Disciplining Culture

Genevieve Abravanel

English Department
Duke University
ga3@duke.edu

 

John Carlos Rowe, ed. “Culture” and the Problem of the Disciplines. New York: Columbia UP, 1998.

 

This collection of essays emerged out of four years of discussion and dispute among humanities scholars at the Critical Theory Institute of UC Irvine. What the contributors, including David Lloyd, James Boon, and J. Hillis Miller, have produced is not so much a theory of interdisciplinarity as a map of the ruptures and problems attendant when disciplines contest understandings of “culture.” The collection’s unproblematized decision to place “culture” in quotes highlights its distance from that moment in the eighties when the quotes in Henry Louis Gates’s title “Race,” Writing, and Difference, required much deliberation and were capable of provoking well-mounted attacks. Here “culture” is in quotes not only because, as with Gates’s reading of “race,” it is understood to be socially constituted, but also, more pointedly, because it is seen as an object of disciplinary knowledge, subject to institutional constraints and to a genealogy of practice. This collection thus participates in a general reorientation which takes cultural studies to be less a specialized field with its own canon than a redescription of the current state of the humanities.

 

Part of the compromise of exploring culture from within an institutional framework such as the Critical Theory Institute is its position as the site of its own culture, albeit not one with a disciplinary structure. The affiliation of the group around the topic of critical theory allows for a significant degree of intellectual space, but is nonetheless grounded in work that has harbored attachments to the linguistic or to the literary. Sacvan Bercovitch’s essay “The Function of the Literary in a Time of Cultural Studies” evinces the strongest desire in the collection to preserve an attachment to literary studies as the arbiter of certain forms of cultural knowledge. For Bercovitch, “to recognize that disciplines are artificial is not to transcend them” (69), and their constructed aspects can occasionally be a source of their value. To distinguish the discipline of literary studies from others, Bercovitch stages an unlikely chess match between Wittgenstein and Faulkner, or between Wittgenstein’s well-known allusions to chess in Philosophical Investigations, and a scene of chess in Light in August. The import of this chess match is that it cannot really be played, because Wittgenstein and Faulkner do not share a set of rules. (Wittgenstein has rules, while Faulkner does without them.) The translation of Wittgenstein’s observations on language into a rhetorical parlor game with a literary text could seem parochial, but it enables Bercovitch to gloss the value of the literary as the site of the particular over and against what he deems a set of philosophical abstractions. Although his case against the abstract is perhaps itself an abstraction of the discipline of philosophy (he highlights Descartes, along with late and early Wittgenstein), it is one that follows from the mobilization of the individual disciplinary position. Faulkner’s culturally-specific, racially-motivated chess match bears with it the textual coding which is the provenance of the literary critic. For Bercovitch, a location in the discipline of literary studies brings with it privileged access to socially-nuanced varieties of meaning.

 

The place of literary studies in an academic context also shapes J. Hillis Miller’s thoughts on present change in the university, and particularly in the humanities. “Something drastic is happening in the university. Something drastic is happening to the university” (45), Miller incants in his essay’s opening. Phrasing the change in Platonic terms, “the university is losing its idea” (45), Miller suggests that since the end of the cold war, the humanities have no longer been driven by nationalistic imperatives “to be best” (52). Funding has fallen off for the humanities much as it has for the non-applied and even the applied sciences, where fields of research once dominated by the universities have shifted over to the corporate sector. The university is still to a certain extent the nostalgic protectorate of old forms of knowledge that do not concede the changing global environment. For Miller, the PhD itself is an outmoded form, at least semantically, since so many “doctors of philosophy” are not in fact trained in those areas of logic that once explained the degree. Moreover, global flows of capital and information–and capital as information, in ways that resurrect Stevens’s aphorism “money is poetry”–erode the status of the university as the disseminator of culture and knowledge.

