What arts and humanities can mean to our living: a review essay

Community College Enterprise, The, Fall 2004 by Aquila, Dominic A

White is a novelist and professor of English at Illinois State University. Like Guillory, deconstructionism intruded into his graduate school experience. And also like Guillory, he chose not to embrace it, even as he felt its allure. Instead, working under Merle Brown at the University of Iowa in the 1970s, White was trained in the close reading of texts, and came to appreciate the importance of reflecting long and deeply on a poem or any work of literature or art in order for it to reveal its "power and suggestiveness."

Whereas Arts of Living and Cultural Capital take aim at the cultural Left and Right, The Middle Mind targets middleness. This "middle mind" is for White a "third force" of American political culture. It is

pragmatic, plainspoken, populist, contemptuous of the Right's narrowness and incredulous before the Left's convulsions. It is adventuresome, eclectic, spiritual, and in general agreement with liberal political assumptions about race, gender, and class.

Its institutional expression par excellance is National Public Radio and PBS. Terry Gross and her popular show on culture, Fresh Air, come in for particularly harsh criticism. White finds her work no more savory than the extremist positions of the Left and Right. In fact, it was the uproar over White's 2002 attack on Gross's programs in Harper's Magazine that led to the publication of The Middle Mind. White had chastised her show for its voyeuristic discussions of culture and her "middle-minded" guests. Gross's fans reacted sharply in the letters section of Harper's. Whether or not one agrees with White's withering assault on Terry Gross (a "schlock jock" in White's final assessment), it sets up an unexpected opposition: Fresh Air-a show that purports to offer an alterative to mass commercial culture as an enemy of real imagination. Curiously, not long after the publication of White's book, a controversy exploded between Bill O'Reilly of Fox News and Terry Gross, and continues to play out along scripted lines. Each side has posted transcripts of the acrimonious encounters between O'Reilly and Gross in the hopes of vindicating themselves from charges of unfairness and bias in their treatment of each other2. Measly stakes, indeed, White would say.

With an unsentimental eye White savages many of the icons of American popular and middle culture, from Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan to Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Like Spellmeyer, White celebrates the creative capacity of criticism, even as he practices precisely the sort of highly polemical criticism that Spellmeyer rejects. White's criticism proceeds from a close reading of texts in the tradition of the New Critics he immersed himself in graduate school. He commends only a few products of contemporary culture, among them, Radiohead's Kid A. Indeed, White is no more compromising than Radiohead's most recent CD, Hail to the Thief.

The most provocative feature of The Middle Mind is White's assertion that "the imagination's most basic social functions are criticism of the status quo and a spur to alternative ways of living." Read in the context of Spellmeyer's and Guillory's books, the reader is especially alert to the deeper meaning of White's contention that the media, American political culture, and the culture of the academic try to manage our minds to prevent undesirable change. Americans aren't stupid, according to White, just "managed," a reference to their unimaginative acceptance of the world as it is and a stubborn lack of faith in plausible alternatives. Such a charge resonates and indeed flows logically from the aims and purposes of an administered society directed by a professionalmanagerial elite. One may agree with White's impatience with Americans' uncritical habits of mind, but he does not sufficiently probe why Americans embrace them. Indeed, the wide readership of White's book suggests that his critique of our flaccid imaginations has registered, yet it does not follow that middle-minders desire to address the world more imaginatively and more critically. There may after all be a certain feeling of liberation in being managed. Despite the book's subtitle-Why Americans Don't Think for Themselves-the "why" remains largely unexamined.