In the Wake of Cultural Studies-Globalization,Theory and the University - Rajan, Tilottama.pdf - Culture - lady_kitty

IN THE WAKE OF

CULTURAL STUDIES

GLOBALIZATION, THEORY, AND THE

UNIVERSITY

TILOTTAMA RAJAN

Theory today has become an endangered species, as evidenced by the resistance to

difficult language. This is not to deny that it leads a quasi-life as the domesticated ground

for what has replaced it, or as a form of prestige: a signifier for “cutting-edge” discourses.

But in using the term here, I refer to the work that came into prominence after the Johns

Hopkins conference on “The Structuralist Controversy” (1966), the modes of thought it

made possible, and the antecedents for such thought going back to the late eighteenth

century. Like the humanities generally, this Theory has become submerged in Cultural

Studies, 1 which displaced it in the nineties as a central concern of institutes,

interdisciplinary programs, and lecture series. “New” academic undertakings in the

humanities are by definition those that have a cultural focus. Occasionally we come

across programs in “Theory and Cultural Studies” which equate fields that could overlap

dialogically but are not identical.

Let us grant that practices at the ground level of teaching are more diverse because

hiring has occurred over generations; or that there are no absolute epistemic shifts because

of what Mary Poovey calls a process of “uneven development,” in which “emergent”

“rationalities” develop from “and retain a constitutive relationship to . . . residual domains”

[ Social Body 14–19]. At the level of marketing and image (and thus also the self-image

of academics), Cultural Studies has become the primary focus of North American

academic publishing in the humanities, 2 which thus reimagines itself in terms of the

globalism of culture rather than the nationalism of “literature,” even as the wider

An earlier version of this paper was published as “The University in Crisis: Cultural Studies,

Civil Society, and the Place of Theory” in Literary Research / Recherche littéraire 18.35 (2001):

8–25. I am grateful to the ICLA for permission to reprint material from this paper and to the

editor Calin Mihailescu for his support. Literary Research also included astute critiques of my

paper by Jan Plug, Marc Redfield, and Orrin Wang, from which this new version has benefited,

though perhaps not as much as it should have.

1. I use the capital letters to designate Cultural Studies as a disciplinary container for the

two varieties of cultural studies I go on to discuss.

2. Older subfields such as Romanticism and Victorianism continue to have book series through

Cambridge University Press and Palgrave. This, however, is not because of uneven development,

but because Britain’s place in the global economy is, among other things, to preserve her national

literature, albeit in a critical mode. Moreover, the Cambridge series publishes books on British

Romanticism, but not the comparatist studies or hybrids of philosophy and Romantic literature

that appeared from American university presses in the eighties.

diacritics / fall 2001

diacritics 31.3: 67–88

technocratic apparatus thereby reduces the entire humanities to a form of “area studies.”

And as Heidegger presciently saw in 1938, publishing is a form of governmentality:

through the “prearranged and limited publication of books,” publishers “bring the world

into the picture for the public and confirm it publicly” [139]. On the other side, if a

space has been kept for Theory, it has migrated out of English into continental philosophy

departments and book series. The result has been an esotericizing and narrowing of

Theory to post-Heideggerian French philosophy: the most powerful current in American

continental philosophy departments—hence the survival of Derrida but not the early

Foucault, and hence the survival of a Derrida very different from the one who made an

impact in the seventies. 3

Why did Cultural Studies so readily replace Theory? And why focus on the loss of

Theory rather than literature, which has also entered the domain of the residual? After

all, Anthony Easthope, a decade ago, saw Theory as no more than the “symptom” of a

crisis leading from the collapse of literature to the emergence of Cultural Studies [5]. In

starting with the cathexis onto “culture” of an academic desire once mediated through

“Theory,” I suggest that both Theory and Cultural Studies are encyclopedic organizations

of knowledge that have therefore served as meta- or flagship disciplines for the

humanities. Constituted outside the regular structure of departments in programs and

