DAMN° 86 – Redefining Pop Culture
In his 1990 stand-up show Relentless, the darkly-satirical comedian Bill Hicks acts out a scene in a diner. A gum-chewing Tennessee waitress approaches him and asks, “What yer readin' for?” Hicks is stumped. He says to the audience: "Not what are you reading, but what are you reading for?" He winds up his retort: "I guess I read for a lot of reasons and one of them is so I don't end up being a fucking waffle waitress." It's not his sharpest bit but, sympathetically, the waitress' question is dispiriting and not simply because it seems to be anti-intellectual but rather because it leads to such a dissatisfying and unconvincing answer. The Philosopher Susanne Langer described this best: “The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it – right or wrong – may be given.” As such, we could say that the waitress’ question “disposes” Hicks to rationalise reading, to have it be practical, to have it make sense to a question that makes utility essential to purpose. Hicks’ other reasons to read are left unsaid because they don't belong in the world of the question. In this scenario, reading is abandoned to a reductive function, it is a means for Hicks to avoid the apparent demeaning status of a low paid job.
It’s not too ambitious to see similarities between this way of thinking and mainstream mindfulness (or: McMindfulness, as cultural critic Ronald Purser puts it). It takes the fundamentally self-sacrificing determination of liberatory contemplation and cuts it with a rhetoric of personal gain and performance enhancement. The question this answers, albeit an implicit question, is "what am I meditating for?" Which is explicitly not the same as asking "why am I meditating?" Approaching mindfulness teleologically, as a utility, is limiting, it is made to be a shady commodity for greedy commercialists and cynically naïve consumers. With that said, it shouldn’t be surprising that Headspace, a mindfulness app, made an estimated $220 million in 2021. In line with this, think back to Mad Men’s kingpin of spin Don Draper. In the closing scenes of the final episode, Draper sits cross legged and linen-clad on the hillside of a New Age retreat. As the camera moves in on Draper and the frame tightens around his smug face, he smirks, his “ohmms” fade out, fading in: I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke. It’s a fantastically disillusioning end to the series. The way Draper attends to his meditation – I will come back to the word “attend” later – is as a means to achieve a certain kind of life, one of personal wealth and professional success. Here, authentic, meditative mindfulness is abandoned by Draper in service of the tactless advertising of a corrosive soft drink.
This is popular culture. I don’t mean TV and Stand Up Comedy (or Mindfulness, or Coke), I mean this pervasive attitude. “Pop” is what is made readily and abundantly in the here and now and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a consumable product either. Popular culture can also be a collectively cultivated temperament. As such, what is popular is what belongs to common people (populus) and I am deeply suspicious of ideologically misleading synonyms that suggest that what is popular is what is most enjoyable, venerable and more generally most likeable. Pop is catching just as much as it is catchy.
With that in mind, this too is Pop: In the UK, university degrees that don’t result in significant employment (read: high earnings) have been dubbed “rip off” and “low value” degrees. Predictably, art and design degrees are framed as the biggest “rip offs” of all. The conservative government is pledging to cap numbers and close courses that don't meet their bean-counting expectations. I’m knocking on an open door when I say that education policies focusing on value for money inherently characterise students as consumers and lecturers as content providers. When prospective employability becomes the dominant reason to learn–particularly in the contexts of art and design but this extends to all disciplines–the pleasure of being curious is made to look like a luxuriously aimless pastime. Unfathomably, universities leave it to feckless cartels of senior managers to regurgitate the same unimaginative gambit of severances, redundancies, and malignant shadow work in an attempt to regain (and grow) their already bloated pay packets. Again, worryingly, this is Pop.
We could say that this is all symptomatic of a ruthless, neoliberal, consumer capitalist culture but there are other ways to think about Pop. For instance, it could also be an issue of “attendance”. Thinking critically about Pop is to investigate what we (the populous) attend to and how we attend to it. I am inheriting this particular understanding of "attendance” from the work of psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist.
