TheBaffler.com is a [[parking lot]].
Title
The Baffler Magazine
Description
About the Baffler
The Baffler sprang into this world back in 1988 from a very simple idea. Thanks to the forces of academic professionalization, it seemed to us, cultural criticism had become specialized and intentionally obscure. The authority of high culture may have collapsed, but the high-culture critics had no intention of allowing their authority to collapse with it. Instead they abandoned the mundane project of enlightenment and aimed for bafflement, for a style that made much of its own radicalism but had astonishingly little to say about the conditions of life in late twentieth-century America. We set out to puncture their pretensions and to beat them at their own game.
Our suspicion of the high critical style quickly merged with a broader analysis of the culture business. If there was ever a time not to be baffling, we insisted, this was it. Between the rise of the Culture Trust and its desire to put an ad on every available surface, a demographic on every face, and an A&R man in every avant-garde, these were times that called for explosive analysis and strong, unambiguous statements.
What we got instead were ten years in which the high critics declared that the production of mass culture was not worth talking about at all, since to do so was to make the distasteful assumption that the public stupidly fell for the commercial ephemera that increasingly made up our cultural surroundings. No, when the subject was everyday life only one interpretation held their interest: that the noble consumer used the dross with which he or she was bombarded to fashion little talismans of rebellion and subversion. And with that little moué of politeness a hundred year legacy was abandoned when we needed it most.
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