Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 7.1
"Terminally Uncool, Unfunny, Lame"
Guest Writer: Bruce Robbins

Monday, April 14, 2014

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[The first in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on Season 7 of AMC's Mad Men, posted in collaboration with the publication of MAD MEN, MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Duke University Press, March 2013) Eds. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert A. Rushing]

 "Terminally Uncool, Unfunny, Lame"

 Written by: Bruce Robbins (Columbia)

The opening credits have been predicting Don Draper’s fall at the beginning of every episode since Mad Men began airing. Last year, at the end of season six, it looked like the moment of professional collapse had finally come. But it also looked like Don’s breakdown in front of the Hershey brass and the indefinite time-out decided for him by his partners might be balanced by some sort of moral redemption. The breakdown itself comes in the form of compulsive and disinterested truth-telling, and the final sequence of last year’s final episode involved more of the truth: Don showing his children the brothel where he was raised.

As the new season premiered last night, many viewers must have been asking themselves how this impulse would or wouldn’t take over and work itself out as the show draws to a close. To put this in a series of questions: what might moral redemption look like, if that’s what’s coming? Would it mean turning against advertising itself? When Don says (during the meeting where he self-reveals and self-destructs, but also earlier) that Hershey’s chocolate doesn’t need advertising, he is echoing a theme that the show has already raised and that may be its most fundamental link with the political vision of “the Sixties”: is the work these advertisers do worth doing at all? Is it good for us? If the answer is no, then what? We find ourselves lost in a dark forest of contradictions. Wouldn’t a rejection of all that professional success mean turning against the vice-ridden virtues by which viewers have been so charmed--turning against what got us so involved in the show to begin with? Are we ready for that? 
In particular, what would a critique of the profession mean for the gradual emergence of women into the ranks of the professionally successful? After all, that emergence has become the show’s single most emotionally compelling line of development as, season by season, the men seemed to get more and more exhausted, empty, and self-repeating. Could Don redeem himself morally without undercutting the rising trajectory of Peggy and Joan? And if their success, too, is going to be undercut, will we get the familiar and distorted logic that associates women’s achievement at work with failure and desolation in private life? I’m not sure I can survive any more of that moral.

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Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture at 25 II: Closing Roundtable
Eleanor Courtemanche

Monday, September 9, 2013

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[On September 6, 2013 the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory held the symposium "Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture at 25 II.” Below are remarks by closing roundtable participant, Eleanor Courtemanche (English)]

Mood Economy

Written by Eleanor Courtemanche (English)

A few days ago I came across the phrase “mood economy” as a way of describing how “working class youth are privatizing happiness” (the headline of an article in the Boston Globe). “Losing hope of the American Dream,” the headline continues, “a generation hopes for inner strength instead.” Sociology researcher Jennifer Silva, a postdoc at Harvard, has just documented how a whole generation has been locked out of the traditional metrics of success—-graduating from college, getting a job with benefits, marriage—-and is focusing instead on a totally different aspirational vocabulary that can be summarized as “Getting My Shit Together.” Their “definition of adulthood” is now built on “defining and conquering emotional problems, mental illness, family chaos, addiction.” Silva suggests that this focus on the self is not only the result of the pervasive influence of therapeutic language in pop culture, but it’s a response to an environment that literally won’t let them grow up.



Now, participants in a forum dedicated to rethinking Marxism are likely to see this development not as an empowering moment of agency but as a kind of pathetic petty-bourgeois backsliding, a mere symptom of the failure of individualism. But the desires of the working classes have only intermittently included hammering through abstract political tracts. Marxists have historically been better at some moods than others: better at sternness, at criticism, at exhortations to solidarity; less attentive to tears and softness, to depression, to aesthetic delight, to things that are funny. Of the many recent works on political affect, I’ll call attention to two that try to engage with these unpromising affects: Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, which links affect to the experience of precarity, of living in a state of permanent crisis that is no longer confined to a nomadic underclass; and also Ann Cvetkovich’s Depression: A Public Feeling–-although she is trying to reclaim precisely the kind of left-melancholic affect that Jodi Dean, in our conference readings from The Communist Horizon, would have us put behind us.
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Mad World on Kritik: Mad Men Season 6.13
"The Only Unpardonable Sin"
Guest Writer: Lauren Goodlad

Monday, June 24, 2013

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[The twelfth in the Unit for Criticism's multi-authored series of posts on Season 6 of AMC's Mad Men, posted in collaboration with the publication of MAD MEN, MAD WORLD: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Duke University Press, March 2013) Eds. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert A. Rushing]

