the culture industry at the end of the world.
media theory to unpack the moment + reading, movie, music, podcast recs galore.
Dear friends,
It’s a compelling time to be teaching a class called Art & Social Change. I structure the class beginning with early theories of the culture industry (Adorno/Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School into Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School), then dig into debates surrounding representation (José Muñoz, the recent-ish Trap Door collection critiquing ‘visibility’), then move into subculture studies, and onto various social movements’ use of art in their organizing. The Grammys, the Super Bowl, and the opening of Wuthering Heights landed during and after our lessons surrounding the debates between the Frankfurt School and the Birmingham School, providing a number of rich texts to unpack in real time.
The Frankfurt School theorized popular culture as a capitalist product that distracted the masses from revolutionary aims, whereas the Birmingham School conceded the materialist view that culture is a product, but argued audiences had agency to make more subversive meaning of what they were given; pop culture, as Stuart Hall wrote, “is a site of struggle.” The students vibed with both views, finding it hard to deny hot takes like this from Horkheimer & Adorno: “Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. They call themselves industries; and when their directors’ incomes are published, any doubt about the social utility of the finished products is removed.”
But these students (at an art institute) are also fans, and found it hard to reconcile that the music and stories they loved were all just “rubbish.” Hall was helpful here: “One of the most significant political moments….is the point when events which are normally signified and decoded in a negotiated way begin to be given an oppositional reading.” Here Hall is naming that audiences can reject subtle or overt hegemonic messaging; indeed, a viewer might even watch AI slop commercials during the Superbowl without being convinced by a digital de-aged Ben Affleck to buy Dunkin’s coffee.
Even more helpful to this moment, I think, is how Muñoz expanded on Hall. In Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, Muñoz offers a form of negotiated reading that allows for both pleasure and survival. Muñoz gives several examples of the ways in which minoritized subjects have to practice partial methods of identification. Take a queer person of color reading the revolutionary thinker Franz Fanon only to discover that amidst his powerful anticolonial writing exists homophobic sentiments. Or consider the young queer person growing up in the 70s and clinging to any gay character he found on TV, even if they were full of unflattering stereotypes (Muñoz is talking about himself here). This method of engaging with a problematic text while also benefiting from it is the practice of ‘disidentification,’ which works “on and against dominant ideology.” Certainly it is possible, Muñoz’s theory helps us see, to critique the NFL and also honor the powerful experience documented by thousands of Latino and Caribbean viewers across the US who watched a performance in Spanish that both drew attention to the violence of colonialism and also invited a group of people being terrorized by ICE to have a moment to dance.
I saw a number of people make finger-wagging Instagram posts to remind everyone that nothing that happens at a corporate NFL game can be radical (their soapbox on Meta is apparently given a pass); this is not an incorrect conclusion. But I wonder now about culture industry critiques at the end of the world (or the end of a world). What to do with the pleasure of monoculture amidst quickening collapse? Some echo the Frankfurt School and say reject it entirely, divest from celebrity and Hollywood at all costs. Others say embrace it, that art can transcend commercial packaging, and is indeed the thing that will nurture the humanity we need to survive. I make it pretty clear where I land (the art! even from hollywood!), but my head isn’t in the sand. Something’s gotta give: those of us invested in a better world can’t rely on pleasure in between commercials for gambling, weight loss drugs, and AI. Still, I don’t begrudge anyone for seeking it (and as for the Bad Bunny performance, especially Latino folks, and especially folks from Puerto Rico, for whom the show was really for).
Pleasure in and (dis)identification from popular culture is a survival strategy in terrible times, but this pleasure demands rigor, a commitment to critique and an awareness of profit-motives. And most importantly, this pleasure demands alternatives— both making and engaging with independent writing, film, and music. If we let it, art in end times will require a lot from us (discernment, critique, new models)... And in a system trying to convince us that it is better to do and think less, I am rooting for anything that requires a lot from us.
***
Below: an anti-ICE panel that locates the problem in borders, a feminist take on ‘natural’ and ‘modified’ bodies, the new dystopic punk novel from Cristy Road Carrera, and more; some thoughts on the wonderfully similar Blue Moon and Peter Hujar’s Day; a new indie pop album to lighten the end-of-winter blahs; and other things from the week that got me through.
love & solidarity,
raechel
Reading + Podcasts.
I haven’t listened to this panel with Silky Shah, Harsha Walia, and Beatrice Alder-Bolton yet, but I’m a big fan of Walia’s work, and I’m already sold by the title: “Abolish ICE, Abolish the Border.” The violence of borders is getting lost in the resistance against ICE, and I’m glad these thinkers want to center the bigger picture. (Thanks C for the share.)
