Early 21st Century Popularism

There I’ve named it. Centuries from now, fans and scholars will look back at this past decade as the birth of Popularism, the movement that stamped the coffin lid on postmodernism.

I attended the Modern Language Association conference in January, and according to the “What’s On” section of The Vancouver Sun I read over my first breakfast, the city was more “erudite” than usual that weekend. Imagine 8,000 English professors converging on one city block. And yet this year’s star speaker was Sara Paretsky, “best-selling mystery writer” of the “revolutionary novels” featuring detective V. I. Warshawski. I’d spied some of her paperbacks in airport bookstores on my trip over. That’s not evidence of an academic bastion. That’s collapsed rubble.
 

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My complimentary Sun also included an article on the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra; “the old days of new music” were “a tough slog for general audiences” but now “are over.” Instead, Jocelyn Morlock, VSO’s composer in residence, is emphasizing “pure fun” and “party atmosphere.” “To a large extent,” she explains, “new music has become more attractive to audiences because the attitude of composers themselves have changed. Composers want to connect with their audiences rather than baffling or alienating them.”

Compare that to composer John Harbison’s 1960s studies with Milton Babbitt, who New York Times Magazine editor Charles McGrath dubbed “the reigning prince of atonality.” Harbison’s “reluctance to abandon melody,” McGrath wrote in 1999, “made him an outcast. He still remembers a moment when one of his grad-school classmates turned to him and said, ‘You’re really just a tune man, aren’t you?’’” The tune man went on to win a MacArthur “genius” award, while being labelled a New Romantic, a term he hated: ‘I think ‘Romantic’ is just a cover for whether or not people like something.’”
 

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Harbison also likened operas to literature: “there’s the literary novel and the novel that’s sold in airports. Opera is in the same place where the literary novel is.” A decade and a half later, the literary novel is nowhere near opera. It’s hanging out with those airport paperbacks now. The infectious beat of genre fiction has gone highbrow. Since winning a 1999 Pulitzer for a novel about comic books, Michael Chabon has been rehabilitating the words “entertainment” and “pleasure” as the not-so-erudite goals of literature.

In the art world, the equivalent to a catchy melody is representational painting, something Mt. San Jacinto College professor John Seed would like to see more of. In a 2013 Huffington Post blog, Seed listed 40 representational painters (culled from 135) who he’d like to see in the Museum of Contemporary Art. “Like other leading American and European contemporary museums and galleries,” writes Seed, “MOCA has narrowly defined contemporary to mean works that have their roots in Duchamp, Warhol and postmodern theory.” Instead, Seed wants the museum to “woo back the respect of its public” by acknowledging that “Postmodernism officially expired.”
 

Triumph-of-Romance_home2 Bo Bartlett

 
That death means all airport reading can discard the “Romantic” covers. Even academic scholarship wants public respect now. The NEH announced in December a new agency-wide initiative, The Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square, emphasizing that “the humanities belong to all the people of the United States.” Their new “Public Scholar” grant wants scholarly books “accessible to general readers” and “conceived and written to reach a broad readership.” University presses, the reigning princes of academic atonality, are joining the common people too. Last year, an acquisition editor at the University of Iowa Press contacted me to ask if I would be interested in adapting my pop culture blog into a “crossover” book designed for a general interest audience, what the press predicts will play “an important role in the future of university publishing.” As a result, On the Origin of Superheroes: from the Big Bang to Action Comics No. 1 will be out in fall 2015.

Over fifty books in comics studies were published last year—including from Oxford and Cambridge—but I’m the only person on my campus who fields the question: “Oh, are you the comic book guy?” Unlike Harbison’s graduate-school snobs though, my colleagues ask it with a pleased grin, followed by an admission of a similarly lowbrow interest of their own. As a result, I keep stumbling into interdisciplinary projects. Cognitive psychologist Dan Johnson and I have begun a second round of studies exploring the so-called division between “literary” and “popular” fiction.”Atin Basu, a professor of economics next door at the Virginia Military Institute, and I are applying game theory to zombie movies. Nathaniel Goldberg, a Washington and Lee colleague in Philosophy, and I are thinking about Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing and philosopher Donald Davidson’s Swampman. Our Art department’s Leigh Ann Beavers is teaming up with me to design a new spring course on making comics—though we may go with the more erudite title Graphic Narratives. None of these projects may be “revolutionary,” but they are “pure fun.”

