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Introduction: The Lineages
of Cultural Studies
David Banash and Anthony Enns
Cultural studies has deep and vexed connections to
two critical movements in the Twentieth century: Frankfurt school critique
and Birmingham cultural
studies. Indeed, just the difference between the words “critique” and “studies” encodes
the differences in these two approaches, differences which still trouble
the definition and practice of what has become over the past forty years
the sprawling academic enterprise of cultural studies. For critics of
the Frankfurt school, such as Theodor Adorno, mass culture was not simply
dismissed, but given careful critical scrutiny. Its effect on its audience,
and its role in expressing and legitimating the ideology of capitalism
was carefully analyzed and critiqued. Art, however, remained one of the
only spaces in which it was possible to embody utopian desires, and popular
culture was simply a commodified reflection of the worst aspects of capitalism.
Though this attitude was not significantly different from more traditional
critics, the mere fact that mass cultural products were seen as valid
objects of critical analysis testifies to the emerging importance of
mass and popular culture in the postwar era.
Adorno’s contemporaries in the Birmingham school, such as Richard Hoggart,
did not have the same reverence for high culture that animated both Adorno’s
critical and personal taste. For Hoggart in particular, criticism was also an
exercise in identity politics avant la lettre, and his work was often frankly
autobiographical, examining the ways in which the working class used popular
culture to construct a unique and valuable identity. Unlike the Frankfurt school’s
outright dismissal of mass culture, critics such as Hoggart opened up the possibility
of taking such subjects seriously, and finding within them real possibilities.
This tendency was further developed by cultural studies scholars, who often chose
to celebrate rather than critique the objects of their analysis.
The history of cultural studies was therefore torn between two poles: critique
and celebration. While subsequent generations of Birmingham school scholars,
such as Dick Hebdige and Angela McRobbie, continued to celebrate mass culture,
a relentless critique of such tendencies continued in the work of Douglas Kellner
and others, who continued to reinvent the ideals and methods of the Frankfurt
school. These two tendencies have also been augmented by a tremendous array of
methodologies and perspectives, including feminism, race studies, postcolonialism,
sexuality studies, as well as deconstruction and other theoretical methods, which
over the past three decades have continually challenged cultural studies to reinvent
itself. Through these new perspectives, new controversies have arisen. For those
who continue to see cultural studies as primarily a critical discourse, scholars
such as Tony Bennett and Michael Bérubé have argued that such criticism
must be wedded to direct and active influence on government policy. At the same
time, scholars have brought to bear the vocabularies of continental theory, from
Kristeva to Deleuze, and used them to take on the world of mass media and subculture,
objects traditionally associated with Birmingham school cultural studies. While
many of these theory-driven projects have challenged the activism associated
with traditional Marxist scholarship, the tension between criticism and celebration
has remained a vexing issue, and for every scholar who writes a convincing critique
of a given text, there is sure to be a rejoinder in the form of a passionate
celebration of the resistant and utopian potentials of that same text.
Rather than fostering anxieties about the loss of some “authentic” cultural
studies, or embracing critique over celebration, practical intervention over
theory, the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies seeks to incorporate all of these
antagonistic approaches, seeing them not as mutually exclusive, but as equally
important. We hope to avoid rigid orthodoxies and publish the best of both theoretical
work and applied criticism on a range of issues, thus fostering conversations
across disciplinary and ideological divides. In keeping with this mission, the
articles presented here illustrate a variety of approaches to cultural studies,
beginning with Corey K. Creekmur’s interview with Andrew Ross, who discusses
the legacy of the Birmingham school, as well as the challenges faced by contemporary
cultural critics. Ross situates the birth of cultural studies “with the
rise of the New Left, with the emergence of knowledge and culture as a vital
part of the economic base, and with the mutation of higher education, which led
to the restructuring of academic labor and the realignment of academic research
with late modernity.” He also discusses the potential danger of contemporary
cultural studies devolving into what he refers to as “armchair theory.” In
order to maintain the tradition of the New Left, Ross calls for cultural critics
to become more fully engaged with communities and labor issues, as evidenced
by his own recent ethnographic work, such as his study of the Disney-created
town of Celebration, Florida, or his upcoming book on the corporate workplace,
and he even encourages his own students “to think of themselves as ‘intellectual
activists’ rather than as ‘career academics.’”
