Introduction to: Interrogating Cultural Studies (Pluto Press, 2003)

Interrogating Cultural Studies

 

Paul Bowman

 

 

1. misrepresentation, misconstrual

 

 

Few, if any, entire academic fields have attracted more consistently febrile attention than cultural studies. It has always received criticism, invective, vituperation; often angry, often confused and confusing (mis)representations of what it is, what it does, and why it goes about things the ways it does. It has also, of course, had its fair share of celebration, (over)indulgent congratulation and flattery. These two types of reaction entail each other: if cultural studies has often announced itself as being somehow messianic or at least deeply consequential – ‘radical’, ‘revolutionary’, ‘emancipatory’, and so on – then it is surely inevitable that those who are not involved who often, obliquely or directly, find themselves to be the objects of its cutting critiques, will protest. On reflection, more or less everyone else in the university, every other discipline, has at one or another time been critiqued, criticised, even excoriated, by cultural studies. Those in the ‘old’ arts and humanities disciplines, those in the sciences, those who are involved in anything even remotely uncritical of things like ‘capitalism’ and ‘patriarchy’ have regularly found themselves accused of being not only old fashioned and out of date (hurtful and offensive enough accusations in themselves), but also to be responsible for perpetuating such evils as sexism, racism, elitism, ethnocentrism, Eurocentrism, homophobia, right wing conservatism, capitalist domination, social exclusion, and so on. When they retort that, actually, no, they do not believe themselves to be evil ministers of all forms of domination, exploitation, and exclusion, a chorus of cultural studies critics unequivocally reply: ‘Oh yes you are, you just don’t understand the ways in which you are’.[i]

 

Celebration and condemnation are entailed from the outset. And in many respects, this has become the dominant form of debate around cultural studies, a discourse that has become something like a merry-go-round, or a pantomime (albeit one which may well have profoundly serious consequences). Cultural theorists of the notion of ‘performativity’, who argue that there is emancipatory potential in everyone’s propensity to ‘perform’ (and hence establish) different social identities, which might thereby transform the socio-political world, could perhaps do worse than to work out a way for cultural studies to step out of the pantomime-like discursive black whole within which it has become embroiled. Amusing as ‘What you’re doing is bad!’, ‘Oh no it isn’t!’; ‘Oh yes it is!’, ‘Oh no it isn’t!’, can be for any young subject, surely one must grow out of it, or grow stale and pathetic. Needless to say, of course, this state of affairs is not simply something internal to cultural studies: it’s not exclusively its own fault, it does take two to tango. But if cultural studies is content to blame and decry others (who in turn criticise and deride it) for the lamentable quality of these academic exchanges, then, you could say, it has no one to blame but itself.

 

This book was conceived with a view to attempting to transform the terms of the debate, and to do so paradoxically by reiterating some extremely traditional questions. My belief is that the historically necessary and once vitally effective ‘high polemical moment’ of cultural studies has today become less than enabling, and more of an encumbrance. The radical polemics of the past have passed. Of course, what they concern has not have been completed, finished, or exhausted. That is not what I’m suggesting. Cultural studies is indeed an incomplete project. However, just because evidence abounds of the continued proliferation of its chosen problematics, that does not mean that its own traditional strategies, or its standard ways of trying to intervene, have not become tired. What demands more attention today is the modality or manner of cultural studies’ efforts. The Foucauldian lessons about the need to repeat, in as many contexts and places as possible, that which you want to become laid down as ‘true’ in the ‘hearts and minds’ of the many, isn’t much justification for this repetition when what is predominantly getting repeated is a fevered and systematically misrepresentative farce. What is repeated, regularly and in dispersion, are not simply the lessons of cultural studies (its intended messages), but rather their ‘reception’: not what they ‘in themselves’ articulate, but how they become articulated as something within a wider discursive context, for a wider audience.

