bérub-a-duba-gate

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I've always admired the work of Michael Bérubé, and appreciated his willingness to take on Horowitz and respond to the accusations that the university classroom is a brainwashing zone. He's done a lot of good work representing the humanities to the world outside of the academy (and internally to education administrators). At least I admired his work and efforts until last week.

Recently, Bérubé deliberately chomped down on the proverbial hand that feeds by publishing an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled, "What's the Matter with Cultural Studies?" Similar to Mark Taylor's strange anti-academic editorial in the New York Times last April, Bérubé's piece was (presumably) designed "to get people talking" by making statements that are critical or contrary to the discipline or field his livelihood has been built on. I bridle at the move not so much because our home fields deserve a measure of piety, nor because I think the discussion is tired (even though it is). Rather, I'm bothered by Bérubé's rhetoric and his rhetorical choices, and what they may indicate about motive, conscious or unconscious: what does a consistent failure to define key terms, the lack of evidence to support grand claims, and a relative lack of historical consciousness collectively say in answer to the question, "why this essay today?" In other words, the essay seems like a cheap shot. So why make it?

Now, to be honest I dithered all day on whether to post a response to the shout-out on Crooked Timber because I didn't want to give the essay even more attention. I don't think the essay is worthy of any more engagement; it's a tar pit, and no one should stick a foot in. As I noted over on The Blogora, Bérubé's essay is "bullshit"---which apparently delights him---but I did not mean "bullshit" in terms of nonsense. Rather, I mean the term in its long-standing---that is, centuries long---rhetorical sense: disingenuousness. The best response----I know, I know----is not to spend time showing where he makes the mistakes of informal logic, or as Jim Aune points out, where he mixes his metaphors ("The period of theoretical ferment that began in the late 1960s and gained traction in the 1970s seemed to have reached the boiling point."). But since I’m implicated in this whole "food fight" by name---and since visits to this blog increased by a third today---[sigh] I should elaborate in response to the tacit call to be "more helpful."

So, back to my question of motive: why this essay, and why this essay now? To begin to answer the question, we have to (unfortunately) rehearse the substance of his essay to put it on the backburner, where it should be. His argument is not very clear. He first advances his major claim after locating the birth of cultural studies in Britain and lauding, in particular, the first Birmingham School book:

In that time [over the last thirty years or so], has cultural studies transformed the disciplines of the human sciences? Has cultural studies changed the means of transmission of knowledge? Has cultural studies made the American university a more egalitarian or progressive institution? Those seem to me to be useful questions to ask, and one useful way of answering them is to say, sadly, no. Cultural studies hasn't had much of an impact at all.

So, the major claim is that cultural studies has not had much of an impact on the institution of the academy, nor on any one discipline. He then proceeds to list a series of "institutional" and "intellectual" reasons in support of his major claim. Among them are: (a) overblown "trimuphalism" about the impact of cultural studies; (b) most universities do not have a cultural studies department; (c) cultural studies has not made a significant impact on fields external to the humanities; (d) rightly or wrongly, it has been received as "coextensive with the study of popular culture"; (e) tragically, cultural studies has been defended as having no method and no object; (f) it has made no political impact; and (f) it only has one, big, neoliberalism hammer and assumes people are dupes.

There is, of course, a major problem with the informal reasoning here: equivocation with the term "cultural studies." It would seem Bérubé leans heavily on the more standard narrative of how cultural studies came to the states (via the Birmingham School), but then "cultural studies" seems to become a floating signifier for this or that group (the 1990 meeting at Illinois, then mass media critical scholars, then the critics of neoliberalsim a la Hardt and Negri, etc.). Bérubé routinely mentions "the field" and "cultural studies" as if it were unified or coherent, but it's not, and what cultural studies means at one place is anthropology or philosophy at another. If cultural studies is more of an anti-discipline and floating signifier given meaning only in context, it really is really difficult to make sweeping claims like "cultural studies is dead."

Today Bérubé qualified and explained how he defines "cultural studies" over on Crooked Timber (finally!). This is helpful, but the "damage" has already been done in the polemic. And he still defends cultural studies as an "it." If one must spend paragraph after paragraph defending one's choice to refer to cultural studies in the singular, as an "it," perhaps it ain't a singular "it." While I do think "rhetorical studies" is much more coherent and can be referred to as an "it," a unified concept of sorts, my own advisor taught me well by making me read his essay, "On Not Defining Rhetoric" . . . . but I digress.

