Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies

Cary Nelson, Dilip Gaonkar, Cary Nelson, Dilip Gaonkar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135221775
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Cultura popular en el arte

First published in 1996. As recently as the early 1990s, people wondered what was the future of cultural studies in the United States and what effects its increasing internationalization might have. What type of projects would cultural studies inspire people to undertake? Would established disciplines welcome its presence and adapt their practices accordingly? Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies answers such questions.It is now clear that, while striking and innovative work is underway in many different fields, most disciplinary organizations and structures have been very resistant to cultural studies. Meanwhile, cultural studies has been subjected to repeated attacks by conservative journalists and commentators in the public sphere. Cultural studies scholars have responded not only by mounting focused critiques of the politics of knowledge but also by embracing ambitious projects of social, political, and cultural commentary, by transgressing all the official boundaries of knowledge in a broad quest for cultural understanding. This book tracks these debates and maps future strategies for cultural studies in academia and public life.The contributors to Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies include established scholars and new voices. In a series of polemic and exploratory essays written especially for this book, they track the struggle with cultural studies in disciplines like anthropology, literature and history; and between cultural studies and very different domains like Native American culture and the culture of science.Contributors include Arjun Appadurai, Michael Denning, Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Constance Penley, Andrew Ross, and Lynn Spigel.

Part One

Disciplinarity and Its Discontents

Arjun Appadurai

1

Diversity and Disciplinarity as Cultural Artifacts

Introduction

There is an implicit economy that informs us when we think of diversity and disciplinarity. Diversity suggests plenitude, an infinity of possibilities, and limitless variation. Disciplinarity suggests scarcity, rationing, and policing. They thus seem to be naturally opposed principles. I argue here that they need not be opposed and that it is important that they be brought into a certain sort of interaction in the American research university. The question is: what sort of interaction?

My observations have a background. First, I take as my context the research university in the United States, as well as those undergraduate colleges whose faculty were trained at research universities. In treating diversity as a cultural artifact, I have in mind the debate of the last decade or so over multiculturalism, political correctness, and affirmative action, which shows no signs of abating, even as it grows more sterile. I am also concerned with diversity as a slogan for the peculiarly American investment in cultural pluralism. I aim to return to the idea of diversity something of the technical sense it has in anthropology.

Images of Diversity

Even without recourse to the dictionary, it is possible to see that diversity is a tricky word. 1 began by suggesting that it suggests plenitude, an infinity of possibilities. There is something to this implication, even if the dictionary will not directly sustain it. Today, diversity is a word that contains all the force, all the contradictions, and all the anxieties of a specifically American utopianism. Let us call this a utopianism of the plural. To my knowledge the story of how the idea of “pluralism” enters American social, political, and academic thought has yet to be told. Briefly, I believe it is a twentieth-century idea, not really a part of the founding principles of the United States. It is a co-optative reaction to the great migrations from Europe of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the fact that it has since become a central aspect of American society, civics, and political science is one of the interesting puzzles of the cultural history of this century. Be that as it may, today “diversity” as a slogan encompasses the strong fascination with the plural, and the even stranger idea that plurality and equality are deeply intertwined in a democratic society. The folk view that biological diversity is a good thing (which has become naturalized in American thought in the same way that the Oedipus complex and germ theory have become naturalized) creates a good part of the energy that animates debates about multiculturalism.

In spite of this utopian subtext, which suggests that diversity means the infinite multiplication of difference, there is an uneasy sense among all participants in the debate about diversity, particularly in the academy, that it is not an infinitely elastic principle. This intuition is culturally and technically justified. If nothing else, it reflects the sense that even American wealth is not infinitely available to subsidize American dreams. The current discourse of the deficit, played out with remarkable uniformity in corporations, in the government, and in the university, certainly makes it difficult to sustain the idea of the plural as infinite.

When we speak of diversity, whatever our position in these debates, we all know that we are not speaking of just plurality, or variety, or difference. Diversity is a particular organization of difference. The question is: what kind of organization? The issue that does not seem to be engaged in much of the debate about diversity is not whether it is somehow organized (that is, rationed, policed, limited, and reproduced) but how it should be organized. In the wider society of the United States, this is the unspoken issue in debates about immigration, bilingualism, and citizenship. But my concerns here are with the academy, and in the academy the central problem is the reluctance to recognize that the economy of diversity is also a managed economy. If it is in the wider sense a managed economy, how then is it or could it be managed in the academy? What is at stake in its management?

