Kammen's point about the desire for authenticity is interesting. In the text he states that a person wants authenticity “reality or illusion – as a means of avoiding ambiguities inherent in blurred lines between fiction and nonfiction” (240). Kammen is referring to documentaries, particularly those by Ken Burns. But this desire for authenticity is applicable to other arenas of culture. Particularly, this is seems highly applicable especially in the case of literary nonfiction. James Frey's A Million Little Pieces would arguably be the most evident case. The story is well known by now, after elements of the narrative were revealed to be fabricated there was a massive backlash. The backlash stemmed from the narratives inauthenticity. But was the backlash from the public? That point strikes me as debatable. The book is still stocked in book stores, in the memoir/biography/autobiography section no less. The outcry was from Oprah, who as Kammen himself stated is a new form of the public intellectual.

I know I haven't stopped talking about music all semester, but this is the final time. As it seems to me, the place where the line of argument surrounding authentic vs. inauthentic is in music. Why are there so many revisionist arguments against Elvis? Because he usurped African-American music and put it into a white context, that's not authentic. The same goes for Led Zeppelin who made a career out of stealing blues riffs. The same authentic vs. inauthentic argument could be applied to the same band. The Clash serves as a really good example of this. Their first four records are held in relatively high critical esteem. By the time the fifth record, Combat Rock was released they were sell outs who played at Shea Stadium. But that doesn't mean that these artists didn't sell these inauthentic records. It's an intellectual debate for audiophiles. It seems that there's an incredibly fine line between what we, as scholars, intellectuals and critics, perceive as authentic and what the general populace perceives to be authentic. However, I do not think that it is a complete disconnect. I do not think that anyone would argue the authenticity of blues, jazz, folk or even gospel.

Kammen

Thus far I really like Kammen’s style. His arguments feel bold without seeming overworked. I think the writing is pretty accessible (absence of LCS terms, b/c he is a historian). He also seems to have a gift for effortlessly, seamlessly packing loads of information into a few paragraphs. I also like all the little anecdotes – they are fun to read, give life to his claims.

And although I liked his attempt to distinguish mass culture from popular culture, Kammen does not seem to acknowledge that the definitions he sets forth are his working, personal definitions and are not necessarily universally accepted throughout history/cultural studies. But I do like his historical explanations for his defining these terms as such. It always shocks me that authors devote so much space to debating the definitions of such terms; what is the point? (Not that I think Kammen does so – I am jus going off on my own tangent).

And overall I do agree with his ideas. I can buy his linking the emergence of popular/mass culture (now I am not sure which one it is) with the democratization of art and entertainment. One thing I do not agree with/understand: Kammen places avant-garde art in with other democratizing artistic forces (the anecdote about the theater in the second chapter). I am just not sure that agree with the particular categorization. Especially when taken in its ‘60s context, the avant-garde seems like a niche to me.

Thoughts on Kammen

In section three in the fourth chapter “The Pivotal Decade: The 1930s” Kammen argues that the 1930’s was an important decade because it was the last time that popular culture was the main feature of American society (83). According to Kammen, during the Great Depression people read more by borrowing books more frequently from public libraries. Book clubs also became more popular, while people also enjoyed a wide variety of cheap pulp magazines. He lists other activities such as gardening, and the formation of gardening clubs among women, jigsaw puzzles, bingo, Monopoly, Bridge, roller-skating, bicycling, dancing, craft clubs, theatre groups, etc. (83-85). In a decade that is usually associated with tumultuous upheaval, instability, and mass migration, Kammen presents popular amusements enjoyed by people at home. His evidence seems to support an attachment to place that is comfortable and stable.

For people to enjoy these kinds of leisure, they didn’t need to travel much. According to Mike Steiner, an expert in regionalism and folk culture, the majority of Americans moved less, and the flow of people from rural to urban areas slowed and actually reversed itself for the first time in American history (Steiner, 442) Steiner writes in his article “Regionalism in the Great Depression,” Demographic evidence and folk testimony confirmed that the traditional promise of mobility deferred to an attachment to place during the depression” (442). Contrary to the image of anxiety, displacement, and dislocation that dominates our historical imagination of the 30’s, the 1930’s, as Kammen quotes Warren Susman, was the “the decade of participation and belonging” (84).

Matt Nelson

I think Kammen offers a surprising and rather important corrective to the way in which we often think about culture. In the text he points that we often consider the dissemination of culture to be a top down process, but in reality it is often just the opposite: filter up.

Coming from a traditional literary studies background, my understanding of the canon and its acquisition of works was just the way Kammen described it, top down. But if one stops and thinks about the way culture functions, the filter up model makes sense in a number of situations.

In American Culture, American Tastes Kammen points to the examples of Tin Pan Alley and Jazz. Both forms of music are thoroughly entrenched within our conception of (high) culture. As a knee jerk reaction, we would assume that their acceptance within the upper echelon of culture would be the result of a top down process. But, the reality is that their status is a result of filter up, as Kammen rightly points out.

The dissemination of culture through a filter up process is not unique if one thinks about it. The example of street art readily comes to mind. Throughout the '80s and '90s graffiti artists such a Shepard Fairey and Banksy were viewed at best as vandals and at worst outlaws. Even the language used to refer to these artists reflects their assimilation and ascent into higher strata of the cultural sphere. No longer are Banksy and Fairey graffiti writers, they are Street artists. Also, they venue for their art has changed. No longer are their pieces found on walls, alleys, billboards, parking meters, etc. Instead, their pieces are housed in “proper” art galleries. In 2002 Banksy art appeared in a gallery in Los Angeles. Fairey's art was used during Obama's bid for presidency in the 2008 presidential election. More recently Fairey's art was featured at the Warhol Museum right here in Pittsburgh. From the street to the gallery, clearly, this is a rather astute example of the filter up process Kammen is describing.

There are countless other examples one can point to of this filter up process. From Bob Dylan, to Punk the process of cultural dissemination through a filter up process is one that can be pinpointed. I It seems that thinking of culture in terms of this filter up method is often overlooked. Yet, such a methodology allows one to see a culture in a new and valuable way. This understanding could be particularly useful in thinking of how the status of a given cultural object can shift from high to middle to low (another phenomenon Kammen points to). In such a situation it seems as if there would be an apparent tension between the critical appropriation and the filter up process. One would have to question which method of dissemination or appropriation would be at play and at what strength.

Keep The Arts in Public Schools!!!

