The Embarassment of Paratext, the Insufficiency of Culture

It’s a little thing, but let me make it into something slightly bigger. In the Sunday Week in Review section of the New York Times today, there’s a brief item about road signs warning of zombies ahead.

The item mentions a few of the recent reports of zombie road signs. And then it says, “Authorities were puzzled over how pranksters could have reprogrammed the road signs”, and then “the choice of imaginary danger may reflect the hard economic times…last fall, data posted by the science fiction blog io9.com suggested that the number of zombie-themed movies released tends to spike in period of national trauma.”

Authorities are puzzled? Really? I hope not, given that you can find the instructions for reprogramming road signs on a popular website. A website mentioned in at least one of the news stories the Times was evidently drawing from. And, oh, a website mentioned by some of the authorities that other reporters have interviewed about this story.

As far as zombie-themed movies being a cultural indicator of economic stress, on one level, that’s just the usual silliness of lifestyle journalism at work, in which it is impossible to write about anything without proclaiming it to be: a) a trend and b) a trend which is part of some metatrend, some big change in the way we are. It’s as wrong an explanation as the claim “authorities are puzzled” is. The history of zombies in popular culture doesn’t offer that kind of neat correspondence, but moreover, on some level, it needs no explanation other than itself. The tropes of zombie films and games refer first and last to themselves and their shared history. Any individual zombie-themed work may have other referents, other messages, other commentaries. But if you want to know why this “choice of imaginary danger”, it’s probably sufficient just to know first the subcultural worlds that the pranksters themselves travel through and second to know that the tropes of zombie apocalypse have achieved a kind of cultural critical mass through iteration. When a theme or genre of entertainment becomes stable enough to be parodied (Shaun of the Dead), it is also sufficiently distributed in the culture at large to be a referent in everyday life. If you wanted to know why kids in the 1950s played cowboy-and-indian, at one level you didn’t any explanation other than Western films and television programs.

—–

Of course, there is always more to say about the content of expressive culture. Cowboy-and-indian or zombie, any theme or story or genre, has deeper roots, deeper meanings. But lifestyle journalism is often at best the Cliff Notes version of that kind of culture-reading. It reads the trends so you don’t have to, it serves up the zeitgeist on a platter so that people in Hollywood have some new patter to throw into their next pitch, so that the national narrative gets a few additional pieces of flair. It’s culture as the entrails of a cow, to be read by augurers who already know what to tell the emperor.

Part of what’s going on in the Times article, though, is also a performance of respectability, an attempt to construct what it is that serious people know and think. Serious people aren’t supposed to have paratextual knowledge of zombie tropes or of the practice of pranksters. So a practice which is in some sense quite easy to explain (both the how and the why) gets an alchemical makeover and becomes baffling in its how and something other than itself in its why, becomes a safely familiar reference to respectable news.

I’m not saying that most readers of the Times know that there’s a website that tells you how to prank roadsigns, or that they’re aficionadoes of zombie movies, or even that they have an implicit paratextual knowledge of zombie tropes. I am saying that you can’t write a little news item in the New York Times that recounts the zombie sign story in those terms, that accepts technological prankstering as a cultural form, that nods to the history of the zombie genre and treats Night of the Living Dead and Dead Rising and Shaun of the Dead as sources of cultural practice in their own right.

There are a lot of reasons why print journalism is tottering on the edge of the abyss, but this is one small piece of the problem. Benedict Anderson’s famous analysis of print capitalism in Imagined Communities argues that the mass distribution of newspapers in the 19th Century was an important instrument in creating national identities, that national readerships felt connected by a sense of simultaneity, that a fellow national was reading the same paper and being addressed by it similarly despite the physical or situational distance between the two readers. But now serious journalism in the United States often has a far more cramped view of its imagined audience, and that’s not merely a matter of targeting a market segment or mapping yourself to a social class. It’s about trying to be the kind of adult who could always be heard speaking in the background of Peanuts cartoons, to be in all things so very grown-up and serious. It’s not just that this is a limiting ambition in its own right, but also that the default version of seriousness that informs a lot of print journalism and television punditry is at best a cobwebbed artifact, a different kind of zombie.

This entry was posted in Information Technology and Information Literacy, Popular Culture, Production of History. Bookmark the permalink.

10 Responses to The Embarassment of Paratext, the Insufficiency of Culture

  1. j. says:

    i like this, but it seems like there’s a simpler alternative explanation which i will simply sum up with:

    everyone under thirty knows about zombies.

  2. Timothy Burke says:

    Well, yeah, that’s kind of what I’m getting at. (Though let’s say, oh, 45, and I think that’ll maybe cover it.) But I’m still interested in the mechanisms that make the Times think “we need a short little funny note about this story in Sunday’s paper AND we have to be wrong about it”. Because I don’t believe that the reporter who wrote up the item was too old to grasp that that it’s quite well-known how to do this and pretty easy to grasp where it comes from.

