Archive for the ‘Critical Culture’ Category

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#397 – Geeking Out

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

two critics on the art of fandom & the politics of geekdom.

Artistry often begins in fandom—as an aspiration, at first, not really to express one’s creative identity but to take on someone else’s. …Real anxiety comes not with influence, but with the imperative to transcend it, which is another part of creative development.

- David Hadju, “Pretending,” on The Beatles: Rock Band & Guitar Hero, The New Republic, 2 December 2009

Whatever the personal roots of Lethem’s compulsions in temperment and trauma, geekdom also responds to a wider history. It is not simply fandom and was not fully possible before the 1970s, the decade in which Lethem grew up. Its scholarly posture awaited the erasure of high/low distinctions and the rise of a popular culture that thought enough of itself to elicit a corresponding critical seriousness. …All of a sudden it was intellectually respectable to spin out theories about Spiderman or I Dream of Jeannie. And not just respectable, but necessary. The ’70s also marked the moment when media culture reaached a kind of saturation point, the age by which we found ourselves, as George W.S. Trow famously put it, within the context of no context. What Warhol intuited and Sontag theorized was now universal—and for children of the ’70s, congenital. All media, all the time: commercials, billboards, boom boxes, Muzak, cable; hooks, jingles, icons, slogans, logos. …Geekdom resists the informational avalanche through the impossible strategy of seeking to master it—hence both its theoretical drive and the infinitude of its quest.

— William Deresiewicz, “A Geek Grows in Brooklyn,” on the novel Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem, The New Republic, 21 October 2009

Hadju, adolescent of the 1960s, and still something of a modernist, argues that fandom arises out of imitation—the anxiety of influence comes from the next step: trying to become yourself.

Deresiewicz, child of the 1970s, and fully born into the postmodern experience, expresses an entirely different worry: no more is the issue to become yourself in the shadow of heroes, but rather simply to survive the onslaught of information in the first place.

This is not an anxiety of influence, but rather an anxiety of lack of influence. The goal is not originality, but mastery of lost originals. One geeks out not to transform oneself, but to find refuge in what already exists.

Posted in Arts Culture, Consumer Culture, Critical Culture, Literary Culture, Mass Culture, Media Culture, Musical Culture, Postmodern Culture | No Comments »

#393 – Sontag, You’re It!

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

the great critic dave hickey on the great critic susan sontag.

It is for any critic. We are all predisposed to bouts of pathological connoisseurship. We are always falling in love. That’s why we’re critics. The idiomatic admission that one is “blown away” by something captures it perfectly. Sontag could be blown away. She was wired for art, and her journal is filled with moments when she declares herself ravished by great books, music, film, and theater….

- Dave Hickey, “Una Lesbiana Enamorada!,” Harper’s Magazine, December 2009, p. 95.

Posted in Arts Culture, Critical Culture, Culture Rover | No Comments »

#388 – Smells Like Mid-Life Crisis

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

it’s like rain on your wedding day: a.o. scott on the ironies (are they ironies?) of the gen x man’s mid-life crisis.

A.O. Scott has a typically intriguing and well-written essay of cultural criticism in which he detects a crisis of the Gen X male’s mid-life crisis. Scott knits together, in a threadbare grunge-flannel tapestry, recent films such as Greenberg and Hot Tub Time Machine and Sam Lipsyte’s novel The Ask to argue that the meta-crisis for Gen X men now arriving in middle age is that they never grew up in the first place.

I think Scott has it backward. The real crisis of Gen X men is not that they can’t grow up in order to have a mid-life crisis, but rather that they were never young in the first place. That is to say, they were never young by the criteria of the baby-boomer definitions of youth (“hope I die before I get old” and all that). These constructions of youth and adolescence—forged in the 1960s and 70s—dominated American middle-class culture in the 1980s and 90s. But they were also imploding as baby boomers clung to youth into their middle years and redefined, along with corporate marketers happy to help them, what young meant.

The need to establish youth as generational difference remained an imperative for Gen X, but it no longer functioned well to establish difference. This was the experience of “vintage postmodernism” that Scott describes in the essay. (As a side note, “vintage postmodernism” a fabulously strange phrase, as if to suggest that now we live in a post-postmodern moment—and perhaps we do; and perhaps therein lies a way out.)

What happened in the 1980s and 90s was that the temporal organization of life stages exploded  across biological ages, thus making it both necessary and impossible for Gen Xers to validate their experiences of youth on baby boomer terms. I think this might well apply for women as for men of this generation.

