We inhabit a culture that has been variously described over the last 20 years or so as postindustrial, postideological, post-Holocaust, postfeminist, postpunk, and, naturally, postmodern. Never mind that in actuality we remain surrounded by the signs and structures of industry, ideology, nuclear war, racism, sexism, and modernity. (Punk rock is the only category in which we are truly “post,” despite the black, spiky remnants that display themselves on Belmont Avenue.) The notion that we come after something else (a social trend, an aesthetic, a theory, a bit of history) remains pervasive; it easily lends itself to a nostalgic and pessimistic reading of contemporary culture, and indeed, so numerous have such readings become of late, they seem to constitute a literary genre in themselves.
But of course Allan Bloom isn’t read for his philosophical insight or his detailed analysis of popular cultural forms; he’s enjoyed for his hatchet job on popular education and culture. His readers want to cheer and jeer as Bloom tells us that rock music “has all the moral dignity of drug trafficking.” Most of all, Bloom offers the perverse pleasure of reading about just how bad things are. No stereotype is too thin to establish this. When Bloom meets a taxi driver, he discovers that the taxi driver is chewing gum. Naturally. And to Bloom’s evident consternation, the driver has undergone therapy (in prison) and engages the professor in a chat about gestalt. It turns out that the taxi driver is keen on therapy and credits it with the recovery of his self-respect. The professor is appalled. He writes: “What an extraordinary thing it is that the high-class talk from what was the peak of Western intellectual life, in Germany, has become as natural as chewing gum on American streets.” Instead of finding pleasure in this, and in the prospects for the taxi driver (who by this time I was starting to feel really sorry for), Bloom concludes sadly that our sense of sin has been replaced with an obsession with the self: “It is nihilism with a happy ending.” Cultural pessimism’s mean-spirited disdain for the dissemination of high culture has rarely been so baldly stated.
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Like Bloom’s tirades against TV (chewing gum for the eyes), Hirsch hits on something in our experience that seems instinctively to be true. When I walk into a lecture theater filled with 60 undergraduates not one of whom can explain to me the difference between an electoral caucus and a primary, I know that Hirsch and the cultural pessimists do have a point. It is difficult to engage in the business of electing a president if one doesn’t understand the overall process. Hirsch has hit upon one of Masscrit’s enduring strengths–its ability to play back to us facets of everyday life that we recognize, while fusing this recognition with a variety of deeply conservative and elitist diagnoses and prognoses.
Take Neil Postman’s case against television, in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. He argues that television has taken over our culture, imposing its values on all significant forms of public discourse: politics (elections as a bow-tie contest); religion (preaching as a televisual activity); newspapers (the colorized simplicities of USA Today); education (Sesame Street and the expectation among students that they should be entertained in the classroom and lecture theater), and, of course, the dominance of TV itself in our use of leisure time. The result of all this is intellectual degeneration, because TV is, according to Postman, an inherently irrational medium.
McLuhan’s second famous set of buzzwords was built on this observation; he stated that some media are “hot,” while others (including TV) are “cold.” This evidently caught on for a while in the 60s–partly perhaps because it reinforced our assumption that there is something magical about “the media,” something inherent in the machines themselves that dictates to us, and enslaves us.
It’s strange to find McLuhan revered today, when his impact on contemporary media theory is so slight. But then Masscrit never was big on theory. The cultural pessimists have rarely taken the time to understand left ideas sufficiently to be capable of an adequate critique. What Allan Bloom doesn’t know about contemporary Marxist thought, for instance, is definitely worth checking out. His chapters on culture, and on Marxism and ideology, are full of classic conservative rhetoric, unhindered by any serious engagement with post-Leninist thought. For Bloom, Marxism is “Vulgar Marxism.” He’s obviously proud of this gratuitous insult. The important and difficult Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, for instance, appears nowhere. To Bloom, Marxism implies a totally determined world, bereft of “free will.” Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of philosophy can drive a coach and horses through that one.
These interventions occur in the context of a growing movement in leftist-feminist academic work to rethink the meaning of mass culture. In the rethought version of leftist cultural analysis, assumptions about the “brainwashing” function of the media and its contribution to “false consciousness” are less easily made. The argument that once reduced mass culture to mere bread and circuses is abandoned and the real pleasures obtained from mass cultural forms are acknowledged. The often unconsciously oppositional or progressive elements of popular culture are stressed. Crude old Marxist economism is abandoned, and new concepts, derived from psychoanalysis and feminism, take their place. (This is the work that Allan Bloom can see only as post-Marxist, when in fact it is very clearly integrated within the philosophical framework of Marxism by virtue of its historical materialist epistemology and its central engagement with class, power, and ideology.)
