What kind of stance should criticism take in relation to the objects of mid culture, anyway?
A few months ago, I got an interesting response from an editor to an essay pitch. As these things often go, it was a rejection, but one with a curious rationale: “I’ll also admit that I crave criticism that can respect its subject, and reviews of ‘mid’ art sort of weary me lately—but there is a lot of mediocrity out there, yes.” Now, the pitch that got this response was admittedly bad—or at least mid. It was an attempt at a hard-nosed takedown of Daisy Jones and the Six, an Amazon Prime limited series based on a very mid airport novel. But even though my initial reaction was to find the email basically sniffy and pretentious, something about the editor’s comments struck me as incisive. “Criticism that can respect its subject” is no doubt a formulation that heavily suggests a certain genre: the NYRB essay, the New Yorker retrospective, the type of piece that does what some of my friends and I have taken to calling the “literature-is-luminous” routine. It is reasonable to ask if this wide-eyed belletristic pose is the only way to respect your object. But it is also reasonable to ask: is every object worth respecting? What kind of stance should criticism take in relation to the objects of mid culture, anyway?
In a roundabout way, these questions led me back to the work of noted object dis-respecter Dwight MacDonald. In 1960, MacDonald published a long essay in the Partisan Review called “Masscult and Midcult.” This essay was something like a post-45 update of Clement Greenberg’s “Avant Garde and Kitsch” (in fact MacDonald was a Greenberg protégé for a while). As MacDonald has it, after the Industrial Revolution, high culture and mass culture existed in a state of relative detente, even as the latter gained ground with the expansion of education in industrialized societies. But after World War II, a new form emerged that threatened to upend this state of affairs. This was what MacDonald called midcult: a grotesque synthesis of high and mass culture. “This intermediate form,” MacDonald writes, “has the essential qualities of Masscult—the formula, the built-in reaction, the lack of any standard except popularity—but it decently covers them with a cultural figleaf.” Over some eighty pages, MacDonald shuttles back and forth between these schematic statements and capsule takedowns of objects he takes to be representative of midcult (these include Our Town and The Old Man and the Sea, among others). These takedowns mostly proceed by showing how midcult works to appropriate and pervert techniques of the avant garde.
It is hard to imagine this critical procedure having much purchase on something like Daisy Jones or, say, WandaVision. I imagine Dwight MacDonald, like a medieval peasant drinking a Baja Blast, would die instantly if someone were to show him the average Netflix show. At first glance, it seems like the ultimately chauvinistic formalism of the midcentury critic can’t tell us much new about contemporary mid culture. Sure, today’s mid culture does something similar to MacDonald’s midcult, in that it dresses up mass entertainment in the trappings of higher-prestige forms: Jeff Koons’s pop-art merchandise; the cheap gravitas of Disney’s Star Wars westerns and political thrillers; Richard Powers’s sanctimonious soap operas disguised as synoptic postmodern novels; Khruangbin’s real-life lo-fi beats, surf rock made just dignified and blandly exotic enough to play in leasing offices for 5-over-1 condos. But this feels like the beginning of an interpretation rather than the whole of it, especially when the types of “prestige” entertainment we’re dealing with here are themselves largely types of mass entertainment. (Surf rock in the avant garde—if the Netflix show didn’t finish MacDonald off, this suggestion just might do it.)
Still, if there is something salutary in MacDonald’s approach, it is his resolute focus on form over content. We can afford to get much more formalist about mid media. This is certainly true of my rejected pitch. I believed my hypothetical essay should shine an unsparing light on the flawed content of its object, and by extension on its politics: like so many objects of mid culture, Daisy Jones uses trauma as a cipher for depth! And it has very weird things to say about the heteronormative family! These might be moderately interesting things to say about, for example, a widely praised work of literary fiction. But when directed at something like Daisy Jones, they fall flat.
