More on Frank's One Market Under God

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Wed Jul 26 12:19:20 PDT 2000



>[It seems to be Tom Frank Week at the NY Observer right now. The
>following excerpt is from Ron Rosenbaum's current NYO column. Full
>text is at http://www.observer.com/index_go.html]
>
>The sheer intelligence [in One Market Under God] of Mr. Frank’s
>close reading of the promotional rhetoric of Internet globalization
>ideology is dazzling, but my favorite two chapters are the ones that
>expose the interpenetration of the hot new cult of advertising
>"intellectuals," the "account planners" and the tin-eared drones of
>"cultural studies" in academia. The ones who claim to be engaged in
>radical politics but, as Mr. Frank demonstrates, serve as
>inadvertent cheerleaders for "market populism." Pretending that
>watching TV and fetishizing the sex lives of Star Trek characters
>are political acts of "contestation" and "resistance."
>
>"Studying fashion magazines or communities of fans was the real
>revolutionary stuff," Mr. Frank observes of the "cult-studs" with
>salutary contempt. "The first step in what would become an
>irresistible assault on the powers that be

cult-studs
>enthusiastically declar[ed] their firm intention to go on
>subverting, to continue ‘fighting the power’ by celebrating the
>counter hegemonic messages of TV sitcoms."
>
>But "for all its generalized hostility to business and frequent
>discussions of ‘late capital’ cultural studies failed almost
>completely to produce close analyses of the daily life of business."
>Failed to notice as well how "the official narratives of the
>American business community of the nineties

embraced many of the
>same concerns of the cult-studs

their tendency to find ‘elitism’
>lurking behind any critique of mass culture and their pious esteem
>for audience agency."
>
>It’s just a brilliant analysis whose sophistication and wit is
>worthy of Mencken or Dwight Macdonald, and it confirms my feeling
>that–with very few exceptions–whether they profess to love it or
>hate it, academics always get pop culture wrong. They no longer live
>it, if they ever did. But rather–despite their horror of
>"commodification"–they commodify it to advance their careers.
>
>[end of excerpt]
>
>Carl

Some cult studs study Anime, B-Movies, & "What Makes Things Cheesy"; other cult studs study Tom Peters & Thomas Friedman. (And there isn't any dichotomy here either. Even that infamous bastion of cult studs Social Text published an issue largely dedicated to studies of "corporate culture" & political economy of late capitalism in 1995.)

There are, however, cult studs like Mike Davis, Robin Kelley, Michael Denning, Paula Rabinowitz, etc. (to say nothing of the late & lamented Raymond Williams).

Yoshie



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