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An alert reader who goes by the handle “The Navigator” informed me yesterday in comments that an alert reader who goes by the name of Lee asked me way back on May 3 for the details of my Beavis and Butthead riff, and that I never replied.  Well, this less-than-alert blog apologizes.  We strive to please around here, and we don’t usually miss wide-open invitations to bloviate, either.  So here goes.

I delivered a talk on the topic of “criticism as evaluation” four or five times from 1994 to 1996, but never committed it to print, because the best parts of the talk (I thought) were the film clips—the last (and best) of which involved Beavis and Butthead making fun of the German metal band Accept.  And it’s a good thing I didn’t commit this stuff to print back then, either, because the general point at issue is made much more clearly and compellingly by Simon Frith in Performing Rites:  On the Value of Popular Music and (more recently) the series of essays by David Shumway, David Sanjek, and Barry Faulk in The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies.  Anyway, here’s the relevant bit of the talk; it starts by taking issue with Andrew Ross’s remark, at the end of No Respect:  Intellectuals and Popular Culture, that studying popular culture involves a “necessary engagement with aggressively indifferent attitudes toward the life of the mind and the protocols of knowledge,” since what Andrew pretty clearly meant was something more like ”academic or formal protocols of knowledge.”

I wish I could include the clip, though.  It’s the best part.  You’ll just have to imagine it, and sing along on your own.

Beavis and Butthead not only have well-developed protocols of knowledge; they have a somewhat ironic—or critical—relation to the language of reviewers as well.  Take for example their wonderful review of a less than wonderful video from fake-metal band Accept.  As Accept runs through the repertoire of choreographed metal swagger, the video shows wrecking balls crashing through brick buildings and a line of t-shirted young men banging their heads against a wall.  B & B’s commentary runs as follows:

Butthead:  Well, he is saying “balls,” and normally that would be pretty cool.
Beavis:  Yeh.  But under these circumstances, it sucks.
Butthead:  Yeah.  Usually demolition and destruction is pretty cool too, but I dunno, it’s like, here it’s just like, it falls flat.
Beavis:  Yeh.  Yeh.  I think even if they had some fire in this video, it would still suck.

Viewers unfamiliar with Beavis and Butthead might expect them to have an uncritical relation to metal bands, and give them all As and thumbs up unreflectively.  But such viewers should realize how accurate B & B’s judgment is here—the video really does suck, and, as any movie critic might say, even the scenes of destruction somehow “fall flat.” Equally important is a later scene from the video, which depicts a number of zombie-like creatures advancing toward the camera—presumably toward the building in which Accept is playing “Balls to the Wall.”

Butthead:  Check it out.  It’s Krokus coming to kick their ass.
Beavis:  Yeh.  Heh-heh.
Butthead:  It’s the night of the living bands that suck.

Now, Bourdieu would be entirely right to note (if he cared to do so) that our boys are, after all, evaluating music videos rather than sonatas, so it’s not as if they’re throwing around their excess cultural capital with abandon.  But even though there is a distinction here between what Bourdieu calls the “aesthetic” disposition and “ordinary” dispositions, it does not follow that “ordinary dispositions” cannot also be variously critical dispositions.  In fact, I could go further and say that Beavis and Butthead are engaging in what one traditionalist critic calls “one of criticism’s foremost responsibilities:  the making and revising of critical discriminations.” For in order to understand who’s the butt of Butthead’s bon mots here, you not only have to catch the brief visual reference to Night of the Living Dead; you also have to know your metal bands pretty well—well enough, at least, to realize how devastating an insult it is to suggest that any metal band could have its collective ass kicked by—of all people—Krokus.

All the same, evaluative systems work—in part—by being exclusive; as Bourdieu insists, they would not be readable as systems otherwise, and all evaluative systems—if they work as evaluative systems—must be somewhat reliable in their evaluations and somewhat opaque in their exclusivity.  For example, it’s crucial that after about a minute of viewing the video for Judas Priest’s “Breaking the Law,” Butthead decides that “I still like Judas Priest and all, but, uh, this video sucks.” It’s a cheesy early-’80s video, poorly produced, badly acted, and sloppily lip-synched—and for that reason, it’s important to our sense of B & B as evaluators that they can admit the video is poor even as they thrash around on the couch and scream, “breaking the law, breaking the law” on the choruses.  Likewise, Beavis and Butthead must be somewhat reliable if their enthusiastic support of a video from White Zombie is really going to put White Zombie on the map (as, in fact, it did).  But at the same time, no evaluative system can work unless it maintains some degree of opacity to those not in the know.  If you got to ask, as Louis Armstrong once put it. . . .