A major in my English department is writing her senior thesis on Fifty Shades of Grey. And why not? It’s a cultural object worth analysis. This invasion of the popular into the serious worries some folks though. Last year, Adam Brooke Davis warned in the Chronicle of Higher Education about “the overwhelming weight of pop culture,” after discovering that his advanced creative writing students were more likely to have read The Hunger Games than short stories by Annie Proulx or Ha Jin. That was a surprise? Isn’t that the definition of “popular”? I’m not a particular fan of Suzanne Collins or E. L. James or Sara Paretsky, but I don’t object to their book sales. It’s just something else to study.

By mid-century I predict the aesthetic pendulum will start slicing back in the opposite direction. Until then, I’m enjoying the party.
 

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41 thoughts on “Early 21st Century Popularism

  1. “It’s just something else to study.”

    That may be the saddest sentence I will read all week.

  2. You are easily saddened!

    Isaac Butler pointed out on facebook that “poptimism” is often used for the phenomenon you’re describing, Chris. I’d only ever heard the term applied to music, but Isaac says he’s seen it used elsewhere (literary poptimism.)

  3. Well, crap! You were at MLA, too? I wish I have known so we could meet up. Maybe I’ll see you in Austin next year?

    Okay, back to reading the rest. I only got that far before having to comment :)

  4. “Popularism” sounds better than “poptism.”

    And I agree with Chris, “It’s just something else to study” is a liberating idea that I have been trying to get my peers to take seriously every since I entered grad school. My other favorite thing, is when I am at some faculty mixer and my work comes up and I mentioned comics, inevitably someone starts asking me about all sort of indie comics, to which I reply, “I like indie comics fine and even write a chapter of my dissertation on Love and Rockets, but I am more interested in Captain America than American Splendor, or Reed Richards than Jimmy Corrigan.”

  5. Sorry to miss you, Osvaldo! I was conducting interviews with my department’s hiring committee, so I barely set foot in the actual conference. And given the cloud sitting across the city, I’m still not 100% convinced Vancouver is surrounded by mountains.

  6. Thanks for the article. I do think you’re on to something and I’m very enthusiastic about it. (I used to study trauma and exile in Spain and now I study films and fan magazines from the 20s and 30s instead; I’ve found that it allows me to get out from under some of the crushing wright of history and find new perspectives on politics and public being). If we want to understand the world we live in, I don’t think that we can continue to fear and dismiss spectacle and spectators, and postmodernism isn’t really able to get past that sticking point despite all of its pop aspirations.

    However, the one thing that does bother me about all of this is not the texts, or the assimilation of pop culture and enthusiastic spectator identities into academic work, but the rise of criticism as consumer identity, which is something I’ve been noticing more and more (or maybe it’s been there always, I don’t know). For many people my age (and I’m insulated from it in Spanish and Latin American Studies, where you still get your daily dose of Marx), criticism becomes identical to fandom. There’s nothing wrong with fandom per se (I study it, after all), and the construction of a enthusiastic public sphere, but I’m talking about a specific type of fandom that meshes perfectly with consumer identity. Unlike the spectator or even the fan, the consumer always returns to a blank identitarian slate; it is easy to try on identities, enthusiams, and even moral outrages without self reflection, and just as easy to take them off. This consumer becomes defined by what they have consumed and continue to consume, so you see fandoms springing up around Jane Austen—to name the number one example—just as surely as around the Hunger Games, and often see fandoms as the main defenders of the canon. This enthusiastic consumption, in my view, does start to scuttle criticism. I don’t think a critical distance or a lack of enthusiasm is necessary for good criticism to happen (or at least I would like to think I don’t). But I do worry about what happens when some of the most noxious, protective tendencies of internet fandom, combined with its strange identitarian impulses, become part of critical discourse. I don’t know what to make of it, but I do think it makes it impossible to resist certain consumer tendencies.