“centers,” both have been responsible for a decentering innovation (recognizing the

emergence of knowledges outside traditional boundaries) and a recentering of the

humanities’ “mission” by which it addresses the university at large. The encyclopedic

impulse goes back a long way, whether it takes form in such gatherings as the early

cabinets of curiosities, in universities as attempts to gather different disciplines into an

institutional plurality, or in actual encyclopedias. Enkyklos paideia , meaning “circle of

learning,” is a gathering of subjects that are meant to be interrelated as knowledge by a

single individual, in contrast to indexical systems (such as dictionaries), which are

secondary reference tools that store information outside the mind for selective retrieval

by different people. Actual encyclopedias, from Anglicus and Vincent of Beauvais to

the Encyclopédie and Hegel’s “philosophic encyclopedia,” have thus been intimately

tied up with existing or projected organizations of knowledge. They have functioned as

proto-universities, legitimizing a certain range of knowledges, a method for interrelating

them, and indeed a concept of what constitutes knowledge.

Both Theory and Cultural Studies have served as invisible encyclopedias for the

liberal arts, themselves a figure for a residual resistance to the multiplication and

autonomization of fields and the recasting of knowledge as information. That said, they

have distinct disciplinary investments that go back to a bifurcation in the Encyclopedia

after the Enlightenment. Briefly, the Encyclopédie marked a post-Baconian turn away

from the arts (which had not initially been distinguished from the sciences) toward an

intellectual public sphere constituted around technology, science, and politics, as well

as toward the encylopedia as a forum for new ideas rather than a consolidation of existing

knowledge. The other major Enlightenment encyclopedia was the Britannica , and so

this turn can be set alongside the Scottish Enlightenment’s emphasis on a “Republic of

Letters” responsible for the diffusion of knowledge and the emergence of public opinion

[Yeo 173–74]. The Enlightenment encyclopedias have their parallel in encyclopedic

projects for the organization of knowledge. Adam Smith, for example, planned a

“Philosophical History,” a “grand synthesis of the human sciences . . . across the civic

and pedagogical domain of the university curriculum” [Duncan 40]. Within this episteme,

3. For a discussion of what distinguishes the early work of Derrida and Foucault from their

(quite different) later work, see chapters 4–7 of my book Deconstruction and the Remainders of

Phenomenology.

political economy (as the management of a nation’s resources) and moral philosophy

(as the management of the self for the public good) were contiguous disciplines. The

Scottish Enlightenment was thus at the origins of what Kant later calls pragmatic

anthropology, which defines knowledge on the ground of culture.

As against the content-based encyclopedias of the Enlightenment, which Friedrich

Schlegel rejects [Behler 284], the German Romantics explored the possibilities of an

encylopedic method . The German “encyclopedia” is not a formal entity, but connotes

the interconnectedness of knowledge as well as its disparate comprehensiveness.

“Encyclopedia” is the term Fichte uses throughout his “plan” for the organization of

studies at the University of Berlin [e.g., 192]. The Schlegels made “literature” the ground

of knowledge, though hardly in the Arnoldian sense critiqued by Readings [70–88], in

which literature is part of political economy. On the other hand Hegel, who became a

Professor at Berlin in 1818, constructed a “philosophical” Encyclopedia, deploying the

term “philosophy” in a quite different sense from Smith. Hegel’s critique of “ordinary

encyclopedias” as “assemblage[s]” of topics “taken up in a contingent and merely

empirical manner” is part of his project of providing a rationale for education and the

organization of knowledge at the university [ Encyclopedia 53]. Moreover, while German

Romantic “encyclopedistics” was directed against the fragmentation of knowledge by

the alphabetic encyclopedias, it was also aimed against the organization of knowledge

on the ground of the social as a purely positive domain [Hegel, Encyclopedia 53–54].

Additionally, then, though there were antagonisms between the “literary” and

“philosophical” encyclopedias, along the broad lines of Romanticism versus Idealism

[Hegel, “Sur l’enseignement” 33], in the longer term the two have much in common—

as has been evident in their increasing convergence from Nietzsche, through Benjamin

to deconstruction. Indeed lest we too readily equate the Romantic university with absolute

identity and aesthetic education [Readings 63], let us note Schlegel’s comment that the

encyclopedia is a “critique of idealism” [“Introduction” 255]. And finally, within this

general division between the social-scientific and the humanistic encyclopedias, “culture”

has not always been thought on the positivist side: the work of Simmel is profoundly

Hegelian, and Foucault’s early work on the clinic is very much part of the philosophical-

cum-literary encyclopedia.

