Frameshift - What's the Matter With Cultural Studies?

What's the Matter With Cultural Studies?

Sep. 14th, 2009 at 4:34 PM

A really interesting essay by Michael Bérubé in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I don't know enough to evaluate his arguments, but I'd love to hear how it reads from a fan studies and/or media studies perspective. A few excerpts:

...In the 1960s, Williams and E.P. Thompson redrew the map of British labor history, and in the 1970s, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies issued a series of brilliant papers on mass media and popular culture that culminated in the prediction of the rise of Thatcherism—a year before Margaret Thatcher took office. Since its importation to the United States, however, cultural studies has basically turned into a branch of pop-culture criticism.

Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (1978), the Birmingham collection that predicted the British Labour Party's epochal demise, is now more than 30 years old. In that time, has cultural studies transformed the disciplines of the human sciences? Has cultural studies changed the means of transmission of knowledge? Has cultural studies made the American university a more egalitarian or progressive institution? Those seem to me to be useful questions to ask, and one useful way of answering them is to say, sadly, no. Cultural studies hasn't had much of an impact at all....

The result is that cultural studies now means everything and nothing; it has effectively been conflated with "cultural criticism" in general, and associated with a cheery "Pop culture is fun! " approach. Anybody writing about The Bachelor or American Idol is generally understood to be "doing" cultural studies, especially by his or her colleagues elsewhere in the university. In a recent interview, Stuart Hall, a former director of the Birmingham Centre and still the most influential figure in cultural studies, gave a weary response to this development, one that speaks for itself: "I really cannot read another cultural-studies analysis of Madonna or The Sopranos."...

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dkompare wrote:

Sep. 15th, 2009 01:51 am (UTC)

I've been mulling it as well since I read it today, and alas don't have the time at present to get into it. Basically, though, he's right. I was there near enough to that 1990 moment (I started grad school in Media and Cultural Studies in 1991) to have experienced it from the inside. Cultural studies (especially in the US) had indeed started to lose its edge by the late 1990s, though it wouldn't be perceived as such till a few years later. These days, at least in media studies, other paradigms and approaches have come to the fore, not as much "replacing" CS as trying to reinvigorate it (I'm thinking especially of production studies in this regard).

Fan studies has (as always) a problematic relationship with this history. Sloppy versions of it became all the rage during the 1990s, the worst of which more or less verified the critique of CS as "too celebratory" (to be charitable). Fan studies has improved in depth and breadth since then, of course, but I think the old baggage of those days still holds us back.

That said, the bigger meta-question, which Berube's critique alludes to, is what is the point of the humanities scholarship and education? We've been researching and teaching along these lines for over 30 years, and we really haven't changed a damn thing in the world. It's something that most of us working scholars, trapped in the everyday pressures of our jobs, try not to think about. But we're going to have to.

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crypto wrote:

Sep. 15th, 2009 03:13 pm (UTC)

Yeah, it rang true to me, in the sense that I read a lot of cultural studies stuff after I left college (in 1990, coincidentally), and by the mid-'90s I'd gotten bored with it -- increasingly, a lot of the work felt like it was telling the same story over and over again. Like the kind of fan studies you describe: "Knock, knock!" "Who's there?" "Subversion!" "Subversion who?" "Um, just Subversion, isn't that enough?"

And the meta-question you raise is an uncomfortable one. I think some of this work has won some hearts and minds, or at least the stuff that was once jargon has filtered out and down. And you can see its traces -- sometimes explicitly -- in various kinds of activist and subcultural media projects over the last couple decades.

But I read something like this recent post by

ciderpress, which has a lot of stuff that I want to embrace, but I get stuck on "Fandom is sometimes subversive, yes. Slash is subversive, yes...." and "If we are here to be free to subvert ideas, ideology and messages in the media...". Because I'm not sure that I believe in subversion anymore in the way that I did cultural studies' heyday.

And I think of Raymond Williams take on Gramsci's theory of hegemony, and his distinction between alternative and oppositional cultural formations. And it's very hard for me to see fandom as oppositional -- even the self-proclaimed "subversive" aspects feel very much alternative, to the degree that dominant culture can clearly accommodate them. Which is maybe analogous to your meta-question about humanities scholarship and education: what has fandom changed in the world?

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Knock, knock - (Anonymous) - Sep. 16th, 2009 02:00 pm (UTC) Expand

Re: Knock, knock -

crypto - Sep. 16th, 2009 02:27 pm (UTC) Expand

Re: Knock, knock - (Anonymous) - Sep. 16th, 2009 06:04 pm (UTC) Expand

Re: Knock, knock -

idlerat - Oct. 10th, 2009 07:30 pm (UTC)

(Anonymous) wrote:

Sep. 17th, 2009 07:28 pm (UTC)

McRobbie

Michael, what about Angela McRobbie, especially her feminist critique of Hebdige in "Settling Accounts with Subcultures" essay from 1980?

JPRS

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(Anonymous) wrote:

Sep. 19th, 2009 01:00 am (UTC)

Re: McRobbie

Well, McRobbie was among the first to challenge the Birmingham boys' club, that's true. I don't deal with her critique of Hebdige in my book, but I do discuss this fine essay (http://www.opendemocracy.net/node/1093) on Hall's legacy w/r/t to New Labour.

--MB

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(Anonymous) wrote:

Sep. 18th, 2009 08:56 am (UTC)

Re: the point of your paragraphs. Since I'm an anthropologist, I don't really have to worry about how it sounds for me to mix up, for example, Ibn Arabi, Nasser, and Ahmad Adawiyya in the same paragraph, since most so-called "serious scholars" in the West don't know squat about any of these anyway. (Roughly, it's "Aquinas, LBJ, and Madonna").

I can claim to be a scientist, so the more obscure the cultural artifact, the more rare and precious it is and the more attention it demands, like a new species. I can also claim the humanities, so the socially relevant the artifact is, the more attention it demands. Finally, I can claim a comparative perspective, so I can and will (someday) persist in comparing Ogotemmeli's metaphysics to Kant's. Actually, anthropology is the future and the true home of cultural studies.

jprs.

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What's the Matter With Cultural Studies?

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