In his acceptance speech upon appointment to a prestigious professorship, Roland Barthes declared that language is “quite simply fascist.” I’d like to think that if I had been there, I would have stood up and shouted, “Then why don’t you shut the fuck up?”
Mario Vargas Llosa might have seconded my query. In Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the Nobel-winning novelist indicts what passes for academic “cultural studies” for the decline of interest in culture, as well as the dumb-down forces driving the media. On one hand, academic theorists, through their obscurantism and pretentious boredom, have waged war against the idea that cultural work can illuminate reality and critique the status quo. On the other, the media has transformed news into entertainment and entertainment into news, distracting consumers from the serious problems confronting our world.
As a humanist who believes that art and ideas have the power to change individuals and societies, Llosa finds much to worry about. Writing with clarity unknown to cultural theorists and depth beyond most journalists, he also dissects what passes for the contemporary fringe. “Culture that purports to be avant-garde and iconoclastic instead offers conformity in it worst forms: smugness and self-satisfaction,” he declares. The millionaires conned into purchasing one of Damien Hirsch’s stuffed sharks are a prime example.
Not every note in Llosa’s relentless drumbeat of pessimism rings entirely true. He worries too much about the rise of the image at the expense of the word. Perhaps, like some of the French theorists he despises, he invests too much importance to language and not enough on other ways of knowing. He dismisses the potential of popular music to convey meaning and significance beyond their role as consumer artifacts. But he correctly tugs at the roots of the problem in the trivialization of culture and the retreat of the intelligentsia into gnostic theories that license academics to turn their backs on engagement while allowing them to feel self-righteous in their weak-kneed posture of rebellion.
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