Rajan, articles
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IN THE WAKE OF
CULTURAL STUDIES
GLOBALIZATION, THEORY, AND THE
UNIVERSITY
TILOTTAMA RAJAN
1
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
67
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.
68
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
69
2
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].
70
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
71
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