. So that's what I'm trying to get at here: the source of the cringe.
Carl's post is not about the conference itself, but about Barack Obama's recent "bitter" gaffe. Nevertheless, I think it gets at something fundamental about how many cultural critics think about politics. Carl talks about how the gaffe reflects a problem the left has with understanding where people's beliefs come from and how valid those beliefs are.[1] He compares it to Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas?, with its theory that working-class small-town Americans had been duped by the right into giving up their economic self-interest in favor of socially conservative politics that did them no good, and to his own pre-book attitude toward Celine Dion. To quote:
I thought a lot about these questions with regard to Celine Dion. There was a time when I would have figured that listening to Celine, like going to big blockbuster Hollywood movies, was a kind of false consciousness - being seduced by a materialistic Disneyland escapism that says nothing about real people's lives. I could have written a "What's the Matter with Celine Dion?" critique parallel to Frank's, claiming that people were being duped into listening to fairy-tale fantasy music sold to them by the very people who were strip-malling and outsourcing their communities' cultures out of existence.Coming from my particular cultural viewpoint and set of beliefs, to conflate "adventurous art" and "reproductive freedom" is ludicrous. In the sense that they are both things that people can have different beliefs about, they're in entirely different categories. Disagreeing about reproductive freedom is a matter of ethics and practicality. We can argue about whether the rights of a fetus are more important than the rights of a woman. We can argue about adoption, poverty, rape, or, if you want to be really tolerant toward the conservative viewpoint, "post-abortion syndrome." Such an argument can proceed from a well-structured ethical system to factual discussion about the practical consequences of different policies toward reproductive freedom.
But when I listened to Celine's music more and talked to her fans, I realized that she did, in fact, reflect her audience's values and concerns back to them in complicated ways - how to be at once strong, modern and feminine, for example, or the fate of tradition and family and community in an era of globalization and mass media - and that the more "rebellious" music that I used to think superior to the mainstream is often indifferent or hostile to those values and concerns. So why should they want it?
I came to think that everybody has a "false consciousness" of one kind or another, because everybody's cultural tastes are the product of their social experiences and position (including critics and rebels and radicals, seeking affirmation in the beliefs and culture they approve). Which is the same thing as saying no one has false consciousness. It's not that all beliefs are equally valid, but you won't get anywhere by assuming or claiming that other peoples' beliefs are inauthentic...
If we want to assert the importance of multiculturalism, adventurous art, minority cultures, reproductive freedom, then we have to recognize that some other people are equally attached to and serious about their religions, their social values, their leisure activities, their "American" culture.
Disagreeing about adventurous art, on the other hand, is a matter of taste. And while taste is important, the arguments you can have about it are based in nothingness. You can never really "win" an argument about the avant-garde. You can win an argument about abortion. And that's as it should be, because abortion policy has real, demonstrable consequences. I can acknowledge and respect your viewpoint on adventurous art because, if it's different than mine, it has no consequences for me. This is not the case for actual matters of politics, for matters of policy. If a lot of people dislike gay marriage, that means a bunch of my friends can't get married. If a lot of people like Celine Dion, I occasionally get annoyed while in a department store. That's not just a difference of degree, but a difference of kind.
Unless, of course, you really do think that cultural disagreements have substantial practical consequences. Carl does, I think. When he says that Celine represents people who are "strip-malling and outsourcing their communities' cultures out of existence,"[2] that's not just department-store annoyance. That is a sort of cultural genocide, and in that case, you can have a ethical argument about cultural issues.
Which, again, seems crazy to me. But there is an entire field of study devoted to just such an idea. They've constructed a complicated--some might say a bit conspiracy-esque--theory on how cultural actions have an impact on power relations and social structure as great as, or even greater than, economic interests or public policy. You can string it together from Habermas to Zizek to various other people, all working under the assumption that culture maintains the power relations in society by distributing the ruling class' dominant messages to the public and inclucating hegemony, the new word for "false consciousness." (Note: this is the only time I will say stuff like that in this post, I promise.) And the perspective came up again and again at the conference that cultural actions--which is to say, artistic actions--had real and substantial (and almost always negative) effects on entire communities. This seems plausible when it comes to individuals, and certainly the role of culture in shaping people's identities is undeniable. But that's not what people were saying. Their arguments ran more along Carl's lines, that a strip mall eradicates the culture of a community. Moreover, there was a creepy strain of intentionality going on there, that zoning boards let strip malls in precisely so that they could accrue the benefits of destroying a community's culture. Over and over again, the most misused word in academia was invoked as shorthand for "corporations and governments are trying to destroy cultures because that is beneficial for their nefarious interests": neo-liberalism. One guy even used it to describe Ronald Reagan's foreign policy, which there may be some sort of literature on, but which from a political perspective seemed as sensible as calling Jerry Falwell a socialist.
