Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 59

What Cartoons
Can Teach Us About
Language and Learning
Clifford Geertz has complained that the "besetting sin of
interpretive approaches to anything—literature, dreams, symptoms,
culture--is that they tend to resist, or to be permitted to resist,
conceptual articulation and thus to escape systematic modes of
assessment" (24). Freud, on the contrary, has demonstrated in chapter
seven of The Interpretation of Dreams, that it is a subject's very
resistance which establishes the credence of a work of interpretation.
Of course, we might say Freud’s subject was psychological and
Geertz's exegetical. But surely one of the great contributions of Freud
is his understanding that the exegetical and the psychological
subjects are not as distinct as we would like, and that our very
resistance to the equation of the two is an anchor point for further
theorization.
Resistances, in these terms, would need to be a component of
any critical examination of culture per se. Unfortunately, as John
Fiske has pointed out, we are not accustomed to think of popular
culture as being patterned, in some fashion, according to resistant
forces. We prefer to think of culture as an ideological glue adhering
our private to our social identity. There is manifested here as well a
distrust of theory, since as de Man has demonstrated, any resistance is
always a resistance to theory. Or, as Lukacs makes the point even
better, "structure, not content, is revolutionary."
This distrust of theory is understandable, even unavoidable.
There seem to be two primary uses of theoretical discourse in the field
of popular culture, and both seem a bit condescending. One theorist
wants to make Bugs Bunny say something someone who is not a cartoon
has said. For example, "What's up Doc?" becomes Bugs Bunny's
rejoinder to Aristotle's notion of a final cause. Another theorist wants
to make someone who is not a cartoon character respond to Bugs
Bunny's "What's up Doc?": "Machiavelli anticipates that lapine
trickster."
The assumption behind each of those "theoretical
applications to popular culture" is that the profundity of the popular