"The Only Unpardonable Sin"

Written by: Lauren Goodlad English/Unit for Criticism)
The literal referent of “In Care Of” is a letter received from the District Attorney of the County of New York addressed to Miss Sally Beth Draper, “c/o Mr. Donald F. Draper.” But in a more a figurative sense, the motif of care—and of care of another—runs throughout this final episode of Mad Men’s Season 6. As the season concludes, the only care Pete exhibits for his mother’s passing is his getting his fair share of her furniture, having determined that an all-expense paid private eye to “bring [his] mother’s killer to justice” was not worth the cost. (This and the black comedy in which the scene between Pete and the SS Sunset Princess was played, left us little time to contemplate the apparent treachery of Manny—a/k/a “Marcus Constantine”—who seduces Pete’s mother while she is in his care, marries her for the money he believes she has, and then throws her over the side of a ship into shark-infested waters.)

Caring for others is not much on the mind of Manny’s friend Bob Benson, though he has taken great care to rid himself of Pete, the keeper of his secret, who now will set off for LA as a (not-so-gay) divorcé. Bob still retains the air of his enigmatic beginnings: was he a corporate spy, we had wondered? Or just an empty suit with a penchant for sucking up? Did he know Manolo was a gold-digger? Whatever else he may be, we know that Bob is a gay man more at ease in the closet than Sal Romano ever was—but with a contrived identity that clearly doubles him with Don (just like his alliterative, tri-syllabic name). Bob’s providing a handy Best Guy Friend for Joan may, perhaps, be a sincere form of care—which would make him the ultimate example of what Mad World contributor Alex Doty called the type of the “helper homosexual.” But what “In Care Of” makes entirely clear is that Bob’s stunt in Detroit—as he manipulates Pete into exposing himself as the one man in Motor City who cannot drive a stick—is the kind of maneuver we’ve seen Don pull off many times.

But was there ever a worse time to ask “What would Don Draper do?” The answer, of course, is both yes and no. Less the finale of a single season than a turning point after 77 hours of serial television, for Don, we might say, “In Care Of” marks the best of times and the worst of times. Dante scholars can debate where precisely he was throughout most of this season in the trajectory marked out by the premiere’s opening reference to Inferno: “Midway in our life’s journey/I went astray from the straight road/And woke to find myself in a dark wood.” What is clear by the end of “In Care Of,” is that Don may soon be leaving Hell and heading for Purgatorio. For Dick Whitman has, at long last, heeded the words he heard from an itinerant preacher thrown out from the whorehouse many moons ago: “The only unpardonable sin is to believe God cannot forgive you.”
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Beyond Utopia?: Response from Amanda Ciafone
“Practicing Utopology, Theorizing Praxis”

Saturday, May 26, 2012

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[On April 26 and 27, 2012, the Unit for Criticism partnered with the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities for a conference, Beyond Utopia? Art, Theory, and the Coming of “Spring.” The last of our three closing roundtable responses is by Amanda Ciafone, a professor of international studies at Macalester College]


“Practicing Utopology, Theorizing Praxis”

Written by Amanda Ciafone (Macalester College)

To begin to open up a conversation between the papers of the last two days, I’d like to use Jameson’s argument for a pedagogical operation to read the Utopian impulse rather than the praxis of Utopia, and identify some of the dialectic and agonistic approaches we’ve seen during the conference.  And then I’d like to ask, quite sincerely (and not answer), why it is some of the most powerful theorists of the contemporary moment have seen neither Utopian impulse nor praxis in the “multitudes” and “horizontality” that has emerged in the recent social movements and Middle East "springs."

“Utopia,” Jameson writes in Valences of the Dialectic , “is not a representation but an operation calculated to disclose the limits of our own imagination of the future, the lines beyond which we do not seem able to go in imagining changes in our own society and world,” except of course in the direction of dystopia and catastrophe. For Jameson, this operation, or “utopology,” is interpreting what he calls the Utopian impulse, which does not correspond to a plan or praxis, but instead “expresses Utopian desire and invests it in a variety of unexpected and disguised, concealed, distorted ways” (415).  It therefore calls for “a decipherment and a reading of Utopian clues and traces in the landscape of the real …[where even] the most noxious phenomena can serve as the repository and hiding place for all kinds of unsuspected wish-fulfillments and Utopian gratifications” (416).  These “hidden traces and signs of Utopianism that lie in wait in the world about us” are much like what Raymond Williams would call “the emergent” of the future in the present and they become more visible in the disentangling of the negative from the positive in a process like Foucault’s “genealogy,” but instead uncovering the “genealogies of the future.”
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Beyond Utopia?: Response from Jan Vanvelk
"We Are Trying to Change the World"

Friday, May 4, 2012

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A sign from Occupy Oakland, taken from Zizek's essay in The Guardian
[On April 26 and 27, 2012, the Unit for Criticism partnered with the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities for a conference, Beyond Utopia? Art, Theory, and the Coming of “Spring.” Below is the second of three closing roundtable responses from Jan Vanvelk, a visiting graduate student in literature from Illinois’ sister university, K.U. Leuven.]