“My sense of order restored, my appreciation of the arcane ways of American cultural possibility was vastly extended. The men were products of both past and present; were both coal heavers and Met extras; were both workingmen and opera buffs. Seen in the clear, pluralistic, melting-pot light of American cultural possibility, there was no contradiction."
Ralph Ellison, "The Little Man at Chewhaw Station"


For my final blog of the semester, I thought I would resort back to using intriguing quotes from Ellison, since he has usually been my muse for my blogs. The story that I kept on thinking back to while reading Kammen’s American Culture, American Tastes was one found in Ellison’s essay “The Little Man at Chewhaw Station,” where the author reveals a time when he was discriminatory against his own race in regards to cultural preferences. After talking to a group of four black men, who are coal heavers, about opera, the author later asks, “Where on earth did you gentleman learn so much about grand opera?” What I found so funny about this scene was that the four black workers started laughing hysterically, which leads to Ellison’s embarrassment and shame. Furthermore, one of the workers then answers that all of the men have attended the Metropolitan Opera numerous times, and sometimes were not just audience members, but extras.

The reason why this scene is so relevant to this discuss about Kammen’s text is because it addresses the incongruities of race, economic status, education, and culture. The notion that race, economic status, and education dictate ones taste has always been perpetuated, but Ellison story shows that there are inconsistencies with this formula, that one may be at the lowest class and of a marginalized race, yet still can appreciate something thought to be high-brow. What I appreciate about Kammen is that he deconstructs the borders placed around highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow, and thereby shows how fluid their boundaries are and the mobility people have to go from one taste to the next. This is definitely what the democratization of American culture is all about.

What I have enjoyed doing while in Philadelphia has been to open inner-city children’s eyes to the fine arts, which I find so valuable. Although the democratization of American culture has occurred, I think there is still an issue of marginalized people feeling as though they are not able to connect with things they have been taught to see as highbrow, which then makes them feel as though they are not intelligent or educated enough to understand them. I think, however, that these feelings can be diminished by allowing easy access to the fine arts institutions as wells as strengthening art programs in public schools. Although the fine arts have been made more accessible via community programs at art museums and orchestras, what I am worried about is that less and less money is being put into art programs, especially at inner-city schools. Why I find this so troubling is that with the arts becoming less accessible for minority children, there is less of a democratization of American culture, which means that cultural stratification, especially along the lines of race, is reified. I do appreciate Kemmen’s optimism about the permeability of tastes when it comes to race, yet I feel that we as a society might be going backwards instead of forwards when it comes to the democratization of the arts.

I am very interested in how Kammen accounts for the extent of participatory of people in culture. In American Culture, American Taste, Kammen reveals two debates in 1950s and 1980s when they discuss the degree of passivity/interactivity of people to mass culture. This topic reappears in the books we’ve read this semester. Both Kammen and earlier, Levine, see the immediate active reactions of the audience toward a performance as some kind of characteristic of popular culture. For Levine, the elites’ disciplining of audience behavior led to the transition of the status of Shakespeare from popular entertainment to high art. Kammen sensed a danger here. For him, though the passivity of audience in front of high culture indicates decorum, the audience’s lack of interaction of mass culture equals a passive acceptance of mediocre cultural products, which implies an ideological inversion. One reason he provides to this phenomenon is that audiences’ genuine diversity is often ignored.

I am not so sure about the situation over ten years ago when this book was published. But I find Kammen’s quote from Herbert I. Schiller seems quite fit the circumstances:
“The audience does count… The managers of the cultural industries are acutely sensitive to the moods and feelings of the nation’s many publics. It is their job, for which they are paid handsomely, to make day-by-day, if not hour-by-hour, assessments of these feelings. When they are mistaken, as they frequently are, they lose their jobs.” (90) Imagine how this saying would strengthen Steven Johnson’s argument that pop culture is getting increasingly complex! As Johnson demonstrates, popular culture is growing more and more sophisticated in the last century, which in a way proves that in this interaction between consumer and producer, with the boosts brought by technology, both sides are taking progressive steps.

I just think the agency of the audience in front of cultural objects is more complex than just be generalized as “passive acceptance”. Raymond Williams’ formulation of the simultaneous pressure of dominant and counter-hegemonic currents is relevant to this inquiry: The most interesting and difficult part of any cultural analysis, in complex societies, is that which seeks to grasp the hegemonic in its active and formative but also its transformational processes. Works of art are often especially important as sources of this complex evidence. (Marxism and Literature 113-14)

This Culture Machine Kills Fascists.

So we've made it through the entire class and it's inevitable. We need to (once again) evaluate ourselves self-reflexively. What brow are you now that you have thought about it for 14 weeks?

I think there's a reoccurring problem that we (as consumers and defenders of taste) need to come to grips with. Artists don't want to be highbrow, but critics do.

In his discussion of American folk culture resisting the imposition of German Romantic (and dangerously Fascistic) "kultur," Kammen narrates a little story from our old friend Woody Guthrie. Guthrie exemplifies the paradoxes of a modern "folk" artist--incredibly commercially successful, sung in Kindergarten classrooms around the world, and yet connected to the "roots" of some "authentic" Americana. From his popularity we see and outpouring of support for the Tin Pan Alley crowd and protest singers of the sixties, and eventually, the epochal changing of the guard when Bob Dylan sold his soul and "plugged in." A similar kind of seduction to "sell out" took place even earlier, Kammen suggests. He writes that Guthrie "wrote to a friend early in the 1940s, referring to folk singers Pete Seeger and Lee Hays: 'Don't let Pete and Lee go highbrow on you'"...also asking Alan Lomax how "to get some of our upper crusts to listen to the real thing" (Kammen, 43).

This kind of distrust of highbrow art is not limited to folk culture, as we have seen throughout the semester. But I think we need to ask the following question: why can't highbrow/middlebrow/and lowbrow all be authentic elements of American culture?

I can imagine a class where Guthrie could be taught alongside Whitman and Bob Dylan and even Hawthorne and Melville for that matter. Just because Guthrie makes a claim to authenticity (that he can't really fulfill to some because of his commericial success) doesn't mean that he should not be remembered as a central part of our cultural history just like how Whitman was obscure and avant-garde in the 19th century as Kammen also points out.

Quality is not eradicated when we think about the brows, but it is evaluated by different criteria. Guthrie's famous line (later appropriated by Bob Dylan) "Some people can rob with a six gun and others with a fountain pen" needs to be updated for our context. Some people can rob you of an education with a canon and others with a dollar sign. As serious critic of American culture as a whole way of life we need to open ourselves to non-so authentic folk singers, plugged-in rock and rollers and popular artists alike. Can we be highbrow and defend Woody? I think so.

culture is a process...

One of the things that I appreciated about Kammen’s text was the way in which he tried to make sure that it could be useful to an academic and non-academic audience. I thought that the ways he incorporated theorists/theories was done in an accessible way, that if you new about Adorno, Williams, etc. you could take what you knew of their work to enrich what you were reading, but if you had never encountered them before you could also understand. His conversational tone—“By now the nonspecialist may very well feel overwhelmed by a surfeit of citations and contradictory points of view. If such browsers are still bearing with me, they surely must sense that the study of popular culture is clearly thriving in institutions of higher learning” (6)—made his text really easy to follow since he would have tons of evidence but then states his conclusions from that evidence in very plain and concrete language. I thought that the work was an interesting hybrid of theory, interpretation, and explication that epitomizes, for me, what a good cultural analysis should do.