  3. AndrewSshi says:

    Well, I think that the whole business of newspaper reading folks (and especially people who read the Times) and newspaper writers entering the “We are Serious Thinkers and will acknowledge each other as such” pact comes from the declining readership of newspapers, a decline that incidentally predated the intertubes. Once you’ve got a state of affairs in which not everyone reads the paper, it’s very easy for those folks who do read the paper to think, “Man, I am so much more sophisticated than the rubes who only watch the news on TV.” And it only makes sense for the papers flatter their readers with the occasional editorial lamenting how few people read, and how few read the paper. This was a nice symbiosis that worked pretty well (at least until Craigslist). After all, twenty-three years old me loved him his Sunday morning New York Times at his favorite coffee shop.

    All of which is to say that I’m willing to give the Times and its writers a pass for something like that.

    But then there are tenured cultural (and intellectual) historians and literature scholars who should know better who write stuff that’s almost as bad. “X reflects cultural situation Y because [handwave].” Now then, in many ways in my end of the discipline this has been improving over the last couple of generations. Thanks to the yeoman work of folks like d’Avray and B?ÃŽ?riou, few scholars these days will argue that commercial imagery in the sermons of the Friars reflect the rising importance of commerce and towns in the thirteenth century. I’m actually kind of curious as to the state of this sort of thinking among Africanists.

    I get more annoyed by a cultural historian doing that sort of thing than Times writers, especially because of the charmingly over-written, We Are Serious house style that said newspaper cultivates which lends itself to ten-minute Cultural Studies.

    Okay, done rambling.

  4. Timothy Burke says:

    Yeah, I agree at least that this is even more annoying in scholarship: the attempt to somehow justify cultural history *as* scholarship by insisting that X culture reads out to Y zeitgeist. I’ll give you one example: WJT Mitchell’s The Last Dinosaur, which takes the generally interesting cultural history of dinosaurs and relentlessly insists that it all amounts to a visible sign of the reproduction of late capitalism. Seriously, that’s fucking awful: the history of dinosaurs-as-image is on some level just partly a history of the last image making the next image; on another level, it’s about the history of taxonomy and childhood; on another level, all sorts of interesting and complex things are going on about life, naturalism, evolution, science, exploration. etcetera. I don’t know that Africanists are more prone to this kind of writing than any other field. Actually as far as cultural history goes, actually better, because one thing that strongly ethnographic treatments of culture tend to avoid is this kind of “reading out”–thick description is pretty much the enemy of flip translations into familiar contexts, sometimes almost too much so.

  5. j. says:

    it’s interesting that the first story you link to drops in an ‘explanation’ at the end which traces the inspiration to OTHER NEWS – not zombie movies or zombie video games, but NEWLY PROMINENT ZOMBIE EPHEMERA. presumably because a similar story simply inspired by zombies would have been less newsy.

  6. G. Weaire says:

    Not sure here. Did broadsheet newspapers like the New York Times ever *not* adopt a voice that presented them as representing The Very Serious Sort of Person?

    My first guess is that this must go quite a way back, to the need for the “quality” press to differentiate themselves from the gutter press/tabloid press/whatever. Which must be at least C19th?

    I’d like to believe that we’re all on the verge of something a bit more playful. (The British broadsheet press is certainly less full of itself than the US equivalent. No utopia, either, of course.)

    But I wouldn’t be too surprised if there was a bright future for the New York Times as a brand – just not for the physical classified advertising vehicle that is the traditional newspaper.

  7. AndrewSshi says:

    Re: your field, Tim, it’s interesting to note that more information seems to be the enemy of breezy generalizations that make up such “two minute cultural studies.” Going back to a branch of my own field, it’s taken scholars who have sat down and sorted through masses and masses of manuscript material to be able to say that no, the genealogy of what’s contained in these sermons cannot be simply ascribed to means or production, urbanization, and the like, but has its own particular internal logic, history, etc.

    OTOH, I still reserve the right to make unfounded generalizations about what cultural artifacts represent here on the internet. 😛

  8. Timothy Burke says:

    Sure! Partly because there are “many eyes” on any given assertion and because it’s an interactive medium. If the Times thing had been a blog entry, someone would have said, “Eh, don’t think so, man: here’s the real deal” and the blog author would (hopefully) have said, “Oh, my bad”. And frankly because much online writing is not intended as the Paper of Record or as being highly composed scholarship, I think it’s right to use it in a more provisional, looser, speculative way.

  9. jpool says:

    I don???? know that Africanists are more prone to this kind of writing than any other field.
    No, and athropologists of a certain stripe seem generally prone to it, but, given the zombies, it makes me wonder if you ever responded to the Comaroffs’ article on zombie rumors in South Africa and the how they were instances of the late-capitalist post-colony’s whatzit.

  10. Timothy Burke says:

    I should. I like their work a lot, but they do seem a bit prone to this sort of translation of practices, this leavening out of meaning. As early as Body of Power, that’s what Jean was doing with South African religious practice, moving quickly to append it to an account of anticolonial resistance or counterhegemony. I don’t think it’s wrong to say that there’s something like that in the mix, just as it’s perfectly fair to say that zombie apocalypse movies in the US are often a commentary on contemporary society–it’s just that we should hesitate to “read out” a single meta-meaning.

Comments are closed.