It’s easy to flip through television channels today and see a
wasteland, from the redneck voyeurism of “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” to
forgettable crime shows and bad suburban comedies. Critics gush over the
latest high-budget network drama, while the real heavyweight ratings
battle is duked out between the likes of Merv Griffin, Judge Judy, and
Dr. Phil. There’s a temptation to view television, as well as most
movies, as too compromised to commercial pressure to be a legitimate
artistic medium.
The critical establishment generally adopts some version of this pose. As Paul Cantor puts it in his new book, The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture, critics inside and out of the academy tend to “treat culture as a realm of unfreedom, dwelling on the constraints under which would-be creative people necessarily operate.” Or worse, they hold the view—inherited from poststructuralists or the cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School—that pop culture is actively deceptive, giving people a false sense of satisfaction while “producing forms of debased entertainment to numb the American people into submission to their capitalist masters.”
All that is what Cantor—by day a Shakespeare scholar at the University of Virginia—seeks to refute. In addition to his literary scholarship, he’s harbored an enduring interest in Austrian Economics and libertarian thought, ever since as a young man he attended lectures by Ludwig von Mises in New York City. His latest project has been to draw these literary and libertarian pursuits together, first producing a book on television entitled Gilligan Unbound and then co-writing the more highbrow Literature and the Economics of Liberty. The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture is the next step, an episodic libertarian history of film and television.
Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/screening-liberty/
The critical establishment generally adopts some version of this pose. As Paul Cantor puts it in his new book, The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture, critics inside and out of the academy tend to “treat culture as a realm of unfreedom, dwelling on the constraints under which would-be creative people necessarily operate.” Or worse, they hold the view—inherited from poststructuralists or the cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School—that pop culture is actively deceptive, giving people a false sense of satisfaction while “producing forms of debased entertainment to numb the American people into submission to their capitalist masters.”
All that is what Cantor—by day a Shakespeare scholar at the University of Virginia—seeks to refute. In addition to his literary scholarship, he’s harbored an enduring interest in Austrian Economics and libertarian thought, ever since as a young man he attended lectures by Ludwig von Mises in New York City. His latest project has been to draw these literary and libertarian pursuits together, first producing a book on television entitled Gilligan Unbound and then co-writing the more highbrow Literature and the Economics of Liberty. The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture is the next step, an episodic libertarian history of film and television.
Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/screening-liberty/
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