For folks who don’t follow the comics, well, for one, this is probably not a good time to start. Especially if you’re anybody but a particular kind of male reader looking to be pandered to (and peculiarly willing to pay $2.99 per pander when you can get all the pandering you like for free online). I’m not going to restate at length what Wheeler and Hudson say perfectly well. The problem is not sexy characters, nor characters having sex. It’s poorly written characters where the poorness of the writing involves in particular an unimaginative reliance on stereotypical characterizations and situations that are narrowcasted to a very particular imagined audience. Even that might not be an issue if the reboot was 52 comics narrowcasted to 52 different possible audiences, but it’s not. There are really only two audiences in sight: the dwindling numbers of existing comics fans, who enjoy weird boutique rearrangements of genres, tropes and references like All-Star Western or Demon Knights (I’m in this audience) and a very small audience of men who seek the aforementioned pandering.

I’ve talked before about the problems of cultural properties that are trapped in a dead end matrix of medium, audience, themes, expectations. There are ways out of that situation, but usually the people that got into the trap can’t see them. The wider thing that interests me about the blindness of DC executives in this case is how they’re connected to similar perceptions in other contexts that the lack of a particular kind of male audience is somehow the most important lack to resolve. Disney executives, for example, have been fretting for a while about how to draw boy viewers to their television programming, and about the perceived danger of becoming seen as “female”.

Behind that fear I think you can glimpse just how powerfully maleness continues to define “normal” and femaleness “difference”. If you’re a medium or a program understood as being for women, in the eyes of many cultural producers, there is no way back to being for people. For cultural producers who are self-consciously seeking male audiences, on the other hand, the only time you might believe that move will make men your only audience is in parodistic excess like Comedy Central’s The Man Show. Somehow DC Comics’ current executives can believe that if they play to a very particular male subculture, they will catch other audiences along the way, or at the very least not permanently change the character or nature of their intellectual properties so as to forever lose other audiences. It seem somewhat obvious that they are much more afraid of presentations that play to other audiences in that respect. Disney executives somehow fear that if it’s only tween girls turning in, it can only ever be tween girls.

The interesting shadow question that hovers around these kinds of anxieties is “where are those lost men going to“? DC’s shadow question seems to be, if comics are losing the male audiences who would have read Gen 13 primarily to see Fairchild in risque poses and semi-undress in 1995, where are they now and how can we find them? They’re signalling in the night sky with Catwoman’s breasts the same way Commissioner Gordon uses the Bat-Signal. And even if I think it’s commercially self-destructive and aesthetically unpleasant to pine for and seek that particular set of missing men, the question itself is kind of interesting. Where are those men going to? Were they ever there in the first place, and were they there for the reasons that cultural executives presume that they were? When I see some of a few of the angry pro-Red Hood and the Outlaws fans surface in the comment threads at comics sites to offer semi-literate denunciations of killjoy feminazis, it’s a bit like seeing one of the Great Old Ones stick a tentacle through an eldritch portal outside of Dunwich: a weird, maddening visit from a remote dimension. But once upon a time, those commenters were as thick on the ground in fannish communities as antelope on the Serengeti.

Where are those men? Maybe they really did not ever exist, maybe the stereotyped desires that both I and DC executives are projecting on to them (for our divergent reasons) never existed. Maybe they grew up. Maybe subcultures of male mischief and misanthropy blossomed into a richer, stranger, more distributed range of subcultures and genres.

Where are the boys that Disney is looking for? Watching something else? Playing video games? Watching nothing at all? Disney’s certainly right that they’re sociologically real: there are as many boys as girls but they’re not watching Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez and Miley Cyrus as much. Are they at Disney XD and Phineas and Ferb yet, as much as Disney would like? I’m guessing not. Or if they are, they’re not doing all the subsidiary consumption that drives the big profits, either of stuff connected to programs or stuff advertised on programs.

Tracking the migrations or absences of men from audiences, and figuring out how to call them to the table isn’t just a problem that wakes up comic book editors and television executives in the middle of the night. It’s becoming an issue for selective higher education as well: fewer male applicants, and a much narrower range of male interest in opportunities within higher education. So I don’t mean to entirely snark at someone else’s expense. Men aren’t vanishing from social structure: so why and when are they disappearing from spaces where their volition and desires were an important driver in the past? (And if they are, for whatever reason, should anyone care?)

Most professional associations of academic disciplines rather markedly avoid Vegas as a venue. Despite what gets said by some sociologists in the IHE article, that can’t be about cost. Las Vegas is consistently one of the cheapest airfares in the country from almost any location within the United States. It has a huge price range of accommodation, particularly if you’re willing to stay somewhere a bit away from the Strip. There are way more beds at affordable prices in Vegas than in Chicago, New York, or San Francisco, the perennial favorites of most of the big disciplinary associations. In the current recession, which has had an especially sharp effect on Vegas, I would think that most professional associations could negotiate deeper discounts than in any other major American city with a large range of hotels and services. If you really wanted to do graduate students and adjunct faculty who may need to attend a professional meeting to be interviewed a favor, you’d put the meeting in Las Vegas every single year. I’d even bet that at least some hotels or conference centers in Vegas gouge less on providing projection services or wireless connections to presenters. It would be nice to attend a major professional meeting where presenters aren’t left to scrounge for their own presentation technology, as has happened at some of the meetings I go to, because “it’s too expensive for the association to deal with”.

