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.

"Knock, knock!" "Who's there?" "Subversion!" "Subversion who?" "Um, just Subversion, isn't that enough?"

Can I steal this? It's very funny. Which is to say, I LOL'd, but I did not go so far as to ROTF.

As for Williams on Gramsci, back in Sept '06 I posted an Internets-breaking three-part essay on "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory" you might be interested in. It's in my blog archives, Sept 5, 6, 12, 2006.

And thanks for reading my little essay in the first place--

--Michael Bérubé

Good question -- the answer would be, basically, yes and no. In The Left At War, I do mount a defense of feminists' work in cultural studies in the 80s and early 90s. Here's a snippet:

The 1980s witnessed an extraordinary profusion of serious academic books on degraded popular cultural forms: the romance novel, the soap opera, the slasher film, and, of course, the most degraded form of them all, pornography. In each case, the argument was made that the close analysis of these forms was important not because the forms themselves were as aesthetically satisfying as The Tempest or as intellectually complex as Paradise Lost, but because they offered representations of the world, however phantasmic, that attracted millions of people; therefore, so the argument went, it was only reasonable to try to discover and come to terms with the thoughts and impressions of the people who devoted significant portions of their lives to romances or soaps or slash films– or even porn. Following the publication of Stuart Hall’s groundbreaking “Encoding / Decoding” essay and David Morley’s The Nationwide Audience in the U.K., and Tania Modleski’s Loving with a Vengeance and Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance in the U.S., many cultural studies theorists embarked on a kind of mass-media “ethnography” in which they sought the opinions of soap fans, romance readers, and TV viewers in order to try to understand how mass-cultural phenomena were actually “consumed” and understood by mass-cultural audiences. [Footnote here to Modleski, Radway, Carol Clover, Linda Williams, and Laura Kipnis]

It is difficult to overstate the amount of derision with which this project met, inside academe and out. When senior (male) scholars weren’t sputtering over what they considered books that should have been published as articles in High Times, mainstream (mostly male) journalists were guffawing at the idea that things like soap operas and romances merited a moment’s thought. [Footnote here to William Kerrigan writing, "People got tenure for writing about the imperialist fantasies of Marvel Comics or the gender rules in Harlequin Romances -- ideas that might have made decent articles for High Times but, driven by theory, got seriously out of hand." I just couldn't make that shit up.] That derision helped to reinforce cultural studies theorists’ initial point– namely, that certain mass cultural forms, and their audiences, are widely considered utterly unworthy of serious attention. But unfortunately, it also confirmed cultural studies theorists’ convictions that they were doing something Deeply Important, something that would shake academe and mainstream journalism and culture to their very foundations. The problem with those convictions of the theorist’s importance, in turn, is part of the larger problem of studying mass culture from a left perspective that looks especially for moments of dissidence or subversion: for if there’s one thing mass culture produces aplenty, it’s moments of “dissidence” and “subversion” that are nothing but. And just as skateboarding and “slash” fanzines aren’t really a threat to global capitalism in the end, so too, the academic study of skate punks and “slash” fans doesn’t really amount to much of a challenge to the established order– save for the established order in a handful of academic disciplines whose established order changes once or twice a decade anyway.

...which, I think, gets back to your original question.

--MB