What′s Become of Cultural Studies?

Graeme Turner

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781849205849, 9781849205832
• eBook ISBN: 9781446292549
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

"Graeme Turner is one of the most remarkable figures in the world of cultural studies. He has helped to make and remake the field over the last twenty-five years. So when he sets his alarm clock - and it goes off loudly - we all know it?s time to pay attention. This extraordinary testament to what is right and wrong with cultural studies today will reverberate across the globe."
Toby Miller, University of California

This original, sharp and engaging book draws the reader into a compelling exploration of cultural studies in the twenty-first century. It offers a level-headed account of where cultural studies has come from, the methodological and theoretical dilemmas that it faces today and an agenda for its future development.

In an age in which the relevance of cultural studies has been called into question, this book seeks to generate debate. Focusing upon the actual practice of cultural studies within the university today, it asks whether or not cultural studies has really managed to maintain a connection with its original political and ethical mission and comments on the strategies needed to regain the initiative.

Written by a world class figure in cultural studies, each chapter supports and guides the reader by introducing the key issues, reviewing the relevant commentary and offering a critical conclusion of how each theme fits into a bigger picture. This timely and provocative consideration of cultural studies as a global discipline will be essential reading for academics and students working in the field for years to come.

THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF CULTURAL STUDIES

1

I was among the first (admittedly, of many) to write a book length account of the development of cultural studies (Turner, 1990, 1996a, 2003); the point of my doing this at that time was to try to make cultural studies approaches accessible to a broader readership than those who were going to be reading Working Papers in Cultural Studies or the various readers being published through Hutchison, the Open University and so on. Today, the idea of cultural studies still seems to me as important and as relevant as it ever has been. However, what has happened to this idea in practice – how it has been implemented in various contexts, what kinds of influence it has had, and ultimately where I worry that it may have lost some of its power – is the topic of this book.

Obviously, there could be quite a bit of debate about what follows – both from inside and outside the cultural studies tent. Indeed, generating debate is one of the objectives of this book. What I would like to do first, however, before properly commencing my critique (although there will be some of that here as well), is to consider what cultural studies has achieved. As a named academic field it has been around for more than 40 years. It has been taught, more or less as a discipline, in universities in the UK and in Australia since at least the mid-1970s and early 1980s. It was slower to start up in Canada while, in the USA, the boom years were the 1990s – although one could argue that it has maintained its presence, if a little more modestly, into the 2000s. Other locations, and there are very many of them now, have their own starting points and narratives of development. For those of us who belong to the first generation of cultural studies scholars, baby-boomers most of us, cultural studies simply did not exist when we entered the university. Our training was in other, more traditional or established, disciplines – most often in English or sociology – and many of us have stories about our experience of those disciplines that explain what we sought to find in cultural studies. Now, some of us are professors of cultural studies and, whether we like it or not, pillars of the university community. Although it has had more than its share of detractors, critics and sceptics¹, cultural studies is recognized as a legitimate field of teaching and research in most places around the globe: by universities, national and international research funding bodies, publishers, booksellers, and even the occasional newspaper columnist. That is quite a transformation to have occurred within the careers of one generation – and in an institutional context which is not known for accommodating rapid change. Something has certainly happened – and so there are major achievements to be acknowledged.

This chapter will therefore engage in a (very) selective stock-take of what I think we might claim so far as among the achievements of cultural studies. For a start, I hope that it is uncontroversial to suggest that cultural studies has helped to place the construction of everyday life at the centre of contemporary intellectual enquiry and research in the humanities². Along the way, it has played its part in opening up a number of cognate disciplines – literary studies, history, cultural geography, film and media studies, cultural anthropology, and even sociology – to analytic approaches and theoretical perspectives that have proved significant in their impact. Most particularly, cultural studies enabled the study of the media to be developed in ways that broke significantly with previous approaches by establishing new kinds of critical analytic practice. In general, I am prepared to defend the claim that the landscape of the humanities and the social sciences has been transformed by cultural studies over the past 30 years. I would also be happy to argue that the landscape of public debate has changed significantly as we have witnessed the penetration of cultural studies approaches, discourses and knowledges into public discourse to an extent that exceeds all expectations. It is easy (indeed, common) to overlook this dimension of cultural studies’ impact. I am reminded of David Morley’s citation of a book reviewer’s comment that cultural studies was no more than a series of ‘truisms’, and ‘so obviously a move in the direction of common sense that it hardly deserves all this attention’. Morley’s response – a response that was right on the money in my view – was to point out that ‘if the things that this reviewer refers to are now “common sense” they are largely so because work in cultural studies has made them so’ (1998: 477).

