"Who is This 'We' That Has Yet to Sing in Our Already Too Familiar land? A Response to Larry Grossberg"
Guest Writer: Robert Mejia

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

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A frame from Erykah Badu's video "Window Seat" (2010) 

 [On Friday March 2, Lawrence Grossberg spoke at a CAS MillerComm lecture hosted by the Institute for Communications Research. In the following post guest blogger Rober Mejia describe Grossberg's lecture while also discussing the keynote lecture at the March 2-3 Institute of Communications Research 2012 Alumni & Friends Reunion Conference]


"Who is This 'We' That Has Yet to Sing in Our Already Too Familiar Land? A Response to Larry Grossberg" 





Written by Robert Mejia (Institute of Communications Research) 

The affective investment Larry Grossberg has had in the path of Cultural Studies should not go unrecognized. As the only U.S. student to have studied at both the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (under Stuart Hall) and the Institute of Communications Research (under James Carey), Grossberg took direct part in an intellectual exchange that was just beginning to occur in the late-1960s. His name is associated with several of the most significant publications and conferences in the history of cultural studies, including Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988 [conference in 1983]) and Cultural Studies (1991 [conference in 1990]), and he has continued to operate as a significant intellectual force through his long tenure as editor of Cultural Studies (1990-Present) and, most recently, through his publication of Cultural Studies in the Future Tense (2010). 

It goes without saying that the field of contemporary cultural studies is indebted to the early and ongoing work of Larry Grossberg. And yet, though I am fond of much of what Grossberg writes, including the selections we read from his recent book, I cannot help but wonder who the “we” is in the “how can we sing—in a strange land?” And for whom is this land strange? 

Interestingly enough, Aisha Durham gave a related lecture on the following day called,“Black to the Future: Old School Lessons for a New Hip Hop Generation.” Like Grossberg, Durham questioned the possibility for alternative politics in our contemporary moment. In her case the question was less “how can we sing?” than why do so many fail to hear those who have already begun singing? Rephrasing the question as such allows us to complicate the main suggestions touched on during Grossberg’s lecture: 
  • We should develop rigorous and theoretically consistent models. 
  • We should find means for contemporary counter-culture to enter the popular. 
  • We are not yet pessimistic enough to undertake the work necessary for grasping the complexity of our contemporary political moment. 







A second frame from Erykah Badu's "Window Seat" (2010)
Theoretical Consistency

Grossberg characterized the work of much of contemporary critical theory as “opportunistic” in substituting the theorist’s own politics for methodological rigor. His claim is that cultural studies (or more generally the academic leftwing) has criticized dominant knowledge paradigms such as science only to uphold the authority of those same paradigms whenever it became politically expedient to do so. This methodological inconsistency, he believes, has played into the hands of conservative politics, while the postmodern destabilization of the “real” has made it difficult to act in the name of ethical political action. Although Grossberg’s concern is relevant, I am uncertain if “we” have all had equal ability or desire to operate so opportunistically. 

I am reminded of Barbara Christian’s The Race for Theorywhich expresses concern that the very moment at which “the literature of blacks, women of South America and Africa, etc.” were beginning to receive significant national and international attention is when this “overtly ‘political’ literature was being preempted by a new Western concept proclaiming that reality does not exist.” Is Christian part of the “we” referred to in Grossberg’s talk? The problem with such uncritical use of the pronoun is that it often means some combination of White, Male, Western, Middle-to-Upper-Class, able-bodied, Academic Professional, etc. 

Entering the Popular 

Asking about whom the “we” stands for in the talk’s title matters in terms of Grossberg’s suggestion that contemporary counter-culture is in need of a means through which to politically engage the popular. The insinuation of this claim, however, betrays the combination of the “we” that he imagines as constituting the popular; for, as Durham suggested in her talk, many populations have not stopped singing. Rock-and-roll was influenced by African American artists from the south, such as Muddy Waters. Hence, it could be argued that what “we” conceive of as counter-culture was at least a partial cooptation of radical politics by much less radical (and, in many cases, overtly commercial) interests. In general, I agree with Grossberg’s contention regarding the limits of an all-or-nothing conception of politics; however, I still believe that it is worth noting that it seems as though “counter-culture” is often recognized as existing only when white populations participate.


