…Examined in the Work of Catherine Opie and Jeremy Chandler

Working for years in animal sanctuaries and particularly with wolves and dogs has reaffirmed my faith – as if I ever had any doubt – about the exquisite efficiency of evolution and the inherent fairness of zoology. Zoology as an academic research field is of course as subject to factionalized competition and disagreement as is any other institutional department, but recent progress in the association of particular encodings of DNA with concurrent traits in “personality” and appearance provides more and more support for the argument that as many traits of behavior are determined by biochemistry as by influences of external development. Thus the current position held by most visual culture analysts that racial differences amid humans exist purely as a social construct holds is for me a site of both skepticism based upon the seemingly oppositional tenets of science and intense fascination – because I want to believe.

The past few years have reached a zenith in demand for the exploration of “whiteness” by the institutional art community, which has sensationalized the subject of the invisible visible race – or at least certain freakish (thus highly visible) subcultures of whiteness. In this paper I will examine the developing area of the study of whiteness using selected works by photographers Catherine Opie and Jeremy Chandler as objects of analysis to frame the arguments of art historians working around this issue, particularly Amelia Jones, the Pilkington Chair Holder at Manchester University. First, however, I believe it is necessary to establish a context for Jones’s work on “whiteness studies” in its appropriate place in the academic continuum of “other studies.” A conclusion will revisit the contrarian view that the perception of race, while the source hostility culminating in the of the infliction of excruciating human agonies, remains a biological issue as well as a social problem and must be dealt with as such, even by visual culturists, as a scientific issue as well as a representational one.

Basing his psychological practice on the preceding work of Jacques Lacan but his writing, partially, on direct observation and personal interpretation, Frantz Fanon warned in Les Damnés de la Terre (1961) about the long suffering victims and subjects of colonialism awakening and rising, determined to resolve by any means possible the problems for which whites (in the United States as well as Europe) have caused but offered no solution. Fanon was right about the violence in places such as both South Africa (now thoroughly recapitalized) and in the Republic of Congo (where the fallout of colonial collapse is a constant state of civil war). In the landscape of visual culture the person who has most successfully introduced violence to the institution is Kara Walker, who creates black paper silhouettes she derives conceptually from imagined Civil War-era narratives about African American life if the Southern United States. Walker, who has been criticized for promulgating negative stereotypes (by Betye Saar, no less), describes her work “both there and not there.”

One of the problems with the ongoing academic conversations about blackness, whiteness, otherness, and so on is this hesitancy to make direct connections – even in installations designed for “experienced viewers” – between implied and actual physical domination and ownership. At least Fanon advocated the practical as well as the psychosocial. Two relatively recent formative essays on strategies to investigate othering, “The Other Question: The Stereotype And Colonial Discourse” by Homi K. Bhabha and “The Marco Polo Syndrome: Some Problems Around Art and Eurocentrism” by Gerardo Mosquera are endemic to what the authors claim is their greater social purposes, that of increasing awareness of the history of aggressive otherness-projection and expansionism on the parts of North American and Western European cultures and in doing so fomenting a macro solution for the present-day woes of such lingering malaises.

            Mosquera and Bhabha, from superficially different backgrounds, come up with similar approaches in addressing the casting of “the Other.” Bhabha, a Harvard University professor of linguistics who has been cited numerous times by The New York Times “Review of Books” for the incomprehensibility of his own prose, does open the topic that practices of racial alienation come in more than one version, though he suggest that making racism a monolithic evil is ingrained in white academic culture: “Fixity, as the sign of cultural/historical/racial difference in the discourse of colonials, is a paradoxical mode of representation: it connotes rigidity and an unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition. Likewise the stereotype, which is its major discursive strategy, is a form of knowledge and identification.”

            Bhabha cites the condition of ambivalence as a cross-cultural ill, however, defining ambivalence roughly as a passive, ingrained acceptance of racist beliefs as opposed to an active, percolating — and thus consciously considered — hostility. Bhabha does not express much of a sense of autoambivalence either, as he did not feel strongly enough about Great Britain, the colonizer of India, to boycott an education from Oxford University.

Bhabha’s refers directly to his greatest influence, Palestinian scholar and activist Edward Said in expanding upon “Orientalist” theories: “…the unconscious pool of colonial discourse and the unproblematised notion of the subject, restricts the effectives of both power and knowledge … those terrifying stereotypes of savagery, cannibalism, lust and anarchy which are the signal points of identification and alienation, scenes of fear and desire, in colonial texts.”

            Bhabha argues that in order for racial stereotypes be read, they must first be identified using a systemic method of terminology. Bhabha says that the projection of alienating qualities resulting in racism continues through lack (the regular kind of lack, not the Lacanian kind) of examination of deep-seated cultural and subconscious teachings and beliefs: “Stereotyping is not the setting of a false image which become the scapegoat of discriminatory practices. It is a much more ambivalent text of project and interject, metaphoric and metonymic strategies, displacement, overdetermination, guilt, aggressivity, the masking and splitting of official and phantasmatic knowledges to construct the positionalities and oppositioanlities of racist discourses.”