I thought that his discussion of the origins of the division of brows coming with the proliferation of print materials, when he brought up Ohmann and Radway, was really interesting. The Lady’s Magazine, published in England from 1770-1837, was a unique publication in which the works of its readership were published alongside the work of authors such as Coleridge. But more interesting was the sentiment that was echoed in its editors’ notes continually through its nearly 70-year long run, that self-improvement must spring from “laudable curiosity”:

Criticism… is not that process of abstract reasoning, which disdains the aid of facts or observations…. It is exercised in its most simple when, after we have perused a literary production, or witnessed the representation of a dramatic piece, or surveyed a work of art, we call to mind what has pleased and what has displeased us in those performances; but when, from a laudable curiosity, or a desire of being enabled to explain the reasons of our admiration or our disappointment, we attentively examine those reasons, we rise into regions of philosophy, and are induced to conclude that only those principles which are founded on this solid basis can form the standard of true taste.

This term, echoed in Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy—arguably the most elitist text ever published—emphasizes the idea that “culture” is not a static object to be achieved, but a process and a becoming. The fact that purchasing publications in order to facilitate that process is just a fact of social mobility. And maybe the date of social stratification could be bumped back a little bit further...

1. In spite of Kammen's efforts, I am not sure I completely get all the distinctions between popular
culture, mass culture, proto-mass culture, folk culture, vernacular culture and common culture.
Is it just a quantitative distinction? Is it just a class distinction? Is it just really about TV? It does not help his efforts that all these types of culture exist at the same time. People still bowl and play golf and go to amusement parks. There are still regional cultural differences. There are still
massive state fairs. Shows at Disney World always include a lame audience participation component. On the other hand, before the 1890s people went to square dances and to saloons. I also find unconvincing his argument that acting rowdily at a Wild West Show or radio-listening and movie-going--the quintessential entertainment activities of the 1930s and 1940s--are truly participatory. The concern that arises with all this overlapping is that a critic can find almost
anything he wants to critique in any time period.

2. In Kammen's view mass culture did not really last that long. It began in the 1950s and using own criteria it is clear that by the time he wrote the book it was disappearing. (Johnson) Electronic mailing lists, contrary to Kammen, spell the end of mass culture. They enable catalogs to be sent out to the tiniest niche markets. Surfing the Web, because of the proliferation of sites, is not a mass activity and it is not without its participatory aspects. Was it really worth all the attention and vitriol directed against it?

3. Kammen's typical and justified complaint is "Not so fast." You think consumer culture has arisen by the 1900s. "Not so fast." You think mass culture had arisen by the 1920s. "Not so fast." The historical record shows a much more complex development. Ideology, whether democratic, nationalist or Marxist, obscured this more variegated situation. Another factor is that when
"literary types" look at history they look for the unified symbolic structures of a finely wrought literary work instead of seeing the messiness of history.

4. Is commodification so bad? It would have been more participatory and "authentic" if I had
played my own blues music, but since I have no musical talent it was much better for me to
buy Muddy Water's LPs and listen to them. Admittedly Muddy was underpaid for his efforts and he should not have been, but there is no intrinsic link between this and commodification. Elvis was not underpaid or at least not nearly to the same extent. Before commodification most humans lived most of their lives literally covered in shit. To compare dark Satanic malls to dark Satanic mills is quite a stretch.

5. Even at the end of the semester I am still a "level up" elitist of sorts. I think we should start
with the great works of literature and and add in those works of popular culture that meet perhaps somewhat relaxed standards. Some will make the cut. Most will not. "Casablanca" will. "Porky's Revenge" will not.

Taste, Consume... Indegestion

First, I have to admit, after reading Kammen's VISUAL SHOCK a few years ago, I was more than excited to get in to the nuts and bolts of American Culture American Tastes. I don't want to sound too much like a fan-boy, but VISUAL SHOCK was one of the few cultural studies books I could get my hands on while in Korea, and it's a book I keep coming back to in terms of the direction and style I hope to implement in my own writing. This is not completely unrelated to my post. One of the streams that has run through almost all the texts for class is this relationship between how owning something (purchasing it vs. creating it) has an invariable impact the ways we construct our identities. I'm reminded of something one of my good friends once told me about meeting new people... She said “It doesn't matter what the person IS like, what matters is WHAT they like.”
In American Culture, American Tastes, Kammen is interested in this very relationship. I'm drawn to page 66, where Kammen states that, “By the 1920's, however, four decades of intensive immigration had opened the eyes of manufacturers and marketing people to the process of Americanization as an opportunity for expansive consumerism.” The impact of modernity upon personal identity, and it could be said collective identity (the way we identify with others), is largely hinged upon this ideas of social and relational designation through consumption.
Within democratic capitalism, its striking at how essential consumption is in designating not only class, but things like religion, sexuality, and ethnicity as well. However, sticking with just one of these, for the sake of brevity and the title of the book, let's stick to this idea of “American.” The general consensus I've gathered from the text is that this shift in niche marketing to immigrants and children of immigrants redefined what it means to be “American “within the nation's collective consciousness. No longer did American mean someone with citizenship who held a set of core ideals similar to those of other Americans. To be American meant, and I would argue still means, to consume and participate within Fordism and the inevitable Post-Fordism that followed. The national identity of those hoping to exist outside such a system has traditionally been called in to debate, slandered, and excised from the healthy body-politic. Black-listed, harassed, or even exiled. How democratic is consumer hyper-capitalism if it doesn't allow for anyone or anything to exist outside of it?
I can't believe I'm going to end my last post of the year with a quote from the flawed film 12 Monkeys, but... Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt's character) while locked down in the asylum erupts, “There's the television. It's all right there - all right there. Look, listen, kneel, pray. Commercials! We're not productive anymore. We don't make things anymore. It's all automated. What are we *for* then? We're consumers, Jim. Yeah. Okay, okay. Buy a lot of stuff, you're a good citizen. But if you don't buy a lot of stuff, if you don't, what are you then, I ask you? What? Mentally *ill*. Fact, Jim, fact - if you don't buy things - toilet paper, new cars, computerized yo-yos, electrically-operated sexual devices, stereo systems with brain-implanted headphones, screwdrivers with miniature built-in radar devices, voice-activated computers... “

Is Kammen Resisting Adorno?

Kammen does something well worth admiring in this book: he puts forth a new model for us to envision popular culture, mass culture, and "proto-mass culture"—the point of transition. But sometimes I find this model convincing and original, and sometimes I don’t. In particular I’m troubled by what feels like “Diet Adorno”—that is, Adorno minus critique.

I like when Kammen emphasizes the roles of things like standardization and technology as catalysts for the move from popular or proto-mass culture to mass culture. He makes a strong point when he points out how regionalism and so on meant that, until the mid-twentieth century, the audience for culture couldn’t be as mass as it was after standardization. He suggests that the move from popular culture to mass culture was predicated in part on overcoming race/class distinctions and creating a mass audience, and that was accomplished through the mass production brought about by technology. Cool, I’m down.