Matt and Kim in "Lessons Learned" (2009)
This assumption, too, illuminates the significance of Durham’s lecture, for her analysis of the reception of Erykah Badu’s “Window Seat” illustrates that the question is not so much “how can we sing” but, rather, why can this “we” not yet hear those who have already begun to sing? For those unfamiliar with “Window Seat,” the music video features Badu walking through the streets of Dallas, singing lyrics such as “I need you to want me / need you to miss me / I need your attention” as she slowly disrobes. Durham explains that Badu’s music video was inspired by Matt and Kim’s music video for “Lessons Learned.” Whereas Matt and Kim’s nudity in “Lessons Learned” was meant to convey an idea of “just not giving a fuck anymore” and resulted in an apology from the police officers on scene who attempted to break up the filming, Badu was cited for disorderly conduct and her actions generated a significant amount of controversy. As Durham suggests, the question of singing is not so much a matter of production as it is one of the policing of consumption—that is the “we” who refuse to see those who have already begun to sing. 

Optimism of the Will, Pessimism of the Intellect 

I will conclude this response to Larry Grossberg’s presentation with a discussion of pessimism. As his lecture came to an end, Paula Treichler asked how “we” can find the political courage to act in a moment so overwhelmed with pessimism about the possibility of any significant effect (in the face of events such as Citizens United). Grossberg’s response was that “we” are not yet pessimistic enough—and here, I would agree. To the extent that the “we” formulated by Grossberg refers to those in possession of some semblance of privilege—whether real or imagined—I do not think that many of those of his intended audience yet carry the sense of desperation needed to undertake the scholarly work necessary to contribute to a larger—i.e., beyond tenure—problem. This is not to propose a false binary between academic work and political or any other kind of work; rather, I suggest that too often, graduate students and faculty are taught to think in terms of interesting questions as opposed to necessary questions. Although interesting questions have a place in the academy, and are not always separate from those of necessary questions, the stance taken matters. 

In other words, what is at stake if one is lazy when engaging with an intellectual question—what is at stake? Tenure? No. For we all know that a wrong published answer is worth more than the correct, but unpublished, answer when the question is one of tenure. But when the questions are those of how cuts to Women, Infants and Children (WIC) funding will affect your sister and nephew, or how the economic recovery is affecting your father, and how much you can afford to help support them on a graduate student’s salary, then you had better be damn right when answering your questions—because in moments such as these, one does not have the luxury of getting it wrong and still being right; one must live with the consequences. 


Until “we,” whomever they may be, understand this—understand that some questions are more than just questions, but rather a matter of life—then “we” will continue to produce interesting questions for the tenured (or not) faculty to ponder, but “we” will fail to ask the questions and produce the answers that are needed at this particular moment.

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Dr. Aisha Durham and Amanda Murphyao for their feedback and support in the writing of this response.
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12/9 Author's Roundtable 2: Dana Polan, Julia Child's The French Chef
Guest Writer: Charles Byrne

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

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[On Thursday, December 9, the Unit for Criticism held the second of its Fall 2010 Author’s Roundtables. Dana Polan discussed his forthcoming Duke UP book, Julia Child's The French Chef. In our previous post we published responses by James Hay, Larry Schehr and Jing Jing Chang.]

The difference she made
Written by Charles Byrne (Philosophy)

Dana Polan’s talk on Julia Child focused on “the difference that she made” (the title of first chapter of his forthcoming book). Hearing last Thursday’s discussion and reading the two chapters available to us for the roundtable, I realized that the “difference” was a pretty substantial one.

