Cultural Studies: A Blast from the Past

Cultural studies is a field perhaps known best for its excesses. In the early 1990s, the rise of this interdisplinary phenomena in the U.S. transformed professors into rock stars, students into sexperts, and Madonna fans into both data and cultural agents. In the process, it provided conservatives with mockery fodder for years to come. Practitioners' offbeat assertions and experimental prose generated a set of high-profile controversies, culminating in a sound mid-'90s spanking by physicist Alan Sokal in the form of a hoax article published in cultural studies journal Social Text. While cultural studies opened up welcome space in the ivory tower for explorations of the power relations embedded in pop culture and everyday practices--and breathed new life into lefty rhetoric after the fall of the Berlin Wall--all too often self-indulgent scholars seemed to confuse informed consumption and neologism-spewing with political foment. I spent my university years puzzling through this intellectual morass, and waded back in this past weekend at the fifth International Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference. "In light of these uncertain and violent times," the "mandate" for this conference exhorted participants, "cultural studies scholars have a moral obligation to police this crisis, to speak to the death of people, culture and truth, and to undo the official pedagogies that circulate in the media. We must seek non-violent regimes of truth that honor culture, universal human rights, and the sacred. We must seek critical methodologies that protest, resist and help us represent and imagine radically free utopian spaces." Some participants seemed nearly as uncertain as the times. One audience member lamented the loss of transgressive power in the word ???queer,??? seemingly missing the significance of the diffusion of the old slur into our common language. Another confessed to me that attending the sessions felt seeing an old girlfriend--familiar and fun at first, and then increasingly wearing. Cultural studies, like feminism and the civil rights movement, may be suffering a bit from its own success--its parlor trick of reifying transgression has leaked out into the culture it studies, surfacing in odd artifacts like dominatrix Altoids ads, extreme bibles and Ozzy Osbourne White House appearances. Keynote speaker Lawrence Grossberg has played a key role in popularizing cultural studies in the U.S. since the late 1980s. I sat down in a radically un-utopian University of Illinois student union lounge to talk with him about how the field has changed and what he thinks progressives need now. Grossberg attributed his own interest in cultural studies approaches to an impatience with the left's overemphasis on economic and political theory. "Abstractions make neither for good history or good politics," he said."I was, have been, and remain unhappy with the American left, and I thought cultural studies could provide something." "The left doesn't believe in doing much work--it's a lazy left," he continued. "Look at what the right wing think tanks have accomplished…bad ideas produce bad politics. We don't seem to care about the debates or encourage the debates that might lead you to interpreting possibilities." Grossberg chided progressive publications for not taking culture seriously enough, and for eschewing rigorous analysis. "I see in the right-wing press more willingness to debate," he said. He spoke admiringly about the last three decades of right-wing strategizing. "The Republicans did the work of convincing the media to change their role, of getting capitalists to treat media like industries…they're great Gramscians, and their leaders know that they're fighting a hegemonic war of positions on all fronts…I want to cry when I look at the coverage of the war in Iraq, and the right wanted to cry about abortion back then…I don't think the left has begun to think in these ways." He also remarked that elitism isn't the answer: "We need to learn how not to be elitist. Although we speak in the name of democracy, Americans aren't stupid….If we can't convice our fellow Americans to agree with us, then it's our problem, not theirs." I asked him what he had learned in his years of building the field of cultural studies, and he replied that he had been "incredibly naive" about both the tenacity of traditional disciplines and the disdain and mistrust that Americans have for intellectuals. But, Grossberg said, it was "crucial to start the conversation by saying that ignoring culture has consequences and produces bad answers…. Understanding capitalism is an educative process that involves giving people language. It's culture." And had postmodernism dragged cultural studies down? He shook off this question, first by asking me to define my terms, and then by defining them for me. "The tendency to make all knowledge relative, that structures and power aren't real…I don't believe those people were doing cultural studies," he said, "because cultural studies believes that knowledge matters. To say that there's no 'truth' with a capital 'T' is not to say that there is no truth with a small 't'…cultural studies is an attempt to find an intellectual way of embracing complexity." According to Grossberg, progressives' attempts to describe the credo of "neoliberals" or define the contours of a new American "empire" are just yet more radical simplifications of a multilayered and site-specific reality. "We need independent thinking. Neither the free market or Marxism is the answer." While Grossberg???s complaints merit some consideration, the title of his keynote talk speaks volumes about the usefulness of simplicity. A mouth-full, it mused: "Should I Stay or Should I Go? The Conjunctural--Determinations/Possibilities/Responsibilities--of Cultural Studies" This nauseous mixture, combining the worst aspects of flip hipster academia with pretentious mumbo-jumbo and crappy punctuation, reminded me of why I'd abandoned the field in the first place. I decided to go. A more hopeful model, however, was in evidence at a panel titled "Intellectual Property Law and the New Hegemony." There, cultural historian Siva Vaidhyanathan hailed the emergence of what he calls "Critical Information Studies," an interdisplinary field in which scholars "make a difference and have fun." He outlined the work of a diverse and lively cadre of economists, sociologists, linguists, anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, communications scholars, lawyers, computer scientists, philosophers, librarians, literary scholars, and historians who work together to explore an emerging set of concerns. These include intellectual property, fair use, the impact of legal and computer codes on cultural practices and production, and what he called "semiotic democracy"--that is, "citizens' ability to employ the signs and symbols ubiquitous in their environments in manners that they determine," such as the right to make meaning from, read, and revise cultural products. What distinguishes critical information studies from cultural studies is that its practitioners are committed to both open source scholarship and open communication with members of the public. Rather than obfuscating everyday practices by filtering them through veils of theory, they clarify complex technological and legal structures and demonstrate their cultural implications. Vaidhyanathan aptly characterized the debate between cultural studies people and political economists as "boring," and offered up critical information studies as the solution. "These folks care about semiotic democracy AND the structure of entertainment industries," he said, noting that these scholars are, by definition, immersed in both fields. "If there is an area for rapprochement between these two fields, this the one" I was convinced. Check out Vaidhyanathan's latest book, The Anarchist In The Library: How The Clash Between Freedom And Control Is Hacking The Real World And Crashing The System, for more of his grounded and readable insights.