Xref: murdoch uva.engl.amstdsma:73 Newsgroups: uva.engl.amstdsma Path: murdoch!darwin.clas.Virginia.EDU!if2n From: if2n@darwin.clas.Virginia.EDU (Ian Finseth) Subject: READING1:mechling Message-ID: Sender: usenet@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU Organization: uva Date: Sun, 11 Sep 1994 17:13:06 GMT An American Culture Grid, with Texts BY JAY MECHLING SO MANY FORCES IN THE MODERNIZATION OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS fragment and segment our world that one of the greatest obstacles to undertaking successful American Studies is getting our students to think about the connectedness of cultural systems. In the early 1980s I redesigned an introductory American Studies course around a scheme -- a grid, really, as I tend to think visually -- that I had found useful in thinking about the ways in which I might locate an individual American cultural "text" within the various vocabularies we scholars use to talk about culture. The grid was proving enormously useful to me in my own scholarship, so I designed the course entirely around the grid. The course went well, I thought, and the grid seemed to help students understand how American culture is a complex, interconnected "web of signification" (1). In the summer of 1984 I made a brief lecturing tour of American Studies centers and programs in Japan, and again I found the grid enormously useful for demonstrating my interdisciplinary approaches to American texts. I offer the grid here, therefore, not with claims of some remarkably new approach to American culture studies but with testimony that it seems to work well in stimulating conversations with students and with colleagues about the meanings of cultural texts. I have used the word "texts" several times now, so a good place to begin describing the grid is to discuss the narrative approach to culture. At about the time I began using the grid in teaching, I had been enjoying success having students read Gregory Bateson's essay, "The Pattern Which Connects," later published as the introductory chapter to Mind and Nature (1979) (2). That essay is about the connectedness of things, about pattern in mind and nature. In that splendid essay Bateson tells a little story about a computer programmer who wonders if the computer will ever think like a human being. The programmer puts the question to the computer, and after a few minutes of analyzing its own computational habits, the computer sends its answer to the printer. The programmer runs to the printer with great expectations, only to find the words: THAT REMINDS ME OF A STORY. Bateson's point, of course, is that to think like a human being is to think in terms of stories, and I tell my students that they can set aside all the fancy definitions of "culture" they may have learned in anthropology or the humanities and think of American culture simply as those stories that Americans tell one another in order to make sense of their lives. This working definition of culture is simple but not at all simple-minded, for it summarizes some very important ideas in culture studies from the last twenty years or so. First, it is a definition in keeping with the hermeneutic revolution in the human sciences, that is, the intellectual paradigm grounded in phenomenology and pursuing a post-rational social science that puts the social act of interpretation at the center of knowledge (3). In this model, "texts" enjoy no abstract, objectively real meaning; rather, their meanings emerge only through the act of interpretation, a collective act "determined" contextually, rhetorically, institutionally, generically, politically, and historically (4). Second, and on a less heady level, treating culture as stories directs our attention toward those theorists and critics who put human narration at the center of their study of culture. Thus, several disciplines are rediscovering the work of Kenneth Burke and of other rhetorical critics who provide useful ways to analyze the forms and style of human narration. Hayden White in history, interpretive anthropologists the likes of Clifford Geertz and James Clifford, the symbolic interactionists in sociology, Richard Bauman in folklore, Walter Fisher in communications, Kenneth Gergen in social psychology, Jerome Bruner in psychology, and Yi-fu Tuan in geography are but a few of the best known scholars urging upon their colleagues the study of narration as the key to understanding cultural texts (5). A third consequence of treating culture as stories is that the approach permits us to expand greatly our usually narrow notion of what constitutes a story. For Bateson, stories must have relevance and context, that is, they must cohere internally ("connectedness") and they must connect with other, larger systems of which they are a part. By "context" Bateson means simply "pattern through time," and many systems in nature and culture have pattern. Starfish and forests have "stories" in this sense, so we in culture studies may approach any behavior or artifacts of behavior and ask "what is the story of which this small text is a part?" A handshake is a text to be located within its story, the context of greeting and social relationships in America. A Victorian chair is a text to be located within its story, the context of history, taste, manufacture, and so on that makes sense of the chair's being in a particular parlor at a particular time and having a par- ticular form and function.6 Moreover, we can move outward from the single artifact of material culture to inquire about the stories implied by larger systems of artifacts, like a house, public building, public park or city design. Fourth, the narrative approach to culture settles nicely its "location." Culture is public. We can study culture without speculating on the internal, private meanings held by participating members of the society. This is anthropologist Anthony F.C. Wallace's point when he distinguishes between two models of culture, one that sees culture as a mechanism for "the replication of uniformity" and another