Irresponsible, Irrelevant
and Proud of It: My Perspective on Cultural Studies
Timothy Burke • Swarthmore College
Originally presented at SUNY Stony Brook, November 1999.
A comment by an unnamed member of my department was relayed to me at the end
of my third-year review. It was, the provost stressed, not really a criticism
as much as an observation. “I hope,” my colleague offered, “that
even though he is a cultural historian, Professor Burke will occasionally integrate
economic and social history into his teaching.”
This puzzled me no end (besides making me feel acutely anxious in that very
special junior-faculty kind of way). I was a cultural historian? The only label
I had applied to myself up to that point was “Africanist”: I was someone
who studied Africa using a variety of methodologies. I suppose if I had been
confronted at gunpoint and forced to categorize myself in terms of my methodology,
I would have said I was a social historian, largely because the kind of scholarship
in my own field that I viewed most favorably self-identified as social history.
I called up one of my former advisors and asked, “Am I a cultural historian?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Actually, I sort of think of you as a cultural
anthropologist, or maybe even a cultural studies guy.”
Now I knew I was in trouble.
I made an uneasy peace with these labels after I was confronted with them. When
you’re writing about commodification and advertising in southern Africa
and Saturday morning cartoons in the U.S., it’s a bit hard to do otherwise.
I did try to cultivate plausible deniability so that when confronted with someone
fanatically hostile to cultural history or cultural studies I could, in a Goffmanesque
fashion, perform another identity. But also, there was something in me that
rebelled at the boundaries implied in the characterization, something that wanted
to have cultural history and social history both to my name, something that
insisted that the two forms of intellectual practice were perfectly compatible.
That’s the nursery rhyme I used to sing to myself as I slunk quietly into
my office on Sunday afternoons to write about Scooby-Doo and Jonny Quest . Don’t
worry, I said. When you’re writing about serious stuff, you’re still
writing about colonialism, capitalism, and proletarianization in southern Africa,
even if you’re also writing about commodities and consumerism. That’s
cultural history, social history and ethnography all at once! And then I would
return to pondering He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.
What I want to talk about today is what happened when I had finished both my
respectably academic and my shamefully unscholarly projects, and how I found,
despite my ironclad resolution to keep them absolutely impermeably separate
from each other, that I had ended up with a very new and fused understanding
of what it is that I do and will do in the future. I still think cultural history
and cultural anthropology are compatible with social history or social anthropology
most or all of the time. But I also think that the time may be coming for cultural
history and cultural studies to situationally shake off the veil of respectable
compatibility with other methodological and disciplinary styles. The problem
with the academic study of culture may not be that it is wild, irresponsible,
superficial and irrelevant—but that it is not yet irresponsible enough.
The respectable study of culture
When cultural history was first announced as a subfield whose time had come,
its connections to social history, not to mention intellectual history, were
readily apparent. Historians like Lynn Hunt, Natalie Zemon Davis, Robert Darnton
and Roger Chartier argued that the “new” cultural history was a product
of social historians’ growing interest in what the French Annales school
called “mentalites”, modes of consciousness and representation in
the past that defined particular social groups and particular social formations.
That social history should have produced an ever-accelerating interest in both
past modalities of representation and past forms of imagining and interpreting
social experience was an easy development to anticipate. You cannot announce,
as foundational social historians did, that you are studying the history of
groups and societies previously excluded from the writing of history; you cannot
look for the signs of that experience in previously unstudied types of documents
or buried within the ostensible, visible content of dominant narratives, and
then be surprised that such an approach brings questions about the ambiguity
of representation to the fore.
So what Chartier, Hunt and others named as cultural history in the 1980s had
been integral to social history for some time. What had changed, what had caused
it to become visible as a different approach to the past? The divergence was
mostly a consequence of the far more widespread epistemological crisis that
had enveloped the whole of the humanities and the social sciences by that time,
a big muddy that we are still hip deep in. The seeming empirical solidity and
consistency of social categories crumbled not only under the weight of this
general crisis, but also as a specific consequence of social history’s
own successes. As Lynn Hunt and Victoria Bonnell have recently written about
social history, “the more that has been learned, the more difficult it
has become to integrate that knowledge into existing categories and theories.”
The divergence of cultural history was thus not initially a surrender to a perceived
crisis in social history, but a solution, a methodological attempt to manage
the historical relationship between representation and practice by consciously
borrowing techniques and insights from literary studies and critical theory.