In The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, McGilchrist is concerned with the split between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. However, what he is doing is different to the hardcore binary thinking that was popular in 60s and 70s science, whereby one side of the brain was thought to “compute” in an exclusively rational way and the other in an exclusively emotional way (or as was often the shorthand: one side was considered masculine and the other feminine). Sternly critical of these outdated views, McGilchrist is concerned with how the hemispheres communicate with each other and how their communication (or lack of) informs what we come to know about and expect from the world. He repeatedly emphasises that the left and right hemispheres are both involved in rationality, and that they are both involved in emotion, and creativity, and so on, but the way they are involved is not the same. In other words, they each “attend” to the world in very different ways. The right hemisphere offers a more sustained, broader, more vigilant and alert attention that is able to have vivid and in-depth experiences. Conversely, the left hemisphere has a much more narrow and sharp kind of attention that simplifies and reduces experiences to partial and general details that are often decontextualised.
In The Master and His Emissary and in his more recent The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, McGilchrist traces the intensive cultural leaning towards the left hemisphere’s ways of attending and finds a waning enthusiasm with the ways that the right hemisphere is able to attend to the world. This, we could say, shows an investment in the general more than the specific, the known more than the unknown, the map more than the territory, simplicity more than ambiguity, and so on. This reads like a schematic of Pop.
McGilchrist's writing is convincing, accessible, and important. What he is calling for is a greater balance in our ways of attending. As such, when we read in contemporary design writing sincere arguments for contradiction or slowness or embodiment or inclusivity – which is all to say, arguments for complexifying simplicity – we can imagine that they are arguing for something more like right hemispheric attention. Critically, this is a way of attending that is adversarial to Pop.
Pop, as it is today, does not presage the end of all design, only the withering of a certain type of design that is lively, alert and vividly idiosyncratic. Matters of living (and living matters) are murky and mucky and when we consider what is Pop those kinds of dirty, underbelly matters look out of season, that is to say: untimely. Perhaps, to regain a sense of balance in our ways of attending, we are in need of something more crude in our design thinking.
In his chapter titled In Search of Lost Cheekiness, Peter Sloterdijk – described by Bruno Latour as the designer’s philosopher – presents “kynicism” as contrary to supposed “respectable thinking”, we can think of respectable thinking here as something akin to Pop-thought. Agonistically, kynicism relates to the dynamic and the dog-like, Sloterdijk says: “Faeces, urine, sperm! ‘Vegetate’ like a dog, but live, laugh, and take care to give the impression that behind all this lies not confusion but clear reflection.” There is much kynical work to be done in design.
To inspire more kynical ways of being a designer, consider the following books as provocateurs for new questions that insist on radical answers. This will help us be more wary of those other kinds of questions that dispose us to respectable thinking. What are you reading?
Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics (Verso)
James Dyer and Nick Deakin, Graphic Events (Onomatpee)
Keller Easterling, Medium Design (Verso)
Kevin Yuen Kit Lo, Design Against Design (Set Margins’)
It’s not too ambitious to see similarities between this way of thinking and mainstream mindfulness (or: McMindfulness, as cultural critic Ronald Purser puts it). It takes the fundamentally self-sacrificing determination of liberatory contemplation and cuts it with a rhetoric of personal gain and performance enhancement. The question this answers, albeit an implicit question, is "what am I meditating for?" Which is explicitly not the same as asking "why am I meditating?" Approaching mindfulness teleologically, as a utility, is limiting, it is made to be a shady commodity for greedy commercialists and cynically naïve consumers. With that said, it shouldn’t be surprising that Headspace, a mindfulness app, made an estimated $220 million in 2021. In line with this, think back to Mad Men’s kingpin of spin Don Draper. In the closing scenes of the final episode, Draper sits cross legged and linen-clad on the hillside of a New Age retreat. As the camera moves in on Draper and the frame tightens around his smug face, he smirks, his “ohmms” fade out, fading in: I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke. It’s a fantastically disillusioning end to the series. The way Draper attends to his meditation – I will come back to the word “attend” later – is as a means to achieve a certain kind of life, one of personal wealth and professional success. Here, authentic, meditative mindfulness is abandoned by Draper in service of the tactless advertising of a corrosive soft drink.
This is popular culture. I don’t mean TV and Stand Up Comedy (or Mindfulness, or Coke), I mean this pervasive attitude. “Pop” is what is made readily and abundantly in the here and now and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a consumable product either. Popular culture can also be a collectively cultivated temperament. As such, what is popular is what belongs to common people (populus) and I am deeply suspicious of ideologically misleading synonyms that suggest that what is popular is what is most enjoyable, venerable and more generally most likeable. Pop is catching just as much as it is catchy.
