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The Burdens of Visual Culture Studies

Posted on: Friday, 8 October 2004, 06:00 CDT

In a pluralistic society whose cultural inventions are divided up by largely independent institutions, ideas often do not fare well. The workings of intellect may have once been absorbed into a national discourse, but now they are conceived and assimilated into enterprises with their own aims, audiences, and resources. The schools, the media, the state, and the art world each form their own universes and have their own subdivisions, such as the academic disciplines in higher education. If an idea remains within one domain, its meaning and integrity are more or less secure, although it may be criticized and rejected.

If practitioners in another realm import the idea into their own work, however, it is subordinated to other designs. Once a powerful idea in contemporary art draws the attention of journalists, the idea exits the studio and surfaces in the "Arts and Ideas" section of the city paper. A philosophical concept (for example, John Rawls's "distributive justice") that catches on with economists is refitted to empirical analysis and fiscal policymaking. The process treats ideas as if they were crossing national borders and their baggage had to be confiscated and their itinerary remapped. The original context dissipates. The vocabulary of the idea bears echoes and traces of a tradition, but in the new setting it sounds abstract, colorless, and frequently ends up glib and packaged. The very depth and insight that prompted the importation turn out to be its first victims.

The dangers of importation put a special burden on academics, who are held to a high standard of intellectual correctness. In recent years, however, that has not discouraged literature and education professors from raising borrowing from a periodic experiment into standard professional practice. Sometimes this has been undertaken in the name of theory, sometimes interdisciplinarity-both labels, since the 1960s, signaling a revolution in academic method and enjoying, for a moment at least, some radical cachet.

With the explosion of the university in those years (from 1960 to 1975 the professorate doubled in size), the disciplines were ripe for shake-ups, and many young scholars became prominent by being the first to bring an outside idea into an established field. If the idea was sufficiently fundamental (for example, the redefinition of art as "text"), the field changed radically. Academic historians of the humanities called it the "theory revolution," and in every major transformation the advocates took their ideas from another domain. From Continental philosophy, Marxism, psychoanalysis, linguistics, sociological and anthropological fieldwork, and various activist movements, scholars and teachers derived critical theory, New Historicism, neopragmatism, gender theory, postcolonialism, critical race studies, trauma theory, and cultural studies.

Currently the arts education field has been invaded by visual culture studies (VCS), a composite formation of interdisciplinary undertakings that flaunts its borrowing as a generative act but never pauses over the hazards. Summations of the practice describe it as a bricolage endeavor, a testament to the innovative, adventurous mind-set of the VCS votaries. One book names the disciplines informing VCS by citing "Aesthetics, Anthropology, Archaeology," and thirty-one others (Walker and Chaplin 1997, 3). The Web site of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Visual Culture Cluster lists as its core disciplines cognitive science, art history, geography, film theory, the "ethics of representation," and the "politics of visibility." The enthusiasm of these recipes indicates the belief that promiscuous borrowing itself is a virtue, a sign of the field's roguish, eclectic temper. One senses an excitement in affiliation and in the mere mention of terms and concepts that would have appeared out of place not so many years ago- textuality, power, signification, critique, ideology, transgression. Multidisciplinary claims and heterodox terms seem to provide a special charge of professional electricity.

In other humanities disciplines, the borrowing process has played itself out for some forty years. Theories and schools have come and gone with the regularity of seasonal fashions, or rather, they arrived as dazzling innovations in scholarship but soon dimmed into just another variant of academic criticism. Jobs were filled, conferences were held, and quarterlies were started. Once hot but now pass theories have engulfed some institutional space and the new formations settled into professional routines. The accommodation of radical theories into the academic establishment gave the lie to their countercultural claims. Nothing so revolutionary is so easily converted into customary practice, and today the political pose cannot pass the smile test (what tenured theorist can claim a radical identity without a smile?) Still, the cycle carries on. Academia loves the new, and one of the attractions of the system is that, when the new succeeds, it becomes old, opening a niche for the next new trend. The old new trend has its faculty advocates and funded organizations, and the only thing threatened is their prestige, not their livelihoods. The new new trend has fervor and frisson, but in a few years the wheel turns and the parties change. Indeed, the half-life of cultural theories seems to be shrinking: In today is not just out tomorrow, but out this afternoon.