But I don’t like Kammen’s active/passive distinction. It’s so troubled that Kammen himself has to keep revising it and offering provisos every few pages. His basic assertion is that popular culture was a more participatory, active culture than mass culture, which, to follow, minimizes audience participation and makes audiences more passive. The most vivid discussion of this is that passage from Aldous Huxley: “In the past when people needed recreation they were compelled to a great extent to provide it for themselves. [. . .] [But today] Recreation is provided ready-made by enormous joint-stock companies. The play-instinct, which found active expression in the past, is now passive” (88-89).

This idea makes good sense, but it’s a fairly typical view of popular culture vs. mass culture. It’s basically exactly what Adorno says in his “Culture Industry Reconsidered” essay from 1967. Adorno tells us that he favors the term “culture industry” “in order to exclude from the outset the interpretation favorable to its advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art. From the latter the culture industry must be distinguished in the extreme” (98). Adorno insists, in closing, “The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object” (99).

Isn’t this the same basic active/passive distinction that Kammen makes, that Huxley makes? Then why do we need a new model for it? Kammen’s active/passive binary just seems like a de-politicized version of Adorno. He makes the same active/passive point that Adorno makes but without the critique or the political urgency. Adorno is concerned about the passivity of the culture industry and says it’s domination. Kammen, on the other hand, seems almost to celebrate the overcoming of regionalism, etc. by mass culture. My question is this: why does Kammen stress the active/passive distinction of popular/mass culture but want to avoid the “commodification” point or “conspiratorial view” of the neo-Marxists (Adorno, et. al.) that he derides? (46). Isn’t it a problem that mass culture has made mass audiences massively passive?

And incidentally, if you want to talk about media and activity/passivity, you want to talk about McLuhan. His models of “hot” and “cool” media stress a point that Kammen makes: “The most meaningful distinction may very well be between active and passive audiences for a particular medium rather than between lowbrow and elite” (91, emphasis added).

to what end?

Back in 2002 I sat in on a reading group of some students in the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design which included a couple books by Neil Postman. We read Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology and another collection of essays. Given that Johnson mentions a different book, my comments might not apply. Postman was asking TO WHAT END are these forms of media the means?

We can criticize their content -- the games teach us how to pragmatically negotiate the achievement of social rewards (commodity fetishism). Was anyone else horrified at the guy who spent all his "leisure" hours clicking to virtually mine ore, make tools to sell, and purchase a new virtual home? CLEARLY, the video game gives him something his dead end job doesn't (the illusion/feeling of progress). This doesn't mean it should be celebrated; it should be seen as a pathological symptom of life in the garbage heap of late capitalism.

Postman followed in the footsteps of EP Thompson who saw oppressive social relationships embedded in the technologies themselves (as did the luddites who resisted them) and the way they became the foundation for further entrenchments of class domination. His focus was more on how culture now tends to be determined more by its participation and dissemination through high technological means (and produced by those with the means to high technology). His book was about the social and ecological relationships on which these technologies were based, NOT how these technologies and virtual entertainments can teach us how to better negotiate the world (and on its terms). Their goals are opposite.

Our kids supposedly get cognitive exercise while electronic waste floods the developing world with heavy metals doing actual brain damage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_waste

My question is really: who cares? What are the problems these games are helping us to solve? At best they come closer to mimicking the life we already live but presenting it in a way that obscures our REAL relation to it *cough*Althusser*cough*.

Here are two "false morels" a couple friends and I found today in Frick Park (this great 3 dimensional and topographically challenging interface with hypertextures and multi-sensory engagement). We were, of course, looking for REAL Morels. These false ones will put you in the hospital if you improperly ID them. The humidity conditions weren't right (although they ARE growing further away from the dry city).

Have You Fed Your Real Baby Today?

“Games are teaching critical thinking skills and a sense of yourself as an agent having to make choices and live with those choices.” – James Paul Gee

Although I was quite intrigued with Johnson’s explanation of the complexity of video games and the opportunity video-game users have of practicing, albeit subconsciously, critical thinking, I still remain skeptic that popular culture is making society smarter. Only several weeks ago, a couple in South Korea was arrested for neglecting their 3-year-old baby daughter, who died of starvation. What shocked me the most about this case was that the couple had devoted countless hours raising a virtual girl character online to the extent that they barely found the time to feed their real daughter. This is pretty unsettling to anyone, regardless if you are a parent or not.

Although I am sure that Johnson would call the noted case an outlier in his research, the very fact that cases such as these are a reality causes me to question whether the critical skills acquired through video games can be transferred to the real-world setting. I definitely agree with Johnson that video games have increased in sophistication, and I am constantly amazed by how realistic and involving these systems have become, but there is no denying the fact that technology is also causing mental, and also physical, atrophy to a certain extent. I believe that many people have become so captivated and mesmerized by the sophistication of technology that they have fallen victim to apathy and complacency, spending countless time mastering complicated digital objects, yet unable (or even unwilling) to sort out real-life problems, some of which are much less complicated.

What I believe Johnson leaves out are the negative consequences of the rising complexity and sophistication of technology. If more and more time needs to be devoted to adjusting to newer and better technology in order to achieve the rewards for doing so, does that mean less time is devoted to confronting the demands of real life? To me, it is all about transferability, and it seems as though sophisticated technology has made people desensitized to the real-world instead of enhancing applicable critical skills.

At first I found it appealing when Steven Johnson says in the introduction that he is not going to take a symbolic approach at the cultural objects, like what most cultural studies do--to establish a symbolic relationship between the work and some spirit of the age. He suggests that the cultural object is not a metaphor for the system, but more like an output or a result, and he would try to systemically diagram the competing forces rather than to decode them. (10) I thought he might be able to come up with a method of cultural studies that can go beyond that sort of ‘symptomatic interpretation’, which oftentimes neglects the specificity of cultural objects and reaches a reading that they are all expressions of the social configuration.

But I was disappointed when I saw the string Johnson uses to thread all the different media is just "the cognitive benefit". And this benefit of popular culture is being analyzed as an isolated process. While "cognition" refers to "a faculty for the processing of information", the question of what kind of information is being processed is more crucial. Ideologized information or ture information to the real world? Johnson uses "man-made weather system" as an analogy to demonstrate what he thinks of culture--it serves as a metaphor for his approach in return--the cognitive complexity only reflects higher level of self-recreation: there is no man-made weather system in real.

In justifying the popular culture, this approach focuses too much on the neurological appetites of the brain, but not the economical aspect of the culture industry, as he promised. He might want to remind people who are there creating these order and meaning that our increasingly stronger cognitive muscles are responding to?