Or, to put Satchmo’s point in slightly different terms, all systems of evaluation must be at once exclusive yet translatable, opaque and yet transparent.  The more opaque and exclusive the appeal, the more “cult” the following; conversely, the more persuasive the criteria, the more potentially influential the critic.  An evaluative system that is infinitely translatable is, at least in principle, infinitely influential; but a system that is perfectly internally coherent but unreadable to anyone save its creator is as problematic to cultural critics as the idea of a “private language” was to Wittgenstein.  Just as Jan Mukarovsky, in Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts, notes that every aesthetic norm strives for a universal validity it cannot possibly achieve (since if it achieved complete universality it would not be perceived as a “rule” at all), so too should we note that every evaluative system, like every language, must be distinct yet translatable.  The difference between my position and Mukarovsky’s, however, is that mine insists that not every aesthetic norm “strives” for universality; on the contrary, there are innumerable aesthetic norms whose value lies precisely in their unintelligibility.  Why do you listen to that awful noise?  If you gotta ask. . . .

Well, you know where that road leads, folks.  It leads to Arbitrary but Fun Value Judgments!  But that’s for tomorrow’s post.

Posted by on 05/12 at 10:44 AM

  1. heh...heh-heh.... you said ‘bon mots’.... heh-heh

    Posted by  on  05/12  at  01:04 PM

  2. Again with the Mukarovsky.

    Posted by Scott McLemee  on  05/12  at  01:17 PM

  3. Next time, Scott, I’ll bring the Avakian instead.  Let’s see how you like that.

    Seriously, tho, the bit about an aesthetic norm striving for a universal validity it cannot achieve, because in its universality it would be understood as something other than a mere “norm”—that’s not bad stuff, there.  Somebody has to give Mukarovsky credit for making arguments like these.

    Posted by Michael  on  05/12  at  01:38 PM

  4. I worry this will sound snarkier than I intend, but an additional point that may be germane: Beavis & Butthead were not making these aesthetic judgments.  I’m not especially sure that Mike Judge, the creator of the series, was making these judgments.  The “evaluative system” talked about in this post was shared by the cartoon’s writing staff: Ivy League educated, Harvard Lampoon-trained, young men. 

    Accept (which was a real band, from Germany) had some genuine success in America.  Accept had an audience, the same white, largely middle class kids whose parents dug Grand Funk Railroad and whose grandparents dug, well, Elvis (Sun-era and Las Vegas-era).  Beavis & Butthead aren’t those kids, but an imaginative recreation of those kids who were alternately reviled and embraced.  Their evaluative system combined fear and contempt for the working class with the loopiest kind of class romanticism.  “Good,” in the world of the show’s writers, equaled “authentic,” but the over-educated writers were consistently handicapped by an inability to define what, exactly, passed for “authentic.” (I’m not defending crotch-rock as good anymore than I’d defend Stephen Duck “the Thresher Poet” as good.  Just “authentic,” when “authentic” resolves itself from a position of privilege.)

    Posted by  on  05/12  at  02:49 PM

  5. Just yanking your chain. You are the only person who cites the guy, other than Williams. (’ve never so much as seen a page of his work. Somebody ought to scan and post a selection online. Hint, hint.

    Posted by Scott McLemee  on  05/12  at  02:52 PM

  6. I hate to cast this question in such simplistic terms, but how do these “systems of evaluation” reconcile with the concept of aesthetic affect or even the sublime? See Williams’ Marxism & Literature and Williams’ aversion to systematic explanations.  And isn’t that what the Armstrong quote is actually in reference to?  I doubt it’s Armstrong or most any creator’s intent to appear opaque or unreadable per se.  Isn’t it important to clarify that the opacity is often on the evaluators’ end?  And it’s a bit perplexing sourcing out the attribution of agency in this sentence:

    “… is that mine insists that not every aesthetic norm ‘strives’ for universality; on the contrary, there are innumerable aesthetic norms whose values lie precisely in their unintelligibility.”

