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.

Culturepolitics

The rise of anti-elitist cultural studies in academia did little to address America’s growing material inequalities. It did, however, find great success in blurring lines, specifically between politics and culture.

The intoxicating mix of high and low culture that was the trademark of the late 1980s could be found in the November 1998 issue of Vogue, the flagship magazine of haute couture and high society. Vogue’s representation of both fashion and the New York social world was disrupted by the arrival of Anna Wintour, child of London’s swinging sixties. Her sensibilities were shaped by the celebrity-driven bohemian hedonism that dominated the London of her own youth. Wintour revitalized the style and feel of the American magazine by being simultaneously more irreverent about couture and more worshipful of new-money celebrity. In the first cover for American Vogue that Wintour commissioned, we see a model named Michaela wearing a ten-thousand-dollar (not adjusted for inflation) jewel-encrusted Christian Lacroix jacket and fifty-dollar Georges Marciano jeans, a slight swell of her belly visible between the top of her pants and the bottom of her top. She smiled radiantly at the camera, her hair freely blowing in the wind. Working-class denim paired with bejeweled haute couture represented the hierarchy-busting Zeitgeist. Wintour’s pop sensibility embraced new money and old, debutantes and movie stars in New York’s fast-changing social scene. Her editorial trademark exuded a Social Text-compatible desire for transgression: she was leading her own cultural revolution against the unwritten laws of fashion propriety.

Cultural revolution was invoked as the one form of political struggle that would shake the foundations of liberal, progressive, and conservative establishmentarianism. A cultural revolution would finally unleash the popular desires to be free from hierarchy, technocracy, expertise, and administered solutions. Maoism, which seemed to offer a way out of the dilemmas posed by existing socialism, provided the orientation here: fight the bureaucrats with endless revolutions. Mao’s thought sanctioned anti-elitist revolt, and for thinkers like Fredric Jameson, political struggles were now to be fought on the cultural field with images, styles, and allusiveness.

Both politics and culture had lost their distinctness: as culture and politics suffused each other, new forms of struggle emerged in unexpected places. The idea of aesthetic autonomy lost intellectual appeal and social prestige, and left thinkers instead elevated ordinary tastes, popular culture, and a critique of all forms of cultural elitism. But this ended up serving conservative and reactionary purposes just as well. Adversaries in the culture wars shared a deep conviction that the sphere of culture could no longer promise any kind of autonomy. Right and Left alike believed that the political potential of liberal thought had been exhausted in the forms of both overweening secularism and hegemonic universalism. In the meantime, culture warriors of all allegiances could not praise the ordinary people enough.

Like many people of my generation, I entered academia as someone hoping for redemption in the world of aesthetic experience made real by robust relationships with people who cared about art and literature as much as I did. On the face of it, this idea of pursuing an aesthetic education through formal education seems naively apolitical at best, and reactionary at worst. But I came of age at a time when the proper use of “free time”—that is, time freed from the constraints of the “market”—was an object of social importance. Also, for those of us whose families benefited from the social mobility of the mid-twentieth century, the pursuit of aesthetic education seemed the natural outcome of a world where want could be banished for the majority of human beings. The exercise of the mind in its pursuit of aesthetic experience combined with sensuous immediacy, while monopolized by a rentier class, could be a site of democratization and political and economic struggle. Here was an institution within which one could glimpse, always in partial and contradictory form, the possibility of autonomy and aesthetic experience. In raging against this institution, the academic populist assault also battered the foundations of my intellectual commitments.

At the end of the twentieth century, one could be a populist in habits of consumption and image only: ordinariness became apotheosized as the space of true innovation and creativity. Within the humanities and in the contested interdisciplinary areas of cultural studies and communications, cultural populism came to represent the ways in which scholars and intellectuals thought of themselves in relation to the world around them. Academic populism allowed for increasingly complex expressions of solidarity with popular hostility against the reign and the “authority” of experts. Its idealization of “extra-academic” experiences of fandom, the body, unreason, subcultures, and the New Age were used as rhetorical weapons against the profession in which academics worked. Academics, demagogues, and campaign managers alike were able to aggravate a popular sense of grievance in the cultural register, even while working against popular interests. The ordinary student, like the average American, found herself flattered and stymied all at the same time. While purloining the emotions of populist rhetoric, American elites, both corporate and academic, tried to harness its awesome power.