            Gerard Mosquera also addresses the perception of the other, specifically in reference to institutional viewing, in “The Marco Polo Syndrome: Some Problems Around Art and Eurocentrism.” Mosquera, a curator and critic who is one of the founders of the Havana Biennale and now an affiliate of the multi-locationed ArtNexus show, suggests that the white mentality toward conquest, expansion and acquisition is a continuing function of Western perception of the “otherness” of different or remote cultures. Fortunately the public at large is somehow becoming aware of this issue: “Only now has an understanding of cultural pluralism and the usefulness of dialogue begun to spread to such an extent that the intercultural problematic has become a major issue.” (This also augurs that awareness of “whiteness” as an identifiable, discussable topic will soon enter popular culture “issue.”)

            Marco Polo Syndrome is therefore identified holistically by analyzing “how current art in a given country or region satisfies the aesthetic, culture, social and communicative demands of the community from and for which it is made. its response is mostly mixed, relational, appropriative, — anyway, “inauthentic, and therefore more adequate to face today’s reality.”

            Mosquera allows that subjugated populations tend to band together through their common oppression (answering Fanon): “The strategy of the dominated moves toward integration through what unites them.”

 “The contemporary artistic scene is a very centralized system of apartheid,” Mosquera continues, though he concludes: “Intercultural involvement consists not only of accepting the Other in an attempt to understand him or her and to enrich myself with his or her diversity. It also implies that the Other does the same thing with me, problematising my self-awareness. The cure for the Marco Polo Syndrome entails overcoming centrisms with enlightenment from a myriad of different courses.”

So the concept of white privilege is an ingrained aspect of the Euro-American culture, and the cure for its unconscious omniscience is examining its unquestioned sense of entitlement. In the 2003 extended museum catalogue article “The Obscenity of Whiteness” Amelia Jones advocates a reexamination of the practices that construct whiteness as “a site of racial difference.” Jones describes personal experiences from childhood in which she became conscious not just of her race (she is white) but of her projection of whiteness onto nonwhites. Jones believes that the denaturalization of white privilege can be achieved by exposing it as obscene, “remove its familiarity and make it into something strange. In so doing we render it ethnic rather than invisible.” The act of making whiteness visible and ethnic is an assessment of the cycle of socialization, not a method for the mobilization for the redistribution of privileges. Can “disidentification,” the process Jones names for the process of whiteness recognition and rejection (by whites) activate social change when whiteness is the only identity considered? Jones claims that the process of disidentification can “change what it means to have lightly pigmented skin (or whatever else gives us access to whiteness) in today’s world).” Instead perhaps this “theatricalization” presents a new form of exploitation, an exploitation of the emotions associated of belonging to a privileged class within a privileged race.

In the artist statement on his Web site, University of South Florida master of fine arts candidate and professional photographer Jeremy Chandler writes that he explores “communities that exist in isolation and am intrigued with the ways which cultural archetypes can both dissolve and perpetuate within secluded spaces.” Chandler examines rural white subcultures though some of his photographs are carefully staged to capture subjects’ actions in their environments, heightening the (institutional) viewers’ sensitivity to the whiteness that they are traversing. Through these “pregnant pauses” he successfully instills feelings of anxiety and anticipation. His works present themselves as staged documents, representations of whiteness that convinces the viewer to affirm or deny their perception of whiteness or non-whiteness: “Interrogating one’s relationship to whiteness when one benefits from this relationship is an unsettling experience.”

Chandler is not just interested in portraying white people, but the peculiarities of white culture and the environment they operate within. The Mud Bog (2006) series explores aspects of subjectivity that go against the grain of invisible whiteness. While Chandler’s works do not necessarily provoke a sense of white superiority, they produce awareness that there is a certain code to being white that non whites do not know. His portrayal of people as hunters and mud boggers do not suggest any overt message of racial prejudice; instead their isolation from nonwhites stimulates an awareness of a certain discomfort toward the history associated with segregated white culture of the south. The discomfort derives from the expressions of not just of confidence and pride, but of a certain aura of loneliness found in Chandler’s subjects. The Mud Bog and Hunters (2007) series reveal a nascent awareness of the segregated, particular nature of rural expeditions with trucks and guns. Jones compares this instance of realization to Lacan’s mode of subject formation. Just as an infant looking at itself in the mirror recognized himself as separate being from its projection n the mirror, “whiteness as a cultural sign become easily detached from any perceived connection with an individual self.”