So take cost off the table. What’s the problem with Vegas? Some of the sociologists interviewed by IHE complain that Vegas is more complicit in the exploitation of women, the reproduction of capitalism, or the exploitation of low-wage workers than other possible venues. It’s odd, you know. I’ve attended big professional meetings in San Francisco, New York and Chicago where the main hotel venue is right around the corner from one of several red-light districts or businesses without hearing that this makes that venue unacceptable. I’ve been to New Orleans for meetings, both pre- and post-Katrina, in hotels right on the edge of the French Quarter, where solicitations to come inside sex-related venues are found in plenitude, drunken young men harass women, and gambling is right nearby. Philadelphia will soon have yet more gambling near its downtown. If you’re so upset by capitalist excess that you don’t want to go to your professional meetings, I assume you always complain when the meeting is in New York.

I’m not saying that you have to like Vegas as a destination. I have weird, conflicted feelings about it as a place, like many people do. I straightforwardly like some things about it (the restaurant scene is great, I like poker, and there’s some beautiful places to hike nearby.) I personally dislike the timeless, adrift feeling of most of its internal architecture, which is totally intentional. But that’s the problem with this whole story: that it should be a non-story. Meaning, that it’s fine to say, “Look, I find this is a creepy place, that’s just me, I have more fun or prefer or enjoy another venue,” in which you admit that at least one of the reasons why you attend a professional meeting is because you enjoy the venue. And in which you admit you are drawn to some aesthetics and not to others, that you find some places pleasurable and not others. I can completely sympathize. I didn’t attend one professional association meeting once because it was in Gary Indiana. Not because I object to Gary for political reasons, or believe there is something uniquely critique-worthy about it. Because I didn’t want to go there. That’s all. Nothing grand, nothing I’d make a fuss about, no sentiment that I’d care to soapbox about.

For some reason, this really reminds me of a passage in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Beautiful Struggle. Describing his father’s commitment to being “Conscious Man”, he writes “To be Conscious Man was more than just the digestion of obscure books that happen to favor your side. It was a feeling, an ingrained sense that something major in our lives had gone wrong. My father was haunted. He was bad at conjuring small talk, he watched very little TV, because once Conscious, every commercial, every program must be strip-mined for its deeper meaning, until it lays bare its role in this sinister American plot.”

I don’t think the academics who go beyond personally disliking Vegas as a venue to argue that there’s something structurally or institutionally wrong with being there are Conscious People in quite this sense. It’s more that they think performing Conscious Personhood is a necessary affect of their professional identity, like a psychoanalyst’s couch or a physician’s lab coat. Vegas is like TV: it presents a surplus of meanings that can’t be accepted or enjoyed as such, that allow no escape into some safe meeting ground between bourgeois academia and the Authentic Masses. It’s all small talk, it pre-empts profundity.

Which, honestly, might be a good reason why more academic conferences ought to be there.

But not so fast. There are Big Problems with Gabler’s view of the Big Idea. The first I suspect is going to turn up in critical responses around the Web today, namely, that he turns to a trite-and-true villain to explain the decline of the Big Idea, the Internet. The argument goes something like this: the Internet makes too much information available to too many people and doesn’t require the users of information to actually know or master that information themselves.

This common sentiment seems particularly beloved among middlebrow intellectuals of an older generation, the sort who harbored ambitions of appearing on The Firing Line and then going to dinner at Elaine’s and having Norman Mailer wave to them. They would have done it too, if it weren’t for those darned online kids. There’s a shining, golden moment that they have in their memories when the vast postwar American middle-class was willing to watch a symphony on TV, read a novel by Roth or Updike, and try to understand the theories of Einstein. Sure, Stevenson might take a shot for being an egghead, but at least everybody who was anybody knew who the Van Dorens were.

This memory isn’t completely rose-colored. Gabler knows better than anyone, given his interest in Disney, that there really was a cultural moment that now seems increasingly remote, where Walt Disney, as safely middle-American as anything could be, got on the television screens and told kids and their parents about the wonders of science’s big ideas. This is a bit of what Gabler’s getting at when he suggests we’re living in a post-Enlightenment, post-reason time.

But blaming it on the Internet just underscores what’s wrong with this memory, namely, who’s the we here? Did most Americans in 1960 really know and appreciate the Big Ideas, really take in a redacted and reprocessed version of high culture? I’m thinking not. What’s being remembered here is the public peformance of self within a certain segment of the middle-class in certain places. Push back Gabler’s account further and this gets even more sharply clear. Euro-American working-classes were far more familiar with a range of sophisticated literary work than contemporary elites suspected in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, but I still suspect that the Big Ideas on Gabler’s list circulated far less widely than his rhetoric implies. He uses “we” throughout: I think he needs a different pronoun.