Bottom Line Universities

In the past forty years, the theoretical revolution launched by the cultural populists has been taken up and advanced by powerhouse private foundations like Mellon and ACLS, which have tried to make the humanities more relevant and popular, if not great, again. The liberal arts have been rebranded in various, NGO friendly formations. Environmental Humanities absorbed nature writing and made it seem more “relatable”; Medical Humanities tries to present itself as giving voice to stories of healing, articulated as a therapeutic—or at least Medical School-friendly—set of practices and skills. Despite these innovations, the number of students majoring in the humanities has continued to decline. Humanities research desperately embraces close readings of the Marvel Comic Universe, the meaning of Taylor Swift, first-person shooter games, Harry Potter, etc., with nary the clutching of a single pearl, but the pandering has not worked out very well. The humanities find itself outflanked by disciplines where no mastery of canonical or historical material is necessary: psychology, business, computer science, etc.

Today’s aspiring academics, the ones who are lucky enough to get jobs in the academy, hardly see themselves as intellectuals. The word itself is now freighted with a history of non-participation in the hegemonic cultural scripts of the day. Aspiring academics, however, do conflate their academic work with “activism,” with vague social justice-oriented goals and even vaguer means of achieving said goals. People are forced to play representational or advocacy roles for their various social identities in an institution that is increasingly indifferent to academic work and the kinds of culture, tradition, and history that the old Cultural Studies types were so contemptuous of. Tradition, skill, historical and material forms, aesthetics, craftsmanship, inner life as subjectivity, the dialectic itself, debate, and dissent have been flattened into a rebranded humanities and social sciences that attaches itself to cryptoreligious notions of healing and redemption. In disciplines collapsing under the weight of finance capital’s cold indifference, the Professional Managerial Class elites that run private foundations keep coming up with cartoonish banners emblazoned with words like “community” and “empowerment” with which to rally the interests of a smaller and smaller, but more competitive pool of desperate aspirants.

Looking back, it’s clear that the cultural turn merely provided an ideological gloss on fundamental structural changes in academia. Since the 1980s, universities have looked to private equity and real-estate investments in order to fund their operations. The financialization of higher education has reshaped the academic missions of the universities themselves. Instead of supporting the academic and research missions of a school, billionaire donors and money managers increasingly dictate a set of priorities geared toward the monied interests. They have shifted the university’s focus from providing an effective education to increasing profits, prestige and power for themselves. As a result, the institutional structures that academic populists sought to break out of and transgress are in bad shape indeed, but they have been destroyed not by countercultural hedonism and New Agey incantation but by the class war, waged by capitalists to spread the logic of the market to every aspect of human subjectivity, beyond the working day, into the realm of affect, identity and thought.

Capitalism destroyed the canon and its formal continuities all by itself: all that was solid, as promised, melted into air. But the canon, as it turns out, was not the enemy. All our efforts to subvert or decolonize it were strangely consonant with the broader restructuring of the neoliberal university.

It used to be that mastery of a canonical set of works was expected of academics who thought of themselves as members of a guild and a profession. In turn, the professions during the Progressive era, tried to build a bulwark against the forces of the market. Today, our professional organizations are merely interfaces between individuals and markets. Perhaps this complete subsumption of value as market value within the institutions of higher education can lead to the liberation of ideological critique from its professional confines. Class consciousness and ideological critique lead to a respect for history as the history of an epic struggle for mass emancipation; historical materialism makes history meaningful to the present day. As our relationship to the mode of production is clarified (we live on the surplus value generated by the working classes and parsimoniously redistributed to white collar elites), so will our relationship to the aesthetic experience and the achievements of art and artists be clarified as well. We cannot let the study of art and culture be monopolized by increasingly discredited universities and their market-driven, philistine administrators.

Catherine Liu is professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine. She is the author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class and is at work on a book on the end of liberalism and the rise of Trauma Culture.