I don't want to bite off more than I can chew here; this is a big, big argument, and at the heart of it is a basic disagreement about how the world works. A cultural disagreement, I guess. So I'm just giving my own particular viewpoint here. Carl points out, rightly and usefully, that lefties have their own sort of "false consciousness" where they're always seeking out things that reinforce their beliefs. I think the perspective I'm highlighting here is a symptom of that. At a certain gut level, it feels right to dislike strip malls and Disney stores and multimational corporations. But which came first here? Does the elaborate theoretical framework exist, in part, to justify these beliefs? And if so, are these beliefs rational, or are they...taste? Is opposing Disney Stores merely a matter of aesthetics? From that same rationalist perspective (which, I understand, the Zizek dude dislikes?), the negative consequences of a Disney Store opening seem hard to pin down, and though we might all agree that they're distasteful, it's hard to compare it to, say, the closing of an abortion clinic, or a change in the gas tax, or welfare reform. Which actually has an effect?
So let's focus on culture for a second, to get out of this comparison. I don't think that the only problem here is the conflation of art and politics. There's also, and more immediately relevently, the consistent attempt to apply ethical standards of judgment to cultural matters. I'm happy Carl points out that we need to respect where other peoples' tastes come from. But I'm not sure you get a cookie for that. Being curious and respectful of what other people like isn't the goal of criticism, but the base standard for responsible criticism. I'm aware that this is not necessarily a consensus view, and I've heard many people say their minds were opened by Carl's book on Celine, which made a great argument for the value of understanding why people like things we dislike. And lord knows I sit around and bitch about bands I think are shit. But I recognize that this is play--that bitching about shitty art is part of art. It's how more art gets made, for one thing.
I don't think that people at the conference really acknowledged this distinction. They seemed very serious about the evils they were cataloguing. They were making ethical arguments. But as I said above, the only way you can make ethical arguments about cultural matters is to assume that not following proper ethical standards has some sort of practical effect on the culture itself. In Carl's formulation, "communities' cultures" are being driven "out of existence"--are being destroyed. But this argument springs from a not entirely convincing vision of what culture is and how it works. In this vision, culture is a single, unchangable thing, that is how it has always been, and when it interacts with changing conditions, it doesn't change, but is, instead, destroyed. Here is the local culture, a pure and unmediated thing; here is the strip mall coming in; and there goes the local culture, which no longer exists, replaced with corporate culture. Different culture are, here, like salmon roe: distinct, unchanging elements that don't interact with each other but merely wait to be consumed, and, once they come into contact with a larger element, are obliterated.
To my way of thinking, though, culture is more like a sourdough starter. It's a basis from which other things spring, that people can take from without destroying, and which reacts to the infusion of new elements by changing, not by ceasing to exist; in fact, we have to "feed it" in order to keep it alive. Any culture, no matter how "traditional" it might seem to us, is historically contingent, socially constructed, and contested. Rewind a few hundred years, or even a couple of decades, and it will look very different. Cultures have always come into contact with new things and changed, always been up for debate. By the terms we use for talking about art, almost any local culture is inauthentic. And that's how it should be. Culture doesn't thrive by standing still, it thrives through play and debate and negotiation and change. This is not to say that any change is positive--I'm happy to talk about positive and negative cultural changes. But to say that negative changes aren't changes but destructions reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of culture itself.
To bring it back to where we began: the problem isn't that we think people's beliefs are inauthentic, it's that we think their culture is authentic. The only authentic cultures are dead ones, certified and frozen by the museum treatment. Any culture worth worrying about is inauthentic as hell, and if it can't take a damn Disney Store, it's hard to see how it would've lasted very long at any point in history.
This taking of culture at face value is persistent, and, I think, unhelpful in our attempts to understand art, pop, and all the rest. To frame these debates in ethical terms is to attempt an impossible argument--to transmute taste to policy. It doesn't work. If we're going to talk about art, for god's sake, let's do it on its own terms. Let's not try and justify our tastes by making the tastes of others seem evil; let's try and figure out what's going on with those tastes in the first place, and what they have to say about the society they're situated within.