It’s a Goldilocks eulogy: what’s being mourned is an imagined past where just the right number of people had access to knowledge, just the right number of people were in that “we” that cared about Big Ideas as well as the smaller “we” that had the ideas in the first place. It’s not too much information, in the end: it’s too many people. It’s not that we’ve gone from a society that valued Enlightenment reason to one that doesn’t, it’s that all the people who never signed on for Enlightenment reason have become visible, speaking subjects.

——

Two other problems with the Big Ideas as Gabler describes them, though. First, most of the things he labels as Big Ideas weren’t necessarily perceived or voiced as such when they were first articulated. What he’s really describing in many cases are retrospective labels created by popularizers and interpreters of denser or more complicated writing and research. “God is Dead”, for example, is not something that Nietzsche just said off the cuff on the Charlie Rose show some night, nor did he mean it as a simple “Big Idea”. Most Big Ideas, scientific and humanistic, appear only as such after a considerable time, and by the time they appear as a Big Idea, they’re often misleading summaries of more intricate or specialized works.

Equally to the point, a lot of what Gabler describes as Big Ideas turn out to have been actively wrong or at least misleading in the wrong hands, and one of the reasons is not the insights and findings of their initial creators but the seductive refashionings of later popularizers. The process that made Big Ideas into two or three-sentence applause lines that can be rattled off in succession in an op-ed in the New York Times is often what allowed them to turn into ideology and dogma.

If the informationally overloaded present is resistant to Big Ideas, maybe that’s not because we’re too busy watching YouTube videos of Jennifer Aniston playing with a cat. Maybe it’s because we’re acquiring an immune system resistance to the salesmanship of middlebrow middlemen trying to extract saleable Big Ideas from the raw material of knowledge production.

I’m sure I noticed this pattern in the letters to the editor in this week’s New York Times Book Review because they were complaining about Laura Kipnis’ review of Maggie Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty.

Kipnis’ review started off with a wonderfully bracing slap to that most tedious kind of middlebrow NPR-listening muddled complaint against mass culture: “Well-meaning laments about violence in the media usually leave me wanting to bash someone upside the head with a tire iron. To begin with, the reformist spirit is invariably aimed down the rungs of cultural idioms, at cartoons, slasher films, pornography, rap music and video games, while the carnage and bloodletting in Shakespeare, Goya and the Bible get a pass.” Kipnis continues, “Low-culture violence coarsens us, high-culture violence edifies us. And the lower the cultural form, or the ticket price, or — let’s just say it — the presumed education level of the typical viewer, the more depictions of violence are suspected of inducing mindless emulation in their audiences, who will soon re-enact the mayhem like morally challenged monkeys, unlike the viewers of, say, ‘Titus Andronicus,’ about whose moral intelligence society is confident.”

If I could fit that on a tattoo, I’d get it put on my arm, just to save time the next time I want to say roughly the same thing, which my friends and colleagues can tell you is about once a day.

It’s just about as predictable that after saying it, you can expect some kind of rebuke from purveyors of the conventional wisdom, often one that speaks past rather than to the original critic.

When I’ve been on panels about media-effects arguments, I’ve always been a bit amused at the gentle chaos that articulating a critique like Kipnis’ tends to sow among researchers or audience members who follow the standard line. They’re ready for dramatic self-righteousness if by some chance an executive or producer from the culture industry should happen to show up and disagree, but not for zooming off in a more perpendicular direction, such as a more academic dismantling of the methodology or conclusions of long-standing media-effects work, or Kipnis’ point about how much criticism of violence in mass media is rather open in its pimping for high-culture snobbery.

As an example of what that gentle chaos can lead to, Josephine Hendin’s response to Kipnis is a really prime example of the aforementioned rhetorical transposition of an act of interpretation with a statement of a fact. Moreover, because Hendin talking about violence, art and popular culture, she does a pretty fair job in two paragraphs of demonstrating why there was a scholarly revolt against limiting the subject of literary study to high-culture works.

Hendin complains that Kipnis “does not clearly distinguish” between valuable artistic uses of violence and “shock value”. I’m sorry, were literary critics the people who were supposed to be especially skilled at close reading? Because as a starting observation, this leaves me a bit confused. Kipnis starts off her book review rather clear on this point: she thinks this distinction is bollocks. So perhaps Hendin meant to say, “I don’t agree with Kipnis: I’m going to argue that there is a distinction”. See, speaking of distinction, I think there’s one between saying, “I don’t agree with you” and “you didn’t make my argument and made your own instead, so I think you’re being unclear”.

The rest of the letter has the same problem: interpretations are converted by some invisible table into empirical data. I understand, it’s a two-paragraph letter, and not a monograph. But it’s not that hard to find monographs by literary critics that make the same rhetorical slip for hundreds of pages, refusing to characterize or imagine a claim as an interpretation and instead stating it as something which is. “Much of pop culture is about endemic desensitization to anything but the action of violence”. Much? Well, what have you got in mind? Tomb Raider and Andy Warhol, really? Not what I’d call major foundation stones of contemporary popular culture, but that’s how these arguments usually work: highbrow critics and audiences reach out desperately for the one or two pop culture texts or properties that they have some paratextual familiarity with, maybe from a panel four years ago at the MLA or from their teenage child’s unrefined cultural consumption.

