sssh! this is a working library.

In his commencement address to the class of 1984 at Texas A&M University, Vice President George Bush, making a familiar point, invoked George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. Mr. Bush spoke of the novel as a prophecy that will not come true as long as America and her allies “stand together, firm and strong, in defense of freedom.” … This bellicose interpretation of Nineteen Eighty Four is nearly as old as the novel itself. When it first appeared, some American rightists hailed Nineteen Eighty Four as a vivid anticommunist manifesto – a misreading that Orwell himself publicly repudiated. … Vowing to oppose “Big Brother” by keeping the U.S. permanently mobilized, Vice President Bush spoke exactly like the fictitious managers of Big Brother’s own regime, who also strive to keep their system “firm and strong” against the enemy. … His proclamation that the governments of, say, El Salvador, Chile, Honduras, and Guatemala are “freedom-loving” recalls the perverse official language of Oceania, where the “Ministry of Peace” promotes war, and the “Ministry of Love” promotes torture, and so on. Miller, Boxed In (309)

Aside from proving that history is doomed to repeat itself, there is an interesting intersection of criticism and ideology in here. Bush sees in Orwell’s novel a vision of an enemy, and onto that vision he graphs the vast, communist empire – not because the text suggests it, but because he is incapable of thinking critically about his own position. Rather than investigate the text, he holds it up as a mirror and finds (erroneously) confirmation of his own simple philosophy. Mark Crispin Miller – who, as is evident from even this short passage, is not a Republican – effectively interrogates Bush’s misreading and points out that Bush has in fact assumed the very position he claims to be against.

It is, in fact, a skill of anti-theory (or, as has been stated before, anti-thinking) – to suggest you hold the opposite position that you do, by means of a distortion of words and their meanings. If the “Clean Air Act” and “No Child Left Behind” aren’t Orwellian descendants of the “Ministry of Love,” I don’t know what is.

Boxed In is a work of critical analysis that takes the tools of literary criticism and applies them elsewhere, most notably to television. Mark Crispin Miller was a student and professor of Renaissance poetry by day, and an author of pop-culture essays on film, TV, and music by night; eventually, the walls between those two efforts came down. I’ll be spending some time with it in the next few days as I venture further into these (as yet embryonic) ideas about criticism.

If criticism’s role is to interrogate texts and uncover (or attempt to uncover) their meaning, then it is a subversive tool, and there will always be those who benefit by suppressing criticism:

Like propaganda generally, advertising must thus pervade the atmosphere; for it wants, paradoxically, to startle its beholders without really being noticed by them. It’s aim is not to jolt us into thinking … but specifically away from thought, into quasiautomatic action … for, once isolated and deliberately interpreted, an ad will betray not only the devices that may enable it to work, but certain larger truths about the system that requires it, and that (therefore) requires that you not think about it. Miller, Boxed In (11)

If a critic isn’t wanted some place, you can be damn sure that place is deserving of vigorous critical attention.

Two concerns need to be set aside before criticism can escape its literary chains and venture into mass culture. The first is the mistaken assumption that the products of mass culture are somehow less worthy of criticism, because they just aren’t all that complex or interesting:

We are accustomed to think of these subtleties in quasi-Pavlovian terms, as hidden stimuli that “turn us on” without our knowing it: nipples airbrushed into sunsets, lewd words traced into some ice cubes, etc. But this conception of the way ads work, and of the way we apprehend them, is much too crude. They function, not mechanically, but poetically, through metaphor, association, repetition, and other devices that suggest a variety of possible meanings. Miller, Boxed In (31)

In other words, there’s not as much distance between a poem and an ad as the poet would have you think. At least, not inasmuch as the critic is concerned.

The second assumption is that in order for a critic to establish that a meaning is evident in a text (wherein a text can consist of words or images or both), she must establish intent; i.e., she must not only convince you that the text means something, but that the author of the text intended it to mean so:

If criticism can demonstrate convincingly that a commercial uses certain strategies, then we can assume that those strategies are, in fact, at work, whether or not the advertisers might acknowledge them. Ibid. (32)

As with advertisements (or designs) as with poetry: the author’s intent is unknowable (perhaps even to the author) and irrelevant: once written down, the text takes on a meaning of its own.