[1] Though he doesn't seem to acknowledge the contextual information about the quote that's come out, which makes clear that Obama was not so much espousing his own views as--to steal Carl's excellent language--reflecting the likely views of a potential volunteer in San Francisco in such a way as to help the volunteer be more tolerant toward the Pennsylvania voters they were going to be canvassing. Obama has stuck to his statement for political reasons--saying it was a gaffe would be a sign of weakness, and he's done very well so far with embracing his embarassments--but I think what it reflects is less Obama's own intolerance (though, let's be honest here, a black man might be forgiven for being a little intolerant toward rural Pennsylvanians) and more his continuing effort to try and get the left to think abut things in a moderate way while not necessarily giving up their actual beliefs. Maybe the difficulty he's run into reflects his occasional clumsiness at doing that, or maybe it reflects the problem with local primaries becoming national news.
[2] While this is in the context of discussing his old position, the only thing he reverses about that position is that the people who like Celine have been duped--he still believes that their communities' cultures are being etc.
Labels: carl wilson, emp, politics, pop, theory
posted by Mike B. @ 9:12 AM
15 Comments:
By the terms we use for talking about art, almost any local culture is inauthentic. And that's how it should be. Culture doesn't thrive by standing still, it thrives through play and debate and negotiation and change. This is not to say that any change is positive--I'm happy to talk about positive and negative cultural changes. But to say that negative changes aren't changes but destructions reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of culture itself.
To bring it back to where we began: the problem isn't that we think people's beliefs are inauthentic, it's that we think their culture is authentic. The only authentic cultures are dead ones, certified and frozen by the museum treatment. Any culture worth worrying about is inauthentic as hell, and if it can't take a damn Disney Store, it's hard to see how it would've lasted very long at any point in history.
I'm not sure I get this bit, Mike. Is authenticity automatically equated with stasis?
(This didn't seem to post the first time, so let me try again.)
Fair enough, I didn't specify enough. I think authenticity is a less-icky way of saying purity, untouched by outside influence or commercial concerns. American Chinese food, for instance, is inauthentic because it adapted to the ingredients that were actually available in America, and so ceased to resemble food in China. But any of those foods are also the results of combinations of different cultures, adaptations to necessity, and (on occasion) attempts to sell more food. So where do you draw the line? Is there such a thing as authentic and inauthentic American Chinese food? Is what we think of as "real" Mexican food (i.e. not that Taco Bell glop) really authentic given that pre-Columbian food in Mexico lacked some of the basic ingredients we associate with Mexican food?
You're right, though. It's another big bite and would require defining the authentic and the real and, ultimately, my point is that these categories are meaningless. Maybe it should be adressed though.
Oh, and the example I used in the comment that didn't post was New York City. People are always complaining (and did, at the conference) about neighborhood cultures in New York being destroyed or disappearing, but all of those cultures themselves "destroyed" an older culture. Historical conditions changed, and for largely commercial reasons, the culture of a given neighborhood transformed. Is that culture then inauthentic? People would seem to think not. But why is the new culture of artists authentic, and the new culture of a strip-mall not, aside from aesthetic reasons?
Okay, that's a little bit better. I still think I might have some disagreements with this post, but they're not clear to me yet.
I think part of my quibble rests on the idea that you can win an argument about abortion. I'm really not sure that you can, and that's partially because, while it does indeed have to do with other people's space and real consequences in a way that art doesn't so much, it has the same kind of faith-based beliefs behind it.
Yeah, I agree that abortion is an unfortunate peg to hang this on. The point may apply more precisely to less faith-based arguments. I think it still applies pretty well, though.
Lots of arguments are faith-based, though. Just because they can exist in a realm of logic does not mean they do.
Also, while bad art may not affect my life quite as directly as abortion, it does invade my space if it's somewhere I have to be. There are paintings in the building where Jared works, for example, that are absolutely soul-sucking.
Yeah, but, you know, compared to fetus-sucking...(sorry)
Mike, I don't think you're being fair to Carl here, in that I don't think he really is espousing the position that you assign to him. Of course a problem I have with Carl is that I think he's terrible as an abstract thinker and so he doesn't know what his positions are. (And this may be me being unfair to Carl in that I still haven't gotten the Celine book and I haven't read his blog that much.) But what I get from that quote is that the very idea he's opposing is that strip malls etc. don't constitute genuine culture, and he's opposing the idea that people whose values don't match up with his own (and that don't match up with those of the people likely to read his blog and attend the EMPlive conference) have been duped into having the tastes, values, attitudes that they do. And I don't think he is conflating "reproductive freedom" and "adventurous art"; what he's saying is that whatever it is that he and people like him are plumping for - whether it be reproductive freedeom, adventurous art, whatever - it doesn't do to assume that those who are plumping for something else have been duped into their own attitudes.