Polan smartly ties Child’s “difference” into an impressive array of the cultural viscera of the 1960s and 70s. The discussion on Thursday repeatedly returned in various ways to Child’s “liminal” status but the chapters investigate a number of complex issues relating to Child’s place in history including, for example, the evolution of cooking shows; the division between “low” and “high” cultural artifacts; the place of public broadcasting; and the connection to fans. Child was “a liminal or transitional figure between worlds and ways of life,” in several ways including the food she chose to cook and help popularize; the structure of her TV show, The French Chef; and her own stand-out personality.

Child’s choice of French cuisine was tied up with her own experiences in France. But she took it upon herself to introduce ordinary Americans to the fare because she saw that what appealed to her in France – old world care and passion directed toward food preparation – pushed back against the increasing mechanization, commercialization, and haste in food preparation in the States, tied as it was partly to changing women’s roles (culminating, perhaps, in Peg Bracken’s I Hate to Cook Book in 1960). French cuisine was also making inroads in American culture, but was generally signified by “imperious,” intimidating spectacles like the French restaurant: Polan referred us to the 1953 I Love Lucy episode “The French Revue,” where Lucy, Ricky, Ethel, and Fred are unable to read the menus.

Respondent Lawrence Schehr pointed out, too, that historically, there has been less sizable French emigration to the US, so French cuisine seems more mysterious. For someone from the American upper class like Child, a more mainstream ethnic cooking, such as Italian, might seem somewhat vulgar – working class, garlic-infused, pungent. French cuisine, on the other hand, “is about uplift.” Still, Child was also practical in her suggestions (e.g., she allowed the use of canned stock, but only as long as spices were added). “Child brings French into America,” Polan noted, “but also America into the cuisine.” And she encouraged her viewers to believe that the French code could be conquered, that “failure is built in, but eventually you’ll succeed”; “if I can do it, you can,” she constantly reminded her viewers. Seen from today’s lens, Child’s cusine packs a horrifying caloric load, with single recipes including whole sticks of butter, cream, eggs, cheese and meat; on the other hand, Child used “ whole,” fresh, natural ingredients where possible, which certainly qualify as current “healthy” impulses.

The French Chef was filmed during a period of significant change–1963 to 1973– in television. Child’s show transitioned from black-and-white to color in the late 1960s. While far from the first cooking show – there were “hundreds” of cooking shows before hers, Polan noted – Child’s show was a new and vital force on the scene, and not only because of her personality. In fact, it seems to me that it took some time for Child to warm into the “boisterous,” “joyous” role that Polan and many others embrace; her earliest episodes show a far more sober and constrained Julia Child. When she pitched the show to public television, Child wanted it to be shot from the first-person point of view. While this idea was rejected, there were at least occasional overhead shots in the show that are suggestive of the first-person. The show itself offered far more movement than was typical; Child herself moved a great deal, rather than standing rooted behind one counter. The show would end with her procession to the dining room with the finished dish, which was actually consumed, unlike other cooking shows of the time, which rarely displayed the pleasures of eating - not to mention tasting along the way, which Child did often, to the horror of some of her germ-obsessed viewers). Her show offered touches of drama and comedy, as well as education.

Perhaps most importantly, the show managed competing needs. As a cooking show, it was necessarily utilitarian (Ernie Kovacs’s Deadline for Dinner, mentioned by Polan, is a possible exception to this rule), but Child made it entertaining and offered unpredictable touches such as dancing chickens. The show was shot live, but heavily planned, which resulted in an overall relative smoothness but also featured bungled camera cuts and cooking mistakes, such as her famous potato pancake mis-flip. The show is chronologically straightforward, but with limited “cheats” of cooked and finished recipes (offering a “glimpse of utopia” to viewers, as Polan puts it). Ultimately, The French Chef was both practical and entertaining, and while it operated under standard cooking show constraints, it was interesting enough to a figure like Lenny Lipton to be considered avant-garde (Polan referred us to David Bordwell’s conception of "sparse cinema"). Her show helped make the burgeoning PBS, Polan advised us, into that national broadcasting vehicle formed from numerous local National Educational Television (including our own WILL).

