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Critical thinking and cultural recycling: A critical approach to the uses of bad movies
Matteo Stocchetti – Senior Lecturer – Arcada University of Applied Sciences
Introduction
Are you among those who complain, have complained or intend to complain for the
outrageous amount of visual trash afflicting our big, small and very small (mobile devices)
screens? If the answers to one or more of the previous questions is ‘yes’, here there’s
something that maybe of interest for you. Imagine if all this trash could have beneficial
pedagogical effects. Imagine if more or less cheap productions and expensive but
manipulative and culturally hegemonic movies could be transformed in valuable pedagogical
texts.
If by now I haven’t got your attention, I just give up. But if I had, here’s my claim:
even trash movie can be processed by learned individuals to develop critical analytical skills,
to reach a deeper understanding of ourselves and of the world in which we live.
How? You’ll have to read the rest of this short article to find out.
The eyes of the beholder
I am pretty sure that the reader won’t let me get away with the rest of this paper if I
don’t explain what I mean by ‘bad movies’- the examples of filmic garbage that should get
the attention of the anthropologist committed to the progress of human civilization; those
specimens of cinematic compost that deserve analytical interest for the upbringing of a
critical mind.
For our purpose my point is simple: a bad movie can be everything you, reader,
consider as such. It does not have to be a ‘Z’ class movie or a Hollywood blockbuster the
kind of Pearl Harbour (Bay, 2001). If you think The Nights of Cabyria (Fellini, 1957) and
The Seventh Seal (Bergman, 1957) are bad movies, that’s perfectly fine with me – for now. If
the beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, so is ugliness. And if for a moment we agree that a
bad movie is an ‘ugly’ movie we can move beyond the problem of defining trashiness in
filmic communication and concentrate on ourselves, on our ‘eyes’ and the beauty or whatever
else may lay behind them.
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In fact, the eyes of the beholder are connected to her mind. But her mind, lives and
develops in a close relationship with the social world of individual minds. Our opinions,
believes, as well as likes or dislikes result from a complex web of hopes, fears, ambitions,
projections, representations, identifications, prejudices, stereotypes, boundaries, explorations,
experiences and a myriad of other processes that the individual cannot perform in isolation.
This is why, and this is maybe the general point I would like to propose here, matters
of taste must be discussed as social matters. These matters are constitutive of the social
individual and, therefore, of society itself. And it is because of this close association between
our filmic tastes, our minds and the rest of the social world that bad movies can be
transformed from cultural garbage into opportunities for self-improvement and critical
thinking – shall we call it cultural ‘recycling’?
Critical thinking: Self, Other and the power of media
For cultural recycling to take place, and to transform worthless movies into valuable
opportunities for personal enrichment we need critical thinking. This is a special form of
thinking still too scarcely practiced even in our democratic societies. Generally speaking,
critical thinking aims at understanding the social construction of reality (Stocchetti &
Kukkonen, 2011). In our discussion, critical thinking aims at understanding what bad movies
can do to us and to our fellow humans, and how they can do whatever they do. Here I will
briefly discuss this way of processing filmic trash through three main steps: the knowledge of
the Self, the knowledge of our social environment (sometimes called the Other) and the
knowledge of the impact of media/films on both – the ‘power’ of ‘bad movies
In psychology the Self is two things: the set of attitudes and habits that make each of us a
unique individual (sometimes also called ‘identity’) and the knowing subject, the active
agency that can know about these attitudes and habits. By asking you to focus on your
response to a bad movie I essentially asked you to get in touch with your Self: to see yourself
as an object of inquiry and to experience yourself as the inquirer.
This inquiry, however, presents an interesting feature: it creates its own objects. This
is to say that we built our Self by looking for it or, more precisely, that we develops our selfreflective capacity by using it. The knowing Self is not a given. It is constructed by the
experiences that, since the very beginning of our life, connect us to the social world. The
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critical self is the capacity to look at these experiences with reflexive eyes and to look at our
connection with the social world not as a given or immutable link but as a work in progress, a
source of challenges and opportunities, the background demanding our active engagement for
the fulfilment of our life project.