that sees culture as a mechanism for "the organization of diversity." Wallace advocates the second model and shows how people with diverse "private cultures" (that is, their own "stories") can parti- cipate quite well in the collective "public cultures" that may or may not match the private. Note that this means people need not "believe" the public stories so long as they are able to act "as if" they believe those stories. Among these public stories we find the "mythologies" of the civilization, the grand, relatively enduring, public stories that seem to provide the largest "symbolic canopies" for events within the culture (8) Ronald Reagan's use of the western pioneer myth to reassure Americans after the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle would qualify as an example of American mythology used to repair damage done to our "sacred canopy" by the failure of our technology. Fifth, the narrative approach to culture helps us keep in mind that there is a contest of stories in the public sphere. Culture is not a matter of consensus but of conflict. Indi- viduals and groups offer their stories to the public as the best stories for understanding American experience. American political tradition permits the free telling of stories, and Americans are supposed to respect each other's right to tell his or her story. But few believe that all stories are equal, and the dynamic of culture lies in the contest of narratives in the public realm. And because it is a contest, power matters. Some people's stories have a better chance of becoming the official public stories than do others. And note, too, that stories in the material world may be involved in the same sorts of contests. Battles over the architectural redevelopment of a neighborhood, for example, are contests between two or more stories the neighborhood wants to tell about itself. So thinking about American culture as those stories that Americans use to understand their lives is not as simple an approach as it seems at first. Buried in that notion are complex, important ideas about the philosophical foundations for our culture studies, about disciplinary approaches to narration, about social practice and artifacts as narrative forms, about the public location of culture, and about the contested nature of cultural meanings. I want to introduce one more concept before presenting the grid. Levi-Strauss shows us that a myth (any story, for our purposes) derives its meanings from both its diachronic and synchronic structures (9). Levi- Strauss suggests thinking about music in order to understand the difference between the two simultaneous structures of a narrative. Think about the diachronic structure as the melody, the temporal sequence of notes that tell the music's main "story." The musical meaning of the melody lies in the patterns and relationships of those notes in their linear sequence. Similarly, in a narrative the diachronic structure lies in what we most often think of as "the story" or "the plot," that is, the temporal sequence of actions by characters. In contrast, think about the synchronic structure of a musical piece as the harmony, the set of relationships between notes heard simul- taneously. In a narrative the synchronic structure lies in the relationships between contrasting sets of characters, events, settings, and so on. Levi-Strauss stresses that these two sorts of structure exist simultaneously in narratives, and that the meaning of any particular character, object, or event must take into account the position of that character, object, or event within both structures. Will Wright's analysis of western films and Janice Radway's analysis of historical romance novels stand as splendid examples of American Studies scholarship using this distinction between diachronic and synchronic structures (10). Perhaps we are now prepared to look at the American culture grid and describe its uses in teaching American Studies (see figure below). Across the top of the grid are labels representing the three "realms of culture" that American Studies scholars are now accustomed to using -- elite, popular, and folk. Elite culture is that realm studied most often in the university. The stories in this cultural realm are told by people enjoying relatively higher levels of income, status, power, and education. The audiences for these stories tend to come from the same ranks of society. The authors and audiences of elite culture have the resources to create institutions (e.g., the university, libraries, and museums) for the preser- vation and performance of the stories. "Excellence" and "quality" are important terms in evaluating the stories of the elite. Authorship is crucial, and a text in elite culture can lose all its "value" if proven to be a forgery. The values of elite texts tend to be cutting-edge, since innovation is valued so much over convention in elite culture's judgment of creativity. We study the texts of elite culture out of con- fidence that we can learn much from watching a single mind create an insightful story about American culture. Thus it is that American Studies types can believe that Melville's story, "Billy Budd," is an enormously valuable text for understanding American culture, even though none of Melville's contemporaries got the chance to read and react to the story. An American Culture Grid with texts Realms of Culture: elite popular folk Rhetorical Form: -------------------------------------------------------------- landscape natural Yosemite frontyards history tour backyards museum built environment F. L. Wright tract home log cabin (private) home built environment San Fran. McDonald's auto showroom (public) city hall converted to church cuisine haute fast food family cuisine foodways clothing haute Levi's jeans folk costume couture photography Alfred "Look" family snapshot Stieglitz magazine album visual art Georgia advertising quilts O'Keefe billboard exhibit narrative Willa Harlequin tales and Cather romance urban legends novel novel dramatic David soap opera campfire skits production