Middle Mind [Paperback]

Curtis White (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 24, 2005

Creeping into art, literature, politics and the media, sliding into living rooms and coming soon to a cinema near you the Middle Mind has arrived. Join Curtis White on a crusade against tedium as he takes on this bland, no-thinking-required product' that passes for culture in America and that we've signed up and paid for in full too. It's not about high- or low-brow, it's about a mainstream consensus that pleases everyone but moves, challenges or shocks no one: from the Hollywood machine to cultural theory equating Madonna with Milton, from free market ideology to TV arts programmes, New Age self-help and Oprah's Book Club. This is a book for anyone who thinks culture should be a force for change, not just something to acquire and consume; who wants to reclaim the destabilizing power of the imagination and start thinking for themselves.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Curtis White’s The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves--which grew from a 2002 Harper's article—examines as its titular object the dominant American liberal, pseudo-intellectual consciousness. "The Middle Mind" disdains hard thinking and true examination of corporate and political forces that act upon it. In the book, White dilates on his notion of an American Middle Mind to imagine a world beyond it, but he frequently gets lost on his journey. He finds three sources for this American malaise: the entertainment industry, academic orthodoxy, and political ideology. But, as in the original magazine piece, the figures he picks to condemn within this triumvirate are a bit surprising, even while his attacks are unremitting. NPR's Terry Gross, for example, is characterized as one whose work is "useless for the purposes of intelligence," and her show is dismissed as a "pornographic farce." In his critiques, White claims to be resisting the classic high-brow/low-brow cultural distinctions; or, rather, he sees the Middle Mind as having absorbed them. But his frequent allusions to Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and high Modernism long for a world that never was, a world of art and political resistance that was somehow accessible in its full complexity to all of America. While White wants a creative, intelligent, politically engaged American mass culture, his exemplars look remarkably like high culture icons and few modern intellectuals are left standing (notably Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Bill Moyers). By the end, his call for a "pragmatic sublime" diffuses into vague, postmodern-theory-laden discussion of artistic formalism and a celebration of David Lynch's film Blue Velvet as a model for resistance. In this context of exclusivity, Terry Gross's inclusive "Middle Mind" seems the more open space for true discourse. --Patrick O’Kelley --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

In March 2002 Harper's ran White's controversial essay attacking Fresh Air radio host Terry Gross (a "schlock jock"). The article sparked outrage at the author's choice of sacred cow to savage. White (Memories of My Father Watching TV) fleshes out that piece into a book-length attack on the pseudo-intellectual tendencies of mainstream America. "The middle mind" describes the large segment of folks who claim to be interested in art and ideas, but who would never permit those influences to budge their complacent assumptions about postindustrial life. White investigates the role of the middle mind in the arenas of "entertainment, intellectual orthodoxy, and political ideology." The middle mind "offers us an art and a cultural commentary that is really just more commercial product." White's writing is undisciplined, frightfully (and unabashedly) elitist, self-satisfied, jokey yet rather entertaining. He is given to outlandish, often unsubstantiated claims about the terrors of modern life; he fares far better when concentrating on a specific text, whether it be Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan or Radiohead's album Kid A. White finds the rise in aesthetic and cultural interest on the part of ordinary people over the last few decades disagreeable, which will disturb some readers. One thing can be said for White, however: there's no arguing with his sincerity.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books (February 24, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0141016752
• ISBN-13: 978-0141016757
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (52 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,540,580 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

55 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Original, thoughtful critique of contemporary culture, July 6, 2004

By 

Lleu Christopher (Hudson Valley, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think for Themselves (Hardcover)

Despite its flaws (which many other reviewers were quick to spot), I found The Middle Mind to be a refreshing look at the bland mediocrity of contemporary American culture. This book may be better appreciated as a collection of essays (which, to a large extent, it is: some of the material has already been published in Harper's) than a book with a unified theme. If you judge it by its title and expect a focused discussion of the middle mind you will be disappointed. If you take each chapter on its own merits, however, you can admire the style, scope and originality of Curtis White's writing.

The middle mind is that superficial, politically correct, nonthreatening cultural terrain that is all around us today. It is, as White tells us, prevalent in the media (especially the supposedly liberal media such as NPR), academia and politics. To the right of the middle mind are the cultural conservatives who want to turn back the clock to a mythic America of the past; to the left are the "tenured radicals" whose criticism of society seldom reaches beyond the university. Steven Spielberg (whose Saving Private Ryan is methodically criticized; White does a good job in exposing it as a simplistic, anachronistic piece of pro-war propaganda), Charlie Rose and NPR's Terry Gross are given as examples of the middle mind in action. I am not familiar with the latter two, but White portrays them as pseudo-serious talk shows full of celebrity gossip.

