The Valve - A Literary Organ | The Hardest Road to Renewal or, Cultural Studies Now!: Joel Pfister ("The Americanization of Cultural Studies,” Yale Journal of Criticism 4:2 {Spring 1991}).... Pfister actually took a very different view... assessing the conflict between the U.S. scholars and Stuart Hall (who spoke at the conference and pronounced U.S. cultural studiess to be in a “moment of danger") as indicative of the path U.S. scholars had taken toward a “post-political” engagement with popular culture, toward cultural studies as “interpretive performance” rather than critique,” toward an abandonment of history and a reconstitution of “power solely as a problem of ‘textuality.’”...
Foremost, Pfister says, the context of the British Old Left was the starting block for the CCCS, but also its main antagonist: “Hall’s stress on culture grew out of the pressing need to unlearn some of the assumptions, strategies, and goals of the Old Left,” doing so by “recogniz[ing] culture as a productive, determining force in its own right and not merely as a reflection or expression of the economic base” rather than by privileging “members of the working-class as the universal subjects of history” and focusing on the “determinations” of “mechanisms like competition, monopolistic control, and imperial expansion.” Furthermore, the work being produced by CCCS was being disseminated through non- or semi-academic channels (NLR, Marxism Today).... “The New Left’s cultural studies was indivisible from the project of regrouping in response to the predicament of socialism within the crisis of cold war capitalism.” This context simply could not be imported to the U.S. along with the texts (Althusser, Gramsci, et al.) which the CCCS researchers and theorists were using to make their breakthroughs.
Instead, the field of action shrank from society to the academy; rather than social transformation, disciplinary sublation was the goal.... Pfister also questions some of the terms used to describe cultural studies work as already inviting a considerable degree of de-politicization or introversion, and this is probably worth quoting in full:
Words like ‘intervention’ and ‘interrogation’ are meant to signify the cultural studies critic’s serious ‘oppositional’ stance towards hegemonic traditions of knowledge production. These two words carry some obvious militaristic and disciplinary connotations: armies intervene and spies are interrogated; police intervene and suspects are interrogated. ‘Intervention’ and ‘interrogation’ have given critical theorists in US English departments a powerful self-image and sense of mission. Personally, I am delighted that literary critics in both Britain and the US are ‘intervening’ in literary criticism and ‘interrogating’ a canon that have [sic] frequently been misrepresented as having no political agenda. But I am also bothered because this discourse of intervention seems to romanticize the critic’s academic role as sufficiently ‘oppositional’… What is needed in the US now is certainly not a postmodern romanticization of the ‘political-intellectual’ but a greater historical understanding of the social, political, and academic conditions within which a discourse of ‘intervention’ seemed to make sense for those British intellectuals who practiced cultural studies because it was unmistakably one necessary dimension of a larger intervention underway...
The exchange between Bérubé and the UC-Davis students is fairly exemplary.... Bérubé seems to be hoping for a culling or a tightening or focusing of cultural studies onto a few specific (and highly valuable) questions: “complicating the political-economy model in media theory, […] complicating our accounts of neoliberalism, and… convincing people inside and outside the university that cultural studies’ understanding of hegemony is a form of understanding with great explanatory power—that is to say, a form of understanding that actually works.” But while these questions seem to be setting the terms for a definition of what a successful intervention might be, they actually draw back from doing so. The rhetoric he uses of “complicating” is, I think, taking a step back from the more confrontational discourse of “intervention,” as in the end “complicating” terms like ‘neoliberalism’ already understood to be immensely fraught and unstable seems more gestural than substantive—it pushes the focus back onto the object: the participle “complicating” is so blank that we move immediately toward whatever it is we’re supposed to be doing this underdefined action to. And a similar thing happens with the last phrase: “an understanding that actually works” again directs us away from the action and towards what it stands in apposition to—the point is that hegemony is important, not what specifically we’re doing to it.
Similarly, the UC-Davis students interestingly do not read Bérubé’s critique as being one about how they should be going about their work, but as a dismissal of what it is they work on.... ‘No,’ they’re saying, ‘it’s not just Madonna; it’s the war on terror too.’...
Pfister, I think, helps us see that this type of move away from self-critique of methodology toward squabbles over content or subject matter isn’t just about re-focusing on methodology in an abstract manner, but that what is required is a firm historical understanding of methodology, how and why the specific methods of “intervention” or “resistance” are taken up. Without this historical understanding, the discursive formulations we use to describe our methodology ("complicating," “problematizing,” etc.) lose their character as actual maneuvers or strategies and that becomes the type of problem Pfister saw in 1991 and that we can still see quite plainly today.
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