°CultStud

November 19, 2005

Over at Posthegemony, Jon has an excerpt of a first chapter from what I take to be a manuscript. The fragment is on populism and Cultural Studies - or, as I think it should be called, CultStud.

In the end, populism, and so also cultural studies, is an anti-politics.

It’s not only good reading, but sharply accurate. I’m looking forward to the rest.

Update: more here.

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9 Comments »

  1. Glad you liked it. Yup, indeed, a manuscript in the works and currently undergoing revisions.

    Jon [November 19, 2005 @ 5:00 pm]

  2. Excellent. CultStud in AU is so lame that a debate about populism and hegemony, let alone a criticism of the very idea and discipline of cultural studies, would be considered impolite. Pointing out the affective stakes is a no no.

    s0metim3s [November 19, 2005 @ 5:51 pm]

  3. anti-cultural anti-nostalgia

    Nostalgia in the house. This week I’ve been creating playlists of music I heard at five (James Taylor), seven (Mike Oldfield), ten (Dylan), twelve (Icehouse), nineteen (Blind Melon, Porno for Pyros). Today I also went looking for a second-hand m…

    Going Somewhere....? [November 19, 2005 @ 10:12 pm]

  4. Hmm, that post doesn’t look like the Cultural Studies I know. But then, neither does the McGowan post on Bérubé’s blog it refers to, so maybe I only thought I knew what Cultural Studies was.

    Overall, I can’t really see what the substance of the critique of CS is without it being more specific with examples. For example, what would Jon make of the cultural studies of the Santa Cruz tradition, e.g. Clifford and Sandoval? None of that work is much concerned with the logic of representational democracy, or populism.

    danny [November 21, 2005 @ 10:30 am]

  5. This is exactly my qualm, Danny, it’s almost impossible to be rigorously specific when you invoke the proper name because what circulates as CS is so broad/heterogeneous/random. But even as I say that, I’m thinking, Clifford, now, he’s more of an anthrolopologist and Sandoval, isn’t she more a philosopher?

    az [November 21, 2005 @ 11:11 am]

  6. Danny, I try to be fairly rigorous about what I mean by Cultural Studies, and focus on what most people would generally agree to fall under that rubric: Williams, Hall, Grossberg, etc.

    Like az, I wouldn’t normally think of Clifford and Sandoval as “Cultural Studies.”

    Jon [November 21, 2005 @ 12:13 pm]

  7. But the reason why CultStud has assumed the sense, if not always reality, that it doesn’t have a canon, paradigm, etc has to do with the strategies people pursued within the university, as a labour market no less than a way to research certain topics deemed outside other disciplines.

    That the efforts against disciplinary models turned out to be no less disciplinary is not unrelated to why CS is now confronted with a disaster in AU: having been deemed to be a refuge, it can now be lopped off.

    But I say this coming from a campus that had no CultStud and a more radical curricula than any other university at the time - so, I never really understood what the big deal is or was, other than the assumption that only CultStud marked a space of radical politics within the university. This just seemed plain silly to me, not to mention something of a marketting exercise for the discipline itself.

    s0metim3s [November 21, 2005 @ 3:53 pm]

  8. Hmm. The trick with all this is to figure out a way of getting money, without letting that determine what one is doing. The Cult Studs managed to sell themselves for a while by making themselves completely inoffensive boosters of capitalism whilst parading as subversives, a great sales pitch when banks sell revolution and unions sell mortgages. Now that they have turned out to be superfluous, it also turns out they were more attached to their little project of sucking up to academic capital than they would have liked us to think. Well, what a tragedy. I mean, the whole Norman Maileresque effort of finding new negroes with which to inject libido into waning middle class lives and fend off Conformism one more day - body piercing! devotees! Madonna! - why did anyone think that was a serious project? It’s amazing they lasted this long after the Baffler trounced them.

    Disgruntled Anthropologist [November 22, 2005 @ 10:29 am]

  9. I’d have more body piercings if I could afford them. But, you’re right about the boosterism aspect: often, the distinction between culture studies and the culture industry was non-existent. Also, a more detailed consideration has to be made of the plays between conformism and coolness, sucking up and marketting. But, yep, at the end of the day, it’s a question about the play of money, how one navigates its workings upon the brain, soul, body and life itself. And that’s not a question about CS, or even just the academy.

    s0metim3s [November 22, 2005 @ 11:49 am]

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