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<div>Good response, Gary. It interests me that cultural studies seems
so often to be made an object of ridicule -- just 'media hype' ....
etc. To get to the bottom of it, I think we need to look past the
Andrew Bolts and Keith Windschuttles and recognise that the tendency
can even be found among those who wear the CS label (or, like Geert,
to participate in CS discussion lists). Internal criticism of CS has
often been coruscating, implying some fundamental error, wrong turn or
egregious error. One of the most characteristic positions in relation
to CS is a kind of ironic detachment -- 'we wouldn't want to associate
ourselves<i> fully</i> with this field, but it can be interesting or
amusing to hang on the edges, listen in, throw in provocations from
time to time'. (It sometimes seems to me that everyone is doing this.
ie. no-one is actually in the middle.)</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Why is CS so prone to this? I don't see a similar tendency in
say, anthropology, philosophy or media studies. The best answer I have
is that the space it has sought to occupy -- somewhere between serious
scholarship, the media, popular culture and mass education -- makes it
inherently controversial. I'm often reminded in thinking about this,
of Joshua Meyrowitz's argument about television -- that in its lack of
respect for traditional boundaries, it ends up mildly offending
everyone. Isn't our view of CS often rather like the common ironic
detachment before TV?</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>All that said, I think Geert is right in pointing out the strong
'Anglo' character of CS. Almost all the examples Gary cites of CS
outside the US, UK and Australia are, when you look at them, offshoots
of 'Anglo' formations: Kuan-Hsing Chen was a student of Larry
Grossberg, who himself spent time at Birmingham; Koichi Iwabuchi did
his PhD in Australia; Meaghan Morris is an Australian living in HK ...
etc.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>The only problem is that pinning 'Anglo' on the field brings us
back to the ridicule. We all know, don't we, that there are no serious
Anglo intellectual traditions? Surely anything that is said in CS,
then, has probably been said before, and better, by a German
philosopher or French theorist. This, it seems to me, is where the
'media hype' analysis comes from. CS is flaky, derivative, second rate
...</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>This is why, for me, it is worth going back to the early 'Anglo'
roots of CS -- not just in the UK, but also Australia and the US. If
you do, I think you begin to recognise that there<i> is</i> something
distinctive there -- and something worth holding on to. You could call
it empiricism if that term was not also, often, a term of abuse.
Better to call it a tradition of close observation. There's a preface
by Jean-Claude Passeron (one of Bourdieu's closest collaborators) in
the French edition of Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy, which
makes the point nicely:</div>
<div><br></div>
<blockquote><font size="-1" color="#000000">The discussion of the
realities of class is certainly to the credit of numerous fractions of
the French intellectual milieu, but it is not altogether wrong to
suppose that its theoretical and abstract tone serves also to keep at
bay a whole set of realities at once simple and scandalous - or
worse than scandalous, vulgar. The whole empirical force of these
realities is evident when a description at once ethnographic and
autobiographical such as Richard Hoggart's brings them into focus
directly, above literary artifice and scholarly
exercises.</font></blockquote>
<blockquote><br></blockquote>
<div>In my view, one of the things that CS has been good at -- and
still is -- is honest description of 'ordinary' realities. I'm
prepared to be proven wrong, but I don't know of anyone doing this
earlier or better.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>To circle back to Terry's original provocation on the 'leftness'
of CS, it seems to me part of the anxiety about this is a simple
misrecognition of who we are and what we do. Terry asks, in his last
post, whether CS people would do any better than the Labor party in
liberating us from Howard. His implicit answer, I think, and probably
right, is 'no'. But should we get too worried by that? CS is not a
political party -- or even, I would say, a political movement. It's a
tradition of cultural analysis and criticism. We should value it for
the quality of its engagement with 'stuff', not dwell on its failure
to do things it is not constituted to do.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>-- Mg</div>
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