What Matters: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Importance

Abstract

This chapter explores mutations in conceptions of popular culture brought by attention to one’s experience of its objects. According to Stanley Cavell, the value of a culture lies not in its “great art” but in its transformative capacity, the same capacity found in the “moral perfectionism” of Emerson and Thoreau. Cavell was the first to account for the necessity of theory and criticism brought about by reflection on Hollywood film. However, he is less concerned with reversing artistic hierarchies or inverting the relation between theory and practice than with the self-transformation required by our encounters with new experiences, what he defines as the “education of grownups”. This does not imply a false revolutionary inversion of aesthetic values but rather a new assessment of importance, which Wittgenstein called for when he asserted the importance of ordinary language philosophy and attention to ordinary practices and life.

This displacement of values toward the important and the personal defines popular culture and its genres. The injunction to appropriate and re-collect one’s experience and what counts within it defines the new demand of the culture of the ordinary, far from laments about the alienation caused by the so-called “mass culture”. We may discover perfectionism in the aesthetic demand to find and invent an audience, as a “personal” search for words to describe and accept our experience. Hence our chapter is a new requirement for ordinary criticism.