Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Curtis, 

I wanted to let you know that I too graduated from the writing
seminars at Hopkins, just two years ago.  I also grew up in Iowa City,
where you must have spent a few years.  It's always nice to see Hopkins
folks who have been able to make a living by writing. I'd love to talk
with you about writer stuff, but unfortunately the hosts of this
conference have a preference for non-fiction, despite the plethora of
creative writers on here.  In discussing a non-fiction work that takes
a real stand on contemporary issues, there's bound to be more
discussion, but there's also going to be a lot of contention.
Thanks for sticking with this, despite it all.  
  

    
It takes more than showing up to earn respect, although I'm grateful
for the opportunity to challenge the work under discussion.

>I talk about the culture that an "educated bourgeoisie" 
>consumes in this country.  NPR, PBS, radical and
>conservative academic culture, and the technological 
>imagination. This is not "deconstructing dog food"

Okay, why the scare quotes?  Are they not really educated?  Are they
not truly bourgeois?  Why the insinuation that the class you are
criticizing is pretending to something other than what it manifestly
is?  Or if it isn't, can you not find a more apposite descriptor?

>My interest is not in the sad spectacle of the 
>lumpenconsumer, nor with the evil of the Right (I leave 
>that to Franken, God help us), but with liberal, 
>well-educated, rather affluent culture.  

As I argued earlier, mediocrity infects every class.  It is not a
novel idea that most educated people have no more meaningful training
then how to game the system, obtain a credential, and pass themselves
off as qualified.  As an educator, surely you have firsthand knowledge
of this phenomenon.  It may also be argued that relative affluence is
no measure of merit, either inasmuch as so much of it accrues to people
who come from affluent families, or enjoy good fortune out of
proportion to their contribution.  Finally, profession of liberal
convictions is, in itself, nearly meaningless.  The label itself
subsumes a multitude of sins, and has been a moving target for over a
century.  At the end of the day, these people *are*, for the most part,
mediocrities, and the cultural and cognitive artifacts they consume
are calculated to appeal to mediocre tastes.  Analysis of this
segment's preferences in creative content is indeed deconstructing
dogfood, although I'll concede it is not a comprehensive evaluation of
the entire pet nutrition industry.

>I suppose in a word I argue that that culture is a sort of 
>fraud, and a dangerous fraud at that.

And yet your book gives no clue as to who is perpetrating this fraud,
nor what their reward for doing so is?  You indict capitalism as if
this were a willful, malevolent force, and its practicioners helpless
victims of a hideous compulsion.  Later in your book, you invoke
mysticism as an antidote.  Are you arguing that an economic system is
Satan?  It's difficult to tell; you never pull the curtain back and
charge "j'accuse!"

>The book moves on two motors: close reading of texts 
>(Saving Private Ryan for example) and satirical ridicule 
>directed at the absurd (once the readings have revealed 
>the absurdity). 

This is, in my judgment, the weakest joist in your platform.  Your
deconstructions of SPR, Fresh Air, and, of all things, MTV, are frankly
laughable.  They reek of projection and show the stitches of clumsy
rhetorical surgery.  You're certainly entitled to your observations,
but I am also entitled to enjoy a great deal of unintended mirth at
your convolutions.  That you should presume to ridicule these artifacts
after making such a paltry case for their absurdity betrays an
intellectual immaturity that provokes as much pity as revulsion.

>It's not that the argument is fiendishly subtle

Ever the master of understatement, eh White?
  

    
For the record, I didn't intend my post to be confrontational in the
least, and I apologize, Curtis, if it seemed to be. I was sincere in my
thanking you for being here.
  

    

Alan, a side observation:  Perhaps

  >scare quotes

is a little bit off-point in the back and forth within a topic, since you 
do a very similar thing using the ascii text convention of the greater- 
than sign and full sentances to do something similar in your own response.  
Just want to encourage you not to get sucked into grammarian trivia and 
jabbing rather than expressing a more interesting core argument, whatever 
that turns out to be.   (Aw, sheesh, now I'm posting about completely
meaningless variations in quotation conventions, too. How'd that happen?)    
  