Once we have equipped ourselves with a notion of the Self, we can process a bad
movie further to gain insights into the nature of our social environment: the crowd of people
that inhabit our lives as relatives, friends, acquaintances or more or less close neighbouring
strangers. This environment is our “world”. Its main feature is that it appears as a ‘natural’
world: given and regulated by ‘laws’ beyond our reach. Critical thinking applied to filmic
trash may help us to gain a greater insight on our positioning in our social environment e.g.
by simply questioning our inclination to like or dislike what everybody else like or dislikes:
to follow the pack or not.
It will be at this point, when the Self and Other have gained an establish position in
our mind, that we are ready for the next step: the actual questioning of what (bad) movie can
do to us and our social environment. This is the stage in which we may be able to see how
even cultural garbage play a role in the social construction of reality, in the establishment and
preservation of way of thinking or not thinking about society; of discussing or not- discussing
about its problems. In the process we may change our ideas about power and the nature of the
social world. Concerning the latter, the opportunity here is to discover that our social world is
far less established that we may have thought and that opportunities for change are less scarce
than we may have hoped. And in doing this we will finally see the true nature of the social
world and its constructed nature. Concerning the former, we may realize that power is not
only about coercion or the capacity of forcing someone to do something. More subtly and
effectively, the exercise of power can be a negative force: the ability to put someone in a state
of non-action, to inhibit active engagement, to passivize, to avoid critical thinking. After all,
if we can control the mind, there is no need to control the bodies.
Look at You!
To start practicing critical thinking we have first to find our Self - and get a bit
familiar with it. In order to do this, think of yourself as an intelligent, sensitive and especially
active human. This means that our brain should not passively absorb the flow of images and
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sounds that cross our sensorial system. Let’s put our mind to work, in addition to our
consciousness, waking up the capacity to think what we feel and why.
Easier said than done. Why? Because for some unfortunate circumstances most of us
endorse the idea that good entertainment is what allow us to stop thinking – a bit like a pain
killer that enable us to forget our headache for a while. Maybe there’s some truth in this and
there’s a pain in us that requires these type of painkillers. If we stop here, to ask what the
problem is that makes the consumption of trash movie some sort of necessary evil, then we
are already doing the critical thinking job: looking into our lives, our daily routines, our
society to try to understand where’s the pain coming from.
The idea that entertainment is synonymous with evasion from (or avoidance, or
dodging of) the problems that afflicts our existence is quite popular and, I would add,
resistant. Some people may even get upset with us if we challenge it – in a way that remind
me of some addicts’ reaction if one tries to get them out of their addiction.
We should be very clear about two points. First: stop thinking is dangerous! It can
harm your mental and physical health. When it comes to movie (or other visual texts, for that
reason) it is a bit like eating without chewing - no wonder one feel a bit strange afterwards
and sick in the long run. Secondly, learning to think critically can actually be fun, more
entertaining than passively watching bad movies.
So let’s think. But what exactly? If you are not trained in critical movie-thinking, the
first exercise is to imagine yourself watching the movie. Imagine yourself sitting in front of
the screen, the bluish light flashing on your face, and try to see the expression in your eyes.
Here, we’ll assume that we are watching an unremittingly bad movie. There’s no question
about our opinion about it. The relevant questions here are about the origins and the
connotation of this opinion. Why and how we don’t like it?
The second important step, after ‘watching yourself watching’, is to dig deeper into
the negative emotional response a bad movie is able to solicit in us. What is the nature of this
response? Is that, for example, irritation, or rather boredom, frustration or even anger? We
should make an effort to give a name to our emotions, to find in our language the right words
to describe what’s going on in our mind (or maybe ‘heart’) as a result of engaging with a
particular sample of visual trash. As in fairy tales, giving a name is to gain a certain control
on the object we are naming (in fairy tales usually a goblin, a spirit, a fairy etc.). By naming
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our emotions we can start interrogating them, to see, for example, where they come from,
how they were awaken, so to say, by that particular imagery, and what kind of message their
awakening may carry for us.
