Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror: Cultural Studies Classrooms and Aesthetic Value Judgments

This is the 3rd post in a series of posts. They are focused on a science fiction class I taught in the Summer of 2011. Here is a link to the previous posts: Visions of Delight,Visions of Horror

This post is an attempt to begin to justify the texts I chose for this class, many of which might be considered "popular culture" or "mass culture".

When I referred to "Visions of Horror, Visions of Delight: Technology and the 20th Century Cultural Imagination" as a "science fiction" class, I wasn't specific enough. It wasn't just a science fiction "literature" class; it was a "science fiction" class in the broadest sense. We didn't just read science fiction literary texts (although there were some). We looked at all sorts of media: films, television shows, musicians, etc.. The approach to the class might fall under the umbrella of "cultural studies," because very little was done in the class to defend the texts we were analyzing as "works of art". It didn't seem to matter what kind of "aesthetic value" the texts had that we pulled from.

Before I proceed in later posts to analyze television shows and films and comic books and video games (as well as literary texts), I want to briefly meditate on the principles by which I included these texts in my class. I want to reflect on the "cultural studies" classroom.

This is a reason why "cultural studies" or "sociological approaches" to literature get a bad rap. They treat "art objects" as no different than any other cultural texts (e.g. a cereal box or magazine ad). Both art objects and other "cultural texts" derive from a given culture, the argument goes, and so both of these things--it stands to reason--might be able to tell us something about that culture. This suggests Don DeLillo's famous criticism of popular culture studies in his novel, White Noise, where he discusses how popular culture departments spend all their time studying cereal boxes and gumball machine toys. 

I take issue with this. I don't think any and every text is worth studying. I believe that there is, indeed, such a thing as "artistic value," but I don't think it's easy to describe the source of that value. Why do we "value" some texts over others? Why do we think some texts are more "artistic" than others? More beatufiul? More ugly? To answer that question we are required to probe the fundamental, ideological assumptions of our culture.

Often times this sort of probing is outside of the scope of a class that utilizes a "cultural studies" approach. And so teachers will choose texts that have not been traditionally considered "valuable" to shock students into realizing and questioning why they value, say, Shakespeare over comic books.

While I truly think it's worthwhile to analyze and lay bare the first principles that inform our aesthetic judgements, I think it's also important, however, to make the most out of classroom time. What do I mean? Well, if you're going to spend hours and hours of class time discussing a text, it should probably be one I "stand by".

What do I mean by this? I can't bring myself to discuss a text that I don't consider art. I feel like it's too much of a waste of time. That's not to say I don't bring texts into the classroom that many might question as "art." For example, in this class I had my students watch a Twilight Zone episode, a Star Trek episode, and a Star Trek: the Next Generation episode. And. Yeah. I think these episodes are artistic; by which I mean, I think they create interesting effects and that they can be used to think about the world in interesting ways.

So here's my thesis: in a cultural studies classroom, it's important for a teacher to get students to analyze the ideological (by which I mean social, or conditional) principles that inform their value judgments. Students should leave a cultural studies classroom looking awry at established "canons of taste" (and not necessarily having thrown them aside). And yet, this sort approach shouldn't be a reason to just bring any text into the classroom. The principle of decision should rest with the instructor, whose professional commitment to scholarly goals will be the determining factor.

Here's what I believe: when "cultural studies" teachers pick texts, their judgement is necessarily aesthetic. Even when they choose a cereal box to study, they are assessing this object as a piece of art, even if they're simply saying it's ugly, or uninteresting, or a negative-art object. Often times cultural studies folks attempt to adopt a "neutral" or "non-aesthetic" posture towards the work they study. I don't think we can do that. We necessarily deploy value judgments onto texts we choose to discuss or study.

In the end, my point is simple: students should evaluate the assumptions that inform their aesthetic value judgements, and so should instructors. But this doesn't mean that we shouldn't make them.

Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror: Technology and the Cultural Imagination of the 20th Century (Post 1)

So, last summer I was lucky enough to be able to create and teach a science fiction class at Case Western Reserve University. The title of the class was "Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror: Technology and the Cultural Imagination of the 20th Century." Here is the course description:

Since the Swing Riots of the 1830s, when rural English farmers destroyed the threshing machines that were making their labor obsolete, many thinkers and artists have noticed how we are both amazed by and horrified of the technologies that we have produced to expand and develop human potential. From fears of robot uprisings, misanthropic supercomputers, to hopes of immortality through digital reincarnation, technology as it has emerged in cultural discourses like film, art, literature, music and television has been inflected in a diversity of ways, as messianic, horrifying, beautiful, and perverse. This seminar will probe this intriguing ambivalence by looking at a variety of cultural texts that enunciate this tension, and it will do so in the service of making its participants more critically aware of how our technologically accelerating moment is calibrating and perhaps revolutionizing the way we construct identities, delimit our organic bodies, define our sexualities, and negotiate and reconcile our religious convictions.

In grasping for the above goal, seminar participants will analyze foundational literary texts that negotiate the above themes, namely Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and H.G. Wells's The Time Machine. Participants will also consider important foundational texts in the coordinate filmic tradition associated with these issues, e.g. Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Participants will also listen to and discuss musical texts that deal with the themes outlined above, namely Daft Punk's Human After All and Connor Oberst's Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. Participants will also read and discuss non-fictional texts that treat the above described concerns, namely Katherine Hayles How We Became Posthuman and Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Participants will also consider how television texts like Gene Roddenberry's original Star Trek series and Rod Sterling's The Twilight Zone symptomatize historically determined assessments of technology's steadily expanding infiltration of daily life.

Let me be upfront: teaching the class was an amazing experience. Some of conversations we had in that class--about Cylons and Replicants and Androids--are the reasons why I got into academic world in the first place.

A lot ideas came out of that class that--not hyperbole--revolutionized my understanding of technology's role in science fiction. It was propitious, of course, that I had a class of about 20 geniuses helping me along the way.

Anyhow...

I'm going to be blogging about the themes addressed in that class. My goal is to revisit the texts we touched on in order to get down some thoughts on them.

And I'd be happy if you joined me along the way!

Metablog Comment: As with my other series (e.g. extended review of the anthology Swords and Dark Magic, The Weird History of the Novel, and The Rogue and the Merchant Pulp Novel Project) these posts will be semi-regular. Why all the post series? I like having series to return to because sometimes "my thoughts make more sense" when I fit them into an overarching framework.