    

It just bugs me.  It's a stylistic shorthand for "what bullshit".  It
annoys me when Reuters (a repeat offender) does it, and it annoys me
when White does it.  I'm not really quarreling with the semiotic
indolence so much as I want to challenge the underlying inference that
the referent is bullshit.

In any event, it's a tangential objection, but one that asserted
itself early in the reading and persisted throughout the volume.  I'm
just saying that if you want to convince a skeptical reader, insulting
his intelligence is a poor enticement.
  

    
Point taken.   Now, about the content......
  

    
good pseud rik!

<sorry for the topic drift>
  

    
Terry:  I think that I mean what Homer Simpson means when he says,
"Doh, can't somebody else do it?"  I mean that we are too content to
live lives provided for us by corporations.  In a world in which you
can't go anywhere in the US without feeling that you're in the same
place (this applies mostly to mid-sized cities) because every Main St.
is the same and every strip mall lining the route into town has the
same eateries etc. and the radio channels are all  owned by Clear
Channel and the media is all owned by the same six megacorps the food
is all grown by the same farm industries in the same depleted soil etc.
 We have insufficient ownership of our sense of place, being, and in a
word World.  We live in a corporate life world rather than one that we
can be said to have participated in the construction of.  It was done
for us.  Axon of course will object that I've not proven this point,
that I'm only making a claim.  But he's wrong to think that that's how
thinking proceeds.  I locate my argument within a  tradition of
critique going back to Hegel, including Marx but insistently assuming
the work of the Frankfurt school, esp. Adorno.  I broaden the context a
bit in including Schlovsky, Paul Ricoeur and a few others but I don't
hide my intellectual tradition.  To buy my argument it is necessary to
think that the earlier critical work of those thinkers is legitimate. 
My purpose is not to persuade conservatives that they ought to be
revolutionaries.  My purpose is to  provide self-understanding and
potential strategies for people who see the legitimacy of the tradition
of Western Marxist critique.  You don't have to be a Marxist to
participate in this tradition; anyone who has an issue with capitalism
especially in its corporate and international mode is working in this
tradition of thought whether they know it or not. Of course, that will
never satisfy Axon and his ilk who will jump on your use of "scare
quotes" on the one hand and then ask you to prove that anyone anywhere
is impoverished.  "Why, they just are too dumb to find their way to my
glorious banquet where Kurt Elling is at the piano bar and the brie is
double cream."  Like I said, Axon, you and I have nothing finally to
say to each other.  We're antagonists.

Coiro:  I didn't at all read your post as confrontational.  Actually,
I don't have a problem with confrontation.  I'd just like it to be
related to the book and what I actually was interested in arguing.

Pineflint:  I think I do occasionally create scenarios that are a bit
black and white.  I think it's important to do fundamental sorting of
who you imagine is on your side (whatever that means) and who not. 
Pity the fool who imagines that this sorting of sides is just too
inexact and impure to bother with.  We should try to think our world or
our world is plenty ready to think us (that's my point).  That means
that Seabrook gets sorted into the "he pretends to be doing critique
while in fact he's really capitulating and happy" camp of
collaborators.  My book's particularity comes in the close readings,
which (pace Axon) provide support for the broader contentions.  

I think what I do is a sort of popular deconstruction with Seabrook. 
He would seem to stand outside of consumer culture, but he is in fact
part of its motor.  I deconstruct the opposition and show the two to be
one.  At that point I feel free to have fun at his expense in the best
tradition of 18th century "word slaying" (actually, Axon, putting
words in quotes like that means "as it is said" or "as they said," in
this case Pope, Swift, Dryden etc.).  I ridicule the absurd.  Some
people are troubled by that aspect of the book.  Others find the humor
tonic.  Slavoj Zizek has referred to my "malevolent irony."  He
approves.