Once we have given a name to our emotion, the next thing is to try to understand its
origins. What is in that particular movie, for example, that is so irritating? Irritation is an
interesting one because it is more intense than boredom but less obvious than anger. Boredom
and anger, however, are also interesting and once we get more familiar with critical thinking
we may enjoy engaging with those. But now is irritation.
A typically irritating movie is one that, more or less subtly, induces the viewer to
assume a certain standpoint. For example, too many mainstream movies pretend to tell
everyday stories by featuring characters that looks in their late 20s, but live standards of
living that a few people in real life can afford only towards the end of their professional
careers, in their late 50s or 60s, if ever. The spectacle of the privileged few presented as
‘normal people’ can be irritating as the suggestion to eat “de la brioches” when there’s a
shortage of bread (Cf. allegedly Marie Antoinette, wife of Louis XVI)
Also irritating is the role of weapons in so many action movies. The confrontation
between Mr. Good Guy and Mr. Bad Guy is a canon that has roots in the cosmological
confrontation between Good and Evil. In trash movies, however, the value of the myth is
reduced to the calibre of a gun or to the individual skills in using it. The narrative complexity
of a fundamental dilemma of human condition is reduced into a confrontation in which the
winner is eventually not Mr. Good but Mr. Big Gun. What may irritate us here is the fact that
these movies are indeed regressive: they induce the viewer to accept the subordination of
justice to weapons technology and military skills – in essence, a return to the law of the
jungle with a technological twist.
Bad movies are usually not cheap in the strict sense of this word. Quite the contrary,
the banality of the narrative – the actual story the movie is telling – is often nicely dressed in
flashing and expensive ‘special effects’ designed to keep the adrenaline running in the
viewer. Like in the rhetoric of demagogues and vulgar people, colourful images are used not
make a point but to hide the absence of it.
Take sex & violence, for example. Sex and violence are important elements in human
life because they are closely associated to life and death. The question that a critical mind
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may want to ask here is, to what extent visual sex and visual violence are relevant in relation
to the overall point of this movie? Bad movies typically exhibit both not to make a point but
to offer an emotional reward to the movie-consumer for her choice. And if one is inclined to
speculation, it may be suggested that in the nature of this connection – the use of image and
the communication of a message – one may also find an important distinction between
commercial pornography and erotic art.
Irritation is a response to visual narrative we read as manipulative, inconsistent, dull,
etc. Whatever the reason, however, the same irritation is a symptom that something important
is happening in our mind. If we follow this lead, a bad movie can help us problematizing
values, opinions, beliefs or else, that are challenged by the badness of the movie itself.
As a note, and to avoid confusion, one should add that great movies are also
challenging, but in a different way. Every acknowledged masterpiece in film as well as
literary history owns its reputation to the fact of addressing important aspects of the human
condition. Masterpieces perform this function thanks to the skill of the Author. Bad movies
may do the same thanks to the skills of the reader – and it should be clear by now that here
we are indeed celebrating the Reader!
Once we know, more or less, why a given movie is irritating (or boring, or upsetting,
etc) we may start digging deeper. Just keep in mind that for every reason to dislike we are
able to name, there is an opportunity to get acquainted with aspects of our persona that may
otherwise remain unfamiliar to ourselves. Preferences are associated to our identity but our
identity is a complex result of the interaction with our social environment – our history,
memory, upbringing, cultural belonging, hopes, fears, etc. This is why from a critical
engagement with a bad movie, we may learn more about not only ourselves but also about the
social world.
Once we know how we feel, once we have given a name to the emotions that a bad
movie is able to solicit in us, it may be interesting to play the historian or the archaeologist
with our own life. We can start from the present, the ‘here & now’ of our encounter with this
particular bad movie and rewind, going back to the point in time when we last saw another
bad movie or, quite the contrary, when we had our last fortunate experience with a good one.
