[lbo-talk] Cultural studies question

Sean Andrews cultstud76 at gmail.com
Sat Apr 21 20:03:25 PDT 2012


On Saturday, April 21, 2012, Chuck Grimes wrote:


> There will be disagreement about this among people in the field till long
> after it is gone, but if the culturalists keep winning unopposed, those
> final days will come much sooner. Sean Andrews
>
> -------------
>
> I need to think a lot on the last few paragraphs of your last post. What
> is a `culturalist' ?
>

I will look for your response.

Good question. Sorry for using that jargon. I take the term from Stuart Hall who argued that there were two tensions or paradigms amimating Cultural studies as a field, the culturalist and the structuralist. Though there was an important tendency on the culturalist side - with people like E.P. Thompson and his focus on class as an exerience brought about by the agency of the working class themselves - which worked I contrast to the structuralist formulations inspired by Althusser. But Thompson was already a serious Marxist and was reacting to a particularly rigid formulation of that theory. He could pull back the other way without undermining the basic concerns.

What the split eventually comes to mean is that the culturalists look for every shred of popular resistance (as Andy Borowitz said earlier tonight "wherever there is injustice in the world, Americans will stand up to it by changing their profile pictures") which would disprove the structuralist notion that there are fundamentally determining forces that structure nearly all forms of agency available. Concomitant with this shift - which most onlookers trace to about the time when the field hopped over the Atlantic and found itself in the US where we have no class divisions (sarcasm) - much of Marxism and political economy got scrubbed from the field along with any attempt to outline an actual theory of how culture works that wouldn't sum it up with empty words like "complexity" or "vitality." all the audience, fandom, pomo pop celebration in the field is result of this culturalist side winning the day around the mid 1980s.

Here's a pretty decent abstract of Hall's article.

http://cltrlstdies.blogspot.com/2007/09/abstract-of-stuart-halls-cultural.html

The last section details out why Cultural Studies closed in Birmingham.

Thanks. I guess I mean I don't actually know why it got shut down - I don't necessarily believe either of the explanations at face value and I haven't read a good tell all of the events that would give me any more insight. My inclination is to believe that there was probably a reactionary somewhere itching to shut it down - there always is - but also that in situations like these you want to be as proactive as possible. And it sounds like they were comfortable internally with scoring below the level they needed to in order to have their unit stay open. Fixing those numbers is important because without them reactionaries don't need to fight to shut you down, they just cross you off a list somewhere and that's it.

s


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