Years ago, fresh out of college, I spent a month in London and came home with a poster by an artist named Victor Burgin. It was a bland fashion photograph of a couple embracing, with the legend: "What does possession mean to you? Seven percent of our population own 84 percent of our wealth." Only recently did I learn, via the Internet, that it had been plastered around Newcastle, pretending to be a typical fashion poster.
Burgin had adopted the strategy and look of commercial advertising to make his own "advert" for questioning its underlying cultural assumptions. This is the underpinning of much pop and postmodern art, and the essence the prevailing "post-structuralist" orthodoxy in literary and art theory. Burgin, I also learned recently, is among its scholars.
In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (University of California Press, 1996) in part chronicles the culture-studies movement, whose early adherents argued that so-called "high" culture was developed by and for the aristocracy to secure privileges. The first generation of thinkers behind this movement, as Burgin points out, were influenced by Marx and Freud, and posited folk and indigenous art as pure alternatives to the poetry and painting produced by and for the aristocracy.
But darn that aristocracy—it insists on controlling mass entertainment, too. Instead of singing folk songs and dancing traditional reels, the pliant proletariat, and much of the bourgeoisie, is content to curl on the sofa and cheer for Apprentice and American Idol contestants. Pop culture, too, it turns out, is organized to sustain the hegemony of that 7 percent.
All of this is background for a kind of despair about cultural production in general. Using ideas drawn from linguistics, semiology, psychoanalysis and other fields, post-structuralist scholars argue that the power-corrupted mediascape controls (or "speaks") us, not the other way around. Burgin contends that:
It is no longer plausible to separate culture into such distinct realms as "mass culture," "popular art," and "high art." At the levels of production and distribution, all cultural workers today actually or potentially rely on much the same technologies and institutions, and all cultural products are equally subject to commodification (albeit the specific forms of their relations to the market vary).
In other words, no matter what you do or make, whether it's paintings, plays or reality TV, you're working for The Man. All cultural productions inevitably are tainted by the prevailing social order. So aesthetic theorists trolled the fringes for new heralds among society's "marginalized." And thus the pages of art magazines, literary journals and doctoral dissertations swelled with pious deference for "difference," for defiant and bitter, self-absorbed art by feminists, gays and lesbians, the transgendered, the ethnic and racial minorities repressed by colonialism and imperialism.
I do not mean to impugn the genuine concerns of any of these groups. I've engaged with rewarding artworks and performances, sometimes caustic, sometimes poignant, out of the identity-politics milieu. But too often such work has been puerile and petty, evincing and sometimes embracing an ethic that rejects aesthetic standards as crushing impositions of the ruling class. And in the absence of an agreed-upon language of critical thought, cultural theorists elaborated an impenetrable jargon laden with neologisms and punctuated words such as "performativity" and "In/Different."
I used to think I was simply too dim-witted to assimilate this argot, so I was heartened to find that no less a savant than Christopher Hitchens derides it: "The French, as it happens, once evolved an expression for this sort of prose: la langue de bois, the wooden tongue, in which nothing useful or enlightening can be said, but in which various excuses for the arbitrary and the dishonest can be offered." Hitchens, the querulous columnist for Vanity Fair, recently reviewed The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism in The New York Times Book Review, calling it "a pointer to the abysmal state of mind that prevails in so many of our universities."
Hitchens also makes the point that the academic champions of the dispossessed and enemies of the elite constitute a huffy elite of another sort. Of course, one wit's elite is another pundit's vanguard. Burgin in his book spurns the labeling of academics as "elitist," as it obscures a manipulative "elite" of aristocratic and political authority. Here, it is necessary to step back again and acknowledge that contemporary cultural theorists such as Burgin—or Derrida, or Beaudrillard—have a point, that we should recognize and question the unspoken implications of most cultural productions. And the much-maligned "high" culture of the centuries, reshaped by successive generations, has much to offer in raising and answering those questions.
The right is unduly energized in this country, and cultural "relativism" is among its targets. It might be time for humanist scholars who appreciate that reality is indeed relative to abandon the absolutism about "high" art's supposedly compromised nature. Conservatives have co-opted and perfected the victim stance, convincing Nascar Dads that they are the oppressed, the victims of feminists, gays and immigrants. So the culture of truculent identity-politics is a dead-end. The canon of "high" culture has rightfully broadened to absorb new ideas and work of those once considered Other. Just as secular society has developed rules and laws through consensus, we can elaborate standards and ideals for cultural products. It is not surrender to elitism to do so; it is elitist, and maybe dangerous, to pretend we can't.
Chuck Twardy is a really smart guy who has written for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.