Thoughts on Everything Bad Is Good For You

It’s ironic that the video games Johnson repeatedly uses as examples for their cognitive benefits are, Tetris, The Sims, Ultima, Zelda. These are games that are devoid of violence, yet Johnson argues that violent content is something that we shouldn’t be concerned with because violent content doesn’t have as much of an impact on our thinking compared to the game form. Why doesn’t he use more examples of complicated violent games then? Granted he does use a violent game like the Grand Theft Auto series a few times to represent strategy, but not nearly as often as non-violent games. He’s also compelled to point out that “shooter games are rarities on gaming best-seller lists” and that games like SimCity and Tetris regularly outsell these other games. He doesn’t cite any statistics to prove this, but the fact he needs to point out the high popularity of these non-violent games, undermines "the content doesn’t really matter all that much" argument which his overall thesis is dependent on. In general, I think he's well aware that he's on thin ice if he pushes violent video games as valid ways to enhance more complex thinking.

The form of reality TV programming may have narrative complexity and strategic value, but at least for me, the degraded content outweighs the benefits accrued from the form. I can watch about five minutes of The Apprentice (is it even on any more?) before I change the channel. The “social intelligence” and “strategy” that Johnson finds in these shows for me, translates to conniving and devious backstabbing. Reality TV form isn’t all that interesting or complicated anyway. Most of these shows are based on some sort of grimy competition for a big cash prize. The argument he also makes when he compares The Apprentice to shows like Who’s the Boss and Mork & Mindy, doesn’t help his case. He writes, “a show like The Apprentice, say – doesn’t look so bad when measured against the dregs of television past” (132). To advocate that reality TV is good for people, by framing it as the lesser of two evils, is not very persuasive. And come on, Who’s the Boss gave us Tony Danza! Who is going to remember any of the forgettable contestants on The Apprentice.

If anyone is interested in a book that basically argues against everything Johnson advocates, it’s Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (Johnson mentions Postman a few times). Postman’s book is a bit dated (1985), and he often comes off as a luddite, but it’s a great foil to Johnson’s work, and I think more convincing.

Matt Nelson

Cognitively--but not ideologically--challenging

[Yeah. So. I was supposed to just comment on a post, but I was impelled to do a post of my own. What I wanted to talk about wasn't really something I could "comment" on someone else's post.]

While I find Johnson's argument about the benefits of increasinly complex "smart culture" convincing, there are ideological problems that I noticed along the way. In his Afterward, Johnson acknowledges with an apparent degree of suprise that the majority of criticism against his book "tended to come more from the left than the right" (204). To be honest, I found Johnson's discussion of this "leftist criticism" utterly lacking in substance. What Johnson either fails or just refuses to acknowledge here is the longstanding tradition that the left has when it comes to criticizing the content of mass culture, which progressives tend to see as an apologia for the consumer capitalist status quo. Adorno and Horkheimer make just this point in their famous "Culture Industry" essay: mass culture, rather than empowering audiences to question the capitalist status quo, instead sells capitalist ideology.

I noticed just this thing happening in some of Johnson's examples. Take that anecdote about how his nephew decided he should lower industrial tax rates as a way of attracting businesses to his Sim City. Johnson uncritically celebrates this moment: his nephew is learning! But frankly I'm a bit troubled by what he learned. Johnson just says he learned a strategy, but I say that he learned free-market capitalist ideology. This strategy isn't value-free but is, rather, laden with ideology. Isn't this just the kind of "market thinking" that turned some of our Rust Belt cities into ghost towns and propelled us into our current Great Recession? And this Sim City thing isn't an isolated example. We see the same thing with one of Johnson's favorite reality shows, The Apprentice. Sure, we're learning strategies and mapping social networks when watching the show, but in the meantime we're soaking up corporate ideology. Great, now I know how to both make networks of friends and crush my competition.

No wonder Johnson got criticism from the Left. His book is built upon the foundation that, ultimately, the extent to which media makes us think is more important than its actual content or subject matter, but when those of us on the Left look at the ideological content of mass culture, we know that it's too important--and sometimes too dangerous--to simply dismiss as simply a "less important factor" in media consumption.

A few months ago a Japanese man married a video game character. Yep, that's right... legally married a video game character. In another equally bizarre incident,the BBC reported in August of 2005, a South Korea a man died after playing StarCraft (an online role playing game) for 50 hours straight. In Asia, gaming is a profession. The more remarkable players are celebrities in their repective fields, with games being televised 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. These two incidents, while rather isolated in the extreme nature, demonstrate the intricate ways in which our understanding and interaction with technology are so closely connected to our very existence.
As an occasional gamer, and a friend of avid gamers, I found Steven Johnson's arguments concerning the structure and use of video games rather enlightening. I can't say that I agree with him 100%, but the implications of his argument are intriguing to me.
Johnson claims that the environment inherent to video games stimulates our brains to produce opioids and rewards the player unlike any other form of entertainment. This strengthens his arguments that we need to evaluate the "form" of video games, rather than the content because there is an implication that something more complex is involved. Through the this kind of achieve-and-reward situation, one could extrapolate further implications concerning the lack of life-or-death driven obstacles inherent to our own evolution as a species. As technology has advanced, our survival instincts have been lulled to a point at which our rewards for ensuring survival are actually rewards for achieving comfortability. Obviously this doesn't hold true to all cultures, but in cultures that embrace the achieve-and-reward video game (and I know Johnson says we shouldn't the take content of the games too seriously) daily life is not a struggle for survival.
The connection of brain chemistry to the virtual world is interesting. The established links between clinical depression and video game use are pretty clear. Video game addiction develops almost primarily within those already suffering from clinical depression. However, like most addictive forms (let's face it, there are stranger ones than video games) the amount of time spent playing is typically a reflection of the level of depression being suffered. However, few addictions have so permeated out society to the extent we cannot escape it. Technology (whether you have an ipod or a blu ray player or upgrade your laptop) is an addiction that we all suffer from. At what point do we embrace this addiction and allow for a symbiotic relationship, and at what point do we resist?

Program or be Programmed!

Now before I get into this, I have to say that I am no computer programmer. I have never been a computer programmer. I will probably never be a computer programmer. The difference, however, between what Johnson describes as end-user interfaces and coding/programming is important for us to take a critical look at in Johnson's book. At the recent SXSW festival, Douglas Rushkoff (who you notice is quoted many times by Johnson) made the bold proclamation: Program or be Programmed! Learning how to use computers is not enough to prevent being used by the people who create their architecture (ahem, CMU technocrats I'm looking at you). So as much as I want to take Johnson's word about how the internet (and computers in general) give us the tools to engage our world more intelligently, there is an untold story here. Let's take his example: Apple's iTunes. While I could go into a rant about Digital Rights Management (DRM) and the sad fact that artists only see 7 cents of the 99 cents from your iTunes download, I'll look to the future...Apple's iPad simply does not fit with the "learn as you explore" narrative that Johnson advocates on page 123 specifically and throughout his writings on digital culture. Many pedagogical researchers have made convincing arguments about the educational benefits of neglecting the manual and learning to use software by playing around, but the iPad directly prohibits that kind of freedom. Yes it is sweet to double-tap and get any program on the iPad to work, but it sucks that the user cannot install any program that is not preapproved by Apple. The internet, and digital hardware/software is not a place to explore. It is a place to receive content. Quickly, rigidly, and the way Apple wants you to.

