Blue Jay Way: Where Will Critical Culture Come From?: Responses
Gitlin, Todd
Todd Gitlin INSTEAD OF critical culture, "struggl[ing] actively over how human beings should live," we have a pale culture of critics. Censorship is a permanent irritation but serious-minded...
...Among those of a genuinely critical bent— those who care about equality and fraternity as well as liberty—ideas in the abstract about the Good are not what is lacking today...
...It wasn't ideas about democracy, or civil rights, or poverty, as such, that made the sixties distinctive—the ideas had, for the most part, been kicking around for decades—but forms of action that were (a) promising, (b) exciting for a critical mass of activists, (c) galvanizing of a larger social spirit, and (d) ultimately effective, like the Freedom Ride, the nonviolent sit-in, the freedom ballot...
...or that unconscious processes are important, that there is a logic to illogic, that infantile sexuality happens, that families are little societies with their own barbarities...
...That was good work—though in the case of Marx, his blindness to the abominations of state power helped poison the twentieth century, a consequence to which "Whoops, sorry about that" won't do...
...Censorship is a permanent irritation but serious-minded people (who can also be joyful, why not...
...Dead doesn't mean useless...
...The wonderful "Simpsons" are Rupert Murdoch's most remunerative export...
...The gold mines are played out...
...Sometimes it's better to admit you're lost...
...Marx and Freud helped crack open the nineteenth century...
...Todd Gitlin INSTEAD OF critical culture, "struggl[ing] actively over how human beings should live," we have a pale culture of critics...
...The old-time religions, including those of Marx and Freud, are what people hang onto when they're lost...
...Derision, as Mark Crispin Miller pointed out years ago, is the normal stuff of sitcoms...
...need to face up to the fact that the grim-faced likes of New York's Mayor No, his mouth locked into a permanent sneer, is also, for critical critics, a feel-good source of embattlement, a convenient target for free-loving thinkers...
...If we have the luxury of living outside the Bible Belt, the censors are not the essential problem...
...A rebellion industry is the routine accompaniment of the sales onslaught...
...It's the necessary accoutrement of a sales culture that offers a zillion commodities to rattle the nerve endings...
...Here's the pathos of individualism in a prosperous society: If your objective is to kick open the doors of musty rooms, there's no failure like success...
...there was a lot of gold, as well as dross, in them hills, and we can still take pleasure in the bracelets, or nose-rings, made from the precious metal, if that's your thing...
...But in any event, the old guys are dead...
...The "transgression" so tediously heralded in unreadable academic journals is not exceptional, not transgressive at all...
...The libertarian side of the left, from Greenwich Village bohemians of the teens and twenties through the sixties, hasn't—or can't—come to grips with the prevailing cultural sponginess...
...Far more important, what we lack are ideas about forms of action...
...But it doesn't take us so far anymore to be reminded that class matters, that means of production (and their friction against relations of production) are crucial, that capitalism is creative as well as destructive...
...TODD GITLIN 's most recent book is Sacrifice, a novel...
...Transgression is cheap...
...Rebellion is written full-bore over the banality of most hip channels and independent films...
...Everything from farts to camp to hip-hop is available on demand—who needs politics for that...
...As Berman writes, we have "too many ideas, coming through too many channels...
...The consumer paradise on offer every day in a thousand forms—just put down your plastic and sign here—is as wide open as a trap door...
...it's normal...
...Criticism is all over the cable dial...
...Finally, I disagree with my friend Marshall that "Marxian and Freudian thought are both immensely provocative...
...One of the chief applause terms today is "edgy"—it's enough to make one want to turn to the Baffler, which bills itself as "the magazine that blunts the cutting edge...
...I would say, rather, that more than ideas, there's a superflux of impulses, quivers, tropisms...
...The internet is loaded with sniggers...
...This isn't the desert, it's the swamp...
Vol. 47 • January 2000 • No. 1