With that in mind, this too is Pop: In the UK, university degrees that don’t result in significant employment (read: high earnings) have been dubbed “rip off” and “low value” degrees. Predictably, art and design degrees are framed as the biggest “rip offs” of all. The conservative government is pledging to cap numbers and close courses that don't meet their bean-counting expectations. I’m knocking on an open door when I say that education policies focusing on value for money inherently characterise students as consumers and lecturers as content providers. When prospective employability becomes the dominant reason to learn–particularly in the contexts of art and design but this extends to all disciplines–the pleasure of being curious is made to look like a luxuriously aimless pastime. Unfathomably, universities leave it to feckless cartels of senior managers to regurgitate the same unimaginative gambit of severances, redundancies, and malignant shadow work in an attempt to regain (and grow) their already bloated pay packets. Again, worryingly, this is Pop.
We could say that this is all symptomatic of a ruthless, neoliberal, consumer capitalist culture but there are other ways to think about Pop. For instance, it could also be an issue of “attendance”. Thinking critically about Pop is to investigate what we (the populous) attend to and how we attend to it. I am inheriting this particular understanding of "attendance” from the work of psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist.
In The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, McGilchrist is concerned with the split between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. However, what he is doing is different to the hardcore binary thinking that was popular in 60s and 70s science, whereby one side of the brain was thought to “compute” in an exclusively rational way and the other in an exclusively emotional way (or as was often the shorthand: one side was considered masculine and the other feminine). Sternly critical of these outdated views, McGilchrist is concerned with how the hemispheres communicate with each other and how their communication (or lack of) informs what we come to know about and expect from the world. He repeatedly emphasises that the left and right hemispheres are both involved in rationality, and that they are both involved in emotion, and creativity, and so on, but the way they are involved is not the same. In other words, they each “attend” to the world in very different ways. The right hemisphere offers a more sustained, broader, more vigilant and alert attention that is able to have vivid and in-depth experiences. Conversely, the left hemisphere has a much more narrow and sharp kind of attention that simplifies and reduces experiences to partial and general details that are often decontextualised.
In The Master and His Emissary and in his more recent The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, McGilchrist traces the intensive cultural leaning towards the left hemisphere’s ways of attending and finds a waning enthusiasm with the ways that the right hemisphere is able to attend to the world. This, we could say, shows an investment in the general more than the specific, the known more than the unknown, the map more than the territory, simplicity more than ambiguity, and so on. This reads like a schematic of Pop.
McGilchrist's writing is convincing, accessible, and important. What he is calling for is a greater balance in our ways of attending. As such, when we read in contemporary design writing sincere arguments for contradiction or slowness or embodiment or inclusivity – which is all to say, arguments for complexifying simplicity – we can imagine that they are arguing for something more like right hemispheric attention. Critically, this is a way of attending that is adversarial to Pop.
Pop, as it is today, does not presage the end of all design, only the withering of a certain type of design that is lively, alert and vividly idiosyncratic. Matters of living (and living matters) are murky and mucky and when we consider what is Pop those kinds of dirty, underbelly matters look out of season, that is to say: untimely. Perhaps, to regain a sense of balance in our ways of attending, we are in need of something more crude in our design thinking.
In his chapter titled In Search of Lost Cheekiness, Peter Sloterdijk – described by Bruno Latour as the designer’s philosopher – presents “kynicism” as contrary to supposed “respectable thinking”, we can think of respectable thinking here as something akin to Pop-thought. Agonistically, kynicism relates to the dynamic and the dog-like, Sloterdijk says: “Faeces, urine, sperm! ‘Vegetate’ like a dog, but live, laugh, and take care to give the impression that behind all this lies not confusion but clear reflection.” There is much kynical work to be done in design.
To inspire more kynical ways of being a designer, consider the following books as provocateurs for new questions that insist on radical answers. This will help us be more wary of those other kinds of questions that dispose us to respectable thinking. What are you reading?
Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics (Verso)
James Dyer and Nick Deakin, Graphic Events (Onomatpee)
Keller Easterling, Medium Design (Verso)
Kevin Yuen Kit Lo, Design Against Design (Set Margins’)