Mamet play music Charles Bruce fraternity and Ives, Springsteen sorority songs Symp. No. 2 dance S.F. Ballet disco square dance program ethnic dance game polo professional Boy Scout games baseball festival SF Opera Superbowl family opening halftime Thanksgiving night Popular culture, sometimes called mass-mediated culture, tends to be middle-culture in many senses. Certainly it is the predominant culture of the middle classes. In this realm, relatively anonymous makers produce stories mass- produced and conveyed through public media for consumption by mass audiences. The importance of convention and formula in popular culture narratives makes authorship rather irrele- vant, and many makers of mass-mediated culture work under pseudonyms. Excellence and quality are similarly irrelevant in our study of popular culture. We value this realm of culture as cultural evidence because large numbers of Ameri- cans are willing to pay money for access to the realm, which leads us to believe that those masses of Americans must be finding there something very comfortable, very compatible with their values. We assume that the values we find in the popular culture stories are the current, public values of the mass audiences. Things change rapidly in popular culture, in part because its nature as a commercial culture requires that value be created, and a fundamental way of creating value is to create difference. Each product is "new," "improved," "advanced" over the previous. We find folk cultures in the relatively small, face- to-face groups in American society. Folk cultures bear "traditions," those forms and contents that define the meaning of life for the group. Folk narratives tend to be highly conventional and formulaic, not unlike popular culture. The "authorship" of a text in folk culture usually is anon- ymous; or, better, we might say that the "author" of a tradition is the folk community itself. Jokes, legends, quilts, and other folk genres have no known authors, just living performers of the traditions. Still, there is room within a folk community to recognize an excellent performance of the tradition. The content and values of the stories tend naturally to be traditional and conservative. And in folk cultures, people tend to value the process of creation over its product, whereas in elite and popular culture the product is extremely important (though for different reasons). Vertically down the left hand side of the grid is a list of "rhetorical forms" or "languages" with which Americans conduct the public discourse, the public story-telling, that amounts to their culture. The rhetorical forms begin with material culture and move on down toward increasingly verbal genres. The list is not exhaustive but only meant to suggest some major forms of American discourse. The two dimensions create a grid of many cells, each of which might be filled with an American culture "text" as an example of the inter- section of those two dimensions. Creating the grid and beginning the task of filling the cells with representative "texts" leads the American Studies teacher and students to several important insights. First, we see quickly that the grid serves primarily as a heuristic device to begin thinking about culture as composed of narrative texts. It is only the beginning because we need not work on the grid long to discover that many everyday texts do not fit neatly into any one slot. The geometrical neatness of the grid obscures the lovely messiness of real culture, an important point to learn. Second, in observing the grid overall, the American Studies teacher and students can see that texts move. The walls of the grid's cells are permeable. Texts born in one cell move to another, either through appropriation or invasion. For example, breakdancing is an American urban folk dance genre with roots in the Caribbean and, probably, Africa. As breakdancing began to receive some media attention, purveyors of popular culture saw immediately that there was a profit to be made. Break- dancing entered mass-mediated culture, such as pop music videos, popular music, and feature films. When Michael Smuin came to choreograph the fiftieth anniversary gala of the San Francisco Ballet, of which he was artistic director, he brought fifty teenagers on stage during one of the numbers on the program to breakdance amidst the ballet dancers. Or, as another example, the "meaning" of alligators to Americans is encoded in a great many jokes and urban legends, such as the alligators-in-the-sewers legend. In turn, these folk ideas about alligators form the basis for mass-mediated narratives on television and in theatrical films. And an elite writer, Thomas Pynchon, uses the same legend for his own artistic purposes in his novel, V. The examples multiply. Elite culture "borrows" constantly from both the popular and folk realms, as in Andy Warhol's painting, Charles Ives's musical compositions, and fiction based upon folk stories. Popular culture has a voracious appetite for materials it can convert to marketable commodities, borrowing elite art to mass-produce "art prints" in poster form for every person's wall, or borrowing adolescent urban legends to make teenage horror films. Popular music has well-known roots in folk music, and the history of bluejeans (blue denim pants) alone teaches us much about the expropriation of symbolic texts across folk popular/elite boundaries. And although some critics worry that elite and popular culture will obliterate folk cultures, the evidence from folk- lorists suggests that folk cultures are quite resilient and draw strength from their talent for appropriating for their own uses the texts of elite and popular culture. Children's folk culture, for example, is filled with parodies of adult popular and elite culture. Folk artists have no trouble turning mass-mediated materials and themes to their own artistic purposes, and so on. Used in this way, the American culture grid can stim- ulate teachers and students to see the interconnectedness and dynamism of culture. But the grid as