Discovering the Field and Parting Ways

Although I have been an avid fan of popular culture all my life, it took a while to realize popular culture could intersect with my work in academia. The change came when I was a Masters student in American Literature— a place where the fact that I’d rather be watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer over slogging through Nathanial Hawthorne was not the kind of comment you openly made in front of colleagues. I had always felt like a literature major merely by default. I loved to read, was apparently good at textual analysis, and to my knowledge, there weren’t many other paths to travel that rewarded those two factors. Then, as part of a teaching assistantship, I encountered James Berlin’s article, “Poststructuralism, Cultural Studies, and the Composition Classroom,” and discovered that popular culture had not only a place in academia but was also a field of study where rigorous textual analysis was being applied to the kind of texts I truly loved. I soon discovered there where whole journals devoted to the topic and a rich history of critical thought on popular culture (most of it lacking, in hindsight). To use a literary reference, I experienced a tremendous sea change, and was soon a doctoral student in the area of rhetoric, composition, and cultural studies.

In hindsight, Berlin was an odd introduction to integrating pop culture into academic studies and composition classrooms. After all, Berlin’s work, by his own admission, was much in line with the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (a school I would now heavily criticize). Though the aforementioned essay discusses how Berlin brought popular culture into the classroom, his social-epistemic rhetoric ultimately had little to do with discussing actual popularity or how his students integrated popular cultural texts into their worlds. In fact, the focus was on how their worlds could hardly be called their own considering the problematic place these texts held in the larger power contexts of society. Following in the theoretical footsteps of Aronowitz, Giroux, and Shor, social-epistemic rhetoric strived to fill a savior function. Students (in theory) were taught the semiotic codes of their hegemonic culture with the hopes that they would come to resist these codes and become more aware, humane, and democratic citizens. Sure, a television show might have made it into Berlin’s classroom; however, the focus was on how students had a cultural pre-disposition to interpret the show through the lens imposed upon them by the ideological villain-of-the-week: capitalism, hegemony, jingoism, etc. With all the emphasis on postmodernism and poststructuralism in Berlin’s late work, the entire project was oddly centered on a misplaced, elitist, and overly-rational faith in Enlightenment at its core: give students the power of reason and they will realize their “true” selves are under attack from a malicious culture industry.
  
Nevertheless, Berlin, gave me permission to bring popular culture into my first forays of teaching composition. Most of my colleagues had little interest in following me down this path. They couldn’t wait to finally have a captive audience of students to preach to about the brilliance of their own favorite novel. I was mostly accused of pandering and just trying to make the class “fun” for my students (though why fun would be a bad thing is something I’ve yet to figure out). The irony is: my students were not having fun. In fact, they were resistant, suspicious, and outraged at every turn. If we analyzed commercials or print ads, they rolled their eyes as if to say: they’re manipulative; we get it. One of two results came from asking them to write essays about one of their favorite television shows and how its semiotic codes were implicit in social ills. One, I would receive a truly appalling essay that went through the perfunctory moves of so-called “critical thinking” but offered no sense that the student truly believed a word of what they had written. Or two, I would receive a brilliantly composed essay where the student clearly knew how to play the grade game. The conclusions of these essays were the most telling. They always had either an implicit or explicit: so yeah, but I still love the thing you forced me to critique.

And they should.  It took me a few years to realize that this is a woefully unproductive way to study pop culture or bring it into the classroom. Turning students against the things they love is an odd pedagogical goal. It also (willfully?) ignores the complexity of concepts like taste, pleasure, and entertainment itself.  I started to care less what pop culture texts "meant," "should mean," or what effects the texts maybe, kinda, probably, likely were having on culture. I jettisoned the notion that I was some hero that needed to "save" my students. I don't want to a.) assume they need to be saved or b.) imply pop culture is something evil that one needs saving from. In many ways, I'm still trying to figure out where I'm at now. Most of the time, I don't even like saying I do "Pop Culture Studies" due to the negative connotation baggage. It's probably more accurate to say I do Taste Studies. Not as catchy. Probably sounds even more potentially frivolous than pop culture studies often gets accused of. And Taste Studies, if I can make that a thing, is a potentially harder beast to describe as it combines network theory, systems theory, psychoanalysis, neuroscience and any other tool that helps explain people's encounters with and reactions to popularity.

Good thing I have a blog, I guess.