I think I agree with you about academics.  I've been an academic for
25 years (and that doesn't count graduate school) and I have to say
that they're some of the least interesting and certainly the least
curious people I know of.  Not universally but...  This book is not
written for academics.  Its readers and "fans" (now the quotes mean
something like "I use that word self-consciously") are smart, curious,
serious people in all sorts of places.  One of the things that I'm
happy about in this book process is the really surprising number of
people who have emailed me and sent books they've written, art works,
cds etc.  It's been very heartening to find that so many people were
looking for a rhetoric of refusal like I have tried to provide.  (You
know, Axon, you make me want to put quotes around everything.)

nukem777 (Geez that's a scary pseudonym.  Is that the apocalypse that
comes after the devil's?)  I'd prefer to define the "social
imagination".  It is not limited to the arts.  It is all of the ways in
which human invention contributes to the construction of the human
world.  it is also the critical engagement with the human world as it
exists (here in these theoretically united states).  I use
Wittgenstein's metaphor of a fly in a bottle wanting to know what the
bottle looks like to explain the critical (and utopic) function of the
imagination.  The fly must imagine a place outside of the bottle from
which he can speculate on the bottle.  This is a utopic and critical
place.  it is the place from which we judge the culture.  I suppose it
is also the place where we can propose a different bottle.

Dwight:  Dear old JHU.  I'd be happy to chat elsewhere.  I'm at
ckwhite@ilstu.edu.  

Axon:  As for my "intellectual immaturity" provoking "pity and
revulsion" (this time the quote means that I'm quoting you).  I know
guys like you.  They're the guys that have spent their lives getting
good at something like chess and when you play chess with them they
kick your ass and you hate them for beating you and you hate the
halitosis coming from their side of the table but it's finally all sort
of a bad John Houseman imitation.  "We earned our smug superiority the
hard way.  We just assumed it."  But you roll back the thin veneer of
their claim ("I can beat you at chess!") and they're just Hollow Men.
  

    
>you and I have nothing finally to say to each other.  We're 
>antagonists.

Not quite. I am an agonist, you are an antagonist (or, if you like,
vice versa).  In the end, you and I *must* speak to each other, else
it's just choir practice.

>"Why, they just are too dumb

I think this mischaracterizes my argument.  I don't think they're dumb
so much as I think they are incurious.  They *are* content with their
corporate existence, in large part because it is a reasonably
satisfying one if you are not overburdened by curiosity.

My principal quarrel is with your claim that the people in this
society are denied any choice in the matter.  In fact there is more
diversity, invention, dissent, novelty, and creative risk-taking in
general circulation than ever before, and it continues to be
increasingly accessible and affordable.

The examples you cite, such as Saving Private Ryan and Fresh Air, are
just a couple of items from a very long menu of content options
available.  I suspect there are people for whom SPR is sort of cultural
slumming; entertaining but not very meaningful.  Popcult eye candy
with few troubling moral ambiguities to sort out.  In short, cinematic
dogfood.  At the same time, there are folks out there for whom FA is
challenging, slightly over their heads, but probably worth their time
to expose themselves to writers and musicians and filmmakers they've no
knowledge of.

Your criticism of SPR is that Spielberg is brainwashing people into
accepting killing as the only safe strategy in a threatening world. 
This presumes that no one, except possibly Curtis White, can examine
this narrative, recognize the ethical dilemmas, and sort them out for
themselves.  Spielberg may be advocating a particular philosophy, or he
may merely be cranking the handle on the dog food grinder, because the
audience just eats it up.

Fresh Air, OTOH, you slam because the producers do not scruple to book
only those artists whose semiotic payloads conform to your moral
imperatives.  That's why there's an off switch on your radio.  You
don't like it (and sometimes I really don't care for the guest), *turn
it off*.  But I have to tell you that the assertion that Gross'
interviews are cultural backwash because she includes trivial and banal
subjects is insulting to anyone who has figured out how to operate a
tuning knob.

