High Theory/Low Culture This page intentionally left blank High Theory/Low Culture Mikita Brottman HIGH THEORY/LOW CULTURE © Mikita Brottman, 2005. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brottman, Mikita, 1966– High theory/low culture/Mikita Brottman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-1-4039-6641-4 ISBN 978-1-4039-7822-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781403978226 1. Popular culture—History—20th century. 2. Civilization, Modern—20th century. 3. Popular culture—United States— History—20th century. 4. United States—Civilization— 20th century. 5. Criticism. 6. Bakhtin, M. M. (Mikhail Mikhaélovich),1895–1975—Contributions in criticism. 7. Barthes, Roland—Contributions in criticism. 8. Lacan, Jacques, 1901—Contributions in criticism. I. Title. CB427.B75 2005 306Ј.0973—dc22 2004050856 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: January 2005 10987654321 Contents List of Figures vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Popular Culture and Its Critics xi 1. Carnival and Chronotope: Bakhtin and Style Magazines 1 2. Joyful Mayhem: Bakhtin and Football Fans 21 3. Rumor, Gossip, and Scandal: Barthes and Tabloid Rhetoric 35 4. “The Last Stop of Desire”: Roland Barthes Goes Shopping 57 5. Blueprints and Bodies: Lacan and the Pornographic Imagination 81 6. Dark Homecomings: Lacan and Horror Fictions 107 Afterword 139 Notes 143 Works Cited 145 Index 155 This page intentionally left blank List of Figures 1.1 Article on Veronica Webb 7 1.2 Article on Matty Hanson 7 1.3 Fasion spread by Brett Dee 8 1.4 The Sex Pistols, from The Great Rock and Roll Swindle (Julien Temple, 1980) 15 3.1 Lovely Lisa! from The Sun 8 October 1993 52 4.1 Filippo Ton Maso Marinetti, “CHAIRrrrrrrR” (© 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome) 65 4.2 Filippo Ton Maso Marinetti “Marcia Futurista” (© 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome) 66 4.3 Carlo Carra “Patriotic Celebration” (© 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome) 67 4.4 Filippo Ton Maso Marinetti, “Words-in-Freedom” (© 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome) 68 4.5 Covent Garden Market as the backdrop for a scene from My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964) 76 5.1 The Beast (Walerian Borowczyk, 1983) 102 6.1 Dawn of the Dead (George Romero, 1978) 125 6.2 Day of the Dead (George Romero, 1985) 125 6.3 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) 126 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments This project began life in Oxford a number of years ago; acknowledgments are gratefully extended to those who gave me advice and suggestions at that time, especially professors Terry Eagleton, Christopher Butler, Bernard Richards, Kate Flint, Lyndall Gordon, Mike Dawney, and Judith Williamson. A version of chapter 1 of this book was published as “Bakhtin and Popular Culture” in New Literary History 23.3 (1992); an earlier version of chapter 2 was published as “Joyful Mayhem: Bakhtin and Football Chants” in Text and Performance Quarterly 14.4 (1993); a section of chapter 3 was published as “Classical Trivia: The Rhetoric of Page 3” in PostScript 3 (1997); a section of chapter 4 was published as “The Last Stop of Desire: The Spatial Text of Covent Garden” in Consumption, Markets and Culture 1.1 (1996); a section of chapter 5 was published as “Blue Prints and Bodies” in the book Ethics and the Subject, ed. Karl Simms, Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 1997. Thanks to all concerned for permissions to republish the aforementioned parts of the book. This page intentionally left blank Introduction: Popular Culture and Its Critics The identity of any form of culture as an intellectual discipline has always been dependent for its existence on the Other that occupies the space outside the academic enclosure. This forbidden, taboo, and often degraded Other is all the language, writing, and art that is not generally classed as “culture,” against which the “self” of culture “proper” is formed. In the last fifteen years, it has been consistently argued that any discipline that fails to take into account 90 percent or more of what constitutes its domain will not only have huge zones of blindness, but will also run serious risks of distorted vision in understanding the small zone it does focus on. In the past fifteen years, it has become quite common for the reader of academic journals in the broad field of cultural studies to come across articles on post-structural linguistics side-by-side with thoughtful essays on soap opera, rock music, and Hollywood movies. At the same time, popular style magazines often contain clever reviews of literature, care- ful decodings of lyrics and images, and trenchant articles on phases in popular music, fashion, and