Was the previous bad one ‘bad’ in the same way? Maybe or maybe not. ‘Badness’ may come
in many forms and shape and to dig into the articulations of our dislike can be as useful and
entertaining as discovering further branches in the tree of our desires.
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We are now digging in our past, following the traces of emotions left by pleasant and
unpleasant engagements with movies or other forms of visual culture and entertainment, to
reconstruct the history of our aesthetic persona – how we became what we are. Commonly,
we think of emotions as some sort of ingredient or attribute associated to something else. But
feeling and emotions can also be used as quick references for the mapping of important
information and knowledge associated to our life. As we shall see if we engage in this
archaeological work, the private history of our filmic inclinations will feature not only
feelings and emotions but also a wide range of characters that at different stage populated our
lives and, in one way or another, may have had a role in our growth. Maybe father liked
‘spaghetti western’ or mother liked the early soap operas? And what about the filmic
preferences of our friends and our first boy/girlfriend? And what about our peers and friends?
If we manage to let these characters enter our enquiry, we are now ready for the next step.
From Self to Other: the management of difference
Among the many questions one may ask, there’s at least one that in my opinion is
particularly important: Can we afford to dislike what everybody else seems to appreciate?
The answer to this question is an indicator of independency from our social environment.
Complete independence is rather unusual and in some measure we all are what we are
because of the society we live in. With this in mind, however, we may still ask to what extent
our opinions about movies (and other things) are really ours; if what we like or dislike
reflects our dispositions or inherited influence, ideas and preferences of significant others,
that we have interiorised but now experience as ours. We may now turn our gaze to the
world.
We ‘watch’ people watching movies and we ask: what are they thinking? We can’t
read people mind but we are people too and we may, therefore, formulate a few hypothesis
about how and why people like a given movie. You can ask others the questions you’ve
asked to yourself. But if you do, be aware that asking critical questions is an important social
act: it may irritate some and making other curious; getting some closer and others more
distant. The important outcome of our enquiry is not the objective assessment of the (bad)
movie but rather an appraisal of our relative position in the social network: of ‘where we
stand’, of the difference and similarities that divide and unite us to the rest of society. At this
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stage of our recycling process we will ask questions concerning the relative positioning of our
preferences in relation to the preferences of others.
We can ask, for example, who are those that like the movie I dislike? What do I think
about them? If I dislike Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994) because I don’t think is funny to see
someone whose head is blown up by mistake, how do I handle the score of those who
actually thought that was funny? How do I feel thinking that so many people around the
world enjoy war movies? Can I manage to preserve my civic respect for those that love
Chuck Norris’ movies? Isn’t there something wrong with those men that like French movies
– whatever is meant by that? Can I conceive the possibility that those who consider Empire of
the Senses (Oshima, 1976) a masterpiece are something else than perverts? Is it possible for
someone to like South Park (Stone & Parker, 1997) and still be a good American citizen?
And so on.
Maybe I am a completely subjugated, mainstream movie goer that enjoys only
mainstream Hollywood movies with sufficient doses of inexplicit sex, explicit violence and
even more explicit advertisement. Can I live with the idea that someone may dislike the
movies I like without necessarily being a Communist or an Islamic terrorist? And is there any
chance for the suspicion to arise that something crucially important may have been missing in
my upbringing? Maybe I am a radical intellectual (French?) that does not even possess a TV
set, that only goes to cinema d’essai and only enjoys small productions from unknown
directors with unpronounceable names. Can I tell how much of my self-esteem depends on
my aesthetic isolation? And is there any chance for the suspicion that my fear of mediocrity
may indeed hide a deeper fear of not deserving my place in the world?
Whatever the case, my suggestion here is that by looking at bad movies critically, and
asking questions about those who agree or disagree with us, we end up asking important
questions concerning our social world and our position in it; issue concerning integration and
isolation, for ourselves and those around us; issues which are fundamentally about the
management of diversity in society.
If we can do that, we are ready to move on and start to engage issues of power.
