Liza Featherstone wrote:
> why must leftists believe that because THEY enjoy a TV show it must be
> ideologically above all criticism and analysis?
If communists want to enjoy life at all, certainly if we want to have the minor pleasures of everyday life inside capitalist society, we have to learn not to put our pleasures through an ideological sieve. There aren't any pleasures available that will pass the test. (And communists who don't get some pleasure out of life will make piss poor revolutionaries. There is a wonerful anecdote in a book published in Hanoi during the war about a PLAF officer in a tunnel in the south taking command of the making of peanut brittle with a small amount of sugar they had gotten their hands on. "Trust the people," he said, "but not when it comes to making peanut brittle." If I remember correctly it was the same officer who loved to listen to Mozart on the short wave radio.) Anyhow, in my first post on Buffy I insisted that Paul should continue to enjoy Buffy, but that if he wanted to make big moral/political claims for it, then he had better confront its racism.
(Again, Freudianism may be lurking behind the scenes here, attempting to make every word, every gesture, every pleasure, every attitude have some deep meaning. Freud turns the entire population into New Critics of daily life, reading the world as though it were Donne's "Canonization." Freud himself tried to avoid this with his crack about sometimes a cigar is only a cigar, but the problem is that except in poems or in daily life subjectively transformed into a poem a cigar is *never* anything except a cigar.)
Anyhow, Paul seems both to want to enjoy that delightful 40 minutes called *Buffy* but *also* to feel like an active leftist intellectual while he is watching it. And that of course simply won't do. Because if he wants to play leftist intellectual and *partly* analyze *Buffy*, then he has to stand still as it were for an extensive ideological analysis of the series. And there never has been a TV series, movie, song, painting, what have you, within bourgeois high, low, pop, or middlebrow culture that can withstand such a demand. Whether the art is mean or high, glorious or despicable, one will find at its core the fantasy of the abstract individual, existing prior to and independently of social relations, by an act of will creating social relations where none existed before, the resulting social relations being as rapidly dissolved and requiring recreation anew by a new act of will of isolated individuals.
Incidentally, there is one great claim that, possibly, one might make for Buffy, though I have not seen enough episodes or thought about it enough to be at all sure. With its focus on and concentrated hatred of an irredeemable enemy, an enemy who unless destroyed or isolated makes daily life imposible, *Buffy* may be the nearest 20th century equivalent to the greatest of all bourgeois novels, *Mansfield Park*. In comparison to Mrs. Norris in that novel Shakespeare's Iago belongs in a '50s family sit-com. But of course the emphasis remains on *bourgeois art*.
Since beginning this I have read Paul's reply to Angela in which he tells her in ALL CAPS that pop culture is about enjoyment. Precisely, but after all it was the Buffy fans, including preeminently Paul, who seemed to be dragging extra-pop enjoyment questions of ideology or something or other into discussion. As long as Buffy is just another beer, and on the same footing with whatever those shows are -- I haven't seen any of them -- to which Paul alludes sneeringly, there can't be any argument, or at least there won't be any argument from me. But as soon as "extra-entertainment" claims are made for it , then I still insist that those making those claims must confront its implicit approval of genocide, or else provide a set of principles of literary interpretation that can exclude that possibility. Who are the Vampires? This is not daily life, and it won't do to say that in this context a cigar is only a cigar. Until someone can argue persuasively to the contrary, I insist that they are African Americans breaking into the suburban dream; and the show (probably not intentionally) is a stroking of the suburban resentment of the threat of the ghettoes to break out of their encirclement.
Carrol