Even if we can operate "as if" cultural studies were coherent (say, as a place continental philosophers went to do work, squeezed out of philosophy departments by the analytical folks), and I would grant there is something singular in the term (after all, were talking about "it") we must then take-up the issue of novelty: the failures of cultural studies constitute a very dead horse. Even Bérubé says, "I am getting very cranky in my late 40s, and I have now heard versions of this gambit for over twenty years . . . ." Exactly. And so he decides to throw the dice?

From the day I started reading Grossberg's famous collection of essays as an undergraduate, to the anxiety rife discussions at Northwestern at a six week institute on the question of "method in/and cultural studies," it has been obvious to me that "cultural studies" would always have its identity in question, and this is precisely because it is constituted as a non-unified "field." There are active efforts, in fact, to do so. Cultural studies seems better poised as a disposition with an institutional history rather than some sort of intellectual trajectory. There is something foundational, and it's a history, an origin narrative, and a set of values, but "the field" only coheres in relation to a certain group of people making certain arguments (perhaps this is why Bérubé keeps coming back to Hall).

So, I'm still saying it's silly to speak as if cultural studies makes sense as some unity; it makes pronouncements about its relatively fertility or impotence seem like wheel-spinning to me. So, again: Why are people engaging Bérubé on this essay? It's more horse beating. Tired horse beating.

So, if (1) Bérubé constitutes a unity when none exists; and (2) is making old and tired claims, we are left with the only important question: Why this essay, and why this essay now? This is a rhetorical question (in the earnest sense). Alternately put: what is the larger context for this essay? What reason explains why Bérubé chose this moment to say something negative about an anti-disciplinary discipline?

It's instructive to see how Bérubé characterizes his own rhetoric:

I'm saying [cultural studies hasn't had much of an impact at all] baldly and polemically for a reason. I know there are worthy programs in cultural studies at some North American universities, like Kansas State and George Mason, where there were once no programs at all. I know that there is more interdisciplinary work than there was 25 years ago; there is even an entire Cultural Studies Association, dating all the way back to 2003. But I want to accentuate the negative in order to point out that over the past 25 years, there has been a great deal of cultural-studies triumphalism that now seems unwarranted and embarrassing.

Such grandiose pronouncements beg for examples (whose triumphalism? his own? to what literature does he refer?). But more significantly, Bérubé never provides his reason for saying that "cultural studies hasn't had much of an impact at all." He is critiquing cultural studies "for a reason," he says, but that reason is never discussed. Is he worried about students on the job market? Is he angered by assumptions that cultural studies have/has "made it," (and if so, why is he angered)? He never really says. And so we have to go digging for this reason. It's one thing to argue that cultural studies is dead or dying or failed or whatever, which I've already said is something of a dead horse. Our concern should be, again, why is he arguing this, and why is he arguing it now? What is the purpose of this rhetoric for our times?

Presumably, the most laudable rationale is to goad cultural studies (whatever that is) to complicate its theories and better promote itself inside and outside the academy. In later remarks, Bérubé suggests the problem with "cultural studies" is fundamentally one of PR:

. . . cultural studies has a serious image problem, and it can get pretty depressing explaining to colleagues (and students!) in other disciplines that actually, Michael Warner and Chantal Mouffe are more important to the field than Jon and Kate [note to people who don’t follow the adventures of Jon and Kate: never mind, it’s not important]. That image problem is, in some precincts, even worse outside the university. Read some of the nonacademic responses Tom Frank's One Market Under God---they're even more depressing.

Hopefully, one notices the irony of such a pronouncement: cultural studies needs to do a better PR campaign, and Bérubé has certainly got that project off to a good start! (Indeed, Bérubé's critique of cultural studies comes precisely at the time graduate students are scrambling on the job market, and at a time when the theoretical humanities are struggling to justify their continued existence).

More importantly, however, I think the ending of the essay is its own best evidence. Here's how hegemony "actually works," in a telling line at the end of the essay: " Michael Bérubé is a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University at University Park. His next book, 'The Left at War,' will be published by New York University Press in November." If we cannot help ourselves on the InterTubes, at the very least we can avoid buying and reading the book Bérub-a-duba-Gate 2009 is designed to promote.