I think it is fair to say that it is no longer perceived as such by die-hard
social historians. Much as some cultural anthropology, especially of the Clifford
and Marcus variety, is perceived by disciplinary traditionalists as a menace
to the future survival of anthropology itself, cultural history, sometimes glossed
as history written after the “linguistic turn”, is increasingly blamed
by established social historians for spreading the taint of postmodernism and
producing what many perceive as a serious breakdown of the discipline. In anthropology,
at least, this battle is being fought in plain sight: every meeting of the AAA
leaves blood on the floor from struggles for the soul of the discipline. In
history, on the other hand, my quite anecdotal sense of this battle is that
it is primarily fought at tenure time and in peer reviews, behind the veil of
anonymity.
There have been some notable public exchanges, particularly in the pages of
the journal Social History . Those public exchanges, particularly Patrick Joyce’s
important essay “The End of Social History”, certainly suggest that
postmodern thought and cultural history both have in fact seriously eroded aspects
of social history’s command of its subject matter. But as I see it, much
of cultural history remains compatible with a modified version of goals and
sensibilities of traditional social and intellectual history. This is a modified
version in which “the social” no longer stands in a simple one-to-one
correspondence with “the real”, but also in which representation is
not infinitely pliable or arbitrary or wholly without reference to the material
world. In my own case, I’d generally say that this is true of my past work
on commodification in southern Africa and of my current project, a comparative
biography of three colonial-era chiefs.
To begin with the former case, my fundamental assumption has always been that
commodification was an important dimension of colonialism in southern Africa.
Canonical social histories of modern southern Africa have frequently argued
that the spread of capitalist patterns of consumption among Africans were an
important part of the reproduction of colonial capitalism generally. However,
such studies are equally notable for their failure to actually look beyond these
observations, accepting that Africans developed "new needs" as an
inevitable consequence of colonial rule––a process whose unfolding
is assumed to have been self–evident or a natural result of other processes
of capitalist transformation. My own work took off from this point of historiographical
silence and argued that changes in the relations between things and people,
in the meanings and uses of goods, in the structure and experience of desire
itself, were anything but simple processes in southern Africa. To explore the
historical complexity of commodification with an interest in these issues, I
argued, one must necessarily address consciousness, performativity, representation,
and subjectivity—and thus make major use of the tools and methods of cultural
history.
In my current project, I am primarily interested in unpacking what has become
a truism in much Africanist social history, namely, the earnest, desperate and
constantly repeated assertion that Africans had agency under colonial rule.
Taken at face value, this is roughly like saying that Africans ate food or breathed
oxygen under colonial rule. All humans have agency.
There are two more meaningful questions: What forms and structures of power
constrained or enabled particular expressions of African agency under colonialism?
This is a question that social history has excelled at dealing with.
The second question, on the other hand, is one that social history has dealt
with poorly, namely, what did the actual exercise of agency by Africans look
like at the level of lived experience in colonial society? The problem here
is that agency is necessarily about individual action and experience, something
that social history almost has to approach in a reductionist manner. The best
that many Africanist social historians can do with this line of inquiry is talk
about individuals by folding them into a descriptive sketch of a larger group
or by making a given individual a representative “ideal type” who
stands in for such a group. Cultural historians dealing with other societies
long since rose to this challenge in various ways, most strikingly with the
“microhistories” championed by Carlo Ginzberg or histories which privilege
narrative, like those of John Demos and Alan Taylor. Africanists have been slower
to embrace such strategies, because they all focus on the idiosyncratic character
of individual experience, refusing to easily dissolve it back into the social—which
in turn makes the pious celebration of African agency as inevitably heroic and
positive far more difficult to engineer.
The refusal of individual experience to dissolve back into the social does not
necessarily make such work incompatible with social history. Ginzberg’s
The Cheese and the Worms , a marvelous study of a miller’s idiosyncratic
engagement with written texts in 16th Century Italy, would make little sense
if we did not have a disciplined sense of how Menocchio the miller differed
from the people of his community, or the social institutions which ultimately
detected and punished his acts of interpretation. Nothing in this kind of cultural
history necessarily perturbs the “grand narratives” which social history
sketches so ably. Indeed, this kind of work is necessary for a complete description
of those narratives. When I was talking about commodification in southern Africa,
whether I was talking about its undeniable centrality as a historical process
or the relatively peripheral and non-representative histories of particular
commodities or particular acts of consumption, I was doing a kind of cultural
history which was a natural complement to canonical social histories. As I now
write about the idiosyncratic and particular exercise of agency by several African
individuals, I am doing the same.