(And I think he's making the tacit assumption that cultural attitudes - towards art, towards abortion - tend to cluster together. So people who are anti-abortion are likely to have a lot of other attitudes in common as well, as would people who support abortion rights. And of course this is complicated (and both sides are likely to couch their arguments in terms of freedom, an it's not as if a lot of people plump for timid art), but it's more or less right.)
Oh, and "authenticity" is a moving target, runs all over the place, sometimes settles on old values and sometimes settles on adventurousness and the overthrow of old values. I'd guess that when someone talks about "false consciousness" he's talking about the inability to see power relations as they really are. But of course this is an authenticity argument too: that "our" eyes and issues and critical vocabulary are for real, penetrate to what's really going on, whereas the other guy's don't. So that's why Carl counters with the idea that the other guy's own issues are authentic too. (Except this doesn't really address the "false consciousness" argument, it just affixes a positive label - "authentic" - on the other guy.) But once again I think Carl is trying to be skeptical towards the "false consciousness" argument, and he's trying to ask what makes us think that our own attitudes are so removed from our own class and cultural self-interest, and challenge the idea that we're clear-sighted about this.
Frank, I think I covered your first objection in footnote 2 there--what he's reversing is the issue of others' beliefs being invalid, not his own views about the destructiveness of corporate culture. The one thing I disliked about the Celine book (which I think you and Dave may be being a bit unfair to) is when he brought politics up, especially coming as it did in this really interesting discussion of how Celine is marketed in different countries. The attitude I'm criticizing comes through loud and clear there, too.
As for the "false consciousness" thing, someone else seemed to think I was addressing that, but I'm not. Carl's right, and I agree, and it's a good point. But I think that we need to go beyond that and ask if our understanding of culture itself has some serious problems.
Carl's in a tough position rockcrit-wise, since cultural studies don't take rock criticism seriously and from my vantage point cultural studies, as far as I can see it practiced in academia, which isn't that far, has very little to offer rock criticism.
I think of one phrase that really irks me (barely related to the conversation at hand, but oh well), "narcissism of small differences," which usually misses the point that differences are only as big or small as they appear to the people taking issue. (That isn't to say that sometimes, rationally speaking, these are small differences, but it doesn't change the animosity, which is the effect of the difference -- rationality doesn't enter into it anyway). If you did a one-line summary of the Celine book ("rock critic challenges elitist tastes, including his own, in an attempt to understand Celine Dion and her audiences," maybe?) it doesn't sound that different from a project I might be informally interested in doing.
But I think there is something in this post in particular that highlights where the "small difference" becomes a big one, and I think it has a lot to do with the role of judgment: I don't just want to argue that, e.g., Ashlee Simpson (commonly critically/conversationally maligned artist with way less of a chance of getting the Talk About Love treatment) deserves a fair shake, but that in fact she's better and more provocative and more deeply meaningful etc. etc. than most of the music I listen to -- and that this isn't a purely subjective issue (because I think a lot of people refuse to listen to her on her own terms).
everybody has a "false consciousness" of one kind or another, because everybody's cultural tastes are the product of their social experiences and position (including critics and rebels and radicals, seeking affirmation in the beliefs and culture they approve). Which is the same thing as saying no one has false consciousness.
Hmmm, but my social experiences and position still tell me that I'm right about Ashlee, and about abortion (separate though these positions might be -- though I might be echoing Frank, if I'm understanding him, in thinking that there's a major correlation between politics and taste, and that in fact plenty of people put about as much thought into their politics as they do into their taste, which is usually to say not enough!), and that, further, other people (who dismiss her; not necessarily who have listened and dislike her) are wrong. So "there is no false consciousness" doesn't really interest me -- to the extent that other people are being ignorant of what Ashlee is doing, what they believe about her is false or inauthentic (compared to my authentic engagement). I'd prefer to ignore that someone ever thought that the concept of "false consciousness" might fly and talk about something else! (Similarly, for all of the good stuff in the Celine book -- and maybe I haven't been vocal enough in counterbalancing my critiques by saying there's a lot of good stuff in it -- at some level I wish we didn't have to talk about her this way, that this conversation wasn't necessary or perceived as a "step forward" to the conversation I want to have. Something like the "cookie" line in your post -- I think I referred to it in a different context, via a Chris Rock routine, as taking credit for some shit you're supposed to do.)
Anyway, I can imagine that to plenty of people the difference between me 'n' Ashlee and Carl 'n' Celine is a small one, but to me it's actually a bigger difference than one between me and someone -- who might blithely slag off Ashlee as stupidly as anyone -- making a stronger claim about the music that does move them.
