The Daily Planet: A Critic on the Capitalist Culture Beat

Introduction
Critics walk a woozy line between the dilatory and the portentous. In the end, if we're lucky, a bit of wit saves us. Listen to Henry Adams, whose description of his work continues to be a beacon to my own. "The press," he wrote in his autobiography, was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and who would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism. The enormous mass of misinformation accumulated in ten years of nomad life could always be worked off on a helpless public. The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding school. But it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education. For decades, that quote has hung above my desk as I furiously typed (and, later, keyboarded). While it works well to puncture incipient punditry, it also reminds me, as does the life of the estimably interstitial Henry Adams himself, that we writers play public roles in public spaces, however rough-hewn those spaces may be.

Sometimes, we carve them out ourselves. As a cultural critic, I've had the good fortune to work in the worlds of journalism, advocacy and the academy, without ever having to give up my freedom. Rarely have my colleagues in one environment had the faintest clue of my existence in another. It has been like an inverse case of multiple personality disorder, in which all of my working selves are actually great friends, but each of which is unknown to the friends of the other. I am hoping this collection of my work will help introduce everybody all around, and also make a case for cultural criticism as an enterprise.

What I do, wherever I do it, is to explore the culture of daily life under capitalism and the ways in which our media help or hinder the project of a civilization in which all of our children can live well, together, in freedom. There are themes: expanding access to information; fostering public life and democratic process; understanding the subtle and not-so-subtle implications of imperial relationships; overcoming victim and identity politics in a polycultural society; finding ways in which art can take us past the glaze of the familiar, the daze of despair, and the cavilling of the helpless and inspire hopefulness about the human project. I have always been as interested in how business and government structures condition opportunity for expression and communication as I have been in the kinds of expression that emerge. And I have always hoped to talk to people about these themes in ways that would connect with their daily lives.

Who, me?     
When the term "public intellectual" started to get bandied about, I felt an enormous sense of relief. Finally, a name for what I was doing! And one that was a little more dignified, or at least more generic than terms like "thumbsucker," "policy wonk," "gadfly" and "pundit"--all those slyly contemptuous inside-the-Beltway pigeonholes, none of which fit me. Unfortunately, the term has come to be cloaked in piety. Among communications academics, it is often reduced to mean a popularizer of our knotty truths to those vulgarians in the press. It now also has its stars, what critic Carlin Romano calls, with his great ability to detect naked emperors, "publicity intellectuals." I suppose the soundbite-ization of the term was inevitable, but it's a pity, because it is a nicely non-career-specific term for symbolic analysis within the context of public life. And it distinguishes such work from the much more common practice--privatized intellectual work conducted by the myriad handmaidens to power in memos, briefs, consultants' reports, and strategizing behind closed doors.

Another reason that my heart leapt up at the idea of the term "public intellectual" was that it implied a commitment to the common good and a common conversation, and not merely ideological thrusts and parries between dueling think tanks. Not that I thought I was standing on neutral ground. My work is all colored by my commitment to fairness and to "strong" democracy, and by my conviction that we can cultivate better civilizational habits than the ones we inherited. These concerns, when I started out writing, placed me somewhere gently left of center of American politics. As politics have shifted with capitalist restructuring, my spot on the landscape has become much more of a left outpost. I think it will probably, even in my own lifetime, come to look more centrist again, as people begin to reorganize themselves along new lines. My fascination with the arts intersects with those concerns, without being congruent with them.

Yet another reason why I liked that label so much was that it distinguished intellectual life in public from politics. If it's one thing that journalism ought to teach you, it's the difference between acting within and on political structures and reporting on culture. Intellectual work can, obviously, sometimes also be political action. My policy writings--some samples are included in the second section of this book--were mostly political acts, at least when they started out. But my critical and journalistic writings are written to fuel public conversation, reaching beyond true believerdom, and that's a different process with different actors. So it's irritating to be neatly filed away under the rubric "left critic" by my pals on the arts beat, since I know full well that left critics are to critics as military music is to music. It's just as annoying to be labelled a "radical academic," since confusing education with political action is just the kind of thing that leaves the professoriate vulnerable to sniping both from the more-working-class-than-thou folks and the right.

Finally, that term "public intellectual" has the great advantage of crossing institutional boundaries, without disparaging them. Although I value my autonomy, I'm also grateful for the resources and collegiality of the institutions through which I've worked. Much of the journalism I have gratefully conducted within the orbit of In These Times. The weekly newspaper is the 1974 creation of left historians, especially James Weinstein, who joined a commitment to social equity with a passionate aversion to cant and dogma and a conviction in the force of properly informed argument. Much of my academic work has been done at American University's School of Communication, where Dean Sanford Ungar convinced me that returning to academe was a good idea. As an advocate, I worked at the United Church of Christ, long noted for its progressive activism, with a wide-open mandate from Beverly Chain, and with great encouragement from her precedessor the Rev. Everett Parker. All of these creative administrators found an intersection between their organization's needs and a cultural critic's curiosities.

Cultivating curiosity
Cultural criticism, when the culture is capitalism, has no neat career trajectory. I began by dashing off movie reviews ...

The Daily Planet: A Critic on the Capitalist Culture Beat.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.