Michael Bérubé - American Airspace

Culture and society

People who’ve read my second book, Public Access, know that I haven’t always liked Terry Teachout’s work (one of the essays in Public Access deals briefly with an essay Teachout wrote in 1993 for the New Criterion, titled—I hope not by Teachout—“Another Sun Person Heard From”). But over the years, I’ve come to respect him—not that he should care about this—for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, because he is a member of what I fear is a dying breed: conservatives who care deeply about the arts. There are still a couple hundred of them in the country, clustered mainly around places like the New Criterion and the Hudson Review, and lord knows they don’t usually have anything good to say about people like me. But when you stop and realize that most of their ideological brethren these days have embarked on jihads against PBS because a cartoon bunny visited Vermont, or are trying to remove all books written by or about gays and lesbians from state libraries—well, I guess I’m just a softie, but it makes me want to extend the Endangered Species Act to cover intelligent, literate conservatives. Seriously. Look what passes for right-wing “cultural criticism” these days: Michael Medved on Million Dollar Baby and John Podhoretz on Star Wars III. The Neo-Zhdanovites. Actually, compared to these folks, poor old much-maligned Andrei Zhdanov was a model of discernment and restraint.

Terry Teachout, however (and this is the other reason), is quite often surprising. I do not mean this as faint praise: on the contrary, it’s the salient difference between a real critic and a hack. You don’t have to read hacks, whether they’re Podhoretz on the low end or Hilton Kramer on the high, because you already know what they’re going to say the minute you see their byline. So, at one point during my convalescence, when I came across Teachout’s essay, “Culture in the Age of Blogging,” I read it eagerly—partly because I didn’t know what it was going to say, and partly because Teachout’s blog is usually full of good stuff. (And here’s another thing that distinguishes him from the rest of the people on his side of the aisle: when he writes, “Laura and I do not write about politics on About Last Night, both because our views are not identical and because (as I noted on the blog last year) we believe that ‘it’s important that there be at least one politics-free space in the blogosphere where people who love art can read about it—and nothing else,’” he really means it. As opposed, say, to the legions of conservative culture warriors who, when they say “art should not be tendentious,” actually mean “we need more tendentious artists producing the kind of tendentiousness we like.”)

And sure enough, it’s a fair and substantive piece, marred by only a few moments of residual hackery that Teachout really would be better off without in the future. For instance, he sticks close to the party line in seeing Stanford’s 1988 curriculum revision as a “watershed moment” in the American Kulturkampf:

A watershed moment came in 1988, when a group of minority students and faculty members at Stanford University marched in protest against that school’s introductory course in Western culture. Led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, then at the height of his influence as an advocate-without-portfolio for progressive causes, they chanted: “Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture’s got to go!” While the battle cry was apparently chosen for its euphony (and because the course in question was called “Western Culture”), it also offered a simplified but nonetheless telling clue to the ultimate purpose of those academics who repudiated the universal significance of Western civilization.

Ahem. I am now going to make a declaration: this represents the very last time that a conservative cultural critic will be allowed to peddle this account of what happened at Stanford in 1988. All of you who were going to repeat this story yet again, or merely cite Teachout’s account, will have 48 hours to back away from your keyboards, beginning at midnight tonight. For although I have tired of the good Reverend Jackson in recent years, I continue to believe that people should be praised or blamed only for things they actually do. And Jackson did not lead this chant. Bill Bennett and Dinesh D’Souza said he did, but one is a compulsive gambler and first-class hypocrite, and the other is a pathological liar. Not being a pathological liar himself, Bennett did retract his claim almost immediately, saying, “I suppose the students were chanting, and perhaps the Reverend Jackson was not chanting.” But Bennett declined to note that Jackson actually rebuked the students for the chant, insisting, when he spoke at the rally, “the issue is not that we don’t want Western culture. We’re from the West.” And Stanford’s Black Student Union seconded the motion, saying “we would like to remind Mr. Bennett that we, too, are a part of Western culture.” (See John K. Wilson, The Myth of Political Correctness, p. 67.)

And may I add, as Stanford professors Herbert Lindenberger and Mary Louise Pratt have long since pointed out, that the “Western Civ” course at Stanford had been in place for only eight years when the students asked for it to be revised? (See Herbert Lindenberger, “On the Sacrality of Reading Lists: The Western Culture Debate at Stanford University,” The History in Literature: On Value, Genre, Institutions, pp. 148-62; Mary Louise Pratt, “Humanities for the Future: Reflections on the Western Culture Debate at Stanford.” South Atlantic Quarterly 89.1 (1990), pp. 7-25.) Holy Boethius, Batman, it wasn’t like a bunch of minorities showed up one day to destroy everything it took you cultured people millennia to build. You all really need to save your outrage for something more consequential, like perhaps a local production of The Vagina Monologues.

As for “the universal significance of Western civilization”: don’t go there. Don’t. Please. Do you know what happens when you claim “universal” significance for the West—or the East, or the Antarctic? It gives universalism a bad name, that’s what. And universalism actually doesn’t deserve the bad rap it’s gotten on the cultural left in the past few decades—but false universalism, that is, merely “significant” or “potentially transcultural” stuff passing itself off as universal, that deserves all the grief it’s gotten and more. If you want to defend introductory courses in Western civilization, then, just do what I do: say, as I did in my review of David Denby’s Great Books, that “people who hope to think seriously about their place in that world have a positive obligation to verse themselves in the history of human thought and achievement, and that at this time, in this country, Plato-to-the-present courses in ‘Western thought’ are as good a place as any (and better than most) to start.” That’s really all you need. Keep the appeals to universalism for when you really need them—say, when it comes to talking about universal human rights.