In arts education, VCS is currently at its height, and proponents of it act with all the verve of partisans on a roll. A little knowledge of history, however, should curb their enthusiasm. Academia has a way of assimilating the most extreme theories and pursuits into standard operating procedure, and the evanescence of reader response theory, deconstruction, and other schools is an important lesson. Ten years from now, we will look back upon VCS as we look back upon New Historicism: as an interesting practice with lasting influence on some literary scholars, but hardly the sweeping transformation that had been predicted by theorists in the late 1980s.

Whether and how VCS endures remains to be seen. We can with confidence say that its legacy will depend, however, not on its timeliness, its reflection of larger social and cultural trends, or its usefulness to graduate students and younger scholars and teachers. Those elements will fade as time passes. What will make it last are what make any humanistic inquiry last: the cogency of its ideas, the infectiousness of its social vision, and the reliability of its judgment and taste.

First Principles

The first fact to note about VCS is its borrowing, more precisely, the profusiveness of its borrowing. Often we hear of other features, such as the expansion of the canon to include material culture and mass art; to include themes such as race, class, gender, and sexuality; or to include issues of social justice into academic work. These are longstanding practices, however, in other domains; scholars have studied comic books and so forth for a long time, and activist criticism in the academy dates back to the 1950s, at the least. The only novelty of VCS is to annex them all and to make the conjunction of multiple theories and disciplines the opening step in scholarship and teaching. One enthusiast speaks of VCS as "informed by a panoply of theories and practices from a variety of disciplines" (Tavin 2003, 210)-not just different theories and a few disciplines, but a "panoply" and a "variety." Count up the sources and you run through just about every discipline and school of interpretation between 1960 and 1995, with VCS waiting at the end ready to wield one or another in the service of a new critique, a better understanding.

VCS unveils the list as a roster of sources, but the immodesty of such schemes no doubt would annoy the precursors, who resent seeing their achievements handled so instrumentally. Master theorists such as Jacques Derrida disdained direct attacks on their notions, but a mechanical application of those notions to selected artifacts by some self-appointed disciples irritated them even more. In keeping with the cult of celebrity shaping so much of the reception of theory, theorists want their works to be inspirations, not tools, and want their students to be followers, not inquirers. Few have been quicker than Derrida and Jacques Lacan to label any whisper of dissent an apostasy. One is tempted to construe the abundance of borrowed notions in VCS as a reversal of power. The first followers of 1960s and 1970s theories divided into sects and adhered to one master; in 1979, deconstructionists and political critics loathed each other. Alternatively, proponents of VCS are equable and even catholic in their adherence. They are not followers of Derrida or Geertz or another theorist, dedicated to spreading the word of the master. No: They range freely and flexibly across visual phenomena, willful interpreters in the land of modern-day culture, technology, politics, and society, reaching into their bulging toolkit for whatever theory or discipline seems right for the occasion.

Some may say that is a cynical interpretation of VCS borrowing- one that is easy to make and hard to prove. If the issue is the make- up of the practitioners of VCS, we should opt for less personal queries about motive and focus moreon professional training and intellectual competence. On that score, the proliferation of sources poses an obvious question: How many educators have the learning, discernment, and flair to implement so much and avoid the superficial? Who has enough knowledge and wisdom to determine when to implement this theory and not that one, this discipline and not that one, this activism and not that one? Who knows how to marshal anthropology, Queer theory, and the politics of visibility into a single interpretation? Behind each invocation lies a tradition that itself takes years to master. The mention of "Fredric Jameson" presupposes a familiarity with Althusser, Debord, Lukacz, and Marx; "popular culture" presupposes knowledge of the Birmingham Centre, media technology and finance, E. P. Thompson, and Partisan Review. Some ideas-for example, Kantian disinterestedness-are too complex for quick and broad treatments. Some practices are too dependent on context, for instance, Eisenstein's film-making (controlled by the Kremlin). Use them without implying their depth and background, and readers are given a false sense of knowledge. Use them without knowing their depth and background, and you sound like a dilettante.