With the intent of his photographs being viewed in a museum, classroom, or other institutional setting, Chandler is able to present his subjects as engaging in some “in perverse enactment of whiteness.” The audience may then distance themselves from the whiteness portrayed but they are also made conscious of the exclusivity of their race. The theatricalization of whiteness has become a successful topic in the art world because it presents specific white subcultures with the same strangeness and exoticism found in images portraying minority cultures. In some ways the popularity of such white subject matter relies on the exploitation of people representing the “stranger” aspects of whiteness

Novelist, essayist, critic and poet Dorothy Allison summarizes the sideshow aspect of current modes of “othering” wherein it is acceptable to gawk at citizens of exurbia: “The inescapable impact of being born in a condition of poverty that this society finds shameful, contemptible, and somehow deserved, has had dominion over me to such an extent that I have spent my life trying to overcome or deny it … Class, race, sexuality, gender and all the other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.” Chandler’s photographs make this task difficult because his subjects “are/are not” otherized. Catherine Opie, an established American photographer from Sandusky, Ohio, who has long worked in the realm of marginalized populations; her recent body of work does address whiteness in direct and oppositional portraiture.

Opie’s recent photographic series of teenaged American football players examines white male identity (when the audience of viewers consists of those accustomed to analyzing images in a museum or academic setting; otherwise, they are just photographs of high-school athletes). In the image Dusty (2007), an adolescent with a flushed face and protruding arm veins wearing a Notre Dame jersey presents a decidely downscale image of aspiration except when compared with Marqeil (2007), from the same series. Viewed in comparison to Marqeil, Dusty presents the stoic façade of heroism, athleticism, sexuality suppressed in service to colonial expansionism. Marqeil on the other hand – frowning, posturing, with his boxer shorts peaking up from his drab field pants, is cast in the role of primitive, natural athlete, and hoodlum. Though at a glance Marqeil and Dusty are similar portraits – taken at midrange, outdoors, Opie gives them starkly encoded aesthetic differences. The shift in tenebrism between from Dusty to Marqeil gives the latter a less-than-elite veneer; it seems a mere snapshot in comparison to Dusty, which bears some of Opie’s trademark highly saturated coloration. Dusty’s dark background provides a contrast to the paleness of his skin, whereas Marqeil has a lighter setting that makes his skin look darker, thus emphasizing the adolescents’ “phenotypes” of difference. Opie forces the white viewer to acknowledge with the obvious assumption that Marqeil is at a disadvantage. While variance in expectations of the ideal is apparent between each Dusty and Marqeil, their intersectionality and commonality is also visible in their youthful masculinity. Opie fulfills Jones’s wish for disidentification nonetheless by creating a theatrical space most – institutionalized or not – can relate to, that of the football field as stage.

            The world of visual culture seems content to have “whiteness” emerge and thrive as the “identity art” of the early 21^st Century, perhaps becoming a going genre concern along the lines of abstract expressionism, which still has fits and starts of resurgencies of interest. The insistence upon have race “acted out” as a theatrical spectacle will ensure longevity of investigation. This seems to place the art world outside the realm of the progressive since differences in race are obviously a literal reality, not a conceit for the guilt-stricken or well-meaning.

            When we view ourselves in the mirror we are looking at our reflection, not the way others view us in real life. We assume that how we look in the in the mirror is the way others see us. But in reality others can only see what we ourselves see in the mirror if they look into the mirror with us. An effective work on the subject of whiteness must make the point that a white person can recede into privilege, and just not worry about racism, by choice. Nonwhites cannot.

 References

Bhabha, Homi. 2005. Adagio. Critical Inquiry 31, (2) (Winter): 371-80.

Bhabha, Homi, and Noam Chomsky. 2005. Homi bhabha talks with noam chomsky. Critical Inquiry 31, (2) (Winter): 419-24.

Blouch, Christine, and Laurie Vickroy. 2004. Critical essays on the works of american author dorothy allison. Studies in american literature (lewiston, N.Y.) ; v. 71. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press.

Butterfield, Bradley. 1999. Ethical value and negative aesthetics: Reconsidering the baudrillard-ballard connection. PMLA 114, (1, Special Topic: Ethics and Literary Study) (Jan.): 64-77.

COTTER, HOLLAND. 2008. A retrospective of many artists, all of them one woman. New-York [N.Y.: H.J. Raymond Co.].

Evans, Jessica, Stuart Hall, Stuart Hall, and Open University. 1999. Visual culture : The reader. London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications in association with The Open University.

Gates, Henry Louis,Jr. 1991. Critical fanonism. Critical Inquiry 17, (3) (Spring): 457-70.

Greifner, Laura. 2006. ‘Integrated’ schooling fosters common ground. Education Week 25, (24).

Heartney, Eleanor. 2007. The long shadows of slavery: Since the mid-1990s, kara walker has been crafting willfully transgressive cut-paper murals of life in the antebellum south. A traveling survey that arrives at the whitney this month examines the full range of walker’s art.(whitney museum). Vol. 95.