 

Literary studies in particular, Miller insists, can no longer be understood as a vehicle for disseminating dominant ideology in its “high” cultural form. “With the study of the English language goes the study of its literature as one of the most potent instruments to spread capitalist ideologies. Or at least we used to be confident that this was the case: it is not quite clear, when you think of it, how the study of Shakespeare or Hardy will aid the economic imperialism of the United States” (54). Miller’s dismissal of the hegemonic potential of English literature seems strange, especially since he cites Crawford’s work on English literature in Scotland, and Viswanathan’s consideration of the British canon in nineteenth-century India. But Miller wants to differentiate between the English canon and US-based bodies of knowledge; while he marks English literature as constitutive of US identity in the earlier years of the university, he cites the emergence of new disciplines of American studies, and the increasing canonization of American literature, as attempts to regulate the production of national identity. This performative gesture toward nation building might seem extraneous in the era of transnationalism, but it is an index of the university’s retrogressive tendency to remain invested in the set of nationalistic assumptions that Derrida terms the “ontopolitologique” (62). The proliferation of the culturally-based micro-disciplines, like “women’s studies, gay and lesbian studies, Native American studies, African American studies, Chicano/Chicana studies,” is for Miller a form of conservative resistance to the increasing transnationalism of the university (62). In strong terms, he insists, “Though nothing could be more different from ethnic cleansing in Rwanda or Bosnia than a program in cultural studies, the development of such studies may be another very different reaction to the threat new communications technologies pose. Cultural studies can function as a way to contain and tame the threat of that invasive otherness the new technologies bring across the thresholds of our homes and workplaces” (62). Because global flows of information and new transnational alliances are undermining the performative nation-building impulses of the university, multiculturalism can be taken as a vestige of the nationalistic model in the name of the political left. Only the acknowledgment of radical alterity can protect against the theoretical equivalence of identity groups. “We need to establish a new university of dissensus, of the copresence of irreconcilable and to some degree mutually opaque goods” (64), Miller insists. For while Miller might differ from some aspects of Bercovitch’s claims, he too seems to wish to acknowledge the incommensurability of the disciplines, in particular of the micro-disciplines that comprise multiculturalism.

 

It is not surprising that a volume suspicious of the nationalizing impulses of some forms of multiculturalism would devote two chapters to explicitly postcolonial issues. The rise of postcolonial studies as a disciplinary formation in US academics is a more recent phenomenon than some multicultural fields, in particular African-American studies and feminism, which had begun institutionalization by the late seventies. Moreover, postcoloniality holds a necessarily more vexed relationship toward what Miller calls the multicultural project of “giving a voice to the heretofore voiceless, to women and minorities…” (61). Because postcolonial studies is a globally oriented field of inquiry, its representatives are not so easily voiced from within the American university. The access of the metropolitan postcolonial intellectual to the human subjects of its disciplinary knowledge has been an early and persistent problem in the theory, one which can be traced through such events as Gayatri Spivak’s periodic reworking of her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” The global aspects of the postcolonial field, as well as its internal challenges to its own authority, could present it as an alternative model to what Miller sees as the multicultural tendency to repolarize the US disciplines through ethnically discrete bodies of knowledge. It is true that globalism has been charged recently by Lisa Lowe and others with promulgating a new form of universalism in its attempts to posit, and thus to generalize, a postcolonial subject. While such a charge holds weight, postcolonial studies nonetheless has the potential to unsettle the organization of disciplinary knowledge around strictly ethnic lines and provide an antidote to some of the rigid identitarian positions associated with multiculturalism.

 

In her essay “Colonialism, Psychoanalysis, and Cultural Criticism: The Problem of Interiorization in the Work of Albert Memmi,” Suzanne Gearhart traces the renewal of academic interest in culture to postcolonial inquiry. Her terms are emphatic: “It would not be difficult to show that the ‘new culturalism’ that has come into increasing prominence derives much of its impetus from the centrality of the problem of culture in the critique of and resistance to colonial domination” (171). She centers this claim on revisionary readings of culture as no longer “a reflection of deeper historical, economic, or sociopolitical forces” (171) but rather an autonomous system that can break with specific economic or political programs. Such cultural autonomy can take forms such as Aimé Césaire’s decision to break with the Communist Party in favor of cultural solidarity with other West Indian and African groups, and it translates easily into nationalism. In those moments when culture is perceived as synonymous with national identity, Gearhart becomes cautionary. Her reading of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism touches on the ways in which Said, despite his various investments in the nation, sees the “potential dangers” (172) of the nationalist position. For Gearhart, nationalism carries with it “the risk of creating or presupposing a new collective and individual identity based on national culture, one that would ultimately be as abstract, limited, metaphysical, and thus potentially as repressive in nature as the humanisms unmasked and criticized from the perspective of a critical concept of culture” (172). The value of the particular as against the abstract, which has threaded its way through Bercovitch’s defense of literary criticism and Miller’s critique of multiculturalism, here returns as a warning against certain deployments of nation in the postcolonial context. It might seem odd, then, that Gearhart’s interest in culture for the postcolonial relies on psychoanalysis, a methodology that along with Marxism has been criticized for investing in a generalized subject. She attempts to resist such a tendency by drawing on the work of Albert Memmi, especially his 1957 The Colonizer and The Colonized. Memmi’s theory of “le vécu” or “lived experience” acknowledges the material difference in individual lives even as it attempts to elaborate the psychic effects of colonization on colonizer and colonized. Memmi’s argument for the interiorization or psychic absorption of the colonial experience is explicitly presented as contra Fanon, whom Memmi reads to focus on the sociopolitical and external facts of domination to the occasional exclusion of the psychological. While Henry Louis Gates claims that there is no need to choose definitively between Fanon and Memmi, a psychoanalytic modeling of colonialism tends to follow one or the other. For Gearhart, Memmi’s interrogation of the psychic through the cultural, and vice versa, is a paradigm of contemporary interdisciplinarity, one that reveals the imbrications of seemingly distinct bodies of knowledge.