“Does not clearly distinguish” is of a rhetorical piece with some of my least favorite repeated phrases in undergraduate papers. For example, the venerable favorite: that the author of a text “forgot” to make an important point in that work. For some reason, my students think this is a gentler, fuzzier way to say that the author is wrong on some important point, while also hoping that they will keep me from noticing that they don’t really have a fully worked-out understanding of what is wrong with the author’s argument. What I point out to my students is that this is both a more condescending characterization than simply saying that they disagree with the text (I’d rather be argued with than have it insinuated that I didn’t do my work properly) and it calls attention to rather than disguises a lack of command over the issues.

I agree that direct and declarative language is a good thing, whatever the length of an analysis. But it’s important to use language that always recalls what interpretation really is, and what it’s not. One of the requirements of that language is self-awareness. By all means generalize, but know that it’s you that’s doing it.

In that respect, I’m a fairly typical comics reader. I’m part of an aging population that skews male, has a long history of reading comic books, somewhat jaded about the genre and form but is also motivated to some extent by the not-yet-exhausted pleasures of nostalgia. As many of the folks who’ve weighed in about DC’s new line have observed, readers like me are the problem in two respects. First, there are fewer and fewer of us willing to pay out to read the still extensive monthly output of the major publishers. The long tail of traditional comics publishing gets longer and longer and smaller and smaller with each passing month, even as the intellectual properties themselves have become ever-more successful mainstream cultural artifacts. But the work which still opens wallets among the dwindling audience is precisely the antithesis of the kind of work that might attract new readers.

To avoid exacerbating that problem, I should explain what’s going on. Because once I get past my immediate irritation about DC’s gambit, I think there’s a deeper cultural problem here that affects much more than just the publishing of superhero comics. DC Comics, which is owned by Warner Brothers, has announced that at the end of August, all of their current monthly comics will come to an end and a completely new line-up of 52 titles will begin coming out with simultaneous digital and brick-and-mortar editions. On paper, that sounds like a bold move, a chance to begin anew with versions of the established characters that might appeal to new audiences.

Expert comic-book Kremlinologists, however, have run over the announced list of titles, creative teams and the visual redesign of characters and found little reason to think that this initiative is that kind of rethink. Most of the titles conceptually have the same continuity-porn self-referentiality that current versions do. The writers are the same writers who’ve written numerous previous titles to appeal to a small fraction of the shrinking audience. The redesigns harken back to the worst creative excesses of the 1990s, an era where superhero comics were mostly driven by collector speculation and by wretched visual tropes like pouches, huge shoulderpads, guns the size of the Empire State Building and anatomy like these two drawings:

However, I don’t think this is just about making a bold move on paper and then not having the guts to follow through on its implications. There’s a structural problem here with the management of what Jason Craft called “fiction networks”, or “proprietary, persistent, large-
scale popular fictions” in his excellent 2004 dissertation.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that shared-universe superhero comics in their published serial form are struggling with a crisis of viability at the same cultural moment that television soap operas are fighting for their life. They have the same problem of a dwindling audience whose intense loyalty to long-established genre norms both threatens and sustains what life is left in the form. Serial drama is expensive to make, even with the numerous cost-cutting strategies that daytime soaps have employed over the years. But it’s not just about the costs.

If you look at the big picture, serial drama is in pretty good shape. Sure, reality shows have pushed most serial drama off of the broadcast networks, but on basic and extended cable, some of the best examples of the form ever are airing. Part of the problem is that they tend to show how deep the cul-de-sac really is for daytime soaps, how much their own traditions and audience expectations thereof have become a serious limit. HBO’s serial dramas show what happens if soap operas could discard limits on sex, violence and profanity while being superbly written and acted: if you squint properly, you can see a kin relationship between The Sopranos and General Hospital. Other cable niches permit other variations as structural premises.

That’s the problem with long-running “network fictions” like the daytime soaps or superhero comics: they tend to revert to a baseline after exciting variations or explorations because the long-tail core audience expects, perhaps demands, such reversion. Passions could have magic, witches, surrealism, violence, but it couldn’t keep it going forever. Grant Morrison can shake up the status quo of the X-Men or Batman, but the company and the readers are going to eventually want to curl up safely with a reverted version.

What’s notable here, particularly in terms of Craft’s dissertation analysis, is that when these properties leap out of the media creche that contains their eternal reversionary impulses, they often can shed most of the accumulated crud that prevents them from moving on or evolving.