Learning how to interact with interfaces documents an impressive new literacy. But with any literacy, there are many other questions and problems built into learning it, studying it, and defending it. The interactivity that Johnson lauds is limited which means that the liberatory rhetroic surrounding this new literacy must be contingent as well.

1. Not surprisingly, I am going to defend reading, especially serious reading, against Johnson. He is correct that TV shows and video games are more complex than they used to be. (But what
about "The Prisoner?" I don't think anyone has figured out in 45 years what that show was
about.) But this is like saying that the tallest building in Peoria is now taller.

2. Sometimes I think Johnson makes my arguments for me. He argues that the content of the video games does not matter, only the structure. From these games, and the reality TV shows based on them, he argues that you learn not how to engage in sustained thinking, but how to
engage in pure strategic thinking. Life is not just strategy and this is what you miss if video games squeeze out serious reading. It seems like the only thing you really get better at by
playing video games is playing video games. These games are complicated but not complex. The fact that you need a 200-page guide to play but not any advanced education is a significant
indicator. He compares video games to mathematics, but mathematics can be applied to science and engineering and is not just a game.

3. Johnson is dismissive of reading to acquire facts, but Sarah Palin shows you what someone is
like without a fact base. She also shows you what someone is like who lacks depth, which you
can also acquire from serious reading. Other politicians often lack this also. There is a difference between reading political and social science and even biographies of John Adams and Winston
Churchill and reading "Hamlet" and "Macbeth."

4. Another place where Johnson seems to make my arguments for me is when he argues that
video game playing is like a drug that stimulates the pleasure centers of the brain. "Reward is everywhere in gameworld." Is this really the best environment to produce mature individuals? Johnson answers this himself when he argues that there is a blurring of kid and grownup culture. Adults should not be worrying about how to get their unicorns to eat more rainbow-colored mushrooms. Maybe you can learn how to strategize better if you think about feeding your unicorns, but is this necessarily such a good thing? I think those individuals who devised the speculative finanical instruments that almost collapsed the economy were good at thinking strategically--and were probably excellent video game players--but were clearly deficient in other types of thinking. From Johnson's perspective, the machiavellian deviant Richard Hatch
should be President.

5. Aristotle argued that you can have about 5 friends, because friendship implies having to spend a lot of time with and energy on your friends. In spite of what social-networking sites and Johnson imply, you cannot have 10,000 friends. I think these sites are a good symbol for what is wrong with Johnson's argument. Social-networking "friendships" squeeze out the time you should be spending on real friendships, just as video games squeeze out the time you should be
spending on learning how to perform sustained thinking.

6. Johnson is correct that technological factors have moved our economy from a mass consumption to a mass customization economy. However, this means that he is making unfair
comparisons when he compares "24" to "Gilligan's Island." He is comparing a niche show to
a mass culture show from the period when the three networks dominated mass culture. The number of viewers "24" gets would have led to the show's cancellation in the 1960s.

7. "Seinfeld" is a funny show and much more complex than "Green Acres," but it is still
in a sense trivial. I remember thinking after 9/11 that we could never watch "Seinfeld"in the
same way, because life is too serious.

Contradictions of the Intellectual

I know I'm only supposed to comment this week but I couldn't help thinking of Zizek and how he's been represented and understood in different media. He seems to embody all the contradictory things we expect from intellectuals today.

We expect them to give us the answers (for the pragmatic British "post-politicians" this means technocratic knowledge, or how to fix the economic situation); radicals expect the magical formula for revolutionary/emancipatory political transformation (in the guise of a magical bullet, or if we only had a more accurate account of the subject...); his publishers expect him to sell books and to provide a persona accessible to a "wide" audience while still being taken seriously; and then there is the professional status of the intellectual in her field of work (innovation --rereading German idealism through Lacan-- in effect, using one intellectual to reinterpret the works of other intellectuals).

As a psychoanalyst who trained with Jacques-Alain Miller (Lacan's "representative on Earth") his writing can be understood as expressing, in different formats and settings, the four Lacanian discourses. The most prominent one is the "discourse of the analyst" which plays AGAINST the expectations and transference of the would-be analysand: the reader. As readers we expect intellectuals to be the subject supposed to know, the fantasy that someone else has the key to our antagonism. The aim of the analyst is essentially to get us to recognize how our own expectations grow out of this very antagonism. As such, it seems Zizek (in form, if maybe not in content) might give us an insight into how an intellectual today might function in an emancipatory fashion: by liberating us from our expectations of intellectuals and forcing us to question how and what we demand of them.

In Ross’s third chapter, we’re revisited by our old friend: the idea of authenticity in opposition to selling out. It made me think back to our previous discussion and I found myself asking if authenticity and selling out have anything at all to do with the artist or is it merely an issue of perception?

Last week, my own cynical, capitalist soaked opinion was that artists have never been divorced from the money and, while their goal may be to express something, to affect people around them, they’re also trying to get fed doing it. Our romantic notion that the frighteningly unstable Van Gogh should be the standard by which we judge seemed unrealistic.

But when Ross quotes Langston Hughes’ poem, lamenting the loss of jazz to dominant white hands, my focus shifted from artist to consumer:

You've taken my blues and gone --

You sing' em on Broadway

And you sing'em in Hollywood Bowl,

And you mixed'em up with symphonies

And you fixed'em

So they don't sound like me.

Yep, you done taken my blues and gone.

It seems to me that the stakes of authenticity may actually be more important to the consumer/reader/viewer/listener. There is something in this poem that makes me wonder if the concept of authenticity and selling out isn’t more about identity and the ability to control how it’s represented. Ross neglects to give us the rest of the poem but here it is:

You also took my spirituals and gone.

You put me in Macbeth and Carmen Jones

And all kinds of Swing Mikados

And in everything but what's about me--

But someday somebody'll

Stand up and talk about me,

And write about me--

Black and beautiful--

And sing about me,

And put on plays about me!

I reckon it'll be

Me myself!

What seems so powerful to me about this poem is that it feels like a call to action; while the speaker is riling hirself up, I can imagine the reader, feeling similarly slighted by inauthentic representations, feeling the need to take up a pen and do it themselves.

Ross does a pithy job of describing how the semi-distinct cultures of white and black Americans relied on each other for source material, and makes sure to remind us that words like imitation, theft, and appropriation are used since the system of exchanged favored on color group at the expense of another. But there is something in his excellent historical illustration that masks the kind of psychic damage Hughes expresses in his poem. When the ability to represent oneself is taken away, no matter the reason, whether well intentioned or ill, it does a kind of violence. Representation acts as a kind of psychic mirror through which we feel our sense of self re-solidified; we identify with things we feel reflect who we are.