 

Of course, we cannot ultimately control how what we say is received, nor how we ourselves are represented. But, of course, we also can. If not ‘ultimately’, then at least in certain contexts, in certain scenes, at certain times. Perhaps not ‘in the heat of the moment’, as it were, as in the initial polemical explosion of cultural studies’ appearance as part of a larger ‘discursive formation’ of basically very angry political and cultural movements. But perhaps one can begin to consider what one looks like to your interlocutors, if not when the flames themselves are under control, then at least when one’s relationship with the task becomes more structured, more regular. The present moment of cultural studies’ familiarity – its familiarity to itself and to its others[ii] – by virtue of its very predictability, affords a unique opportunity for reassessment, and hence a new chance for revivification. What does the face cultural studies presents to the world look like and signify, and what reactions will that presence most likely elicit? There have got to be different ways of making something present, presenting ourselves, our case. But of course, I do not wish to simplify things. The polemical force of cultural studies’ accusations about the largely unrecognised political aspects inextricably entailed by all forms of pursuits of knowledge, and (perhaps) all forms of cultural practice, are eminently valuable, and must never be devalued or forgotten. The battles should certainly be memorialised, revisited. There is a value in taking the kids to the pantomime, as it were, and in studying it; a need to rake and re-rake through the lessons of this history; for, as John Mowitt has argued, ‘what we believe to have happened to us bears concretely on what we are prepared to do with ourselves both now and in the future, [and] the formation of such a memory is inseparable from historical, and ultimately political, practice’.[iii]

 

Today, is cultural studies’ responsibility really just a straightforward process of pointing out the deficiencies of its academic others?[iv] True, such work has effects. But perhaps they are not so straightforwardly transformative, radical or emancipatory as they are often claimed to be, or as it was once thought they might be. One of the unintended consequences of cultural studies’ polemical elaboration might well be its having become the unknowing participant in a repetitive and increasingly normal pantomime, that has been misrecognised or misdiagnosed, believed to be ‘crucial’ or ‘central’, but which may well be off the mark. Of course, the repetition of something that appears to be the ‘same’ will also be different each time it occurs: polemicists will necessarily modify their positions, changes will occur. But one of these changes is also the growing institutionalisation of cultural studies itself. And if it is institutionalised as an acceptable actor in nothing more than a novel academic pantomime, then is this really all it could or should be?

 

I do not want to become too skewed by the effects of thinking in terms of metaphors and facile analogies of the carnivalesque: the idea of figuring the contemporary scene as a pantomime now threatens to dominate my entire efforts to think cultural studies’ relation to the other disciplines and institutions.[v] So, to echo more than one contributor to this collection, the question, first of all, is how to conceive of cultural studies: which metaphors have structured its history; which metaphors has it, does it, should it, ‘live through’, and what effects have these had on what it can see, think, know and be inclined to do? There are many other metaphors, equally suggestive. One can think of cultural studies as the incessant irritant, the annoying little parasite that won’t shut up and leave everyone else alone; that speaks out, that shouts too loud, that may well therefore be unknowingly placing of itself in more and more jeopardy, actually becoming more threatened to the extent that it threatens or is capable of threatening – in short, more literally endangering its life to the extent that it is institutionalised and apparently ‘stable’. This idea is contrary to the way that most people interpret its growing institutionalisation. But perhaps establishing a greater institutional stability for cultural studies actually conceals its fragility, or the increasing likelihood of its demise. So what form should or must its apparently growing ‘stability’ take?

 

One idea has always been that its proliferation reduces its ability to be cutting edge, radical or transformative. But what edges need to be cut now anyway? And is it, indeed, as valuable, urgent, radical and transformative as it sometimes claims; or is this its delusion, its ideology? The mainstays of the regulative fictions of cultural studies have always been its (fetishistic?) attachment to the marginal, the abject, and to ‘resistance’. Perhaps this is why it fears ‘success’: as this would call its bluff, blow its cover. Is the ‘proper’ cultural studies world view nothing more than an expression of its resentment? And, in any eventuality, what is the relation between its regulative fictions and its academico-political potential? Is its growing stability and proliferation helpful or deleterious to its ethico-political aims and intentions? Are its aims and intentions ‘realistic’? Need they be? What relation do its conscious intentions have to the consequences or effects its existence and activities have produced, wittingly or unwittingly? Is it friend or foe to the status quo, what actually is that status quo, and does cultural studies risk its own life, or guarantee itself a future, through its actions? What kind of future might it have?