 

Another version of redisciplining the postcolonial comes from James Boon, who brings his position as an anthropologist self-consciously to bear on theorists like Fredric Jameson, Homi Bhabha, and Aijaz Ahmad, as well as historian Arif Dirlik. As a point of departure, Boon briefly restages the now-famous critique Ahmad posed to Jameson’s “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital.” While Boon sides for the most part with Ahmad, he takes care to note the moments when he feels that Ahmad has overlooked certain subtleties in his defense of third world literature. What Boon finds troubling is Ahmad’s attention to “Nation-Narration” at the expense of Boon’s own category of “region/religion” (144). Suggesting that certain aspects of cultural studies have become myopically invested in the nation, Boon asserts that “it is assumed that the nation, narrated, is the privileged venue for generating obfuscations of Realpolitik (or réelle-power-knowledge)” (144-45). In particular, Ahmad’s claim that “the kind of circuits that bind the cultural complexes of advanced capitalist countries simply do not exist among countries of backward capitalism” (Ahmad, qtd. 145) neglects religious connections such as those enabled by Islam. Boon adds, almost as an aside, that Ahmad not only fails to weight religious difference but “makes little of languages overall” (145). Here is the crux of Boon’s interest. He has titled his piece “Accenting Hybridity,” and his reworking of the Bhabhian hybrid to include linguistic variation allows him to cite Edward Sapir’s work on language. Sapir, best known for his contributions to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic constructivism, is useful to Boon’s interventions in more traditional postcolonial thought. What Boon calls “plus-que-post-colonialist hybridities” (153) are the linguistic affiliations across races and cultures that he traces from Sapir’s work on language. While the problematic of linguistic identification, for example with English or with French in Africa, is not new to postcolonial thought, the angle of Boon’s critique of Ahmad follows from a perspective that should be understood as disciplinary. Boon’s interests have historically been crucial to postcolonial studies, but they have also often been reinscribed within the problematic of the nation. The value of disciplinarily marginalized critiques like Boon’s is to unsettle what Boon emphatically terms “NOW-MAINSTREAM POSTCOLONIAL CULTURAL STUDIES” (162).

 

