Just popping in from hell month (affectionately!) to throw a few notes your way:
1) If you liked my last EMP paper, I am going to be there again this year. Rachel Arnold and I will be presenting a paper on pop songs used as campaign songs. The paper will probably show up around these parts in the future.
2) Generally I think Stanley Fish is a tool. But apparently if you give him 40 years to think about something, he can come to a pretty reasonable conclusion on it, at least if his article about postmodernism is anything to go by. It's pretty close to what I think about all them Frenchies these days: they weren't trying to disprove rationalism or claim that physical reality doesn't exist, they were just pointing out the socially constructed nature of things and kinda leaving it at that. I don't know if that's what they were actually trying to do, but it seems like the sensible way to think about them. That said, though, there were significant differences between them, and they're important. In retrospect, we can probably call Derrida and Baudrillard the Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin of theory: provacateurs who probably didn't mean all of what they said, and don't really need to be taken seriously, even if some people do. Barthes is kinda the Robin Williams: playful and entertaining, but harmless, if occasionlly annoying in the repetativeness of his schtick. And Paul de Man is just crazy.
But--and not to be a grad student talking about Foucault here, but--Foucault is genuinely important and generally right. His histories applied the deconstructive mindset to concrete and meaningful subjects, and what he turned up helped make strange questionable truisms. In a way, what he did is basically what Gallileo did; both questioned widely-held assumptions that had a real effect on people's lives. But where Gallileo did it with geography, Foucault did it with language. And that has to be attributed, at least in some small part, to the Frenchies, or at least the environment they whipped up.
I go on about this because the rection to Fish's post is just baffling. Comment after comment complaining about postmodernism! Who knew? And this is why I point out that not all French theorists engaged in the kind of rhetoric Fish is talking about (and people are complaining about). There were some that did do legitimate work that really called into question certain things. Many people would, I suspect, agree with Foucault's take on mental illness. It's unfortunate that certain theorists have given the whole enterprise a bad name, but it's really confusing how, after Fish spends a good number of words laying out a reasonable position, people still get really worked up about deconstruction. I mean, it sucks that the one dude went to McGill and had to read Derrida, but I think most English departments these days provide ample opportunity to engage in traditional studies of literature. All the postmodernists went off and formed critical studies departments, didn't they? Oh, what do I know. Maybe Foucault isn't even part of this group.
3) I had previously posted about how much I liked the video for Mariah's "Touch My Body," but I only now realize that I really like the song too! It's dirty but assertive, the melody is really strong, and I like that Mariah's standing up for both her own sexuality and her control of the situation. The sweet way she sings "I will hunt you down" is amazing. I think it's my single of the year right now.
4) Oh yeah: thanks, Universal, for making my entire BYOP post a moot point by removing "Becky" (and two other songs) from the final version of Get Awkward. You are a bunch of enormous cameltoes.
Maura had a good post a couple weeks back reacting to Virgina Heffernan's NYT Magazine piece lamenting the imminent passing of Friday Night Lights. Maura's conclusion:
i think what heffernan’s argument really boils down to is the fact that, generally speaking, scripted shows that are adored by self-proclaimed tv connoiseurs–from your alessandra stanleys to your twop message-board denizens–don’t really do well on a mass level in general. (the success of a show like lost is probably the exception to the rule, although that show is pretty compelling on a mass level, and it featured many shots of absolutely stunning people running around shirtless and/or in rainstorms. hello, josh holloway!) but the online chatter, ancillary fantasy worlds, and general obsessing about those sorts of shows creates the illusion of greater popularity than there really may be, much like certain other phenomena that i’ve come across in the day job.
Maura's coming at this from the particular perspective of her aforementioned day job--and in this case that's probably the right perspective to come at it from, since Heffernan's trying to make this about the internet. But what she says resonated with me for another reason. Let me come at it from my particular perspective for a minute.
I don't really know why I've felt the need to be coy about this, but I'm going to the Newhouse school right now as a grad student. (Please do call me out if I'm no longer keeping it real on clapclap. The implicit prohibition on swearing and general uncomfortableness with elaborate, obscene metaphors in the academy has been hard to adjust to.) I've taken two classes so far with Bob Thompson, who's probably the most visible television scholar in America. And while it was refreshing at first just to hear someone talk seriously about television, as the classes have progressed, I've become more and more dissatisfied with his critical perspective. And while I don't want to shy away from calling him out in particular on this--I'm going to use examples from his lectures in a second--he is, ultimately, a part of the group Maura calls "self-proclaimed tv connoiseurs." And as someone who's looking to spend a lot of time studying TV, I have a few problems with them and the particular artistic values they're attempting to impose on the rest of us.