Gen X was itself a manufactured label born of the 60s impulse to define generational cohorts. This group came of age with the need to talk about their generation, but they themselves had to manufacture both the talk and the generation out of categories that no longer caused a big sensation. And they’ve been uncomfortably numb ever since.

Posted in Advertising Culture, Consumer Culture, Critical Culture, Culture Rover, Popular Culture, Seventies Culture, Sixties Culture | 1 Comment »

#376 – Product Placement

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

cultural criticism in the age of social networking: from content and form to contexts and formats?

Rob Horning’s always fascinating columns explore the politics of consumerism. Horning charts a path between the usual camps of “consumption bad!”—”no, consumption good!” Recently, he has focused on the impact of Web 2.0 technologies, particularly social networking, on public life.

In “Reviews for consumption convenience,” Horning turns his attention to a recent blog post by Jason Kottke about developments in Amazon.com reviews, which increasingly focus on the formats of cultural products and the contexts in which they might be consumed rather than their actual content or form.

For Horning, the shift away from critical spaces for discussing content and form are troubling, but he uses the occasion not merely to issue a screed, but rather to ponder the place of cultural criticism in contemporary public discourse. Horning writes:

Criticism will recede into recondite elaborations of personal experiences with the goods, as the idea of trying to capture a consensus view will have disappeared completely from public discourse. Public discourse itself seems sort of threatened anyway, subject to replacement by social networks. Lost will be that middle ground of critical reviews, which help establish a context of reception that makes our engagement with something far richer and more meaningful.

It’s a nice description of what is so appealing, yet troubling about social networking: it is radically democratic, but does it fragment cultural criticism’s ability to achieve any sort of collective framework for shared understanding of cultural goods and experiences? There’s still “engagement,” as Horning points out, but no more “middle ground” of “consensus” and a “context of reception.”

Of course, consensus had its own historical shortcomings. Usually a small group’s opinions were mapped onto collective opinion. But, is it worth reconceptualizing what kind of “consensus” might be possible in the radically fragmented and decentered channels of Web 2.0? We’re probably not going back, so where does cultural criticism go now?

We still don’t know yet what the public looks like in this new zone of social interaction, and if at times it looks like a pseudo-public in which supposed consumer empowerment masks the profound inequalities and anti-democratic dimensions of corporate capitalism, at other moments, social networking seems to offer new avenues for cultural criticism as a more democratic encounter with “engagement” and all that it might entail.

Posted in Consumer Culture, Critical Culture, Culture Rover, Digital Culture | 1 Comment »

#370 – Critiquing Critique

Monday, March 1st, 2010

beyond beyond critical thinking.

In “Beyond Critical Thinking,” Michael Roth offers an intriguing argument that humanities scholars should turn from offering critique to creating norms. But ultimately it feels like a strawman argument.

Roth creates too strong a binary between norms-creation and critique. There are more supple ways to imagination the relationship between building ideas or values up and tearing them down.

One better question might be, as Joel Pfister puts it, critique for what? What’s the end of critique?

Another better question might be, what kind of critique?

It strikes me that there are many kinds of critique, offered with multiple motivations and goals, and articulated in multiple modes and idioms. There can be sympathetic critique, criticism offered in the spirit of negation, and condemnation offered as insistent refusal. There can be a critique driven by reason and one driven by emotions, and most driven by some combination of both. Critique can be nihilistic and suffocating and it can provide oxygen and life support. There can be the cliched “constructive critique” and there can be questioning that lingers between rejection and acceptance, and there can be a kind of Trojan Horse critique that arrives in the guise of a gift while actually seeking to destroy all.

Roth’s article begins to add nuance to the pedagogy of critique. Humanists might do more than teach our students the techniques of dismissal, the ability to locate inconsistencies and holes in arguments and drive a stake (or a truck) through them.

But dismissal and refusal are not the same thing as critique, which might be more elastic, capacious, and perhaps even generative than Roth suggests.

Posted in Critical Culture, Culture Rover, Intellectual Culture | No Comments »

#353 – The Dude Abides

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

hey, careful, man, there’s a beverage here — a refreshing look at how the dude abides in academia.

At long last, a New York Times article that does not simply dismiss academic efforts to take pop culture seriously.

In  “Dissertations on His Dudeness,” book critic Dwight Garner earnestly engages scholarly analyses of the cult film The Big Lebowski while also, with congenial subtlety, poking fun at the attempt to philosophize alongside the Dude.

This is a cause for celebration. For even if you’re into the whole brevity thing, and you don’t like mixing your highbrow and your lowbrow, Garner let’s you enjoy the fun of taking this strange, absurd, borderline-insane/borderline-profound Coen Brothers film seriously. This approach of twinkling and rolling the critic’s eye all at once is so much more refreshing than the umpteenth version of the typical New York Times reactionary response to academic studies of popular culture.