Jones, Amelia. 1995. ‘Clothes make the man’: The male artist as a performative function. Oxford Art Journal 18, (2): 18-32.

Kocur, Zoya, and Simon Leung. 2005. Theory in contemporary art since 1985. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.

Krach, Aaron. 2008. AMERICAN LESBIAN. The Advocate(1020).

Morris, Christine Ballengee. 1998. Cultural ecology: Arts of the mountain culture. Art Education 51, (3, Community, Art and Culture) (May): 14-9.

Nei, Masatohshi and Roychoudhury, A.K.. 1974. “Genic Variation Within and Between the Three Major Races of Man: Causacoids, Negroids, and Mongoloids,” The American Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 26, No. 4. (July) (421-443)

Newitz, Annalee, and Matt Wray. 1997. White trash : Race and class in america. New York ; London: Routledge.

Plagens, Peter. 2008. From fame to tame. Newsweek (U.S. Ed.) 152, (13).

Stallings, Tyler, Ken Gonzales-Day, Amelia Jones, David R. Roediger, Laguna Art Museum (Laguna Beach,Calif.), and Fellows of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles,Calif.). 2003. Whiteness, a wayward construction. Laguna Beach, Calif.; Los Angeles: Laguna Art Museum ; Fellows of Contemporary Art.

Caesarea Mushroom

This post is concerned with “Out of the Closet and into the Universe: Queers and Star Trek” by Henry Jenkins. Even though this piece is nominally about homosexuality vis a vis popular culture, the writer’s unifying field is not an idea, however, but an emotion, the unmoored nostalgia for an unrealized past that manifests as an incurable yearning projected upon the present and future.

Jenkins article, reprinted in 2004 without updates that would have allowed for the recognition of another Star Trek spin-off television series, Deep Space Nine, which provided a deeper consideration of gendering and alterity subjects, discusses a sort of popularly-based movement fomented by fans of the sequel to the original Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, to have an “openly” gay character join the multicultural, multispecies Enterprise crew. Further wishes included incidental portrayals of gay behavior, such as ambient, non-storyline driven asides to shots of men kissing and so on. There is certainly a genuine sweetness to the Trekkie fandom community amid the fanaticism attendant to the science fiction/fantasy core crowd.

By focusing on the Galaxyian “protest movement” and their dialogues with one another and with various representatives of the estate of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenbery, Jenkins’s view with regard to the representation of queerness within science fiction televisions programs in particular and on television – particularly assessing programs in regard to aesthetic value – in general is quite limited. In fact gay characters have flourished on television, even prior to the broadcast of the original Star Trek in the late 1960s. Star Trek was predated by a few years by Lost In Space, a campy, Cold War saga many notches below Trek in execution and sociological ambition but possessed nonetheless of one of the most memorable presences or any sexual orientation, Dr. Zachary Smith, played splendidly by Jonathan Harris.

Harris channeled Peter Lorre from M and Casablanca to portray Dr. Smith as an effete villain: a Russian spy, possible pedophile, and general whiner and meddler whose inability to adjust robotic mechanisms in a manly way provides the MacGuffin that drove the short-lived series. Jenkins does address other contemporaneous science fiction/fantasy totems such as Marion Zimmer Bradley’s reimagining of the King Arthur stories (Lancelot’s gayness – he thus rejects Morgan le Fay’s advances – is the cause of much mayhem), so it seems strange Dr. Smith would be omitted from consideration of foundational gay sci fi television presences existing around the time of Star Trek version one. How did viewers of Lost In Space know Dr. Smith was gay, when there was ostensibly no one – he mostly fraternized with teenaged Will Smith and Robot – to be gay with? The just did, intuiting extremely caricatured signs, which, upon review do not necessarily contribute to Dr. Smith’s continued treacherousness and laziness. Thus Dr. Smith is a somewhat prescient gay construction; he was averse to work and prone to accepting bribes not because he was gay, but because he was a jerk.

Dr. Smith is also a useful touchstone in considering Jenkins’s limiting treatment of ST: TNG’s Tasha Yar character. In discussing the interaction of the android, Data, with Yar, Jenkins and panelists concur that Data’s onetime sexual liaison with Yar “straightens” the asexual robot (whom Roddenberry had nonetheless conceived and described as the most variably “human” of the Enterprise crew). This incident seemingly confirms Yar as a heterosexual as well; there is no dithering once one has had sex with an android apparently, though the Galaxyian activists express a wish in the article for Captain Jean Luc Picard to engage in shore leave bisexualism. It seems Jenkins and panel have performed the crime most fatal to gaining the upper hand in any fanboy battle over sci-fi minutiae: failing to commit to memory every single plot and line of dialogue from every single episode of the television show, book, or film being fought over.
In fact the Yar character frequently mentioned questions and doubts about her perceived and “performed” identity (as the ship’s security chief) as well as her troubled but non-explicitly described romantic past to the Enterprise’s empathic counselor, Deana Troi (Marina Sirtis). Like Dr. Smith, it was simply understood amid Star Trek: The Next Generation viewers that the Yar character was a lesbian, one who exercised the option to concentrate on her Starfleet career officer aspirations to the exclusion of any firm relational attachments. (In fact Denise Crosby, the actor who played Yar, has clearly acknowledged that her understanding and performance of Yar as “gay” was based upon direction from ST: TNG writers in two documentary films about the series.)