The power of cultural trash and the social construction of the world
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If you are among those that complain about the increasing amount of trash filling up
the cultural tanks of our lives chances are you also believe this trash has the power to
contaminate, suffocate or otherwise induce the decay of our body-social. But this need not to
be the case since, as I shall argue shortly, the detrimental effects of bad movies depend on our
ability to deal with them. The third step in our critical engagement with cinematic trash is to
ask questions of power or: what trash can do to us? The concept of power is an important one
in critical thinking but also a difficult one to handle. The critical engagement with our
favourite bad movie can offer an opportunity to learn a few things about this notion applied to
cinematic narratives and other type of texts.
In a critical perspective, the notion of power is usually associated to the idea that
powerful (e.g. a powerful text) is something that is influential on the social construction of
reality. In this perspective, a powerful movie is a movie that is influential on the social
construction of reality and on the way we think, write and talk about important problems of
our lives. The idea that movies ‘have’ power, however, is misleading for at least two reasons.
First, because power is not an attribute or a commodity that someone can ‘have’ in greater or
lesser quantity, but rather a relationship between two or more parties. Rather than ‘having’
power, a powerful agent is one that can take advantage of a situation in which circumstances
make her more influential than the other agent to whom she is connected to. Second, a movie
cannot ‘have’ power also because, as a form of text, it is an inanimate object that does not
have a will, cannot have a relationship and cannot ‘take advantage’ of whatsoever. Rather a
text can be a tool used by a human agent to become or remain influential in a given
relationship – as is most obviously the case, for example, in propaganda. To think critically
about the impact of trash movies we need to familiarise ourselves with a concept of power
construed as a relationship between agents– a relationship in which only human agents are
active participants and in which movies are tools.1
A quick note. Are you disappointed by the idea that a movie is a mere tool and therefore
deprived of the kind of power – intentional influence – that concerns us when looking into the
cultural future of our affluent (Western) societies? Well, critical thinking is not designed to
make a thinker happy but to help her getting a deeper insight into the social construction of
reality. It is because a movie is a tool that, for example, we can use a trash movie as a training
ground to enhance our skills in critical thinking. But you may want to think about yourself as
a detective investigating a crime: Would you be satisfied by reaching the conclusion that the
victim was killed by a gun or would you rather try to find out who used that gun and why?
Same here: if cinematic trash can ‘kill’ our cultural life we can’t stop at the tool.
1
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To avoid the opposite risks of overestimating or underestimating the social influence
of filmic communication my suggestion here is to keep our critical skills focused on a few
basic questions: Who does what to whom, why and how?
Who?
Who is responsible for a trash movie and its effects on us? For an exercise in critical
thinking and cultural recycling we have to go beyond the directors and producers and look for
the constituency of a bad movie: the people whose experience, ideas, values, interests, fears,
ambitions, opinions, belief and much more finds expression in the movie itself. Beyond the
director and the producers, but not independently from these, a movie is always in some way
a sign of its time: a text expressing something important for a group of people large or
influential enough to assure the material and immaterial resources necessary for the actual
making of the movie. In asking questions of power, the effective cultural recycling of
cinematic compost requires issues of authorship not to be dealt with only in terms of blame
but rather in terms of constituency. For example, the whole genre of Hollywood war movies,
at least from Top Gun (Scott, 1986) on, is inspired and materially supported by the Pentagon
needs to support recruitment and the broader need of US leaders to wage war around the
world. Visual trash in other genres, e.g. the police or medical TV series, is designed to
preserve people trust in the ‘system’ while the same services are falling apart (police is
corrupted, public healthcare inefficient or non-existent, etc.). For critical purpose, and to
assess the power of our favourite trash movie, we should think of the Author not as a single
person but as an agency, a group, or most probably an ideology inhabiting our social world –
as the aliens invaders inhabited Santa Mira in The invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel,
1956).
Does what?
