What's Wrong With Cultural Studies?: A Modest Proposal

R. H. Stephenson What's Wrong With Cultural Studies? A Modest Proposal Die Methode vom Abstrakten zum Konkreten aufzusteigen [ist] die Art für das Denken, sich das Konkrete anzueignen, es als ein geistig Konkretes zu reproduzieren . (The method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind.) —Karl Marx, Einleitimg, Grundrisse Michael Sprinker's stringent criticism of the present state of Cultural Studies in the U.S. and in Britain distinguishes itself in its trenchant intelligence from the welter of half-articulate disquiet, even amongst its own practitioners and theoreticians, that is being expressed about this would-be "discipline." Sprinker's critique turns on the lack of historical awareness on the part of the practitioners of Cultural Studies and the related lack of attention to the detail of particular objects of study in favour of what he calls "generic hypotheses" which, in their windiness, are reminiscent of good old/bad old literary history (391, 388). Throughout Sprinker's argument there is the clear imputation that the result of such broad-brush concerns with, largely, the products of mass-culture is an irresponsible failure to evaluate, with open—and criticizable—criteria, the objects of such "study": "The one conclusion never reached in cultural studies is that analyzing contemporary mass culture might not be worth the effort expended on it" (392). In this paper I should like to pursue one—rather crucial—point in Sprinker's argument which, leads to a conclusion that he himself did not reach, at least explicitly, in that essay. "One needn't subscribe," says Sprinker, "to the evaluative hierarchy implied in Aristotle's observation that poetry is more philosophical than history to recognize the justice of his distinction between different genres of writing" (389). Now, in order to press home the need to distinguish between different kinds of subjectsof -study, one must indeed deploy a hierarchy ofsome sort. For, as we have surely learned from Jacques Derrida, a hierarchy is always already present and at work within a distinction. In the case of the philosophical pair of "Particular-General"—which, as Sprinker rightly argues, lies at the nub of all knowledge-acquisition—there is, in any given discourse, a bias in favour of one or the other. In other words, the a-historicism that Sprinker rightly ascribes to much of Cultural Studies is a logical entailment of a one-sided privileging of generality. The dismissive and arrogant gesture which Hegel, according to Adorno, accords the individual entity in opting "with serene indifference [. . .] for liquidation of the particular" is at work in contemporary Cultural Studies, with similarly undifferentiated, totalizing results (59). For "history" and "analysis" are not optional alternatives; they are rather co-implicates: the one presupposes the other (Sprinker 390). The (relative) 198 the minnesota review specificity of historical knowledge provides the material for the (relative) generality of analytic reflexion which, in turn, furnishes the enhanced general framework for further historical investigation, ad infinitum. And it is the particular, not the general, that embodies varying degrees of human valuation. To neglect either pole of these two constituents of scholarship is to produce trivial popularization of two complementary kinds: to speak with Kant, either "empty" propositions or "blind" assertions—or both. If the evaluative hierarchy implicit in all analysis (namely, that some objects of study are more important than others) is disregarded, first the content of study is made too easy, then the form becomes correspondingly lax—in a descending spiral. The obliviousness of Cultural Studies in respect of value and rigour is all the more striking when one considers that, outside the US. and Britain at least, the disciplined, scholarly study of culture has, since at least the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, been a preoccupation of a methodologically sophisticated tradition. One need only think of the ongoing German preoccupation with Kulturwissenschaft from Wilhelm Dilthey to Ernst Cassirer, to make this point.1 It seems to be a symptom of that selfdestructive a-historicism that Sprinker accuses Cultural Studies of fostering that it rarely engages with a body of thought that holds out the promise of helping...