Generally I want to see more passion (+ intellectual rigor) in music writing, and it seems like the concessions Carl tends to make to cultural studies (or whatever you wanna call it) lingo and discourse leads inevitably to dispassionate analysis, a kind of drying out of the conversation. And, significantly, I think most of the language of cultural capital, an attempt to find terms of understanding that are way too precise to seem of any value to me in dealing with cultural messes of taste OR politics. To me the role of passion itself is a difference between taste and major political issues, though -- I'd like to see a lot less "passion" in plenty of wider political debates (including abortion) since often passion just becomes a way to bulldoze over any rational discussion. (So yes, people are attached and serious about their religions and social values -- and their taste -- but they're not attached and serious, too, depending on how you define that; by attached and serious, I don't just mean the passion of one's commitment, but also one's ability to make and defend an argument. You can do it with taste and you can do it with as hot-button or faith-based an issue as you can find; sure, understanding is a prerequisite to making the argument in the first place, but that's not in and of itself where the interesting part of the conversation is.)
"Everybody has false consciousness" and "no one has false consciousness" are ridiculous statements, since there's nothing inherently false or inherently true about having a consciousness based on one's social experience and position. But Carl's just not a philosopher, and I don't think the potential truth or falsity of consciousness is what he particularly cares about. Also, I don't think there's anything wrong in principle with saying that someone has a false consciousness, though the phrase does function as something of a buzz word, implying that you've got a whole social theory underlying your claims when really all you're saying is that you think your view is better than someone else's. But one's view may well be better than someone else's.
Mike, I don't want to go around a circle on this, especially since I've read so little by Carl and don't really know what he thinks, but if he does think that corporate culture is "destructive," he can nonetheless believe without contradiction that corporate products and how people use them are genuine culture. Just as one can consider slavery destructive but recognize that the cultures of the slaves and the masters were genuine cultures, and that the culture doesn't just consist of what exists despite or in opposition to slavery but also the components that are shaped by slavery.
Since you ask, there are excellent practical, real-world reasons to hate strip malls / Wal-Mart / Disney (and worse multinationals like Monsanto). First of all, by underselling and bankrupting local businesses, they turn communities built around the self-employed and turn them into communities of dependents, communities that can be abandoned in a pinch with no resources left to fall back on. Second, as regards Disney-style uber-cross-marketing and their noisy, flashy toys and videos for babies, there's a lot of brain research, American Pediatrics Association endorsed, that shows they warp and stunt the brain growth of children.
Now I happen to respect the rest of your main points a lot, so I'll concede something. It is true that I've hated every Disney movie (Tron excluded) that I've ever seen; that big indoor malls make me feel horridly uncomfortable; that I do not, for what it's worth, like Celine Dion music. This may mean that my cultural tastes affect what evidence I believe. But I do believe some things that are inconvenient to me too, so ... anyway, there's more than taste at stake.
Hmm, don't believe I said anything about Wal-Mart. But sure, let's talk about that. I hate Wal-Mart, but for its business practices, not its cultural practices. If a company behaved just like Wal-Mart did toward comsumers but didn't run its own small command economy, I'd be fine with it. The reasons for hating it are political and economic, not cultural.
And as for Disney toys stunting the brain growth of babies, I don't quite know what to say about that, but again, that's a medical argument, not a cultural one. If adults want to watch Disney videos, no harm done, right?
Important to note major myths in the perceived cognitive development of children here as well (and possible differences in cognitive development along class and cultural lines) -- Disney usually acts as a sorta "cultural hegemony" bogeyman because it's a convenient one, but for all of the hand-wringing, even from a cognitive development perspective, it's not clear to me that any effort is made to really understand the real uses of Disney, even among child audiences. And the myth process works both ways -- academics tend to underrate the agency of children to "filter" messages (at least over the age of about 6 or 7, though admittedly I'm basing this on the little research on advertising, not necessarily more engaging -- and longer-lasting -- forms of media like a Disney film); advertisers, on the other hand, tend to overrate this filtering mechanism, treating their youngest demographic as a fully autonomous, savvy group of potential consumers.
Still, I think most of my angst over children's media comes from more institutional (and legislate-able) areas -- surveillance/dataveillance methods, monopolization, invasive marketing, etc. As per this whole discussion, it's a somewhat fragile, but distinct, balance to keep in mind when producing art criticism; the trick is to incorporate it without necessarily conflating the content or quality of the work with the means by which it was produced, which is an argument a lot of people feel uncomfortable engaging with. (Thing is, I probably also know a lot more about, e.g., institutional practices of Disney in the realms of marketing, copyright law, conglomerate consolidation, etc., than your average think-piece-type writing something about Hannah Montana, while also enjoying much of her music (more) comfortably.)
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