A Middling Mine

The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think For Themselves, by Curtis White (HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), is an angry book. It began as an essay in Context that got picked up by the "Readings" section of Harper's in March 2002 (I have the clipping somewhere). What everyone seems to remember from the essay is its savage treatment of Terry Gross, host of NPR's "Fresh Air." At the time of the Harper's reprint, Ms Gross had either presented or was about to present a unique in-person evening of memorable moments from "Fresh Air" at Town Hall, here in New York, to raise money to pay for a new transmitter for WNYC, which of course had lost its old transmitter in the previous September's attack on the World Trade Center. (It was a lovely evening.) I really couldn't believe that any right-minded person would go after Terry Gross, but I saw just the same that Mr White was onto something.

The problem isn't with Terry Gross. It's with anybody who thinks that "Fresh Air" is an exercise in intellectual criticism - which perhaps Mr White thinks it ought to be.

The Middle Mind is able to accomplish its business in part, as I have said, because its assumptions have become so naturalized. In the world of the Middle Mind, all one asks of art is that it be "entertaining," "fun," and "interesting," and that's as it should be. Things are "interesting" in the Middle Mind in much the same way that a character would be said to be "clever" in a novel by Henry James. For James, a clever person has all the appearance of perceptiveness without really being perceptive at all.

The "Middle Mind," if I may rearrange some of the words in this passage, is Mr White's term for the habit of confusing the interestingly entertaining with the serious. The Da Vinci Code and its televised epiphenomena are superb examples. Nothing, after all, could be more "serious" than the possibility that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and fathered generations of offspring, or the possibility that the Roman Catholic Church has been using his name in vain ever since the time of St Paul. Were such allegations to be established, Western Civilization would receive a bigger blow to its backside than the one delivered by Charles Darwin. But Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code fashions these possibilities into a bullfighter's cape, with which he rouses his readers' thrill-seeking curiosity, and in the process he completely misrepresents the chivalric veneration for the Holy Grail that in fact marked the appropriation by Europe's aristocracy of the story of Jesus, which it altered to suit itself. Instead of anything "serious," he delivers a James Bond knockoff seasoned with shuddery rumors about the Templars. Anyone who thinks that The Da Vinci Code is a book for educated people has succumbed to the Middle Mind.

So has anyone who takes Saving Private Ryan to be a "serious" film. Having disemboweled Steven Spielberg's typically dishonest war story, Mr White writes,

In the thoroughly managed and self-surveilling world of the Middle Mind, how, we ought to ask, is it ever possible to create real art? How does anyone manage to elude its charming devices? Or how, as the great social theorist Theodor Adorno put it, can an autonomous or fine art be produced in a context of enduring societal unfreedom? Spielberg's films are not "free." They unroll under heavy ideological and aesthetic obligations (even if Spielberg is perfectly happy to acknowledge and live by these obligations.) The question before us is how others might elude Spielberg's fate. Adorno's ideas on art can help.

...

The most powerful and sinister gambit of what Adorno calls "administered society" is to promise the freedom of individuality while simultaneously prohibiting it. For example, consumers have been promised the "freedom of the open road" by auto-makers for the last half-century, but with each passing year the realization of that freedom becomes more unlikely for all the familiar reasons (not least of which is the perverse insistence of other individuals to use the same roads promised for your freedom). Or, more to our point, the Middle Mind offers us an art and a cultural commentary that is really just more commercial product. The promise of art becomes its betrayal.

...

For Adorno, the idea that the struggle for the virtue of "spontaneity" was being waged with pop culture would have been the assurance of its failure.

For my part, I have long regarded the term "pop culture" as a whopper of mendacity. Where genuine culture enriches people, the pop variety diminishes them, by replacing transformations that are both intellectual and emotional with anxieties about status and information. I'm not sure that we have to revive Adorno's modernist aesthetic (and a very ascetic aesthetic it is, too, always uncomfortable with comfort) to combat pop culture. I'm more optimistic: I think we can just turn off the television set and refrain from premature evaluation of the Harry Potter books. My objection to Curtis White's vision is that it divides cultural artifacts into the stark categories of "honest" and "fake." Terry Gross is an honest entertainer with a good grasp of what people are talking about. (Puritan disdain for "what people are talking about" is simply misanthropic.) She becomes a fake only when viewed as a literary critic with a microphone.

