tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post1181410667939613994..comments2024-03-27T13:13:25.164-04:00Comments on johnshaplin: Populism and Conspiracy Theory by Mark Fensterjohnshaplinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-88433664400132309952016-06-25T20:11:52.479-04:002016-06-25T20:11:52.479-04:00Hofstadter
Mass culture threatened to destroy bou...Hofstadter<br /><br />Mass culture threatened to destroy boundaries crucial to the success and stability of the postwar culture. Andreas Huyssen has identified the dominant binary in nineteenth century culture as being between, on the one hand, "mass culture" and women, and, on the other ,"authentic culture," the prerogative of men. Although this strong association made by modernist European artists and intellectuals was somewhat less pervasive in American postwar mass culture debates, it remains as a residual element in Hofstadter's argument. Huyssen writes: "The problem [for the modernist artist] is not the desire to differentiate between forms of high art and depraved forms of mass culture and its co-optations. The problem is rather persistent gendering as feminine of that which is devalued."[ Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 1986) Hofstadter's brand of modernist politics was based on a series of crucial divisions between the legitimate and the illegitimate, the rational and emotional, and the political and the personal. Retaining the boundary was crucial, and he and his contemporaries worried that McCarthyism, Goldwater, and any 'extremist politics' or irrational political discourse would prove victorious over the legitimate and rational (though such fears were certainly present), and that the order between order and its other would disappear.<br /><br />In this sense, Holfstadter's fear of the loss of a clear set of divisions included the fear of secure gendered boundaries as a structuring principle, just as in politics (not to mention the history and political science departments) of his era was based in the exclusion of women and the lesser qualities they would have bought with them had they been allowed to enter the political and historical realms. Extremism is emotional, hysterical, and pathological; proper politics is logical, ordered, pragmatic, and efficacious. . . <br />johnshaplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.com