Teaching Culture

Throughout the history of film, plots have required that a character be rendered unconscious for a finite period with no explanation of the process and with no other consequence, to which end, the medium invented the “magic-single-punch.” All one character has to do is say: “I hate to do this but . . .” then throw a swift punch to jaw, and the recipient agrees to pass out for however long the plot requires. More significant than this compliant character is the equally compliant viewer, who accepts this miracle of anesthesia, that works to perfect effect even on a character who, in other scenes, might have a chair broken over his head or receive several karate chops to the trachea with barely a blink or stagger.

Although I believe that car chases were the reason God invented “fast-forward,” even more bewildering than the apparent popularity of this screen event is the fact that audiences have failed, over the last two decades, to wonder why not one of the cars involved has a working airbag. Such thoughts, of course, disrupt the pleasure that has been paid for with money, time, and attention, in the same way, for example, that disputing the comparably absurd tenets of Reaganomics disrupts the myth of satisfaction purchased with (low) taxes, lip-service patriotism, and self-serving citizenship.¹ In 1984—in the middle of Reagan’s reign over morning in America—federal law required that all cars have passive restraints by 1989. Since Reagan’s second term, in other words, in defiance of legality and common sense, the premises of Reaganomics and of movie car chases have remained unchallenged. Fueled on the one hand by pleasure industries, and on the other, by think tanks and talk radio, the speeding of the economy and of the movie-chase car, along parallel courses toward disastrous crashes could be glossed by saying that, as usual, American mass media had disabled the wrong airbags. Although we do not need them to explain how the media did so with such alacrity and overwhelming popular consent, Althusser and Gramsci certainly help us see the difficulty of undermining a subject position in which large populations are invested. As Terry Eagleton points out, in Althusser’s account, ideology is “not just a distortion or false reflection, a screen which intervenes between ourselves and reality or an automatic effect of commodity production. It is an indispensable medium for the production of human subjects” (148). The unquestioning acceptance of the magic-punch or the universally disabled airbag, therefore, replicates in a limited fashion the mechanics of culture, for culture is constituted not by nature but by narrative.

Consider for example a conversation that becomes particularly heated and acrimonious: One might invoke numerous narratives to explain this event: “She is defensive because . . . ,” “I am inarticulate because . . . ,” I am confused . . . ,” “He trusts Rush Limbaugh . . . ,” etc. I think it unlikely, however, that one might explain the event by saying, “this conversation has tanked because an evil demon has inhabited his body and taken over his soul.” But I know an anthropologist who worked with groups in urban Brazil where such explanations were absolutely viable.

For any group of people, at any specific moment, in other words, some narratives are deemed too “absurd” to mention, others so “obvious” they can go unsaid, while yet other narratives remain in play; they retain enough explanatory heft within a specific community to vie for cogency. “Reality” for any culture, therefore, demarks the arena of cogent narratives. For this reason, “one way of thinking about ‘culture’,” Stuart Hall points explains, “is in terms of [the] shared conceptual maps, shared language systems and the codes which govern the relationships of translation between them” (21). Because the borders of that arena are protean, moreover, culture is necessarily a loose term, one that can only be talked about partially, that is, in parts, and partially, that is, in terms of the biases reflected by the narratives to which it is partial. For most of us, I’m guessing, delusions of grandeur, yes, evil demons, no. Some people in contemporary American culture are still partial to the...