Respondent James Hay usefully pressed our standard conception of a benign PBS, pointing out that, while largely motivated to offer more substantive, educational fare to counter the increasing commercialization of the 1950s and 60s and the perceived dumbing-down of TV, this pushback against TV as “vast wasteland” was also strongly tied to upper-class white concerns about a degraded, vulgar culture. Did PBS valorize upper-class white elites who disdained TV? Child certainly has to be seen as part of a movement with mixed motivations, conscious or not. Hay also suggests that, despite Child’s own repugnance toward commercials or brand placement, the educational television movement of which she was part has been commodified into the explosion of today’s so-called lifestyle channels (Food Network, HGTV, etc). Child’s pasted-over product labels have morphed into Martha Stewart Omnimedia and Rachael Ray Nutrish pet food.

Polan doesn’t disagree, although he insisted that Child remains a mediating figure among all of these concerns. Unlike Rachael Ray, who can wear a cashmere sweater while cooking, Child’s show involved you in the whole process of cooking by including spills and missteps. It is also hard not to notice the seemingly inevitable sexualization of some of the most popular female cooking stars of today: Rachael Ray poses for FHM,“in short-shorts with an exposed midriff, licking chocolate off a big wooden spoon”; Nigella Lawson prepares herself for a late-night date with her “Caramel Croissant Pudding,” which she takes to bed. Child serves as someone more clearly mediating traditionally masculine and feminine roles, since her height and forcefulness are often read as masculine. Her history also shows a well-educated woman who served in espionage duties during WWII, married later than average, had no children, and enjoyed socializing and drinking. She “got men in the kitchen,” as one audience member pointed out, which was a great delight to her, not only because she trained with men in Le Cordon Bleu in Paris (despite the school’s initial resistance), but also because she was often dismissive of “housewifery” and what she saw as female flightiness in the kitchen.

For someone like Betty Friedan, The French Chef might have been seen as part of the old order, but for Child, it was an “opening up” for women who were willing to devote themselves to the task in a committed fashion. According to Polan, Child teaches us that cooking, often seen as a routine, trivial, but necessary task, can become one of life’s important projects. What makes a woman, or man, cannot be reduced to the simple fact that one is in a kitchen; it has to do with how one approaches life. This idea was one attempted moral of the project, and ensuing film, Julie and Julia.

At the beginning of his book, Polan notes that Child’s voice is hard to pin down: “Is it a breathless warble? is it a lilting and lifting vibration?. . . is it vulgar or marked rather by upper-crust emphases that resonate with the speaker’s social origin in the moneyed world of white-bread Pasadena, California?” French but also American, Child was “big, boisterous, strapping, visceral, messy,” midwestern even. Her American melting-pot-background might explain her complicated political status. The French Chef spanned some rather politically fertile years, but “you could see her show without seeing anything about the 60s,” Polan remarked.

Child remains a liminal figure. Is bringing upper-crust cooking to so-called ordinary Americans a radical act or an act encouraging upper-class striving? Is she merely the embodiment of the elite, or is she helping to make the elite accessible? Commenting from the audience, Lauren Goodlad suggested that having “no way to disentangle” the many, often contradictory sides of Julia is part of the very reason “why there’s such affection and nostalgia for her.” Polan calls Child a mediator, someone who “held together tensions.” Until or unless Jetsonian food pills and astronaut ice cream overtake us, cooking and eating will always be with us, and Child offers a view to finding meaning in them. This is something we have control of in a life seemingly filled with events and institutions beyond our control; hence, the difference that she made.


