My response this week is fueled less by the readings this week and more by the arguments in my head that were provoked by last week’s articles. Last week’s readings frustrated me. I believe there is an overemphasis in cultural criticism and discussion as a whole, on the constraints individuals experience in their lives and in their ability to interpret cultural productions for themselves, especially for those in lower socio-economic positions or in minority ethnic groups. There are constraints upon people’s lives and creative expression to be sure. But such an overemphasis obscures the academic’s own interactions with the culture, whether that be as an individual within the culture or as an outside observer of the culture.
This also reinforces a very top-down understanding of how culture works, with producers at the top of the hierarchy and the audience at the bottom. What this forgets is that the producers are also part of the culture, individuals who grew up within a particular culture, influenced by the products of that culture. It seems very reductionist to me to believe that the only impulse behind mainstream cultural productions (such as film and popular music) is financial. Yes, companies must make money, but the producers’ experiences of their culture as participants in it influence what they believe will or will not make money. Those who produce are not without constraints either, be those constraints of the market or of background, moral beliefs, and personal identities.
As Parades pointed out about anthropologists, I believe that academics forget to interrogate their own subject positions. Additionally, I believe we forget that we are also part of the whole of culture and society that we study and discuss. We have prejudices that have been ingrained into our understanding of the world, not only in terms of our cultural backgrounds, but also in terms of an educational system that privileges certain knowledges over others and certain people over others.
In his discussion of authenticity, Lindholm quotes a passage from Judith Shklar that I feel is relevant to these issues that I find so thorny and difficult to articulate:
If men accept themselves as the sum of their roles, it is said, then that they are doomed to inequality. Only if we assume that there is a self, apart from all social definition, which is capable of morality and therefore deserves respect, can we justify the claims of equality on which not only social justice but liberty itself depends (qtd in Lindholm 6).
If we accept individuals, especially those we are studying, as the sum of their constraints, then have we not doomed them to inequality? We have certainly determined how we are going to view their cultural productions, as lacking due to what they did not have access to, culturally, socially, economically, and in myriad other manners that could be listed. It seems that we are wrapped up in this constant discussion of what people lack rather than acknowledging and investigating the agency that they can and do exert in their own lives. It would be far more productive to contemplate how an artist interacted with the constraints of his or her background than a constant emphasis on how that artist was constrained. Yes, we are all constrained in some manner or another. What does that mean for our cultural productions or our understandings of the productions of the culture we live in? How do those constraints affect how we view our own work and how others with other constraints view our work? How do these constraints affect how we view and interact with our own cultures and the cultures of others? Most importantly, I believe we must acknowledge that people are aware of the constraints upon their lives.
Thank you for “listening” to the argument from my head. :)
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