World Affairs
The highway of despair. Oprah Winfrey and J K Rowling are the villains; Radiohead are the cultural revolutionaries. The latest howl of rage against capitalist culture and American mediocrity exemplifies the sentimental, self-indulgent non-thinking it sets out to attack
Published 23 February 2004
The Middle Mind: why Americans don't think for themselves
Curtis White Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 205pp, £12.99
ISBN 071399763X
In Don DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis, a super-rich currency trader encounters a violent anti-capitalist riot, but is unfazed: "There was a shadow of transaction between the demonstrators and the state. The protest was a form of systemic hygiene, purging and lubricating . . ." Curtis White's book, a howl of rage against capitalist culture, is just such a make-believe act of insurrection, the transaction in this instance being with HarperCollins, which published it in America. I don't suppose Rupert Murdoch personally approved The Middle Mind, though if not he should have done so, in the knowledge that it is entirely innocuous, and the hope that it might prove the cultural companion-piece to the bestselling Michael Moore.
A veteran of 1960s San Francisco, White shows his age in affectedly buddy-buddy, torn-jeans prose ("C'mon, let's think together"; "Bet your ass") and sophomore-pleasing gush about his absolutely all-time favourite films and pop groups. Yet with the exception of Derrida, whose inconsequential, drifting style he echoes, his is often a healthy set of heroes and villains. Theodor Adorno and Wallace Stevens are in the first category, J K Rowling, Oprah Winfrey and cultural studies - which he rails at for putting politics above aesthetics - in the second. As a critic he is most forceful when he is letting his conservative hair down. "What the Middle Mind does best is flatten distinctions. It turns culture into mush." So also said Alexis de Tocqueville and Matthew Arnold. Sometimes White comes across as a cranky Romantic, fulminating against scientism (he is amusing on "technophilia's Adolescent Abyss") and grouching about a faulty ink-jet cartridge. Occasionally you suspect that at heart he is an old-fashioned cultural declinist got up in revolutionary drag. The result is a forced, Marxoidal tone: American TV is not just a disaster, but "a pre-emptive effort to saturate the field in which the imagination might do its work".
Like many of a culturally conservative bent, his main problem is democracy. By "middle mind" he means in effect mediocrity, but he cannot say so too loudly without getting into the nature of mass man, a taboo concept. So he goes flat out for the corporate cultural interests, which is fair enough (though without mentioning Murdoch, which is dishonest). The trouble is that lambasting the prevailing culture while ignoring the public is like deploring the whore and turning a blind eye to her customer. To cover himself, White insists - again reasonably enough - that popular culture "has gotten smarter and more technically adroit" - though only on "its progressive margins". But the majority cannot be on the margin. So it is that consumers, transmogrified into a progressive minority, escape censure for cultural kerb-crawling and submitting to the seductions of the corporate whores.
With the public safely elided, it is a straight fight between capitalism and its stooges and cultural revolutionaries such as Radiohead. "In these inspired moments of Mahlerian sweetness the band rises above the shit of our shared condition. (What else does Mahler try to do, in symphony after symphony, but dramatise this shared desire?)" Right, and Wagner is heavy metal. Radiohead, it should be said, are not with Rupert Murdoch. They are with EMI. "We are obliged to create our art though international mega-corporations," White imagines them explaining themselves, adding that maybe they are self-indulgent - "But hey, some folks are." A genuine radical would have paused to wonder whether being "obliged" to pocket millions might make their sweetness part of the shit.
There are good pages explicating Adorno's "instrumental rationality" in its modern guise, and White's refusal to fall in with either the Harold Bloom canon or the cultural studies crowd can produce refreshing insights. The overall effect, however, is oddly dated. This is a counter-cultural antiques roadshow, with a bit of Russian futurism ("Reclaim the home of the imagination with all its social force"), a lot of Walter Pater's aestheticism ("The strong assumption in the contemporary academy is that the idea of beauty is disreputable") and art-speak reminiscent of Whistler's "Art is on the streets". With wearying reiteration, White lauds the apple-pie world of the imagination and creative people (he has written novels). Such folk can feel unconstrained by bourgeois logic or consistency on public affairs, and on politics White wears his old-fashioned Doc Martens, so you can hear him coming.
The blurb complains of the lack of intelligent discussion of international matters, yet his sole sentence on Afghanistan talks of "Afghanis fleeing for the borders, dodging bombs". The terrorist threat? Hey, our nuclear reactors are also dirty bombs. And another thing: Clinton should have been impeached not for Monica, but for bombing the Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. Absolutely. Makes you feel good to read it. Just one problem. A few years ago an article in the left-leaning New York Review of Books demonstrated, quoting public testimony, that the facility in question was dual-use, making medicaments for the sick and chemicals to kill.
Why do intellectuals think that, where politics is concerned, they can stomp around the high moral ground sounding off with all the rigour of chuntering clubmen or tabloid leaders? Is moralising without troubling to find out what you are talking about, plus a right-on return to the 1960s approach, what White really means by "social imagination"? The dualism between his cultural conservatism and his baby-talking politics resolves itself in a splurge of conventional non-thinking - an unspecific radicalism, a twist of New Age, a wagonload of creativity and a touch of all-American sentimentalism. By the time you have gone through the chapter "The Highway of Despair Leads to a World in Love" and into "Notes Toward the Next American Sublime" the wooziness gets to you, eyelids droop and you struggle to turn the page.
Though not uncritical of the 1960s, White fails to understand its link with the self-pleasuring culture that he rightly excoriates, but of which he is a part. The narcissism of such phrases as "those of us who think that art should matter", "incorrigible and ever hopeful artist and intellectual that I am", or "the present work is of uncertain genre and may itself be a novel of some kind", clearly escaped the author. His soixante-huitard sloganeering about art and the imagination is a political placebo, a commodity for the conscience as much as culture is a commodity for the sweet-toothed corporations. A manifestation, in other words, of the Middle Mind at work in its "alternative" guise, flattening distinctions between make-believe and reality and turning culture into a faux-revolutionary mush. "We endure a situation in which we are free to think and say what we like so long as what we think and say doesn't matter, doesn't threaten dominant state/corporate/military narratives." No you don't, Curtis. Murdoch published your book, and the reason it doesn't matter is because so much of it is self-dramatising bullshit.
All of us are marked by experience and, to that extent, partisan. I can't claim to have suffered in San Francisco (how bad was it, man?), or taken part in its glorious liberation. In the early 1960s I was a postgraduate at Moscow University; plenty of "instrumental rationality" there, comrade. And in '68, while White was marvelling at the narcotically stimulated imaginativeness of posters in the Bay Area, "driving art to the creation of a new human world", I too was reading posters, in Peking, where another "new human world" was being created by means of the murderous cultural revolution, much romanticised by drugged-up American radicals at the time. Self-indulgent? Hey, but some folks are.
George Walden's latest book is Who's a Dandy? (Gibson Square)
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