Both kinds of work often focus on what I would call “importantly insignificant”
histories. Ginzberg has no intention of treating Menocchio as anything but what
he was, “so unusual as to appear incomprehensible”. The most important
expressions of agency in the lives of the three chiefs I am writing about did
not concern issues that were central in colonial society: one of them regarded
the most important time of his life as the time he served as an urban fireman,
while another waged a pitched political battle with colonial authorities over
the building of a communal bathroom in his town. The uses of toothpaste in colonial
Zimbabwe were not particularly important compared to the social experiences
of migrant mine laborers in the rigidly authoritarian “compound system”
favored by colonial authorities.
The gesture that I am refusing—and that some cultural history and cultural
anthropology similarly refuses—is what I would characterize as one of the
classic “Stupid Dissertation Tricks”, which is discovering a previously
obscure document or incident and declaring it the secret key to some previously
obscured central narrative of social experience. To insist that importantly
insignificant histories as traced by cultural historians add necessary texture
or detail to the grand narratives of social history is to acknowledge both their
compatibility with social history and their difference from it.
Irresponsible scholarship
But enough of this respectable treatment of irrelevant history. What I’m
sure everyone wants to hear about is the irresponsible stuff—which of course
means Saturday morning cartoons.
No doubt you are thinking that once you commit to writing a cultural history
and ethnography of Saturday morning cartoons, irresponsibility comes quite naturally.
Quite the contrary. Aside from the fact that some work in cultural studies and
cultural history can make the most seemingly trivial aspects of pop culture
sound as morally weighty as genocide (more on this shortly), there are some
excellent, serious and intelligent works of accessible scholarship by scholars
in cultural studies, communication and cultural history about children’s
entertainment or children’s television. One in particular I want to mention
is Heather Hendershot’s 1999 work Saturday Morning Censors: Television
Regulation Before the V-Chip . This is a really superb piece of scholarship
which manages, without pretention or opaque theorizing, to intelligently and
seriously analyze the history of public debates about children’s television.
I mention it as a point of contrast from the outset because some of the arguments
that my brother Kevin Burke and I offer in our own Saturday Morning Fever
are in many ways similar to Hendershot’s central argument, but the manner
and style of our writing is very different and very deliberately non-scholarly.
What I want to talk about at this point is what I learned from approaching the
study of culture from a deliberately non-scholarly perspective—an irresponsible
perspective—and how that lesson is curving back in on my scholarly work.
The disciplinary history of cultural studies is now remarkably well chronicled,
especially when you consider that many practicioners and critics alike do not
regard cultural studies as a discipline. By now, the story of “British
cultural studies”, with its strong sense of political commitment and its
genealogical ties to social history, radical literary criticism and cultural
anthropology, is well known. This is the form of cultural studies described
by Rita Felski as “Cultural Studies A”, which she argues “wants
to link descriptions of cultural texts and practices to analyses of how structures
of power operate…Cultural studies, in that definition, involves a delicate
balancing act between the macro and micro and between the competing claims of
textual and social analyses.” Felski contrasts this with “Cultural
Studies B”, which she says is the bad American form, which is “simply
shorthand for political approaches to literature”. The gambit—distinguishing
between good British cultural studies and bad American cultural studies—is
familiar.
What it is that makes the American variety bad varies from critic to critic.
Felski says it is a shorthand for crude political readings of literature, which,
she argues, almost everyone is tired of—and which the really good American
cultural studies scholars don’t do. They do British cultural studies. Other
critics, most recently Thomas Frank in his New Consensus For Old: Cultural
Studies From Left to Right, say that bad American cultural studies is too
eclectic, or too disorganized. Or, as Felski notes, disciplinary specialists
fault it for being insufficiently like their discipline—not historical
enough for the historians, not anthropological enough for anthropologists, and
so on. And many (esp. social historians) fault it (and sometimes cultural history
as well) for lacking the political commitment of British cultural studies. It
is, they say, trivial and irresponsible.
I say, not nearly enough.
What makes much cultural studies scholarship so deadly to read or work with
is in fact its strong gestural attachment to the language of politics and commitment.
Contrary to Felski’s assertions, that tendency can’t be easily distinguished
from the style of “British cultural studies”: indeed, the British
model, with its insistence on connecting texts to power, is one of the key contributors
to this tendency. As Barry Shank describes it, British cultural studies has
“conceived of culture as a realm of conflict and struggle, striated by
power differentials and fragmented along multiple axes of social differentiation.”