Considering the era of Star Trek: The Next Generation (the mid-1990s) affords observation of many more gay television characters in programs of far lower quality and general staying power (in terms of re-view-ability – as screening any “Michael Boatman” episode of Spin City demonstrates). The NBC situation comedy Will & Grace, broadcast in years overlapping Next Generation, was explicitly about two gay men with respective heterosexual women roommates/sidekicks yet Will & Grace exhibited a slick aesthetic – the characters fretted over Jennifer Lopez issues and nouvelle cuisine over a laugh track – eschewing the forays into more topical subject matter made by the Star Trek franchises.

Interestingly, Jenkins makes no allowance for or reference to the show most closely related in duration, temporality, agenda, and fan devotion/interference level to Star Trek: The Next Generation: Xena, Warrior Princess. The titular character of the latter, and other series favorites including Gabrielle and Callisto, appear, as did Tasha Yar, as more or less fully-realized adult women, so the development of their sexual identities is presented as de facto. Xena features a somewhat asexual character in comparison with Data (Joxer), who, like Data, provides occasional moments of nearly slapstick humor in contrast to the series’ generally serious investigation of personal and historical problems. Again, while Xena is clearly meant to be read – and is – as a gay woman (who sometimes is distracted by men) her personal life, particularly her attachment/attraction to Gabrielle, takes a secondary role to what is after all the important mission of defeating evil and saving the Earth.

The sequel to Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, began airing concurrently with Next Generation, so it is interesting Jenkins does not undertake an evaluation of the “progress” made by the subsequent series in the furthering of the Galaxyian agenda. Deep Space Nine, which is situated in the static environment of a satellite inhabited by various species of “aliens” and humans, thus liberated from spaceship vagaries such as meteor collisions and nebulae, derives almost its entire story line from the conflicts generated between interplanetary populations by their constructions of alterity and frequently addresses colonial politics, prejudice, land and resource aggression, and gender subjugation. As the Galaxyians had wished, women and men hold hands and kiss randomly on the space station, and a main character, Odo (played career-definingly by Rene Auberjonois) is able to alter his form to experience life and love as an affiliate of both maleness and femaleness, homosexuality and heterosexuality.

Tasha Yar’s character is echoed in the presently-airing eschatology-minded Sci-Fi Channel series (another reimagining of an heirloom program) Battlestar Galactica. The commander of the Pegasus, Admiral Helena Cain (played by Michelle Forbes, who was briefly a Vulcan on TS: TNG) is a neoconservative lesbian who may also be the twelfth Cylon (and thus a sort of deified presence). Cain directly references Yar when she discusses her formative years as a security officer.

Reference

Henry Jenkins, “Out of the Closet and into the Universe: Queers and Star Trek” in Queer Cinema: The Film Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004).

“Enraged by Tea,” one of my all-time photophone favorites, from 2005.

The three essays discussed in this response paper relate to contemporary concepts around the analysis of visual culture through the interpretation of the philosophies of history, commodification, and language as refracted by The Man’s capitalistic hijacking of the involuntary human practice of looking.

While Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels use the terminology typically associated with the social proposals of communism including the expected references to the “proletariat” and the “bourgeois,” these selections from German Ideology constitute less a political manifesto than an intellectual proposal for the active reconfiguring of the recording and interpretation of history. Marx and Engels (and, for the consideration of these works, Barthes) are not particularly known for easily comprehensible prose styles. German Ideology capitalizes, so to speak, on the even more opaque writing of the greatest German ideologue of the time, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Marx and Engels propose that while there is some fundamental correctness to the Hegelian principle of the dialectic – ascertaining an absolute truth through logical dissection and argument – historians and philosophers following Hegel had simply got everything wrong. Rather than intangible evolved yearnings for “immanence” and “transcendence,” humanity is a material manifestation controlled by economics. This definition of “historical materialism” is preceded by “dialectic materialism,” which establishes both the sole existence of the physical (as opposed to ephemeral) world, and, more significantly in connection to visual culture studies, the establishment of the thesis/antithesis paradigm which eventually becomes known as “binary opposition.” (Marx – more Marx than Engels – also takes exception to other “Hegel deconstruction” scholars such as Ludwig Feuerbach and Max Stirner). In a certain titular and textual respect, these selections undercut some of the assumptions endemic to the concepts of alterity politics and false constructions of Otherness raised during the heights of Post-Modernism simply by presuming that such a thing as an ideology based not upon colonial dynamics or Western European cultural dominance but on the national identity of Germans.

