Resistance is futile

Resistance is futile but not for the usual reasons. The old Marxist model saw avant-garde culture as the last holdout against an all consuming culture industry. Back then it seemed that talent scouts were about searching for the newest art in order to incorporate it into mainstream entertainment. Now there is no such tension. Avoiding appropriation is easy, no one in Hollywood is paying attention anyway. Political critiques of entertainment are shrugged off as irrelevant, queer readings are welcomed.

What does this mean for academic criticism? While it once seemed surprising to apply the critical tools of academic commentary to popular entertainment, this sort of cultural studies hardly seems challenging anymore. It is so easy to make a critical political reading of a contemporary film that even the most ardent old school leftist must suspect something. The culture industry does not worry that critics will unveil the neo-liberal message implicit in children's cartoons. The screenwriters worked hard to put it there, they're flattered some professor noticed.

Increasingly the purpose of cultural criticism is to show that art today can have political importance and that once upon a time it did have a social charge. History is the last refuge of criticism. "No one worries about the avant-garde anymore. But they used to seem explosive." Criticism needs to show how art could be radical, shocking, inspiring. We don't need to only use the language of the avant-garde either. This newest historicism seeks to explain the tensions in earlier historical periods, in order to make clear that it could be so once more. Romanticism was once revolutionary, in fact "revolution" used to be revolutionary--the very word has been tamed.

Academic criticism followed the path of the avant-garde in the 1970s by adopting increasingly complex and arcane procedures which separated it from ordinary culture. This specialization was less an attempt to legitimate theory by giving it a jargon than it was an attempt to insist on an academic version of aesthetic autonomy through the use of experimental writing techniques.

In the end, autonomy has brought with it dismissal and ignorance. "You can keep your autonomy" has been the attitude of such institutional voices as the New York Times. That academic writing is dismissed by the Times and so many other mainstream outlets is partially the result of the theory movement's disdain for compromised writing, its insistence on a purity of language even as it demonstrated its impossibility. The age of theory is over not just because that entire generation has died, but also because the shock value of highly complex thought has worn off. Couple that with a political culture that celebrates populist ignorance of history, grammar and logic, then you have the current gulf between the university and the rest of society. So the trick is to write sophisticated commentaries in a new manner.

Lost Theory

What a joy to find a long overlooked theory article! I know everyone writes that theory is over, but every now and then that old rush returns when I pick up an unfamiliar masterpiece written decades ago.

I had spent years reading Foucault and after relying on him to structure my dissertation turned into first book, I thought a break was in order. That first book was so thoroughly defined by my allegiance to Foucault. "The hand of the master is little too obvious," one of my writing group buddies said back then. Ok so I over compensated, avoided Foucault just as I had avoided Adorno and Benjamin after graduate school.

And then that little essay, really just a bunch of lecture notes, "Of Other Spaces," brought back all the old happiness. After nine years sitting in the wilderness, what a pleasure to read that old style intense language where every paragraph spawns a book. No more rambling current events blogs, no more unconnected contextualisations—no a short burst of closely packed ideas, strung together as assertions, almost commandments to reflect upon and critique.

Sure, I knew the essay was out there, sure lots of people give a passing footnote to his heterotopias. But those footnotes were always so pro forma, so empty of specifics, just a nod in the direction of Paris that I never felt drawn to the essay, until yesterday in the mad panic to construct a syllabus.

Boom, now I am loaded with a whole new terminology, all my geographical/spatial mutterings have a kick, that once upon a time surge of walking around the neighborhood packing, even its just my own basement study.

To read a fine essay, even as lecture notes published posthumously, brings to mind how dull things have become since the theory heads sailed away across the ocean of eternity.