    To point out, in some contexts, “aesthetic norm” reads as oxymoronic.  And the concept of “unintelligibility” invokes the mental, classificatory realm as a determinant of value.  Not a concept that most creators’ use in explaining their processes or their desired effects. The concept marginalizes embodied reactions that are not processed through a “system.”

    Posted by  on  05/12  at  03:29 PM

  7. I can’t resist it:

    Butthead:  Well, he is saying “cultural capital” and normally that would be pretty cool.

    Beavis:  Yeh.  Yeh.  I think even if he had some Derrida in this essay, it would still suck.

    Butthead:  Check it out.  It’s Sokal coming to kick his ass.

    wink

    Posted by Jeremy Henty  on  05/12  at  03:56 PM

  8. My apologies.  That should of course be “Skl”.

    Posted by Jeremy Henty  on  05/12  at  04:18 PM

  9. It seems that much of what you say would be applicable as well to the processes that bring us the local video house “favorites.” Those shelves and funky colored stickers that suggest that this or that employee strongly recommends this or that DVD because it is or will be a “cult classic.” This less formalized system seems to be appearing as well in book stores, where once one might have been able to speak to a clerk and receive a personal statement of critical review, thus enabling deeper context, today there are just funny stars and cute labels, and again those special shelves---"our employee of the month, billy, says these books rock!”

    In providing these forms of evaluative review, the retailers assume that their clientele understand the nature and substance of the system, yet it is doubtful that even the employees themselves fully comprehend the criteria and intents.

    Posted by  on  05/12  at  04:46 PM

  10. Michael,

    I thought this was pretty cool, until you got to, “the more persuasive the criteria, the more potentially influential the critic,” the opacity of which frustrated my attempts at assimilation into your discourse-world. 

    Can criteria be persuasive?

    At first I misread it as, “the more persuasive the *critic*, the more potentially influential the critic,” but the dumbness of the tautology rang false, so I re-read, and got stumped.

    Do you mean, “the more *attractive* the criteria”?

    “Complete universality” is an abstraction that does not need attacking; it can only be posited.  By your definition, we can’t know whether an example exists, since if it did exist, by your definition, we wouldn’t perceive it; my hunch says that it couldn’t exist in culture, due to (Sylvester) Stewart’s First Law of Funkydynamics, which states, “Different strokes for different folks.” Methinks your interlocutor was overstating, and merely meant hegemony or cultural dominance.  I agree with you, though, that plenty of subcultures thrive on the marginality of their aesthetic norms.  Deleuze, perhaps unconsciously alluding to Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith,” warned us of people who proclaim, “We are the marginals!” I happen to love a lot of those marginals, but I dig Deleuze’s beat too.

    Posted by John S.  on  05/12  at  06:10 PM

  11. Damn.  I was sure I was going to be the first to point out that Accept was a real band and “Balls to the Wall” a real song, and I wasn’t even close.  I don’t ever recall Beavis and Butthead making fun of a fake video, actually--I think they were always real.

    Posted by Robert Rushing  on  05/12  at  07:20 PM

  12. Damn.  I was sure I was going to be the first to point out that Accept was a real band and “Balls to the Wall” a real song, and I wasn’t even close.  I don’t ever recall Beavis and Butthead making fun of a fake video, actually--I think they were always real.

    Think again, binky—B&B reviewed “The Majesty of Rock” by Spinal Tap in 1993. Their verdict: “They’re not as good as they used to be.”

    Posted by  on  05/12  at  08:52 PM

  13. B&B were one of the few who honestly took on the untouchables of pop culture.

    Beavis, looking at a trainstoppingly bad video of Yoko Ono while she’s “singing” and wearing huge wraparound sunglasses:

    “You know Butthead, I don’t think she’s really blind.”

    Butthead watching a U2 video “I’m getting an attention headache.”

    Posted by  on  05/12  at  09:43 PM

  14. [Bananarama’s cover of Venuis is the video]

    Butthead:  If GWAR had children with these chicks, their kids would be the coolest kids ever.