There is no doubt that cultural studies’ achievements are subject to vigorous internal and external debate – its internationalization, for instance, is still not universally regarded as a good thing (I argue at some length in Chapter 5, drawing on the example of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies movement, that it is among cultural studies’ genuine accomplishments). There is also debate about cultural studies’ increasing integration with more established disciplines and networks; the fear is that this weakens cultural studies’ critical capacity and its foundational challenge to disciplinarity. For some, what amounts to the re-incorporation of cultural studies into the academy may reflect a diminution of its critical project, and thus the beginning of an entropic cycle for the field as a whole. For others, since cultural studies has accomplished the disciplinary corrections it was set up to produce, and since it has neither the aspirations nor the epistemological equipment to become a discipline itself, cultural studies is now effectively over. Finally, there is (always!) debate about how relevant or important the ‘project’ of cultural studies has remained: its theoretical interest in the analysis of the cultural production and distribution of power, the critical dimension of its practice – and also perhaps the romanticism of its characteristic claim to intervene in the political processes it sets out to examine (Grossberg, 2010: 96–7). In the following chapters, these debates and issues will continue to run under the surface of my account of what has become of cultural studies.

THE INSTITUTION OF CULTURAL STUDIES

This subheading is a provocative one in this context, perhaps, but it does seem to me that the first thing I need to do is to point to cultural studies’ remarkable success at creating space for itself within the university, as well as within other institutional contexts – research funding bodies, for instance – around the world. In at least one case of which I am aware, Lingnan University in Hong Kong, where the 2010 Crossroads conference was held (as we shall see in a later chapter, a very different event from that held in Birmingham!), cultural studies is officially represented as one of the flagship programmes for the whole university. While such institutional success will always be the result of concerted political effort, it is an effort that for much of the history of cultural studies has been disavowed. Readers may remember a special issue of Cultural Studies from 1998, edited by Ted Striphas and dedicated to discussing what was at the time deemed to be the ‘problem’ of the institutionalization of cultural studies. That such a topic was considered to be important reflects the fact that, from its beginning, cultural studies had maintained a principled objection to its own institutionalization. While it certainly sought recognition and respect, it also saw itself as opposed to the disciplinary formations that organized the university and warned against aligning the development of cultural studies’ teaching programmes and research agendas too closely with the interests of the institution in which these activities took place. Such an accommodation, it was argued, ran against the grain of cultural studies’ critical project. As cultural studies began to expand and internationalize – finding varied ways to establish itself in university systems around the world – many in cultural studies recognized that it was going to be increasingly difficult to maintain such a position³. Ted Striphas, in his introduction to the special issue, both reported and challenged the orthodoxies informing this stance:

cultural studies has developed something of a ‘line’, so to speak, in response to the ‘question’ of institutionalization – despite its professed disdain for ready-made answers. When the prospect of institutionalizing cultural studies gets posed, published reactions often tend towards some variation of ‘Resist disciplinarity!’ I wonder, however, how productive this response is, given the practical and historical exigencies facing cultural studies, particularly as it finds itself increasingly institutionalized. (1998: 459)