    It’s hard to know what to make of all this, and I don’t want to suggest that I’m putting myself above or outside this tendency. But I wonder if you’ve also noticed this homogeneous “fan” identity that doesn’t necessarily differentiate between objects, and what you think about it? Can we be optimistic about it? Maybe I’ll write something about it in the coming weeks.

  7. I just googled Butler and poptimism and his term sounds like a critique of popularism, a way of labeling the same phenomenon while suggesting its flaws? I admit my statement, “It’s just something else to study,” is overly glib and can be taken too far.

  8. Also, I realize that the phenomenon I’m referring to tends to be highly gendered (as enthusiastic spectatorship often does), so I don’t really know how far the critique can be taken. It’s just something that intrigues me. As for the rest, long live popularism (it IS just something else to study).

  9. Osvaldo: “too far” if a text’s popularity is privileged above all of its other qualities, and if popularity is used as the primary feature for selection in general. I think popular texts should be studied, but I don’t think the opposite is true. I delight in the obscure and off-putting too. So I want to add popular texts to the range of study, while not removing other texts from that range.

  10. Emily, your point about fandom makes me think of Lovecraft fans who are offended at the thought of his statuette being replaced for the World Fantasy Award. The fans are blindly championing Lovecraft and so refusing to acknowledge his racism. And his top advocate/scholar, S.T. Joshi, is the worst culprit. Identification with the object study has overwhelmed actual studying.

  11. Ah, I see what you mean. I agree. It thought you were suggesting that there were particular forms or content that remain “below” study, which seemed to not jive with your claim here, so I wanted clarification.

    Also, funny when I used “popular” in this context, I don’t think of actual popularity. When I write about some failed comics series like Prez or OMAC (for example), while Simon and Kirby were involved with them make them well-known among aficionados I’d hardly call them “popular,” despite being example of the “popular.”

  12. Ah, that’s the perfect example I was looking for. I couldn’t think of one off the top of my head. And I think you’re right, it’s an issue of identification. I don’t know what to make of it at all but it’s clear that (in this case, at least), it can be very toxic. I think a lot of the hand-wringing about pop culture and popularism comes from those types of sources, but I don’t think it’s the same thing.

  13. Yes. That identification is dangerous. I think the idea of “both/and” is crucial in this work. A popular work can be both your most favoritest thing and deeply problematic, and a good critic can navigate those tensions.

  14. “But I do worry about what happens when some of the most noxious, protective tendencies of internet fandom, combined with its strange identitarian impulses, become part of critical discourse.”

    I’ve been thinking about this somewhat painfully this week. I write on romance novels sometimes, because I like them and am interested in them. My take or approach is often somewhat different from folks in some internet fandoms, and there is a *lot* of hostility. It’s depressing, because I would like to talk to those folks; they have a lot of expertise, and I’m interested in what they have to say. But conversations tend to turn into them telling me that I’m an awful person, which is obviously not very enjoyable or enlightening for me. (Somebody even suggested I was just interested in romance novels because I was trying to promote my Wonder Woman book, which seems bizarre enough that I wonder if I misunderstood her. )

    It’s not gamergate, obviously, and not even the Lovecraft idiocy Osvaldo is talking about, but it’s still disheartening.

    Chris, poptimism comes out of music journalism. It’s pretty enthusiastically embraced by people who write about things like Celine Dion. I think it’s used much as you use your term (though somewhat more narrowly, at least in my experience.) The opposite of poptimist is usually rockist, rather than postmodernism, so that’s a difference.