Corporate culture is not the only content on the shelves.  In every
class and at every level of educational attainment and critical
discrimination, though, it has the benefit of being predictably
satisfying, cost-effective, and conveniently obtained.  You turn on the
teevee and you getcher HBO.  You turn on the radio and you get the
poptart of the month.  Browse Barnes & Noble and get the New York Times
Bestseller list, marked down 30%.  It can certainly *seem* as though
the culture as a whole has become a shallow, homogenized, default,
commercial sludge.

But it does not take that much more effort to find all sorts of
interesting, challenging, risk-indulgent, frankly *scary* work.  Far
more than a decade ago, and much of it a google and three mouseclicks
away.  You do not let this burgeoning trend intrude upon your
anticorporate tantrum, and that seems, if not dishonest, at least
negligent.
  

    
>Do you find Normal conducive to creative work?

Ha!

(well, there was the guy who put the "Aids Kills Fags Dead" sign in
his dorm window about 15 years ago, eh Prof. White? He created havoc,
if nothing else.)
  

    

> "We earned our smug superiority the hard way.  We just assumed it."

That made me laugh. Thanks, Curtis, and hang in there!
  

    

> My principal quarrel is with your claim that the people in this society are
> denied any choice in the matter.  In fact there is more diversity, inven-
> tion, dissent, novelty, and creative risk-taking in general circulation
> than ever before, and it continues to be increasingly accessible and affor-
> dable.

That may be true, but I think it is also true that the mainstream culture
grows and dominates, and the mainstream corporate providers of culture like
it that way.  Greil Marcus said years ago that the music business would be
happy to put out just one record a year if everybody in the country bought
it.

There's great stuff out there for those who seek it.  But it is equally true
that our great corporate cultural exports tend not to be the great stuff.
  

    
>it is equally true that our great corporate cultural exports tend not
>to be the great stuff.

True enough; mediocrity on the supply side mirrors the same on the
demand side.  White argues that the market for art has been brainwashed
and manipulated by a corporate media conspiracy to accept, even
demand, banal, formulaic, consistently conformist content, whereas my
observation is that as some content consumers have avidly sought more
challenging, subversive, inventive material, the marketplace has
responded by furnishing it, while pioneering new models for
collaboration, distribution, production, promotion, and compensation in
the process.

I think White's quarrel is not with the Middle Mind, which he argues
is contrived by a corporatist agenda for its own convenience, but
rather with the Middle Class, which, despite its having acquired a
portfolio of appropriately liberal social values, is best suited to
accepting and defending a status quo in which it enjoys comfortable
privileges.  It listens to NPR, e.g., because it is safely to the left
of center, and resonates with the liberal impulses of the graying
boomers, but not so far as to actually disrupt the Middle Class cocoon
of paid medical benefits, equity appreciation, 401k/IRA retirement
plans, or a criminal justice system that gives them a false but
credible sense of personal safety.

In this I agree with White; the vast majority of media/content
consumers in this country, even among the well-educated and affluent,
are uncritical, and are vulnerable to sophisticated semiotic influence.
 But this is not new, nor news, and thus the crisis, or state of alarm
he so breathlessly reports, has no urgency.  Not only is the sky not
falling, but we've known it for awhile.

In fact, alternatives (to what might be described as centralized
content) are emerging organically, not in response to clarion calls and
alarmist rhetoric, but as a natural consequence of the creative and
innovative impulse amplified by inquisitive (as contrasted to
acquisitive) demand.  One of the most encouraging trends in the
migration to digital production/distribution/exhibition models is the
emphasis on meaning over artifact.  The force animating this
transformation is not a desire to own the physical form factor, but
merely to appreciate -- enjoy, critique, even modify -- the content
itself.  The presages an evolution, not in consciousness, but rather of
economics.
  

    
And crucially, great stuff is often pushed out by crap, thanks to
technology, the consolidation of corporate power, and economies of
scale. Need I point to Wal-Mart? Need I point to Clear Channel? The
degradation of civic culture is demonstrably shown every time an
independent merchant is put out of business. There are demonstrably
fewer independent radio stations. Choices are fewer, and what's left to
choose among is, demonstrably, crappier all the time. And even if
there were good choices for the discerning among us, I think it's a
fair complaint that the culture as a whole suffers from the
proliferation of crap. 