The second chapter of The Middle Mind, "Such an Awesome Site of Resistance," ought to be rewritten in tranquility. Mr White's rumbling irritation with Cultural Studies, Culture Wars, and Canons clouds his message, which is that what distinguishes great art and thinking from the not-great is the ability to "enstrange," a term that he borrows from the Russian formalist of the 1930's, Viktor Schlovsky. It is only with the appearance of Schlovsky's idea that the battles reviewed in the chapter attain an objective. The problem with human perceptions is that they become automatic with repetition: they engage less and less of the brain. Which is a good thing most of the time. But without the check of aesthetic refreshment, perceptiveness dies, and life becomes dead. Artists and thinkers have been grappling with the connection between novelty and passion ever since Rousseau. I wish that Mr White could think his way to suggesting that we revisit, along with Schlovsky, the aesthetic idea that prevailed before Romanticism: the question of Taste. It is time to accept the fact that successful art (and thought) cannot be essentially unpleasant to confront.

"Awesome Site" struck me as an insider's tirade, addressed to Mr White's fellow academics, and there were many touches that I could not assess; for one thing, I never did figure out just why Mr White undertook to use John Guillory's Cultural Capital as a heuristic (if that is what he was doing). The third chapter, however, "The Great American Disaster Machine," is a straightforward denunciation of the wrong-headedness of American life, which has its origin in a failure to grasp that our elevated standard living has entailed misery for much of the rest of the world. Mr White paints a gruesome little picture of the United States as an adolescent whose ADD can be forestalled only by kewl video games and mighty action movies:

Having staked my claim for the American military-industrial-technocratic empire as disaster machine, let me proceed to some of the particulars of the work of the imagination in relation to technology. The first scenario is from what I'll call the Adolescent Abyss, a conceptual place where the monomania for technology renders all other considerations not so much irrelevant as boring. Social considerations of justice barely exist, so enthralled are we here by the prospect of bombs going off, enemies being crushed, in a matrix requiring at least three of the following in any one incident: satellites in geosynchronous orbit (for the techno-geek looking at the world from the depth of the Adolescent Abyss, our victory in space is, if not more important, certainly more "awesome" than our victory in the Cold war), unmanned air vehicles, sensors of all kinds, gunships, the Global Positioning System, laser guidance systems, and nuclear missile interceptors (space-based lasers are a big fave [actually, space-based anything is a big fave (actually actually, just the notion of being "space-based," the mere sound of the hyphenated word, its quick-rhyme poetry, rocks this mind like a jolt of acid)]).

While I agree about the Adolescent Abyss, I find this passage more intemperate than amusing. The pile-up of parenthetical remarks at the end seems to sound a warning that the author may be about to be sucked into the AA at any moment. In other words, Mr White is in urgent need of the imperturbability of the poet he so admires, Wallace Stevens.

The next chapter, "The Highway of Despair Leads to a World in Love," tackles the question of how to avert the disaster to which a flattening technology may have doomed us. How can the Middle Mind, destitute of and almost allergic to imagination, rouse itself? As in the second chapter, Mr White's tone is punitive: he runs through a series of books about the role of imagination in American life only to discard them, to show that their promises are utterly false (or that, in the case of George W S Trow's My Pilgrim's Progress, they make no promises at all). Not for the first time, Jacques Derrida is called to the rescue, but the only result is to heap more contumely upon the unreflective American mind. It becomes clear that anybody who can follow Mr White's argument doesn't need this book, and that the people who presumably need Mr White's wake-up call will not hear it here. Ordinary Americans are very unlikely to recognize themselves in the thrall of The Middle Mind, and Mr White does less than nothing to invite them to consider the prospect. His contempt for uncritically contented Americans is not going to enamor him to them. If Mr White represents the Enlightenment position, then average minds will be forgiven for leaving the lights off.

The brief fifth chapter, "Notes Toward The Next American Sublime," might very well drive them deeper under the covers. In what appears to be a sketchy attempt to distinguish the beautiful from the meretricious, Mr White arrives at Regret for the Sixties. By focusing on the liberating aspects of the "counterculture," he fails to address the fear and revulsion that the tumultuous decade has deposited in so many American minds. It is not honest to remember the brilliant poster art and "experienced" rock music without also recalling the strain of reptilian opportunism that spoiled so many of the age's highest ambitions. We learned, I should hope, not to liberate ourselves before arranging for some fundamental protections. Any attempt to retread the Sixties without addressing the safety issue will never gain popular respect, certainly not among those Americans whose lives Mr White would like to change.

Although I first read this book nearly a month ago, I'm writing a few days after the news of Susan Sontag's death, and the coincidence jogs a thought: writers like Sontag, Joan Didion, and even Jane Smiley have mastered the art of disciplined outrage. Doubtlessly aware that women are commonly faulted by men for shrill incoherence, they proceed with the aloof obliviousness to pain of a great ballerina. Their voices are clear and level, neither raised nor lowered. They write with an appealing if tart dry humor, and they are never cute. It is regrettable that their example did not inspire The Middle Mind.

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