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/426/ Expropriate the Canon ft. Catherine Liu (Patreon)

Published:
2024-07-23 07:00:06
Edited:
2024-07-23 15:38:31
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

On the disaster of the culture wars.

[Patreon Exclusive]

Regular contributor Catherine Liu is back on to talk about her essay in Damage, issue 2, "Professional Populists in the Culture Wars". We discuss:

What were the original 'culture wars' and how are they different to today?

Was there a need in the 1980s to "disrupt" the humanities?

 Is everyone an “academic populist” now?

Why does conservatism now need to wear "populist" clothes?

How should we defend the "canon"?

What is the "Catherine Liu Foundation for Attacking Badness"?

Links:

Professional Populists in the Culture Wars, Catherine Liu, Damage

/246/ Why Isn't There Revolution? ft. Vivek Chibber

/67/ Legacies of Postmodernism ft. Catherine Liu

Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, Janice Radway

Files

Comments

Eli S

You should probably include a link back to your coverage of Vivek Chibber's "The Class Matrix". Oh also, Catherine, tattele, your accent is terrible.

Eli S
>>144429903

Ok, fuck it, no longer going to resist this joke. Decolonize the curriculum? Someone should just go massacre and kidnap English professors in their faculty lounges. What did y'all think decolonization looked like? Vibes? Papers? Essays?

Vico1725

In 1966, Australian author and intellectual, Frank Moorhouse, wrote an essay called, “Teaching the Masses their Media”, where he examined the limitations of submitting popular culture to academic study, and what was lost in its transmission. He traced this policy back to a 1960 National Union of Teachers conference in Britain, titled “Popular Culture and Personal Responsibility”, quoting the stated objective of this policy: “a determined effort must be made to counteract the debasement of standards which result from the misuse of press, radio, cinema and television: the deliberate exploitation of violence and sex; and the calculated appeal to self interest.” Cultural critics emerging in 1960s Britain, including Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, acknowledged the influence of that National Union of Teachers conference on their subsequent work. ‘The core of their argument,’ Frank stated, ‘seems to be that the children enjoy popular culture more than the school curriculum and that the two are in conflict.’ For Frank, this attitude was born of a ‘sense of exclusion which popular culture creates in intellectuals’, which had led them to react in various modes, both frustrated and angry, which Frank translated, in turn, as ‘ridicule-it’, ‘control-it’, or ‘teach-it’. ‘The conference’s answer was teach-it,’ Frank concluded: ‘Grimly and moralistically.’ Nicholas Tucker’s Understanding the Mass Media (1966), was the latest offering from this field, and was the subject of Frank’s essay. The book was written as a tool for teachers to put popular culture on the school curriculum. Frank opposed this step, arguing that popular culture should not be taught in schools, precisely because of its informal role in young people’s lives. ‘Perhaps for children it is a respite from a world of demanding relationships and participating activity – a part of their world which is informal and unsupervised.’ Frank suggested this non-intellectual aspect of popular culture was precisely the point of it, and why they were uniquely important. But intellectuals like Nicholas Tucker treat this central concern of popular culture – ‘the fantasy, the myth, the wish-fulfilment, the escape and vicarious living’ – as if it were a point of failure. Frank concluded that Tucker’s ‘conception of “reality” is the expectations and experience of the majority laced with his morality – health, sobriety, work, and tolerance – a set of values remote from the complex, brutal, confused nature of much of life.’ Tucker criticised people’s adulation of film stars, especially their supposed off-screen sex lives – as well as popular culture figures, such as The Beatles – but Frank argued the basis for such adulation was not linked to ‘reality’ at all, but to a knowing sense of ‘unreality’, concluding: ‘Tucker ignores the possibility that this vicarious-sexuality is a transition from painful puberty to real relationships. In adults it can be an entertaining alternate sexuality.’

Richard R

Absolutely stunning reversal of Liu's line on the PMC. From a rejection of academic self-superiority to an embrace of it, more or less wholesale. Sure, yeah, okay, whatever, it's choosing disciplines and institutions which do not yet exist over existing ones, but the role of the expert in this regime is totally preserved. Also, her frame is a real challenge to Bunga's idea that rightwing parties are worker's parties because workers are consuming their bullshit. No, I will never let this latter point go. Incredible to advocate Maoist reading groups and reclamation of folk culture against decolonization. Words I guess have no history. As I see it, these two points represent the first major contradiction (which, hey, may be resolvable). The second is the practical production of critical theory. I'm a (nearly) devout Freirean, to the point of using group therapy with felons to discuss the nature of freedom, or working out theories of addiction with people in recovery, and teaching institutional critique as a method of achieving the kind of individual responsibility that the clinical literature widely agrees is crucial to successful addiction recovery. If you're saying we ought to be bringing Marx and Malcolm X and Rousseau into prisons, I'm right there with you. But I'm not seeing something really radically new here. People have been doing this since the 1970s. Foucault, leather daddy of the cultural studies movement, was advocating care of the self and a new form of self-discipline in what, 1968? If what you want is to evade elite capture of these ideas, the decolonialists are your friends. Wasn't Mark Fisher's whole thing an encounter between the liberalized maoist decolonialists, psychedelic artists, and the discipline of a communist party? We are not reinventing the wheel here. We are building a new mill.

Richard R
>>144671235

You know who ran critical theory reading groups with working class people? Monarch of intersectionality, bell fuckin hooks.

Robert C

I’m a longtime fan of Liu’s interventions; just short of writing fanfic, alas. However, her discussion of Allan Bloom in this episode too glibly dismisses Bloom’s ideas which are highly relevant, if not at times identical, to her own argument: - Her criticism of, for example, the New Musicology as a faux-populist de-skilling disguised as political critique; - Her critique of the “insane over-investment in liberal pluralism as subjectivity”; - Her notion of intellectual and academic life as a “struggle” to “find better ways of understanding the world” in “debates” and her rejection of fragile epistemic relativism; - Her call to “attack philistinism, vulgarity, badness”. It is hard to see many major differences between these positions and Bloom’s in _The Closing of the American Mind_ (1987). The only important difference I can spot is her call for a universalism based not on “liberalism” but on “historical materialism.” But in the context of the contemporary humanities department, when would this difference become *all that* consequential? Bloom’s location on the political right may have been more of an accident of his own moment, rather than a deep property of his own thought.

Daniel L

Good point about parts of Cultural Studies getting lost in translation in the journey to the US. Birmingham School originals like Stuart Hall talked about 'hybridity' in a way that would be anethema to current identity politics, and actually in his later years said that CS needed to return to the economic. Paul Gilroy has also critiqued stay in your lane identitarians, saying that "politics requires the abandonment of identity in a personal sense".

Mouldy L

For reasons that are quite obvious and others I can't quite put my finger on, Virtue Hoarders and Liu's interviews here and elsewhere often make me think of Lars Von Trier's movie The Idiots, in which a Danish commune of radical progressive PMC types explore their inner idiot, i.e. pretend to be retarded in public. The movie is definitely flawed, but its themes (class, private/public space, culture, love, history of the left and left academia etc.), I think, are right up the old Bungastrasse. It also has one of the most incredible endings in cinema, up there with the end of City Lights or A Woman Under The Influence. See what you think.

Surface Envy

'Birmingham has more miles of canals than Venice' To which a Venetian would respond, 'yes, but it's quality not quantity'