 

This book poses ‘traditional cultural studies questions’ on these themes, not simply to clarify what cultural studies is about, has achieved, has not achieved, could do, cannot do, should try to do, etc., but also to convey a sense of its stakes, its urgency. The book is not so much ‘what is cultural studies?’ as ‘why cultural studies?’ and ‘how cultural studies?’ Of course, any answers to any such question imply answers to the others, and open out onto potentially evermore. I wanted to frame things or tether this down, so as to reduce the potentially interminable slippage of one question into another, in terms of the question(s) of institution. This is perhaps ‘arbitrary’ and inessential, but current and currently vital and vitalising nevertheless.

 

Does a more stabilised cultural studies amount to a neutralisation of its potential or a strengthening? Does it become, as it were, hypocritical: claiming radicality whilst yet policing its own instituted orthodoxy, imposing codes and conventions of propriety, and being an agent of the disciplinary power that it always claimed to challenge? Or does its ‘success’ both rely on and produce what it has always been accused of: namely, its ‘Mickey Mouse’ status, its indiscriminate studying of anything (including Mickey Mouse); a strategy chosen or perpetuated conveniently and/or cynically perhaps just because it is popular, and just to keep it popular (because disciplines need students)? Is it that, actually, it effaces its own pointlessness and political and intellectual ineffectuality, providing spurious token justifications for its own existence by invoking alibis about ‘political engagement’, ‘resistance to domination’, ‘ethical relations to alterity’, etc., which are utterly without substance?

 

Those who attack cultural studies often present some version of this argument. These representations are too easy to make. Fortunately, though, their sophistry, amphibology, and tendentiousness are also incredibly easy to demonstrate. However, what if there is something in it? For, actually, very many people involved in cultural studies do indeed see this as a real threat. It is possible to discern, in some places and in some of its manifestations, a drifting away from the traditional, initial and initialising, injunctions of cultural studies. In some incarnations, the practice, object and orientation of cultural studies have become the simple celebration of popular culture, subculture, cyberculture, technology, obscurantism, etc., matched by a depoliticising of its agenda; as if, while the name remains the same, its initial, formative, ‘authentic’ or authenticating identity or project has been evacuated, denuded, obscured, or more and more erased. It’s as if cultural studies is forgetting or losing the sense, not of what it once was, but of what it was once meant to be(come). Many voices within cultural studies, from old-guard stalwarts to ‘new radicals’, see some important threads being severed or fruitlessly strung out, attachments to crucial lineages and orientations waning or growing sclerotic, and the traits of cultural studies mutating (even if that mutation takes the form of a new sedulous refusal to change), such that a commitment to ‘its’ ‘own’ ‘proper’ historical manifestos, remits, and enlivening/frustrating problematics have been abandoned, or have become pretexts for pointless playing.

 

The sense is one of an increasing abandonment of a particular kind of relationship to the enlivening and identity-conferring problematics of cultural studies: the perhaps interminably intractable contradictions, aporias and antagonisms that are thrown up when one not only wants to know the whys and wherefores of culture, history, the ascription of value, the determinants of desire, the constitution of subjectivity, the logic of the economy (and the economy of logic), the problems of truth, knowledge and power, politics, subject-and-structure (the question of agency), but when one unremittingly also pays attention to the implications of acknowledging one’s own intractable imbrication within it all. The accusation is of there having been an abandonment of the very problematic of cultural studies (in all the senses that the expression ‘the problematic of cultural studies’ can connote).