For the purposes of this paper Roland Barthes most logically follows Marx and Engels both for his preoccupation with the false perceptions of the bourgeois (those perceptions held by the bourgeois, that is) and with the creation of a specific terminology from which to investigate social norms from a Marxist framework. Working through the middle decades of the 20th Century, Barthes is also similarly interested in opposites, or binaries (the writer and the reader, for example), and focuses most intently upon language as the reductive vector through which all communication is reduced to “secondary signification.”

“Myth Today” contains the graphical representation of the semiotic formula containing the signified, the signifier, and the sign, as well as a tier for the adjacent process of “secondary signification.” As with the case of his contemporary, Jacques Derrida, it is difficult to distill Barthes’s contributions to deconstructionism down to a single or even a few sentences, and “Myth Today,” with its insistent use of the first person and numerous parenthetical irrelevancies is not one of Barthes’s more impenetrable texts. However, somewhat comically, this essay remains popular within academics because of its use of simple illustrations. The loaded image of the saluting boy soldier on the cover of Paris Match allows for a relatively uncomplicated parsing of its ramifications with respect to “reading” race and international relations.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer share a byline on “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” though the rhythmic immediacy of the prose is uniquely Adorno’s. Adorno was a musicologist who dabbled in writing straightforward popular culture criticism and his penchant for declarative clarity and endlessly repeated aphorisms (“The fully enlightened Earth…” and so on) make all the more troubling the fact that the masses he wishes to connect with just do not get his weltanschauung and become more absorbed into the insatiable Matrix of The Man with each episode of The Hills. Subsequent essays by Guy Debord, Marina LaPalma, and even Régis Debray on approximately the same subject homage Adorno through the decades by restating the basic premise of the Frankfurt School, though Horkheimer and Adorno were quite proficient at repetition themselves.
“The Culture Industry…” contains some remarkably prescient observations with extraordinarily contemporary readings, particularly: “The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows,” and “A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself.” Horkheimer and Adorno essentially make the case that mass culture is a much a tool of social subjugation, propagated by The Man, as Marx claimed religion to be (though that somewhat rash and hyperbolic reading of Marx’s famous statement is often decontextualized).

Somewhat de-emphasized in this essay but notable as it is later seized and expounded upon and then refuted by Barthes is the diminution of the individual in the reception of “what the culture manufacturers offer…” “The Culture Industry” also has predictive value with respect to “The Bubba Factor,” arguing that the “stereotyped appropriation of everything,” coaxing reflexively self-congratulatory recognition responses to the infliction of “the arts” even as leisure begins to more and more closely resemble work and “amusement” is “intellectualized.”

Horkheimer and Adorno seem to make a little Walter Benjamin joke about “Jewish intellectuals” though undoubtedly (as his emerging correspondence reveals) the latter’s remaining work and sense of purposed right up to Negative Dialektik suffered from Benjamin’s loss.

Peak Libraries: Developing Sensitivity to Future Consequences

Insensitivity to future consequences is an identified behavioral aberration experienced by people who have experienced traumatic brain injuries to the cerebral cortex (Franck, 1995). Though perplexing and disruptive, at least there is some explanation for the actions of those who suffer this affliction. There is no such biological explanation for the shortsighted and damaging behaviors affected by those responsible for the stewardship of public library and museum programs, particularly in Florida. Florida’s plight, which is duplicated in states and municipalities nationwide, presents a particularly tragic case as the consequences of defunding important cultural and social programs may easily be foreseen.
Parallels may be drawn between the “gas crisis” and the “library crisis.” For more than twenty years, since the administration of President Ronald Reagan, patrons and employees of museums and libraries have dealt with increased funding shortfalls and budget and staff cuts in pretty much the same way as the general population has dealt with the current petroleum crisis: by complaining, and doing nothing else. Until recently, drivers griped about gouging at the gas pump and kept buying Hummers. Librarians and museum curators long bemoaned the crumbling cultural infrastructure (Klein, 2007). Through 2006 and 2007 commuters continued to drive exactly as much as always, and since 1984, library administrators have also continued, with respect to the lack of public funding for collections and facilities, to commiserate with colleagues and at library conferences, and perhaps most damagingly, to continue to rely on the personal integrity and client focus of library staffers to maintain the high level of productivity and professionalism associated with librarianship.