Striphas’ strategy for challenging this orthodoxy was to frame his approach around how, ‘practically speaking’, cultural studies practitioners have actually dealt with ‘negotiating the institutional/disciplinary space’. His introduction is sceptical about the reality (‘practically speaking’) of the orthodox position; he politely submits that ‘the polemical announcement of cultural studies’ ‘anti-disciplinarity’ seems to lack ‘a discrete or recognizable institutional embodiment’ (480). That is, to put it more bluntly, all the talk about anti-disciplinarity and resistance to the institution loses much of its credibility when we notice that most of it comes from those who have tenured positions teaching cultural studies as a named disciplinary formation through established programmes within the university system. As Tony Bennett, one of the contributors to the special issue, points out: ‘[if] we survey the scene today, cultural studies has all the institutional trappings of a discipline’ (1998: 530). To deny this would be disingenuous, Bennett suggests, rewriting a history in which the development of cultural studies has in fact always ‘depended on definite institutional conditions’. Importantly, he goes on, ‘the fact that these do not happen to be entirely the same as those which have sustained the development of other disciplines is … no reason to characterize them as extra-institutional’ (534).

These days, perhaps, many would admit that this resistance to disciplinarity has become more of a fashionable fiction than an actual practice (Chapter 2 takes up this issue), but it was still a question for serious debate at the time Striphas’s issue was published – and, indeed, it had taken on added urgency as a direct result of cultural studies’ increasing penetration into the American university system. Striphas is quite brave in confronting the issue head-on: he uses the second half of his introductory paper to defend the pragmatics of institutionalization, and to outline some ways in which this might be accomplished without abandoning the original objectives of the cultural studies project. Along the way, he astutely points out how mistaken it would be to assume any neat homology between interdisciplinarity (or anti-disciplinarity) and a resistance to institutionalization. Indeed, Striphas notes how handy it has been for the corporatizing university, seeking economies of scale and financial efficiencies as well as a competitive position in the market, to make use of interdisciplinarity as an academic rationale for the administrative merging of disciplines, departments or schools. As he sees it, in this context, cultural studies’ preferred institutional practices run the risk of unwittingly ‘colluding with the university’s corporatist logic (of which interdisciplinarity often – and ironically – is a symptom)’ (1998: 454). This is one of the earlier warnings about what has in fact turned out to be a significant factor in cultural studies’ institutionalization over the last decade. Despite its principled opposition to institutionalization and the corporate university, I think it is possible to see cultural studies as among the unlikely beneficiaries of the neo-liberal attack on the humanities in higher education. While I am not suggesting that such an outcome was something anyone in our field set out to achieve, nonetheless, the fact is that it would be rare these days to find a humanities administrative unit in any university that is not embedded within some kind of multidisciplinary formation. Such a formation might well be the product of a legitimate arrangement of cognate disciplines but it is also just as likely to be the outcome of a cynically arranged shotgun wedding between the academic administrative units concerned. All too often, cultural studies is used as the legitimating, interdisciplinary glue which holds such unions together and, as such, has made itself useful if not indispensable to the whole enterprise.

Even though the 1990s debates about institutionalization still linger somewhere or other, and can still surprise us by resurfacing with renewed intensity from time to time, on the whole it has to be admitted that talk about cultural studies resisting institutionalization today just sounds like a fantasy. Indeed, if we examined the past decade, it would be much easier to find examples of cultural studies’ outstanding success at institutionalization than to find examples of heroic resistance to it. Undergraduate teaching programmes abound, postgraduate students do too; cultural studies research centres have proliferated and prospered; cultural studies academics find themselves on national academic committees, research funding assessment panels, government advisory boards, and in the media. In the most sincere form of flattery, some of our colleagues in other disciplines even find it politic (from time to time) to occasionally pretend to be one of us (I am thinking of the number of research grant applications I see these days, especially from literary studies, which self-nominate as cultural studies in the curious hope of enhancing their chances of success). Even though there are certain places, such as in the UK daily press (most egregiously, in left-leaning ‘quality’ papers such as The Guardian), where cultural studies is routinely parodied and its legitimacy questioned, I think it is defensible to regard this, by and large, as a marker of cultural studies’ success rather than its vulnerability.

