Professional Populists in the Culture Wars

The cultural studies revolution rejected universalism and embraced popular culture. This has been a disaster for the humanities and social sciences, but enormously successful in obfuscating growing social inequality and inflating the importance of culture

The war fought over the literary canon in the 1980s-90s could be considered the original “culture war,” in the debased, necrotic form that we have come to know today. This conflict pitted a new guard of New Left cultural studies professionals against the order of things—namely, aesthetic hierarchy, the “canon,” any group of books alleged to be “great,” and therefore required reading for all intellectual and academic aspirants. The target of leftist and progressive agitations was an allegedly “elitist” point of view that privileged the “great books,” as well as the grand theories sometimes articulated within those books. These culture wars made strange bedfellows of Birmingham School leftists and French theory enthusiasts, who opposed stuffy historicists and reactionary aesthetes stuck on things like the value, quality, and the continuity of the Western tradition. In those days, it seemed transgressive to write about Madonna instead of Moby Dick, and “subversive” to take Dallas (the TV series) as seriously as one would take Hamlet. Cultural conservatives like Allan Bloom and William F. Buckley, Jr. decried these new trends in academic life as stultifying, but their own conservative readings of the classics were mediocre and boring, content as they were to laud the greatness in these books, without asking great questions of them.

By the 1980s, the humanities and social sciences seemed in desperate need of a makeover, and popular culture was very... popular. More than that, there was a genuine creative energy in popular music and film, with artists like the Sugar Hill Gang, Afrika Bambaataa, the Sex Pistols, and Joy Division making us dance and sending a chill down our parents’ and professors’ spines. Malcolm McClaren rallied “Buffalo Gals” and remastered Madame Butterfly. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and the seemingly infinite profusion of strangeness on early MTV gave young people license to chill about the classics and the boring secondary literature that one was expected to master. Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher may have been the political leaders of the Anglosphere, but youth-driven street fashion had the power to disturb the Burberry-clad commuters in New York and London.

Wanting to participate in this explosion of youthful creativity, countercultural academics in the humanities and social sciences decided they were done with the Ivory Tower—at least, in theory. No longer wanting to stand aloof as mere observers or critics, and feeling unable to enjoy or produce anything truly new or useful, left academics longed to be of the people and to give voice to the pleasures of fandom from within the confines of a profession they sought to conquer.

This new “academic populism” found a charismatic and articulate spokesman in the figure of Andrew Ross. In his 1989 book, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture, Ross urged cultural critics and intellectuals to stop preaching and start “rearticulating” a “popular politics” in the face of the overwhelming appeal of right-wing populism. Intellectuals, Ross argued, were going to have a hard time grasping the “popular,” since, as eggheads, they were invested in “reason,” while the new politics was grounded in “the body.” The message from Ross and gender-troubled philosopher Judith Butler was that bodies mattered in ways the mind could barely grasp. Bodies were the site, at least for Ross, of both irrationality and pleasure. For him, popular politics “trades on pleasures which training in political rationality encourages us to devalue.” By the late 1980s, the Anglo-American Left desperately needed a new political and cultural strategy. Considering its failure in both the United States and the United Kingdom to win the people’s favor through the popular vote, Ross suggested that the Left would henceforth have to reimagine a newly-configured politics of hedonism and irrationality. He pleaded with intellectuals to give up “preaching” about popular pleasures: he asked them to renounce their expertise and to seek out a “common ground” with the people in order to build a real “popular-democratic culture.”

In 2005, Ernesto Laclau’s On Populist Reason echoed Ross’s denunciation of political rationality in favor of an affirmative theory of populist politics. Laclau admired the way in which populism divided the political field into two starkly opposed camps: “the people” and a “power bloc.” Instead of organization, populist political activity affirmed creativity, spontaneity, and improvisation in hitherto denigrated forms of popular resistance. Authentic resistance, Laclau argued, would appear in linked but not cohesive collectives, each with its own distinctive set of political priorities: the people were finding ways to articulate a series of more and more radical demands, some economic, some infrastructural, some cultural, some psychosexual. The populist chain of demands kept the power bloc off balance and set the terms for reaction from the elites. According to Laclau, however, only “theory” could adequately explain what the people wanted and who the people were. With the rise of global populism as a completely new form of politics, the people and their desires could only be deciphered through an esoteric form of poststructuralist linguistics, and “the people” were the emptiest of signifiers. Like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s creative “multitude,” Laclau’s “people” escaped the old, battered Marxist concept of class struggle as easily as it eluded traditional forms of referentiality.

In The Retreat from Class, Ellen Meiskins Wood presented a devastating critique of Laclau’s anti-Marxism, but her arguments were met with silence. Debate and discussion, along with rationality, were going out of style for the radical new thinkers. According to Wood, Laclau and his co-author Chantal Mouffe affirmed radical democracy by dismissing “class reductionism,” but after much huffing and puffing, they left readers with a weak tea of pluralism, albeit in esoteric and theoretically seductive forms. Many young people, buoyed by the economic mobility of their parents’ generation, nonetheless embraced Laclau and Mouffe’s discursive construction of a “popular force” unmoored from class or material conditions. Everyone seemed tired of the old ideology critique bound to problems of labor and capital.

By the 1990s, the era of “grand narratives” was declared to be over. Secularism and reason were cast as twin tyrants that had to be overthrown in the name of freeing the people from that most overweening of potentates: cultural elitism.

Claiming a novel form of solidarity with the people through their embrace of popular tastes, academic populists rushed to proclaim their hatred of experts, bureaucrats, and elitists. They asked themselves how they could make their work relevant and more whole. They chafed at narrow, artificial forms of specialization. Academic populists gave voice to a general sense that we had become trapped by the steel cage of professionalization: how, then, were we to break out of these institutional confines? Theory, interdisciplinarity, popular culture, cultural studies: a vast array of new methods and objects emerged to challenge the very idea of proper academic research.

Populist cultural critique thus expressed itself in myriad academic channels—and it was fueled by its conviction that high culture’s fall from grace would bring about a necessary and revitalizing cultural revolution. Few in academia were willing to concede the problems inherent in the leftist turn toward cultural populism. Key amongst those problems was the simple fact that the demise of cultural hierarchy in academia masked the rise of economic polarization: a class war was being fought alongside the culture war, but the redistribution of wealth was not of central concern in the new populists’ interventions. Anti-elitist cultural critique attacked normative, dominant, elitist presuppositions, taking out of the equation basic (what they might call “totalizing”) accounts of exploitation or expropriation.