Why is this? In part, because these interpretations can feel almost tautological. There is a way in which a piece of mid media like Daisy Jones anticipates or choreographs exactly the critical response I wanted to write. Think of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie, whose big set piece is not a musical number or fantasy sequence but a speech by America Ferrara’s character about all the contradictory demands that make it “impossible to be a woman.” The lines are plausible in the mouth of the character, but there is an inescapable sense that they are above all channeling the voice of the film, providing a gloss or commentary on itself, modeling how we are to receive it. In other words, the pivotal scene in Barbie is a distilled and embodied version of a think piece about Barbie. This is an especially radicalized form of what MacDonald called midcult’s “built-in reaction,” a virtually ubiquitous feature of mid media. Daisy Jones interposes scenes with faux talking-head interview footage, where older versions of the characters react to past events—and sometimes react to one another’s reactions.
Here, though, the built-in reaction sets the whole terrain on which we are to experience the object. We are to take Barbie not as a film so much as a container for propositional statements about how it feels to be a woman. This is why even the critical takes feel redundant. Much of the criticism of the film stays on its terrain—see the mass of think pieces admonishing Barbie for not launching a “revolutionary“ critique. (You can almost imagine Ferrara’s character saying: You have to get across a feminist message—not too feminist, because then Ben Shapiro will film himself burning dolls, but also not in a shallow and gestural way, because then critics will take you to task for not being “revolutionary.”) Where midcentury midcult presented itself as strenuously apolitical—a font of universal humanistic values—contemporary mid culture wants us to see it as hyperpolitical, a meaningful arena for political struggle at the level of representation. In this way, the editor had it exactly backwards: my proposed takedown made the mistake of respecting its object too much.
What would it mean to refuse to meet the mid work on its own terrain? One answer is to locate the political character of the mid work outside its bounds, in its function in the broader political economy. This function, not the work’s propositional content, is the mid work’s real political unconscious. Where midcentury midcult was fixated on consumption—locked in a battle, like MacDonald’s criticism, with the abstract figure of the ‘passive consumer’—contemporary mid culture plays out a drama of circulation. The formalist perspective would recognize that mid media is at bottom content—and whatever your reading of value theory is, content is something that is, at least, valorized in circulation. The consolidation of musicians’ catalogs in the hands of private equity expresses itself in the wave of interpolations in streaming pop music (remember the Yung Gravy Rickroll song?). Barbie itself is part of a planned series of Mattel toy movies: not so much commercials as experiments in valorizing IP differently, handing it to directors with arthouse bona fides and seeing what they can make of it. Mid art prompts us to perform these critical acts not on isolated works, but on works plus their penumbra of reaction, function, circulation.
Does this mean we should ignore the aesthetic properties of mid objects and simply follow the money? Not at all. Our challenge as critics is to find conceptual tools that can take us from the aesthetic level to this more-than-aesthetic, circulatory level, and back. We’ve seen some exciting work that does just this: Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy: Or, the Style of Too-Late Capitalism lays out a sweeping and compelling theory of something like an aesthetics of circulation in contemporary media, while Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed Publishing and American Literature reads several forms of contemporary mid literature (chief among them genrefied literary fiction) as mediations of shifting conditions in the publishing industry. Both books keep an eye closely trained on style. But rather than take their objects’ style simply as a vehicle for propositional arguments to endorse or refute, both authors read mid media as aesthetic crystallizations of deeper material processes.
If this sounds like a description of historical materialism, well, it is, but that should only add to our appreciation of this work. It is hard to read the contemporary as a historical materialist. One of the virtues of mid media is that they allegorize—dramatize, fret over, clumsily try to dodge and trip over themselves in the process—the conditions of their own circulation with a special, insistent, almost stupid transparency. More than the real slop, which can sometimes seem like random firings of hedonic sensation detached from meaning, and more than the stuff that announces itself as Art, with its aspirations to autonomy, mid media give us corporate art’s frankest account of what it is up to in our world. To want any more from it would probably be a mistake, but to ignore what it is so blatantly telling us would be an abdication of our responsibility as critics.
Mitch Therieau teaches at Stanford. He lives in California with his partner and an Italian Greyhound named Marzipan.