 

To the extent that different interlocutors in these debates (if a debate exists, if ‘debate’ is not a misnomer for what is taking place) might listen to and hear each other, it would in fact be a very valuable thing. The idea of questioning, engaging in dialogues that critique each other and hence forward knowledge, attempt to establish what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s best, and what the consequences of various positions are, is a core part of cultural studies’ desire, or myth – its desire to ‘intervene’, its desire to ‘make a difference’. The idea of a productive dispute, a debate across fields, contexts, disciplines and practices is part of the very dream of cultural studies. But what if no one ever actually receives the intended message of anyone else’s critique? Surely, given the multitude of different and perhaps mutually untranslatable languages, language games, the language of one discipline or group cannot hope to be intelligible in the language of another – even, and perhaps especially, when they both sound and look the ‘same’. Who could possibly be authorised to translate and adjudicate? Obviously, given the unlikelihood of everyone mastering the language games and competencies of all disciplines,[vi] a state of ‘disagreement’[vii] is inevitable. But we don’t even need to go that far: what is the likelihood that everyone within cultural studies understands the ‘same’ things the ‘same’ way? What does it portend when people use the same words, but understand very different things by them?

 

This was one of my initial questions. This book was conceived as a very straightforward way to find out what people understand by some of the key terms of cultural studies, to see what the variety of answers to the questions would be, to enable one to begin to work out what this proliferation (consensus or dissensus) enables or scuppers. At the very least, the idea was that everyone so inclined would be able to find in this book a way to get a better sense of what, why and how the discipline is about. I believe that this book does constitute precisely this sort of good way in, for those who want or need one; and indeed, by the same token, that it will offer a good way out of that dimension of circular, boring and predictable febrile (non-)debate that, perversely, structures so much stupidity into the heart of the dominant debates about the university and the production of knowledge.

 

 

2. (mis)construction, (dis)organisation: a note on the text

 

This book also seeks to show the lie of a growing myth. This is the tacit assumption that there is an inevitable and necessary distinction between two ‘kinds’ of academic book. On the one hand, there are ‘textbooks’ geared towards an introductory readership, designed specifically and only for teaching the things that are well established within a discipline. On the other, there are books that are aimed at, written by, and designed for advanced researchers – more innovative, trailblazing, ‘difficult’ explorations. The sense is that, for some under-interrogated reason, never the twain shall meet – as if the distinction is inescapably necessary and absolutely inevitable. I conceived of this book, however, with the hypothesis that this distinction and division of disciplinary space need not necessarily be the case for a subject like cultural studies, a subject that otherwise consistently views itself as trailblazing through and through, and not just at its own ‘cutting edge’ or ‘outer-margins’. For, as more than one of our contributors argue, there are all sorts of institutional, political and economic reasons why such distinctions ever creep quietly into being in the first place.

 

Such a trifling issue as this may hardly seem to warrant attention. But the point is that many, if not all, distinctions, features, characteristics, ‘commonsensical’ intuitions about how things are, and ‘obvious’ understandings about the way things should be and how everyone ‘must’ go about doing and thinking things – all those things that might on first glance appear either quite trivial, inevitable, or both – may well be consequences of political, ideological, economic and cultural factors or movements, which will themselves have political, ideological, economic and cultural consequences. So, the very fact that there is a belief in the necessary and inevitable differentiation between introductory and advanced books might well be a symptom and expression of the growing institutionalisation of cultural studies, and a contradiction in (its own) terms. So what are the implications for a practice that always claimed to seek to intervene in cultural and political issues and struggles, when it becomes compartmentalised, standardised, professionalised, domesticated, and divided? (And conquered?)

 

Such questions as these, questions about the workings and internal affairs of an academic subject, may also appear to be secondary or supplementary to the primary questions of the real, urgent, acute or chronic political and cultural events and phenomena ‘out there’ that cultural studies has always claimed to be overwhelmingly concerned to understand and intervene in. But again, these secondary questions are actually primary. For, the question of the institutionalisation of anything is always political, and always has real consequences: how is it organised, arranged, elaborated? What goes and what cannot go, for what reasons, and why? What consequences does the form it takes have for what it can and cannot do? What limits does its institutionally accepted form place on what it is and does? For, the way in which those who study culture are institutionalised, orientated, motivated, policed and demarcated, determines an awful lot about what they can possibly know about the objects of their attention – and this is both an important academic and political matter.