Jeff Lewis’s essay “From Culturalism to Transculturalism” provides
an overview of two conflicting cultural movements which have developed out of
Birmingham school criticism: posthumanism studies and cultural policy, or what
Lewis refers to as “cultural civics.” While posthumanism “abandons
the possibility of a meaningful or fixed communicative form,” Lewis argues
that a policy-driven cultural studies, following Habermas, is based on the notion
of “a consensual communicative action within the public sphere,” which “provides
the basis for understanding the actual conditions of ordinary people’s
everyday struggles.” Lewis also suggests that this divide might be rethought
using the concept of “transculturalism,” which he offers as an improvement
on Richard Johnson’s notion of “culturalism.” Culturalism,
Lewis argues, “fails to appreciate adequately the complex nature of culture” because
it “only partially acknowledges the relationships between meaning and non-meaning,
ideology and subjectivity, social reform, and social imagining.” Transculturalism,
on the other hand, integrates the posthuman and the cultural policy movements
by attempting to negotiate both “the semiotic” and “the material
conditions of life.” In other words, “language and materiality continually
interact within an unstable locus of specific historic conditions. However, our
access to and knowledge of these material and historically defined conditions
are necessarily filtered through an engagement with language and language wars.” Such
an approach thus offers a more precise way of describing complex cultural events,
and Lewis illustrates this methodology through an analysis of 9/11 and the Afghan
War.
In “The Cultural Offices of Joe Strummer,” Brady Harrison employs
a more traditional Birmingham school approach by performing a clearly celebratory
reading of the life and music of Joe Strummer, former frontman for the British
punk band the Clash. Harrison argues that Strummer’s recent work—as
D.J. of the BBC’s world music show “London Calling” and as
a “reborn folk-raga-rocker” in his new band The Mescaleros—represent “cultural
offices” from which Strummer speaks “on music, life, politics, history,
and more.” From these offices—as musician, D.J., producer, etc.—Strummer
broadcasts songs which “communicate a faith in cultural openness, in human
liberation and dignity, in the power of music to move people and to make them
think, and that, at the same time, tilt against the foes of the disenfranchised,
the working classes, and the vast majority of people who live beyond the privileges
of the first world.” Harrison is careful to note, however, that there are
also ways in which Strummer’s career might be subject to a far less celebratory
critique:
[A]s a figure from the metropolitan center [London],
he surveys and consumes the labor and products of the former colonies;
he appropriates
their musical styles and themes, and recasts them in a way understandable
to other Westerners. He lifts songs and forms from their social and historical
contexts; he perhaps contributes to their political and cultural emptying.
They perhaps become—in their slick packaging and gleaming surfaces—commodity
fetishes rather than expressions of lived experience.
Despite these negative possibilities, though, Harrison
concludes that Strummer “seems also to believe in the possibility, if not quite
the inevitability, of liberty and equality,” and that “the
world he envisions might be calling itself into being no matter how much
late capitalism might work to suppress it.”
In “Burn this Journal!: Reconstruction, the Value of Information, and
the Future of the Journal,” the editors of the on-line journal Reconstruction
challenge cultural critics to rethink not only the ways in which cultural studies
work is conducted, but also the institutions which receive and support it.