  15. Of course! There’s room for all of it right now which is why, in spite of all the doom and gloom (which is real and I will soon face), I think this is a really exciting time to be doing academic work. I feel as if there are a lot of new and unexplored possibilities, which isn’t necessarily how I felt even 2 or 3 years ago.

  16. And yes, Noah, I see what you’re saying. It’s not always the most noxious or even dangerous examples, so much as a general tendency. Many of the people I know who are mega-fans are not bad critics or scholars. But I find it really difficult to have a conversation with them.

  17. Yeah; I would like to talk to them. A conversation that went, “you are wrong because of this example and this example from my reading,” would be great. Instead, it’s much more like, “you don’t have the right to speak until you’ve read several hundred romance novels, and even then it would be better if a woman were writing about these things and outsiders like you weren’t trying to profit off our fandom.”

    Sorry; obviously I have feelings here…

  18. The broader point is maybe that popularism, or poptimism, is often billed as more democratic or open, and it can be in some ways — but fandom enthusiasm isn’t necessarily always as open as it looks. Gamergate is a popularist movement in some ways — don’t criticize us, you damn elitists! When it’s mixed with (in this case) misogyny and white male identity politics, it can get really ugly.

  19. To me this is much larger than literature. I think what you’re describing isn’t a response to postmodernism so much as it’s a product of the Internet, which democratized criticism by opening it up to new populations and making room for experimentation. I also wonder if prestige television helped break down the high/low dichotomy.

    In literature, though, it’s worth noting that postmodernism/popularism aren’t exactly polar opposites. As you mention, Michael Chabon (rightfully) gets a lot of credit for rehabbing people’s notion of entertainment. But before Kavalier & Clay, David Foster Wallace was showing us how our smartest thoughts can be about “stupid” things. He wrote like a blogger before blogging even existed! And while he wasn’t exactly a champion of genre like Chabon, he expanded people’s horizons on what makes something worthy of contemplation.

  20. Postmodernism isn’t super-distinct from modernism either…I think there’s a difference between pop art and popularism, though, even if it’s just one of emphasis and where exactly you put the pop.

  21. Is it possible that academic interest in pop culture actually widens the gap between academia and the rest of America, with Rush Limbaugh-listening types seeing academics as a bunch of good-for-nothing elitist fuckers who get paid to sit around analyzing superhero comics?

  22. If we only studied the canon, then Rush-types would just say we were out of touch and irrelevant. It’s a no-win battle that I think has more to do with their desire to do away with the educational system as we know it and their hatred of teachers, and their desire for no one to get paid for anything, ever.

  23. Having read a lot of comments on right-wing websites, I guess you’re probably right, Emily. Those guys tend to dislike the whole public sector.

  24. Yeah, I wish I didn’t have to sort of say, “forget it,” but I don’t think there’s any way to win them over to academia, especially when it comes to the demagogues like Rush. The real masterminds like the Kochs probably see it as either harmless or beneficial, given on how many business consultants they can place in administrative positions and economics professorships.

  25. Also, Noah, I wouldn’t go so far as to call GG a “popularist” movement. It has more than a touch of populist demagoguery, for sure, but being anti-elitist doesn’t make you a popularist in the sense Chris is describing, I don’t think. I don’t think this problem of criticism as identity is necessarily a popularist problem, but it’s becoming common in criticism and can be encouraged or discouraged by popularism.

  26. Well…it’s popularist in that it’s at least claiming to champion an undervalued art form….It parallels comics fight against Wertham, for example, even down to the fact that Wertham was arguing on behalf of social justice (for women and black people; adamently not for LGBT folks.)

  27. Didn’t all this already happen in semiotics and “cultural studies”?

    There’s an episode in Community where Abed, one of the college students, takes a course about Who’s the Boss?. The prof’s textbook is called — the likeliest possible title for such a book —Who indeed?

  28. Chris, I want your job. I’m not qualified to do it, of course, but that’s beside the point.

  29. I do seem to have backed myself into a pleasantly odd corner of the universe, John. It apparently required my teaching high school for ten years, and then adjuncting for another seven, but amazingly I’m now a tenure track English prof making a career in pop culture. Not what I would ever have predicted. As far as being qualified, well . . .