A genealogy of encyclopedic thought-forms from post-Kantian idealism to the

present must await a longer study. But we will better understand what is at stake in the

culturalist turn if we consider it within such a genealogy. Indeed, both Theory and Cultural

Studies need to be approached through a history of organizations of knowledge—a

precedent for which is furnished by the early work of Foucault, who held a chair in the

“history of systems of thought.” Such an analysis could also consider how Theory might

enter into the domain of culture, and the defensive crystallization of “High” Theory

within post-Heideggerian philosophy and the turn to ethics (whose defenses are at work

here is an interesting question). But my focus here will be less on Theory than on Cultural

Studies, and less on a history of the latter or a mapping of its encyclopedic impulses

than on the more recent symbiosis between the cultural encyclopedia and globalization.

This reflection, then, falls into two parts, beginning with a critique of the current

organization of Cultural Studies and then turning more briefly to two other knowledge-

forms with encyclopedic ambitions: post-Kantian “philosophy” and its later return as

“Theory.”

diacritics / fall 2001

We can begin with Cultural Studies, which some will argue no longer needs to be the

object of a critique since its effectiveness has been diluted by its amorphousness. 4 Thus

Readings, who in 1994 had not quite decided whether it was a spent force, complains

that Cultural Studies has become “dereferentialized,” encompassing the study of all

signifying practices [98–99]. 5 I would suggest instead that the elasticity of the term

reflects its original encyclopedic mandate: a comprehensiveness not of contents but of

constituencies. As Easthope says, cultural studies operates on the “democratic principle

. . . that the discourses of all members of a society should be its concern” [7]. Emerging

in the fifties alongside “the Americanization of Britain [and] new forms of

modernization,” it sought to include the working classes as well as various subcultures

and later “work around gender and sexual difference” [Grossberg 24–26]. In its

beginnings it was thus a populist expansion of the bourgeois public sphere: a civil society

made up of groups bargaining for political power and formulating common interests on

their own terms.

As much as this original cultural studies promoted a form of “socialist humanism”

[Grossberg 7], the new complex that emerged in America in the nineties has a subtly

different encyclopedic mandate. Its aim—or effect—is to simulate the preservation of

civil society after the permutation of the classical public sphere into the “sphere of

publicity” where, as Habermas argues, public communication is no longer protected

from economic imperatives, and where the public is no longer a dialogically formed

collectivity but is collectivized through segmentation [ Structural Transformation xii,

160, 175]. Far from being a spent force, Cultural Studies, I will argue, has undergone a

symbiosis with globalization, wherein its dereferentialization is what makes it dangerous

to some of its own original components. The new Cultural Studies complex may not be

a mirror in which individual culturally oriented critics will recognize themselves: indeed

if it is not, this critique will have served a purpose. But despite having failed as what it

was, and despite having become something else, a certain culturalism has “occup[ied]

the entire field of the humanities without resistance” [Readings 99]. I adapt the word

culturalism from what Clifford Siskin calls “novelism” as a naturalization of the novel.

The novel may have been the site of the new, but when “writing becomes just like

hunting,” novels (and likewise culture) are drawn into a consumerism that domesticates

them and, more importantly, deploys even individually subversive phenomena

collectively within an apparatus of power [185].

What has given culturalism its current dominance despite its lack of explanatory

power is precisely an inclusive vagueness that masks underlying contradictions. Both

British and American Cultural Studies have a functional identity as forms of canon-

revision that have ended the “High” cultural regimes of literature and now Theory. But

this said, the new Cultural Studies encompasses two very different tendencies whose

divergences are strategically elided in an institutional pax americana —an arrangement

enabled by the fact that the United States, as Readings notes, does not “legitimate itself

. . . by appeal to any particular cultural content but only in terms of a contract among its

subjects” [102]. The new Cultural Studies takes in populism and New Historicism; it is

4. Hillis Miller provides a further argument for the timeliness of seemingly belated critiques

in using the model of trauma. Something has indeed changed in the university, which he sees as

“irreversible” and thus not even amenable to the vocabulary of crisis. But as with trauma, we did

not experience the change when it happened, and experience its post-traumatic stress only when

repeating it in a later analysis [19–21].