Furthermore, do a little extra reading and you find that the thoughts of some of the preferred forebears of VCS do not mesh well. To note some general cases: Celebrants of postmodernism and members of the Frankfurt School fundamentally disagree about the value of mass culture, yet they appear side by side in the roster of influences. Empirical social science provides VCS with data on which to hang generalizations about contemporary culture, yet several acclaimed sources (for example, Jean Baudrillard or Donna Haraway) routinely dispute the scientific method.

This is not to say that a copious blending of disciplines, theories, and activisms is impossible. On rare occasions, we know, certain learned and brilliant thinkers have coordinated multiple lines of inquiry and action into a new thesis. In the 1960s, Ren Girard combined anthropology, Hegelian philosophy, comparative religion, and literary criticism into a theory of desire and the scapegoat that met requirements of exactitude in each field. In the 1890s, William James united clinical psychology, German Idealism, scientific method, and Darwinian theory into the only homegrown American philosophy, pragmatism. These thinkers had to be willing to venture outside their formations to produce such generative conceptions; VCS takes such eclecticism as examples for others to follow. We must remember, however, that James, Girard, and the other happy few were extraordinary minds at work, and their compound theories emerged only after long years of study (James did not publish his first book until age fifty). It was not just their disposition to experiment with other fields that gave us new methods and inquiries. Circumspection, judgment, learning, and intelligence each played a role, and VCS would do well to remind scholars in training that, however much activist aims and new theories may inspire them, they should never forget the ancient scholarly virtues. Granted, we should not hold every practitioner to the yardstick of genius. It would strengthen the case of VCS, however, if it would affirm that erudition should come before interdisciplinarity, that the materials of interpretation are easily abused, and that what appears neat and clean in final form sometimes originated in chaotic settings and profound mistrials.

Given the heady and heedless way in which VCS announces its genesis and purpose, I doubt whether any of its leaders worry about such intellectual niceties. The blandishments of joining the vanguard are too strong. Not to do so, however, is to doom VCS to the fate of all trends. As noted above, whatever social and institutional conditions may spur VCS for the moment (such as the Internet, university administrators looking to merge departments, and so forth) will wane. Unless the field has a solid ground of ideas and methods to fix on, it too will wane.

Postcolonialism is yet another illustrative case. In the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union broke up, as a "New Economy" leader won the White House, and as "empire" became the dirtiest of political words, postcolonialism seemed to represent a historical inevitability. At the same time, within the university, all the variants of poststructuralism had run their course and lost their stakes, issuing little more than one clever reading after another. Humanities professors maintained the necessity of theory, but they were bored with its practice. Postcolonialism offered a fortuitous merging, keeping the theory but energizing it with topical content. No longer need the conundrums of Lacanian analysis be confined to nineteenth-century novels and modernist poems, postcolonialist theorists declared. The dialectic of recognition applied to relations between the developed and Third World, to diaspora literature, and to traditional Anglo-American scholarly practice.

For five years, hiring committees and conference organizers favored postcolonialism as "The Next Big Thing," although they knew little about it. Times changed, however, and postcolonialism could not stay new for very long. When scholars got past the novelty and uncovered what postcolonialism provided to those in non- postcolonial fields, they found merely the same old theory suffused with anti-capitalist and anti-American resentments, often expressed in indigestible prose. Postcolonialists introduced situations unfamiliar to those in English Departments-say, the meaning of widowhood in India-but the approach appeared all too customary, and colleagues felt free to ignore it. If postcolonialism had grounded its ideas and analysis in the study of history, religion, and language, it might have thrived in those domains, but instead it rehearsed standard poststructuralist maneuvers, using exotic novels as a pretext.