it now stands is only half the story, for the grid I imagine really has four dimensions, not two. The third dimension consists of those qualities that Americans use to distinguish themselves one from the other. And the fourth dimension consists of those relatively enduring narratives that deserve the name, myth. The third dimension to the American culture grid intro- duces the notion of pluralism, of many cultures participating in the public contest between stories. The five qualities that I find most useful for describing this dimension are gender ethnicity (and race), social class, region, and age. There probably are other important qualities (I could add religion to the list, for example, but evidence mounts that this variable predicts increasingly less about a person's beliefs), but these five serve very well in reminding us that our general- izing about "Americans" must take into account how Americans may differ according to these social variables. Put differently, any "text" that we place in one of the cells of the grid probably represents not all Americans but a group defined by one or more of these social variables. Soap operas (daytime television serials) may be an important dramatic form of popular culture, but we must ask questions about gender, ethnicity, class, region, and age before we will have a complete picture of the audiences for whom these stories are meaningful narratives about life. These five variables alert us to the fact that there may be some very specific American cultures that share narratives. This amounts to the teachers and students recognizing what advertising and marketing professionals have come to realize, that the American public of consumers behave as if they were clustered into "market segments," identifiable "lifestyles" that may be targeted with very precise messages and appeals. If middle-aged, middle-class African-American women on the West Coast tend to prefer the same narratives (advertising, let us say), and if these same narratives are meaningless to an audience if we change one or more of these variables, then we have seen how careful we must be in generalizing about the "meanings" of an American text. We must always ask "meaning to whom and in what contexts?" The fourth dimension of the American culture grid (one dimension beyond my ability to draw) is what I call mythologies, the relatively enduring stories that run through the grid, connecting disparate cells into one coherent story. The "American Adamic myth" is one example familiar to American Studies students and teachers, but there are others. The American "monomyth" identified by Jewett and Lawrence crosses several genres (l2). There is something like a three-hundred year history to the "captivity narrative" Slotkin found in early America and extending to the present (l3). In fact, it is tempting to suppose that there is a finite number of basic myths in American civili- zation, and that once we have created the list of these myths and their major variants we will have accounted for all of American culture. This makes an interesting project, though it is unlikely to succeed. American Studies teachers can use the grid as the basis for class exercises, assignments, and projects. The text-centered approach of the grid lends itself naturally to assignments asking the students to write interpretive essays based upon textual analysis. The student begins with a single text, a sort of cultural puzzle, and the assignment is to interpret the text in all its contexts. The grid helps locate the text as a form of discourse within a certain realm of culture, but the grid also leads the student to consider if and how the text moves. How is the text "determined" by certain conventions, and where does it appear in the contest of interpretations? What have gender, race, class, region, and age have to do with this text? In short, what "story" makes best sense of this text and how is that story related to other stories? The grid also leads away from textual analysis to fieldwork based with live producers and consumers of the stories. A good model here is Janice Radway's study of historical romances, a popular genre read primarily by women. Feminist textual analysis concludes that these novels are "bad" for women, bearing messages and values that sustain the hegemonic patriarchy. But Radway asks the simple question: what use do the women who read them make of these novels? So in addition to her textual analysis of many romances, Radway interviewed and surveyed readers (including some men) about the meanings they drew from the novels. For American students this sort of fieldwork is rather easy, and American Studies teachers ought to include fieldwork exercises in their courses. American Studies courses taught outside of the United States do not so easily include fieldwork, but even outside the United States students can either interview Americans or interview the natives of the home society who are consumers of American films, music, and other products. Texts do not always speak for themselves, so we always ought to check our textual interpretations by asking the participants what they think are the meanings of the texts. Two aspects of the grid make it especially attractive, I should think, to the American Studies instructor teaching students outside the United States, students who are not native Americans and who do not have a great deal of tacit knowledge to tap in their understanding American culture. First, the grid makes all realms of culture and all rhetorical forms equally valuable as starting points for the inter- pretation of a text in its cultural contexts. Unlike traditional approaches to American Studies, which privilege the history, art, and literature of the elite, the grid attributes no special usefulness to the sorts of texts with which American Studies began. A piece of furniture is just as useful a "text" for beginning the cultural analysis as is a Hawthorne story. Both texts lead us necessarily into wider and wider contexts of signification. Both texts are determined