  30. “By mid-century I predict the aesthetic pendulum will start slicing back in the opposite direction.”

    ^ Chris Gavalar seems to imply that what’s happening is just part of a familiar cycle. But nothing like this has happened before. The lack of interest today in elite aesthetic ideals is maybe roughly comparable to the situation in the Late Roman Empire, but of course the intellectuals of that time and place didn’t have much good to say about contemporary popular entertainment.

    So maybe this is the “popularist” era. Or maybe one dying profession – the high arts – is just trying to keep itself alive a bit longer by taking ideas from the popular arts, and trying to pick up some of their audience, while another dying profession – the academic humanities – tries to prove it still has something to offer to society by applying its methods to the same; and maybe the pendulum will never “start slicing back,” because there won’t be any place for it to slice back to.

  31. I don’t think it’s true that this has never happened before. Or at least, there have been times when the barrier between high and low art was a lot less solid than we’re used to thinking about it. Lawrence Levine talked about the massive popularity of Shakespeare and opera in the 19th century (I discussed that here.) I think that modernism was kind of odd in the extent to which it saw high and low as separate.

    Is high art dying? The writers Chris talks about are pretty popular… I guess we’ll all just have to wait and see. But apocalyptic declarations about the death of art and/or academia certainly aren’t anything new, at least.

  32. Of course there’s been art that attained both the high ideals of the time and popular appeal. That’s not what’s happening now. We don’t have high artistic ideals now. We have certain styles and themes that are tacitly understood to be more prestigious than others, which is why Michael Chabon uses more opaque language than Suzanne Collins and usually works in some personally relevant identity politics or bourgeois divorce-related trauma. But we have no strong idea of what an artist is supposed to master in order to be better than a mere popular entertainer, where Shakespeare and, say, Mozart were admired exactly for making their popular works without sacrificing the high ideals.

    When they were admired. For ambivalent critics from Ben Jonson to Samuel Johnston to Voltaire, admiration for Shakespeare is contingent on whether and how much they can identify more in his work than just the hand of an inspired savage. In 19th century opera, on the other hand, it was simply understood that the popular Italians after Rossini – Donizetti, Bellini, early-through-middle period Verdi – WERE inspired savages, which was sort of correct, though they were still more schooled than the vast majority of our popular musicians today. In some respects, we’ve progressed: We know it’s almost always safe to assume that Shakespeare knew what he was doing, and we’ve learned to appreciate the truly great things that the young Verdi achieved with his relatively crude means. But there were things he couldn’t do that more cultivated composers could – Chopin, Wagner, Brahms, Verdi himself in old age. The 19th century had no difficulty in understanding that part; we do.

    Yes, the modernist estrangement between high and popular art was an anomaly. Most people understand that now. What’s strange is that many people seem to think it was somehow an isolated anomaly, with no implications for what came after. On the contrary, to me we seem to be living through the predictable next phase. Having made itself useless to the people, high culture realizes there’s nobody interested in feeding it any more and makes a too-little, too-late effort to win them back.

    Do people make doomsday prophecies all the time? Yes. Sometimes they’re true. Remember when Greek and Latin were part of a standard college education? Well, soon neither will anybody else.

  33. “Of course there’s been art that attained both the high ideals of the time and popular appeal.”

    This…has nothing to do with my last comment. Maybe it’s not supposed to? Not sure what you think you’re saying here, or why you think it applies to what I said?

    “where Shakespeare and, say, Mozart were admired exactly for making their popular works without sacrificing the high ideals.”

    That’s not really true in the 19th century. Shakespeare seemed to be widely admired because of melodrama and humor. To the extent that his ideals were seen as high, it was often because his plays had been rewritten (Lear’s the most famous example.) Have you read Levine’s book? Popular Shakespeare meant lots of Shakespeare pastiches, rewritings, and general mucking with the plays. Drove the high art fans nuts.

