Who Oppressing Whom?

Mike B.’s post yesterday on clapclap.org addresses some problems in leftist cultural critique that have bothered me as well: there is something disturbingly parternalistic and condescending in claiming that a certain group of people is under the influence of false consciousness, and such claims are often made with little understanding of the selected group’s actual motivations. There is certainly a well-documented tendency for some practitioners of critical theory to slide towards elitism – witness Adorno in the 1960s, with his insistence that jazz fans are somehow being lulled into acceptance of what he saw as inferior music – and while not all go that way, the tendency for critics to assume that no one could rationally like the things that they do not themselves like – in this case, it was Celine Dion – persists, and, as Carl Wilson came to realize in his investigation of Dion, it is fatal. I agree with the main drift of Mike B.’s post and I have nothing to add to it except to point the way to Isaiah Berlin’s attack on paternalistic notions of liberty, but there is a minor point of his that I would like to expand upon:

Their arguments [those of speakers at the EMP Pop Conference] 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.

There certainly is a lot of cooperation between between the corporate and government worlds, but the assumption in a lot of leftist thought is that they all form one unit whose interests are exactly those of the status quo, so that whenever there is some aspect of culture that is perceived to have a negative effect on individual or community freedom, it is assumed to be imposed willfully by this oppressive body – it’s Pynchon’s Them, basically, which, as I’ve mentioned before, is a level of paranoia that we’re not meant to aspire to. It seems like Foucault’s claim that not all power is exerted by any particular party has given way to a semi-mystical idea of a generalized opponent that gets the blame every time something happens that might restrict people’s freedom. Max Horkheimer may have made a breakthrough when he declared that the critic of culture must acknowledge the fact that he or she is also steeped in it, but I think it’s time we take this a little further: whatever persons are pulling the strings of culture, if anyone is, live within that culture just the same as the rest of us, and might be pulling each others’ strings as well. There are no puppeteers behind the curtains, and no one is following a script.

~therighthandofnixon

Maybe Partying Will Help

This entry was originally posted on the now-deceased Literature’s Next Frontier on February 8th.

As the suspense of the U.S. presidential primaries continues on unbroken, I thought I’d just drop in to remind everyone that They are watching on in amusement as we vote on which of Their puppets They will string into the White House next.

Yes, I have been reading Pynchon. And no, I’m not serious, but the problem of co-opted resistance is one that has been bothering me lately. I am currently writing a thesis about the literature of the carnival, a time in which the norms and boundaries of society are temporarily removed in favor of universal hedonism, and I can’t decide what to think – is this really a form of transgression, or does it only reinforce the social norms that return once everyone goes back to work?

Mikhail Bakhtin, who wrote one of the classic studies of carnival (or at least of Rabelais, whose work was a large part of its culture in France), thinks that carnival cannot be co-opted. Laughter, he says, will always remain a free weapon in the hands of the people. But I can’t see how laugh tracks are in any way in the people’s hands. Theodore Adorno, to pick on a particularly sad curmudgeon, argues that television comedy makes light of social inequalities to distract from their seriousness, and to keep people from feeling outrage where they rightly should. Couldn’t the carnival be seen in the same way? As a way of quelling all the people’s rebellious and transgressive urges at once in, say, one week of utter revelry, so that the rest of the year they will be docile?

It has been. The debate has been swinging in that direction since the 90s or so. But it hasn’t exactly ended. The original arguments for carnival’s power got sort of abstract after Bakhtin – Julia Kristeva writes that carnival forms are different from modern forms like television because in their language they do not allow for binary distinctions, instead letting opposites coexist. There is truth to this – the forms of parody that occurred in medieval carnival were not unilaterally negative as modern forms often are, but instead tore down and elevated at once, like insults exchanged jokingly between friends – but the way that sort of argument goes is too structuralist for the present taste. Mine too, but I still tend to agree with the conclusion even if I don’t like the argument. True dissent is possible, or at least I’d like to think so so much that I’m going to think so regardless.

But even if it’s possible, it might not happen much anymore. Kristeva agrees with Adorno that the supposed boundary-breaking we see in modern forms of humor (like, say, Family Guy) is evidence of nothing but a “law anticipating its own transgression;” in such cases, the transgression comes from the same system that makes the laws. If we accept that there is one, unified “system,” then this is certainly true. There’s where Pynchon comes in. The whole basis of his novels is the belief that everything is controlled by the same, invisible Force – both the squares and the rebels, both the Allies and the Axis. If we accept this, there can be no real escape because all the means of escape that are open to you have been specially designed to lead you right back into Their clutches. Scary.

But Pynchon writes satire. As much as I think Pynchon’s novels reflect on his times, I don’t take all the elaborate paranoid systems he constructs as anything more than grotesque absurdities. He’s not advocating that sort of thought – he’s making fun of it. I imagine he’s a bit of a paranoid himself, but I’m sure he’s painfully aware that it’s a delusion. What he’s saying with all the paranoia has more to do with our unfulfilled need for structure than with the actual order of our society. It’s more about the lack of structure in our world than anything. Of course I don’t think there’s a Them.

Even so, dissent is often corralled into a fenced-off place by one institution or another, and that must weaken its power to some extent. The obvious example is those “free-speech zones” from a few years back, but you can also think of television shows like South Park that break norms just to shock people – ultimately, this sort of comedy does nothing but underscore the norms that it breaks.

The solution, of course, is to avoid defining your new position in terms of the thing you’re trying to escape. This means that art must become ambivalent again. Art that leaves some of the thinking up to the reader can’t be filed away so easily as art that really, overtly attempts to tear things down – it’s better to let dissent flow than to crystallize it. And as for revelry, I’m all for it, but you shouldn’t just drink to forget.

~therighthandofnixon