This is why I don't understand the "let the 'dull normals' have their
shiny things, I've got plenty for my own" mindset. Don't you want more
choice in radio stations, don't you want nicer buildings, better retail
service, less expansive parking lots, a thriving, livable downtown?
These things are yours as much as anybody's. 
  

    
slip.
  

    

>Don't you want more choice in radio stations, don't you 
>want nicer buildings, better retail service, less expansive 
>parking lots, a thriving, livable downtown?

I'm not sure this taxonomy is comprehensive, but sure, of course.  But
I'm getting more choice in radio stations (lots of great new
broadcasters on the net, the satellite, etc.) just to take one example.
 The problem is not that there isn't more choice, but that most people
aren't interested in that choice.  What has changed is that it is
possible to sustain these alternatives *without* mass market
acceptance.

I enjoy a very livable downtown in my medium-sized college town, in
large part because Wal-Mart and the rest of the big boxes have created
a Massive Retail Hell in southeastern Chico that draws all the mindless
consumers *away* from the village center, so we can have a thriving,
inclusive, engaged market commons distinguished by few pattern vendors
(in fact, the Chevy's downtown recently closed; the only chain in the
whole downtown is one lonely Starbucks, and the other cafes are really
beating its time), lots of independent businesses, arts and crafts
stores, etc., and all of it overlaid by a growing resident artists'
colony.
  

    
All:  I've been thinking about the politics of what I'm trying to do,
having signaled a certain affinity to the enlightenment and debt to
Hegel.  One way to think this politics is in terms of the relation of
the "universal" that preceeded the Enlightenment (we were all subjected
to the universality of the feudal state and the church) and the
subjectivity that we achieved through multiple fronts in the
Enlightenment.  The Englightenment created the idea of the subject as
the focus of a kind of suffering and entitled to grievances and
deserving of justice that we can find in Mozart as well as Kant.  One
way to think the problem with the corporate life world of the present
is that its tendency is to return us to a new form of the old
universality while claiming, of course, to be all about freedom of
personal choice.  (We can all choose a car that expresses our
personality, but at the end of the day our delusion is clear: we choose
among absurdly limited choices all made in advance by corporations. 
Which is why the art critic Dave Hickey likes what low riders in LA do
to their cars.  They detourn Detroit with lights, paint, and hydraulics
in the chasis.)  Another Hegelian thought here is the difference
between being in itself and being for itself.  In one way what we want
is nothing other than what I call the Middle Mind if we understand that
for Hegel redemption is in the fall.  Until I called it the Middle
Mind the Middle Mind existed "in itself."  Once I'd called it the
Middle Mind it was obliged, to a limited degree, to exist "for itself".
 Now that we understand through critique the thing we are unhappy with
we don't need to posit something other and superio to that thing we
critique (mass culture).  The spirit of critique itself provides that
something other and opens the field--now that we are conscious,
functioning "for ourselves"--for what I call the imagination.  So what
I want instead of the Middle Mind is in a sense implicit in the book
itself.  The book performs its own idea of utopia.  Simply naming the
Middle Mind destroys its privileged existence "for itself" beneath the
radar of critique. Critique is already an assertion of subjectivity
against the universality of the corporate life world (in which we all
vegetate to Clear Channel).

Sorry to inject Hegel and not sorry.  One of my contentions in the
book is that one of our national dysfunctions is that certain ideas
that we need most are unavailable to us because they are ghettoized in
the academy.  I don't think there's anything innately impossible to
understand in the Hegelian thought I've just tried to provide. 
Unfamiliar, maybe.  But that passes quickly for humans.  That's to our
credit.  We need to do more with that capacity in ourselves if we are
to survive the next century.  What are the odds of that under the reign
of the imagination of corporate capital in its international mode? 
What are the odds that we survive the next century without a major
nuclear event?

Thanks to all for the posts.  Special shout out to Dan who recalls a
good time in the ISU Senate.  Things haven't been that interesting here
in years.
  