    “PANTERA! PANTERA! PANTERA! Pantera kicks ass!”

    I especially like the one segment where they thought the Nelson brothers were chicks and even when Butthead pointed out to Beavis that they were dudes, Beavis still got wood.

    Posted by  on  05/12  at  10:08 PM

  15. This discussion reminds me of that scene in the film version of The Remains Of The Day where the butlers are listening, after hours, to the victrola. The music is, to my ears at least, this godawful music hall crap-schlock. But the butlers aren’t just tapping their feet--Anthony Hopkins sort of holds his hand up, as if to say “wait, listen to this part”. Like there’s this finer point that he wants the other butlers not to miss.

    Part of the point was, of course, not to get the wrong, “My Man Godfrey” notion of people in service: unlike Gielgud in Arthur, real butlers probably don’t read Hamlet and listen to Mozart. But my own thought at the time was, a hyper-refined taste in rock music will possibly look just as ridiculous at a remove of a hundred years.

    Posted by  on  05/12  at  10:13 PM

  16. Wow, Beavis and Butthead inserted into an intellectual discussion of aesthetic ctritique.

    My son was just accepted into the CU creative writing program.

    I believe it’s the Churchill/Little Eichmann Grant he received but had I known Penn State offered such a curriculum vitae I would have instantly demanded his transfer.

    Michael; great post, you rock.

    Beavis: “Hey Butthead, is this cool ?”

    Butthead: “Well; it’s loud...”

    Posted by  on  05/12  at  11:05 PM

  17. I don’t think our host is confused about the “realness” of Accept as a band, 80s, German, restless and wild, whatever. He is, however, calling into question whether or not they are, in fact, “metal”.

    Michael is being a bit sly here. In his discussion of evaluative systems, he himself draws the circle of metal so that Accept is outside. His basis for this choice is dramatically “opaque”, seeming to rely more on Beavis and Butthead’s dismissal of an execrable video than on any criteria relating to the music. Not, of course, that the music ever really matters when we’re arguing about genre - and identity.

    Which gives me an opportunity to offer a shout out to my fave book on pop music: Running With the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music by Robert Walser. Turned me on to Bakhtin back in the day, as well as justifying my music collection to my future wife. Good thing . . .

    Posted by Martial  on  05/13  at  12:50 AM

  18. I can’t believe I’m devoting energy to this, but here goes:

    One thing we’re all assuming here, it seems, is that Beavis and Butthead deployed a consistent evaluative system from episode to episode?  Did they?  I was a fan, but I was not, as yet, a fully-mature cultural critic (ok, so I was in college, and I was certain that I knew--that, in fact, I was good friends with--the real-life models for the show’s main characters).

    I remember, at first, being baffled by *The Simpsons’* refusal to maintain any kind of consistency from episode to episode.  Moe, for example, is variously, if always secretly, despicable and admirable:  he has been an orca smuggler in league with the mob, an underground surgeon, a reader of *Little Women* to sick children at the hospital, and an undocumented immigrant.  I don’t recall being similarly distressed with Beavis and Butthead--but their inconsistencies may have been more subtle, more philosophical, in which case I myself may have been too busy banging my head (without irony) to the big four (Metallica, Megadeath, Slayer, and Anthrax) to notice.

    And, if their system was consistent from show to show, can anybody here demonstrate that it was based on an internally consistent logic?  I mean, can you love Metallica *and* GWAR?  I don’t see how, whether you’re a harvard lampoon type or real-life head-banger-ignoramus.  Of course, though, it was good enough for me. 

    Butthead (responding to a Winger video):  “These guys live on the edge.”

    Beavis:  “Yeah.  The edge of wuss cliff.”

    Posted by  on  05/13  at  09:39 AM

  19. Lance, I think you’ll find that B&B did not like Metallica in all instances. Furthermore, there are pieces of Metallica that a GWAR-lover can praise while still acknowledging that, as a whole, Metallica sucks rocks.

    Posted by Bellman  on  05/13  at  10:59 AM

  20. I don’t think our host is confused about the “realness” of Accept as a band, 80s, German, restless and wild, whatever. He is, however, calling into question whether or not they are, in fact, “metal”.