Which brings me to the core of Teachout’s essay, which is that the core no longer exists, the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the Internets: “One thing of which I am sure,” he writes in his penultimate paragraph, “is that the common culture of my youth is gone for good.” Again, it’s surprising that a cultural conservative who says such things nevertheless embraces blogging, even as he identifies blogs as “indicative of a sea change in American culture.” And what sea change was that? Oh, come on, you know:

the common culture of widely shared values and knowledge that once helped to unite Americans of all creeds, colors, and classes no longer exists. In its place, we now have a “balkanized” group of subcultures whose members pursue their separate, unshared interests in an unprecedented variety of ways.

All right, then, let’s get the easy stuff out of the way first. Teachout is only five years older than I am, having been born in 1956. Was there a common culture of widely shared values and knowledge in the United States at any point between 1956 and 1976, if we accord Teachout a “youth” of twenty years? Actually, yes there was, but it lasted for only for one week during 1967. In the words of Langdon Winner, “the closest Western Civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the week the Sgt. Pepper album was released. . . . At the time I happened to be driving across country on Interstate 80. In each city where I stopped for gas or food—Laramie, Ogallala, Moline, South Bend—the melodies wafted in from some far-off transistor radio or portable hi-fi. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard. For a brief while the irreparable fragmented consciousness of the West was unified, at least in the minds of the young.”

Other than that, folks, American culture in the early 1960s was plural and incoherent, being part of that irreparable fragmented consciousness of the West and all. Some people cared about exciting recent developments in the New York art world, some people cared about the Yankees, some people cared about those four young men from Liverpool, some people were reading Saul Bellow, and some people were concentrating on the important shit, like Gilligan’s Island. And before that? Before that, things were fragmented. Don’t take it from me—take it from Henry Adams. He’ll give you an earful on the subject, mainly with respect to how it’s been all downhill since the twelfth century.

So, then, I like Teachout’s praise of blogging, I like most of his own blogging, and I even like the conclusion to his essay:

At the same time, however, I still feel the need for a common space in which Americans can come together to talk about the things that matter to us all. And so my hope is that the blogosphere, for all its fissiparous tendencies, will evolve over time into just such a space. No doubt there will always be shouting in the blogosphere, but it need not all be past each other. When the history of blogging is written a half-century from now, its chroniclers may yet record that the highest achievement of the Internet, a seemingly impersonal piece of postmodern technology, turned out to be its unprecedented ability to bring creatures of flesh and blood closer together.

But if we’re going to talk about things that matter, we have to get a few things straight about this here “common culture” fetish. One: there was no common American culture in our youth, except for that week in 1967. Two: whenever you hear someone talking about that common culture, even though it didn’t exist, you’re probably safe in assuming that they’re playing a curious kind of three-card-monte game with the word “culture.” They start off using the word to mean something like “works of art, literature, music, etc.” and before you know it, they’re really talking about “ethnicity.” Teachout admits as much in his second footnote, citing Norman Podhoretz’s 1972 denunciation of “ethnic enthusiasts,” and in his penultimate paragraph, where he echoes the point, blaming the loss of our common culture on “the rise of ethnic ‘identity politics.’” There are two very different senses of “culture” at work here, and basically, the right-wing alarm bells go off the minute those ethnic people (with their “culture” in sense number two) stop caring about the works of art, literature, music, etc. (that “culture” in sense number one) that “we” allegedly cared about at some point in the past—or maybe our parents did, or our professors did, just before Jesse Jackson and the ethnic hordes showed up. (In earlier decades, you’ll recall, the folks who were screwing up the common culture were known—to quote T. S. Eliot’s notorious essay on the subject—as “freethinking Jews.” Rootless, cosmopolitan, and yet indelibly distinct, they messed with common cultures simply by showing up.)

Third, and most important: to date, not a single conservative thinker has managed to explain why a “common culture” is so important. When they try, they resort to another three-card-monte game, except that sometimes they’re not even aware they’re playing it; and when they are aware of it, what they do, subtly or unsubtly, is to substitute the ideal of a common society (which is what Teachout is really talking about when he speaks of a “common space in which Americans can come together”) for the notion of a “common culture.” And on this substitution, O my readers, everything depends. Some conservatives insist that a common culture is the very foundation of a common society, which is why they worry so much about Mexican-American families in Texas hanging Frida Kahlo reprints in their living rooms. Others insist that a common culture is a salve and a balm for social inequities, and they tend to be perfectly OK with Frida Kahlo reprints in people’s living rooms so long as the artwork keeps people from agitating to raise the minimum wage. And some conservatives simply don’t see the difference between “culture” and “society” at all.

But you’d think that the recent history of the Middle East—not to mention the Balkans, which always get invoked here, as in Teachout’s reference to “‘balkanized’ groups of subcultures”—would cast doubt on the idea that common cultural foundations have anything to do with fostering social harmony. The balkanization of the Balkans was not the result of the breakdown of the common culture of southeastern Europe; on the contrary, one might argue that the Balkans would have been a happier place in the 1990s if fewer people in the Balkans had been obsessed by the events of 1389. Robert Pattison made this elementary point back in 1988, in a critique of E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy:

every Irish person north and south knows the date of the Battle of the Boyne, when Protestant King Billy whipped Catholic King James. This was the Gettysburg of Irish history, and every Irish person can debate the high and absolute values at stake in that conflict. We know where that universal knowledge and that universal dialogue have ended. Similiar observations obtain in the Middle East. The Arab students are undoubtedly better versed in their culture than their American counterparts are, and many times more adept at arguing the primary values on which their culture rests. Yet I would not hold up Ireland or the Middle East as models for the education of the young in postindustrial societies.

