Artificial Mythologies. A Guide to Cultural Invention

College Literature, Fall 1998 by Ostherr, Kirsten

Saper, Craig. 1997. Artificial mythologies. A guide to cultural invention. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. $17.95 sc. xxv+195 pp.

KIRSTEN OSTHERR BROWN UNIVERSITY

Artificial Mythologies attempts to redefine the style, form, and function of written academic work. Saper takes on this sizable task in order to correct what he sees as the fundamental problems in the study of contemporary culture: the scholarly tendency to describe, rather than act, and to critique rather than invent; the myth of the centered subject/critic; and the purported intentionality and aspiration toward mastery that accrue to the subject. The project consists of an adaptation of the methodology suggested by Roland Barthes's groundbreaking 1957 work Mlythologies; Saper develops a new approach to cultural analysis by producing a series of "inventions"-close readings of cultural details- from sources as disparate as televisual coverage of the Gulf War, urban decay, and Amish family values. Each chapter is a case study in the production of an "artificial mythology," which Saper defines as a "recip[e] for cultural invention" (10). The exact meaning of the term is purposefully unstated as Saper's aim is to produce a "decentered reading strategy" (20) that can resist the lure of intentionality and agency. To this end, Saper privileges Barthes's punctum-that extreme, peripheral, and distracting detail which, if followed, can lead the artificial mythologist astray sufficiently to accomplish that "decentered reading strategy." Thus, the founding premise of the book-that "artificial mythology" can provide the basis for a new form of activist scholarship-inherently resists clear-cut definition; one can't know what artificial mythology is until one is doing it.

The ambiguity of this review thus far testifies to Saper's firm refusal to define the concept of "artificial mythology," and the rest of his keywords are left equally indeterminate. But this observation isn't meant as a criticism; on the contrary, it is an indicator of Saper's success, since explicitness and clearly delineated boundaries are not cherished attributes of the practice that Saper promotes. In fact, the form of knowledge that Saper advocates most intensively is that of "sprezzatura, the ability to speak as if on the spur of the moment and to have a sense of timing and humor" (17). The book as a whole complies with this demand by moving abruptly and unpredictably from one point to the next. One way of describing this method is to say that it resists the totalizing impulse one would expect from a project that explicitly aims to transform the very nature of scholarship on contemporary culture. From a different angle, one could say that the work lacks an overarching organizational structure, and that the main source of cohesion is the continual struggle to define what exactly an artificial mythology is. The practice is articulated through different examples in each chapter, based on objects as diverse as photography, cinema, television, urban architecture, and public relations. But each chapter reads more like an isolated investigation than a logical consequence of the preceding chapter; the parts do not ultimately produce a whole.

Saper might justify the selection of his case studies as intentionally illogical, his transitions motivated only by the most tenuous links precisely in order to highlight the importance of the detail (again, punctum as practice). And indeed, since Saper's desired effect is to unsettle naturalized cultural discourses, his method is largely successful. However, the downside of this strategy is that, at times, Saper seems to have produced a randomly generated, composite image of contemporary culture, which is compelling only to the degree that one is charmed by the author's idiosyncratic choice of specimens. For instance, in the chapter entitled "Family Values and Media Technology," Saper moves from a cultural history of Amish communities in Pennsylvania to an analysis of Heidegger's philosophy, to a proposed "family values methodology" based partly on an analogy between Amish rituals and the nineteenth-century practice of "bundling," and concludes with a discussion of the representation of Amish life in Hollywood film. The point of linking these seemingly unrelated topics is to argue, against the conservative right-wing discourse of family values, that "[Amish] family values function to defamiliarize, denaturalize, and demythologize everyone's family values" (167). In other words, the connections are justified by the challenge that this series of objects poses to a prevalent cultural mythology. This strategy of producing an argument by analogy (or what Saper might call a "fortuitous accident") sacrifices explanatory force to rhetorical style; artificial mythologies do not account for causes, they only draw connections between seemingly disparate effects. But perhaps that is exactly the point. Perhaps Saper's underlying argument is that the search for causes must be put to rest once and for all, because meaning is ultimately the effect of no more and no less than an unpredictable and untamable confluence of largely unidentifiable forces.