historically, politically, generically, institutionally, and rhetorically. Both require us to ask questions about gender, race, class, region, and age. Both show evidence of "moving" across the grid (Hawthorne used folk ideas and ballad plots in his stories). The grid permits the teacher to enter the "webs of signification" at whatever level is appropriate for the students' grade level and mastery of English. In fact, the material culture portions of the text could be taught entirely in the students' native language. Moreover, the grid legitimatizes the study of those sorts of cultural texts -- theatrical films, television, popular music, popular dress -- with which the students are bound to be most familiar. Beginning with the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen and moving eventually to the poetry of Walt Whitman sacrifices nothing in American Studies and may lead to some new insights into the continuities and discontinuities of American civilization. Second, the text-centered grid encourages comparative culture studies, which must be central to American Studies both within the United States and abroad. Just as texts from the grid move across the grid into different contexts, so may find certain cultural texts within different cultural contexts. I can offer a few salient examples just from my brief visit to Japan. The game of baseball is enormously popular in both the United States and Japan, yet it means something very different in the two contexts. Sergio Leone's highly successful "spaghetti Western" film, A Fistful of Dollars (1966), starring Clint Eastwood, is a remake of Kurosawa's equally successful samurai film, Yojimbo (1961). The similarities and differences between these two films permit the teacher and students to discuss the formulae of the two genres and the nature of the hero in each culture. American fast-food restaurants are plentiful in Japan, but the Japanese have put a distinctive cultural stamp on every aspect of those popular culture dining experiences, from the seasonings of the hamburgers to the display of wax food to the deferential bow of a life-size Ronald McDonald statue welcoming the diner. And a team of scholars could work for years comparing the Tokyo and Anaheim Disneyland parks. My aim here has been to offer a teaching device that can provide the organizing principle for a single class session, for an entire American Studies course or for an entire American Studies curriculum. The text-centered approach to American Studies frees the students and teacher of the "coverage fallacy," that this, the notion that an American Studies course must "cover" a certain body of material, and that undertaking interdisciplinary American Studies is so difficult because we must try to "cover" all of American history, art, literature, philosophy, and so on. Instead, the text-centered grid reminds us that cultures are interconnected systems of stories, and that beginning with one story or even a piece of a story can lead us into discovering other American stories. The "facts" of American history and artistic culture can be learned by anyone; the more important goal is to learn how to find in any finite body of facts "the pattern which connects." NOTES 1. We can thank anthropologist Clifford Geertz for reminding us of this, Max Weber's felicitous phrase, "web of signification". See Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 5. 2. Gregory Bateson, "The Pattern Which Connects," CoEwlution Quarterly (Summer 1978): 5-19, and Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979). 3. For the philosophical foundations of this approach, see the essays collected in Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy, eds., After Philosophy: End or Transformation? (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987). For a sample of culture criticism in this tradition, see the essays collected in Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan, eds., Inter- pretive Social Science: A Reader (Berkeley: University of California Press 1979). 4. James Clifford, "Introduction: Partial Truths," in Writing Culture "The Poeics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 6. 5. Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988) Richard Bauman, Verbal Art as Perfonnance (Prospect Heights Ill.: Waveland Press, Inc., 1977); Walter L. Fisher, Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason, Value, and Action (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press 1987); Kenneth J. Gergen, Toward Social Transfonnation in Social Knowledge (New York, Springer-Verlag, 1982); Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986); Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974). 6. E. McClung Fleming, "Artifact Study: A Proposed Model," Winterthur Portfolio 9 ed.Ian M.G. Quimby (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1974). pp. 153-173. 7. Anthony F C Wallace, Culture and Personality (2nd ed.; New York: Random House, 1970). 8. "Symbolic canopies" and "symbolic universes" are phrases used by Peter L. Berger; see his The Sacred Canopy (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1967). 9. Claude Levi-Strauss, "The St-!ructural Study of Myth," Journal of American Folklore 68 (1955): 428-444. 10. Will Wright, Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1976), and Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance Women, Patricarchy and Popular Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). 11. Jay Mechling, "Alligator," in American Wildlife in Symbol and Story, ed Angus Gille. and Jay Mechling (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), pp. 73-98. 12. Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, The American Monomyth (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/ Doubleday, 1977). 13. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence (Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), and Elizabeth Walker Mechling, "Patricia Hearst: Myth America 1974, 1975, 1976," Western lournal of Speech Communication 44 (1979): 168-179.