There was just something in this third chapter, so excellently executed, that seemed to miss the spirit of the voice it invoked. There was something that felt inauthentic to me, a quality learned rather than lived.

So I guess I’ll end, not with a Rothko this time, but with one of my favorite poems by Hughes:

Café 3a.m.

With weary sadistic eyes
Spotting fairies.
Degenerates,
some folks say.
But God, Nature,
or somebody
made them that way.
Police lady or Lesbian
Over there?

The Beats, Disco, New Wave Boy Bands and Andrew Ross

I think it's interesting that Ross begins “Hip, and the Long Front of Color” with Frank O'Hara's “The Day Lady Died”. On the poem Ross states: “when it comes to his poetry, jazz almost never figures in the urban taste milieu within which he represented himself, or in the realm of daily cultural events about which he wrote in copious detail...In fact, it appeals to me as a fond reader of O'Hara that this scenario might possibly be read as an ironic, even parodic gloss on the stereotyped Beat devotee of the more 'authentic' world of jazz culture” (67). It strikes me as odd that Ross over looks the fact that the collection that contains “The Day Lady Died”, Lunch Poems, was published by City Lights in the Pocket Poets series. The Pocket Poets series includes collections by notable Beats such as Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. Perhaps I'm making something out of nothing, but the line to which Ross is referring to seems to be more of a wink and nod to City Lights publisher and O'Hara's friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

But this off reading is symptomatic of the misreading and generally dismissive tone Ross takes in regard to the Beats. Ross does point to the line in On the Road in which Kerouac praises and idolizes the figure of the African-American jazz musician. Yes, the portrait offered in that scene paints Kerouac badly. But throughout the chapter Ross dismisses the Beats as nothing more than middle class posers who willingly chose to live a life of self-imposed poverty. Ross maintains: “the Beats were neither missionaries nor sympathizers in respective solidarity with the people” (86). This analysis neglects Ginsberg's prominent role in the free speech, anti-war, gay rights, and nuclear disarmament movements throughout the latter half of the 20^th century. It also neglects Gary Snyder's role in both political and environmental movements, as well as Lawrence Ferlinghetti's role as outspoken political activist.

Ross' analysis of the Beat's is not the only problematic aspect of the chapter. Earlier in the text, he asserts that there hasn't been a form of popular music before or after Rock 'N' Roll that called attention to itself as both popular and disposable. This assertion seems to be beyond hyperbole. After all, No Respect was released in 1989, after the death of both disco and new wave. One would be hard pressed to not think of these genres as being as much, if not more so disposable than the early Rock 'N' Roll to which Ross is referring. Furthermore, one cannot blame Ross for not having the foresight the see the oncoming juggernaut that would be the teen pop phenomenon that would hold popular music in a chokehold during the waning years of the '90s and the early years of the '00s.

so, what now?

"It is through the retention of the form or containing structure of the category itself that cultural power, at any one time, is able to designate what is legitimate, on the one hand, and what can then be governed and policed as illegitimate or inadequate or even deviant, on the other. The intellectual's training in discrimination is an indispensable resource in such a process. For this is where the intellectual's accredited power of discrimination reinforces the power to subordinate even as it presents itself in the form of an objective critique of taste" (Ross 61).

As I was reading this week, I began to be overwhelmed with the thought that we can never make things better. That no matter how much we try and democratize art, educate people, and create opportunities for people to cross paths with the healing powers of aesthetic objects, we will always be caught up in a tug of war with the system--while simultaneously inadvertently supporting its structure. Scholars like Ross, Said, and Foucault all tell us that we inevitably legitimate boundaries that we are trying to reveal as constructed, so I guess my question is: what do we do?

Do we, as suggested by people such as Paolo Pedercini (apologies to those who have already heard my rant about this) and Dick Hebdige, work to try to appropriate or re-appropriate cultural objects that have become "neutralized by being fully absorbed" (Ross 45)? Pedercini seems to think so, stating on his website Molleindustria.it (which literally means "cast off or cast aside industry) "We believe that the explosive slogan that spread quickly after the Anti-WTO demostrations in Seattle, 'Don't hate the media, become the media,' applies to this medium [videogames]. We can free videogames from the "dictatorship of entertainment", using them instead to describe pressing social needs, and to express our feelings or ideas just as we do in other forms of art." So then, do we enter into a "tug of war" with the culture industry in which we confiscate objects from them which they have confiscated from us, and which they will likely reconfiscate so that we will have to take them back again? And can intellectuals gain some agency through legitimating cultural objects that can actually be used as agents of the system against the system, and perhaps allow us to stop reinforcing the borders that we are trying to destroy? And lastly, will we have to sacrifice some of our standards of taste and "what is good" in order to do so?

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

What is the role of the middlebrow in our cultural and academic representations? In the 1972 film “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” the director Luis Bunuel criticizes the Bourgeois lifestyles in France as they mock working class servants and constantly engage in meaningless gatherings of dates, business arrangements and consumption. Two of the sequences in the film come to the bourgeois with a different eye. Throughout the movie, we randomly cut to a long deserted roadway where the characters walk slowly and indifferently to nowhere in particular. This is not a casual stroll, but more like purgatory. This feeling is also examined in the reoccurring meal setups, where the characters gather expecting a meal and are never fed. During the whole film, the characters never eat and are left hungry by all of their desires.

While Bunuel clearly has no sympathies for the Bourgeois (these two elements are more damning rather than understanding), we might consider why we should have sympathy. Throughout the course we have discussed how the working class taste is often romanticized in culture and highbrow taste dictates culture. The middlebrow taste, as characterized by Andrew Ross’ account of the Rosenberg’s letters is always disdainful. There is a feeling by intellectuals that the middlebrow taste in its striving, is just trying too hard and the result is a web of emotions, literary and cultural signals, and attempts at profoundness. Ross calls this “the language of “ordinary people” writing for literary effect … they are writing for a public” (27).

Ross points out: “The problem of petty-bourgeois taste, culture, and expression remains to this day a largely neglected question for cultural studies and a formidable obstacle to a left cultural politics” (29). So, while No Respect was written in 1989, it still doesn’t seem like this question has been sufficiently developed, (yet in 20 years, I’m sure it has and I just haven’t stumbled on it yet). Ross traces the anxiety of the bourgeois, especially the petite-bourgeois. We also see it in Bourdieu’s chapter in Distinction, where through his case study of petite-bourgeois interviews, the fear of not ‘keeping up’ is clearly expressed and the mode of indicating pleasure in objects is always aware of itself. There is a knowledge that one should say they know Picasso and be able to articulate major works or general styles, but the effort and time required to keep such an education is taxing on their well-being and financial security (families running their financials into the ground just to send their children to better schools or buy expensive theater tickets).