It thus forms one of the canons which practicioners of cultural analysis, both
in cultural studies and within disciplines like history and anthropology, feel
obligated to cite and emulate. What British cultural studies and other bodies
of related work—including social history—then becomes is a superego
which can be mollified by adopting the appropriate rhetorical posture.
The consequence of this in much cultural studies writing is the celebration
of transgression and subversion, or alternatively, the relentless characterization
of particular texts or popular practices as playing a central role in domination.
Texts trangress. Particular representations or images dominate. Performers subvert,
and audiences do, too. But against what? Or dominate what? Sometimes nothing
particularly discernible. Sometimes against or for the usual suspects: the culture
industry, the patriarchy, global capitalism, local autocrats. Often we are reduced
to a game of spot-the-hegemon. And sometimes the transgression or domination
is purely figurative, a rupture in or confirmation of a master discourse (master
of what, we are often not told) which only disrupts or confirms as long as the
scholar takes note of said transgression or domination.
Cultural studies ends up caught between its own version of the devil and the
deep blue sea—in this case, the old materialist logic of “the last
instance” that demands that a claim about the political content of representation
eventually be referred back to material reality and a celebration of culture
as endlessly and generically protean, determined by no referent or predicate
other than itself. In between lies the worst of both worlds, a neurotic posture
which frets about free-floating forms of power and even more insistently about
its own political authenticity. I found echoes of this characterization in Jerrold
Seigel’s recent intelligent critique of Derridean ideas about the self
in relation to historical scholarship. Seigel notes,
In [Derrida’s] thinking, the very same linguistic structures that impose
a radically relational constitution on the self simultaneously locate it in
a space of boundless transcendence…Derrida dissolves concrete self-existence
in order to let an unconditioned, abstract kind of selfhood arise in its place.
It is only when self hoold is conceived in this way that it becomes available
to power such utopian projects as Marxian revolution, the Nietzschean Uebermensch,
Heideggerean authenticity, and the various compounds that may be made of them.
Such a vision, simultaneously wrapping the self like a mummy inside a tight
web of relations and projecting its escape into a world where no bounds restrain
it, hardly seems a promising way to think about the powers and limits of the
self.
The solution to this mummification, it seems to me, is to reject that superego,
to stop preemptively and autonomically justifying the study of culture in terms
of some overall or totalizing project of critique whose terms and problematics
remain fixed phantoms in the scholarship. This is the opposite of what Thomas
Frank demands, which is a return to responsible, legitimate, "necessary"
subjects.
If critique is our objective, it should be critique that is modestly matched to the particular constellation of texts and practices at hand, something that Frank correctly criticizes "cult studs" for their failure to achieve. One prominent author who seems to me an emblematic failure of this kind, who perennially argues that if popular culture is not unmistakeably radical and comprehensively transformative it must be complicit with every bad and reactionary thing, is bell hooks. The now-infamous anthology The Madonna Connection had something of this tone about it in the opposite direction, a desperate hunger to legitimate writing about Madonna by finding expansively transgressive content in her every pose and vogue.
In contrast, if I had to name works of cultural studies that engage in serious
critique but which direct that critique to the more modest and particular terms
that are native to their subject matter, Gilbert Rodman’s Elvis After
Elvis , Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers and Laura Kipnis’
Bound and Gagged are closer to the mark. Hendershot’s Saturday
Morning Censors is a superb example of restrained and careful critique:
it focuses on a particular kind of censorship within a particular form of cultural
production, and its connection to a larger but still quite specific politics
of childhood.
For other purposes, we might wish to go even further than the mere taming of
critique, the mere reigning in of the superego to a helpful and focused whisper.
When cultural studies scholarship seeks to move into what Constance Penley calls
“multiple public spheres”, beyond the mere tedious dialectic between
the academic and the popular, a more irresponsible id needs to move to fore
and center. Scholars in cultural studies incessantly proclaim the necessity
of such a strategy: Felski’s defense of “good” cultural studies
argues that it is not merely dreary academic jargon, but in fact “less
prone to the sin of intellectual smugness”. Lawrence Grossberg describes
an ideal cultural studies in which scholars are “co-travellers” with
popular audiences who unnecessarily practice “voluntary self-exclusion
from the everyday world of media life”. The problem is that almost no one
actually does this in their work.
