In Defense of Cultural Studies

"Those Who Disdain Cultural Studies Don’t Know What They’re Talking About" by Rita Felski, in The Chronicle of Higher Education (July 23, 1999), 1255 23rd St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20037. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ever since physicist Alan Sokal smuggled his deliberately nonsensical essay (in which he solemnly maintained, among other things, that physical reality is "a social and linguistic construct") into the cultural studies movement’s premier journal, Social Text, a few years ago, cultural studies has come to seem, well, a bit passé. Felski, an English professor at the University of Virginia, rises in defense of the relatively new (but now apparently "old") interdisciplinary field.

Cultural studies, she complains, has come to be simply a term of abuse—shorthand for taking a political approach to literature. And as such, it is rejected by critics who want "a return to aesthetics in literature.... They want to talk about language, style, and sensibility, about why they love poetry and what makes Shakespeare a great writer."

But cultural studies "has always been concerned with language and form," Felski contends. "It is just as much about the aesthetic dimension of the social world as it is about the social dimension of a work of art." The discipline, which originated in England in the 1960s, treated culture anthropologically, "seeking to make sense of the entire range of symbolic practices, texts, and belief systems in society rather than equating culture exclusively with high art." Cultural studies scholars showed "how the most ordinary behavior—eating, wearing clothes, shopping, going to the beach—involves complex rituals, symbolic expression, and multilayered levels of meaning."

In short, Felski says, cultural studies "enlarged rather than erased our aesthetic sensibility," expanding it to encompass such forms of popular culture as "rap music, sitcoms, science-fiction novels, [and] slasher movies." In the influential Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), for instance, Dick Hebdige "explored the aesthetics of British youth culture," showing that "punks" employ "avant-garde techniques of collage, bricolage, and surreal juxtaposition, combining random, mass-produced objects—dog collars, safety pins, school uniforms—in a perverse parody of consumer culture." Similarly, Kobena Mercer, in a much-cited essay in his Welcome to the Jungle (1994), "unraveled the multileveled meanings of black hairstyles."

Cultural studies seems fated, Felski observes, "to be faulted by historians for not being historical enough, by sociologists for not being sociological enough, and by literary critics for not being sufficiently interested in literature. There is also a rich vein of self-criticism within [the field] itself." Nevertheless, she concludes, since "cultural studies" has been pressed into use as "a much-abused term [of abuse] in America’s culture wars," it is time "to insist on its distinctive identity and its integrity as a scholarly field."