    Thanks, Martial.  I was in transit yesterday and didn’t have the chance to straighten this out.  By “fake-metal band” I meant “fake metal,” not “fake band.” With (fake) apologies to Udo Dirkschneider and both his fans, of course.

    kd, there’s really nothing oxymoronic about the idea of an aesthetic norm; the problem, perhaps, is that (as Mukarovsky notes) one norm in aesthetics, for the past 150-200 years or so, has involved violating social and aesthetic norms.  But even still, you know that wailing screaming guitar solos are a norm in metal whereas they are not in (for instance) adult contemporary or bluegrass.  And John S., yep, criteria can be persuasive.  Just think of what happens whenever someone passes judgment on a thing according to criteria you regard as wholly inappropriate.  One of the reasons we come to trust certain people’s judgments more than others, surely, is that we agree not merely with the judgments but with the means by which they are generated; that is, we think that the proper standards of evaluation (whatever we imagine these to be) are being applied to the object at hand, and that we’re not just dealing with some wanker who complains that there aren’t enough bitchin’ guitar solos in bluegrass.

    Posted by Michael  on  05/13  at  11:50 AM

  21. All I know is that this entire thread has been some of the best lunchtime reading I’ve had in a while.

    Posted by  on  05/13  at  12:45 PM

  22. Thanks Michael for the explanation of persuasive criteria.  Your substitution of the word “appropriate” makes me understand what you’re getting at.

    In my college punk-rock band, a guitar solo had to be *herkin’*; bitchin’-ness had nothing whatever to do with it.

    Posted by John S.  on  05/13  at  01:14 PM

  23. Wow.  I’m kind of stunned to have helped to prompt the most erudite Beavis & Butthead discussion of all time.  Proud, in a way, but mostly stunned.  This really isn’t my field, so I don’t know that I have anything of substance to contribute, but I should note for the record that, having been challenged to step up to the plate, our gracious host hit a grand slam.  Truly, he has the Eye of the Tiger.

    P.S. This does remind me of the utterly brilliant time B&B were watching some typically trite video and Butthead declared, “yep, that’s what I thought I was gonna see when I turned the TV on.” A perfect dismissal of the imitative mediocrity of so many videos.
    Although Lance may be on to something - another time the boys were watching an Iron Maiden video which was also quite cliched, but Butthead decided he liked it:  “Say what you want about Maiden, but when it comes to making videos, they don’t screw around - it’s just, like, chicks and bikes and explosions.”

    Posted by  on  05/13  at  02:28 PM

  24. I recall B&B watching a futuristic video, leading Beavis to say to Butthead, “The future sucks. Change it!” That should have been the official watchcry of Generation X.

    Posted by  on  05/13  at  08:35 PM

  25. All this erudition is fine, but I think Beavis pretty much summed it all up ages back:

    Butthead: This sucks, man.
    Teacher: You can’t use that kind of language in the classroom.
    Beavis: We use language?

    Posted by  on  05/13  at  08:46 PM

  26. wow. wow wow wow wow!
    this moment in beavis & butthead history has been a kind of touchstone in the lives of me and my sister. for years we’d both just dissolve into laughter if either one said “accept” or “balls to the wall.”
    this critique was truly one of the best moments on that show. ever.

    and thanks for the marvellous analysis. not at all clumpy. most wonderfully cultural studiesish. going to phd school in this english lit/cultural studies thing was the smartest decision i ever made! perhaps beavis & butthead can be my dissertation topic.....

    Posted by kbryna  on  05/13  at  11:29 PM

  27. Before we forget; “props” to Mike Judge. B&B are the vessels..with the pessils..fo shizzles..

    Posted by  on  05/14  at  01:30 AM

  28. I never watch this show....

    Posted by Chastity  on  04/20  at  09:44 AM

  29. I don’t like watching Beavis and Butthead.

    Posted by Florinda  on  04/24  at  03:24 AM

  30. The problem with animation is that it is always assumed as for kids up. But in my opinion, I don’t think this show is appropriate for kids.

    Posted by Marissa@ Braun & Gresham  on  05/13  at  04:03 AM

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