 

That is to say, if you are blinkered in a certain way, or unknowingly motivated by certain biases and prejudices, then this cannot but have effects on what you can ‘know’, what you will be able to ‘see’, what you will be inclined to ‘do’. This is why this book has privileged the apparently secondary matter of cultural studies itself, as opposed to any particular thing that cultural studies might choose to study. Now this is not a theme that is exclusively either introductory or advanced, either historical or cutting edge, either mainstream or radical for cultural studies. It is its mainstay, stock trade, defining characteristic, even its lifeblood. My contention is that the questions animating this book are both as basic and as advanced, as originary and as contemporary as cultural studies can be. You may not agree. Certainly these assertions imply a certain exclusive (excluding) definition of cultural studies; and accordingly, the exclusion of certain possible definitions and forms of what cultural studies might otherwise possibly be. This might mean I have transgressed cultural studies’ own traditional claims about its ‘inclusiveness’, its ‘openness’, its own refusal to be defined or pinned down to an object or approach.

 

But these normal cultural studies claims of openness, inclusivity, and the refusal to be defined, efface their own impossibility. To claim that cultural studies is simply open, inclusive, indefinable, and so on, may be something of its preferred fantasy, one that, if accepted (as if ‘simple’), entails refusing to see that openness itself excludes: it excludes closure, or it includes it. It cannot simply be open. And the idea of its inclusivity harbours the undecidable problem of whether to exclude or include exclusion, and which way any exclusion or inclusion would be most inclusively done. Also, of course, any refusal to be defined will be done in some definitive kind of way, and is already somewhat definitive, limiting, exclusionary and enclosing.[viii]

 

The simple advocation of these ideals can become a self-aggrandising or self-satisfied and complacent ideology – which would make cultural studies into the very thing it would least like to be. For this would imply its own unknowing complicity with certain forms of cultural, political and historical power. In other words, it would mean that it remained ignorant of the very things it is supposed to know all about. However, on the other hand, the insistence that cultural studies should be open, inclusive, indefinable, and so on, can still be advocated, as a problematic and hence generative, regulative and critical ideal, which might prove politically and culturally valuable in any number of ways. The very fact that such notions are riven with contradictions, problems, uncertainty and undecidability suggests perhaps the fundamental vitality of cultural studies. So, yes, this book has deliberately staged and set up a closed and exclusive defining sense of cultural studies, positing the presupposition that it could not and would not be cultural studies if it were not primarily political (both preoccupied with the political, and itself political, through and through). This was both to find out in what ways this presupposition might be justified and in what ways it has effects. It was also, of course, to find out what cultural studies means when it speaks of ‘the political’.

 

This task is important at all levels. Researchers and teachers, whilst finding much that may be familiar in these pages, will also find plenty that will be new, whether in the content or in the conjunction, the juxtapositions. The book consists of brand new statements on common but inexhaustible themes from the unique viewpoints of each of the key thinkers (from within and around cultural studies) gathered together here. Students will find much that is entirely new to them. Some interviews, and some sections of all interviews, will prove immediately intelligible, some more complex, and some apparently impenetrable. But all weave the familiar and the unfamiliar together in ways that will develop every reader’s own thinking and understanding in untold directions. Not all of the contributions are as user-friendly as the student might initially like; not all of them are as complex as the more advanced reader might initially like. But, given the accessibility of the interview form, and given that they are all constructed around the same set of questions, at the very least the similarities and differences will stimulate and engender much, in ways that I cannot pretend to predict.