With gasoline, the question the past few years has been: How expensive would gas have to get before it actually began to affect driving habits? Would two dollars per gallon be the point at which motorists said, “Enough is enough, I am going to drive less!”? No. Two dollars came and went and the only thing that changed was the amount of complaining, which went up. Three dollars a gallon, then? No. Demand for gasoline did not go down. Four dollars?!
Finally, four dollars was the tipping point at which gas prices created a degree of public outrage concerted enough to actually cause action: Driving is down, mass transit use up, peak oil is acknowledged, politicians agree that maybe it would be a good idea after all to drill in the Gulf of Mexico off Florida’s coast.
Yet what will be the moment of combustion when it comes to the dismantling of our public, school, academic, and museum libraries? In January 2003, then-Florida Governor Jeb Bush proposed the closing of the Florida State Library and laying off its fifty-plus employees, a petty retributive gesture against retiring library administrator Barratt Wilkins’s disagreement with many Bush policies. Librarians at the Tampa Bay Library Consortium (and support staff also) have been laid off in 2008 even as more systems rely on connected services and collections. Public librarians have been laid off throughout the state of Florida. As the University of South Florida prepares for the reaccredidation process for the School of Library and Information Sciences, course offerings are diminished and the prestigious graduate assistant program is able to accept fewer qualified candidates. However no one would know this from the silence of librarians and library students on email list serves, blogs, and in the conventional news media. What will it take for these capable communicators to make their voices heard and rise to action?
Having introduced a comparative scenario and a few examples of a critical issue facing libraries and indeed cultural history, I will review just a few possible actions – some cannot really be called agreeable solutions – to the problem faced by libraries, which amounts to major economic problems exacerbated by fear, denial, and resistance to cooperative collaborations.

Avoiding Corporate Sponsorships

At first recollection, one of the most successful alliances in American library history was 2001’s “@ The Library” campaign, a sponsorship arranged by the American Library Association and underwritten by Major League Baseball (ALA News, 2001). Though MLB still claims on its promotional literature to be a “major sponsor of the Campaign for Literacy,” in fact no significant joint activities between ALA and MLB have taken place since 2004. MLB gets the good public relations while ALA’s public division gets nothing and its administrators say nothing publicly about an industry in which a single player’s annual salary could fund a small system for several years.
There is actually a case history of how, and why, corporate sponsorships of public agencies are not necessarily symbiotic relationships as they present practical as well as ethical problems. Beginning in 1995, Archer Daniels Midland, the agribusiness megacorporation, began funding programs on both National Public Radio and through the Public Broadcasting Systems, most notably NPR’s All Things Considered and PBS’s acclaimed News Hour With Jim Lehrer (Solomon, 1998). ADM provided as much as $24 million a year for News Hours’s production. In spring of 2008, ADM announced that, as a result of (among other things) Lehrer’s unfavorable reportage on ADM’s factory farm, genetic patenting, and general business practices, it would terminate its fourteen-year tradition of underwriting the show. Owing to its reliance on this corporate stipend, News Hour is now in great peril of cancellation (Anonymous, 2008).
Public libraries and museums are supposed to be open repositories of openly available information, some of which invariably offends some people, and the ethical ramifications of accepting funding from corporations is obvious, and will not be discussed at length here, but seriously, who could trust a library whose collection was underwritten by Monsanto, Halliburton, or Philip Morris?
One suggestion is that libraries and museums actively court not corporations but individuals who have done very well indeed owing to the exposure they have received, and credibility they have attained, by having their work displayed in and promoted by cultural institutions (Brewster, 2008). Instead of selling honorary T-shirts fêting the Whitney Biennial through the Gap, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Marilyn Mintner, Chuck Close, and Kenny Scharf could kick a few million apiece to museums less wealthy than the Whitney. Same for the fantastically rich authors whose work is on constant reserve in every public library in the country – John Grisham, Danielle Steele, Jodi Picoult, and others who don’t receive the acclaim of Umberto Eco or Annie Proulx but who achieve popular fortune largely through libraries (Rogers, 2004) (Malanga, 2004).
Most libraries are slaves to Microsoft and costly database subscriptions, paying a large portion of annual budgets for licensing and having to spend more, year after year, for patches, upgrades, and more Windows software (and now, in Florida, with the emerging uniformity of Polaris) for servers.
What about open source software? Linux has been free (free of charge and free of all known viruses) for years, is easily comprehensible, and enjoys a large and supportive community of freeware enthusiasts (Stratigos, 2003). A library could pay one person a good salary to run an open source IT systems for hundreds of thousands of dollars less, per year, than by continuing to participate in corporate software perpetuation.