There are many ways in which diversity could be managed in the academy, notably by the wholesale application or extension of larger principles, mechanisms, and ideas from outside the academy, such as quotas, censuses, and entitlements. These approaches tend to generate affirmative action babies, human and technical, whether we like them or not. Much of the official discourse of the University, notably in matters of recruitment, retention, and promotion, is premised on the assumption that diversity is a mechanical good, the aggregate outcome of good intentions applied case by case. By refusing to recognize that diversity requires more deliberation and more organization, universities allow the unfree play of the market—in students, in staff, and in faculty—to determine actual demographic outcomes. Furthermore, actual outcomes—specific statistical profiles about the presence of students of color, faculty of minority background, and a vaguely international milieu are used as marketing tools by many colleges and universities to seek further diversity in their populations.

What is lacking is a sustained effort to examine the links between intellectual and cultural diversity. One way to approach diversity in the university is to see it as a particular organization of difference, in which intellectual and cultural diversity are interactive and mutually interlocutory. If we miss this link, the last vestiges of difference between the academy and other corporate organizational forms will disappear and the university will become just another workplace. This is not to deny that the university is also a workplace (involving issues of class, wages, safety, discrimination, mobility, and productivity) but to recall that it is a special sort of workplace concerned with thinking, with training, with ideas, and with knowledge.

One symptom of the current lack of critical thought about diversity in the academy is to be found in the canon debate. While much has been said in and about this debate, one feature of the debate is worthy of remark. There is a peculiar anxiety about quantity that characterizes much of it. This emerges in arguments over the form and shape of the canon—in particular of classic or “great” books in the undergraduate curriculum. In this debate of the last decade, there is a strange slippage between issues of quantity and quality. On the face of it, the debate is about the sort of standards that ought to govern the selection of classic books to be read by undergraduates—prima facie a question about quality. But this issue invariably tends to slip into a zero-sum discourse in which the addition of new sorts of classic works—by women and people from other societies and traditions, for example— is seen as unseating and eliminating a list, even if imaginary, of already time-tested classics. The debate often implies that for books to be truly great, they must belong to a closed and short list.

In one sense, this view reflects the deep and widespread idea that lists of the great, the rare, and the precious tend to be short and overlapping, with books as with other sorts of commodities. More salient is the fact that the issue of classic works involves a small fraction of the thirty or so courses that most American undergraduates take in their four or five years in college. In this sense, the list is finite, not by its nature but because the formal pedagogical opportunities to tell students what is really great about some books are relatively few. The true scarcity is not of great books—an odd idea—but of opportunities to impress upon students the right norms of quality-control.

Given this unconsciously apprehended scarcity of pedagogical opportunities to communicate ideas about great texts in the average college curriculum, it is no surprise that the sense of scarcity—and thus of urgency and of competition—tends to blur the line between the admission of books into various kinds of lists and the admission of students (and, to some extent, of faculty and of staff) into the social world of the university. There is a vague political intuition, shared by all sides in campus debates, that the demography of great books and the demography of students and faculty are somehow related. One aspect of this relationship, which has been widely noted, is that new kinds of students (“multicultural”) tend to demand new kinds of books, but the sense of demographic anxiety runs deeper than this factor alone. It also reflects unease about the lack of principles with which to regulate intake in any of these lists. With human beings as with texts there is a sense that issues of quality (a.k.a. “standards”) and issues of quantity are connected, but there are few explicit efforts to engage this connection.

Tied to the general absence of engagement with the links between intellectual and cultural diversity is another absence: the lack of any effort to distinguish between cultural diversity and the culture of diversity. By this I mean that the commitment to cultural diversity is dominated by numerical and categorical strategies that fundamentally involve addition and extension. A more serious effort to create a culture of diversity requires more than new categories and added numbers of people and books conceived to be different. What is required is a sustained effort to create a climate that is actually hospitable to diversity: one which puts diversity at the center of the curriculum and the demographics of the university, rather than at its statistical or conceptual margins. Affirmative action—in the narrow sense of entitlement by quota—is good neither for books nor for people. What is wrong with the narrow sense of affirmation is that addition of numbers—though good in itself—says little about the organization of the new or the transformation of what already exists by what is new. Put simply, the demographic and textual core of the university remains untouched if affirmative action is seen as a matter of a few more books, a few more courses, and a few more students and faculty of color.