If the author can be an ideology, what a bad movie does is ultimately an effort to
change the conditions in its (social) environment so to assure its own survival. Movies are
particularly influential forms of narrative that do what all narratives do: provide models,
alternatives, food for thought, temptations, allusions, solicitations and for many of us also
simple answers to the complex problems of life. The productive capacity of visual narratives
has almost no limit. Independently from its quality or our opinion about it, a movie always
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challenges or reproduces ideas, opinion, attitudes, belief, and the relations of power based on
them. This is why in practice, if not in principle, movies do perform ideological functions.
How well they do that, how effectively a visual narratives can seduce us, it depends on many
factors including the relative ignorance and lack of critical skills of its viewer. What seems
clear, however, is that the ideological message of a bad movie is usually more readily
absorbed if we stop thinking about it. Critical thinking, on the opposite, makes us relatively
safe, if not invulnerable.
To whom?
Since the ‘what’ depends on the audience, we need to ask question about the audience
itself. If what a movie does in practices is to offer ideas and behavioural models to help to
preserve or to challenge ideas and the relations of power based on them, we may want to map
the audience of trash and discuss differences that can make an individual or a group more or
less vulnerable to visual intoxication. Difference in education, cultural sensitivity or simply
life experience are obviously important. We may be simply too old or too sceptical to enjoy
the display of videogames effects on a story reflecting adolescent fantasies in movies such as
Battle: Los Angeles (Liebesman, 2011). But what about adolescents? After all they are
precisely the target audience of military recruitment. And what about differences in opinions
rather than in education or experience? This is where our previous exercise in social
positioning may prove useful. Even in shamelessly commercial and totally mainstream
movies, the target audience is almost never the ‘mass’: society as an undifferentiated ‘whole’.
The ideas and behavioural model more or less effectively offered for uncritical consumption
are always about a group of people we have identified as our out-group, those united in liking
what we dislike – and presumably disliking what we like. If for some the Zombi genre may be
not only disgusting in itself but also dangerous to the extent that suggests cannibalism as a
possibility, for others it can be hilariously provoking and politically allegoric of the capitalist
blind self-destructiveness when it comes to the use of resources. And what about
pornography? Is it about exploitation or liberation? Does it instigates or prevents sexual
crimes? As the ugliness depends on the viewer’s eyes, I suggest that also the effect of a filmic
narrative depends on what is in the viewer mind and even a short comment can tell us
something about the commentator. Is it the Last Tango in Paris (Bertolucci, 1972) an
indecent story about unnatural practices or a mastery tale about the importance of (lost) love?
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Movies ‘do’ different things to different individuals and the ‘power’ of our favourite trash
consists also in reproducing or challenging the boundaries of our social identity. Because, as
stated in the beginning, our (filmic) preferences have social roots. It is thanks to this power
that one can e.g. infer, with a certain approximation, ideological preferences concerning
taxation or abortion by asking questions concerning nudity or violence in movies. As critical
movie thinkers, we may gain some social clairvoyance.
Why?
Since the movie is a text and a text is an inanimate object, why-questions cannot be
asked because inanimate objects, by definition, cannot have purpose. What we can and
should ask, instead, is why the social author of a trash movie tries to affect the social
environment to reproduce its ideological standpoint - idea, values, behavioural models that
challenge or reproduce existing relations of power? And now you are about to discover one
fundamental piece of truth: in the social construction of the social world, relations of power,
as other aspects of the social world itself, are never reproduced identical to themselves.
Because social reality needs to be continuously reconstructed and in this reconstruction
relations of power can change. The practical possibility of social change keeps awake both
the powerful and the powerless, those who exploit and those who are exploited. If power is a
relationship, and the nature of every relationship depends on the behaviour of the participants
to the relationship itself, the range of events that can bring about change in people’s
behaviour and, consequently, in power relations is very broad. So much can happen! At the
same time, however, it is precisely because so much can happen that those interested in
preserving certain particular relations of power put so much effort in the communicative
construction of the social world. And this is also why movies – good and bad ones alike – are
important. As influential visual narratives promoting ideas, values and behavioural models,
movies participate to the social construction of reality and to the reproduction or challenging
of the relationships of power associated to that. Depending on our social positioning – see the
earlier section – we may claim that a certain movie is trash because it challenges some
fundamental aspects of our social identity. It can offend our morality, is can suggest
dangerous ideas, it can undermine some fundamental certainties, or it can simply irritate our
aesthetic sensitivity, instigate more boredom than our intelligence can afford to bear, or play
tricks that confuse our simple mind.