This was certainly one of the things I wanted to do with Saturday Morning
Fever (and, I must note, my editor wouldn’t have settled for anything
else…) It is, as we say in the introduction, a history, a rant, a plea,
a meditation, a memoir. Kevin and I wanted to make something of the same argument
that Hendershot does, namely, that battles over children’s television were
really battles between adults over the meaning of childhood and competiting
forms of power over children and over cultural production more generally, that
the critical intelligence of children was persistently ignored in favor of the
deceptive figuration of “innocent childhood”. But we wanted to make
this argument in terms of our own experiences, past and present, and the experiences
of many other people of our own age.
We wanted to make this argument in irresponsible ways, with irresponsible language.
So rather than translate certain kinds of iconic generational conversations
about kidvid into some respectably academic form, and so assert their “real”
significance or meaning, we wanted to reproduce those conversations as we experienced
them—and in some parts of the book, make our own contributions to those
conversations in their own idiomatic form. We didn’t want to find some
hidden hermenuetics in the widespread perception that Scooby snacks were laced
with narcotics, or argue that the cartoon version of G.I. Joe reinforced the
hegemony of the military-industrial complex. We didn’t want to hold Papa
Smurf responsible for patriarchy. We didn’t want to look through the business
history of kidvid production with X-ray eyes to some concealed real set of motives
or intentions underneath—though we also didn’t want to the history
of the kidvid business and kidvid advocacy simply at face value, since the producers
and critics of kidvid themselves don’t do so.
We didn’t want to do these things both because these claims would be empirically
incorrect and because we would have been denied many authentic insights we gained
by writing about cartoons in everyday language and generational idiom. More
than anything else, we wanted to avoid the persistent aura of slumming that
haunts much cultural studies work which consciously strives to speak within
popular conversations about culture. As a result, we weren’t forced to
defer some of the perennial issues and ideas associated with kidvid, or television
as a whole. We didn’t have to pretend that the issue of quality, of the
badness or goodness of particular programs, was somehow only interesting to
an intellectually unsophisticated audience. And we didn’t have to dress
up our own experience of aesthetic pleasure in theoretical drag. Rita Felski’s
defense of cultural studies in The Chronicle of Higher Education is most
urgently addressed to the final chapter of Richard Rorty’s Achieving
Our Country , in which Rorty accuses cultural studies of draining all the
pleasure, awe and romance out of reading or consuming culture. I don’t
think Rorty had in mind the pleasures of Thundarr the Barbarian or Reboot ,
but on this point, I think I’m far more sympathetic to him than I am to
Felski.
Now this is not a model for most scholarship, I grant you, and that’s why
I think it is worth stressing the difference between Hendershot’s work
and Saturday Morning Fever . Hendershot’s work is a basis for future
research and should have a kind of authority which I would never claim for Saturday
Morning Fever . Our work is more what historians call a primary document,
a commentary from within the subject rather than outside of it.
Each cognate disciplinary form of cultural analysis has its irresponsibly unscholarly
twin that rewards the scholars who dally in it. For cultural studies, it is
middlebrow cultural commentary and fan-talk. For cultural anthropology, I would
suggest that it is journalism and travel writing. And for cultural history,
it is story-telling and narrative.
Which brings me back to where I started, trying to reconcile social history,
its strong sense of mission and its strong commitment to critique, with “importantly
irrelevant” work in cultural history. If you’ll remember, I argued
that this work was ultimately compatible because cultural history describes
the uneven and idiosyncratic texture of everyday life, it gives us a more phenomenological
sense of how “grand narratives” are actually experienced, and a sense
of how people make the concerns that animate social history meaningful in their
individual lives. Knowing that class is not a “real” category but
instead a relational and experiential one doesn’t have to lead to Patrick
Joyce’s proclaimed “end of social history”: the fact that each
person experiences social class at a particular historical moment in a different
way doesn’t mean that they experience it in an arbitrary or infinitely
variable fashion. Social history constrains the possibilities; cultural history
fills the space in between.
What I’d like to suggest is that a walk on the wild side of our disciplinary
approaches to culture, irresponsible ventures into reportage, memoir, middlebrow
commentary, fannish passions, and from-the-hip critique, further serves our
ability to provide and explain the kind of texture I have described. You can
overdo it: Camilia Paglia is Exhibit A for the prosecution as far as that goes.
But most of us are not in danger of that kind of excess: quite the opposite.
Working on Saturday morning cartoons has given me a new sense of the limits
and powers of scholarly work, which is in turn having a powerful impact on my
current project in modern Africa. I have a finer sense of where my unnecessary
pieties and inherited inhibitions lie, and a renewed respect for the power of
narrative not just in my work but in the lives of the men I am writing about.
My venture into irresponsible cultural studies has made my irrelevant history
and ethnography all the better. I plan to keep doing both.