Symposium: Katrina vanden Heuvel
Symposium: Katrina vanden Heuvel
Some questions are really not worth asking, even as they nag. What relationship should American intellectuals have toward mass culture: television, films, mass-market books, popular music, and the Internet may be one of them. Before answering it, let me first attack any effort to do so.
I don’t think we have a recognizable group of American intellectuals of real political weight, at least not intellectuals of the sort celebrated by and occasionally inhabiting the old Partisan Review. That is, we don’t have an identified bunch of very smart and socially interconnected people—of course, often neurotic, passionate, and sometimes delusional—who judge their life by its contribution to human science or art and who see themselves as the guardians of its standards before a debasing and resolutely meretricious mass culture.
One reason we don’t is that, whatever the searing inequalities of the American economy, talented Americans of almost every conceivable background have access to higher education. Another is that technology has erased virtually all barriers of entry to broadcasting individual opinion. A third is that America now lacks anything like a responsible business elite or a working class that might provide a natural audience. The well-heeled abandoned this country some time ago. The democratic public, without much organization or political leadership, is still not fully formed. We don’t have standards of public discussion in this country. We don’t even have political debate requiring rhetorical regard for the public interest.
I also don’t consider myself such an intellectual. I consider myself a reasonably intelligent editor and publisher, running an independent magazine of opinion, whose chief social interests are political. I’d like to make a contribution to achieving this country and making peace in the world. The most immediate way I know to do that is by getting the next issue out, making it as interesting as possible, and by disseminating its values and opinions on radio and television.
Perhaps I mistake myself. The word “intellectual” traces to the Dreyfus affair. It was the new collective name taken by those diverse writers and artists who, in sudden and articulate concert, condemned the injustice of his treatment. I’m sure I would have joined them. A generation ago, Noam Chomsky said the responsibility of intellectuals was to tell the truth and expose lies. I try to do that every day. However, I think of intellectuals as not only fearless truth-tellers but as people materially contributing to that truth by advancing science or art. I don’t do that.
I also don’t think “mass” means much these days. Most of the commercial boundaries between high-brow and low-brow culture have long since dissolved. Certainly that distinction isn’t policed by the technologies themselves. It’s not as if book readers are high-brow and blog readers are low—after all Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels and Glenn Beck’s screeds dominate book sales while scholars like Juan Cole and Michael Bérubé reach their largest audiences via blogs. Cornel West has over 12,000 Twitter followers. And how would one describe the phenomenon of Oprah’s Book Club, which can instantly put works by William Faulkner and Leo Tolstoy on the middle-brow New York Times bestseller list through the magic of TV talk and paperback mass marketing? Did “high-brow” opera (Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma” from Turandot) become “low-brow” trash when cell phone salesman Paul Putts turned it into a global hit on the reality TV show Britain’s Got Talent? Or was it when Luciano Pavarotti popularized it during the 1990 soccer World Cup games? These distinctions have long since stopped making sense—if they ever did.
These caveats entered, I guess my answer to the question would be “critical embrace.” And in giving it, I’ll use “intellectual” in the broad sense of “a thinking American with interests in public affairs,” to include myself.
I take it to be manifestly crazy, even were it possible, for such intellectuals to ignore or shun mass culture. It’s too important. That’s where most Americans, especially but surely not only the young, get most of their information, opinions, and general take on politics. Their other source is their friends, who are generally watching and reading the same things. So of course we should engage. Frank Rich must have written a dozen columns using AMC’s Mad Men to frame these times. And 24 may have influenced how a generation thinks about torture. As Judge Sonia Sotomayor admitted of herself, Perry Mason and Law & Order shape popular thinking about law. Before Twyla Tharp choreographed to Billy Joel, the Joffrey Ballet danced to music from the Purple Paisley god himself—Prince. The cheapest forms of popular culture (comic books, TV, pop music, and so on) have forever shaped the imagination of current and future artists and presidents and offered the consolations of escape and control and pleasure.
It’s also true that the profit imperative and relentless consolidation of corporate media, and more than a little of human nature, means that much of mass culture is utter junk or worse—indeed degraded, inhumane, politically backward (sexist, racist, materialistic, and so on), or just stupid. But nothing’s new here except its totalizing reach, total because of the continued decline of alternative sources of authority. That’s the way of a depoliticized capitalism: no real secular community, politics and society as largely spectacle, mass privatization of civic culture. It may be that changes of degree have produced a change in kind, that people have actually become lobotomized, not just idiotically entertained. But I doubt it.
For one thing, the notion of “mass” in our culture is transforming before our eyes. At the ground level, the fact that the costs of broadcasting and information retrieval have dropped to near zero, and the limitless possibilities of peer-production and self-organizing made available by the Internet, is the greatest social technology fact of our time. The Internet has already changed political campaigning and social movement organization and advocacy. It is well on its way to transforming government and almost all critical economic relations: the structure of the firm, the divisibility of property rights, national and local strategies of economic development. I think this opens enormous possibilities for progressives. They should stop congratulating themselves for cottoning to the Internet just a tiny bit faster than the Right and devote themselves to collectively mastering and diffusing liberation technologies.
A little higher up, the expansion of the number of commercial broadcast channels and segmentation of audiences has of course increased the dangers of only listening to oneself. But it has also manifestly opened up a host of mid-sized audiences for good content. I can get as much opera and political satire as I want, along with home-shopping networks and reality TV. What I miss from television is my own Fox, a source of intelligent analysis and widely resourced coverage that I can rely on, in the same way its current audience relies on its lethal distortions. But even here, I think we’re a bit better off than a while ago. Would Rachel Maddow, a decidedly intellectual, openly gay, and progressive commentator, have commanded an audience of any size ten or twenty years ago? Would an academic like Charles Ferguson have gone into business, and then decided to make an Oscar-winning political documentary? I doubt it. We’re also seeing the rise of a new generation of intellectuals who freely combine high and low culture, demanding and easy analysis, in ways that find a decent-sized audience. Whatever else one thinks of him, Michael Moore exemplifies this, as does Spike Lee, whose mostly rigorous documentary When the Levees Broke was broadcast on HBO the same year his crime drama Inside Man hit theaters.
This is all to the good. They and others are producing smart, nuanced, thoughtful mass-culture products that also find an audience, even if that audience isn’t the same size as, say, the one for The DaVinci Code or Dancing with the Stars.
So I don’t worry about intellectuals being able to penetrate mass culture. I assume the next generation of them will assume, with everyone else in our Internet-united humanity, that there are a variety of technologies available to make their arguments and art and a variety of genres and styles that can be mixed in making it. What I am worried about is that their contribution will become merely another form of niche entertainment, with no real bite. I want the public itself to have the information and capacity to act on arguments, and worry that that is diminishing. This is almost entirely a political matter, and this is where the critical part of the embrace comes in. We need to declare, to one and all, that in the mass of commercial speech we also need easily accessed, publicly driven or public-minded sources of news and information. In news, it’s past time that the United States join the rest of the world in having some public-minded alternative to the major commercial networks. And in the United States and the rest of the world, I think it essential that we stop the commercial erosion of the democratic global space opened up by the Internet. Here I think intellectuals have some intellectual work to do—to design a more public-minded communications system than the one we have, while keeping the barriers of entry to its use low, and to design an intellectual property rights regime, globally, that will not choke off humanity’s current capacity for improvement. In truth, I think most of the work is political—to make the case for why that’s important at all. As with other public goods, a democratic media and communications system will be hard to achieve without a public.
Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor and publisher of the Nation.