For example, I’ve been re-reading old Lee/Kirby Thor comics recently. There’s no way you want to be a storyteller today who has to regard those as stories which happened to the character of Thor and require continuing reference as part of the fictional history of the contemporary character. Sure, some elements are wonderful, the tone is evocative, but Thor’s girlfriend Jane Foster is a ridiculous misogynstic caricature and his father Odin is unambiguously mentally ill. You could find inspiration in the early comics, and the reasonably decent film did, but any ongoing publication should continually reboot and rethink the character. The thing to do is find great storytellers and let them tell interesting stories about Thor, a godlike superhero, a powerful alien from another planet, a fish out of water stuck on Earth, a character of uncertain sanity: all versions have had some useful life in the comics here and there. That’s what you’re shooting for, and what you want to support. The other important thing? Cut way down on the intertextuality, the crossovers, the asterixes from assistant editors about the last time Thor met the Absorbing Man.

Whether it’s soaps or comics or other network fictions, what happens when they leap from their place of cultural birth is that a new creator has to take a hard look at the primal story underneath. What’s Green Lantern’s story? Well, he’s a guy who finds a magic ring that can do anything. Ok, ask yourself what usually happens in those kinds of stories in most human culture. “Joins a police force of aliens who fight fear demons” is assuredly NOT high on the list. There are precedents for “human gets involved in a fight far bigger than himself and learns to deal with it” (E.E. Smith’s Lensman series most notably) but it’s not the same story as “finds a magic ring that can do anything”. The thing is, the two stories in the history of the character Green Lantern are combined partly by the accidents of themes that post-Comics Code superhero stories would support, not because they’re logically partners. The Green Lantern film did as poorly as it did partly because it couldn’t decide how to resolve out the weird conflation of not-particularly-congruent stories and escape the history of the genre and medium.

In humanistic writing, I’m struck by the sometimes uncomfortable mixing of a romanticist vision of authorship with the value of scholarship as a collaborative, collective and accumulative enterprise. In peer review, tenure review, grant applications and other venues where we set the benchmark for what counts as excellence, we often expect scholarly work to exhibit the author’s “quality of mind”, and that in turn is often best established by the degree to which the analysis and interpretation in scholarly writing appear to be original and highly individualistic, all values that I think trace back to a romanticist vision of cultural creation as the expression of a liberated and extremely distinctive self. We often insist that the act of research in the humanities reveal or uncover something that we did not yet know, and suggest that this is both a mark of the individual quality of mind of the author of that research and a benchmark of its contribution to a shared project.

I think this somewhat contradictory posture accounts for the wariness of many humanists towards digital media, crowdsourcing and so on. I also think it inhibits scholarly writing in some unfortunate ways. I was musing on this feeling a lot while devouring Wendy McClure’s The Wilder Life over the past week. Basically, what I kept asking myself was, “Why isn’t this how cultural studies scholarship normally reads?”

McClure is not a professor: she’s a writer and editor. I suppose you could say that’s why scholarship doesn’t read this way, because she’s someone who makes her money from writing well rather than proving her erudition. And yet, the book is in its own way quite erudite. She’s certainly read just about everything there is to read about Laura Ingalls Wilder, a fairly substantial scholarly literature in its own right. Yet, if a junior cultural studies or literary scholar submitted this as their manuscript for review by a tenure committee, I feel fairly certain that their candidacy would be in serious trouble in many institutions. That’s a damn shame.

The book is offering no strikingly new findings about the Ingalls or their place in history. As McClure points out, it’s not even the first book to offer a travelogue of journeys to important Ingalls-related tourist sites. But it is a smart, personal engagement with the big questions that the Little House books pose: why were they written and published? (By whom, in fact?) Why do we like them? (Which ‘we’?) What have they done to and with national, religious, cultural and gender identity in the United States over the last forty-odd years?

To me the gold standard for scholarship is not “is this an original finding, an act of research which is wholly original to the person who undertook it?”, but “what conversations does this provoke? how could I teach it? how does it help me to think about what I already know and teach me things that I did not know?” I’d be happy to enshrine McClure’s book as a sample type of what one kind of synthesizing, engaging cultural studies scholarship ought to look like. The analysis it offers is personal, wistful, meditative, as well as consistently funny, and I have no doubt that this would irritate some of my colleagues in cultural studies who have an expectation that the underlying social formations expressed through the novels and their fandom require more trenchant and systematic critique.

It’s not reasonable to expect that this kind of book be the first thing that junior scholars write, but it is reasonable to suggest that it’s a very desirable kind of synthesizing, explanatory writing which the humanities could move towards.

I have a long-standing engagement with comics and sequential art both as a consumer and in terms of some of my underlying scholarly interest in fan cultures, subcultures, and divergent national histories of genre and form. De Haven’s book isn’t as formal or far-reaching an analysis as work like David Hadju’s cultural history of the moral panic over comic books in the U.S. during the 1950s or Gerard Jones’ look at the beginnings of the superhero comic as a form. De Haven’s short commentary on the history of Superman as cultural property and idea rests heavily on such work, as well as work about comics history by comics creators such as Jim Steranko’s authoritative account. (Which, by the way, some publisher should consider reprinting.)