More may be better, but it is not good enough. It is not good enough for the university unless the commitment to diversity transforms the way in which knowledge is sought and transmitted. That is, without a conscious commitment to the mutual value of intellectual and cultural diversity—which is really what I mean by a culture of diversity—the core mission of the university remains insulated from the commitment to diversity. Though the American academy has to some extent managed to put into practice a minimal commitment to cultural diversity, it has a long way to go before it can truly claim to have instantiated a culture of diversity. While the American university has managed to put into its official life (job advertisements, faculty and student recruitment, and courses of study) the principle that more difference is better, it has not succeeded in creating a habitus where diversity is at the heart of the apparatus itself. To deepen this appreciation requires a critical approach to the problem of disciplinarity, since it is in and through various kinds of discipline that the American university pursues its pedagogical and research projects.

The Idea of Disciplinarity

There has been much serious writing on the history of disciplines and disciplinarity, and an even larger literature about particular scholarly disciplines, their history and organization. There is also a substantial literature about the way in which the American research university adapted late nineteenth century German models, which accounts for a good deal of the morphology of departments and disciplines, for the ideology about teaching in relation to research, and for the value of research training. The “liberal arts” college is a more peculiarly American thing, which combines elements of the Oxbridge model of undergraduate life with the European model of disciplinary research. Notice that in neither European model (the British or the German) is there the slightest interest in diversity, especially in its social and cultural sense. That is an American preoccupation of this century, as I have already suggested. I am not going to engage this complicated set of literatures. Rather, I am going to propose a naive anthropology of the idea of disciplinarity as a cultural artifact.

One place to begin such an anthropology is the tension between historicity and authority. At least since the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, there has developed a broad consensus that the historicity of certain forms of inquiry is not the enemy of their productivity but perhaps its guarantee. This idea has leaked into various fields, institutions, and disciplinary cultures unevenly, but it seems clear that a simple model of accumulation and expansion no longer governs, even in such fields as philology, psychology, or musicology. Nevertheless, the virtues of historicity (or at least its undeniability) do not seem to blunt the rhetoric of permanence in many disciplinary contexts. This rhetoric usually underwrites the conservative discourse of standards, canons, taste, and anti-fashion that is most visible in public debates about the humanities, but in a quieter way appears in the social sciences and even in the natural sciences. The issue tends to show up in the invocation of quality and permanence—typically humanist tropes—in fields dominated by reading and interpretation. In the social and natural sciences the rhetoric of permanence relies on images of reliability and objectivism. It is thus also invoked in regard to ethnic identities, nationalist histories and the like, and often deployed against critiques couched in the idioms of invented traditions and constructed realities. The battle over trendiness, fashion, and the tradition of the new in the humanities seems to be fought largely at the annual meetings of the MLA and in cultural studies settings, but it is present throughout the academy.

One crucial question is why the humanities have become the site for the displacement and enactment of these large academic and social anxieties. I would suggest that this implosion into the humanities of issues of general cultural import reflects the peculiar status of the humanities and, at the college level, of the liberal arts, in an educational atmosphere increasingly driven by mega-science, corporate sponsorship of research, the rollback of federal support for big research, and the continuing scramble for professional and pre-professional credentials among American students. Thus while many colleges and universities have increasingly become factories for specialized research, applied interests, and professional credentializing, the humanities have become the critical site for the idea that the University is also about thought and reflection, cultivation and conscience, disinterest and abstraction, literacy and cosmopolitanism. Since the humanities are simultaneously badly funded and seen to be infected by dangerous fashions—in art, literary theory, popular culture and the like—they are a serious site for cultural warfare. On their survival rests the image of the academy as being independent of wider social pressures, whether from science, state, or industry, and of the university as being the critical bastion, in modern American society, of the cosmopolitan.

In addition, there is the anxiety about quantity and quality that I alluded to in an earlier section of this essay and a widespread presumption that the four years of undergraduate life (when most students are roughly between eighteen and twenty-two years of age) constitute the crucial window for instilling cultural literacy. Before that age, students are seen as inadequately mature and after that, as given over to the full-time worship of Mammon. What...