 

The interviews can be tackled in any order. The book is polyvocal and intertextual – or hypertextual, if you prefer. But it is hypertextual without imposing actual hyperlinks or other such signposts to guide or control your navigation – for such signposts, while apparently helpful, are ultimately also limiting, as they also work to place a structure, to place limits, on the range of possible connections and meanings that could be produced. Of course, I have arranged the interviews into an order that suggested itself in terms of giving the book a certain form and rhythm. I hope that this does not overcode, over-categorise, irritate or offend. In arranging the book, I conceived of it as being primarily in conversation with itself. I did not look outside these pages, into the archives of historical polemics and movements within and around cultural studies in order to determine some proper order into which they should or could otherwise be placed. Instead, I merely identified some striking ways in which each chapter referred to others. But each refers, relates, to all of the others in some way: every one sheds new light on aspects that may have been occluded or difficult in another, or problematizes and complicates aspects that one or another interview might have presented as being certain and straightforward. I arranged them into a kind of conversation that I liked the shape of. I did this to try to guide, a little, but not too much. For, as Thomas Docherty argues in his interview:

 

education should be of the nature of the event: the Docherty who is there after reading and thinking about Joyce or Proust or Rilke or Woolf is different from the Docherty who was there before that activity; but the earlier Docherty could never have predicted what the later one might think – that was the point of the exercise of reading in the first place: to think things that were previously undreamt of in my philosophy.

 

Whether undergraduate or professor (friend or foe; or indeed, even the academic and publishing-industry’s much fantasized hypothetical ‘interested general reader’), this book cannot but be thought-provoking and beneficial to everyone’s necessary continued education. Each statement and argument overlaps, complements, contrasts with, or contradicts those of other contributors, so that the reader will acquire a strong sense of both the common ground, community, and the conflicts that constitute the disciplinary space in and around cultural studies, as well as a strong sense of the stakes of cultural studies itself. That is to say, teachers will find it valuable for teaching, students will find it valuable for studying, and researchers will find here a unique research archive in its own right.

 

These grand sounding claims can be made for very straightforward reasons. It is not just that any text lends itself to a potentially infinite range of readings and readerships, in the way that a text can be made legible, intelligible, interesting and important both to young children and to the world’s most eminent philosophers (like Hamlet, for example), or the way in which certain texts have both an immediate force, accessible to almost all, and a subtle complexity that is available upon ever more rigorous reading (like The Communist Manifesto). It is rather because, firstly, the book poses the same direct questions to very different thinkers. The questions themselves are basically reiterations of some of the main things that cultural studies academics have pondered for years, questions on the day to day issues enlivening cultural studies, questions you might assume could be ‘taken as read’, for cultural studies. Whilst the questions might now be taken as read, the answers never can be. Hence the need to keep reiterating the questions.

 

Secondly, because the book takes the form of interviews with figures from different ‘fields’ within and around cultural studies, each interview elicits responses to these basic questions in terms of the specific expertise, interests, and experience of each interviewee. In this way, the book also introduces even more of the field’s diversity, and orients and aids the understanding of even the most ‘difficult’ or ‘obscure’ argument by virtue of the direct and explicit nature of the questions. Even where a passage might be extremely difficult, the reader should always be able to work through it by recourse and reference to the question that inspired or provoked it. Even though not all of the chapters explicitly contain the questions, they were all inspired by them.[ix]

 

In selecting who to invite to participate in this collection, I was not unduly preoccupied with questions of hierarchy, lineage, affiliation, and canonicity. I did not attempt to find the ‘best’ representatives of ‘the proper canon’ of cultural studies. That seemed to me to be a very un-cultural studies thing to do, even though, perhaps, the inevitable desire. The paradox is that those trailblazers who first worked (among other things) to deconstruct so many institutions and canons inevitably became institutionally famous and canonical themselves. Also, of course, thereby the best people to ask. But that is to formulate it in a simplistic way: there is no one canon, there is no one consensus. That’s the whole point. And even if there was, my interest and aim was more to do with constructing a sense of the diversity of the field – more specifically, with trying to collect a group of diverse, complementary, contradictory, at times utterly incompatible thinkers, in order to establish what different conceptions of ‘the political dimensions of institutionalised cultural studies’ currently animate thinking and acting within across and around cultural studies. In order to try to stir things up a bit, I also invited people whose work is self-consciously defined as other than cultural studies, but which, perhaps for that very reason, is nevertheless important and valuable to it.

