FoolsCap

"Everyone who goes about with ‘cultural studies’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart."  A paraphrase of one E. Scrooge, adapted here for cultural studies rather than Christmas holidays.

Since my brain is a bit fried and all, please forgive the perhaps undisciplined (ha!) form this blog-esque reply takes.  As y’all know, I’ve been sort of stuck between disciplines of late, and this week’s reading has been an interesting opportunity to think more about those questions of where I belong in the academy, even if I’ve yet to resolve them.

Felski’s article prompted some thought on what exactly "Cultural Studies" means.  As Felski notes, it is, at present, sort of an amorphously defined discipline, with no set boundaries and no universally agreed-upon field of stuudy.  As I noted last week, and as Pruchnic’s chosen essays exhibited, there is interesting work being done in rhetoric and composition that incorporates what might be thought of as Cultural Studies, i.e., the articles on LSD and on the English Only movement.  And, as the Hartman piece this week shows, Cultural Studies works within the confines of traditional literary scholarship too.

As Felski notes, Cultural Studies as a field is sort of a postmodern discipline, inspired by the breakdown (or, at least the recognition of an arbitrary constructedness) of the modernist high-low great divide.  Cultural Studies, as I understand it, really got rolling in the mid-1960s (1964 I think)with the founding of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the Univ of Birmingham.  CCCS was one of the first major efforts to study popular culture and audience response thereto, and its founding is often described as the start of modern Cultural Studies.

Thinking about all of this, I want to make a few claims based on my understanding of the field of Cultural Studies (which is to say I don’t have the research to back my ideas up), and then, having made these claims, end with a few half-formed thoughts about the place of CS in the university today.

So: claims.

—Cultural Studies began, perhaps, as interest in popular culture and the media associated with them took hold in the university.  

—Threatened, as ever, by questions of relevance, the University (as an ideal) had to incorporate Cultural Studies in order to justify its ongoing mission.

—At the same time, however, there is a sense that studying popcult is a sort of exercise in intellectual onanism, that academics overthink works that are meant to be brainless pleasures.

—As postmodernism or Cultural Studies or whatever made disciplines more porous, the idea of Cultural Studies sort of expanded beyond popcult and mass media into sort of a catch-all term for any interdisciplinary endeavor, like today’s Hartman piece that incorporates history, readings of legal proceedings, and questions of African American subject identity–which then gets published in a literary journal despite only ever mentioning literature in passing.

So: half-formed thoughts (HFT) about Cultural Studies in the university today.

HFT #1: This leads me to a couple of extrapolations about the disciplinarity of Cultural Studies.  Either a discipline is strictly bounded by field of study (say, modernism) or by method (empirical research and experimentation in the sciences vs textual research in the humanities).  What makes studies inter-disciplinary is the fusion of one or both of these characteristics.  A literary sociologist (such as Felski mentions) might study the importance of a given text in a given culture (or subculture) through empirical research.  Or, again turning to Hartman, an African American literature scholar might look to law for ways of reading AfAm subject positions.  What this means for Cultural Studies, logically, is that, having neither set (by set I agreed-upon by a majority of scholars in the field, not arbitrarily defined by an outside authority) field of study nor set methodology, Cultural Studies is not, in fact, a discipline.

HFT #2: That said, I think there is still a way to embrace the inter-disciplinary work that CS often does by just a slight shift in the way we think about things (which is never slight in our realm, is it?).  Instead of thinking about CS as a discipline, might we not think of it as a method?  Hence, Cultural Studies (capitalized and plural) might become a method of inquiry, cultural study (lowercase and singular).  For me, at least, what this does is free scholars to work in the inter-disciplinary fashion advocated by the former Cultural Studies without necessarily having to be "inter-disciplinary" as such.  (I confess the boundary between interdisciplinarity and my proposed cultural study method is still hazy.)

HFT #3: If, as Felski alludes, Cultural Studies is generally concerned with contemporary culture, why not just say so?  In my proposed reworking of the field, CS would remain CS, but instead be rechristened Contemporary Studies in order to distinguish it from the cultural study method used across disciplines.  The question, I suppose, is where would Contemporary Studies belong in the university: Communications dep’ts or English dep’ts?  I don’t know yet, okay?–that’s why they’re called "half-formed" thoughts.

HFT #4: I’m still not clear on how CS (either the real CS or my thought experiment CS) differs from Media Studies (another misnomer perhaps?).  I say, fold MS into CS (my new CS) because that’s what I understand MS to be.  We all study media–film, books, WWW, TV–they’re all media.  Why have a separate division just called Media Studies?  Unless, of course, we want to get fancy and proclaim a new discipline along with Contemporary Studies called Digital Studies, which would incorporate the work of new media theorists with a method similar to traditional textual research?

Well, having proposed two new disciplines, reshaped the English dep’t (which would, per James Berlin, end up being renamed the Rhetoric Department because that’s what we’re all studying in one way or another), and sent Cultural Studies off to the dustbin, I think it’s time I shut up.

As others have said:  Much praise to all of my colleagues in 7010, whose work I’ve found enjoyable and engaging, challenging and exciting.  Don’t think I could ask for a better lot than y’all to start my grad studies with.  To paraphrase the bard, "Ta’en for all in all, he/she/post-gender subject was a man/woman/post-gender subject identity.  I shall not look upon his/her/post-gender subject identity possessive pronoun like again."

And that’s why identity politics is bunkum.