Academics have a reputation for making simple points into complex ones, or for investing tremendous energy into questions that are of no practical use, aka angels dancing on the head of a pin.
It’s a fair cop. Some of the time. But some of the time, folks complaining of this tendency are treating an actually complicated (evidentiarily complicated, philosophically complicated) problem in a simplistic way and then getting pissed off because an academic called them on it.
Today, I have in mind the question of what influence does a particular work of culture—a novel, a film, a poem, an essay, a theatrical performance—have on how people think and act in the world? This is a primary question for entire disciplines and for major fields of study within disciplines—literary criticism, cultural history, cultural anthropology most predominantly but not exclusively.
In the wider public sphere, asserting that a particular cultural work has contributed to a particular social behavior or trend is a frequent part of partisan “culture wars”. Liberals and leftists mock the very idea of such a relationship when the claim comes from the right—say, Vice-President Dan Quayle asserting that the character Murphy Brown having a baby and being a single mom was contributing to the disintegration of the traditional American family—by arguing that these representations are just fictions, that they are just words that each viewer interprets for themselves as free citizens of a free country, or that these works and representations are reflections of social reality, not producers of social reality. But liberals and progressives frequently hurl their own accusations at work they believe reinforces right-wing or reactionary ideology: that the show 24 normalized torture, that Ken Burns’ Civil War helped revive Lost Cause thinking by giving Shelby Foote a soapbox, that the film Bohemian Rhapsody manages to be implicitly homophobic about its very queer protagonist, and so on. That sometimes solicits the same dismissive response, that liberal-left critics are seeing something that isn’t there, that they’re exaggerating the influence of some element, that they’re promoting their own ideology at the expense of artistic or communicative truth, that they’re being censorious control-freaks. Even self-anointed centrists who try to define themselves as open-minded without constraints, and who argue (more or less) along the lines of sticks-and-stones-but-words-will-never-hurt-me, that culture and communication have no constitutive power over society, generally turn out to have a particular band of work they actually see as legitimate and a large range of cultural and intellectual work that they view as dangerous in part because it claims to have polemical or ideological intentions.
Those culture-war conversations are often empirically malformed. Everyone participating is wrong in the sense that of course culture can influence how we think, act and associate. More queer characters in popular culture represented in more diverse, human and approving ways of course makes it easier to be queer, and therefore makes more people willing to explore and express their sexuality. More women in works of popular culture who are raising children on their own—including entirely by choice—makes more women willing to consider doing so, just as more depictions of single mothers as tormented, unhappy, immoral or irresponsible does the opposite. Dan Quayle’s point wasn’t intrinsically ridiculous as a claim about a television show, it was just politically objectionable as a claim about the way American society should be. In many cases, culture wars are a re-situating of rivalrous claims that are at an impasse within political institutions into another arena, and a way to claim that your preferred view of society is the “normal” majoritarian view but for the influence of culture created by a subversive minority.
Maybe. That’s the complexity that actually calls for a scholarly response, whether you’re trying to generalize a relationship overall in a historical moment or social situation or you’re trying to document the influence of a particular cultural work.
Let me put it in terms of three stages of the work of interpreting the impact or influence of a work of culture, each stage more demanding in terms of the research and analysis it requires.
Stage 1: You, A Reader
This is the easiest stage, available to anyone. It only requires reading or viewing a cultural work and showing a modicum of willingness to subject your impressions as a reader to some of the basic facts about the text. (I’m going to use “read” throughout here, but I’m also talking about cultural works that you watch or interact with in ways other than reading.)
To talk here about influence or impact is about you, so some measure of self-knowledge is useful. How do you read, what do you usually read, what have you read, why do you read? But also: who are you, in sociological terms? When you think about yourself making sense of something you read and evaluating its influence on you, what groups do you think might share your reaction? Why? (e.g., do you find that you typically react to culture the way that most people of your generation, your socioeconomic class, your profession, your race or ethnicity, your gender, your sexuality, your region, react? Or are you much more aligned with more particular subcultures? Or more idiosyncratic generally?)
Here too you can gauge what you already paratextually knew about what you’re reading. Have you read other work by the author? Have you heard of the author or this particular work before? Where does your knowledge of this text comes from? (Newspaper reviews? Your education? The author’s celebrity? The ostensible subject of the text? General knowledge?) Sometimes it’s hard to know where you heard of something but you know that you have—that’s interesting too.
