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ACADEMIC CONFERENCES AND A MANIFESTO

The rapidly increasing visibility of cultural studies in the United States over the past few years gives us an opportunity to see how an emerging body of theory is realized politically and professionally, to reflect on its articulation to existing institutions in medias res, before those articulations are fixed for any period of time. One of those institutions is the large academic conference, two of which took place within a few months of each other, “Cultural Studies Now and in the Future” at the University of Illinois in April of 1990, a conference I helped to organize, and “Crossing the Disciplines: Cultural Studies in the 1990s” at the University of Oklahoma in October of 1990, a conference organized by Robert Con Davis and Ron Schlieffer where I presented an earlier version of this chapter. Cultural studies has also recently been the subject of special sessions at regional and national meetings of the Modern Language Association, all of which events together give a fairly good indication of what the future of cultural studies—especially in English—is likely to be. Though cultural studies has a much longer and very different, if still contested, history in U.S. Communications departments, it is on its very recent commodification in English that I want to focus here.

I might begin by posing a single strategic question: what does it mean that Robert Con Davis and Ron Schlieffer, in the papers they gave at the Oklahoma conference quite properly felt it appropriate and necessary to refer to the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in Britain and Hillis Miller, presenting the keynote talk at the opening of the same conference, gave no evidence of knowing anything about it and yet felt fully empowered to define both the history and future of cultural studies? I suppose in the broadest sense it means that the spread of American power and American culture across the globe has led some Americans to believe Disneyland is the origin of the world. I have the uneasy feeling that if one told Miller he ought to find out about the Birmingham tradition he’d reply that he didn’t know such interesting work had gone on in Alabama.

At a regional MLA conference in 1988 I argued that people who claim to be commenting on or “doing” cultural studies ought at least to familiarize themselves with the British cultural studies tradition, beginning with Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart and moving through Birmingham and beyond. I must emphasize, however, that almost nothing in this tradition is simply transferable to the United States. Williams was partly concerned with defining a distinctly British heritage. The interdisciplinary work at Birmingham was often deeph ollaborative, a style that has little chance of succeeding in American depart* \ts and little chance of surviving the American academic system of rewards. But the struggle to shape the field in Britain has lessons we can learn much from, and British cultural studies achieved theoretical advances that are immensely useful in an American context. So that would be part of my answer to the question Jonathan Culler posed, with an air of whimsical hopelessness, in Oklahoma: “What is a professor of cultural studies supposed to know?” A professor of cultural studies might, in other words, be expected to know the history of the field. Professors of cultural studies need not agree with or emulate all the imperatives of British cultural studies, but they do have a responsibility to take a position on a tradition whose name they are borrowing. Moreover, people with strong disciplinary training who are now feeling their way toward cultural studies have something to gain from encounters with others who have already made such journeys. Leaving open what it will mean to establish cultural studies in America, British cultural studies nonetheless illustrates some of what is at stake in theorizing culture in any historical moment.

Immediately after my 1988 talk, my friend Vincent Leitch, who ought to know better, stood up in the audience, waving his arms as he scaled some Bunker Hill of the imagination, and declared that he “thought we had thrown off the yoke of the British two hundred years ago.” At an Indiana University of Pennsylvania conference on theory and pedagogy in September of 1990, I heard James Berlin prophesy, with a solemnity nowhere cognizant that he was predicting coals would be brought to Newcastle, that he was simply giving critical theory a new name, that cultural studies would miraculously turn our attention toward “textuality in all its forms.” The claim of course was hardly new; indeed, this heralded revolution had already taken place under another name. In November of 1990, a panel on cultural studies at the Pacific Coast Philological Association unself-consciously offered two models of cultural studies: as an opportunistic umbrella for English professors who want to study film or the graphic arts, and as a terrain of vague, metonymic sliding between all the competing theories on the contemporary scene. Cultural studies in that context was considered interchangeable with semiotics, the New Historicism, and other recent bodies of theory. And at an October 1990 University of Illinois panel on “The Frontiers of Eighteenth-Century Studies” John Richetti, preening himself in the manner of a disciplinary cockatoo, announced with satisfaction that “eighteenth-century people had been doing cultural studies all along.”