 

Criticising cultural studies is too important to leave to anti-cultural studies polemicists. It is infinitely more important, informative, and helpful when it comes from those who know what they are talking about, those who have immersed themselves in it, rather than those who, at the very mention of cultural studies, wrinkle their noses as if having just spotted a brown stain on a hotel towel. As I have indicated, cultural studies is misconstrued and misrepresented at every turn. Most criticisms of it are so febrile and misinformed as to be hilarious, were it not for the fact that every major misconstrual and tendentious misrepresentation may well place the subject in jeopardy. So I did deliberately court critique and polemic, but from those who know and think, rather than from those who think they know but believe this without actually ever bothering to read nor taking the time and effort to try to understand the complexity and stakes of it all. So this book is far from a celebration or simplification of cultural studies. If anything, it is a sustained complexification staged by inviting some very different scholars to respond, in any way they chose, to these seven questions:

 

1. How do you position yourself and your work in relation to the cultural studies project? Or, rather, do you see cultural studies as a ‘project’, and is contemporary cultural studies still the ‘same’ project or discipline as it once was?

 

2. Cultural studies is said to be a political project. What, to your mind, are the politics of cultural studies? Does it have ‘a’ politics, or is it, rather, political in some other way? Another way to phrase this would be to ask you what are the politics or what is the political significance of your own work? What do you consider to be the ‘proper destination’ of your work?

 

3. What are the institutions of cultural studies? That is, what works, methods, orientations, etc., have become instituted as the repositories of ‘knowledge’, methodology, and ways of going about doing things? This is as much as to say, what do these institutions (or the institution of these authoritative guarantors as ‘the proper’ or ‘the best’) forbid, censure/censor, limit and enable? What factors determined or overdetermined their institution?

 

4. How does the institutionalisation of cultural studies affect, support or undermine it?

 

5. Does cultural studies have any significance outside of the university at all? If so, what forms does this take?

 

6. What is, has been, might be, or might have been, the significance of cultural studies within the university?

 

7. Where is cultural studies going? This question is obviously tied to that of ‘where has it been?’, which is an interesting and important question itself; but we wonder where you think it should go, or what you think it should now do or try to do: in short, what has cultural studies ‘achieved’, what has it ‘failed’ to achieve, and to what extent are these ‘failures’ inevitable, structural, or is it just that their realization is only a matter of time or strategy?

 

 

 

 

 

 

I defer pursuing the question of whether any or all of these accusations are justified or otherwise. Suffice it to say that many have emphasized a different kind of sequence: such as that cultural studies went about its modest business and never really bothered anybody, only to find itself having incurred inordinate amounts of condemnation and opprobrium for no rational reason. Diagnoses abound as to what such heated reactions are symptomatic of. These matters have occupied me for some time (hence, of course, this book); and my own studies of it appear as ‘‘Alarming and calming. Sacred and Accursed’’, in S. Herbrechter (ed.), Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinarity (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, forthcoming); ‘Between Responsibility and Irresponsibility’, Strategies, 2001; and ‘Proper Impropriety’, Parallax 19, 2001.

[1] Of course, as Hegel pointed out, ‘What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar.”… it is the commonest form of self-deception’, quoted in Spivak’s Translator’s Preface to Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p.xiii.

[1] John Mowitt, “Introduction: The Two Texts”, Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object (Durham and London: Duke, 1992), p.2.

[1] And, we might well ask, how does this ‘hostility’ square with cultural studies’ much-championed ‘ethical’ position of ‘hospitality’ to the other?

[1] Nevertheless, it is compelling, particularly as less than ten minutes after writing these words I was interrupted by my wife calling to me to tell me that Terry Eagleton today has a column in The Guardian. I went to have a look, and on arrival she laughingly read out a brief letter in the same paper: ‘I was going to write about what a tired, blinkered, middle-aged old pantomime dame John Lydon has become… but I can’t be bothered’. The (chance?) coincidence of Eagleton’s mainstream success coupled with the growing comicality and/or tediousness of a once allegedly ‘radical’, ‘cutting edge’, ‘revolutionary’, ‘dangerous’ punk icon suggests a peculiar, and not necessarily straightforwardly legible conjunction (if it is one). See The Guardian, 18^th May, 2002.