Polan references Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point near the end of his book, drawing a sparkling analogy between the film’s infamous explosive ending and one of Child’s explosive cooking moments involving a mixer and copious amounts of sugar. There is a way of seeing, with benign intent, Child’s influence (and Polan’s work, in turn), as that moment in the film played in reverse, where all of the detritus of American consumer culture contract back into the singularity of that explosion.

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Michael Berube on Cultural Studies

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

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From yesterday's Chronicle of Higher Education, a thought-provoking analysis, "What's the Matter with Cultural Studies?," from a former University of Illinois colleague, Michael Berube.

Here are two excerpts:


In 1990, my first year as an assistant professor there, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign held a conference on "Cultural Studies Now and in the Future." The program included historians, media theorists, sociologists, anthropologists, and AIDS activists; and the theoretical terrain—over which cultural studies had held earlier skirmishes with deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, and, of course, in an epochal struggle, with Althusserians and neo-Gramscians—had lately been enriched by the arrival of Foucauldian historicism and queer theory. It really did seem plausible that cultural studies could be the start of something big.



And, from later in the piece, as Berube contemplates the relatively limited achievements of cultural studies to date,

...How often do we find ourselves ascribing disparate political events and cultural phenomena solely to neoliberalism—that is, to the evisceration of the social-welfare state and the privatization of social goods? That is not to say that neoliberalism is immaterial; it has dominated the political and economic landscape for 30 years, and its effects on higher education are palpable, baleful, and undeniable—the corporatization of administration and research, the withdrawal of state financing for public universities, the enrichment of the student-loan industry...

But I want to ask, in a general way, whether cultural-studies theorists are starting from the fact of neoliberalism and then proceeding to the analysis, or whether the analysis simply concludes where it begins, with "It's the neoliberalism, stupid."


A discussion is just starting on the Chronicle's website but the topic, with its references to Illinois's long institutional investment in cultural studies and to colleagues such as Robert McChesney, might also warrant discussion here on Kritik.


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The Impossible Middlebrow

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

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Written by Robert Rushing, Comparative and World Literature

In a recent article (you'll need a subscription to read, however) in the Chronicle of Higher Education, David Shumway wonders why filmmaker John Sayles hasn't gotten much attention in the academy. So why doesn't cultural studies love John Sayles, as Shumway asks in the article's title? He offers several possible explanations, concentrating on the absence of critical articles on Sayles and cultural studies. He writes:


"Sayles's films are often described as didactic, and they are.… they promote a general set of political values, including equality, tolerance and appreciation of difference, and an ethic of community… [but] perhaps it is less that Sayles has political points to make than the way in which he makes them. A colleague remarked that despite feeling sympathetic toward his politics, she wished he wouldn't express them with such earnestness. Unlike in the 1970s, when directors like Robert Altman used studio-era genres ironically, Sayles plays it straight. Michael Moore draws audiences to his polemics by making fun of the other side, something Sayles rarely does.… It is worth recalling that Andrew Sarris's most damning classification in his seminal study of auteurs, The American Cinema, was "strained seriousness." It seems as though the worst sin an American film director can commit is to treat serious issues seriously."


I don't think this is a problem specific to cultural studies, since there isn't a ton of work on Sayles in cinema studies, either (it certainly isn't absent, but it does tend to biographies and interviews). Cultural studies, as Shumway notes, tends to be interested in texts that either appear to be non-ideological while actually concealing a reinforcement of the dominant ideology (often high culture texts) or those that are concealing a form of resistance to dominant ideology while appearing to be mere entertainment (often popular culture). But this bias (or preference) is not limited to cultural studies. Almost all of the humanistic disciplines that interpret in one capacity or another—that is, all of those fields that take something like a "text" as their object of study—duplicate it. They are all fundamentally exegetical in their approach, positing a model of the object of study that conceals a hidden message which must be laboriously unveiled by an expert for the uninitiated. This is the task of the scholar, and most theoretical models follow this approach (Hegel, Marx, Freud, Foucault, and so on—analysis or archaeology or whatever will reveal a hidden truth of ideology, economics, the unconscious…). Lacan offers only a slight variation on this formula when he argues that truth is concealed on the outside, in plain view. But it is still concealed, and it still requires an expert to decode, decipher, explicate, gloss, articulate—all of our favorite verbs.