The Eschatology Position

There is something else library and museum administrators and staffers can do in the face of the extraordinary rendition of cultural resources in the service of bank bailouts and funding Blackwater: nothing (Foucault, 1997). Not in the same way the members of this profession now do nothing in the way of solidarity actions (or calls to action), but simply by refusing to continue in this manner. If elected and appointed officials as well as voters place zero value on public funding for libraries and museums, then that is the service that will be rendered: zero.
This scenario has played out in other cultural and artistic arenas. Faced with lack of public support and unwilling to kowtow to corporate sponsor demands for endless programs of “popular” fare, in the past ten years, symphonies and orchestras in Fort Lauderdale, Tulsa, Savannah, Colorado Springs, San Jose, and Toledo have simply shut down (Anonymous, 2008). In the past five years, the Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, Indiana; the Dolls’ House and Toy Museum and the Mary Merritt Doll Museum in Washington, D.C.; and the Terra Museum of American Art in Chicago have all become extinct. Tellingly, Thomas McCormick an art dealer quoted in The New York Times regarding the Terra said, “We’re all more or less guilty for not supporting it … but by next week, will anybody really notice that it’s gone?”

Conclusion

Of course people notice when a library or museum closes, or for that matter when looting and war destroy such an institution. Now there is a public outcry over the destruction and looting of the Iraq national library and museums, just as the world grieves over the destruction of the Bamiyan Valley Buddha statues. Yet each library or museum threatened or imperiled by disaster capitalism is its own unique tragedy. Every lost collection, vestige of visual culture, and shuttered repository is a tragedy not just of the present incalculably to the future.
Certainly organizations such as UNESCO and the Institute of Museum and Library Services – which I realize were to have been the lynchpins of this paper – have performed critical interventions and created dialogues that benefit that patrons and staffers of libraries and museums. Their presence (particularly that of UNESCO in Afghanistan) and voice is creating advocacy for and diminishing the threat to cultural treasures all over the world, no doubt.
However I am as troubled by the death by a thousand budget cuts being suffered, especially locally, by library and museum programs as by some of the more notable international outrages of war and colonialism. As students and librarians-to-be we have learned that being agreeably quiet does not save programs or jobs, so this should remove the “but I’ll get in trouble” obstacle to becoming activated and mobilized. I am not certain that any level of action can, at this time, turn our culture around, but I hope librarians will be noted in histories as people who spoke up, acted out, and behaved to the last second as if the future depended upon them.

References

ALA NEWS. (2001). American Libraries, 32(7), 6.
Bernstein, D. (2004). A museum in chicago is closing its doors. New York Times (Late Edition (east Coast)), p. B.7. Retrieved July 10, 2008, from New York Times database. (Document ID: 726578841).
Brewster, D. (2008). Contemporary art defies doomsayers.(WORLD NEWS). Financial Times, , 6.
Eakle, A. J. (2008). Museum literacies of a second-grade classroom: A classroom museum was conceptualized, designed, and built by this class, leading to unique understandings of literacy skills. The Reading Teacher, 61(8), 604.
Foucault, M., Faubion, J. D., Hurley, R., & Rabinow, P. (1997-). The essential works of michel foucault, 1954-1984. New York: New Press.
Gleadell, C. (2008). Holding steady. Art Monthly, (313), 43.
Klein, N. (2007). The shock doctrine : The rise of disaster capitalism (1st ed.). New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt.
Malanga, M. L. (2004). Carnegie redux. Library Journal, 129(14), 52.
‘Marketplace’ report: Newshour to die?(12:00-1:00 PM)(broadcast transcript)(audio file).(2008). Day to Day,, NA.
Oder, N. (2006). New IMLS collaborative grants. Library Journal, 131(17), 20.
Rogers, M. (2004). Hostile takeover? Library Journal, 129(14), 52.
Solomon, N. (1998). Made possible by…: The death of public broadcasting in the united states. The Progressive, , 40.
Stratigos, A. (2003). Library of the future. Online, 27(1), 74.

The culture war: It’s back!

“Democrats may have thought that the disastrous Bush years killed the GOP’s favorite tactic. The Palin effect shows they were wrong.”

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“I’m really shocked that the city has made the decision to close the library on Friday and Saturdays,” resident June Connell said of the city’s proposal to close the Countryside Library on Fridays and Saturdays to save money. – From The St. Petersburg Times September 5, 2008, edition.

Hey city of Clearwater residents, particularly those who voted for Amendment 1! Here’s what the closings of the Clearwater library branches are paying for: For the sprinkler system to be turned on while four city workers lay chalk lines and even up the turf at the Drew Street sports complex, commencing at 6:00 a.m. weekdays.

Mexican red wolf, courtesy U.S. Department of the Interior

Following, Christopher Nolan, (1998) ••••; Haven, Frank E. Flowers, (2004) ••••; Love Liza, Gordy Hoffman, (2002) •••••; Armistead Maupin’s Further Tales of the City, Pierre Gang, (2001) ••; Disturbia, D.J. Caruso, (2007) •••; The Last Emperor, Bernardo Bertolucci, (1987) ••••