"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?
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ReplyDeleteJoy,
ReplyDeleteGreat question(s). I keep thinking about the beginning of the semester when we all confessed our highbrow and lowbrow affinities. We didn't discuss the middlebrow affiliations but we all can definitely identify with something in that category. At least among our classroom, we all seem to have a horizontal relation within the brow spectrum. Granted, taste categories without a doubt reinforce boundaries and legitimate unequal class structures. But I think brow formations, and other cultural configurations such as subculture, counterculture, and mainstream are not necessarily discrete vertical entities. In the book I'm reviewing, called "Skate Life: Re-imaging White Masculinity" the author argues that cultural studies scholarship has not adequately explained the relationships between mainstream culture and subculture. She uses the concept of "corresponding culture" to understand, for example, how skateboarders, being mostly white, male, and heterosexual (at least in Ann Arbor, Michigan) both exclude minorities while also critiquing certain hegemonic aspects of traditional white male masculinity.
Maybe a way to at least re-orient brow categories, to make them more malleable and diffuse, would be to search for other examples of cultural correspondence. I certainly think honest and introspective admissions of how we actively participate in the brow continuum is a start in understanding and unpacking the politics and economics of these relationships.
Matt Nelson