advertising. In the academy, literature courses in many universities are proving less popular than (and sharing much ground with) the faculties of cultural studies. It is now commonly argued that, in the light of recent theories of postmodernism, bricolage and the collapse of various genre barriers, the high–low cultural divide need no longer be argued. And yet much of the academic analysis directed at popular culture has been distinguished by a general uncertainty over which methods to use, confusion over the absence of any universally agreed basic theory or groundwork, and opposition from an academic canon suspicious of material so generally available. Forced into defensive positions by consis- tent justifications of the use of data that by definition seems too frivo- lous to warrant serious investigation—data that is often considered less important and significant than canonical texts and too banal, trivial, or xii / introduction unsuitable to constitute a part of the cultural tradition—academic defenders of popular culture have too frequently fallen into strategies that appear to concede a certain validity to the attacks of their detrac- tors. These strategies include the general assumption that most forms of popular culture are not substantial enough to respond to the same complex intellectual treatment that is regularly applied to canonical cultural texts. Academic interest in the historical stability of the canon began in the 1960s, when the French scholars Pierre Macherey and Etienne Balibar began to debate whether literary texts should be considered “literary” in themselves, according to their own intrinsic characteristics, which distinguish them from “nonliterary” texts. They concluded that a text is “literary” because it is recognized as such, at a certain moment, under certain conditions. The cultural or literary canon, argued Macherey and Balibar, must be regarded as an accidental and temporary historical construct rather than a fixed entity, and one that is constantly open to revision. Indeed, as Macherey and Balibar suggest, the very concept of “the literary” is always based on a series of exclusions that themselves assume an idea of culture as concerned with certain “high,” “universal” values that are not, in fact, static or independent, but random, ephemeral, and historically determinate. There will always be a cultural context in which the marginal is the mainstream, and vice versa. Moreover, the movement of any form of activity from cultural periphery to cultural center also involves a transformation in the very “essence” of that activity. So the “essence” of “high” or “literary” culture is in fact far from ahistorical; historicity invades the very nature of these modes of activity and their products. It is the fixity of the hierarchical scale of values, and the arbi- trariness of its contents at any given point, which provide the scale with its particular power. Moreover, of course, the very label itself, “popular culture,” needs a fixed scale of differentiation in order to exist, since it is mostly defined in terms of what it is not—opera, theater, poetry, classical music, and so on. And yet it is well known that writers such as Samuel Richardson, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and James Fenimore Cooper have now been accorded “classic” status, despite their one-time popularity and their use of such “low” cultural tools as melodrama, scandal, burlesque, stereotype, and violent action. The “classic” status of these writers is now defended through reference to the familiar terms of literary criticism (structure, irony, tragic consciousness, and so on) and, ultimately, through their association with other “literary” figures and artifacts. introduction / xiii Popular culture, then, can apparently be transformed into “high” culture by a simple critical act of appropriation. Indeed, so insecure are these cate- gories that the popular culture of one decade can easily become the high culture of the next—a fact that applies today not only to individual artists (Tom Wolfe, William Burroughs, Raymond Chandler, Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis), but also to styles (romanticism, magic realism), and even genres (science fiction, horror). This raises the significant issue of how the “popular” is then to be defined. Is it to be defined as a formal property of certain cultural goods? Do the texts themselves determine their readings, and hence define “popularity?” Is “popularity” related to who is doing the consuming? For the purposes of this book, in which the texts I analyze range from films, to style magazines, to the activities of shopping and sports supporting, I am defining popularity as dependent on not who is doing the consum- ing, but on how many are doing the consuming.