"Cultural" Gatekeeping: A Few Thoughts

When we hear the term "gatekeeping" these days we are likely to be hearing criticism of what is called "cultural gatekeeping"--not the gatekeeping of a profession or a career or access to an educational institution permitting social advancement, for example, or gatekeeping a discussion of public affairs, but the arena of culture, with discussion of such gatekeeping today extending even to popular culture.

It seems to me undeniable that this does happen--and that it can be very hard to justify. After all, if gatekeeping is in some degree unavoidable, it is easiest to argue for such gatekeeping when a field has a strong claim to having its own, distinct, body of technical knowledge whose indispensability to understanding and practice has been proven, and which an outsider to the field is very unlikely to possess. This is especially unlikely to be the case in the cultural realm--and so more obviously needless, and more blatantly a matter of "experts" defending their privileged position. Certainly one sees this in the realm of what is tellingly called "higher" culture, with its ostentatious snobberies about certain classics, and the cults it makes of them--such that one is not only expected to know them if others are to take them at all seriously in the "conversation," but hold the "right" opinions about them. (Thus it is not enough to recognize Shakespeare as a hugely important figure in English and world literature and culture. It is not enough to have read Shakespeare, or even all of Shakespeare, and to have done so closely enough to have opinions about him and be able to argue intelligently for them. One is obliged to be a Bardolator who believes him the epitome of literary accomplishment, perfect in every way, unsurpassed and never to be surpassed--seeing him not as a man of his time whose work is in some ways best understood in that time, but a transcendent figure for all time, such that one could almost say anything else is not really worth bothering with, as, for extra points doing what is too much even for such a self-confessed Bardolator as Harold Bloom, one lies about seeing graces and profundities in the trashy edgelordism of a production of Titus Andronicus.)

For my part I do think that it has a pernicious effect on our ability to appreciate art and talk about it, among much, much else (there are distinct political implications in the English-speaking world having as its Supreme Poet a man who died in the seventeenth century, more a Medieval than a modern, paralleling that way in which many have from century to century seen English political evolution as having in many ways come to an end in 1688, leaving the situation frozen ever since--if not going backwards). However, acknowledging that this does happen--constantly--and that it has its consequences--negative ones--is a very different thing from giving the charge of "gatekeeping" a free pass in any and every situation, as we see especially when we are talking about popular culture, where, it should be easy to see, the prestige is lower, but the financial stakes are far, far greater. These days just expressing in public admiration for something which happens to be "old," or dislike of something which happens to be new, is likely to get the charge thrown at you in a reflection of how the media-industrial complex's cynical pushing of stale do-overs of stuff that often wasn't worth doing the first time around lines up with the warped and trivial and insanely overheated cultural politics of today behind its efforts to get the public to pay for its trash. Think there are too many sequels and prequels and remakes and reboots and spin-offs these days? That's just gatekeeping! Think we've had too many superhero movies and it's time to give the form a break? That's just gatekeeping! Think that movies were better off when "they had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting?" That's just gatekeeping! Reactionary, racist, sexist gatekeeping! (And you should be ashamed of yourself for it!)

Indeed, it should be obvious that while many can and do use the past to criticize the present having respect or even affection for a particular artifact of the past hardly makes one a reactionary. In fact, it should be obvious that asking for originality and thoughtfulness in storytelling is not gatekeeping, but actually the diametrical opposite--that it is not the act of one slamming the door in the faces of those who have been unjustly locked out of the discourse in the past, but rather one calling for the gates to be opened wider to them in the most meaningful way. It should also be obvious that gatekeeping really being pervasive, and really being used in "reactionary, racist, sexist" and other unfortunate ways, makes flinging about light-minded and false charges less forgivable, rather than more so. But of course, nuance is not a strong suit of the cultural politics of our time, and of course, not at all desired by those whose manipulation of the situation, if blatant and stupid and blatantly stupid, and uncertain in realizing their ends, is still something they believe to be working in their venal interests, making them determined to "stay the course."