“We’d All Be Good if We Just Could”:
Cultural Revolution, Love, Freedom, and Other Platitudes in hooks' Outlaw Culture

--J. J. Peachum, “On the Uncertainty of Human Circumstances” from Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera

In the introduction to her book, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, bell hooks attempts to define and to promote the practice of cultural criticism.  Citing her passion for universal “critical consciousness,” she asserts that cultural criticism is the process of
“[m]erging critical thinking in everyday life with knowledge learned in books and through study” (2).  Further, she states that such critique is elemental in the challenge against domination, most particularly that nefarious, omnipresent scourge of domination perpetuated by the white male elite, that inhumane colonialist matrix which insidiously makes this world so unbearable and so downright unjust to live in (2-3).  

Specifically, hooks’ method is based upon the crossing of rigid, traditional scholastic “borders” in order to attempt a cultural revolt for and by the masses.  Nonetheless, despite her “radical” élan, a reader gleans the pseudo-missionary zeal of her exclusivity, an exclusivity which can be regarded as no more or less than a shifting of masters and an ineffectual grasping after a specious ideology of superhuman love.  Implicitly speaking from the position of an infiltrator, more specifically an illegal alien, at the borders of academia (3), hooks wants to “decolonize” not only discourse but culture as well.  She intends to do this by enacting some colonizing of her own, more or less forcing everyone “to do everything differently” (7).  Simply stated, bell hooks wants things her way.  She wants to create “a just [,] more humane world” on her own terms, and her quasi-credible intellectual battle cry against “the underlying metaphysics of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” is only the means to a deceptive all-consuming equity without remainder.  That is, she restates a still popular pipedream—total justice and freedom for all.

It would be petty to cite the inconsistencies of hooks’ position just from the evidence she presents in her introduction.  To be fair, her initial assertions on the mode of cultural criticism are notable.  Undoubtedly, cultural criticism is revolutionary by nature.  Investigations and interrogations of popular culture are revealing.  They keenly make us aware of who we are and where we come from.  Still, to frame these revelations with too strong an adherence to a socio-politico-economic-gender platform is most severely to dehumanize them.  Surely, there are rampant injustices being perpetuated in society, and hooks addresses them admirably, but when she reaches for conclusions, she is at one and the same time premature and futuristic.  For instance, at the end of her book, by maintaining “love as the practice of freedom,” she suggests that by means of universal love and fraternity we will almost magically be free and live in a beloved community of tomorrow (243-50).  Such a vision has its precedent throughout human history, throughout human prophecy.  It is kindred to the vision of a Disney Utopia, and, like such visions, hooks’ spirit of cultural criticism/revolution is, in the final analysis, most inhuman.

The problem bell hooks typifies is not new.  Albert Camus, in his essay “Helen’s Exile,” written in 1948, elucidates our contemporary tendency toward sweeping reform and boundless justice at the cost of our very humanity with its needs for both beauty and measure.  Clearly, bell hooks neither offers nor implies an aesthetics, and without an idea of beauty, how can there be an ethic of love?  Regarding measure, one must be aware of limits.  To understand this, we must join Camus who hearkens back to the Greeks, stating:

This naïve expectation of equilibrium is the utopian vision of hooks’ love ethic.  It is a matter of putting things off for a golden future, a prophecy for a liberal multicultural City of God.  A more accurate account of hooks’ proposition is to align it with Christian missionarianism, a new, amorphous remaking of our world into an indistinct muddle of homogeneity.  This is veiled tyranny in the worst sense, and, in the best sense, it is a makeshift attempt at codifying a world-view.  As a kind of cultural physician, hooks has sanctimoniously indicated the symptoms of this culture’s malaise, but, too quickly, she prescribes a good old religious dose of the love placebo.

