Commodify Your Dissent by Thomas Frank

Author:Thomas Frank
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-03-05T05:00:00+00:00

Come Around to My Way of Thinking

Perhaps the only good thing about the commodification of “alternative” is that it will render obsolete, suddenly, cleanly, and inexorably, that whole flatulent corpus of “cultural studies” that seeks to appreciate Madonna as some sort of political subversive. Even though the first few anthologies of writings on the subject only appeared in 1993, the rise of a far more threatening generation of rock stars has ensured that this singularly annoying pedagogy will never become a full-fledged “discipline,” with its own lengthy quarterly issued by some university press, with annual conferences where the “subaltern articulations” of Truth or Dare are endlessly dissected and debated.

Looking back from the sudden vantage point that only this kind of image-revolution affords, the scholarship of academia’s Madonna fans now appears as predictable in its conclusions as it was entertaining in its theoretical pyrotechnics. After careful study of the singer’s lyrics and choreography, the professors breathlessly insisted, they had come upon a crucial discovery: Madonna was a gender-questioning revolutionary of explosive potential, a rule-breaking avatar of female empowerment, a person who disliked racism! One group of gaping academics hailed her “ability to tap into and disturb established hierarchies of gender and sexuality.” Another celebrated her video “Vogue” as an “attempt to enlist us in a performance that, in its kinetics, deconstructs gender and race,” an amusing interpretation, to be sure, but also one that could easily have been translated into academese directly from a Madonna press kit.

The problem is not that academics have abandoned their sacred high-culture responsibilities for a channel changer and a night at the disco, but that in so doing they have uncritically reaffirmed the mass media’s favorite myths about itself. Discovering, after much intellectual twisting and turning, that Madonna is exactly the rebel that she and her handlers imagine her to be, is more an act of blithe intellectual complicity than of the “radicalism” to which the Madonna analysts believe they are contributing. After all, it was Madonna’s chosen image as liberator from established mores that made her so valuable to the culture industry in the first place. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that singing the glories of pseudo-rebellion remains to this day the monotone anthem of advertising, film, and TV sitcom, or that the pseudo-rebel himself—the defier of repressive tradition, ever overturning established ways to make way for the new; the self-righteous pleasure-monad, changing identity, gender, hair color, costume, and shoes on a whim—is more a symbol of the machine’s authority than an agent of resistance. But academics seem to have missed the point. For years the culture industry has held up for our admiration an unending parade of such self-proclaimed subverters of middle-class tastes, and certain scholars have been only too glad to play their part in the strange charade, studying the minutiae of the various artists’ rock videos and deciding, after long and careful deliberation, that yes, each one is, in fact, a bona fide subversive. How thoroughly had they come around

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