I haven’t really got the heart to involve myself in yet another round of cultural-studies-defensiveness-and-infighting just at the moment, but the discussion at Mel’s blog has prompted me to think that maybe it’s time for another set of Keywords, in the tradition of Grand Hegemon Raymond Williams. If I were brave and energetic enough to do it, I’d start with the knee-jerk terms that keep popping up in these debates – terms that are astoundingly multivalent, but seldom recognized as such. So for a start:
- “populism”
- “critical”
- “theory” (and theorised, as in “theorised work”)
- “political”
- “engaged” (which is usually preceded by the adverbs “politically”, “theoretically”, or “critically”, but not by the adverb “popularly”)
And like the well-trained, rigorous cultural studies practitioner I am supposed to be, in another, more energetic, universe, I’d maybe trace the contexts in which these terms are used, and the cultural and political work they are made to do in each of those contexts.
Anyway, this latest article by one of cultural studies’ inhouse critics is kinda relevant as an input to the politics of the popular in cultural studies, and so is handy for my thesis:
Jim McGuigan, The Cultural Public Sphere, European Journal of Cultural Studies 8 (4)
…let us identify three broad stances regarding the politics of the cultural public sphere: uncritical populism, radical subversion and critical intervention. Uncritical populism is associated with populist cultural studies, the credibility of which derives not so much from its intellectual acuity but from its affinity with currently conventional wisdom. The domain assumption here is that consumer capitalism is culturally democratic. Consumer sovereignty goes unquestioned. What we get is what we want. The consumer is consulted and permitted to speak. In any case, consumption is an active phenomenon. Consumers are not the passively manipulated recipients of commodity culture and mediated experience: they choose, and woe betides any business that fails to respond efficiently to its customers’ demands.
[…]
The value of uncritical populism – the kind of position that would regard Big Brother as a vehicle of the public sphere – is its debunking of the critical idealization of a public sphere that is never present but always absent in favour of a ‘realistic’ attention to what actually goes on.
[…]
Radical subversion is the exact obverse of uncritical populism. Instead of apologetics, it offers total transformation whether people want it or not. In this sense, it is elitist and, to many, either downright offensive or simply unintelligible. The third position regarding politics and the public sphere, critical intervention, combines the best of uncritical populism – an appreciation of the actually existing cultural field – with the best of radical subversion, producing a genuinely critical and potentially popular stance.
Speaking of engagement and critical populism and the politics of research (and researching cultural politics), somewhere or other Glen noted that UWS cultural studies types did quite well in the last round of ARC grants: list of projects here.