[1] Which is actually the condition of possibility for anything like proper interdisciplinarity – which, of course, actually reveals that ‘proper interdisciplinarity’ is impossible.

[1] As Jacques Rancière has argued, a ‘disagreement’ occurs not when one person says ‘black’ and another says ‘white’, but rather when both say ‘black’, but mean different things by it. See his Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

[1] Cultural studies arguably spends more time defining itself, or ruminating on the limitations of self-definitions, than anything else. This may seem comical, but it occurs because a key part of the problematic of cultural studies entails attending to the conceptual and pragmatic consequences of definitions, characterisations, pigeonholing, the role of these processes in all forms of understanding, and the connection between forms of understanding and the forms of practice that they foster and/or preclude.

[1] In the case of interviews carried out over email, some contributors directly answered all of the questions, some answered more or less of them, and some took the questions as read in composing a chapter. In the case of interviews carried out face to face, the core questions themselves and the interviewees’ responses to them inspired yet more, always related, questions.

 

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[i] I defer pursuing the question of whether any or all of these accusations are justified or otherwise. Suffice it to say that many have emphasized a different kind of sequence: such as that cultural studies went about its modest business and never really bothered anybody, only to find itself having incurred inordinate amounts of condemnation and opprobrium for no rational reason. Diagnoses abound as to what such heated reactions are symptomatic of. These matters have occupied me for some time (hence, of course, this book); and my own studies of it appear as ‘‘Alarming and calming. Sacred and Accursed’’, in S. Herbrechter (ed.), Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinarity (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, forthcoming); ‘Between Responsibility and Irresponsibility’, Strategies, 2001; and ‘Proper Impropriety’, Parallax 19, 2001.

[ii] Of course, as Hegel pointed out, ‘What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar.”… it is the commonest form of self-deception’, quoted in Spivak’s Translator’s Preface to Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p.xiii.

[iii] John Mowitt, “Introduction: The Two Texts”, Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object (Durham and London: Duke, 1992), p.2.

[iv] And, we might well ask, how does this ‘hostility’ square with cultural studies’ much-championed ‘ethical’ position of ‘hospitality’ to the other?

[v] Nevertheless, it is compelling, particularly as less than ten minutes after writing these words I was interrupted by my wife calling to me to tell me that Terry Eagleton today has a column in The Guardian. I went to have a look, and on arrival she laughingly read out a brief letter in the same paper: ‘I was going to write about what a tired, blinkered, middle-aged old pantomime dame John Lydon has become… but I can’t be bothered’. The (chance?) coincidence of Eagleton’s mainstream success coupled with the growing comicality and/or tediousness of a once allegedly ‘radical’, ‘cutting edge’, ‘revolutionary’, ‘dangerous’ punk icon suggests a peculiar, and not necessarily straightforwardly legible conjunction (if it is one). See The Guardian, 18^th May, 2002.

[vi] Which is actually the condition of possibility for anything like proper interdisciplinarity – which, of course, actually reveals that ‘proper interdisciplinarity’ is impossible.

[vii] As Jacques Rancière has argued, a ‘disagreement’ occurs not when one person says ‘black’ and another says ‘white’, but rather when both say ‘black’, but mean different things by it. See his Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

[viii] Cultural studies arguably spends more time defining itself, or ruminating on the limitations of self-definitions, than anything else. This may seem comical, but it occurs because a key part of the problematic of cultural studies entails attending to the conceptual and pragmatic consequences of definitions, characterisations, pigeonholing, the role of these processes in all forms of understanding, and the connection between forms of understanding and the forms of practice that they foster and/or preclude.

[ix] In the case of interviews carried out over email, some contributors directly answered all of the questions, some answered more or less of them, and some took the questions as read in composing a chapter. In the case of interviews carried out face to face, the core questions themselves and the interviewees’ responses to them inspired yet more, always related, questions.