Okay, so it’s been more than a couple weeks. Okay, so I lied to you. Would it help to say, “I’m sorry”? To both of you that actually read this blog? I mean, c’mon, if this blog were a state it would be Arkansas (big in intentions, but who would actually live there). Besides, I’ve changed. I feel like we’ve grown apart. No longer am I that quiet Southerner sipping bourbon in the Alabama sunshine. I’m in Cleveland now–I’m a midwesterner again for the first time in 6 years. That means I am entitled, to feel smug and act rudely to you by ignoring you while I move across country, and to admit to being a vegetarian in public without people starting to question whether they should drag me behind a truck for a while. Not that I don’t love you, Ms. Dixie, I do. But I just feel like we need some time apart. Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely in love with you especially Carolina, but I need space for a while. Think of it as an extended bachelor party…
Okay, enough of that analogy. Yes, I’ve moved, but I’m still teaching writing and now a bit of freshman science studies. And I still read the same old blogs: Berube, Horgan, and the Chronicle blogs are my favorites, though the political blogosphere is sometimes interesting too. Just the other day I saw a Michael Berube article on the Chronicle website, and I knew it was time for my triumphant (ahem ahem) return to blogging. The article concerns the apparent impact of cultural studies on the Academy and the world at large, Berube taking the position that it has not had the anticipated effect of revolutionizing the university as it promised–that it has not (yet, anyway) been effective overall. He is, however, hopeful that it might.
First, I must applaud Berube’s humility. He cites many important thinkers from cultural studies–among them Stuart Hall, whose work had a tremendous impact on me as an undergraduate–and yet he does not include himself. I would enthusiastically add Professor Berube to the list of notables in the article. Yet I must take issue with Berube’s overall negativism. Cultural studies has accomplished some things. It has convinced most of the university that language is not an important component of “culture” (excluding most actual foreign language departments of course). Why? Because it initially had to compete with the related discipline of comparative literature, my own field, for university resources. Comp lit insisted since it was founded after WWII that learning a culture’s primary language was vital to understanding that culture, avoiding world wars, etc. Cultural studies positioned itself against comp lit. Since the so-called cultural linguistic turn (a rather deceiving name!), culture itself has largely been reduced to the politics and economics of a given State and language is unimportant because unreliable (langue, parole, sign, signifier/ied, sleepy, dopey, and doc could, after all, mean just about anything). Though Berube admits that cult studies is perhaps too enamored with postmodernism, we must also realize that cult studies held the day in this competition. As such, we might also suggest that cult studies accomplished other things– it killed the author and comparative literature in one fell swoop.
Now this may simply sound like sour grapes, since I am a comparatist (you just can’t say that word without sounding pedantic). But to build on the effect of the cultural turn and consider the reduction of culture to political and economic components, we might re-read Berube’s article. To what aspect of culture do his examples speak? To politics? To economics? Certainly to models of the dissemination of information, especially as they concern…politics and economics. Even Americans, who one might suppose do nothing but read the Times or the Wall Street Journal and discuss politics all day, occasionally engage in conversations, write songs or poems or novels, construct buildings, cook dinner, unanimously declare to repress their future generations with religious guilt, etc. Is this not culture? Berube is partially correct to accuse cult studies of focusing too much on pop culture, but is focusing on politics not equally egregious?
Read the article a third time. Not only is culture not defined beyond politics, but the vast majority of examples offered come from British or American authors and universities and engage with primarily anglocentric issues. So, the third and most important thing that cult studies has done is turn cultural studies into studies of THE culture. We might hereafter even rename it to the Study of Cultural Leveling. But I really don’t mean to criticize cult studies (I am, after all, one of those people that “does Cult studies” sometimes) or Berube. Merely to point out that should it wish to find its bearings, as Berube wants for it, it may have to engage with other disciplines, perspectives, etc. (And I do NOT mean this!), including those that still see some value in other components of culture like language and literature.
But enough for today, I’m babbling–what an American activity! Someone should do a study…
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