Here, then, is the critic’s eye turned towards something which would ordinarily be ignored, with revealing results:

“Family Feud” would seem the most straightforward family show on television.…And yet, in fact, it isn’t the familial bond that wins the prize on “Family Feud,” but the family’s successful self-erasure. Each of Dawson’s questions is a test of sameness, its answers based on tallies of “one hundred people surveyed,” well ahead of time, by the show’s producers. A “correct” reply is therefore not the smartest, but the least inventive answer, matching an alleged “consensus” expertly defined and validated by the show itself. Thus the irresistible appeal of “Family Feud” is also the attraction of TV, which tells us endlessly what “we” believe, thereby using our supposed group sentiments to reconfirm its own authority¹.…For all its seeming family pride, then, each group that plays on “Family Feud” does not come on to manifest its own discrete identity, but rather struggles to get rid of it. Miller, Boxed In (54)

This is why we talk of TV as being “mind-numbing”; why, after watching it, you can feel sapped or empty, or, like the narrator in Fight Club, even violent. By addressing “Family Feud” critically, Miller reveals the “truth” of it (there’s that word again). And he reveals his own perspective, namely, that television’s depression of our individual identities in the name of commercial success is a dangerous practice deserving of resistance. If we’re all unflinchingly in agreement, then the conditions for democracy have not been met; we have to be willing to assert our differences meaningfully if we’re to be effective citizens:

We retain the rhetoric of liberal democracy, but in concrete terms this supposed democracy gets enacted as the commodity culture, in which freedom of choice really means Wendy’s versus Burger King. Berman, Dark Ages America (73)

The first – and arguably most important – step towards resisting this phenomena is to bring it out from the shadows; that is the critic’s role.

1. Emphasis mine. ↩

Of course, television is most dangerous not when it suppresses our own identities, but when it distorts the identities of those who purportedly represent us:

In this age of television, it matters less what people do than what they look like. Therefore, the function of the President’s men is not just to make his policies seem like their mistakes, but also to make the President himself look better by contrast with themselves. If Machiavelli were to update his directive in accordance with the current practice, he would say: “A president should surround himself with ugly people doing ugly jobs, in order to seem that much more attractive himself by doing no job at all.” Miller, Boxed In (83)

He’s talking about Reagan here, but I’ll forgive you for thinking it was more current than that. It’s interesting to think of Machiavelli as the first brand expert; his guidance is all about making you appear as something you are not, which is often (and unfortunately) what branding is about.

Where politics meets identity design:

In a paradigmatic encounter with Reagan in January 1982, Dan Rather sounded more like a publicist than an interviewer, talking about “perceptions” and “signals,” at one point making this assessment: “This is going to be a continuing problem for you, getting people to believe that you really do know what’s going on in the interior of your Administration” (emphasis added). Reagan’s not knowing what’s going on would seem to be our “continuing problem,” not his, and one of disastrous proportions; but Rather, with the assumptions typical of his profession, could see the danger only as a problem of packaging. Miller, Boxed In (87)

Set aside for the moment how depressingly familiar this all sounds, and consider the implications: television, as the principle means by which a commodity culture is upheld, supports a shallow and consumerist approach to citizenship. No surprise there (though it’s worth repeating it to yourself from time to time, as the medium is remarkably effective at making you forget its purpose). Subsequently, the vote is reduced to a consumerist choice between brands, on par with the choice between Wendy’s and Burger King. The medium of television (and, increasingly, that of the mainstream media on the web) is never going to look any deeper than that; but we have an obligation to investigate those brands, and not merely to understand the assumptions and emotions they are playing on (a revealing effort in and of itself) but to establish whether or not there’s any substance beneath the brand: whether the brand goes all the way down, or if it’s just skating on the surface:

The derision that began in 1986, while mildly gratifying, was – like the adulation that preceded it – too heavily concentrated on the man himself to constitute a real critical perception: TV…is given automatically to such extreme and trivial depictions. It is not Reagan’s so-called “management style” that now requires consideration, nor his near senility (aka “the age issue”), nor his many entertaining “gaffes,” but the true murderousness of his regime. Miller, Boxed In (92)

In other words, instead of focusing on the truth, television focuses on the branding; it does not matter what the candidate actually believes or does; it only matters how they package and distribute it.

And – perhaps more importantly – television intentionally diverts our eyes from anything that could lessen the consumer impulse – like, say, war, death, famine, etc. Terrorism has become the meme of the decade only inasmuch as we place shopping in diametrical opposition to it. The more they terrorize us, the more we buy expensive t-shirts with the word “red” in parentheses. (The parentheses are important; it makes the word look weak, coddled, especially quiet. In other words, not particularly demanding or threatening, and certainly not suggestive of the idea that, say, uncontrolled consumption and reducing world poverty are possibly not the best of friends.)