To then write or speak in public about what you, a reader, see in a text via your own experience of it only has a few constraints if you want to do it responsibly. You have to talk about what’s actually in the work and try to locate any specific claim of influence or impact, of reaction-to, in its contents.
For example, without having read any of the discussion in the United Kingdom of the film The Lost King, about Philippa Langley’s crusade to find the remains of Richard III and redeem his reputation, I found myself annoyed in the early going of the film not because male historians and archaeologists were being portrayed as self-aggrandizing and patronizing towards Langley, but because the development of Langley’s own fascination with and identification with Richard is portrayed as so out-of-nowhere and without precedent. I didn’t know at that point that the real-life Langley had read a 1955 biography by an American historian that argued that Richard III was not a usurper and that she was taken with the idea of writing a screenplay about his life; I only knew that the film was representing her as being one of a few lonely people to have this point-of-view and coming to it essentially on her own (and because she hallucinates Richard visiting her), whereas in the wider world, there’s an entire school of “Ricardians” who think his negative image comes from Tudor propaganda—Langley was a new initiate of a long-standing body of thought and her initiative helped to push that school forward both through the discovery of Richard’s remains but also by publicizing the views of Ricardians in new ways.
To figure out what was annoying to me, I had to self-examine: was I being one of those male historians? Was I being too much of a stickler for my sense of procedural realism, e.g., knowing experientially how those conversations in academia actually sound and develop and knowing they don’t tend to have the compact manichean drama of scenes in the film? Was I being set off by the creative device of having Richard appear to Langley as a hallucination? I had to think about my own preferences, about whether I was just too tired at the time I was watching, and so on.
To ask, “Am I worried about the impact of this film?” if I’m sticking with “me, a reader”, I can align it with my own viewing of many other films and readings that portray academics as temperamentally conservative, stuck-up, conformist and controlling, usually in opposition to a bold crusading thinker or activist who comes from outside the academy. But to stay on Level 1, I need to foreground that as my experience of those texts and my experience of the influence or impact of those representations on something that matters to me.
Despite being a kind of thinking everybody can do, there’s still ways to do it in bad faith. One is to not talk about the text itself at all, or to render a series of “impressions” that have no real grounding in the text. At worst, that’s a knowing, intentional mode of bullshit; at best it just suggests that the analyst didn’t really read or understand the text. Everybody’s entitled to their impressions, but you can get a text factually wrong. The second bad faith move is to move too casually from you, the reader, to all of them, the society, to say “because this text struck me as racially insensitive, it has in fact been a contributor to racial insensitivity in this society.” That’s the next level of analysis.
Stage 2: The Intellectual History of the Text in Its Contexts
Tracing the sum total of how a single text has had influence is hard work that requires disciplined research.
A dedicated cultural consumer with long experience can substitute in their own encounters with a text to a limited extent in order to make claims about its general impact. Having seen Star Wars in my early teens, as an avid consumer of speculative fictions of all kinds, as a person who has seen nearly every subsequent work within the Star Wars franchise, as an American of my generation, I can make some claims about the impact of Star Wars without additional information. I can remember many famous citational nods to the text—the Reagan Administration referring to their anti-ballistic missile system as “Star Wars”, the vogue for talking about Joseph Campbell’s version of “the hero’s journey”, endless parodies and citations of Star Wars in various television programs, and so on. Just from my own experience, I can see the impact that the film had on the political economy of Hollywood film-making and on the general status of science fiction in American popular culture.
Even so, if I were setting out to talk about the impact that Star Wars as a single film and as a franchise has had on its audiences, I’d need to do more than reference my own lived experience.
For example, is Star Wars as distinctive as it seems, in any sense that I might want to claim? For example, is it really the origin point of a different system of priorities in Hollywood production, or is that Jaws? Or is it neither? Did the summer blockbuster actually take shape as a system later? Or earlier? George Lucas often claimed later to be referencing Flash Gordon and other works of earlier 20th Century American popular culture, but is that how audiences saw it? What did the audiences of 1977 see or connect to? (Why did they go see the film in such numbers over such a sustained period of time?)