While I don't recall him necessarily ever coming out and saying so, Thompson's favorite show of all time is probably St. Elsewhere. When he first began discussing the show last year, I was happy to go along for the ride. He's watched the show very closely and even corresponded with the show's staff to clarify and confirm certain points. But his argument for the show's quality revolves around one particular assumption: that it works on multiple levels. For instance, in watching an episode where Howie Mandel goes through the afterlife, he broke down a basic scene where two characters sit in the hospital kitchen and recapitulate previous plotlines by showing how a series of lines go by that all employ condiment metaphors, that those metaphors are also dirty jokes, and that the lines sometimes alliterate. He compared this to Shakespeare, as well as to Arrested Development, the former in a positive way, the latter in a negative. He criticized Arrested Development for being overly obvious in its delivery of jokes, whereas with St. Elsewhere, you might not even notice that there was a joke.
Now, I could point out here that this is at least partially because puns on condiments aren't particularly funny, whereas Arrested Development's jokes could sometimes exhibit the kind of structural complexity that would make a grown man weep. His point was, in this and other discussions of the show's worth, that the writing was dense, complex, and worked on multiple levels, and that therefore this made St. Elsewhere a great show.
Heffernan goes on about franchising and the internet and "museum fatigue" (agh!), but what her argument ultimately comes down to is the same thing Thompson's argument ultimately comes down to: that a show's worth is directly related to how dense it is. Not only that, but that density has to be visible and deliberate. It's not enough for a show to resonate on multiple levels; we have to have evidence that the show's creators intentionally put those multiple levels of meaning in there through a heroic act of creation. The show must cater to us or challenge us, rather than expecting us to bring our own meanings to it--it cannot be, as Heffernan puts it, "art that doesn’t need us." But art that does need us sounds like, well, needy art. And since when is needy attractive?
I don't mean to sound like I'm dismissing complex art here. I think complexity, intentional or otherwise, is certainly one level on which quality and pleasure can be generated, though as I imply above, I think it's a little silly to want it to be intentional complexity all the time. But it should not and cannot be the only critereon for excellence when it comes to TV programs. Indeed, it's clear that complexity is not the only way shows can prove their worth. There are too many well-loved, straightforward shows to think otherwise.
Thompson makes the case that the new crop of "quality TV" that's emerged over the last 25 years has fulfilled the promise of television as a medium by allowing it to become a new way to tell stories. But is it really a new way? Don't we often hear The Wire compared to novels? Isn't The Sopranos, for whatever you might think about it, just as much a "middle-class form of the novel," as Heffernan so annoyingly puts it, as anything else? For that matter, isn't Battlestar Galactica? (And in terms of storytelling, haven't we seen this before everywhere from Dickens to comic books to movie serials of the 1940s and 50s?)
I'm just saying that what gets touted as "quality TV"--shows that are, as Maura points out, overwhelmingly scripted dramas--aren't the be-all and end-all of good television. The formal possibilities of TV are by no means limited to the serialized episodic structure. You can do other things on the small screen besides what Dickens did when he was getting paid by the word 150 years ago.
Again, I'm being coy, so let me just come out with it. In an overview of the first 60 years of American television, Thompson commented while watching the famous chocolate eating scene in I Love Lucy that it was not all that different, formally, from what we're still watching today. The scene, he said, would fit right into an episode of Will and Grace. On this, he is most certainly right. And it applies to almost every genre of television. Game shows (which includes reality shows), dramas, soap operas, and news have changed their formats strikingly little from the 1950s. The tone and design might be slightly different, but the essential forms have been set for a good half-century.
And then there are cartoons.
What you see above is an episode of Space Ghost Coast to Coast, and I would challenge anyone to find a show predating it with which it shares any formal qualities. Seinfeld was hailed--rightly!--for its formal innovations, and it referred to itself as a show where nothing happened. But, of course, lots of things happened in Seinfeld episodes. There were numerous conflicts which were then complicated and intertwined and eventually resolved. That complexity and manipulation was a big part of what made the show so satisfying.
