Bernstein

Posted by admin on May 9th, 2008 filed in The New Illiterati

“And surely it is a scandal, I tell my students, how Americans are afflicted with attention-deficit disorder, just like they say in Time magazine, which after all should know, being one of the major sites of infection for the disease it laments, with it’s “you can never simplify too much” approach to prose and its relentless promotion of predigested cultural product. […] What is striking today is the refusal to recognize that it is a degraded cultural agenda of the major print and electronic media, and not the state of culture, that has given rise to mediocrity. […] They prefer to support projects that translate art and ideas into administrative and presentation packages most similar to what is already available, generally reducing art to personal narrative and ideas to feelings about these personal narratives. Such “dumbed down” programming is counter-productive because it reinforces the common conception that unpopular art just offers bad versions of what you get in popular art and entertainment […] Typically, intellectual and cultural work is not readily familiar. At its best it resists endless repetitions of the already known. But this does not mean it is inaccessible. While diet and exercise have become a national obsession, the idea of exercising the mind is treated with increasing contempt. The problem isn’t that Sally and Dick can’t read anything more difficult than the Op Ed pages, the problem is that the Op Ed pages reinforce this ignorance. […] The idea that complex or unfamiliar ideas, indeed that compound-complex sentences are “elitist” must be countered as demogogic populism and quasi-totalitarianism. It is not that writers and artists and intellectuals, any more than listeners or readers, are ignorant; but the constraints enforced in public space produce, protect and defend ignorance.”

From the essay Revenge of the poet-critic by Charles Bernstein.