The key here lies in the final two words: postindustrial societies. For what really fragmented the “common culture” was modernity itself . . . but that’s matter for another time. The immediate point is that I can agree with Teachout that we need common social forms, and that the blogosphere might just evolve into such a form: so far, it actually doesn’t have any country clubs or gated communities. (It is rare to hear conservatives talk about common social forms; more commonly, cough cough, they’re primarily concerned with gutting what remains of the public sector.) But there is no reason to predicate common social forms on the idea of a shared common culture. And I would say this not only to nostalgic conservatives but to nostalgic leftists as well, the kind who think that modernity and technology have rendered asunder what was once an organic green gemeinschaft. Back in 1993, in a judicious essay on the life and work of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall noted that talk of a lost common culture could be found on a certain wing of the British left, and he warned against lapsing into the belief that such a culture could serve as the foundation for the idea of a nation. Hall thus took issue with Williams’ critique of “a merely legal definition of what it is to be British”; in 1983, Williams had written that “to reduce social identity to formal legal definitions at the level of the state is to collude with the alienated superficialities of ‘the nation.’” A decade later, Hall replied, in words that should resonate even more richly today,

If you are a black woman trying to secure rights of citizenship from the local DHS office or an Asian family with British residence running the gauntlet of the immigration authorities at Heathrow, “formal legal definitions” matter profoundly. They cannot be made conditional on cultural assimilation.

It should not be necessary to look, walk, feel, think, speak exactly like a paid-up member of the buttoned-up, stiff-upper-lipped, fully corsetted “free-born Englishman” culturally to be accorded either the informal courtesy and respect of civilized social intercourse or the rights of entitlement and citizenship. . . . In the matter of citizenship, of course, there are minimal responsibilities to those others with whom one shares a political community, just as there are “rights.” But, far from collapsing the complex questions of cultural identity and issues of social and political rights, what we need now is greater distance between them. We need to be able to insist that rights of citizenship and the incommensurabilities of cultural difference are respected and that the one is not made a condition of the other. (Emphasis in original.)

In other words: common social spaces, and shared norms of citizenship, do not require a common “culture.” Quite the contrary: too much common culture can actually be corrosive of common social spaces. So, then, may the blogosphere evolve into a common social form, and may a thousand uncommon cultures bloom in it, writing about last night and about the Beatles and about all manner of cultural phenomena. Except, of course, for the culture that recycles suburban legends about curriculum revision at Stanford. That one we can do without.

Posted by on 06/15 at 02:13 PM

OK, now I’m really glad you’re back.

I’m waiting for the amended version of that Stanford urban legend to show up, in which Jackson wasn’t chanting because he was busy spitting on returning Vietnam vets.

“One thing of which I am sure,” he writes in his penultimate paragraph, “is that the common culture of my youth is gone for good.”

Teachout must have lived through a different 1970s than I did. I recall a fair bit of exuberant cultural diversity arising in that era, from the birth of salsa and reggae to self-conscious childrens’ TV shows like ¡Villa Allegre! and Jambo! (obvious exclamatory precursors to such interestingly punctuated phenomena as Earth First!) Cherie Moraga was writing then, and Frank Chin and the non-leg-shaving editorial staff at Off Our Backs, and then kids in Omaha started shaving patches of their scalps and shoving safety pins through their cheeks.

Which is of course pretty much what Podhoretz was decrying, itself ironic in that Podhoretz was one of those Eliotian freethinkers.

It’s unusual to do anything but lament the existence of the 1970s, but watching the burgeoning hopeful freedom of those years - and then seeing the effects of the Reagan Clampdown, still in progress - makes me pine a bit. I think we’ve come much closer to having a common culture in the last few years, and not only is it superficially ethnically diverse, but we have Latino attorneys general endorsing the use of Critina Aguilera recorings being used as torture to maintain that common culture.

I do understand that nostalgia for the wrongly-remembered culture of yore, though, especially when you compare it to the seemingly deliberate vulgarism of Amerikan Kultur. Take my favorite piece by Catullus:

Quid facit is, Gelli, qui cum matre atque sorore
prurit, et abiectis peruigilat tunicis?
quid facit is, patruum qui non sinit esse maritum?
ecquid scis quantum suscipiat sceleris?
suscipit, o Gelli, quantum non ultima Tethys
nec genitor Nympharum abluit Oceanus:
nam nihil est quicquam sceleris, quo prodeat ultra,
non si demisso se ipse uoret capite.

You’re not gonna find stuff like that on South Park.

Posted by Chris Clarke on 06/15 at 05:06 PM
fissiparous:"1. Reproducing by biological fission; 2. Tending to break up into parts or break away from a main body; factious.”

“And so my hope is that the blogosphere, for all its fissiparous tendencies...”

A poor choice for a writer. Most readers, should they know the definition (I did not), will still be drawn to the definiton of fission in their minds, a act of physics brought about by an implosion sphere (usually). It has nothing to do with breaking into parts.

It may seem anal, but this is a big issue for bloggers, or should be. How plain can we make the language to be easily understood by all but at the same time not be dull? I chase this one around all the time.

Posted by paradox on 06/15 at 05:17 PM
(I did not), will still be drawn to the definiton of fission in their minds, a act of physics brought about by an implosion sphere (usually). It has nothing to do with breaking into parts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission:

In general fission is a splitting or breaking up into parts.
In physics, nuclear fission is a process where a large nucleus such as uranium is split into two smaller nuclei.
In biology, binary fission refers to the process whereby a prokaryote reproduces by cell division. It is similar to mitosis and meiosis in eukaryotes.

Posted by Chris Clarke on 06/15 at 05:22 PM
By jingo, Michael really *is* back - and in fine fettle!

Outstanding post, Doctor.

Posted by on 06/15 at 05:40 PM
The act of fission is compression, massive compression, then the nuclei break apart. Before the nuclei are forced apart they are brought together to break the Strong Nuclear Force that holds atoms together.

It’s why you keep vocabulary simple. If you don’t you have no idea where your readers will end up, and it’s a massive assumption to think they’ll end up anywhere near where you wanted them.

Most readers will not look up words. They’ll just slam anything in there and keep going.

Posted by paradox on 06/15 at 05:43 PM
When he was listing off the common culture, and it included abstract-expressionist painting, it made me wonder if he was focused in part to the common culture put forth by the ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’ shadow funds. Now _there_ was a culture Americans could all get behind.