If I wanted to argue that Star Wars reinforced American exceptionalism, realigned what Americans thought of as “empire”, served as a confirming echo of Reagan-era moral manichaeism, I need contextual evidence of those claims. I’m free to see those meanings in that text in my own experience of it, but to say that it affected how other people thought and acted, that it functioned as a component of an ideological system, I need more than my own readings. The moment I place a work in context and make arguments that something happened in the context that originates in the work, I have evidentiary obligations. And some of the evidence is incredibly difficult to come by, because you’re tracing how people in the past thought (which is not always reliably documented by what they write or leave behind in archives), you’re looking for evidence of how that work is referenced in everyday practice and life. How many kids played with Star Wars toys? Wore Star Wars costumes at Halloween? Knew who the characters were? Daydreamed about the Force? How many people thought of what they did in the world as “like in Star Wars”, or used Star Wars as a sustained metaphor of their activities? How sociologically specific was any of that? Are we just talking about upper-middle-class white boys? (Who tend to leave the most detailed evidence of their material, cultural and ideological activities.)
If I want to make claims that C-3PO was coded queer, that Slave Leia made a significant contribution to the sexual objectification of women, that Lando Calrissian rose above racial tokenism, that the Emperor was the continuation of a system associating bodily disfigurement and disability with evil—not just as examples but as contributions to those tropes and systems of representation—I need a rich understanding of the intertextualities and cultural histories I’m talking about. On my own reading, I can certainly “see” characters and narrative in those terms, but placing them in histories bigger than my own reading takes real work.
Just finding the work prominently placed in key institutional locations doesn’t tell you nearly enough. The money spent on it, the K-12 curricula showcasing it, are only preconditions of its possible influence. There are films and books which were extraordinarily popular in their initial moment, which we can measure by the coverage given to them and the money made from their dissemination, which have today completely vanished from memory. Does that mean they didn’t matter very much? Possibly. But possibly not: maybe their influence is deep underground, in more than we might guess, or in some unfamiliar or unexpected place. That’s a research question. There are texts which nobody seemed to care about when they first appeared, but which became better known later on. How did that actually happen? That takes research. There are texts we assume had a huge impact because they are used to reference the zeitgeist of their moment: Easy Rider, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Catch-22, Patton, and so on, but the evidence that most people actually saw or read them and actually saw them as a marker of the times can be surprisingly lacking, particularly in post-war American history. Educated liberals of the Baby Boom generation in particular have a habit of assuming themselves to be the universal American subject after 1945 when in fact their experiences and cultural habits are sometimes quite sociologically limited. Maybe there’s as many Americans of that generation who think of The Green Berets and Death Wish as unironic touchstones of their times.
There are texts which have been taught continuously in American secondary education. Does that mean they’ve been important to what people think about the issues or questions represented in the text, that they’ve influenced people in their identities or choices or politics? Has The Scarlet Letter been influential in that sense in the last fifty years in American life? I’d venture the answer “no”, but that’s a research hypothesis, not a finished argument. Has Lord of the Flies been influential? I’d venture a hypothesis of “yes”, but there’s work to be done to demonstrate that.
Intellectual history sometimes has put limits on the parameters of this kind of inquiry by simply looking to fill out a citational family tree: this philosopher cited that philosopher and was cited by this philosopher, hence, the text is important and constitutive. The moment you get any bigger in your claims about the determinative influence of one text over a wider context, you have a hell of a research problem on your hands. In terms of cultural work, that is often about homage, allusion and remaking, which usually takes some kind of experience or erudition to spot—and especially in the case of music, it’s dangerous. Things can sound, look, or read alike without actually having any intentional or even unintentional connection.
Stage 3: Culture and Consciousness
Some of the most common arguments we make in culture wars assert that consciousness, identity, affinity and ideology have a one-to-one correspondence with some precedent work of culture. On the left, the strategy for this critique is often modeled on a loose—perhaps even careless—stripping down of Edward Said’s Orientalism to a kind of reproducible modular apparatus that can be used to trace knowing progenitors of culture and interpretation that provide foundations for dominant sociopolitical formations. On the American right, this has often followed some form of the “paranoid style”, an accusation that some small group of people residing in America have infiltrated civil or governmental institutions, or established centers of cultural production, with the intention of producing cultural works and paradigms intended to shape consciousness and social life in a particular fashion.
In both cases, such a critique can have some degree of factual validity, both as statements about intent and even about outcomes. But more than a fair amount of time, the examples that these mobilized critics are examining have cause and effect out of order. E.g., changes in identity, social consciousness and perspective do not come from culture but instead look to already-existing culture and re-interpret it in line with their needs and perspectives.
That is not a wrong thing to do, far from it. Culture is not “originalist”, it is a living thing. We see new meanings in old works as we change. Sometimes we find affinities that we never had before, sometimes we find embarrassments in something we previously loved or enshrined.