The two essays on the postcolonial, while materially disparate, nonetheless occupy a certain sequential space near the end of the volume. Such a grouping is perhaps prefigured in the seemingly well-disciplined decision to collect the two pieces with explicit gender commentary together at the volume’s center. These two essays, Linda Williams’s discussion of Psycho and Leslie Rabine’s consideration of African-American women’s fashion magazines, seem somewhat less self-reflexive with regard to the disciplines than several of the other pieces, perhaps because they are most recognizably located in the new interdisciplinarity of cultural studies. Yet Williams’s observation that “film studies achieved its first academic legitimacy through appropriations of linguistic models of textuality” (87) suggests the originary pressures on the “new” disciplines. In similar terms, Rabine’s assertion that fashion as a field of inquiry has been slighted due to its emphasis on pleasure relates a more recent struggle for legitimacy of new bodies of knowledge. Considering Psycho, Williams notes how its installment at the heart of the film studies canon eroded the thrill of enjoyment that must be accounted for in gendered or cultural readings of the audience. She quotes Hitchcock on the film: “To me it’s a fun picture” (97). Williams aligns the emotional trajectory of viewing Psycho with a roller-coaster ride and notes that one of Disney’s contributions to contemporary culture has been to bring the affective rhythms of the horror film and the thrill ride closer together. Williams’s interest in Psycho‘s original audiences leads her to Hitchcock’s claim of universal horror: “If you designed a picture correctly, in terms of its emotional impact, the Japanese audience would scream at the same time as the Indian audience” (109-10). While Williams casts doubt on such an assertion, she nonetheless generalizes on the basis of gender: female audience members’ identification with the victim may make them more prone to shock, but it may also increase their enjoyment. Although Williams does not exactly unravel the relationship of gender to culture in the viewing process, she is invested in the networks of identification that make the film psychically meaningful. Impact on the audience is also the focus of Rabine’s contrast between black and white fashion magazines like Essence and Mirabella. Rabine, who is not African-American, does not invoke the “we” (111) that Williams prizes when discussing female audience members. Rather, she suggests that “a postmodern, fluid, white, feminine identity depends for its production upon the image of a fixed black feminine identity” (124). In particular, she looks at the ways racialized meaning was produced through the late-80s fashion of “lingerie dressing,” in which underwear became outerwear. For both Williams and Rabine, objects of study, such as film and magazines, are useful insofar as they permit speculation on their audiences. While specifically reception-oriented approaches are by now well established in cultural studies, this volume makes apparent the desire within virtually all contemporary considerations of culture–multicultural, postcolonial, feminist–to locate and connect with the kinds of identity groups or interpretive communities that are posited in reception theory. What Williams and Rabine contribute, by approaching such identity groups historically and in racial terms, is a recognition of just how difficult this kind of access to an ostensible group’s feelings or dispositions can be.

 

Opening and closing the collection, David Lloyd’s meditations on the university and Mark Poster’s rewriting of the end of history display some of the primary tensions that inquiry into the disciplines can generate. Like Miller, Lloyd wants to rework the Habermasian ideal of the university into a space more amenable to the new global environment. He does not see multiculturalism as a polarizing enemy but rather as a potential corrective to Western forms of knowledge. Not only do the disciplines correspond “to a postenlightenment (that is, Western and modern) division of a universal human reason into ‘faculties,'” they also serve as models for the “larger differentiation of spheres of practice within Western society: the technological/economic, the political, and the cultural” (20). Such a disinclination to maintain current disciplinary formation is even more emphatically pursued by Poster in his peregrinations around “the end” (215). Following from a critique of Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, Poster explains that the end of history he envisions is not the triumph of liberal democracy, but rather the end of history as a discipline in its current, ideological formation. As Poster puts it, “arguments are being raised more and more frequently that the kind of writing done by historians does not address the concerns of the day, that it is being done better by individuals trained in other disciplines, or that it supports an outmoded and dangerous institution: the nation-state” (215). As a kind of metanarrative of the problem of the disciplines, Poster considers the historicity of the current study of history, including the electronic retrieval of information, the reinvention of the archive, and the consequent pressures on the psyche and working habits of the historian. For Poster, the “linearity of modernity” with its progression from past to future is eclipsed by a “postmodern temporality, nonlinear and simultaneous” (222). Poster’s redescription of historical time corresponds in important ways to Lloyd’s movement away from the “modern” disciplinary structure founded on hierarchy and modeled after the “longer history of state-formations” (20). For Lloyd, the tension here is between idealisms of the university and what he calls “the particular” as understood by multiculturalism (25).

 

The problem of the particular and the universal, when reframed as the problem of the particular and the university, is in a certain sense the overriding contemporary concern of the disciplines. If a collection like this one is at all representative, and it appears to be, the origin of new disciplines of knowledge tends to occur in resistance to totalizing epistemologies or generalizations. If multiculturalism is valuable when it resists homogenization (as for Lloyd) but undesirable when it commodifies difference as interchangeable and therefore really the same (as for Miller), then it seems that the epistemological high ground is the provenance of the particular. Not only is the study of popular film and fashion magazines theoretically energized by its inquiry into particular groups, but even Faulkner’s final checkmate against Wittgenstein, whether or not one wishes to accept it, is enabled by his ability to attend the subtle nuances of the social. The transformation of the disciplines reveals an extreme discomfort with varieties of universalism, from a representative canon of humanism to the ideology of the nation. Both multiculturalism and postcolonial studies are motivated by impulses to rethink canon and nation, and disciplinary reformation derives much impetus from their lead. It therefore seems justifiable to venture that the object “culture” is also in need of further particularization in inquiries such as these, even as it is necessarily abstracted as the disruptive force around which new disciplinary knowledges can converge.