Popular Cultures, Ordinary Criticism: A Philosophy of Minor Genres

Stanley Cavell was no doubt the first to account for the transformation of theory and criticism brought about by reflection on popular culture and its “ordinary” objects, such as so-called commercial [grand public] cinema. However, Cavell is less concerned with reversing artistic hierarchies or inverting the relation between theory and practice than with the self-transformation required by our encounters with new experiences. Robert Warshow, Cavell’s inspiration on these matters and the author of remarkable analyses of popular culture put it thus:

We are all “self-made men” culturally, establishing ourselves in terms of the particular choices we make from among the confusing multitude of stimuli that present themselves to us. Something more than the pleasures of personal cultivation is at stake when one chooses to respond to Proust rather than to Mickey Spillane, to Laurence Olivier in Oedipus Rex rather than Sterling Hayden in The Asphalt Jungle. And when one has made the “right” choice, Mickey Spillane and Sterling Hayden do not disappear; perhaps no one gets quite out of sight of them. There is great need, I think, for a criticism of “popular culture” which can acknowledge its pervasive and disturbing power without ceasing to be aware of the superior claims of the higher arts, and yet without a bad conscience.

(xxxvii)

Is there still any sense in talking about “popular culture?” Or has this sense been transformed to the extent that we now use the expression without really knowing what we are saying—or, to take the title of one of Cavell’s essays, without meaning what we say (Cavell, “Must We Mean What We Say?)? In The Claim of Reason, Cavell defined philosophy as the “education of grownups,” in parallel with his goal in his major works on cinema—The World Viewed, Pursuits of Happiness (on comedies of remarriage), Contesting Tears (on melodrama), and Cities of Words (which covers the entirety of his teaching at Harvard, alternating between lessons in philosophy and studies of films)—to give popular culture (Hollywood movies in particular are his main interest) the function of changing us. According to Cavell, the value of a culture lies not in its “great art” but in its transformative capacity, the same capacity found in the “moral perfectionism” of Emerson and Thoreau. Philosophy consists in “bring[ing] my own language and life into imagination,” in “a convening of my culture’s criteria, in order to confront them with my words and life,”

and at the same time to confront my words and life as I pursue them with the life my culture’s words may imagine for me: to confront the culture with itself, along the lines in which it meets in me.

(The Claim of Reason 125)

How can we imagine continuing to grow after the end of childhood? Cavell’s philosophy defines growth—once childhood and physical growth are over—as the capacity to change. This capacity is at work in Cavell’s favored object of study, the apparently minor genre of comedies of remarriage, which stage characters’ mutual education and their transformation through separation and reunion.

In this light, philosophy becomes the education of grownups. . . . The anxiety in teaching, in serious communication, is that I myself require education. And for grownups, this is not natural growth, but change.

(The Claim of Reason 125)

Cavell also gives this philosophical enterprise the outdated name “moral education,” or “pedagogy,” as in the subtitle to Cities of Words. For Cavell, whose childhood and youth were haunted by Hollywood movies, the culture in question is popular cinema, whose productions reached more people at that time than at any other. The educational value of popular culture is not anecdotal. Indeed, it seems to me to define what must be understood both by “popular” and by “culture” (in the sense of Bildung) in the expression “popular culture.” Within such a perspective, the vocation of popular culture is the philosophical education of a public rather than the institution and valorization of a socially targeted corpus of works. The way in which Cavell has claimed the philosophical value of Hollywood cinema...