Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies

Epiloge: How Scholarship Matters

227 Epilogue How Schol a r ship Mat t er s Ba r bie Zel izer Most scholars would say that they engage in intellectual work for the sheer joy of it, yet underlying a fierce curiosity about the efforts of the mind rests a humble hope that our scholarship will not perish when we are no longer around to remind others of its relevance. This volume asks us to consider concepts in cultural studies. In particular , it assesses the basic impulses of the work of James Carey in the context of those who claim its influence on their own scholarship. It is a smart, timely, and useful effort to delineate the setting in which Carey’s ideas might and do live on. It is also a clear testament to him, and to those he taught and mentored, that the offerings compiled here come from some of the most renowned and respected scholars in the field. It is, then, with a large dose of humility that I attempt a task first mandated to Carey himself. This book began while he was still alive, and its epilogue was to have been his place to voice his assessments of the articles collected here, to say whether they got things right or wrong or moved in directions he had not anticipated. I can do no justice to that task, so I will instead take my comments on a different path, envisioning Carey’s scholarship through the prism of Raymond Williams’s keywords project and considering the chapters compiled here as illustrative of a collective critical moment, one that 228 Barbie Zelizer necessarily moves an academic community from honoring a deeply venerated individual and scholar and his terms of intellectual inquiry to positioning his work in context after he is gone. What that movement signifies about the health and durability of academic inquiry is central to understanding both the role of individuals as motivators of the collective and the resilience of the collective to journey on once the individual is no longer among its members. The questions, then, raised here are central: How have Carey’s scholarship and key terms of inquiry fared over time? Are they still productive, and if so, among whom, to what extent, and on which grounds? On Keywords and James Carey Keywords offer a fertile place to begin in taking stock of a field, and they have emerged as useful tools for doing so at certain moments or in response to certain critical incidents.1 This book, organized as an extended conversation about some of the keywords that were central to Carey’s work, builds on the commonsensical relevance that keywords have accrued in our culture. Providing a kind of shorthand to central, complicated, and controversial ideas, examinations of keywords have moved with astonishing ease and rapidity into our understanding of the world, appearing in places as varied as information retrieval, computer networking, and citation analysis. Though they date to work in semantics produced during the late nineteenth century,2 their popular usage today draws most directly from the cultural critic Raymond Williams (1983), who argued that keywords mark the collective edges of consciousness by which a collective decides what matters. As Williams saw his project, the relationship between culture and society could be seen in an encapsulated form in the key terms by which the people of a given time period referenced their world. The keywords he selected—a mere 131—e mbodied a set of conceptual supports for the time span of one of his seminal books, Culture and Society (1958).While working on that volume, Williams compiled a list of terms that he realized were central both to understanding the cultural formations of the time and to anticipating their development over time. Though the list was originally planned as an appendix to Culture and Society, it was instead published nearly twenty years later as an independent collection of reflective essays on words. Published in 1976 with only 110entries and updated in 1983,Keywords offered a glossary of the cultural terms that mattered to the time period under question. Many of those original terms still stand, although only forty-one of them were transported into New Keywords (Bennett, Grossberg, and Epil o g u e: How Sc h ol a r sh ip Ma t t er s 229 Morris 2005), which took Williams’s experiments with words and transposed them, with alterations, onto the...