There are a couple of problems with this book. One is the insufficient attention given to the central topic of the middle mind itself. White gives some good examples of it, but never really pins down the middle mind and its relationship to the extremes. Another, related problem is that White, especially in the last few chapters, get bogged down in a complicated technical discussion of metaphysics which, if I understand it correctly, undercuts the book's premise to some degree. For one thing, these highly theoretical arguments are the very kind that the aforementioned tenured radicals are so fond of. White discusses the theories of Derrida and Hegel. Derrida was a postmodernist who helped to start the trend of "deconstruction" so hated by conservatives like Harold Bloom. Hegel was, among other things, the philosopher who used the device known as dialectic. Although White doesn't get into this, dialectic --with its thesis, antithesis and synthesis-- is closely related to the problem of the middle mind. I'm not saying Hegel was an advocate of White's middle mind, but if you are going to bring in Hegel's extremely complex thinking, you should at least address the part of his philosophy that most closely relates to your topic. As for Derrida and postmodernism, White first seems to imply that they are part of the academic tendency to fall prey to the middle mind. But then, in the later chapters, he returns to Derrida and tries to use him to further his argument. I found White's final chapter, in which he advocates a culture that embraces the imagination, admirable in its intent but a little too abstract to be convincing.

The limitations of this book do not take away from its value. White is an intelligent and entertaining writer; his style ranges from serious to cantankerous to tongue-in-cheek. I agreed with most of his criticisms; where I found him lacking were in his attempts to suggest positive alternatives. Yet the book's main focus is one of criticizing the status quo, and there is much value in that. His approach is non-dogmatic, so we can forgive him for not entirely succeeding in giving us the Final Answer to the problem of the middle mind. This is the kind of book that can stir readers out of intellectual complacency and remind them that creativity and the imagination lie outside the boundaries of today's pop culture.

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Joy of "Reading", June 29, 2004

By 

DancesWithAnxiety "chewtoy to the Fates" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think for Themselves (Hardcover)

As other readers have commented, White does a poor job of giving a precise meaning to "the middle mind," and he actually fails to tell us why Americans don't think for themselves. He gives plenty of examples of Americans not thinking for themselves, but provides little in the way of explanation.

Nonetheless, a prescription, and a valuable one, can be abstracted from this rather scattered and wide-ranging work of social criticism: let us critically examine our cultural, political, aesthetic and social worlds with an eye to the possible alternatives and open possibilities. White performs evocative readings of disparate social artifacts, ranging from Saving Private Ryan, The Accidental Buddhist, and Radiohead's music to political efforts co-opt "stupid smart" gen-Xers for business revitalization. Some of these readings miss the mark while others are quite perceptive; I suspect every reader will find occasion to agree and to disagree. I would suggest that far from attempting to feed us "correct" opinions, White is telegraphing a critical stance to the world whose absence he rightly deplores. By analogy, if this book were about the state of the culinary arts, it would not be a cookbook of tried-and-true recipes, but a call that we should challenge ourselves to discover the joy of cooking, with all the risk and mess it entails. Who knows what new culinary creations might come of it?

This is an extremely ambitious short work -- a book that ultimately points to a world of thought and engagement far beyond its own pages. Highly recommended.

63 of 71 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Forget Reviews - Read It Yourself, September 6, 2003

By 

Joerg Colberg (Northampton, MA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think for Themselves (Hardcover)

Those reviews they got up here so far show exactly what Curtis White is criticizing. In that sense they are pretty much useless. Curtis White's position is neither liberal not conservative. Anybody who claims that White is liberal or conservative has simply missed the main point of the book. White is attacking NPR and Dinesh D'Souza, Cultural Studies and Steven Spielberg. The real point of the book is how one can possibly go beyond the stifling lack of imagination - which manifests itself so clearly in those almost petrified structures you run across every day - including the reviews here. If you're willing to throw some of those convictions you got over board and try to see things not from left or right but from somewhere else go and read the book. If you're caught in the liberal-right wing scheme and you prefer to read somebody you can agree with save your money.