5. While critical of Cultural Studies, Readings does also see it as the wave of the future [174,

183].

antitheoretical and theoretical, and thus reduces factions. On the ground level are the

conglomerate of approaches described by David Simpson as the academic postmodern.

These include postcolonialism (though, I would add, not the work of Bhabha), some

kinds of gender studies (though not French feminism), and studies of popular culture

and “everyday life.” Simpson provides a trenchant analysis of these approaches as

nostalgically reverting to Benjaminian storytelling, autobiography, and subjective

experience, ostensibly to insist on local knowledge, but really to reinstate self-expression

and identity politics. Accusing it of a “narrowing-cum-pluralizing” focus, Terry Eagleton

likewise describes this cultural studies as concerned with the signifying practices that

constitute “the complex of values . . . and way of life of a specific group,” and thus as

allowing Arnoldian “literature” to continue as “cultural politics” through a shared

promotion of (social) subjectivity [15, 33–34, 39]. These approaches are humanisms

that often avoid Theory, although they are also the humanities’ anthropologically inflected

attempt to appeal to the same market as the social sciences. What they retain from the

theoretical revolution of the late sixties is “poststructuralism” as the oppositional

overthrowing of structures, but not the rigor of its linguistic turn. 6 As John Guillory

argues, these forms of cultural studies result in a canon revision that changes the contents

but not the forms of thought, the thematics but not the structure of scholarly inquiry.

And although this is not as insignificant a mutation as Guillory claims, it is true that

cultural studies of this kind is not theoretically innovative, which is why literature

departments have easily absorbed it into an existing template of textual, authorial, and

period study [3–84]. Hence also Eagleton’s complaint—typical of a broader Marxist

unease with Cultural Studies—that the study of the social, aesthetically abstracted from

the economic, leaves no room for “‘politics beyond . . . the particularisms of cultural

difference’” [31, 43].

However, the second kind of cultural studies is eminently theoretical. Examples

include the work of Friedrich Kittler, Bernhard Siegert, and Gregory Ulmer: theorists of

techno-poststructuralism and changes in mediality, whose work cannot be repatriated to

the study of texts or the establishment of collective identities. While the academic

postmodern fails to recognize its nostalgia for models that precede commodification,

this second cultural studies embraces technology so as to ally itself with science, progress,

and membership of the global scene. I mention these particular theorists because their

subject matter makes literally visible a shift in the very thinking of culture from education

or cultivation to technology, 7 or in Andrew Milner’s words from “culture as art” to

“culture as society,” and the instrument rather than opponent of industrialization [3–4].

But we could include under this rubric works such as Mary Poovey’s A History of the

Modern Fact , which explores one particular domain of “governmentality” or the study

of “the technologies and theoretical accounts” (the two being synonymous?) “by which

individuals were rendered thinkable as governable subjects” [147]. In her assumption

that the role of humanists is to provide a disciplinary critique of the social sciences—a

critique that is also a self-discipline in taking something nonhumanistic as its object; in

her “stubborn attachment” 8 to a massively detailed genealogy of the “fact” as a means

to this goal; in her choice of political economy as the metadiscipline of modernity going

back to the Scottish Enlightenment; and in her overlooking of competing disciplines at

6. On the nineties’ appropriation of poststructuralism into positivist forms of pragmatism

and activism that draw on (and domesticate) Deleuze and the later Foucault, see chapter 2 of

Rajan, Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology.

7. It is worth noting that before the prominence achieved by Cultural Studies in literature

departments, its first entry (into Canada at least) was via communications programs.

8. I borrow the phrase from Butler’s perceptive psychoanalysis of the “disciplinary cultiva-

tion of an attachment to subjection ” [102, and more generally 83–105].

diacritics / fall 2001

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