Comment

Comment on the Perkins Review of Mediated

Thomas de Zengotita

I want to say a few words about the Roy Perkins review of my book, Mediated, on Fifth-Estate-Online. The only other negative review I know of, by Russell Jacoby in The Nation (Perkins mentions that review, and endorses it), recoils from my work in similar fashion. But unlike Mr. Jacoby, Mr. Perkins seems actually to have read the book and he doesn't like the way it tries to reach mediated young people and academics simultaneously. Fair enough. But let me explain.

The style that both Perkins and Jacoby find annoying is meant to be satire. Young people who like this book understand that immediately, and they know the satire is aimed at them. I find that many old-style left-wing critics of global capitalism miss the satirical intent entirely, but that's just a symptom of a deeper problem. A left critique that does nothing but unmask the institutional power arrangements behind the media circus is doomed to insularity. If that gesture were sufficient, there would be a lot more left of the Left today than there is. We have been in control of much of the cultural agenda, especially in education, since the 60s, but we failed to pass the torch along.

And we can't just blame Reagan and Thatcher. What really needs to be understood is why Clinton and Blair succeeded. And that cannot be done without a grasp of 'method acting' politics, a notion that in turn depends on an analysis of the 'virtual revolution' the media have made possible over the last 30 years; in place, as it were, of a real one.

Such processes, which are extraordinarily subtle, are among the many specific mechanisms of mediation I examine in the book. But they aren't even visible, let alone explainable, to people who look at popular culture through eyes that know nothing but disdain.

Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin understood that culture criticism had to be immanent. Adorno was so steeped in the elite disciplines of high modernism, that he couldn't bring himself to write in an accessible way, but he listened closely to a lot of jazz, for example, before he deconstructed it. And Benjamin spent a lifetime researching his Arcades Project, examining thousands of artifacts of popular culture. He collected and catalogued them reverently, all in service of his criticism. Adorno characterised their joint aim as an effort to 'break out' the historical meanings 'congealed in things'. Benjamin's dream was to present his objects in a way that would allow them to 'speak for themselves', as he put it, to say, in their own voices, what commodification came down to, in each separate case, with the nuances respected.

I find it comforting to think that many an orthodox left-wing critic of 19th century capitalism looked at all the pictures and toys and advertisements and souvenir figurines in Benjamin's collection and found them as tiresome as Perkins found my discourses on Harry Potter and Princess Di.

I am not pretending to have realised Benjamin's aspiration in my book, of course, but that was the ideal I tried to serve. The main difference in context being that most of the things that furnish the vast arcade we now live in are literally mediated, as well as dialectically.

Thomas de Zengotita is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine. He teaches at The Dalton School and the Draper Graduate Program at New York University. His book Mediated, received the 2006 Marshall McLuhan Award from the Media Ecology Association.