In contrast, there is one episode of Space Ghost which could be summarized thusly: Thurston Moore plays the guitar for 5 minutes. Then the credits roll. Literally nothing happens. The episode above consists of 9 minutes of Space Ghost following an ant along the ground, until he encounters giant ants and is chased by them for about 10 seconds. Then the episode ends. That's it. That's the episode. It's certainly like an Andy Warhol film, except this was broadcast on national television and ends with a joke about fire ants. (Miss Clap's comment: "Wow, I can't believe they aired that.")
Ostensibly, it was supposed to be a cartoon talk show, and sometimes it was structured as such: opening with a monologue, proceeding to interviews, and the three characters would banter back and forth for a while between. But other times, the show might start in the middle of a line, or wander off to Space Ghost's apartment, or take place entirely in black & white, or be not a cartoon at all, but a re-creation of a past cartoon by human actors. A bad recreation. Long--loooooong--uncomfortable silences were a regular gag. You counted it lucky if the show made any sense whatsoever. And it was immensely enjoyable. Generally, you know what's happening on TV shows; even what counts as a surprise is really just a lesser-traveled path on the recognizably branching forks of the basic TV plotlines. But with Space Ghost, you legitimately had no idea what was happening next. Look above--don't you keep thinking something's going to happen? Don't you keep thinking that they can't possibly drag it out this long? And yet--and yet--they do.
I am happy to recognize that there is an element of taste going on here. Even if I am not as blown away by many of the dramas hailed as groundbreaking and transcendent by the TV connoisseur crowd, I certainly recognize their worth and would never try and talk other people out of liking them so much. But if there was a shift to "quality TV" in the early 1980s, then it has to be recognized that TV cartoons went through at least as sweeping and productive a change starting with Ren and Stimpy in the 90s, and that cartoons are at an entirely different level than cartoons were for the 30 or so years preceding the arrival of NickToons in 1991. Though they might not all be as widely recognized as the HBO canon or the NBC canon, I think the cartoons that have come out of that explosion constitute a canon of at least equal worth. There's a great history to be written--by me, I hope--of the post-80s cartoons, which include, besides Ren and Stimpy and Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Beavis and Butt-Head, The Simpsons, Futurama, Family Guy, South Park, Metalocalypse, Animaniacs, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, and whatever your personal favorites may be. If that seems too frivolous, narrow it down to The Simpsons--soon to become the longest-running show on TV--and South Park, plus a bunch of other quality short-hops. Are they excellent in different ways than Six Feet Under and The Wire? Sure. But that's still excellence.
Again, consider not depth of theme of complexity of structure, but formal innovation. In an interview, Metalocalypse creator Brendon Small said his pitch for the show went like this:
We’ve got a TV show. It’s going to be about a metal band, like a death metal band or black metal, I’m not sure -- old-school, kind of thrash stuff. But it’s going to be about a metal band, and there’s going to be tons of murder. And we’re not interested in having anyone understand anything anyone says.
Now look, that is just not a show. Why would anyone want to watch that? And yet it is a fairly accurate description of the final product, which is eminently watchable. That's formal innovation. People are talking over each other, sometimes in unintelligible accents, people are constantly getting killed, the whole conceit revolves around an extremely obscure genre of music--it's like having a show about bluegrass musicians who converse half in Gaelic--and they have found a way not just to make it work as art, but to make it entertaining, incisive, and funny as hell. That is at least amazing as multiple-layer jokes about condiments, isn't it?
It seems fair to say that, after a long time in the wilderness, TV is finally being taken seriously as an artform in the same way that pop music and movies are. Which means that, right now, we're negotiating the consensus critical understanding of the genre. With films, that seems to have coalesced around the idea of the auteur working through the Hollywood system to make a personal statement. With pop music, that centered on the creative genius making masterpieces in the context of a genre of teenage fluff. And with TV, we're rapidly coming together around these HBO shows that, if they crack a smile, are never remembered for doing so, with their successes attributed to single creators: David Chase, Alan Ball, David Simon. But why do these have to be the shows that legitimate the genre? Why, in the context of an artform that celebrated and was built on insubstantiality more than almost any other, do we have to once again fall prey to the cult of the serious--the cult of the complex, the cult of the romantic creative, the cult of the absurdly meaningful. Can we ever sanctify a form of expression without first deeming it sufficiently serious? And do we really want TV to move solely in this direction? Do we really want the standard of worth for future creators to be just these canonized shows, when the people who made these shows grew up on a very non-canonical diet of television? I object here not just because I think shows of incredible worth are being undervalued, but because I love the medium. I love that TV now is going in so many different directions, that it's exploring possibilities rather than closing them off as gauche or critically unacceptable. It's easy to say that we're embracing the discredited simply because we're taking TV seriously. But is it really an act of daring to trumpet the quality of shows that insist so visibly on being taken seriously? Isn't it possible that there are shows out there just as full of meaning which don't try and hit you over the head with it? Why not the cartoon? Why not now? Why not, before it is too late?
