In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • From Language to Medium: A Small Apology for Cultural Theory as Challenge to Cultural Studies
  • J. E. Elliott (bio)

Wenn immer man denkt oder sagt: es “gibt” eine Sache, es “gibt” eine Welt, und damit mehr meint als nur, es gibt etwas, das ist, wie es ist, dann ist ein Beobachter involviert. Für einen Beobachter des Beobachters, für uns also [emphasis added], ist die Frage dann nicht: was gibt es?—sondern: wie konstruiert ein Beobachter, was er konstruiert, um weitere Beobachtungen anschließen zu können.

—Niklas Luhmann 1

I believe that sociology, when it is reflexive, enables us to track down and to destroy the last germs of ressentiment . . . the sentiment of the person who transforms a sociologically mutilated being—I am poor, I am black, I am a woman, I am powerless—into a model of human excellence, an elective accomplishment of freedom and a devoir-être, an ought-to-be, a fatum, built upon an unconscious fascination with the dominant. Sociology frees you from this sickly strategy of symbolic inversion . . . the worst thing that the dominant impose on the dominated. . . . Thus, for me, sociology is an instrument of liberation, and therefore of generosity.

—Pierre Bourdieu 2

I

Social theory may be seen to intervene at the crossroads of textual and cultural approaches to literary and nonliterary artifacts, taking up once again the dispute between intrinsic and extrinsic criticism that we have been compelled to relive, roughly since the death of Paul de Man, as a decisive if not universal turn away from High Theory toward the regimen of ethics, politics, the social, and everyday. So fruitful and comprehensive has been the range of Cultural [End Page 385] Studies, in fact, that its momentum alone seems to charge us with a singular myopia in overlooking the diversity of human interests that a posthumanist criticism must take as one of its binding commissions. This invites facile oversimplifications in literary history. The same concerns were never absent from High Theory’s philosophic ambitions, and the rhetoric of awakening us from one or another anthropological sleep invariably sought to provide the anthropoi excluded from the going definition with voices of their own. But to the extent that the values in question were mediated through a priestly discipline of attentive reading, their cultural emphasis was threatened at every turn with methodological etiolation. By the mid to late 1980s, in the wake of a number of largely independent movements on New Historicist, Marxist, Postcolonial, and Cultural Studies fronts, what Jonathan Culler and others were beginning to claim for the broadly cultural influence of deconstruction seemed, if not outrightly false, at least highly ambivalent. 3 As Fredric Jameson had already asked in 1976, what did this textual demontage, so surreptitiously distributed from the high temples of academic privilege, amount to if not one more artifact for the formalist museum, stamped, packaged, and labeled for viewing: entrance free on alternate Wednesdays? 4 What profit it to understand the world, to recycle the familiar objection so familiarly recycled since the Young Hegelians, if one proved unable to change it—or at least to represent it adequately for those, the “farting others of supermarkets and public toilets,” for whom the deconstruction of three millennia of logocentric thought has about as much meaning as the theorem of binary coefficients or the cricket scores from Port-au-Prince? 5

The reasons for this shift toward the “cultural” have yet to be adequately delineated. It is unlikely that it could have occurred, for example, without a parallel shift in the ethnic make-up of younger faculty and graduate degree candidates as a whole. A more demanding job market has also made it necessary to rationalize selection criteria in the form of refereed publications, opening up a much expanded research network in need of new (transcanonical) material. 6 As David Shumway has shown, the increase in the number of academic journals, in which a then-conservative and very canon-oriented PMLA lost its centrality, operated in tandem with the increase in both organized conferences and the “traveling theory” phenomenon. 7 If there are more people in the research game, it is also easier to determine what they are up...

Share