'Baffler' carves cynical trail of dissent in the '90s

By Nikolai Slywka

Established in 1988 as a literary magazine by two undergraduates at the University of Virginia, The Baffler has evolved into a journal of belligerent, quick-witted, and at times ham-fisted cultural criticism. Commodify Your Dissent compiles the shrewdest essays from The Baffler's first eight years, with selections ranging from a discussion of how the advertising industry constructed the Generation X phenomenon to a prediction of the death of the metropolis in the rapidly maturing Information Age. Among its other targets, the essays ridicule consumer America and its various corporate, political, and academic shills. The authors chop away at the new crop of entrepreneurs and media moguls who promote what Advertising Age has called "life as a perpetual marketing event," and they try their best to haul questions of class back to where they belong: at the center of national consciousness.

Courtest W.W. Norton

In this time of stupefying government cliché and awesomely vacuous human interest pieces, The Baffler's rampaging cynicism makes for a good, albeit not always convincing, read. The polemics of Thomas Frank, co-founder and prime mover of The Baffler, are particularly compelling in their vitriol, even if they tend to indulge in overstatement.

In one of his essays, Frank writes, "Between the virtual monopoly of business interests over the stuff you spend all day staring at and the decision of the academics to join the burgeoning and noisy legion of culture industry cheerleaders, very little that is adversarial is allowed to filter through. There is almost no dissent from the great cultural project of corporate America, no voice to challenge television's overpowering din." This passage is typical of The Baffler's sweeping and peremptory annunciations. The editors model their work after that of H.L. Mencken, but only occasionally match his precise and violent social criticism. The Baffler's essayists are willing to risk sounding blustery and reductive if it will distinguish their writing from the crabbed diction of academic journals.

For all its pessimism, The Baffler believes that criticism can and should inform--but not substitute for--civic engagement. As Frank sees it, the willingness of many academics to conflate their specialized theorizing with political action makes The Baffler's type of generalist cultural criticism so necessary. Frank, who spent the better part of the '90s getting a doctorate in history at the University of Chicago, argues that professors by and large have forsaken a critical approach that might orientate and empower the individual in contemporary society. Such a method would provide an awareness of the historical contingency of a given set of social conditions and in so doing allow for the recognition of substantive political alternatives to things as they are. Instead, "when the subject was everyday life only one interpretation held [the academics'] interest: that the noble consumer used the dross with which he or she was bombarded to fashion little talismans of rebellion and subversion."

Although Frank never explains what separates The Baffler from a "little talisman of rebellion" (it is, after all, a little, puckishly decorated, and rebellious response to consumer society's dross), his general point is a good one. The phenomena that pass for subversion and political potency among academic cultural critics is often only a consolation prize, as Todd Gitlin put it, for the losers in the societal power game.

What bothers Frank and his friends at The Baffler more than weak forms of dissent are the ways in which consumerism itself is trumpeted as a viable access point to subversion and radical individuality. The celebration of nonconformity that arose in the 1960s, the injunctions to topple the "Organization Man," the belief that acting on impulse somehow leads to self-fulfillment have all been internalized and then actively promoted by the culture industry. Advertisements preach revolution, and in Details, Henry Rollins (in the magazine's description, "`a rock and roll samurai outside the law'") summarizes his success with, "`Mom, Dad, I outgross both of you.'" Meanwhile, the publisher of Details boasts of "`delivering those twenty-something people to marketers in whatever way we can.'" The distinction between iconoclasts and the keepers of the temple of culture becomes meaningless. In the essay, "Why Johnny Can't Dissent," Frank says, "The counter-cultural ideal has become capitalist orthodoxy.... What we understand as `dissent' does not subvert, does not challenge, does not even question the cultural faiths of Western business."

Although this rebel consumerism shouldn't be news to anyone, its treatment in The Baffler sometimes has a breathless, overheated quality to it, as if the writers were greenhorn archaeologists decoding the glyphs that describe a hitherto unknown and absolutely repulsive ritual. But cultural criticism doesn't need to be news in order to be good. In fact, it doesn't even have to be subtle. The Baffler's blunt critiques hack out the beginnings of trail for sharp dissent to follow.

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