Thomas Frank - New Consensus for Old: Cultural Studies from Left to Right

NewConsensus for Old

CulturalStudies from Left to Right

Thomas Frank

PRICKLY PARADIGM PRESSCHICAGO

2002 Prickly Paradigm Press, LLC All rights reserved.

An earlier version of thispamphlet was published as chapter eight of One Market Under God (Doubleday,2000).

Prickly Paradigm Press, LLC 5629 South University AvenueChicago, II 60637

www.prickly-paradigm.com

ISBN: 0-9717575-4-2 LCCN: 2002 102651

George was touched by theFair. He stood one night with Charles Nolan, watching the crowds of the Midway,and dreamed aloud: the people had done all this! It was of the people, by thepeople, for the people! The lawyer argued: No, most of the money wassubscribed by rich men. The people had nothing to do with designing thebuildings. The economist pulled his beard and sighed. Anyhow, the people wereenjoying it....Perhaps the Kingdom of God was a little nearer.

Henry Georges visit tothe 1894 Columbian Exposition, according to Thomas Beer, The Mauve Decade(1926)

The sociologist Herbert Gans had been writing aboutpopular culture and its audiences for some twenty years when he published his1974 book Popular Culture and High Culture, a 159-page summary of histhinking on the subject. The volume is now twenty-eight years old, and itbuilds on arguments Gans had been making since the 50s, but if not for a number ofbad calls and an obsolete jargon it could have been written yesterday, soreliably does it predict certain dominant scholarly concerns of our own times.For Gans, as for so many academic writers about culture, the longstandingAmerican debate over high culture and mass culture was really a broader clashbetween elitism and populism, between the snobbish tastes of the educated andthe functional democracy of popular culture. Gans began the book by rejectingthe idea that popular culture is simply imposed on the audience from above,that a malign culture industiy is able to tell us what to think. In fact, heargues, audiences have the power to demand and receive, through the medium ofthe market, the culture of their choosing from the entertainment industiy.Then, in what would eventually become the trademark gesture of academiccultural studies, Gans hammered the critics of the entertainment industiyas the real villains, as elitist nabobs who are unhappy with [recent]tendencies toward cultural democracy and who obnoxiously assume they know whatis best for the world. The real subject of cultural debate is thus the attitudeof the critic, in particular his or her faith in the intelligence of theaudience. And for holding audiences in inexcusably low esteem Gans scoldedmid-century critic Dwight Macdonald and Herbert Marcuse, late of the famous FrankfurtSchool of Marxist social theory.

Up to this point Gans seems to have anticipated withuncanny accuracy the issues, the preconceptions, and even the villains ofacademic cultural criticism of the 90s. But his streak of prescience ends whenhe predicts that the elitist mass culture critique he identifies with Macdonaldand Marcuse would stage a triumphant return in the veiy near future. Gansarrived at this prediction by connecting the mass culture critique, as a theorythat celebrates the transcendent worth of a canonical education and good taste,with the interests of intellectuals generally: when their status is underattack or in decline, they revert naturally to the old elitism, dreaming up allsorts of highbrow bushwa about art and culture in order to reinforce thehierarchies that support their exalted social position. But when respect forintellectuals is on the rise, they can lighten up, make peace with middleAmerica, and read USA Today along with the rest of us.

In fact this is almost exactly the opposite of whatactually happened in the 90s, when the culture wars brought the humanitiesunder the fiercest attack they had endured in generations. Yes, academicprofessionalism did indeed seem to grow more and more pronounced with eachassault from the family-values right. Think of the clotted, ciphered academicprose stylea reliable source of amusement for journalists throughout thedecadethat knotted itself ever more egregiously with each blustering newchapter of the culture wars. The object of all this credential-flashing, sentence-manglingexpertise, however, was not the sanctity of high culture, but precisely theopposite. Academics of the 90s loved popular culture. They did not sneer.Rather, they declared their fandom in the most earnest of tones and mostsophisticated of theoretical formulations. Popular culture was not onlydemocratic, they believed, it was downright counter-hegemonic. Meanwhile themass culture critique that Gans so abhorred did not reappear in the 90s; onthe contrary, scholars joined journalists, politicians, and media moguls inpounding it relentlessly, in dispatching it off to that special oblivionreserved for intellectual anathema.

Rumblewith the Cult Studs

Lets start with Highbrow/Lowbrow, the influential1988 book in which historian Lawrence Levine argued that the problem ofaesthetic elitism was in fact the central drama of American cultural histoiy.By parading before readers a series of vignettes in which repulsive,upper-class nineteenth-century snobseach of them coupled carefully with his racistand otherwise offensive remarkslooked to high culture for a refuge fromdemocracy, Levine sought to prove that hierarchies of taste were analogous tosocial hierarchy generally and to racism specifically What the high culturepatrons of the past set out to do was to make audiences less interactive, totransform them from a public into a group of mute receptors. HistorianAndrew Ross carried both the argument and the rhetorical strategy into thetwentieth century in his 1989 book No Respect, continuing to find invirtually any iteration of highbrow taste a tacit expression of contempt fordemocracy

As the 90s unfolded, it soon became clear that thesignature scholarly gesture of our time was not some warmed over aestheticism,but a populist celebration of the power and agency of audiences and fans, oftheir ability to evade the grasp of the makers of mass culture, and of theirtalent for transforming just about any bit of cultural detritus into animplement of rebellion. Although cultural populism appeared everywhere inacademia, its best known and loudest proponents were the various celebrities ofthe rapidly growing discipline known as cultural studiesthe cult studs, touse the phrase of one canny reviewer. Like Gans, the cult studs tended to beunremittingly hostile to the elitism and hierarchy that older ways ofunderstanding popular culture seemed to imply; they tended to see audienceagency lurking in eveiy consumer decision. They were able to find seeds of

rebellion and resistance in almost any of theculture-products once scoffed at as lowbrow, and accordingly they turnedtheir attention from the narrow canon of highbrow texts to the vast prairiesof popular culture. British academic Jim McGuigan has described this centralarticle of the cult-studs faith as a formulaic populist reflex, a tendencyto judge any thought, proposal, or text by this overarching standard: What doesthis imply about the power of the people? Accounts of popular culture in whichshoppers twit shopkeepers, say, or sitcom viewers think subversive thoughts, orfans of boy bands grow suspicious of patriarchy are to be celebrated andaffirmed for their democratic implications. On the other hand, accounts ofpopular culture in which audiences are tricked, manipulated, or otherwise madeto act against their best interests are automatically elitist, as thedistinguished cult stud Lawrence Grossberg once put it (in a line echoed inalmost eveiy cultural studies essay or book I have ever read), because theyassume that audiences are necessarily silent, passive, political and culturaldopes.

Generally speaking, cult studs do not frequently applythe term elitist to Hollywood executives or TV producers. This is acharacteristic they attribute not to the culture industries but to