Posted by Konczal on 06/15 at 05:48 PM
uh, paradox, as a physicist (ok, a physics grad student), fission is what happens when an atom splits in two. you do have compression in an atomic bomb, but that’s because the way the bomb works is that it shoves two pieces of uranium together. neither piece is large enough to set off a chain reaction by itself, but when they’re forcibly combined, you get a large enough piece to produce a chain reaction. the actual process by which any given atom undergoes fission does not involve compression, or even interaction with any other atoms except, possibly, for the absorption of a neutron released in a previous fission reaction.

Posted by willie on 06/15 at 05:57 PM
i did mean to say that this was an excellent post, but all the physics must have driven it from my mind. it’s an occupational hazard, i guess.

Posted by willie on 06/15 at 06:00 PM
Are we off-topic yet?

The act of fission is compression, massive compression, then the nuclei break apart. Before the nuclei are forced apart they are brought together to break the Strong Nuclear Force that holds atoms together.

Um, no. Not even close. Sorry.

In nuclear weapons, the compression just serves to lower the critical mass threshold, by increasing the overall likelihood that the typical atomic nucleus in the fissile material will collide with a stray neutron. The only reason that compression is used in weapons is because you need to have a pile of fissile material that isn’t at critical mass until you want it to be, because you need to get it to the target before it goes off. If you’re building your nuke on the target site, all you need to do is build a big enough pile of U-235: no compression necessary.

Your larger point is a good one, that we should be careful not to talk over our audience’s heads. I wholly agree. But you can’t expect a writer to anticipate every cockamamie misunderstanding of a common word that might come down the pike, as happened here.

Posted by Chris Clarke on 06/15 at 06:02 PM
Oh Michael, please don’t knock Henry Adams. His earful in The Education is on of my favorites. I think he gets Harvard and New England just right, and I’m all for civilizations which are moved by the power of the Virgin and not just the dynamo.

I do think that there is a benefit to a certain sort of common education, because I think they make it possible for us to understand what the others are saying. (It isn’t possible to know how wrong Victor Davis Hanson is, if you haven’t read any of the Greeks.) So, yes I think everyone should read some Homer and Plato. Having said that, I don’t disagree with the thrust of what you’re saying.

Posted by on 06/15 at 06:02 PM
I should have added, even when they look up the words they still fuck it up. Sorry for all the useless yap.

I only know (sketchily) nuclear weapons, and only that because I studied USN weapons procurement as a poli sci major. I do the best I can. I’ll leave you higher beings to your higher plane now and not bother you again.

Posted by paradox on 06/15 at 07:04 PM
Wonderful. Although I’ll have to pick one more (non-nuclear) nit, right at the end: Stuart Hall’s rebuke of Raymond Williams is based on a pretty selective reading (via Paul Gilroy) of Williams from his The Year 2000 (pp.195-196). Look again. The scenario, as Williams sets it up, definitely complicates the mode of address (an ‘English working class man,’ his encounter with new ‘unfamiliar neighbors,’ a ‘standard liberal reply’—and none of these speaking as/for Williams). In this context, Williams says that you’re not going to convince your alarmed neighbor by saying ‘hey, they are as British as you are’ (because, in such a moment, the ‘merely legal definition’ won’t suffice). Williams, then, is not saying that such legal bases for citizenship are worthless or, further, that citizenship must be made ‘conditional on cultural assimilation’ (c’mon, you know your Williams better than to think that! So, for that matter, does Hall.) I also think that there are ways of thinking the ‘common’—never mind your too-convenient split of ‘social spaces’ and culture—that are more complex than you’ve accounted for here. But, otherwise, I’m on board.

Posted by on 06/15 at 07:24 PM
You’re talking to a Henry Adams fan, Abby. Not a big fan, but a fan nonetheless: he’s my favorite conservative Christian anarchist neo-medievalist ever.

As for that common education: the really cool thing about the Western Civ course—and I say this from a completely self-interested standpoint as a college teacher—is that it allows professors in the upper-level courses to assume that all their students have read the Plato-to-Nietzsche syllabus. Most of my professors at Columbia loved the pedagogical freedom this gave them. In the general culture at large, though, the problem is that we actually don’t need Plato and Homer in order to communicate with each other; a working knowledge of Gilligan’s Island and Fear Factor will do the trick. Rather, we need Plato and Homer in order to think seriously about ways of being in the world, which is quite another thing altogether. Me, I’d say start from Bernard Williams’ Shame and Necessity and work backwards. . . .

Posted by Michael on 06/15 at 07:31 PM
And Greg: yes, you’re quite right about the partial (in both senses of the term) Gilroyization of that passage from Williams. Williams wasn’t really arguing that you have to look, walk, feel, think, and speak exactly like a paid-up member of the buttoned-up, stiff-upper-lipped, fully corsetted “free-born Englishman” in order to count as truly British, and Hall’s line is a bit unfair. But in Hall’s defense, he was reacting also to the strain of “culturalist” cultural studies he identified in 1980, and Hall et al. were right to hear in Williams’ vague but generous insistence on culture as “a whole way of life” those curious Eliotic overtones. After all, in Culture and Society Williams openly acknowledged his debt to Eliot from the outset, and I have to quote the passage because I love what a great piece of cultural ventriloquism it is (on Eliot’s part): “Culture . . . includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches, and the music of Elgar.” Cheerio and pip, pip, Tom! Note that very few of these things are items from the culture of St. Louis, with its blues and its beers and its riverboats and its Cardinals.

As for my too-convenient split between social spaces and culture: OK, I admit it, I was being fissiparous.

Posted by Michael on 06/15 at 07:43 PM
Yeah, I was going to end with ‘fissiparous’ but was too lazy to scroll up and check the spelling (so, I left it as ‘too-convenient split’. So, hey, I set it up, you knock it through the posts. And I won’t engage in a battle of Williams’ quotes (but, really, reaching back to Culture and Society? Even Williams would remark that he could no longer recognize the guy who wrote that book.) Further (as you might have guessed) I’m no big fan of the cultural studies’ two paradigms—culturalist / structuralist—split (look where that’s got us). Call it fissiparous too I suppose.