Sometimes it’s not a linear causal relationship: we change how we read culture, our changed readings in turn change us. We assemble new canons and forswear old ones, but then find sometimes that the new canon is an ill-fitting garment, or a prison that traps us in the sociopolitical imaginary of our immediate ancestors.
But sometimes too—perhaps most of the time—it’s alchemy, where culture, influence and transformation are related as an emergent system, where it’s not clear how representation and practice inform one another, whether we’re talking the life of a single person or the vastness of national and regional publics. I’m going to go so far as to say that the times where you can plausibly map a single cultural work as the cause of a singular change in the worldview of the people who read it (or cursed at it based on what they believed it said) are rare. Claims that this has happened are not rare, but they’re usually not at all careful in the evidence they cite. (Or, as in the case of current American conservative attacks on left-liberal cultural influence, are marked by profound antipathy towards anything like evidence of influence.)
Even the simplest cases you might think of: The Jungle led to federal regulation of food production! The Hidden Persuaders led to regulation of advertising! Titicut Follies led to deinstitutionalization! All of those bear closer examination. Sometimes they function as convenient synecdoches, a shorthand way to reference a longer and more complicated history. Sometimes they operate as ideology for the people who claim responsibility and agency over a transformation (e.g., they allow them to assign credit to themselves) or as a way to conceal the fact that real transformations actually did not take place for a very long time after the ostensible catalyst was published or broadcast. Often they rely on profoundly incurious engagements with the alleged source text, which is given credit for some miniscule fraction of its content while the vast rest of it is excised from memory. (This happens a lot in histories that encode themselves as stories of progress, especially in science: Newton becomes nothing but the calculus, gravity, the orbits of planetary objects, while his spiritual preoccupations puff away as if they never existed.)
The argument that X text is a singular or important cause of Y state of mind in a broadly distributed way—where it is important to either promote the reading of X text or to argue strenuously for its cancellation—is one of the hardest arguments to make that I can think of.
If you want to make it with integrity and care, at any rate. There are reasons why few people want to undertake that work, and at least some of them do reside in a legitimate resentment of the ways that the formality of that charge contradicts the experiential and intuitive substance of our cultural lives. Sometimes you really just do want to say “Look, I have been alive for a while, I’ve seen Star Wars, I have an on-the-ground sense of what it means to people, of how it informs their lives”. Sometimes you are absolutely right to say just that, and your intuition isn’t merely a feeling, but a really perspicacious and insightful interpretation. But sometimes it’s worth considering why you’re so sure that X text is doing Y kind of work, and respecting how hard it can be to really satisfyingly achieve that surety.
That’s a windmill I’m willing to tilt at, a fair amount of the time.
Image credit: "'Tilting at Windmills?' - Found Along Scenic Highway 218 North of Wiscasset, Maine (July 2014)" by UGArdener is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
Yes, I agree. The juxtaposition/opposition was way overdrawn. I sensed that without knowing of the 1955 source. I took the basis of the film was not the story of his R3 was reinscribed as royalty but rather the story of an outsider facing off against authority. A long clichéd theme. And I suppose that would be where one would engage the question of influence. Of course, The Nasty Girl is among the best of the genre, though enhanced by the serious personal risk she took on as her research moved along. And it was the persistent work of serious research rather than spiritual communications that produced the result, as far as film representation takes it. I’m not equipped to move beyond Stage 1, but it think I dabbled Stages 2 and 3 in Combing of History on Nasty Girl and Heaven’s Gate😉🤔👌
Yes, Tim, I am moved by your effort to open this very difficult challenge. And by your suggestion of a way to organize one’s work and thinking--more specifically what an academic or expert might engage the challenge. I am taken by your attention to Langley’s project in The Lost King, exercised in your presentation of Stage 1. But I saw The Lost King (I grant this is my Stage 1 response) as a challenge to expertise, the claims of academic expertise, maybe also challenge to science as a field of practice. This is the story of an outsider. Close to true or not, that’s how I took in the story. Would there have been a story here without the outsider versus the experts? So perhaps we can also imagine an outsider to your model of analysis...though now that’s a challenge. In a next read I am thinking of the arguments about the successive film representations of Shaka that could not shake themselves free of earlier film images even as audiences were changing. (A new production for tv is coming out soon!!) And I think of Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate in its failed efforts to rehistorize the frontier of the West, partly the effect of an already too firmly established literary and film constitution of the frontier. You’ve opened a lot of questions. Thanks.