They call it Theory Monday — Crooked Timber: Let me propose that cultural studies can be considered a salient field, though not fixed for all time, in the following ways:
(1) it developed (and continues to develop) a rich “culture and society” school of criticism, in which the many and various meanings of the first term (from the Arnoldian to the anthropological) are tracked with relation to the contours of the formal and legal apparatus of the latter term. For instance: in 1993, Stuart Hall argued, “far from collapsing the complex questions of cultural identity and issues of social and political rights, what we need now is greater distance between them. We need to be able to insist that rights of citizenship and the incommensurabilities of cultural difference are respected and that the one is not made a condition of the other.” This is not simply a condition-of-England question (as some people have complained about the “culture and society” tradition); it is critical to any attempt to think about hijab-wearing schoolgirls in France or Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Scientists refusing medical care for their children in the US. Yes, this school of thought arose out of radical historians’ work on the English working classes, but it didn’t stay there and doesn’t need to. The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain and Paul Gilroy’s There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation are responses to (and therefore part of) this tradition, and their revisionary accounts of British identity arguably helped result in the Parekh Report.
(2) it developed (and continues to develop) a rich tradition of analyzing the functions of mass media and mass culture in industrialized democracies. The tradition was kicked off by Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy and the broadly provocative final chapter of Williams’ Culture and Society, and has gone in, oh, roughly a thousand directions since, mostly in critical dialogue with the tradition of the Frankfurt school and the political economy wing of communications studies. As with (1), there’s a lot of room for maneuver here, and any number of ways to go in the future. But usually, cultural studies sees the “political economy” approach to mass media as Grossberg does—as necessary but finally insufficient for an explanation of how people understand media. As I put it in my post on Manufacturing Consent, sometimes people respond to mass media by saying “this is bullshit,” and writing scathing liberal/left critiques of the mass media; or sometimes people say “this is bullshit” and proceed to blow a lot of Hot Air about how Rachel Ray is sending seekrit terrorist keffiyeh messages with the help of Dunkin Donuts and the librul media. People are funny that way: for a variety of reasons, they sometimes refuse to believe what they’re told.
(3) in the 1970s, it developed New Left-inflected analyses of youth subcultures, “resistance through rituals,” and subcultural formations hovering around things like punk and ska. This is the branch of the field that eventually led to too-celebratory accounts of fandom in the 1990s, and indeed it could be (and has been) argued that it romanticized white working-class boys back in the day. But it served as a necessary rebuke to moral panics about “mugging” in the 1970s, as well as to a persistent kind of leftish moralism that sees only decay and hears only noise when it turns to the passions and pastimes of These Kids Today. And it gave rise to some great, terrain-transforming feminist work on romance novels, slasher movies, soap operas, porn, etc.
(4) out of its work on subcultures, its work on mass media, and its work on culture and society, it developed (and continues, etc.) a Gramscian or neo-Gramscian or post-Gramscian analysis* of the dismantling of the postwar welfare-state consensus, the rise of the new right, and the workings of hegemonic political projects in civil society. The impetus for this school was the rise of Thatcherism in the UK, but, again, it didn’t have to stay there and doesn’t need to. It served as a necessary rebuke to the “body snatchers” theory of the left’s decline, as when Hall wrote, “Of course, there might be an essential Thatcherite subject hiding or concealed in each of us, struggling to get out. But it seems more probable that Thatcherism has been able to constitute new subject positions from which its discourses about the world make sense.” And it also tries to serve—though, as I argued in the Chronicle essay, not with great success so far—as a corrective to the “blame it all on neoliberalism” and “blame it all on false consciousness” tendencies in leftist thought. Additionally, this tradition’s insistence on the diffuseness of “wars of position” enlisted it on the side of the “merely cultural” left in Ye Olde “Two-Lefts” Debate. Again, Hall, from “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity”:
The effect [of Gramsci’s work] is to multiply and proliferate the various fronts of politics, and to differentiate the different kinds of social antagonisms. The different fronts of struggle are the various sites of political and social antagonism and constitute the objects of modern politics, when it is understood in the form of a “war of position.” The traditional emphases, in which differentiated types of struggle, for example, around schooling, cultural or sexual politics, institutions of civil society like the family, traditional social organizations, ethnic and cultural institutions and the like, are all subordinated and reduced to an industrial struggle, condensed around the workplace, and a simple choice between trade union and insurrectionary or parliamentary forms of politics, is here systemically challenged and decisively overthrown. The impact on the very conception of politics itself is little short of electrifying.
(5) As the UC Davis letter says, and many many others. You’ve got transnational cultural studies dealing with diaspora and global flows, refugees and immigration; you’ve got cultural studies of science and technology; you’ve got cultural studies of disability and embodiment (hey, I do that stuff!), and so forth. But I think it might be the effort to call these things by (something like) these more specific names, and to try to explain where they do and don’t intersect with the schools of thought sketched out above.
Finally, I think one of the best responses to my argument was one of the first, from way back when I delivered that paper to the Cultural Studies Association this past April: that of my Penn State colleague Jeff Nealon, who said in the Q/A after that panel, and then developed the argument later that night over a couple of beers, that one could argue, contra me, that cultural studies has changed a great deal about the way humanists and social scientists think and work—insofar as nobody goes around anymore proposing to study this one text or that one event in isolation from everything else. Everyone (well, just about everyone) knows that you’re not done with the analysis, you can’t punch out and go home, until you’ve located the text or event or object in some wider network of relations and explained what it’s doing there. (Or to use the proper terms of art, until you’ve located the object or practice in relation to the various cultural formations and historical conjunctures to which it is or has been articulated.) In that sense, Cultural Studies® may have had much less of an impact that people hoped or feared twenty years ago, but a lower-case and amorphous cultural studies has become lingua franca, so to speak, in dozens of fields. I told Jeff at the time that I would still want to show up at a Cultural Studies Association conference panel on “the university after cultural studies” and refuse the invitation to triumphalism. But I think his counterargument has considerable merit, so I’ll close with it, and turn things over to you.
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