If VCS wishes to avoid that fate, it must shore up its treatment of major ideas. When three visual culture specialists at Pennsylvania State University end a brief note in Studies in Arts Education by announcing, "We believe that arts educators adopting a visual culture orientation should address the imbalanced power relationship between teachers and students and . . . bring this to the forefront of instruction" (Knight, Keifer-Boyd, and Amburgy 2004, 272), readers can only guess at what they have in mind. Behind the proposal lie the usual progressivist pedagogies and echoes of 1960s egalitarianism, but those notions have circulated for decades now and still have not solved the exigencies of classroom practice, such as assigning grades. There is no evidence here that the authors have anything helpful to say, except to insist that power dynamics and group identity bear particularly on visual culture (just as literary theorists say the same thing about literature, and historians say the same thing about history). When the authors add a note at the beginning stating, "This is a true co-authored work with equal contributions from all of us and no first author. The order in which we list authors is based on a rotation we use in our collaborations or publications" (270), we wonder if we're in the midst of parody of an old SDS meeting (after all, this isn't a clinical study by a team of medical researchers). If all VCS has to offer are a few shopworn critical theories given an egalitarian thrust and political causes given a curricular form, and if the scruples of the proponents of VCS are cranked up to such delicate and self-regarding levels, few scholars and teachers outside the field will take them seriously. The grandiloquence of VCS announcements indicates that the field has vast ambitions, striving to shape K-12 teaching, the art history canon, and artistic practice while evincing a canny, real-world relevance. If they do not meet basic intellectual criteria, however, the political zeal and vanguard identity look like posturing, and nobody outside the VCS clique will adopt the vision.

Botched Borrowing

For a field whose chief tactic is copious borrowing, the initial criterion is getting the ideas borrowed right. Unfortunately, VCS fails to meet the requirement time and again. It takes ideas from philosophy, social science, speculative theory, and activist movements and puts them to careless uses, drops them as names, misconstrues their meaning, and applies them beyond their rightful purview. It echoes concepts hatched decades ago and introduces them as if they were yesterday's event. It invokes ideas long discredited in other domains and revives them as intellectual breakthroughs.

One example is that of "total description." Total description was the dream of social science as it evolved in the first half of the twentieth century. As the physical sciences concentrated upon one bit of nature or another and produced astonishing breakthroughs, social scientists craved the same kind of success but understood that society could not be segregated so cleanly. Physical scientists could effectively isolate one phenomenon in the laboratory, control for others, and derive predictive laws. Social scientists, however, took human subjects, human relations, and human history as their focus-objects so complex and interrelated that isolating one factor and controlling for others was impossible. Attempts to do so produced some of the more grotesque experiments in modern times. To get around the problem, social scientists opted for a mode of description that included more and more kinds of content and matched them with ever more inclusive methods. It was not enough to study religion, they claimed. One had to mingle religion and economics, geography, sexuality, and so forth. Because any cultural artifact or practice was infused with form and meaning derived from all of these factors, social science had to account for them all. To stick \to one was to present an artificial picture of human reality. If one could use the resources of science to accumulate a holistic apprehension of the object, human beings might become as open to clear inquiry as nature had.

This was a heady notion for social scientists in budding fields. Needless to say, their efforts failed. Social science never gained the respect of the physical scientists, who found flaws and holes in the methodology, peer review, and grandiose aims of particular efforts. The most visible failure of total description occurred in the economic experiments of socialist governments, whose planners believed they could control prices, production, and consumption through central management. There is no need to comment on the misery that they caused. Over the course of the second half of the century, social science as a whole relinquished the project and turned largely to quantitative analysis of social data.

Despite all that, the goal of total description returns in VCS, hailed as an improvement upon formalist, historical, and connoisseur- based approaches to arts learning. Usually, the theory follows simultaneous assertions of the multiplicity of cultural objects and the multiplicity of their interpretations by VCS. As one scholar puts it, "all cultural sites, but especially ones like television and the Internet, include a range of modalities, especially language, images, and sound" (Duncum 2004, 253). Behind the windy verbiage of "range of modalities" lies an old idea, namely, ontological pluralism. A fixture in philosophy since the Greeks, and especially in philosophy of science for the past one hundred years, ontological pluralism maintains that real objects are comprised of different aspects and that these aspects exist in reality, not in the different viewpoints that human minds shine on them. New media such as the Internet press home the condition, VCS rightly avers, but no more so than, for example, the court masques of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones or the mixed installations of conceptual art going back to Duchamp.