Posted by on 06/15 at 08:45 PM
but, really, reaching back to Culture and Society?

I just love that quote, that’s all. Henley Regatta, Wensleydale cheese—a whole way of life.

Posted by Michael on 06/15 at 09:01 PM
Wensleydale? What’s wrong with Wensleydale?

Posted by Wallace (the windows) on 06/15 at 09:55 PM
I like Terry’s blog a lot, too, as well as a number of the other ArtsJournal.com blogs. And I’m happy to see you mention it (openly, that is), though a link wouldn’t be so bad. You won’t get conservative cooties, I promise - ask Roy Edroso.

It happens that not long before the essay you discuss appeared, I appealed to some of Terry’s ideas (as he had expressed them at his blog previously) in a somewhat different context at my site. I’ve had a bit too much wine right now to bother any more, so suffice it to say that I don’t think you can underestimate the role of broadcast in what he means by “common culture”.

As for common culture as defined above, it almost arrived once again when Prince released “Let’s Go Crazy”; it also blossomed, against the odds, when Sinead covered “Nothing Compares 2 U”, which I heard played on every radio station, across every format, when it was at its peak. Which goes to show, I guess, that Prince was the common culture.

Posted by JL on 06/15 at 10:00 PM
First, I just want to throw in that, in recently going through old papers, I found the article “Public Image Limited,” published in the Village Voice by Dr. Berubé about 14 years ago. (Hey, that’s the same guy that has that blog!) The article refuted the media claim that “young faculty members in the Humanities” were plotting “the destruction of the West.” How unfortunate that the same inane claims must still be fought; but how good that you are still at it in a nuanced and rational manner.

I would suggest that one very large problem with the analysis of many who talk about a “common culture” is a sense of that culture as static and as “white.” In fact, I don’t think that US culture can be understood except as profoundly dynamic, with that dynamism being largely tied to the evolution of the African (person, community and ethos) in the US.

Teachout seems to locate his “common culture” in the 1950s, referring to “film, jazz, musical comedy, modern dance, and abstract-expressionist painting” as its exemplars. Of course, the unacknowledged appropriation of the African by Gershwin and Astaire and Elvis, by country music, etc., was central to US popular and to some extent high culture in the 1950s, and continues today,

While Michael refers to Sgt. Pepper as a uniting moment, I would suggest that Motown reached out to many more communities and has lasted longer. We all know the Lonely Hearts Club Band, but we all react viscerally to Dancin’ in the Streets. (For example, for a certain class of middle-aged white Southerners, Motown and related music, referred to as “beach music,” is central to their identity as a group. They hardly exist collectively without a group of African-American musicians to give their bonding meaning.)

Why does this matter, aside from questions of historical accuracy? Because, I would argue, the so-called assault on “Western Civilization,” the “balkanization” that is so feared by conservatives and some liberals, is essentially the movement to critique white racism and Eurocentrism. That critique came first historically in academia, has had the greatest continuing vigor, and most deeply links to global questions and international relations. (This critique also provides a pointer back to the reality that “Western Civilization” has always been a syncretic project, incomprehensible and impossible without Muslim learning or, going farther back, Egyptian influence.)

Feminist, GLBT and other critiques stand on their own, but historically have followed, in all senses, the critique of racism.

Those who are “defending Western Civilization” are actually defending an entity that never really existed— “white Western Civilization” that was at some moment unalloyed and without an inner dialectic driving it to evolve. And they are defending it against the “non-white”—mainly historically African—that has in real life been the central dynamic force of US culture.

Teachout and his less intellectually rigorous allies are seeking to refer back nostalgicaly to a common US culture, while seeking to block or at least distance themselves from the continuing development of the most dynamic and probably most central component of that culture. Aside from the moral and political issues in play, this is simply not a viable project, as shown by the pervasiveness and creative power of hip-hop culture. There is today no breakdown of a common US culture; there is, as there has always been, an evolution, which leaves some of us older folks behind. There is also an increased awareness of how culture works and of questions of ownership, appropriation and denial, so that many people of African descent today are more likely to claim their contribution, and many whites are less able to ignore it.

The “white” majority of the US as a society continues to be profoundly in denial around race; but as a culture, the US continues to need to attend to, even to nurture, the Africanness at the heart of our culture. (We also know, especially those who market culture, that the African element of US culture is key to its global popularlity.) To the extent, then, that conservatives (or liberals) are identified with a defense or minimization of racism and a nostalgia for a petrified moment of culture, they are incapable of keeping up with US culture, or even genuinely respecting the past they claim to be protecting.

Posted by on 06/15 at 10:14 PM
This shouldn’t bother me but it does.

. . . to be accorded either the informal courtesy and respect of civilized social intercourse or the [------] rights of entitlement and citizenship . . . .

Can anyone tell me what purpose Stuart Hall serves by omitting the parallelism, that is, by including the word formal?

Posted by on 06/15 at 10:41 PM
Teachout must have been living in some upper middle class fantasy world in his youth. I am a year older and the “common culture” was definitely a myth when I was growing up. Maybe you needed to be where things come to a boundary to appreciate this. My dad’s family was Protestant (except for the ones turned to athieism by zealous religion), my mon’s family was Catholic. My dad’s family spanned the projects to the social register, labor Democrats to paleo-Republicans. I grew up with white ethnics and “poor Jews” who were sometimes a world away from the WASP world of some people I knew.

There always have been breaking points in American culture and what passes for Western Civ. The Irish example is an excellent one, because it continued to reverberate centuries later in the US. Despite three generateions of intermarriage, it’s still a big deal for someone to marry a Catholic in my Dad’s family. The separation of Church & state held in this countrybecause Episcolpalian and snake handler alike, Protestants were afraid of the Pope. After Vatican II and JFK, the Prots no longer had the same enemy they once did and now we are stuck with faith-based nonsense of all sorts.

