Friday links! Critical theory vs. everything edition

Jacques Derrida, who is always like, "Why aren't you reading a book?"

Jacques Derrida, who is always like, “Why aren’t you reading a book?”

Welcome to another privileged discourse from the “author” of Combat! blog, where I exploit my socioeconomic advantage as a website owner to perform the act of “free” speech. As a cis white male, I hope you’ll find my opinions reflective of larger power structures. Obviously, writing them down and publishing them on the internet is indefensible. Any Marxist, post-colonialist, or even close reading troubles the notion of auhtor(ial)ity, until the very act of producing a work for public consumption becomes an immoral expression of solipsism. Today is Friday, and critical theory condemns that. Won’t you seize the high ground with me?

The good news is that the internet is ready to admit it has a problem with having problems with everything. After watching the viral sitcom parody “Too Many Cooks,” Drew Magary read this series of tweets by one Rusty Foster and went yard:

All right, I figured out what bugs me about Too Many Cooks. It’s clever and funny but something seemed kinda rotten about it. The 70s/80s sitcom was a deeply conservative form that used The American Family to reinforce broadly acceptable norms & stereotypes for a culture which was largely founded on murder and greed everywhere but in the wood-paneled American Living Room. So what Too Many Cooks does is make the implicit explicit, which feels more than anything like explaining a joke. Hence, clever but ugh.

First of all, not fucking hence clever but ugh, Rusty Foster. That doesn’t follow at all. Second, and more importantly, Foster’s analysis exemplifies the form of pop critical theory, which starts with deconstruction and ends in disdain, appealing to pious conceits along the way. It’s possible that American culture is not “largely founded on murder and greed,” but who would disagree in this context? Thus does criticism seize the moral high ground by reading guilt into the text.

For example: the problem with that street harassment video that went viral a few weeks ago? Not enough of the men shown catcalling are white. That’s Hanna Rosin’s argument utterly craven snatch at coattails on Slate’s XXfactor. Why didn’t that short, immensely successful video drawing attention to how men treat women also address racism? Come to think of it, why does Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech not mention how women are depicted in advertisements? Once again, Dr. King’s male privilege blinds him to an issue that affected over half of the black population. In conclusion, Martin Luther King was morally flawed, and I am good for pointing it out.

It works better when you do it to a TV show instead of a person,1 or, better yet, an advertisement for a TV show. No one feels sympathy for an advertisement. It is the sawdust dummy around which the rapier flashes, as in the New Inquiry’s critical analysis of ads for Showtime’s Homelandtitled The White Women of Empire. If that seems like too high dudgeon for a review of a commercial, don’t read the first sentence:

In imperialist fantasies, the most famous role of white women is the damsel in distress, the pure and purifying object of sexual desire menaced by the unclean, violent, sexualized colonial subject: Faye Wray in the grips of King Kong.

By “imperialist fantasies,” we mean billboards advertising cable shows. The beauty of pop critical theory is that it simultaneously elevates its subject intellectually—by making it the object of deconstruction and, in this case, post-colonial theory—and denigrates it morally. A trashy soap opera people love becomes a colonial power fantasy propagated by white cultural hegemony. By demonstrating that it is aware of these problems, The New Inquiry suggests that it is not complicit in them.

Of course, some images in popular culture really do reflect historic injustices that we should actively refute. Take that Paper magazine cover featuring the grotesque Kim Kardashian, which is the work of French photographer Jean-Paul Goude. Goude based it on another, racially problematic photo of his called Carolina Beaumont. Now that is an othering white gaze, right there. I’m not sure it means that “Kim Kardashian’s Paper cover has a race problem that no one’s talking about,” though, since Kardashian is not black. She is a Kardashian.

But it is not a white man’s job to say who is black. That’s what we call a historical error, and I’m correcting it right now. Paper should be ashamed of itself for exoticizing a potentially black woman, and I can’t believe no one is talking about it. We both know that’s wrong. Read my blog more, and maybe give me some money.

Monster props to Young Jodi for the link.

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3 Comments

  1. actually, the problem with too many cooks is that it’s a 15 minute long rozerem commercial. rozerem fucking sucks. if you smoke a joint before its half-life is over, you experience THE WORST delirium.

  2. If I got more posts on this subject I would give you some more money. You are doing well to identify the dishonesty in these links. Kudos.

  3. Although the observation “the form of pop critical theory, which starts with deconstruction and ends in disdain” holds true for the execution of these ‘analyses’, I think the opposite is true of their genesis.

    All of these (and far too many other) examples smack of someone encountering media and asking “why isn’t this ok” – disdain before deconstruction.

    The most useful (and fun!) results of the various tools of critical theory come from maintaining their interrogative aspects for a long period of time with everything you encounter. Funny little things pop out. Whipping out your post-colonial handbook midway through a show you’re guilt-watching is lazy, and shit, and lazy again.

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