In the typical Times article, the reader, the film, popular culture, the academy all get bashed repeatedly by a “can you believe those daffy professors are writing about American Idol?” tone of incredulity that has become even more tiresome and limiting than the worst mismatches between high theory and low culture could ever be. What started out as a healthy guarded skepticism in profiles of the ivy tower gone prime time became nothing more than a long line of gimmicky, close-minded, clichéd puff pieces-in-reverse: one loud lazy whine of hack-job elitism masquerading as populist outrage.

In Garner’s review, which makes fabulous use of Umberto Eco’s essay “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage,” we can have our white Russians and learn how new shit has come to light too. And this, thankfully, is how the whole durned human comedy can keep perpetuatin’ itself.

Posted in Critical Culture, Culture Rover, Film Culture, Journalism Culture, Literary Culture | No Comments »

#348 – Snark with Spark

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

a critique of critique of critique.

Jody Rosen had two extremely fun and funny critical takedowns of other critics last week in Slate. The first burst burned down the bucolic barn of New York Times editorial-page ruralist Verlyn Klinkenborg. The second went at all the John Mayer haters out there.

Were they snarky? Yes. Were they ruining conversation? Probably not. For there was plenty of argument behind Rosen’s fairly vicious quipping. He had a point to make in each case, and he made it with a series of swift, magnificent uppercuts rather than any hits below the belt.

Listen to Rosen on Klinkenborg:

…bewilderment is his shtick. Klinkenborg’s columns are literary minstrel routines, starring the writer as an idiot savant—a bumpkin-seer who perceives the marvelous in the pedestrian and pivots to “epiphanies” that elude those of us who haven’t spent years watching sunlight dapple the snouts of woodchucks.

And Rosen on Mayer and Jonah Weiner’s “playa hating” of him:

Jonah, let’s cut to the chase: John Mayer is a douchebag. Or, rather, he’s a meta-douchebag—a guy who’s smart enough, self-aware enough, to know that he’s a douchebag, and to meditate on douchebaggery and its discontents in his music.

…It strikes me that Mayer and his ilk get an especially tough time from critics. Sensitive white boy singer-songwriters with easy-listening proclivities and Berklee College of Music-honed chops—they’re not exactly rock critic bait. Even in these poptimistic times, it’s still socially acceptable to reflexively dismiss the Mayers of the world. So I’ll say one more nice thing about him: the guy can write some tunes.

What’s wonderful about these critical put-downs is that after the initial sting, there’s plenty to ponder. Having pastoral tendencies, I have always read Klinkenborg uncritically, dreaming of life on ye old idyllic Hudson Valley farm; but I will never do that the same way again, even if I will still not “playa hate” Klinkenborg as much as Rosen does. And though I still, much to my own dismay, cannot remove my authentic core of rockist purity (I jest for those of you who have followed the great poptimist vs. rockist debates), I will give that Mayer another, more ironic listen.

The key to Rosen’s snark is that it has spark: it illuminates. It may open up wounds, but it also opens up conversation, deeper thinking, and more careful inquiry.

Posted in Critical Culture, Culture Rover, Journalism Culture, Literary Culture, Musical Culture | No Comments »

#338 – Culture Rover’s Unfamiliar Quotations

Friday, October 16th, 2009

I am serious about criticism. The critic has a moral requirement. He may write about a book from any view whatever, but he owes it to his audience and to the book to separate the book’s ideas from his own, and to follow it with a warning that his reaction to the particular work must be seen within that context. Without such a demurrer, all integrity leaves criticism, and one is merely producing propaganda.

- Norman Mailer, Letter to Max Glissen, 17 December 1951, published in the New York Review of Books, 12 February 2009

Posted in Critical Culture, Culture Rover, Literary Culture, Unfamiliar Quotations | No Comments »

#307 – Sign of the Apocalypse

Monday, April 20th, 2009

exit only, indeed.

resurrection healthcare

Posted in Critical Culture, Culture Rover, Film Culture, Popular Culture, Religious Culture, Visual Culture | No Comments »

#305 – Culture Rover’s Unfamiliar Quotations

Saturday, April 11th, 2009

containing multitudes, arts and crafts style.

Mostly, matters of any consequence are three-sided, or four-sided, or polygonal; and the trotting round a polygon is severe work for people any way stiff in their opinions. For myself, I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have contradicted myself at least three times. – John Ruskin, Inaugural Address at the Cambridge School of Art (1858)

Posted in Critical Culture, Culture Rover | 1 Comment »

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