Whether new or old, the argument goes, the fundamental heterogeneity of things pushes interpretation to widen its lens. This leads to the other premise of total description: "Any cultural site, of any kind, can be understood according to multiple readings generated from the multiple positions from which one views, reads, or hears" (Duncum 2004, 253). The author terms this a "post- structuralist insight," but, once again, the notion dates back many years and has an established place in intellectual history. In Nietzsche and Bergson's time, it went under the label perspectivism; now it is called epistemological pluralism-that is, the belief that objects can be approached from many sides and assumptions and yield different, but not incompatible, interpretations.

The combination gives us a pluralistic universe in which each entity and each mind is, in itself, multiple. Strangely enough, and notwithstanding its abhorrence for anything that totalizes, in VCS this multiplicity requires a unifying description; hence its penchant for borrowing. Instead of selecting one side of the object and studying it from one standpoint, VCS jumps around the object from side to side and adopts one standpoint and then another. If enough approaches come together, it is assumed, the composite description verges ever closer to the object's actual condition. The ultimate aim is an encyclopedic critique, a "ruthless criticism of everything existing," as Marx put it.

At least that is what the theory calls for. The final outcome purports to be a cumulative projection of the cultural site-its form, history, politics, ideological meaning, moral value, and so forth. Whether individual efforts fulfill that mandate is to be decided on a case by case basis, but we may note here the extraordinary claims made for the VCS practitioner. The inquirer envisioned by VCS possesses breadth of social vision, facility with multiple theories and outlooks, an eye for multiple modalities, and the wisdom to unify them all. One might expect VCS to consider the extensive training and vast years of study required for one to fill this profile. Proponents of VCS never do, however-a fact that suggests that either they do not take their own demands seriously enough or that they believe they already meet them. In either case, before they don the mantle of total art critic and teacher, arts educators should recall remarks on the relation of minds to large social processes by F. A. Hayek (1952):

If it is true . . . that social processes can achieve things which it is beyond the power of the individual mind to achieve and plan, and that it is from those social processes that the individual mind derives what power it possesses, the attempt to impose conscious control on those processes must have even more fatal consequences. (159)

Total description is not the only flawed notion in VCS. I shall conclude by referring briefly to three others.

Unholy Three

The Object as Sign. In VCS statements, artworks are often described in semiotic terms such as signifying practices, cultural codes, intertextual articulation, and the like. The terms make up a critical idiom that spread through the humanities in the 1970s, when the works of Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Sanders Peirce (the founder of semiotics), Roman Jakobson, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes circulated through literature departments and captivated younger scholars and graduate students. In the process, concepts of form, unity, tradition, and genius were out, and the tactical, active language of textual production was in. Look up an essay in Diacritics or boundary 2 from 1978 and the density of semio- technics strikes one from the first paragraph.

When political criticism became popular in the 1980s, the semiotic idiom adjusted quickly. Before, critics applied "sign thinking" to theoretical and epistemological matters, such as the iconic nature of poetic language. Now it was only a matter of steering the theoretical cruxes (such as Derrida's il n'y a pas d'hors-texte) toward feminist and racial themes. One spoke not of the coded circulation of signs in a Manet canvass, but of the sexually coded representation of signs in it. Better yet, to show their engagement with the real world, one should bypass canonical figures and take mass culture as the subject, for example, post- World War II Cinemascope images, treating the spectacle of Victor Mature playing Samson and Charlton Heston playing Moses as illustrations of the social construction of masculinity in the cold war era.

The strategic value of semiotic analysis is obvious. When Peirce formulated a theory and taxonomy of icons, indices, and symbols, inquirers quickly recognized the value of dividing how signs signify from what they signify. The advantages of semiotic language, however, open the pitfall of any professional lingo: As it is adopted by any accredited guild, it veers into a shorthand jargon, a membership language uttered ritualistically in professional communications. Because the members of a profession or discipline share so many interests and outlooks, after a time their language becomes more rarefied and oblique, striking laymen as remote and stylized but working smoothly in specialized settings. Recent history shows that the only thing that keeps a jargon from drifting into empty convention is its beneficial consequences or connection to concrete realities; this explains why jargon in the physical sciences bothers nobody, but jargon in the humanities receives constant ridicule in the public sphere. Once the language becomes so abstract that it eclipses the objects it signifies and has few extraprofessional effects, users of it begin to confuse the description with the objects themselves.