If anyone out there is, or has been, an American Idol viewer, I would be forever in your debt if you would take a very brief survey for me. It's for a research project--I am a grad student now, btw--and so you would be serving science.The survey can be found here:
1) A disconnect with reality. Three particular claims stood out, the first being:
But Fish thinks humanities professors bear some blame for their diminished standing. He’s at work on a new book, “Save the World on Your Own Time,” which argues that academics should teach, not proselytize. In his view, “the invasion of political agendas” into the classroom in the ’60s and ’70s was “extremely dangerous,” since it meant classrooms could become battlegrounds for political demagoguery.
Yes, and it's not the 60s and 70s anymore. Aside from a few scattered wackos, who does this? My college was so political that in the 60s they changed the grading system so you couldn't get below a C (because if your GPA was below a C you could get drafted), but I was never proselytized to. Professors will try and convince you of things, but mainly those things run along the lines of "the things I study are important and you should care about them." Every professor I had was extremely sensitive to coming off as a libtard, and if anything, this seemed to restrain their capacity to teach effectively. Fish is grandstanding to a wider audience that thinks that somewhere they don't know about there are these hook-nosed (thanks Mallard Fillmore!) profs turning our children into black-hooded anarchists. If there's something that's diminishing the standing of professors, it's more likely to be people like Fish portraying a bunch of quiet, passionate nerds as demogogues.
Second:
For John Guillory, an English professor at New York University and the author of “Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation” (1993), “The major fact that the discipline is confronting today is global English, which is a cultural corollary of economic globalization.” At the same time, postcolonial Anglophone culture is only half a century old. “I’m often impressed by this scholarship, but I’m also concerned that this new field seems to be so disconnected from the history of literature and scholarship that goes before it,” Guillory said. “I see too many scholars in the field who know very little about anything before the 20th century, and that concerns me.”
Really? You see a lot of literature PhDs who know very little about pre-20th century literature? Or is it just that they care very little about pre-20th century literature? (And by "very little" I suspect he means "not as much as I do.") If someone's getting their doctorate without having an understanding of the scope of literature and literary history, I don't think that's the fault of "politics," it's the fault of whatever cut-rate university gave them the degree.
Judt also denounces the balkanization created by interdisciplinary ethnic studies programs. Multiculturalism “created lots and lots of microconstituencies, which universities didn’t have the courage to oppose,” he said. “It’s much more like a supermarket — kids can take pretty much any courses they like: Jewish kids take Jewish studies, gay students gay studies, black students African-American studies. You no longer have a university, but a series of identity constituencies all studying themselves.”
Again, where is this? No doubt some students take classes in "me studies," but how many of these kids then go on to major in that field? How many would have majored in English or History or Politics otherwise? If the number is low (and I suspect it is), then why does it matter that they take essentially a focused history, literature, or politics class that can engage them?
These three claims--that professors are political demogogues in the classroom, that a significant portion of English PhDs are ignorant of pre-20th c. literature, and that minority students primarily major in multicultural studies--are quite serious, and I hope they are all backed up with rigorous studies. Of course, none are cited here, but I'm sure that's just an oversight, rather than an attempt to play on stereotypes and lazy thinking to make a normally-functioning system seem frighteningly out-of-control.