Teachout should talk to some real people not some abstract ones of some wingnuts. Certainly there are liberals of this stripe, but we’re taling about wingnutia. He may care about humanities, but presumes some concern with how things like art, writing, and music relate to human experience....

Posted by on 06/15 at 11:02 PM
You won’t get conservative cooties, I promise.

Oh yeah, right, easy for you to say, JL. But just you wait. First I link to Terry’s site. Next thing you know, I’m linking to Armavirumque. Within a few weeks, I’m citing Virgil as an inspiration for PNAC, and . . . even worse . . . I’m pining for the days of Catullus. Grandeur, Rome, dying days of the Republic, you know, the whole deal. (Thanks, Chris! Did you know that that the Catullus archive offers this family-friendly warning when you ask to check out 88? So much for our common culture!) And JL and Larry, as much as I like Prince and Motown, Chris is right about the diversity of the 1970s; let’s not get too misty about the evanescent moments of unity in the 1960s or the 1980s. (I was citing Langdon Winner on June 1967 ironically, of course. I just loved his reference to the Congress of Vienna—you put that together with Eliot on the Wensleydale cheese, and I’m a happy camper, citationally speaking.)

Posted by Michael on 06/15 at 11:19 PM
Excellent post. (And you sly dog, you!—with the “important shit like Gilligan’s Island” shout-out to the Kos kerfuffle.)

Posted by Orange on 06/15 at 11:27 PM
Did you know that that the Catullus archive offers this family-friendly warning when you ask to check out 88?

A warning well-heeded: the poem describes extremely friendly families.

Posted by Chris Clarke on 06/15 at 11:42 PM
Wensleydale cheese? I prefer Venezuelan Beaver Cheese, myself.

Cue pat summary of shared Western media culture.

“Culture? Finest in the district!”
“Explain the logic underlying that conclusion...”

Posted by on 06/16 at 02:03 AM
Okay, Michael, I didn’t mention earlier, but it is damn fine to have you back, even though your guest blogger did, as you say, “Koufax Work.” I’ll be nominating right along with you. Oh wait, that was the last post.

Just a thought about this post. Has anyone read Samuel Delaney’s “Times Square Red, Times Square Blue?” In the second essay, he borrows some notions from Jane Jacobs about cross class contacts (as opposed to networking, which is primarily intraclass), and traces how the control of this activity is a frequent aspect of those out to “protect” the culture. What I mean is that Teachout’s “shared” culture is not just race based but class based (which frequently crosses race lines, not to mention gender, sexual, and other lines many would rather pretend don’t exist(hey Jamie, how you doin? Playin’ baseball this summer?)), which I think goes directly to the Williams issue

It all reminds me of Eagleton’s genealogy of English Literature as a field of academic study (which keeps me nervous as I get ready to enter grad school in English Literature). English lit comes into being as a method of creating a cultural identity to be delivered onto the lower classes to generate the necessary shared culture that those up the class ladder need to keep the proles from looking at their Kahlo reprints and deciding to heed its call for revolt.

Or somthing like that. Eagleton may have his problems, but I’m still sympathetic with crank Marxists.

Thanks for your time.

Posted by on 06/16 at 02:18 AM
Well, one person’s common cultural moment is another person’s cultural imperialism. It’s interesting that jazz, blues, and abstract impressionism rank as the former and McDonalds, Hollywood blockbusters, and SUVs rank as the latter, at least according to certain of our left-leaning bretheren in Europe (you know what it’s like, living in one of those countries is like living in them all, what with the common European culture...). The interesting thing is that the former is somehow considered ‘not American’ but universal, whereas the latter is considered typically American, and therefore imperialistic. Or are we back to a media/marketing distinction?

Not quite sure which group would include Gilligan’s Island, but Buffy the Vampire Slayer would definitely be included in the first.

Not mind-bending stuff, but then again I’m a blog virgin, or was before this post…

Thanks

Posted by on 06/16 at 06:25 AM
Within a few weeks, I’m citing Virgil as an inspiration for PNAC, and . . . even worse . . . I’m pining for the days of Catullus. Grandeur, Rome, dying days of the Republic, you know, the whole deal.

No, no. That’s what happens when you start reading the collected speeches of Robert Byrd. By the way, aren’t these the dying days of the Republic?

You should link to Armavirimque, if only because James Panero is a gifted art critic. And then there’s Roger Kimball! Think fish, barrel.

I’ll probably write more later, but aside from all of the confusions and misunderstandings a phrase like “common culture” can inspire, some of the comments here seem to be directed toward a Terry Teachout of the mind. I don’t claim to know his entire history, but far from coming from an upper middle class upbringing far from where boundaries meet, he’s from a small Missouri town outside St. Louis, and is a serious student (as a writer and musician) of jazz. For better or for worse, those facts shape his outlook. When he writes on topics such as this, I tend to think of his words as coming from a character in a Lanford Wilson play.

So, when it was four white guys from England dominating the airwaves, that was a common culture, but we shouldn’t get nostalgic for the times blacks or women did the same? This common culture of yours sounds mighty suspicous to me! Oh hey, wait; that’s your point.

Posted by JL on 06/16 at 07:22 AM
Like Orwell, a dead metaphor makes me react as to fingernails on a chalkboard. Teachout’s use of “sea change” causes such a reaction.

Way back when (oh, twenty years ago), a “sea change” was the change the sea effected on an item. A piece of a glass bottle, for example, comes out of the sea quite different from how it went in.

Somehow, this eventually was twisted around to a change of the sea itself, a change of the greater thing--not the smaller changed by the greater (as the original metaphor intended).

Sorry to nit-pick Teachout, but better that than my going on a rant about the real lack of “common culture” in the 1960s--or anytime--in America. As a wanderer amongst the “counterculture” of the time, I quickly realized that the myths of commonality were based on wishes all as ephemeral as Norman Mailer’s Aquarius. And I’m not speaking simply of the “counterculture” (a mythical media creation, anyhow) but of “common” culture.