However, that is not all one would want to say about this. Indeed, in a controversial 2009 article published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, called ‘What’s the matter with cultural studies?’, Michael Bérubé offers a very different assessment of the institutionalization of cultural studies today:

Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (1978), the Birmingham collection that predicted the British Labour Party’s epochal demise, is now more than 30 years old. In that time, has cultural studies transformed the disciplines of the human sciences? Has cultural studies changed the means of transmission of knowledge? Has cultural studies made the American university a more egalitarian or progressive institution? Those seem to me to be useful questions to ask, and one useful way of answering them is to say, sadly, no. Cultural studies hasn’t had much of an impact at all. (2009: 1)

While Bérubé acknowledges there are some ‘worthy programs in cultural studies at some North American universities, like Kansas State and George Mason, where there were once no programs at all’ (1), nonetheless he regards this as a disappointingly modest achievement. I am aware that many of Bérubé’s colleagues in cultural studies in the USA were profoundly dismayed by the publication of this piece; the message it sent to deans looking for programmes to cut can’t have been helpful. If we set aside the politics of his intervention for the moment, however, he does have a point. One remembers the high hopes of those introducing cultural studies to America in the early 1990s⁴, as well as the level of hyperbole that surrounded this venture. At the 1990s ‘Cultural Studies Now and in the Future’ conference at Champaign–Urbana, which is so often regarded as the moment when the cultural studies invasion of America was launched, Stuart Hall addressed concerns raised by what he described as ‘the enormous explosion of cultural studies in the US, its rapid professionalization and institutionalization’ (1992: 285). A decade later, in their introduction to a volume which constructs an extremely interesting version of ‘American cultural studies’, Hartley and Pearson (2000) refer to the institutionalization of cultural studies in the USA, as if it had proven to be a more widespread phenomenon there even than its British counterpart had been in the UK; they refer, further, to cultural studies ‘installation in American universities as a mainstream subject for undergraduate and graduate study’ (10). Given the fact that there were, even at the peak of this invasion, only a tiny handful of undergraduate programmes to name themselves as cultural studies (the effect was primarily on graduate programmes), such comments offer us an insight into what had become more like a reflection of the zeitgeist that had been whipped up around cultural studies in the 1990s rather than an accurate account of what was actually going on in the universities. Given such hyperbole, it is certainly understandable that Bérubé should regard what has become of this movement as a depressingly modest result.

It is, of course, remarkable when one considers how structurally important America has become to the international institutionalization of cultural studies (the proportion of international journals located there, the number of American scholars who identify with the field, and, most importantly, the crucial role played by the American market for our books), that the cultural studies’ institutional presence in the American university system has remained so limited. Bérubé goes on:

In most universities, cultural studies has no home at all, which means (among other things) that graduate students doing work in cultural studies have to hope they’ll be hired in some congenial department that has a cultural studies component. The good news on that front is that you can now find cultural-studies scholars working in anthropology, in critical geography, even in kinesiology. In ‘museum studies’ and cultural ethnography, in the work of Mike Davis and Edward W. Soja on cities, and in analyses of West African soccer clubs or the career of Tiger Woods, cultural studies has cast a wide net. The bad news is that the place where cultural studies has arguably had the greatest impact is in English departments. And though people in English departments habitually forget this, English departments are just a tiny part of the university. (2009: 2)

On the one hand, from what I can tell from my own experience of the USA, this looks like an accurate characterization (even though some respondents to Bérubé’s piece described it as a ‘Jeremaid’)⁵. On the other hand, this situation may well be the predictable consequence of what might now be seen as th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Practising Cultural Studies Today
• 1 The Achievements of Cultural Studies
• 2 The ‘Undiscipline’: Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinarity
• 3 Teaching Cultural Studies
• 4 Unintended Consequences: Convergence Culture, New Media Studies and Creative Industries
• 5 Internationalizing Cultural Studies: From Diaspora to Indigeneity
• 6 Does Cultural Studies Have a Future?
• References
• Index