They begin by offering a critical assessment of the structure of academic publishing
itself, calling our attention to the ways in which the liberatory impulses
of cultural studies are held in check by the conservative practices of the
traditional peer review process. By rejecting this process and developing new
methods of publishing academic scholarship, the editors argue that
Reconstruction contains the potential for intellectual
projects that are themselves organic in their growth—living cultural texts which
are not subject to the authority of individual scholars. As such, the
concept of scholarly “authority,” which is bound up in the
concept of authorship, is surpassed by a vital, evolving, intellectual
movement: no one voice speaks, instead there exists a chorus of articulated
thought.
Attempting to put into practice the most radical
and utopian rhetoric of the theorists of digital media, these editors
envision a new mode
of publication and education based on the possibilities of web publishing.
In place of traditional academic hierarchies, the editors invite scholars
to become equal partners in the journal “through the message boards,
through accessibility, and through numerous projects that invite our
readers to become our writers.” The ultimate goal of Reconstruction
is therefore not simply to publish contemporary cultural studies scholarship,
but also to radically “change the way that scholarship is conducted
by building new universities.”
In contrast to the previous essays, Barbara M. Kennedy’s “Choreographies
of the Screen” questions traditional cultural studies approaches to film
scholarship, and she argues that the methodologies of cultural critics typically
fail to account for the actual, lived experience of watching films. According
to Kennedy,
a cultural studies approach to film has rendered it a form of representational
images and sounds through which to discern some overall sociological
or ideological understanding of our realities. For example, questions
of representation have highlighted political debates around gendered
subjectivities or have provided discourse around the politics of identity.
Consequently a cultural studies paradigm has primarily considered film
a political form through which to critique and to challenge dominant
ideological discourses to do with class, race, or gender.
While not dismissing the importance of these goals,
Kennedy attempts to add to them other perspectives by mobilizing the
critical vocabulary
of Gilles Deleuze. According to Kennedy, “the pleasures and desires
experienced through cinematic encounter may . . . lie outside the restrictions
of a psychically constructed subjectivity,” and she adds that “the
cinematic experience might better be understood through different trajectories
that might be creatively explored through the auspices of philosophical
discourse.” Although Kennedy’s approach is borrowed from
continental philosophy, she never loses sight of the fact that the subject
she is dealing with is popular Hollywood film, and the experiences she
analyzes are a part of popular culture; she even chooses Blade Runner,
a work of science fiction, as her key text. Through the concept of choreography,
however, Kennedy asks us to rethink simplistic responses to such popular
texts. She defines choreography as “a rhizomatic text, flowing
through the cityscapes and bodies of contemporary cultural formations:
T.V. music, dance, fashion, advertising, film—where these connect
and assemble; where their own forces and intensities create new thoughts
between, new feelings between, outside Cartesian patterns of logical
discourse.” In other words, by examining the interactions of bodies
with real texts, images, and screens, Kennedy looks for the spaces in
between, which traditional cultural critics often overlook. In her reading
of the scene in Blade Runner where Zhora is killed by Deckard, for example—a
scene which many critics have interpreted as evidence of the film’s
misogyny—Kennedy claims that “Zhora’s escape through
the screen of her simulacrum through to the other side technologizes
an escape from representation beyond image into the movement-image and
affection-image. There is a pedagogy of the image whereby it is not just
something that is actually seen.” In readings such as this, Kennedy
points out that texts simply dismissed as reactionary or otherwise compromised
in the terms of more traditional cultural studies might be rethought
in terms of desire or affect:
Desire is not fixed or located within a representational
space, neither is it abyssal or negative as we see in psychoanalysis.
Desire is what
makes things, forges connections, creates relations, produces machinic
alignments. The clone’s (Zhora and the spectator) isolated psychoanalytic
abyssal positioning is projected differently—through immanence—by
virtue of movement and rhythm.
Kennedy asks us to consider new ways of interpreting popular texts,
and of finding within them spaces for thinking and desiring differently.
It is our hope that this journal will continue to encourage and support a variety
of cultural methodologies, and that the work presented here might suggest both
the methods and benefits of bridging intellectual divides within the ever-widening
field of cultural studies.
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