One sees this slippage in VCS discourse all too frequently, as the utility of treating visual culture as a sign system leads into assertions that visual culture is a sign system. One scholar recounts asking preservice elementary teachers to choose any visual image and approach it in six ways, including "multiple codes of representation" and "intertextual connections and modalities" (Pauly 2004, 267). The author included some of the responses, which turned out to be so much more interesting and variegated than the author's categories as to render them meaningless.

Peirce understood the danger from the start, insisting that semiotics was a useful and illuminating way of describing objects but not identical with the objects themselves. True, he maintained that cognition is a semiotic process (we think in signs), but he also observed an "otherly" element that enters into any cognition and makes it infer the existence of real things. Sometimes, he said, the element rises to the level of a "hitting" effect (1958, passim). The effect might follow from making a mistake-for example, claiming the stove wasn't hot, then touching it and finding you were far wrong. Another example would be trying to interpret something differently from what it is, say, such as making a rejection into an acceptance. Any gap between our wishes and the world around us implies a reality made up of more than just signs. Hence, Peirce maintained, each semiotic description presupposes nonsemiotic existences "behind" it. Description runs up against something that resists description. We find ourselves approaching the object from one side or another; yesterday's comprehension does not meet today's demands; the object will not be "moved" into a different meaning. VCS regards this variation and pluralism as grounds for more borrowing and additive interpretations, but a better lesson is to acknowledge those limits and pursue smaller but surer interpretations of one aspect of visual culture or another. This is not to say that Peirce's metaphysical remarks clear up the issue. On the contrary, they cloud it, implying that the tension between a fa\vored terminology and a fluid reality never entirely goes away. That requires interpreters to wield their terms always with a measure of circumspection, not with the complacency that one finds too often in theoretical jargon.

The Critic/Teacher as Adversary. In 1971, a curious little book appeared in Chile that stands today as an emblematic high point of political criticism. Chile was in ferment; the Popular Unity government had been voted into power and was struggling against corporate and American interests in mining, media, and communications. With charismatic President Salvador Allende and the peasantry pitted against the military generals, representatives of Pepsi, other U.S. giants, and the CIA, the nation emerged on the international scene at an epochal crossroad of ideology-socialism versus capitalism and workers' rights versus property owner and shareholder rights. Millions of dollars were at stake and violence was imminent; eventually, the military took control in 1973, Allende was killed, and Pinochet became dictator. In the middle of it all appeared How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart. The book unmasked the Disney comic as an instrument of capitalist propaganda, hardly the innocent entertainment that audiences (according to the authors) assumed it to be. Its premises were lifted directly from Marx's The German Ideology: "In a society where one class controls the means of economic production, that class also controls the means of intellectual production" (Dorfman and Mattelart 1971, 95). Its examples were suitably heavy-handed (Donald and his nephews help a king combat revolutionaries, and so forth). How to Read Donald Duck exposed the commodification of people and goods in the Disney universe and the normalization of "the American way of life." Moreover, the authors passionately affirmed Disney's hostility to leftist action and inappropriateness to Latin American countries. In 1973 the book was banned in Chile and confiscated by the U.S. Customs Bureau when imported, and the authors fled into exile.

Here are all the ingredients of adversarial criticism: intellectuals confronting the military-industrial complex; a work of mass culture passing itself off as entertainment, but bearing coded messages to a gullible public on behalf of a dominant class; an interpretative method derived from Marx and focused on power structures as sublimated in art; and the establishment turning its force upon the intellectuals themselves. Given the conditions in Chile in 1971 and the sweeping momentum of Marxist-Leninist movements in South America (Castro and Vietnam led many to believe that a revolution across the third world was at hand), one can accept the adversarial pose of Dorfman and Mattelart. The language they use has a certain historical piquancy ("Putting the Duck on the carpet is to question the various forms of authoritarian and paternalist culture pervading the relationship of the bourgeoisie among themselves, with others, and with nature" [98]), and the fate of the authors lends credibility to the critique.