"We Are Trying to Change the World"

Written by Jan Vanvelk (Literature)

On The Guardian’s website, Slavoj Žižek makes an attempt to envision the future of the Occupy Wall Street movement. His concern is that the protestors display the attitude also present in May 1968, an attitude which, although inspired by the right ideals, threatens to succumb to the alluring idea of "having a good time" rather than an unequivocal commitment to purely political resistance. Žižek acknowledges, however, that “‘capitalism’ is now clearly re-emerging as the name of the problem.” The protest movements seem to be discovering a new language, a new way to speak about problems otherwise trapped in a rhetoric that denies any extra-capitalist speaking. In opposition to a critique of the financial crisis based on personal greed and a general decline of individual morality stands the critique of the system itself. Žižek believes that it is possible to invent a language that is able to speak in the terms of such systemic critique. Therefore, art criticism – seen as an important aspect of the analysis of culture and of society’s formative role in constructing or maintaining the capitalist status quo – is charged with a double task: providing insight into these economic structures while also inventing a new language.

Criticism’s promise in this case is identical to the promise of theory. Now, do not ask me what either of these terms mean, precisely: for our present purposes, I think it will be fruitful to suggest that criticism sticks more to its "object", while "theory" tends to place more weight on the scale when it comes to general claims or patterns that are, ideally, more susceptible to a consideration of a wider range of "objects". However, in defining a "cultural object," we are always-already speaking with a crippled tongue: the restrictions of generic categorizations that rely on ideological mechanisms are tainting our "means of perception" from the very start. But, as turns out to be the case, this seems to be only a temporary set-back when it comes to critical and theoretical discourse. It is always able to recuperate exclusions (from the canon, for example) as the source of a kind of utopian power, one that nurtures the margin as the incarnated enclave of possibility itself.

Indeed, in his well-known valuation of the genre of science fiction, Fredric Jameson (following Herbert Marcuse) speaks of the utopian imagination as,
This passage appeals to "SF"’s ability to succeed by failure in the sense that it is always unable to fulfil its own promise: it will never be able to imagine the future, yet with this a priori acknowledgment comes extraordinary signifying power, the ability to articulate our own intellectual, imaginative and epistemic boundaries. This truly subliminal moment of contemplation is, in my view, also a source for concern. Theoretical or critical practice itself displays an enormous power in prefiguring its own observational limits, a power that allows the aesthetics of utopia to speak about its own boundaries, attributing to the hermeneutic extraction controlled by the utopian impulse, a potential for totalization, the possibility that it has set the terms of its own critique.



A photograph from Tahir Square, provided by Mohammed Bamyeh.
The double task of criticism entails on the one hand engaging with the discovery of the already-there, to say something about the "reality" of cultural practices. But insofar as criticism is enable to comment on the real, a normative dimension is ultimately unavoidable because the descriptive moment opens up, even promises, to supply an alternative discourse in which we could talk about politics, about the contemporary crises in our society. Whether on the level of the utopian aesthetic or on the critical-theoretical practice, the stakes with which our game – my apologies for the word – is played, only increase the political danger that our own ideological aberrations pose.

If the utopian aesthetic is not kept in check, it will make us blind precisely to the things Jameson warns us about in his article, such as the historical nature of utopian texts. If we engage with the questions of our time, as Žižek and many others have done following the Occupy movement and the events of the Arab "spring," it is of great importance to accept the necessity for a new language to be "invented", but the sheer power of our political promise that is delivered through scholarly or academic criticism all the more enforces the imperative that we scrutinize our own project rigorously. This can only be achieved, in my opinion, by reading in a truly utopian fashion, that is, “to succeed by failure”: a reading that always accepts its own hermeneutic limitations, that takes in the raw materiality of the text – and I mean "text" in the broadest possible sense. This practice, one that could just as well be called “rhetorical reading”, might be the best treatment – but never cure – for ideological aberrations we have.
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