What’s Theory Got to Do With It? The Silly Archives, Film & TV, and Popular Trash as Cultural Revolution

“We expose ourselves to serious error when we attempt to “read off” concepts that were designed to operate at a high level of abstraction as if they automatically produced the same theoretical effects when translated to another, more concrete, “lower” level of operation.” – Stuart Hall

Fictional characters and imaginary worlds “…have long been on a quest to articulate an alternative vision of life, love, and labor and to put such a vision into practice” (Halberstam, 2011: 2). Last year, I illustrated the above specificities discussed by both Stuart Hall (1990) and Jack Halberstam (2011) in the work I did on the subatomic terrain of Ant-Man and the Wasp to discuss racism and whiteness (Ventour-Griffiths, 2023). Further to Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Marxism via Guy DeBord’s ‘the spectacle’, (Ventour-Griffiths, 2023b). However: ‘what if the abstract nature of filmic and televisual storytelling was used a slingshot into getting different types of audiences confident navigating scholarly theories? 

In his book The Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam coined the term ‘low theory’ (adapted from Hall, 1990: 413) to challenge established forms of knowing and “to think about ways of being and knowing that stand outside conventional understandings of success” (p2). It is arguable this challenge to standardised knowledge formation is queer, where bell hooks describes queer “… not as being about who you’re having sex with (that can be a dimension…) but ‘queer’ as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it…” (The New School, 2014: 01:27:50-54). Tim Dean extends queerness ‘beyond sexuality’ and insists “… ‘queer’ is opposed not simply to ‘straight’ but broadly to ‘normal’ (Dean, 2000: 225). Perhaps showing how ‘normalised knowledge’, is opposed to divergent productions of knowledge – a people who are also made to defend themselves from the ‘standardised traditions’ of the academy.

Being seen as silly or eccentric is also what allowed (and still allows) trendsetters to think against the grain of normative knowledge production. However, works that seriously use seemingly ‘childish’ endeavours, like comic book movies, risk being ridiculed. Yet, ‘seriousness’ in academia tends to be double talk for ‘academic rigour’. And though I engage with fields like Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, it was not they who encouraged me to seriously engage with the popular – the art world did!

This workshop encourages participants to ‘think silly’ in serious ways, using the films and television we know and love as vessels to alternative ways of thinking about life and love in our pursuits to happiness in an unjust world. What Halberstam calls the “silly archive” (2011: 19) can be applied to disciplines across scholarship as ways to enhance interactions with ‘common sense theory.’ Embracing our inner-child is in our interest – where fictional worlds, not just ‘pure facts’, are vital to the human experience. 

Reference 

Dean, T (2000) Beyond Sexuality. Chicago: University.

DeBord, G (1967) The Society of the Spectacle. London: Rebel Press

Halberstam, J (2011) The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke. 

Hall, S (1990) “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.” In: Kuan- Hsing and David Morley Chen (eds).  Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogies in Cultural Studies. NY: Routledge. p.411-441. 

The New School (2014) bell hooks - Are You Still a Slave? Liberating the Black Female Body | Eugene Lang College. YouTube [online].  

Ventour-Griffiths, T (2023) ‘Micro/Aggression’: How Ant-Man and The Wasp Offers Longed-For Alt. Terminology. Medium [online]. 

• (2023b) “I Am Kenough”: Guy DeBord, Barbie, and The Society of the Spectacle. Medium. 

Bio

Tré Ventour-Griffiths is an autistic creative, public historian, sociologist, and cultural critic who speaks and writes on subjects broadly contained within Black British history, neurodiversity, intersectionality, cultural criticism, and insurgent politics.