2) More importantly than these nits that have been picked, though, it seems absolutely absurd that no one points out the significance of the year they keep citing as a turning point: not only is 1965 twenty years after the G.I. Bill was signed and right when the Baby Boomers were hitting college, it's the year after the Civil Rights Act was signed. In other words, these changes in American academia weren't random, but happened at the same time a whole lot more people were going to college, and that's no accident. More students meant more teachers and more colleges, and that meant the tight focus universities were able to maintain while serving only a small percentage of the population had to dissolve. While the article admits that "humanities departments thrive at elite institutions (at Yale, for example, history has long been the most popular major, with English usually beating out economics for second place)" it's not really followed up on. People like Bloom are comparing apples with oranges here--the university system in their purported golden age is almost entirely different from what it is now. If we looked only at the colleges that existed before the G.I. Bill, would we find the same phenomenons? If our sample was the same kinds of people who went to college pre-WWII and the same colleges they went to, how much differentiation would we actually find? The article claims that "Reading lists, though, are a zero-sum game: for every writer added, another is dropped." But there's not just one reading list for all of academia, and in fact, there are now far more reading lists than there ever were. Academia didn't lose a classics-based education so much as gain a whole bunch of new fields of inquiry. And the idea that higher education should be, in effect, standardized is inimical to the goals of academia, which (you'd think) are to expand knowledge rather than continually pumping out the same ideas over and over again. These arguments, especially when accompanied by this utter lack of historical perspective (which is a little ironic given the participants), serve only to reinforce the phenomenon they seek to oppose. Why would multicutural studies departments stop being oppositional when there's still an enemy within claiming they shouldn't even exist? Why would we step back and examine these new additions to the canon when we apparently still have to battle for them even to be considered? The position taken by Fish et al seems actively anti-intellectual, an argument that we should stop being critical thinkers and continue to accept what's been handed us. (This isn't even getting into the hilarity of including Marx in a canon and then complaining about political activism.) The classics will always be there; there's no chance they'll be lost, and if you think Americans' lack of critical thinking stems from a lack of Plato-reading, then Americans were never critical thinkers.
In the end, though, this is maybe an example of what seems to me to be academia's biggest problem right now: the "when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" syndrome. This essay is in the books section, after all, and maybe purely from the perspective of literature, this is a problem, especially if you think Faulkner is objectively superior to Toni Morrison. And if you're used to proving things by close readings, then maybe it seems inarguable that the historical changes the academy has undergone must produce these ill effects. But that's simply not true: those are charges that have to be actually proved if you're going to throw them around (and, to be parochial for a second, a classic example of mass society thinking). There are things I agree with here, but I think for different reasons than the proponants would want me to. I do think the Balkanization of academia is a bad thing, but I also recognize that it was necessary since grumpy old men like Bloom wouldn't let people study those things in the departments that currently existed. In other words, they're not failures, but symptoms. Academia's future leads not backwards to some imagined golden era of dons teaching the classics or outwards to a universe of microdisiplines. It leads across, and lies in the synthesis of ideas rather than the partitioning or limiting of them. All culture is culture war because culture is conflict, and not within the bounderies set up by academic departments. Culture is not something that conforms to our expectations--it's continually changing, and continually surprising. We'd all be better off if we recognized that, embraced that, rejoiced in that, rather than desperately scribbling lists to hold at bay the barbarians who have already won.
- Post will be up shortly--it'll be the EMP paper, but I'm working on some additions that may end up being longer than the paper itself, whoops. Stay tuned. Paper is now up, sans italicizing and most music files, which will have to come later.
- Please see the note at the beginning of the paper--can anyone covert Quicktime files so my 1-minute clip isn't 200+meg? Lemme know and I can give you an FTP login or something, it'd be a huge help. Thanks Eric!
- And yet more reviews in the new issue of Under the Radar, though I don't entirely remember of what. Cornelius and the Danielson DVD for sure; also Bang Gang and...uh...well, I can't remember. Anyway, they're not online.
So what looks like soulless professionalism to people outside of academia is really just a way of keeping things interesting. Still, things have gotten to the point where aesthetic advocacy (i.e., saying something is awesome) is considered not only unprofessional but wrong. Saying Wagner is awesome -- or, for instance, pointing to the opening contrabassoon E-flat of Das Rheingold and discussing how all the exfoliating little figures that grow out of that one note create a musical image for creation itself and then saying now that's awesome -- seems politically regressive. I've written about this suspicion of aesthetic pleasure before. But what struck me about the EMP pop conference was how most of its participants seemed to be pretty comfortable geeking out on their topics, and that the fanboy tone that crept into the sessions didn't make them any less intellectually stimulating.