I could add other anecdotes. But these are enough to introduce the first points I want to make: of all the intellectual movements that have swept the humanities in America over the last twenty years, none will be taken up so shallowly, so opportunistically, so unreflectively, and so ahistorically as cultural studies. It is becoming the perfect paradigm for a people with no sense of history—born yesterday and born on the make. A concept with a long history of struggle over its definition, a concept born in class consciousness and in critique of the academy, a concept with a skeptical relationship with its own theoretical advances, is often for English in America little more than a way of repackaging what we were already doing. Of course nothing can prevent the term “cultural studies” from coming to mean something very different in another time and place. But the casual dismissal of its history needs to be seen for what it is—an interested effort to depoliticize a concept whose whole prior history has been preeminently political and oppositional. The depoliticizing of cultural studies will no doubt pay off, making it more palatable at once to granting agencies and to conservative colleagues, administrators, and politicians, but only at the cost of blocking cultural studies from having any critical purchase on American social life.

People interested in theory have often been universally accused by the Right of facile opportunism. As I argued in the opening chapter, there is certainly an element of thoughtless opportunism in the way people flock to the most recent turns in theory, but the historical record actually suggests a very different and much more difficult pattern of struggle and mutual transformation for many of those committed to the major bodies of interpretive theory. Consider the deep personal transformation, the institutional changes, the wholesale reorientation of social understanding that accompanied the feminist revolution and its extension into the academy. Compare the various times this century when taking up Marxism has meant a comparable reorientation of one’s whole understanding of society. Even a body of theory like psychoanalysis, which in its academic incarnations has avoided many of its imperatives toward personal and institutional change, has entailed a good deal more than adopting a special vocabulary; even for academics, psychoanalysis has meant accepting a view of human agency that isolates them from their traditionally rationalist colleagues. In Britain and Australia taking up cultural studies has followed the more radical pattern among these alternatives. But not for most disciplines in the United States.

The conference in Oklahoma was part of that repackaging effort. Its joint sponsorship by the Semiotic Society of America suggested as well that semiotics could get new life by being recycled as cultural studies. One also hears graduate students and faculty members talk frankly about repackaging themselves as cultural studies people. The disastrous academic job market, to be sure, along with most of the daily messages consumer capitalism sends us, encourages that sort of anxious cynicism about how one markets oneself. The large number of young people who presented papers at Oklahoma—many of them willing to pay a $95 registration fee and endure the humiliation of potentially tiny audiences at multiple sessions (there were seventeen simultaneous sessions on Sunday morning at 8:30)—testifies to the sense that putting a “Cultural Studies in the 1990s” label on your vita is worth an investment in exploitation and alienation.

I do not mean to belittle the impulse behind the willingness to cooperate with that kind of structure. The unpredictable realities of the job market are terrifying enough to more than explain graduate students and young faculty members signing on for the odd honorific anonymity that being on a large conference program entails. But I also think there’s good reason to bring these realities into the open and subject them to critique.

Indeed, the job market in cultural studies—at least in English—gives a pretty good indication of how the discipline is going to take up this new paradigm. In 1989 a graduate student at Illinois—a specialist in feminist cultural studies with a degree in communications—interviewed for cultural studies positions at MLA. It was quite clear that many departments hadn’t the faintest idea what cultural studies was. It was a way to ask the dean for new money by pointing out an area where they needed to catch up and a way for interviewers to make a display of ignorance look like canny interrogation: “So what is all this cultural studies stuff about anyway?” What better way to ask uninformed questions than in the role of job interviewer? Who cares what serious cultural studies job candidates might think? The search committee has the power and the money. If the answers are confusing or slightly threatening, the candidate will be out of the room in twenty minutes anyway. The committee, of course, has the only last word that counts—the authority to recommend who gets offered the job. Some departments in effect conducted fake, exploratory cultural studies searches as a lazy way of finding out between cocktails a little bit about what the young people are up to these days. As the Illinois student found out, it all comes down to the final question: but can you fill in when we need someone to do the Milton course?