    
So, to go all practical in antithesis of your theoretical turn, how might it
come about that ordinary people would succeed in naming The Middle Mind and
thereby depriviliging it?

And how does corporate culture prevent that? Is it by bombarding us, from
early on, with so much . . . "content"? (Scare quotes to indicate irony,
perhaps . . .  :)  emoticon just for the sheer hell of it. No. Enough meta.)
  

    
Boy, nothing like a little Hegel to dry up the old conversation!  You
gotta love the guy!

Bumbaugh: In practical terms, we are habituated to a theater, a
spectacle in which the opposition of the commercial and the
non-commercial, the liberal and the conservative are paraded before us
daily, routinely.  (I've written on the Franken/Coulter theater
recently, but it doesn't have a home yet.) So, without effective
self-reflection, Terry Gross and Fresh Air can pass for something
different from commercial fodder.  But here's what Gross does: she
flattens distinctions.  She is part of the death of discrimination. 
Barry Manilow and Christoph Eschenbach are all the same to her.  It's
all good, as they say.  But good for what?  It's all good for
commodity.  Finally Fresh Air like any commercial program is about
product and marketing.  (In the book I add a critique on her tendency
to turn to the personal in conversations with artists making her
interest in the arts finally sensational.  That's why she's a schlock
jock.)  Anyway, by creating this notion of the Middle Mind and finding
Terry Gross part of it, you can't listen to her anymore in the same
way.  Many people have told me this after reading the essay or the
book.  "You've ruined the show for me!"  Usually they're glad for that.
 So that in itself IS the change we ought to want.  That spirit of
critique that McLuhan spoke of in the Mechanical Bride.  But there is
more.  Debunking Fresh Air's "otherness" (its difference from the
commercial radio and TV interview programs; think Baba Wawa) opens the
field to possibility.  First, you start looking for the "real"
interview program (I've found quite a few during the promotion of this
book; check the Paula Gordon show in Atlanta; check Michael
Silverblatt's Bookworm in Santa Monica); second, maybe someone actually
creates their own show! (Like the David Byrne song "Found a Job" in
which a family makes its own TV shows.) That's been Pacifica Radio's
purpose for decades.  

So critique is the key and the treasure.  But it also opens the field.
 What needs to happen is for that "for itself" consciousness to become
broader and deeper socially.  Right now its the same rather sad "core
audience" (as my publisher puts it) of maybe a couple hundred thousand 
potential reader/thinker/actors. Just enough to lose every
presidential election for the next century. I don't know what will
increase that  community.  All I know is that I'll talk to anyone
because for me that's part of what feeling alive is about.  And I like
feeling alive.  We all should.  Even if the rest of the culture feels
like it's going into meltdown (someone recently called it "creeping
fascism").
  

    
Some people can take Hegel, and some, Kant.
  

    

> here's what Gross does: she flattens distinctions.  She is part of the
> death of discrimination.  Barry Manilow and Christoph Eschenbach are all
> the same to her.

Where does a notion like this come from, and how do you back it up?  I'm
sorry, but it makes no sense to me.
  

    
(concurring slippage)

When you say Fresh Air is "part of the death of discrimination" and
"flattens distinctions", it sounds like you're advocating a system in
which privileged critics tell listeners what they should like.  Why is
that Terri Gross's job?  Shouldn't listeners be deciding that for
themselves?
  

    
the interrogative "what were you thinking?" comes to mind.  the
important questions go unasked and (more often) unanswered.  why
doesn't anyone in mainstream media with any power think that we should
hold people accountable for their statements and actions?  the oj
prosecution comes to mind...  
  

    
Terry Gross makes some great choices as to guests and she does good,
probing questions.  I think she's part of the solution, not part of the
problem.  I just don't see her as flat and undiscriminating.  Isn't her
treating Manilow and Eschenbach the same part of her journalistic
objectivity?
  

    
I could buy into the flattening of distinctions if she asked the same
questions of each.    But she doesn't.