The problem with Sayles is that his maligned "earnestness" is precisely the desire to speak plainly, to say what you mean without any concealment. He resists the dominant ideology, but not in a way that is hidden or concealed in some kind of pop confection. Numerous studies of action films done in the 1990s, for example, concluded almost universally that the hyperbolic masculinity of action films like Rambo or Die Hard was less about machismo than they were about masculinity in crisis, on the edge, in a panic. (Is Rambo secretly politically progressive?) Now that's a satisfying argument. This structure is familiar and pleasing to anyone who has "queered" a text that was formerly apparently heteronormative (one can imagine the MLA paper title already: "Lesbian Desire in Chick Lit: Bridget Jones' Secret Diary"), or discovered that an apparently progressive film actually reinforces the dominant ideology. Sayles' films leave the professional exegete with nothing to say, because there is no layer underneath the surface to be revealed.

I don't think there's anything wrong with this kind of work, of course (I'm guessing all of my research work falls into this "exegetical" category). In fact, I think that this is perhaps the single greatest pleasure of my job, but it is a pleasure that is not without its negative side. On the one hand, it is a pleasure that stems from a love of engagement with the text, knowledge about it and about its context; on the other hand, it owes much of its power to an exclusivity—"I possess the secret key to explaining David Lynch's films," or "We understand Lacan, and perhaps we will let you into our club—and perhaps we won't." At its worst, this kind of approach can be deeply elitist (you think Lynch is a mess of surrealist images, but that's because you do not see (you are too stupid to see) the hidden messages, the hidden kernel of the real, the de-subjectified voice, the…). Sayles, in short, poses the problem of the middlebrow: it has no unintentional camp humor, no incomprehensible or enigmatic imagery, no radical formalist experimentation, and as a result, there's nothing to elucidate. In this way, Sayles may be politically and socially progressive, but profoundly un-academic. To pose this all as a question, are academics unable to deal with texts that are straightforward, that need no interpretation, or is this an "impossible object" that we constitute ourselves around?

* * * * * *

My introduction to the films of John Sayles came surprisingly early, especially for a teenage fan of heavy metal in Southern California who'd seen at most 5 or 6 films by the early 1980s. My idea of intellectual depth at the time was Rush lyrics. But late one night watching TV with my best friend, whose parents were rarely around and let us stay up as late as we liked, we happened to catch Brother from Another Planet, and we loved it. We loved it in much the same way that we loved Monty Python, or Altered States, or any other film that we found "weird." I liked Joe Morton in the role of the alien who happens to appear as an African-American to Earthling eyes (he is mute throughout the film). But even at the age of 15 or so I understood that the film was an allegory (hey, there was allegory in Rush lyrics!), that Morton's alien was a refugee slave, that the film was duplicating America's history of slavery in space so we could see it as something still present.

I didn't see the film again until my first year in college. I went to UC Santa Cruz, and ended up at Oakes College there, the multiculturally-themed college. Our core course at Oakes was organized around different cultural identities, and had a rather tokenistic organization (this week, Asians! next week, gays!). And for each week, a film. For the week on African Americans, we saw Brother from Another Planet. The African American students in the class were outraged. "This was our film?" one African American student asked, aghast.

So here's a problem that cultural studies might find more appealing, one that it's potentially well-suited to: why did Sayles' progressivism "strike out" with the very community that he presumably wanted to speak to (and certainly was speaking about)? Sayles is much liked in the independent film community and by progressives, but the working class he's championed are far more likely to have seen Transformers than, say, City of Hope. Can culture be progressive (or revolutionary) and popular? Adorno? Benjamin?

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