Whoops… I’m about to rant, so will shut up instead.

Posted by on 06/16 at 08:42 AM
As I understand, Henry Adams was part of the cabal which engineered the Spanish-American War. I’ve been meaning to find more about that.

His flat, third-person style in “The Education Of” made that book the hardest book to read I ever tried. Marcus Aurelius was hard for the same reason, but as a Roman Emperor, Marcus had an excuse.

Posted by John Emerson on 06/16 at 09:11 AM
Teachout’s history sounds even more narrowing than I guessed. Small towns in the midwest are great places for socializing people into delusions about a comon culture (usually some Velveeta version of Protestant small town America). My grad school roommate from Kansas was a good example. A nice guy in most respects and open to stuff like Carlos Castenadas, he ultimately was unable assimilate a comsopolitan view of the world (or understand those of us who had no trouble identifying with it). Marrying a woman who was Jewish probably made him more rigid than open. For him, the norm was Methodist small town Kansas. Teachout sounds pretty similar.

Posted by on 06/16 at 10:32 AM
Teachout’s history sounds even more narrowing than I guessed.

That’s pretty much the response I expected. I don’t think anyone, Terry himself very much included, would disagree that his conservatism is rooted, at least in part, in his background. But instead of thinking about the various experiences that might have been a part of that history and the differing ways they may have affected him, you only shift into another fantasy version of his past. Perhaps it’s time to stop speculating about Teachout and actually read him?

Posted by JL on 06/16 at 10:44 AM
Great to see you back in full force, MB. I don’t have much new to add except that Teachout’s nostalgic musings strike me as unbecomingly provincial, certainly not the sort of opinion I’d expect from anyone with academic pretensions. Further, I concur with Larry’s analysis of conservative discomfort with “multiculturalism” and find it disappointing that they so frequently insist upon absolute Western monoculture rather than being satisfied with mere Western hegemony, which has never seriously been challenged. I expect (and hope) that the common social spaces MB mentions will play an instrumental role in dismantling the deep insecurity and parochiality that give rise to these kinds of fears.

Posted by on 06/16 at 10:46 AM
Nice job of distinguishing between the two uses of “culture” by the right, and you’re of course very right to point out that “common culture” nostalgia is nostalgia for something that never existed (Jameson, anybody?). When I hear such drivel, I always think of “underground” gay bars in NYC in the 1950’s--none of which, I venture to guess, were called “Arnold’s Drive-In.”

In fact, if you split one type of culture--the kind that includes both Shakespeare and Sgt. Pepper’s--into “high” and “popular” (or, better yet, “commercial"), then it’s possible to see how we’re more culturally unified now than ever, in some ways at least. In your pomo AmLit course at Illinois, Michael, we were discussing how Scott’s vision of LA in Blade Runner became the template for dystopian sci-fi films and that, after it, few films in that genre could imagine the future in any other way--a dark, industrial wasteland. But you said: “Folks, I have seen the future, and it looks like north Prospect.” (North Prospect is the north end of Prospect Ave. in Champaign, and it’s where all the chain restaurants, Targets, Best Buys, Barnes & Nobles, etc., are.)

It is this aspect of increasing cultural unification that magnifies other aspects of our cultural fragmentation. Every town within twenty miles of an interstate has the same stores and restaurants, but still there are those pesky ethnic and liberal types who want to ruin it all. So, when (insert cultural conservative here) starts bemoaning the end of western civ, there now actually appears, at least to thos of us who live in a town with a Wal Mart or a Chili’s, to be empirical evidence that such a culture existed, vestiges of which are being preserved at an exit ramp near you.

Here’s the irony: What unifies much of the U.S. commercial culture is the sense that we have lost a common non-commercial culture. Applebee’s--eatin’ good in the neighborhood? Ah, remember neighborhoods? Hence, too, in my last comment, my implied guilt at having eaten at Cracker Barrell. Ah, remember crackers, and barrels?

Posted by on 06/16 at 10:47 AM
Reductio ad glib-ism: the notion of a “Common Culture” denies the notion of culture as a commons.

Posted by Chris Clarke on 06/16 at 11:27 AM
Only to express agreement with Greg’s qualification of the Williams quote. Important to be careful how you peddle Williams when some—err, many—won’t bother to read him for themselves. Isn’t that how all of these problems with the Stanford mythology and Western civ courses originally got started?

And, ummm, Rich, those are stereotypes. Who is actually doing the homogenizing when using such stereotypes? Don’t forget the dangerous tendency to impose “common cultures” on others.

Posted by on 06/16 at 01:12 PM
I find this part fascinating:

In the words of Langdon Winner, “the closest Western Civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the week the Sgt. Pepper album was released. . . . At the time I happened to be driving across country on Interstate 80. In each city where I stopped for gas or food—Laramie, Ogallala, Moline, South Bend—the melodies wafted in from some far-off transistor radio or portable hi-fi. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard. For a brief while the irreparable fragmented consciousness of the West was unified, at least in the minds of the young.”

If you drive across I-80 today, every time you stop for gas or food, you’ll not only hear the same songs on the local radio stations, but you’ll pass the same fast food restaurants and gas stations, and you’ll be buying the same brands of foodstuffs at the gas station mini-mart. To many people, this is also part of culture, and it’s a lot more homogenous than it ever was.

Posted by thehim on 06/16 at 07:20 PM
Thanks! I really like the distinction betweeen “culture” and “society"--I’ve been groping for a way to articulate that distinction. The South is a society; blacks and white aristocrats and white non-aristocrats have always been part of that society, but have different (although very connected) cultures.

Posted by on 06/16 at 09:07 PM
"Did you know that that the Catullus archive offers this family-friendly warning when you ask to check out 88?"--Michael F. Berube

115, one of the Mentula poems, was in Zukofsky’s *A Test of Poetry*. I think all the poems anent Mentula on the site you cite have the safety warning on them.
This seems to be only because of how they translate the name--what else in 115 could offend?

