Questions of Method

Intellectually, I've long been drawn to those sharp epigrams with which some theorists dot their texts and thereby condense an entire critical program into a few concise and astute words: for example, "History is what hurts" ( Jameson), "In political analysis and thought, we still have not cut off the king's head" (Foucault), "Intuitively, Kant foretold what Hollywood consciously put into practice" (Adorno/Horkheimer), "It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that any contemporary consciousness that has not appropriated the American experience, even in opposition, has something reactionary about it" (Adorno again—a master of the philosophical one-liner).

Of such pithy pronouncements, none has been more consequential for me than the famous assertion by Jean-Paul Sartre in his Search for a Method that "[Paul] Valéry is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valéry."¹Search for a Method is Sartre's attempt to find mediations between existentialism and Marxism, and I take this great epigram to be arguing the need to deal both with abstract categories (of, in this case, class belonging) and specific historical cases and not reduce the latter to the former nor become so empirical that the latter lose any larger historical representativeness. I've found Sartre's Marxist existentialism to provide a way to think about politics as lived practice—including the ways it has been lived by the cultural workers, both famous and anonymous, who made and make the cinema and television I study. I take pride in having recommended the Sartre quotation (and the critical assumptions behind it) to the late, greatly missed George Custen, who used it to good effect in his Darryl Zanuck study and trenchantly examines how the individual producer negotiated (sometimes quite literally so) and found voice in an industrial and cultural context that too often is treated simply as a pressure to artistic conformity.² Most recently, I've found myself quoting the Sartre epigram in a work in progress on Julia Child's television work: there, among other things, I situate Child alongside other icons of the 1960s (for example, Jane Jacobs, Betty Friedan, Jackie Kennedy) to suggest that any social subject lives her or his historical moment in ways that are determined and delimited but also biographically specific so that any one life is only ever a singular version, a partial story, of the times. Each life is its own symbolic response to the history it passes through. For example, although she's politically a liberal and responds accordingly in her private life to the turbulence of the times, Child leaves politics behind in her cooking show, which uses the safe haven of the kitchen set as a utopic space in which the pressures of history can seem to be bracketed out or reduced into manageable form. This is not the only way that cultural icons lived through the 1960s; this is not the only way they expressed their class allegiances and realized their political situation.³

In thinking about the specificity of such acts of cultural production within historical context, I've come increasingly to take inspiration from Sidney Mintz's classic study of commodity circulation, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, which, among other things, examines how, for England, sugar moved from being a luxury item of the aristocracy to an essential part of the industrial working-class everyday diet. Mintz connects this local diffusion of the commodity back to the imperial context in which many other laborers far away (slaves and then indentured workers) suffered so that the English working class could be given its sugar fix.⁴ While well attended to in history and anthropology, Sweetness and Power has not received the attention it should in cultural studies—even though it anticipates cultural studies investigations into the seemingly anodyne objects of everyday life and has the advantage of tying the study of the specific commodity back to its larger contexts of production and circulation. And Mintz's volume offers the special virtue of showing how the particular commodity that was sugar came to...