Given how smoothly How to Read Donald Duck fits into a Leftist romance of the courageous critic speaking truth to power, we should not be surprised that their language and pose is echoed in VCS discourse. One essay speaks of how "visual culture and critical pedagogy recognize, analyze, and critique how social, political, and economic realities help name and shape our experience of the world" (Tavin 2003, 209). Other critics speak of combating conservative ideologies and uncovering the political uses of mass entertainments. The ambition is central to leftist scholarship and teaching and has motivated entire fields for decades (for example, American Studies, Women's Studies, and various ethnic and race-based programs). In assimilating their theories, VCS has adopted their adversarial aims as well.

We might dispute the intellectual grounds of such tendentious enterprises, which close inquiry into certain matters from the start (how many women's studies programs consider abortion an open question?). We might also examine the credentials of arts educators who reach far beyond their expertise (how many arts educators understand econometrics?). Because adversarial teaching and scholarship have thrived in the humanities and social sciences for many years, moreover, we may pose a simpler question: What evidence can adversarial critics muster to prove that their methods have worked? VCS critique always flows in one direction: against capitalism, conservatism, and common sense. Are there any studies that show critical pedagogy has made students any less consumer- oriented, any less vulnerable to advertising, any more willing to dissent from popular opinion? Since the 1960s, activist movements have certainly altered public tastes and values, but has the academic critique played a significant role in the process, especially in the last ten or fifteen years?

The verdict is clear: They have played no role, at least not recently. When critics in education and literature departments fulminate as if the same conditions prevail in U.S. society circa 2004 as they did in 1954 or in Chile in 1971, they sound like wayward souls in search of an oppressor. At one time, the campus was at the center of social change, but over the course of the 1970s activism moved elsewhere. The war in Vietnam ended, women's liberation fizzled into lobbying groups, and the civil rights movement settled into government offices ensuring equal rights. Today, VCS practitioners have no support except for the results of their own instruction. Without some concrete consequences to point to-changes in social policy or generations of students whom they train for cultural critique-the claimants can only fall back upon their own moral authority. Needless to say, the public is skeptical. When academics set themselves against the state, corporations, racism, sexism, or any other monolithic injustice, and instead of suffering harassment are hired and tenured, the adversarial pose turns into a hollow act.

The Import of Popular Culture. VCS insists on bringing popular culture into the classroom as a basic responsibility. Some scholars clearly revel in TV shows and pop music-so often that one wonders why they chose the academic route instead of the entertainment business. Others advance a more serious justification for teaching mass products, an educational purpose for exposing students even further to something that bombards them outside the classroom all the time. One essay states it well: "The educational significance of the mass arts arises from their ubiquitous presence in our lives" (Chapman 2003, 23). It is precisely the overpowering nature of mass culture that solicits our attention, VCS says. By bringing rap music, videogames, and Friends into the classroom, they can be analyzed, not just consumed, and thereby students will learn to view them with a critical perspective. VCS will send students back out into society with sharper interpretative senses, attuned to the subtle messages of visual codes as they are expressed in images of race, class, and gender, and, to top it all off, bourgeois ideology.

If only it were so. Arts educators who believe that their minutes of criticism in the classroom will counter the students' weeks and months of outside consumption are nave. Perhaps one or two students will turn critical in the preferred fashion, but others will soak up pop culture materials in class in the same way that they do outside class. No doubt, students perk up when Britney sings, and overworked arts teachers spring to interpret it as a sign the pedagogy is working. This is a poor sellout, however, to student apathy. It also skirts a pedagogical question. Why does VCS assume that, to inculcate a critical attitude toward mass culture, one must incorporate mass culture into the lesson plan? Representation is not so simple, nor is the relation between content and cognitive attitudes so direct. If the purpose is to teach students to dismantle and analyze what they see in music videos, teachers should expose them to more sophisticated, layered, artistic examples of moving images. Once they study the deep focus of Orson Welles, the stills of La Jete, the pacing of Antonioni, and the chiaroscuro of Wild Strawberries, they might return to music videos with a better sense of clichd images, hack editing, and coarse themes.