Posted by on 06/16 at 10:35 PM
The translation of number 21 is rather, um, neologistic.

Posted by Chris Clarke on 06/16 at 10:44 PM
Excellent post! I have always thought the common culture argument was more a test of people’s sense of collective memory. The “common” myth has been preserved by a thoroughgoing suppression of non-white, bourgeois then middle-class, mostly prostetant people. And their European ancestors. Nothing common about Chinese immigration through the 19th century into the 20th for instance and what those generations of immigrants contributed to U.S. society.

Difference as threatening is a different view of balkanization than that, sat Judith Butler analyzes re: feminism. This may be akin to the “culturalist” cultural studies Michael mentioned?

What is interesting to me is “balkanazation.” There seems some unanimity against politics grounded in hardened factionalism but a great deal of dispute over what can cause that. I think anti-difference and difference fetishism are the two lines of argument. The point at which one’s positionality speaks entirely for them you have an overflexed concept of difference. But the conservative critique of balkanzation via “common culture” is mostly grounded in prejudiced self-regard and fear. It is an effort to instill a homogenous collective memory as some kind of guarantee on a homogenous collective future.

The left’s critique of balkanzation is predicated on fostering difference without difference becoming an a static collection of positions that kill off dialogue. I am not so sure that happens as often as people worry about, but it is a very different direction from which to worry about cultural factionalism.

Posted by on 06/17 at 09:12 AM
This is weird. I was just thinking this morning that cultural harmony was superior to cultural unity (or at least more fun). I tried tracing my thoughts back as to why I was thinking this - looking for some common source shared by this blog posting and my ponderings. I listened to NPR on my morning commute, but I can’t remember a thing that was on it. Maybe they had some cultural analysis story inspired by Teachout’s essay.

Posted by on 06/17 at 09:17 AM
Well, I got around to reading Teachout’s essay. I agree he was mistaken about there ever being a cultural unity. Even if you just look at the racial divide, there were always two distinct cultures. Yes, people’s interests crossed the cultural divide at times, but the divide was real.

What existed before and what I think still exists today, though to a much lesser degree, is an unofficially recognized standard culture. It is the white, English-speaking, heterosexual, Christian (not Judeo-Christian), top-40 listening, name-brand-consuming, culture. It is not, thank God, the common culture. It is probably more common than ever before, though less rigidly expected than before.

He was right in that American culture has always been pleasantly permeable to other cultures. He was wrong in assuming theat American culture was common to all Americans.

Posted by on 06/17 at 09:53 AM
Hi Professor Michael B Hockeypuckington!

Welcome back, and I’m glad to see you’re moving at a goodly clip through the convalescence stage and the blogging-about-incredible-urination stage into the dropkicking-buffoons stage of your post-op return to the ring. Maybe this is a totally shameless and unacceptable self-plug (what a phrase!), but: I was pretty taken aback and annoyed by Teachout’s essay, and responded at some length and no great insightfulness to it right here. Since only like three people read my blog, one of whom is me, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, right?

Side note: I’m given to understand that ‘cosmopolitan’ used to be used as an anti-Semitic slur, since ‘citizen of the world’ is pretty close to ‘person without a country’ - i.e. ‘not one of us’. I’m curious as to at what point that meaning was inverted (if it has on average been so)…

[OK finished butchering the rules of grammar for the morning. Back to shuffling XML around at work.]

Posted by Wax Banks on 06/17 at 10:15 AM
Thanks Michael—I saw this the other day and did not have the patience to read it—coming back and reading it in full I’m glad I waited. The distinction between senses of “culture” = “art”, “culture” = “society”, “culture” = “ancestry” is a critical one to keep in mind when listening to arguments that conflate them.

Posted by Jeremy Osner on 06/17 at 12:28 PM
One thing I am sure of, is that the common culture of immediately before I came into this world is gone.

Posted by Jeremy Osner on 06/17 at 12:29 PM
Given how well the Irish (in the south, the Republic) have been doing in the post-industrial economy of late, that quote from Pattison is a bit outdated. Of course, the advancement of the Irish economy has correlated pretty nicely with the decline of the Catholic Church as a social force in Ireland (which rapidly accelerated in the early 1990s) and the acceptance not just of European money but a more European identity (more so than just about any other country in the EU and no doubt partially because of a certain Irish diasporic cosmopolitanism), so Pattison’s point is strengthened by its very outdatedness!

Posted by on 06/17 at 01:51 PM
Yep, and that’s what I like about it, despite Pattison’s unfortunate line, “we know where that universal knowledge and that universal dialogue have ended.” Points that are strengthened by their outdatedness are rare and valuable things.

Posted by on 06/17 at 02:30 PM
All this talk about fission won’t do much good if we can’t agree on the best bait.

Methinks the televisionization of postwar suburbia created a mythical commons quite unlike any generation before. And perhaps its precedent, the modern pr industry, emanating from WW1. Between both, a more faddist popular culture arose and the young, especially, were wrapped in a cocoon of knowing instantly what the cool kids were doing, and wanting to do it, as well.

So while I agree that multiple cultures have existed throughout Western history or US-centric history, the culture of mass media sufficed to convince many that Elvis was real and Little Richard was not, that good guys wore white hats, and bad guys black, with little thought about the culture of bad guys.

(And where can the racial divide be clearer than in words like ‘enlightenment’ and phrases like ’dark with despair’?)

I’d say Sgt. Pepper’s may have been a unifying moment, but I believe ‘Sock it to Me’ and ‘You bet your sweet bippy’ were as much. But the fact remains that it has been as much the challenges to conventional WASP cultural paramounts, as the paramounts themselves, that has created a multi-threaded fabric that simultaneously provides warmth, coolness and moments of itching.

Posted by Kevin Hayden on 06/19 at 03:20 PM
I don’t mean to critique, as I am not a professor, but your writing is very hard to follow and too abstract. There is too many ideas flowing and hard to grasp what you are trying to get across.

Posted by on 04/26 at 09:06 PM

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