Michael Bérubé has posted a lengthy response to criticisms of the CHE essay "What's the Matter with Cultural Studies?" that I'd linked to last month, with bonus elaborations and clarifications. And for those playing along at home, special guest appearances from Lisa Duggan, Jody Berland, and Simon During!

I'm just going to highlight here this one section that touches on fan & television studies, and emphasizes the history of their critique by and within cultural studies:

My complaint about Frank’s account of cultural studies in One Market Under God (in a review essay reprinted in Rhetorical Occasions, titled “Idolatries of the Marketplace”) was (a) that it relies almost entirely on Bob McChesney’s “Is There Any Hope for Cultural Studies?” and (b) that Frank was simply unaware of the rich tradition, in cultural studies itself, of criticism of the field’s cultural populist wing. So here’s the relevant passage from The Left At War (I tell you, the book covers absolutely everything in the world. The second edition will cover all the other stuff):

It is, without question, a serious political and theoretical mistake to overestimate the importance of popular culture and the power of its consumers (even if they are also, in some ways, its producers), and to strain to find world-historical political consequences in the film Basic Instinct or televised “reality” shows. But it is a still more egregious and lamentable mistake to ignore a vast terrain of popular culture and popular experience altogether, or to determine in advance (and in ignorance) that it can serve only reactionary ends, or to decide that certain cultural phenomena might be worth the attention of conscientious leftists—but only if they (the phenomena) have nothing to do with corporations. At the time McChesney penned his attack, cultural studies had more than its share of enthusiastic celebrants of the “active audience” thesis, it is true; they had already been repeatedly criticized by other cultural studies theorists, as when Tony Bennett complained about his colleagues’ “sleuth-like searching for subversive practices just where you’d least expect to find them” (“Putting Policy into Cultural Studies,” 32) or when Simon Frith wrote of “defending popular culture from the populists” [footnote]. But it also contained plenty of people who understood that the struggle against the Reagan-Bush right could not be engaged exclusively on the terms of electoral politics, let alone defeated on the economic front by dragging out the charts and showing Americans that their real wages were falling while CEO wages were skyrocketing.

The Frith quote is footnoted like so: “Simon Frith, ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent: Saving Popular Culture from the Populists.’ diacritics 21.4 (1991): 101-15. Other classic critiques of populism in cultural studies include John Frow, Cultural Studies and Cultural Value; Larry Grossberg, It’s a Sin; Jim McGuigan, Cultural Populism; Meaghan Morris, ‘Banality in Cultural Studies’; and, alphabetically last but chronologically first out of the box, Judith Williamson, ‘The Problems of Being Popular,’ from way back in 1985.” In fact, McGuigan’s book, proclaiming itself “a sympathetic critique of cultural populism,” nevertheless argues that “neo-Gramscian hegemony theory’s approach to subcultural analysis was deconstructed and reoriented toward what became an uncritical understanding of youth cultural consumption. A similar trajectory is traced in the construction of ‘popular television’ as an object of study, exemplified by the turn toward ‘the active audience,’ which in spite of its evident advantages neglects the economic, technological and political determinations of televisual culture. The uncritical endorsement of popular taste and pleasure, from an entirely hermeneutic perspective, is curiously consistent with economic liberalism’s concept of ‘consumer sovereignty’” (6).
So, okay, but what's happened to fan studies? Sure, a lot of later work dialed back on the rhetorical excesses of "active audience" boosterism, but so much of it still seems governed by a "the fans are alright" orientation. On the one hand, you have Henry Jenkins and friends, the Convergence Culture coterie, whose collective intelligence has apparently led them to stop worrying and embrace the brand extensions, and wherever possible to embrace industry itself. On the other hand, you've got the cult of the fanwork, where transformative is the new subversive, pleasure becomes its own politics, and the material/economic domain is largely reduced to questions of copyright and creativity. Sure, that's a gross generalization of a lot of really interesting work being done -- but I look at the (excellent) fan(works) studies articles from the In Focus section of the latest Cinema Journal (pdf), and I see, albeit posed in more sophisticated and nuanced terms, yet another valorization of active audiences which, all in all, doesn't seem to have moved very far beyond the orbit traced by Jenkins' Textual Poachers, published nearly two decades ago.

Am I missing something? Has fan studies simply defected from cultural studies, rejected its presuppositions and preoccupations as inadequate or irrelevant, or shrugged off the '90s critiques of cultural populism?

I'll close with a bit of Meaghan Morris' most excellent "Banality in Cultural Studies":