A Call for Rethinking Cultural Studies

BEYOND CELEBRATION: A CALL FOR RETHINKING CULTURAL STUDIES Carolyn Lea A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY December 2007 Committee: Dr. Ellen Berry, Advisor Dr. Nancy C. Patterson Graduate Faculty Representative Dr. Donald McQuarie Dr. Ewart Skinner © 2007 Carolyn Lea All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT Dr. Ellen Berry, Advisor This is a polemical dissertation which seeks to serve as an intervention into the theoretical debates and tensions within cultural studies. These debates, which have taken place over the last few decades, have centered on the populist bent within cultural studies, the turn away from the concerns of political economy, and the influence of French theories that emphasize signification, play, and relativism. At stake in these debates is our way of understanding the world and imagining it differently. I argue that the celebratory direction found in much of the work by cultural studies scholars in which resistance, subversion and transgression are located in all things popular has led to an expressivist politics which lacks explanatory power and is symptomatic of a loss of political will. This dissertation critiques three particular directions that exemplify the celebratory turn: claims regarding transgression; claims regarding audience activity; and celebratory accounts of consumption. Chapter one provides an exposition of the debates that have plagued cultural studies, laying the ground for later arguments. Chapter two provides an introduction to reality television which is enlisted as a cultural symptom through which to interrogate weaknesses in theoretical positions (in chapters three through five) adopted by cultural studies scholars and strengths in alternative theoretical legacies. Chapter three turns toward the concept of transgression, arguing the romantic view of transgression as subversion relies on a partial reading of the work of figures such as Bakhtin. Chapter four focuses upon a critique of the limitations of conceptions of the active audience, arguing that the political economy of the Frankfurt School theorists can serve as a corrective to perspectives that divorce iv production from consumption. Chapter five then examines the promotion of consumption as resistance, construing individual self-fashioning as a politics. Such an expressivist politics ignores broad structural change in favor of changing the self. Finally, I conclude that there has been a failure of imagination within cultural studies scholarship. I propose that a return to devalued theoretical legacies, such as the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, can provide a vantage point for rethinking cultural studies. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION ..........................................................1 CHAPTER ONE CULTURAL STUDIES ON THE LINE: ADDRESSING FISSURES AND GAPS .....................................11 CHAPTER TWO SITUATING REALITY TV ..................................45 CHAPTER THREE TRANSGRESSION: NORM = BAD, TRANSGRESSION = GOOD OR GOTTA BE BAD TO BE GOOD .............................................66 CHAPTER FOUR AUDIENCE UNBOUND: “LOOK MOM – NO HANDS!” .........109 CHAPTER FIVE WHEN THE GOING GETS TOUGH THE TOUGH GO SHOPPING: CONSUMPTION AS POLITICS ...............167 CONCLUSION ........................................................200 REFERENCES CITED AND CONSULTED ......................................212 1 INTRODUCTION With his re-election in 2004, President George Bush claimed that he had been given a mandate. With fifty-one percent of the popular vote, he declared the country was on course. Despite the failure to find “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, the war against terror was proceeding apace, tax cuts were alleviating the flagging economy and he was ready to push forward with his agenda to privatize social security and simplify the tax code. Meanwhile, almost four years later, we are still in Iraq, social programs continue to be undermined, real income continues to fall, and the United States now has the greatest divide of all industrialized countries between the rich and the poor. Millions of Americans are facing foreclosure on their homes while the stock market is reaching new highs. With such growing disparity between the haves and the have-nots, it seems especially important that any analysis of contemporary culture take the constraints of class and the institution of globalized capitalism into account. That it would be of paramount importance to cultural studies, a field of academic study which perceives itself as political, should go unsaid. Instead, there has been a retreat from class as a point of analysis as well as from a critical analysis of the culture industries within the larger capitalist market economy. Such a retreat has signaled what has been seen as an apolitical and uncritical cultural studies and has led to broad debates both within and outside of the field in regard to theory, method, and the role of cultural studies more generally. These debates have centered on the populist bent within cultural studies, the turn away from the concerns of political economy, and the influence of postmodernism, 2 especially the emphasis on signification, play, relativism, and transgression.1 At stake in these debates is our (cultural studies) way of understanding our world and imagining it differently; that is, at stake are the questions of how cultural studies might contribute to the creation of a critical consciousness and political praxis. This is a polemical dissertation which seeks to serve as an intervention into the theoretical debates and tensions within cultural studies. It is far from impartial; it argues that particular directions within cultural studies have foreclosed on other theoretical possibilities, limiting the questions asked as well as the answers While it would be unfair to claim that all work within cultural studies is overly celebratory and uncritical, there has been an undeniable trend within the field toward what Jim McGuigan (1992) has called “cultural populism.” This work has a tendency to see popular cultural practices as inherently resistant and while focusing on pleasure and consumption, has tended to ignore the means of production and the broader social context within which cultural products are produced. I will argue, then, that certain trends and practices within cultural studies have, unintentionally, led to a narrowing of the grounds for critique, an anti-judgmental relativism, and an overly sentimental assessment of popular culture. Such an anti-judgmental relativism in which all things popular become sites of “resistance,” “transgression,” “subversion,” and “opposition” fails to evaluate how resistance and transgression may not in and of themselves be progressive, and how celebrating pleasure and consumption may not be antithetical to the market but rather converge with the interests of consumer capitalism. Failing to contextualize popular cultural products within the context of production and ignoring the constraints and limitations within which audiences construct 1 I am using the term “postmodernism” broadly here to refer to the influence of French theorists, including the poststructuralism of Foucault as well as the work of theorists such as Lyotard and Baudrillard. 3 meaning has led to an exaggeration of audience freedom in which we each become “authors” or “producers.” My use of the term production here refers both to the conditions of capitalist production in a Marxist sense, that is to situate cultural products within a changing global economy, but also how cultural meanings are produced within the social relations endemic to that economy. While the theoretical directions within cultural studies that I critique can be read as a reaction against what was seen as the pessimism of the Frankfurt School and/or what was seen as a reductionist Marxist economism, the failure to integrate these theoretical insights into much contemporary cultural studies work has led to a sentimental valorization of popular culture and the “people” and a notion of the political that relies on the individual and particularity and fails to imagine the possibility of collective action for structural change. The political has indeed become the personal. This shift within cultural studies threatens to undermine the validity of cultural studies as anything more than an academic discipline, little different from literary theory or communication studies, except with a broader purview. For those of us who, like the founding fathers, conceive of cultural studies as a political intervention, a political pedagogy, this shift is of critical import. A cultural studies that uncritically celebrates the pleasures of consumption, consumer freedom, and small transgressions is a cultural studies which mimics the rhetoric of the market. What is needed, then, is a cultural studies that does not abandon the insights of critical poststructuralism and postmodernism, but also does not abandon the insights of those theoretical perspectives that are no longer fashionable within the academy. With the commodification of cultural studies as a discipline, ideas themselves have become products for consumption; theories are discarded with each new theoretical fad. I argue that a critical cultural studies must engage dialectically with the 4 work of the Frankfurt School, political economy and other theoretical positions it has dismissed. Such a rethinking will enable a more

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