In examining Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Ross points to this concern again. The selection he takes from AGK about the Russian Peasant (44) could be more fully fleshed out. Yes, Greenberg holds that the process of the art piece is the real focus and not the “effect.” Yet, he also understands what it would take an individual (especially one from a lower class, - I’ll add middleclass -) to comprehend and appreciate an artwork such as Picasso. Ross leaves out this bit:

“This needs, after all, a considerable amount of “conditioning.” Superior culture is one of the most artificial of all human creations, and the peasant finds no “natural” urgency within himself that will drive him toward the Picasso in spite of all difficulties. In the end the peasant will go back to kitsch when he feels like looking at pictures, for her can enjoy kitsch without effort” (Greenberg, 19).

Ross’ focus on choice and freedom in this chapter does not connect Greenberg’s awareness of how other classes come to art and how they are trained. I think in this passage, we see that Greenberg ‘gets it.’

The middlebrow is the most hated of all the brows, maybe because they buy into a system that keeps them “buying in” (???)

Rock Groups and Intellectuals Killed My Daughter

(the part of the video I'm discussing starts at 4:20)

Have you ever seen the video of Timothy Leary being verbally attacked by Art Linkletter on a New York talk show in 1990 or so? I bring it up because it’s a great illustration of Ross’s point about how both popular culture and intellectuals produce ripples in our culture, albeit in different ways.

First some background: Long-running TV personality Art Linkletter always blamed 1960s Harvard-professor-turned-LSD-guru Timothy Leary for the suicide of his daughter, Diane, who supposedly killed herself due to LSD. When Linkletter met Leary on this TV show via satellite, the sparks flew. But Linkletter didn’t only blame Leary; in his interview he also mentions rock music, poets, and novelists:

“And mind you, I do not blame Dr. Leary for all of this. I think he was an important part of it. Such things as Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane and the rock groups singing the songs of drugs. People who were like Ginsberg the poet and even Aldous Huxley and his Doors of Recep…uh…Perception was talking about the glories of drug abuse.”

Nevertheless, Linkletter holds special contempt for Leary and argues that Leary had a particularly strong influence because he was an intellectual:

“But Timothy Leary happened to be an intellectual, university-based guru and gave the youngsters a kind of a rallying point. They weren’t just talking about hippies, they were talking about an intellectual leader. And he, by saying these things, was giving them an additional argument for experimentation [. . .].”

There’s a lot going on here. First Linkletter’s choices are striking: popular rock music from Jefferson Airplane, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, relatively highbrow British novelist Aldous Huxley, and intellectual Leary. All colluded, according to Linkletter, in marketing drugs to the youth of the 1960s. But each did so, presumably, in a different way—each according to their own kind of authority. “At the heart of the story about intellectuals and popular culture,” explains Ross, “is a structural interrelatedness between knowledge and power” (5). While Jefferson Airplane had some catchy hits, their authority couldn’t quite match Leary’s: the former was merely branded with RCA Victor, while the latter was branded with Harvard.

Linkletter’s list is just one particularly interesting example of how intellectuals and culture are “fractionated [. . .] into countless arrangements of minute differences of taste and consumption, each governed by the authority of cultural competence, whether inherited or else explained by reference to an occupational hierarchy based on education and training” (6).

Linkletter knows this implicitly. Did you notice that his list goes from the force with the least authority and lowest position on the occupational hierarchy to the force with the most authority and highest occupation?

1. Jefferson Airplane (commercial rock group)
2. Allen Ginsberg (NYC Beat poet)
3. Aldous Huxley (British novelist)
4. Timothy Leary (Harvard professor)

Linkletter’s account is striking and reminds me of the way in which Ross talks about intellectuals’ relationship to popular culture.

"Did you do those photographs in there or what?"

"Yeah, I sort of dabble around, you know."
("Dabble? Listen to me, what a jerk.")

"They're wonderful. They have a quality."
("You're a great looking girl.")

"I would like to take a serious photography class."
("He probably thinks I'm a Yo-Yo")

"Photography is interesting because it's a new art form and a set of aesthetic criteria
have not emerged yet."
("I wonder what she looks like naked.")

"Aesthetic criteria? You mean whether it's a good photo or not?)
("I'm not smart enough for him. Hang in there.")

"The medium enters in as a condition of the art form itself."
("I don't know what I'm saying. She senses I'm shallow.")

"To me it's all instinctive. I just try to feel it. I try to get a sense of it and not to think about
it so much."
("God, I hope he doesn't turn out to be a schmuck like the others.")

"Still, you need a set of aesthetic guidelines to put it in a social perspective, I think."
("Christ, I sound like FM radio. Relax.")

---"Annie Hall"


1. I think "Casablanca" is really art, but I am not sure that Baumann does. He might find this
conclusion easier to make if he realized that art is a family-resemblance concept (Wittgenstein)
like the concept of a game. Not all works of art have the same characteristics. Rather there is
a shifting network of features that define art. "Casablanca" possesses some of these features. So
does "Star Wars."

2. I also think Baumann would find this judgment easier to make if he were unabashedly
a cognitivist about value (McDowell) instead of occupying a largely non-cognitivist position. (12-13). Social constructivism is a non-cognitivist position. Only cognitivism about value makes
sense of our phenomenology, our language and our motivations about value. People are only
non-cognitivists about other people's values. We all (probably) think that George Bush was
morally not just instrumentally wrong to start the Iraq War with at best very slender evidence.
The ethical case transfers to the aesthetic case. What Baumann should have argued was that
"Casablanca" and "City Lights" were art all along , but that class and other prejudices blinded
people to this fact until they learned better, not that these films suddenly switched from being non-art to art in 1965. Value is a discovery not an invention.

3. I had a more favorable view of statistics after reading Bourdieu than after reading Baumann.
I just do not know (or remember) enough statistics to understand some of the statistical conclusions he was making nor was he very helpful about explaining them. My view now is that historians should use at most correlations in their analysis not regression, since correlation
has an easy-to-understand common counterpart. Peter Stearns, a professor I worked with while
getting my MA in history, was very opposed to literary sources, but he was also not a big fan
of quantification. His view was that it was sufficient to read through your sources until
you stopped finding new things. I think Baumann should have followed this approach to film
reviews and advertising instead of his quantification approach. Baumann's approach seems like
inaccessible overkill.

4. I think sociologists are too quick to convert everything to the currency of status. Can't I just
like a work of art without worrying about quantity of status it will bring me?

5. I don't think Michelangelo or Raphael or Rubens thought there was such a dichotomy between
art and money or between art and group effort, and if they are not artists who is?

6. We know that Baumann does not like close reading because of his snarky comment about
the analysis of the shark in "Jaws," but does he even like films? At first, I thought he could
not undertake such a large project without liking movies, but the antiseptic tone of the book
leads me to doubt this conclusion. He could have been writing about the history of garden
tools.