This is a fundamental cultural question as well as a pedagogical one. What art works do arts teachers wish to impart? What tastes do they want to cultivate? What is the best knowledge they want the young to take from the teaching? If students do not encounter Bernini in an art class, they are unlikely to do so on their own. If they do end up in Rome at the Villa Borghese and face Apollo and Daphne, they will not have the familiarity to recognize it or the cognitive vocabulary to experience it fully. More generally, they will not realize how important artistic traditions are to an individual sensibility. This is one of the most troubling aspects of VCS. It seems to have little sense of the value of tradition and little respect for the virtue of erudition. VCS does not prize learning, and the arts educators who espouse it do not appear to be particularly learned people. They may have political ardor, but the academy is not the place for political action. They may cultivate grievances over various social injustices, but passing them along amounts to an off-topic instruction, and most students shirk them off anyway. Proponents of VCS may sport a savvy insight into the workings of capital and culture, but few have ever witnessed them up close. As for those educators who believe that a pop video is just as formally, conceptually, or historically rich as a work of high art, one can only say that their opinions are as ephemeral as the worksthey prefer.

These problems may sound arcane and academic, but ultimately they stem from a few basic human vices, namely, narrow-mindedness and arrogance. It is arrogant for proponents of VCS to prescribe a political orientation for the classroom. It is irresponsible for them to pick and choose from fields in which they have little competence. It is shortsighted for them to dignify mass culture as worthy of aesthetic study.

This is not to say that some of the contents and themes of VCS should not be allowed into arts education. If VCS wishes to espouse cultural critique and open instruction to borrowed ideas and pop materials, however, it should do so with less surety and haste. If teachers want to import theories from other disciplines, they should ask those other disciplines to weigh in on VCS versions of what they are borrowing. To introduce the political analysis of art, VCS should include, in addition to progressivist and liberal approaches, some specimens of libertarian and conservative thought. Finally, study of mass culture should be interspersed with high culture, so that students might begin to discriminate one from the other. Such nondogmatic recommendations do not match the outlook of the proponents of VCS, but practitioners should adopt them in order to match their practice to their professedly resolute motives. Instead of being so consumed with current politics, they should try to transcend them by affirming the enduring values of learning and taste.

For a field whose chief tactic is copious borrowing, the initial criterion is getting the ideas borrowed right.

Are there any studies that show critical pedagogy has made students any less vulnerable to advertising or more willing to dissent from popular opinion?

References

Chapman, Laura H. 2003. "Studies of the Mass Arts." Studies in Art Education 44 (3): 23-45.

Dorfmann, Ariel, and Armand Mattelart. 1971. How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. Trans. David Kunzle. New York: International General.

Duncum, Paul. 2004. "Visual Culture Isn't Just Visual: Multilileracy, Multimodality, and Meaning." Studies in Art Education 45 (3): 252-64.

Hayek, F. A. 1952. The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies in the Abuse of Reason. New York: Free Press.

Knight, Wanda B., Karen Keifer-Boyd, and Patricia M. Amburgy. 2004. "Commentary: Revealing Power: A Visual Culture Orientation to Student-Teacher Relationships." Studies in Arts Education 45 (4): 270-73.

Pauly, Nancy. 2004. "Interpreting Visual Culture as Cultural Narratives in Teacher Education." Studies in Art Education 44 (3): 264-84.

Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1958. Collected Papers. Vol. 8. Ed. Arthur W. Burks.

Tavin, Kevin M. 2003. "Wrestling with Angels, Searching for Ghosts: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Visual Culture." Studies in Am Education 44 (3): 197-213.

University of Wisconsin-Madison. Visual Culture Cluster. http:// www.visualculture. wisc.edu/whatisvisualculture.htm (accessed June 30, 2004).

Walker, J., and S. Chaplin. 1997. Visual Culture: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press.

Mark Bauerlein, on leave from the Department of English at Emory University, is Director of the Office of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts. His views as expressed in this article do not represent the views of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Copyright HELDREF PUBLICATIONS Sep/Oct 2004

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