I enjoyed his weaving together of the now-familiar, once-obscure story of the travails of Superman’s creators, Joe Schuster and Jerry Siegel, with the evolving meaning of the character to his publics through his successive iterations in different media, which have ranged from a kind of devil-may-care social crusader early on to the weird mix of surrealist plotting and boys-club misogyny of the Mort Weisinger era and onward to the continuity-laden, densely fannish treatment Superman gets in many current comic books. De Haven ends up arguing that there is a sort of essential core to the character, most importantly that he does good because he enjoys it, almost because it’s his hobby. (He points out that the idea that Superman was raised right in the American heartland by two salt-of-the-earth Midwesterners was added relatively late to the character’s mythology.)

In any event, even if you had no interest in Superman or comic books, De Haven’s book is a good model for a looser style of extended essay by an academic cultural critic. It’s not an exhaustive work of original research, and doesn’t need to be. It’s a commentary that requires the author to have an erudite understanding of the texts involved (Superman comics, the television show, the movies, advertisements) as well as the wider social and historical contexts but doesn’t feel obligated to compel its readers to share that erudition in order to understand the basic thrust of his interpretation of Superman. De Haven does a nice job of integrating his personal experience of Superman the character and cultural property into his analysis, and maintaining a relaxed, curious, open attitude towards his subject. In many ways, I wish this is what cultural studies scholarship looked like more often.

In the essay, Mooney reviews arguments from neuroscience about why we believe what we believe, how we react to new information that contradicts our existing convictions, and about the actual cognitive processes involved in persuasion or being persuaded, concluding that at least some of the tendency to reject new information or challenges to our beliefs is cognitively hard-wired. Mooney extends this observation to explain how many people arrive at a misreading of scientific publication or knowledge, in part because the norms of scientific publication require the provision of information which permits or encourages misreading. Much of his analysis dovetails into established arguments about the power of framing discourses in the media, forms of confirmation-seeking consumption of information, and the degree to which strongly held values trump factual information or rational persuasion.

I have a lot of complicated misgivings about the implications of this overall approach in its reconsideration of the public sphere, deliberative processes, the act of persuasion, and our models of subjectivity, agency and consciousness. But I have a simpler objection to this particular subset of the bigger paradigm. Namely, that it is not irrational or unreasonable to regard scientific claims which recommend or insist upon particular public policy initiatives with sharply pronounced skepticism across the board. Not because science itself requires a particular form of skepticism (though it does) but because such skepticism is evidence-based, derived from the history of the relationship between policy, the modern state, and science, a history which even non-experts have often viscerally experienced or witnessed.

Three kinds of evidence particularly warrant this preemptive skepticism. The first is spectacular, well-known examples of flagrant ethical misconduct in the pursuit of scientific knowledge justified by an appeal to the public good or in service to a public policy objective. The conventional response is that these incidents, such as the Tuskegee Experiment or the fudging of informed consent in the creation of the HeLa cell line, have been dramatically reduced through institutional reforms and safeguards. Perhaps, but the record on this point alone is sufficient to justify caution about scientific work whose procedures and costs are justified or demanded because of some allegedly urgent public good or policy priority.

Second, the interests of political elites and institutional actors within modern states are demonstrably not identical in all or even most instances to the public good, and have a history in their own right of delivering policies which subsequently prove to have unintended, uneven, self-interested or destructive effects. When scientific knowledge gets caught up in that process, it becomes by definition less trustworthy or more worthy of skepticism than research which is not strongly directed towards justifying political or bureaucratic decisions. Add to this the intrusion of businesses and other private institutions with a strong interest in the production (or suppression) of particular kinds of scientific knowledge in relationship to the making of public policy. A historical perspective quickly demonstrates that many claims imbued with the authority of science, deployed in service to policy, have had powerful consequences but a very weak relationship to scientific truths. If you lived through the last fifty years, you can remember a great many things which public officials and influential scientists told the public to do or believe which were not just wrong but primarily served the self-interest of government, private industry or research institutions. It is completely rational to recall this evidence every single time that science and policy intersect.

Third, more and more studies today are suggesting that a good deal of scientific research, both that which concerns policy-making and that which does not, is covertly or subconsciously manipulated to produce results which just barely cross the threshold of statistical significance or otherwise establish “legitimate” results. What this suggests is less that many researchers (both scientists and social scientists) operate with conscious bad faith and more that there is a system of underlying incentives which pushes research communities towards the entrepreneurial overproduction of unnecessary or marginal knowledge. Where this has particular implications for the intersection of policy and science is that overestimating the significance of results or simplified interpretations of results in order to suit policy formation and public debate are governed by the same system of incentives. As a result, attempts to apply or deploy research findings in policy formation are often drastically premature, or mismatch the expense and difficulty of policy to the strength of research findings. Moreover, the rhetoric of scientific truth is often used in such cases to strongarm more complex or humanistic ethical and practical objections to a particular finding and its application aside. Again, the historical record of the last fifty years in the United States and Western Europe is fairly replete with expensive or drastic public policies adopted on the strength of thin or tentative findings which were easily contradicted or reversed by later research. And so again, presumptive skepticism towards scientific and social scientific claims that inform or demand policy implementation is justified on evidence, not because of underlying, intrinsic cognitive orientations.

