Seinfeld as a Field of Signs: Critical Compositions and the Analysis of Popular Culture

Postmodern culture is dominated by a series of contradictions that undermine the ability of students to write in a clear and coherent manner. Through the analysis of a diverse range of television programs in my composition classes, I have found that there is a constant production of both liberal and conservative messages at the same time, and that this cultural production of contradiction is derived from the spread of global mass-mediated capitalism. As Daniel Bell has accurately described, capitalism has always relied on sending the dual messages of saving and consuming, conforming and innovating, of individualism and mass culture. What has changed in postmodern culture is that the tension between these opposing values has been lost, and now one encounters the constant production of contradictory messages.

This circulation of conflicting belief systems renders obsolete many of the past forms of political and critical analysis. One can no longer simply decode social and cultural texts in order to discover the ways that the dominant class controls the masses by getting them to buy into the very ideological systems that oppress them. Moreover, the conservative desire to locate a consistent liberal agenda in our cultural productions has also become out-dated. Both modes of ideological criticism fail because they neglect to see how postmodern culture lives and thrives by coming down squarely on both sides of every issue. By reading Seinfeld as a field of signs, I will show how this constant circulation of conflicting messages produces in its audience a state of cognitive ambivalence and political apathy. This analysis, in turn, will allow me to formulate strategies to empower students in composition classes by developing skills and strategies aimed to combat cultural and subjective ambivalence.

One of the first things that I do in my writing courses is to have students watch and analyze an episode of Seinfeld. The first time we watch th