8th June 2003

Cultural Incompetents… Here’s a post

Cultural Incompetents…

Here’s a post I find remarkable:

The Repressive Hypothesis

We spent some time in Queer Theory talking about the place of talk shows in modern discourse, trying to decide when the Confessional becomes the Sideshow. I brought this up again Wednesday night when we were discussing The Repressive Hypothesis, and we tossed it around for a while. We discussed the scripted fakery of shows like Jerry Springer, and Jeff compared it to Roland Barthes’ essay on wrestling, which presents the wrestling match as a morality play of sorts, a re-enactment of justice…. [continued at slimcoincidence arete]

I find this post remarkable because a  few days ago I blogged thatit seems ever more important to me that the gardeners in the academy  return to tending their garden, prune the diseased sport of post modern theory from all but a few specimens necessary to provide context in our measurement of progress, and get on with the job of  studying and learning and teaching what is and what we imagine.”

In an email following that post I said, “If you have time to read it, perhaps even to provide a reflection, no matter how brief, critical, rancorous or scornful, I’ll appreciate it.  My engagement with this topic comes from some resentment I still feel that when I was a student of American Literature in the sixties, my teachers generally were not prepared to discuss Wallace Stegner, Thomas Pynchon, Ken Kesey, or Vladimir Nabokov. and certainly NOT Kerouac, Ginsberg, Bukowski, Ferlinghetti, William Burroughs and all.  I have a feeling things are much the same today and the focus on  critical method may overpower the brilliant content of artists of all ages.

Marek J (blogging most recently at Gonzo Engaged, but a Radio user since the nineties) was kind enough to respond.  Here’s what he said:

I vote to call the new age the “Unblinking Eyeball’s Lust For Manufactured Concerns.”  The age began with the release of the movie ‘Network’ in 1976. The ‘running out of bullshit’ was a first phase of this new age. New bullshit had to be manufactured. The second phase began by the Jerry Springer Show which elevated our Lust for Unblinkingness. It transformed bullshit into Concerns to Pay Attention to and caused us to discuss it at the Watercooler. This is the stage where manufacturing of Concerns began (culminated by President George Bush with the invention of Concerns Manufacturing Lust Machine in 2024). I believe we are entering now a third phase of this new age. Not sure what that is yet but it has to do with Reality Shows of Manufactured Tenderness and Cruelty. Shows like ‘Jackass’, ‘Real World’ and the Bachelor Varieties.

Marek’s right.  And while I am generally sensitive to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and queer concerns, I have to wonder about the place for the great cultural opening classes that take up space in the academic world.  Why “women’s studies?”  Why “[ethnicity-label] studies?”  Why “queer concerns?

Building cultural competence, solidarity, empathy, and awareness are important goals and the campus community is an important place for this to happen.  But when I was a kid (besides walking thirty miles to class through drifting snow, uphill both ways) we shared community through an institution of our own called the “free university.”  A lot of learning happened, and a lot of consciousness-raising.  I’m afraid my generation was guilty of holding the institutions hostage to our demands that they include this material in core curricula, but I think it was probably a mistake.

The funding that scholars found to institutionalize “multi-cultural awareness” was not money well spent.  Opportunistic charismatics drove their post modernist stakes in the ground around these studies, shut down serious political discussion, and poisoned research in political science, anthropology and sociology.  The inmates took over the asylum, and the philosophers, who couldn’t really agree on WHY the classroom lights turned bright when the switch was flipped, suddenly found themselves to be responsible for foundational work that wedded the social sciences and the humanities in a shotgun marriage made in hell. 

It’s just occured to me that Slim’s “Queer Concerns” reference might be to other than a formal college sponsored for-credit class.  I hope that this is the case.   

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2024 at 11:39 and is filed under Anti-intellectual Thuggery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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