Mooney’s essay addresses a lack of belief in the findings of fundamental or basic science. You could argue that this lack of belief is not justified by the evidence I’ve described above, that basic science should be subjected to the ordinary skepticism demanded by the scientific method but not judged against some record of particular historical propensity for error. Indeed, the opposite, given basic science’s strong record of continuous progressive improvement in the quality and depth of its understanding of the universe. The problem is that scientists operating in this domain rarely take pains to distinguish themselves from science which is claimed by policy-makers or claims to have found concrete solutions to real-world problems. Nor are many scientists particularly eager to acknowledge the sociology, politics or history of science as having any relationship to their research work, whether pure or applied. Instead, many would rather do what Mooney offers: use science to explain away even the critique or suspicion of science as definitionally extra-rational and to consign any actual engagement with that popular skepticism to humanists who wallow in the rhetorical and discursive to begin with.

I’ve experimented with classes that are annotating primary documents, something that other faculty at Swarthmore have taken to a whole new level. Similarly interesting discussions arise out that kind of “applied knowlege”.

Another concept that I haven’t tried yet but which seems like a natural possibility is guiding students through the preparatory work that an author or producer might do if they were adapting a body of knowledge, a setting or a story for some kind of media besides scholarly publication. Say, what kinds of researched knowledge you might need if you were going to write a script, make costumes, find locations, fine-tune dialogue, craft audio, and so on for a film working with a particular historical setting.

Or, in another case, if you were going to debate and discuss what you’d have to do to successfully adapt a science-fiction novel to a film. Not actually create the adaptation, just figure out what the issues involved in an adaptation might be, what rules of preference for ‘adaptable’ works a group of students could generate and discuss and so on. This is probably yet another example of an exercise or a direction for a class that would define me as the advance guard of a barbarian horde dedicated to despoiling the noble traditions of disciplinary inquiry and serious scholarship. But honestly, you can study texts which exist and use them to raise the same questions: how does intertextuality operate? How do visuality and textuality interrelate? Are there cultural works which are so strongly native to one mode or form of representation that they have no plasticity, no room for reinterpretation or translation into other forms? Are specific technologies of representation necessary preconditions of some kinds of cultural work? It’s just that starting from the question, “Which books on this list do you think could plausibly be adapted into films, and what kinds of translating and interpreting would you employ in your favored cases” gives those discussions an interesting mix of open-ended contingency and practical concreteness.

Having to explore your reasoning for those kind of preferences is a really interesting exercise. For example, on the Register‘s current list:

John Scalzi, Agent to the Stars. This seems like an easy adaptation to me, and a highly viable one. But why? Some of it is Scalzi’s prose and dialogue: it already feels like a screen treatment in places. The pacing of the story fits the likely pacing of a standard commercial film. The premise isn’t complex, it doesn’t have a huge amount of world-building or backstory. On the other hand, stripped of Scalzi’s wit and the smooth readability of his prose, it could come off as derivative or familiar.

Stephen Donaldson, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Well, maybe I’m inclined to think these books both unadaptable and unwise to adapt because I don’t like them much. But an assignment’s an assignment, so independent of my feelings, this is the classic kind of premise that creates a puzzle about the relationship between diegetic and extra-diegetic elements. In the best case scenario, that’s a goad to the creation of really amazing work that pushes at the boundaries of what cinema can be. In the worst case scenario, well, we’ve all seen epic fails in rising to this challenge. There are some existing films that work brilliantly with the basic construct at the heart of the Thomas Covenant books: The Wizard of Oz for one (the visual and narrative relationship between Oz and Kansas, but also Dorothy has Covenant’s dilemma in the sense that it’s important that she not accept Oz for what it offers, just without so much self-loathing, leprosy and rape).

David Brin, Kiln People. I think I might pick Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon instead for some of the same themes and mood of this Brin novel, but both of them strike me as readily adaptable and as being adaptations that could support a really wide range of visual aesthetics and thematic ambitions. Compare to the Scalzi: anybody who tries to make that a “heavy” text or as an occasion for visual invention is going to break what charm it has. But Kiln People or Altered Carbon have some thematic potency lurking inside the noir-ish mood.

Jack Chalker, the Well World books. Can’t see that these could be adapted as a single feature film, for a zillion reasons, ranging from the irreducible genre geekiness involved in their premise and style to the visual challenges to almost-Rule-34-invoking Chalker fetish about body-swapping to the convoluted plotting of even the relatively simple first book in the series. On the other hand, this strikes me as an insanely appropriate series for adaptation to a digital game, especially a massively-multiplayer persistent-world format.

Robert Heinlein, Time Enough For Love. As my uncle once put it, “Easiest book ever to summarize: an immortal guy has sex with everyone he meets, and then travels through time to have sex with his hot young mother. The End.” Here the premise restricts what it can be: too outre and Mary-Sueish to work as a story played straight, and made as a piece of porn that tries to hold on to a shred of narrative complexity, it would be at best a quaint period piece alongside “Dwarf Threesome Amateurs” and so on in the contemporary market.