    “We know it’s almost always safe to assume that Shakespeare knew what he was doing”

    Again, that’s an odd thing to say. Shakespeare’s intent is pretty uncertain, often. Intent is always hard to figure, and we know less about Shakespeare’s than about that of many other writers. The kind of Bardolatry you’re talking about certainly has its proponents, but I wouldn’t say it’s especially convincing to me.

    “Having made itself useless to the people, high culture realizes there’s nobody interested in feeding it any more and makes a too-little, too-late effort to win them back.”

    But the effort seems fairly successful? Michael Chabon is as popular as a high artist is likely to be, it seems like. I’m not a huge fan of his, admittedly, but he’s doing pretty well.

    Doomsday prophecies are kind of by definition not true if you can type about them. Yes, Greek and Latin aren’t part of a standard college education; is that the end of high art? I don’t see why it has to be, any more than popular musicians not sight-reading has to mean the end of great music.

    Have you read Percy Everett’s Erasure? I wonder what you’d think; he’s extremely erudite, while also playing with genre in some ways (to some degree through parody.) He’s coming at things from a somewhat different place than popularism, I think. I don’t know — you might enjoy him. I like him a lot more than most of the people Chris mentions.

  34. Also…is there really less interest in elite intellectual ideas now than in the past? Literacy is higher now than it’s probably ever been before. Academics have more access to a popular audience than ever before in history…. Not to be over-optimistic or anything; I’m just skeptical of narratives of decline (or progress.)

  35. This – “Of course there’s been art that attained both the high ideals of the time and popular appeal.” – has nothing to do with this – “…there have been times when the barrier between high and low art was a lot less solid than we’re used to thinking about it.” – ?

    “That’s not really true in the 19th century. Shakespeare seemed to be widely admired because of melodrama and humor.”

    True to limited extent, the 19th century (in the west) being when the usefulness of high art to society starts to seem questionable (even as the prestige of the artist reaches an all time high). But emphasis on “limited extent”: There were of course many distinguished 19th century artists and critics who worshipped Shakespeare while holding the likes of Verdi in contempt as melodramatic trash. Some of which may have been Shakespeare benefiting from the prestige that comes with old age, but that again shows the difference between us and the Romantics, who in some ways look like classicists compared to us: We don’t even need the prestige of age; we’re undisturbed by much cruder craftsmanship than Verdi’s, in works of our own time.

    “Shakespeare’s intent is pretty uncertain”

    Now we’re talking about the artist’s “intent”? Come on, you and I both know they beat that out of you in the first week of college, if not sooner. The idiom “knew what he was doing” of course denotes competence; or is it now cool again to call Shakespeare incompetent? Sorry, it’s been about five years since my last Shakespeare seminar with a fashionable academic; I know these things change fast.

    “Yes, Greek and Latin aren’t part of a standard college education; is that the end of high art?”

    No, it’s an example showing that just because an institution has survived an astonishingly long time, doesn’t mean it can’t quickly disappear.

    “Doomsday prophecies are kind of by definition not true if you can type about them.”

    That doesn’t make sense. I made a doomsday prophecy about high art. You can type without high art.

  36. “Also…is there really less interest in elite intellectual ideas now than in the past?”

    Yes. In absolute numbers, cranks like me of course outnumber the pedantic intellectual elite of the 17th century, but we are in turn outnumbered, in this our own time, in and out of the elite, by people who don’t care, so we don’t matter.

    Also, no, I have not read Percy Everett’s Erasure. Thank you for the recommendation!

  37. Ah…I didn’t understand what you were trying to claim with the Greek and Latin point. Is that an institution, though? It seems just like a sign of institutional change in the humanities, which are still around (not that they will be forever, but they don’t seem to be going anywhere at the moment.)

  38. A new experience: going back to an article via an email link, reading through and then hitting the first comment, thinking “Heh, who said that?” — only to find out it was you.

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