As a contrast and an application of hooks’ position, consider Oliver Stone’s film Natural Born Killers.  Ostensibly a phantasmagoric journey through the exploits of a psychotic couple, the film is a critical commentary on the evils of the media.  Nevertheless, at bottom, it is really just a love story.  This is especially evident when one considers the prison interview Mickey (Woody Harrelson), the male protagonist, has with the tabloid TV journalist Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr.) toward the end of the movie.  Immediately preceding this encounter, this dialogue, between “psycho” and “investigative reporter,” we see Mickey shaving his head, having flashbacks to his abusive childhood and his witnessing of his father’s suicide.  Simultaneously, Wayne grooms his nose hair with an electric gizmo and tells a black prisoner that he empathizes with his incarceration for murder.  The juxtaposition of these images is darkly humorous and also revealing.  In relation to hooks’ cultural criticism, this juxtaposition makes a parody of her assertions.  In the first place, we must ask, “How can we escape our individual and cultural pasts—those mechanisms and experiences not only of a lifetime but of a cultural lifetime?”  We cannot simply forget all the cultural technologies that are part and parcel of our character, our existence.  We cannot be who we are not.

Further, the compassionate portraits of suffering and disenfranchisement presented throughout Natural Born Killers indicate a parallel between both the “empowered” representatives of law and order as well as the “disempowered” representatives of revolt and disorder (reorder?).  The delineation, therefore, is blurred in opposition to hooks’ rather black and white distinction between the dominant white male oppressors versus women and blacks.  Finally, the actual dialogue between Mickey and Wayne directly addresses hooks’ love potion cure.  When Wayne asks when Mickey became a killer, Mickey says, “Birth.  I was born into a pit of scum.”  He goes on to indicate that violence and murder are human fate, a natural consequence because humanity is not born “innocent.”  Indeed, an anesthetized love is inhuman.  Are we made solely for love and freedom?  Certainly not, there is more to humanity and nature than these notions of “goodness.”  Mickey continues, stating many deserve to die, and, implying that God is a killer, he ascribes to himself the role of “Fate’s messenger,” the angel of death.  Redefining this role, Mickey calls the murderous urge in himself and in humanity as “the demon,” and he adds, “The only thing that kills the demon is love.”  The semantics are important here.  At this point Mickey reflects on his love affair with his common-law wife and partner in crime, Mallory (Juliette Lewis): “Love kills the demon.”

Wayne, in disbelief, sardonically asks if a murder spree is worth the separation from Mallory, from love.  Mickey coolly counters, asking, “You mean, is an instance of purity worth a lifetime of lies?”  The commentary is poignant; given the mechanism of universal love and harmony, murder is patently excluded.  Still, murder is a natural potential; therefore, universal love and harmony, in truth, are lies that empower the cultural mechanisms of domination.  Hence, hooks’ “loving community” which she offers in conclusion to her book is a subterfuge, a purely intellectual hypothesis lacking insight into the fundamentals of human nature, human reality.  Even worse, it is a reassertion of old church tales, and if we reconstruct the church, we cannot help but restore the forms of domination implicit therein.

Perhaps Mickey best summarizes this issue when he offers no solutions except following his own nature, the nature of ceaseless revolt.  On the other hand, hooks urges us to love despite the “guarantee that one will be dismissed or considered naïve” (247).  Actually, the “choice of love” on a world scale is not “naïve”; it is arrogant, a dangerous extermination of the complexity of human character that is both angel and demon.  Given this understanding, we see the value of Mickey’s statement: “A moment of realization is worth a thousand prayers.”

Overall, putting bell hooks’ definition and theory of cultural criticism into practice, it becomes clear that it has limitations.  The basics of her critical view reveal commentary from a closed perspective which is ultimately resolved in liberal platitudes.  Until cultural criticism addresses itself to the issues of the totality of human possibility, there can be no satisfactory resolution to the apparent injustices and marginalism of contemporary society.  Without a recognition of aesthetics and limits, hooks’ “radical border-crossing” of contemporary cultural criticism will remain nothing but a disjointed bout of finger-pointing at “The Man” by a mob of intellectual prisoners inciting a rhetorical riot.

Works Consulted

Camus, Albert.  “Helen’s Exile.”  The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays.  Trans. Justin O’Brien.  New York: Vintage, 1955. 134-38.

Foucault, Michel.  The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality.  Trans. Robert Hurley.  New York: Vintage, 1990.

hooks, bell.  Introduction: “The Heartbeat of Cultural Revolution.”  Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations.  New York: Routledge, 1994.  1-7.

---.  “Love as the Practice of Freedom.”  Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations. New York: Routledge, 1994.  243-50.

Stone, Oliver, dir. Natural Born Killers.  With Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Robert Downey Jr., and Tommy Lee Jones.  Warner Brothers, 1994.