The Left at War

5 What Is This “Cultural” in Cultural Studies?

209  5  WHAT IS THIS “CULTURAL” IN CULTURAL STUDIES? O uTSi de The ST iLL-T i NY world of academic cultural studies and communications departments, Hall’s work on Thatcherism and the left is nearly invisible in the United States. The Hard Road to Renewal is out of print, and has been for some years now; and most of the anthologies that include Hall’s essays tend not to include any of the material from Hard Road (remarkably, this is true even of the best anthology in the field, David Morley’s and Kuan-Hsing Chen’s Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies). In my many conversations and correspondences with liberals , progressives, and leftists since the late 1980s, I have met only a small handful of people outside academe who are familiar with Hard Road or Hall’s 1980s essays in Marxism Today. Moreover, within American academe , since the beginnings of the U.S. cultural studies “boom” in the late 1980s, two curious things have happened. One is that Hall’s work in the late 1970s and early 1980s has not received as much attention as his brilliant late 1980s to early 1990s series of essays on race and diaspora (such as “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” “New Ethnicities ,” and “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?”); the other is that “cultural studies” as a whole (insofar as one can attempt to speak of “‘cultural studies’ as a whole”) has been dismissed, either as a trivial enterprise that draws attention away from “real” political struggles or, even worse, as an academic cheering section for the corporate culture industry. In this chapter, I revisit the debates over cultural politics and cultural studies as they took place in the United States in the 1990s, in order to try to explain why American left intellectuals remain so addicted to “false consciousness ” theories of political behavior. And though I concentrate in part on commentators who got cultural studies entirely wrong, or who never had any significant sympathy with its intellectual project in the first place, I do not embark on a wagon-circling defense of the field. Something did indeed go awry with American cultural studies in the years before 9/11, and the people who helped to align the field with an uncritical populism in cultural and political matters are as much to blame for cultural studies’ 210 WhaT iS ThiS “cuLTuraL” iN cuLTuraL STudieS? disconnection from public political debate as the people who argued that we need to turn away from uncritical populism and get back to the eternal leftish verities of how corporate and political elites dupe people into misidentifying their real political interests. The now-classic leftist broadside against cultural studies was issued by media theorist Robert McChesney, in a talk (later an essay) titled “Is There Any Hope for Cultural Studies?” which he delivered at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in late 1995. Perhaps to ensure that his auditors would not be left in suspense by the interrogative nature of his title, McChesney made it clear at the very outset that the answer was no: At some universities the very term cultural studies has become an ongoing punchline to a bad joke. It signifies half-assed research, selfcongratulation , farcical pretension. At its worst, the proponents of this newfangled cultural studies are unable to defend their work, so they no longer try, merely claiming that their critics are hung up on outmoded notions like evidence, logic, science, and rationality. In my view there are two reasons for the decline of political radicalism in cultural studies. First, this is the normal consequence of becoming institutionalized in the academy. As Russell Jacoby has pointed out, this has tended to undermine intellectual radicalism regardless of the discipline. The professionalization of cultural studies implicitly encourages depoliticization, which makes it far easier to get funding. For those who abhor radical politics or believe that radical politics must be secondary to institutional success, this depoliticization is a welcome turn of events, a sign of the field’s maturity. Needless to say, institutionalization is especially damaging to cultural studies, in view of its explicitly populist origins and project. Second, the postmodern or poststructural turn in cultural studies has had disastrous implications for its politics. I acknowledge that postmodernism has produced some keen insights. But it is too much like mainstream quantitative social science: each is well suited for specific types of tasks, usually narrowly defined, but neither...