Modernist Studies and Cultural Studies: Reflections on Method

Cultural studies has paid scant heed to questions of modernity, modernism, and modernization. The leading journals in the field, such as Cultural Studies,The International Journal of Cultural Studies, and Social Text, very seldom publish essays that engage substantially with such ideas. Of the forty contributors to the massive Cultural Studies volume edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, none expresses even a cursory curiosity about modernity or modernism. Apart from one essay by Edward Soja, a similar indifference pervades another widely used collection edited by Simon During. Sifting through the ever-expanding pile of samplers, summaries, introductions, and overviews of cultural studies, one is easily persuaded that it is a field devoted entirely to the immediate present. ¹

What might seem like an unfortunate sign of historical hubris or academic oversight is in some eyes the singular virtue of the cultural studies project. "Cultural studies," writes Simon During, "is the study of contemporary culture." ² It is a field that is adamantly yoked to the new and the now, a method matched to its own moment, an approach tied to the epochal uniqueness of our own image-saturated, consumption-crazed, globally connected yet politically fragmented age. Since the mid-1980s, the lure of the word "postmodern" has proved almost irresistible; when "modernity" appears at all in cultural studies, it is often there to be refuted, derided, or denounced, a handy catch phrase for conservative politics, old hat metaphysics, and snobbish aesthetics. ³

While cultural studies may seem oblivious to modernist studies, the reverse is far from true. In literature departments anxious to remake themselves, cultural studies has become a much favored way of announcing that one is moving away from business as usual; it is widely used shorthand for social relevance and political urgency, for a clamorous movement to reconnect word and world. Although cultural studies often gives short shrift to history, in literature departments, paradoxically, it has come to signal a return to history. The "new modernisms" are a much heralded part of this critical turn, speaking to a sense of weariness with reverential rereadings of modernist masters and an eagerness for broader, more expansive maps of the modern that can locate texts squarely in the political fault lines and fissures of culture.

Yet the growing use of "cultural studies" as a catchall synonym for "the study of culture" should give us pause. Not long ago, I heard a well-known literary scholar remark in response to a question after his talk: "of course, we're all doing cultural studies now." The proliferation of such comments indicates that a specific rubric is being bloated and distended beyond all recognition, in danger of becoming as ubiquitous as it is useless. A phrase that once named a distinct project, an intellectual tradition, a core cluster of ideas and arguments, is now being stretched to subsume a grab bag of differing and often incompatible textual methods. Cultural studies may seem like a useful umbrella term, but if too many people try to cram under the umbrella, everyone will end up getting very wet. ⁴

Cultural studies, it must be said, has not been overly anxious to rein in the rampant, kudzu-like proliferation of its name. It is a much favored gambit in the field to argue that any attempt to specify and hence limit its agenda must be strenuously resisted. The downside of this claim that cultural studies cannot be defined is that it becomes impossible to show the wrongness of any particular definition. "Cultural studies," writes one critic, "is a whirling and quiescent and swaying mobile which constantly repositions any participating subject . . . a project whose realization . . . is forever deferred." ⁵ For other scholars it is the model for "an interpretative politics with no limits." ⁶ This aversion to circumscribing the parameters of cultural studies often goes along with a fervent denunciation of disciplinary straitjackets and institutional orthodoxy. Insisting on the utterly nonroutine nature of cultural studies is now a...