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And how?
How do movies perform their ideological functions of tools in the social construction
of reality? By proposing narrative models that establish identities associated to ideas, values
and behavioural models that orient, so to say, the way we deal with the problems of our lives.
How do we learn about our roles in society - what does it means to be a good son or daughter,
a good father/mother, a good friend, a good Italian, a good Christian and so on? How do we
learn when violence is appropriate and when is not? How do we learn about the appropriate
way of fulfilling our desires? How do we learn how to learn? After all ‘communication’ is the
name of the game. And once again movies are visual narratives in which these and other roles
are presented within the frame of meaningful events. A movie ‘describes’. But the stories
contained in them ‘prescribe’. When we really hate some movies the reason usually lays in
the social possibilities that narratives construe for us. The idea that a bigger gun is a solution
for every problem, or that spoken English with a foreign accent may reliably signal the ‘bad
guy’ of the plot may irritate because we perceive them not much as descriptions of a more or
less fictional story, but rather prescriptions applicable to our real lives. While the greater or
lesser influence of any specific movies or genre depends on an individual capacity to produce
original responses to common problems, movies are there as models in a fashion magazine:
suggesting not merely way of clothing but ways of being. We may be mainstream or radical
chic trash movie goers, with very different cultural inclinations and social identity but we
may still agree that visual narratives offer and justify models of life as ready-made responses
to relevant problems in our relationship with the world. Nothing much to understand: just do
it!
Conclusion: Critical thinking and the ecology of (cultural) trash
The wise old men of the Frankfurt School once warned us about the dangers of
cultural decline but were criticised for the apparent passivity of their stance. The threat, put
simply, comes from the commercialization of culture, a fundamental process in the
reproduction of capitalist ideology – what they called the “culture industry”. In the culture
industry “The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us to believe, not its
subject but its object” (Adorno, 2006: 99)
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In this process:
The consumers are made to remain what they are: consumers. That is why the
culture industry is not the art of the consumer but rather the projection of the will
of those in control onto their victims. The automatic self-reproduction of the
status quo in its established forms is itself an expression of domination. (Adorno,
2006: 185)
The trick is relatively simple and for our purposes can be described in terms of the reduction
of citizens to consumers. Ultimately, the ‘power’ of the culture industry consists in
convincing people to use cultural text in terms of ‘consumption’ rather than ‘participation’.
The latter presupposes a form of intellectual activism that may undermine control. It involves
questioning and questioning is something that, almost by definition, may undermine existing
relations of power.
The approach I suggest, and that I call critical thinking, aims at challenging this
objectification by rediscovering the individual as an active agent in the social construction of
reality. Not a mere recipient or consumer of culture where culture is reduced to a commodity,
but an active and relatively independent sense-maker of the social reality. Film and other
cultural artefacts can be reduced to tools and training ground for critical thinking, to gain a
deeper knowledge of our Self of our relevant Others and of the nature of the power
relationships that can be reproduced or challenged by the cultural text in the social
construction of reality.
I know this may sound lame. But if the effects of capitalism on our society are so powerful
that most of us are not even aware of them, for the time being there’s not much more one can
do. Social change is a collective phenomenon that has its origins in the individual mind. The
strength of capitalism and fascism – in both the Western and the Eastern versions – consist in
seducing the individual into the idea that she can delegate thinking to someone else: the
Leader, the Party or the Market. The thinking individual – a fundamental element or ‘topos’
(τοποσ) in Western culture whose origins predates the Enlightenment – is a project never
fully realised but that still can serve emancipation more effectively than other Utopias by
virtue of its radical simplicity. And for those of you familiar with the debate on
Postmodernism, I should add that, in my opinion, this intellectual tradition of self-reflective
criticism does is not undermining thinking nor the centrality of the individual but rather offer
an extreme form of intellectual exercise that ultimately may make us more resistant to
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manipulation and to the incitement to enjoy mediocrity. Digging in the cultural trash can help
understanding the cultural canons of our “society of spectacle” (Debord, 2002), the
functioning of the “cultural logic of late capitalism” (Jameson, 1991), its values, distortions,
rejections. As an intellectual practice, critical rejection supports the integrity of the individual
by connecting him/her to a community of significant others, hence avoiding individualization
(Bauman, 2004) on the one hand, and the emotional fusion with the postmodern tribe
(Maffesoli, 1996), on the other. Ultimately it can preserve the idea of aesthetic fulfilment
beyond and despite the grieves of the present but also the capacity of critical thinking itself.
