I've followed the on-again, off-again thread about Law & Order and Homicide the past few weeks, along with the various threads regarding Butler and other postmodern currents. Of course the TV debate reflects a kind of rhetorical commonplace of left culture criticism--there is always the element that says there can be no merit in pop culture, practically by definition, because it's all tainted at the source, and thus the only worthwhile question is *how* it serves to reinforce some aspect of the dominant ideology blah blah blah.
Because it *is* a rhetorical commonplace, no one is going to win this argument, and I don't really want to join it. I only want to point out that this critical tack (ie, the position defined above) is as predictable and boring as it is insular. Yes, as a matter of sheer volume, most mass culture is dreck, of course it is--but I can't really fathom how anyone with a mind halfway open can fail to find moments of surprise, of pleasure, of revealing ironies and absurdities in the popular arts. Even if your interest is purely sociological, it's a mistake to suppose that pop-culture products only manipulate their consumers; they also try desperately to please, to touch a chord of some sort in an audience *that is not wholly constructed by them*--so if nothing else, there is a lot to be learned from them about the secret life of the popular imagination. (This approach may be forgotten, but it has its exemplars--off the top, I think of CLR James's American Civilization and Walter Karp's essays on the soap opera.)
To condemn it all a priori seems to me indicative of a distaste not only for the culture machine but the people who consume its products and, for better or worse, understand much of their lives in terms of those products. It amounts to a withdrawal from the world in which most people are actually living.
Which brings me around to all the blather about postmodernism that the smartest people on the left seem forever entangled in. I'm not about to claim that there aren't useful insights in the literature (which I have made a strenuous effort to avoid for the most part since getting my masters in continental communication theory about 15 years ago, so I won't pretend to be very current), especially in regard to critical tools for analyzing how hegemony works, but it seems to me that virtually all the postmodernist/poststructuralist camps involve a shared central claim: that the whole world is best understood as a text, and one that we really cannot understand as referential to a "real world." What I mean is that these intellectual currents seem, in the broadest sense, to amount to strategies for withdrawing from engagement with the world in favor of insular and usually pretentious debates about what's really literary theory. It always struck me as possibly significant that these bodies of theory began to take shape in Europe during the generation after WWII; I wondered whether their retreat to a self-referential world of textual analysis was in part a defense mechanism, a means of denying the responsibility to come to terms with the Holocaust and the broader toll taken by fascism in the 1940s. Maybe there are subscribers here who can tell me whether anyone has actually bothered to look at the rise of "postmodernist" thought in this light.
This is dashed off quickly and late at night, so I'm hoping it doesn't seem too opaque. In part I'm simply wondering if there is anyone else here who thinks that these various post-what-have-you intellectual movements are largely an unfortunate sideshow so far as left politics is concerned.