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Mars Trilogy. Great text for thinking about how cinematic work handles (or fails to handle) world-building fictions. (Anybody who watched Game of Thrones this last week saw a case of a cinematic work really struggling and sometimes failing to surmount this obstacle.)

Rather than a dreary point-by-point response to everything objectionable in the essay, I want to focus on one issue in it that Alan Jacobs and I were discussing earlier on Twitter, because it’s a problem that crops up in similar jeremiads against the culture of the present.

Edmundson complains that literary scholars stopped making judgments about the relative quality of literary and cultural work in the course of the 1960s, thereby instantaneously flushing the entirety of the Western tradition down the toilet in a matter of a decade or so. Why didn’t the public at large just keep at the discernment of quality thing? Because ultimately Edmundson, similar to some conservative or traditionalist humanists, believes in a command model. The public only valued literature because the critics told them to. The public only understood literature because the critics told them what it meant. The public only read literature because the critics lead them through the reading of it. Once the commandment vanished, so did the Western tradition itself, and with extraordinary rapidity.

For one, this doesn’t exactly square with claims about the immortal greatness of Shakespeare, Milton, Melville, etcetera. So self-evidently great, so full of incomparable majesty and worth, so important that they get tossed overboard for “Three’s Company” and some nachos the moment a small group of tweed-festooned men stop continuously churning out oracular instructions about how to read and honor the classics? That’s a picture of literary criticism that makes critics sound more like secret police for an authoritarian regime.

Second, of course, most of the canon as it stood in 1950 or so is still being read and valued by critics and general audiences alike. But I’m tired of trying to make that particular point to the “English departments only teach classes about the laundry lists of left-handed lesbian Iniut factory workers” crowd: you can hear a thunderous squoosh of fingers inserted into earwax every time this fact gets in the way.

Third, and most important, Edmundson and a small number of similarly-minded critics prefer to see criticism in terms of a command model, and their critical colleagues as betrayers, because the alternative is to actually make arguments about quality that are persuasive. If there’s anything that’s been forgotten (by Edmundson, apparently) it is that these are the hardest kinds of interpretation, not the easiest, at least if you want to make them as substantive, well-reasoned intellectual claims built on a systematic infrastructure that other critics could add to or disagree with. Arnold’s aphorism about the best that has been said and known stirs many a critical heart, but don’t forget the hard work that follows if you don’t want statements about quality to simply be a tea-sipping genteel version of The Argument Clinic from Monty Python.

When a critic with this complaint against the present moment actually ventures to anoint a literary work as having quality (or as lacking it), their assertion often comes down to one of three things: 1) of course this is great, because it is one of those works that was called great by those great literary critics we used to have; 2) of course this is great because the wrong kind of lesbo-Marxist-postmodernist critics hate it WARGLEBARGLE LOOK OVER THERE IT’S A UFO; 3) of course this is great because it talks about love and sadness and things that are very profound and makes me feel all philosophical and stuff, like when I was a teenager and did I ever tell you about how I felt in high school?

Go ahead, think about it for a minute. Why is one work of literature great and another not so much? For that matter, why is a work of high culture great compared to a work of popular culture? (Or is it?) The answers to those questions are never obvious. If you think you can tell me in a paragraph why Moby Dick is a greater work of literature than Northanger Abbey, I don’t think you really know what you’re talking about, even though I’d completely agree with the sentiment.

There is a reason that critics did stop making “is this great?” the first and last question of literary analysis (Edmundson is not wrong to say that this problem has been sidelined in cultural criticism, and this does indeed raise problems, as the concept of good and bad work is indispensible). The reason is that it’s a really hard philosophical problem that was made to seem easier through slight-of-hand when the answer was conflated with the preferences and tastes of a fairly narrow social class that held itself aloof from a wider public.

It is not a question that can be successfully answered through collecting data or assembling evidence. The history of critical judgment does not provide one with any confidence of steady improvement over time in the sorting of great from not-great, even before the dirty hippies and postmodernists wrecked the whole thing. Many works that traditionalists now commonly celebrate as self-evidently “great”, literature that makes its way into Great Books programs, was not infrequently once regarded by expert judgment as derivative, weak, pointlessly transgressive, vulgar, or lowbrow popularizing. Tell me that Dickens is great, and I’ll remind you that there were once expert critics who saw him otherwise. It works as well the other direction as well: there’s a long list of works once lauded as self-evidently great which even the most florid defender of the traditional canon would likely concede are now best forgotten.

I’d welcome an investigation of what makes some cultural works great and others ordinary or bad that was consciously intended to provide a critical toolkit to other readers and critics. Note that to be useful as an infrastructure for future criticism, such a work couldn’t answer all questions of greatness in advance. Not a canon, but the foundation for making a canon. To be useful, it would have to be applicable to works that its creator had never read or considered, and to stimulate rather than close down debate about works that its creator knows well.

That’s a mighty work I’m imagining. I wouldn’t blame anyone for refusing to tackle it. I would blame those, however, who regard this kind of critical judgment as easy, blame all the rest of the world for failing to undertake it, and yet can’t seem to be bothered to do it themselves beyond a few one-liner declarations about the greatness of favored works.