In time of hegemony, cultural survival requires adaptation. The practice of cultural recycling
I discussed here is a mere tactical move designed to do that in the lack of better options and
in wait of better times. If one is interested in challenging the oppressive effects of social
control through the commodification of culture – and teachers should be interested in doing
precisely that – ‘cultural recycling’ seems still a better option than isolation or overt
antagonism.
The incitement to isolation and the idea of turning off the screen, disconnecting ourselves
from the circulatory system through which visual trash is delivered to the mass is appealing
and also a mark of distinction for disenchanted, intellectual neo-aristocrats. Applied to
pedagogy of visual communication, however, the risk of isolation is vulnerability. I think that
critical exposure is a form of intellectual vaccination that can preserve our intellectual health
more effectively.
Overt antagonism is a most tempting form of engagement that has the advantage of offering
personal satisfaction and social recognition. The risk however is that of contributing to the
legitimation of the culture industry, rather to its decline. As Adorno pointed out:
How nice it would be if, under the present circumstances, one could claim that
the less films appear to be works of art, the more they would be just that. One is
especially drawn to this conclusion in reaction to those snobbish psychological
class A pictures which the culture industry forces itself to make for the sake of
cultural legitimation. (Adorno, 2006: 186)
The culture industry absorbs the cultural challenge contained in the most radical text by
simply producing the text and transforming its challenge into a business opportunity.
What to do then?
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The problem, as I see it, is that if the “culture industry” is here to stay one cannot just
complain. An effort must be done to make the best of what is available. If our days are
inhabited by good looking and bad tasting offsprings of corporate marketing strategies,
intellectual freedom can still be practiced in critical rejection.
Critical theorists should not underestimate the capacity of human mind to produce adaptive
responses to the environment. One may also suggest an epistemological move and re-evaluate
the idea that meaning come from individuals and that cultural artefacts, therefore, do not
‘have’ but ‘are given’ meanings. In the end it is the individual critical capacity that not only
may lead to high quality cultural expressions but, more fundamentally, high quality
interpretations of cultural artefacts of mediocre or even shamelessly low cultural value –
interpretations that would give value to such artefacts, making them somehow valuable as a
result.
Maybe we can resist cultural decline and the commodification of culture by challenging the
passivity of consumption and re-discovering the challenges of participation? How about
considering a cultural text as a “target” rather than ‘food’ for thought? The latter can be good
or bad, nutritious but also toxic. A target, instead, is only a target: no doubts about its
functions. Maybe we could also get rid of the idea of the work of art as a ‘model’ and think of
it as a crash test dummy instead? Maybe we can quit the renewed quest for the sublime and
practice applied deconstruction as a form of mental gymnastics to enjoy the intellectual
pheromone it may offers if and when practiced intensively? Or maybe one can support the
idea of a cultural text as a training ground: a communicative place, no matter how pleasant or
repulsive, where we can practice systematic questioning. Maybe it is this capacity –
systematic questioning – rather than the quality of the cultural texts – the movie – that should
be the focus of the critical efforts to resist cultural decline.
Finally, and to those that do not consider thinking as a form of effective action I would like to
answer as Adorno himself replied: “Repressive intolerance toward a thought not immediately
accompanied by instructions for action is founded in fear”. (Adorno, 2006: 200)
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