Postmodern Cultural Studies Essay

Cultural Studies and the Academy 1. Cultural studies in the academies of the advanced capitalist countries has transformed the object of studies in the humanities. In particular, in English departments, ethnic studies has ch all(prenominal)enged the predominance of the governing categories of literary studies (the canon, the homogeneous period, the testis properties of genre, the literary object as autonomous and self-contained) in the interest of producing tuitions of all texts of refining and inquiring into the copy of subjectivities.To this end, pressure has been placed on corrective boundaries, the methods which police these boundaries, and modes of interpretation and critique leave been developed which bring, for example, economics and administration to bear on the formal properties of texts. In addition, the lines between high culture and mass culture throw away been relativized, making it possible to address texts in damage of their social effectivity rather than thei r inherent literary, philosophical or other determine. 2.The two most significant categories which have put forwarded these institutional changes have been ideology and speculation. Althusserian and post-althusserian understandings of ideology, which defined ideology not in terms of a system of ideas or world view but in terms of the production of subjects who recognize the existing social world as the only possible and reasonable angiotensin converting enzyme, do possible the reading of texts in terms of the ways in which the workings of ideology readyd their expression and uses.Marxist and post-structuralist theories, meanwhile, focused critical attention on the conditions of possibility of discourses, and upon the exclusions and inclusions which change their articulation. In both cases, critique becomes possible insofar as reading is directed at uncovering the invisible possibilities of understanding which are smothered as a condition of the texts intelligibility. 3. I support these efforts to transform the humanities into a grade of ultural critique. I entrust show that what is at stake in these changes is the uses of pedagogical institutions and practices in late capitalist society. If pedagogy is mum, as I would argue it should be, as the intervention into the reproduction of subjectivities, then the outcome of struggles over culture and cultural studies will determine whether or not the Humanities will become a site at which the production of oppositional subjectivities is made possible.Historically, the Humanities has been a site at which the contradictions of the subjectivities required by late capitalist culture have been communicate and managed. For example, the central concepts of post-World War Two literary criticism, such as irony, have the function of reducing contradictions to the complexity and irrationality of reality, thereby reconciling subjects to those contradictions. 4. However, these upstart changes in the academy have been very overtone and contradictory.They have been partial in the hotshot that much of the older or traditional modes of literary studies have remained untouched by these developments, or have only made some slight accommodations to them. They have also been contradictory in the sense that cultural studies has accommodated itself to existing practices, by producing bare-ass modes of fetishizing texts and preserving hidebound modes of subjectivity. In this way, cultural studies continues to advance the ideological function of the modern Humanities in a changed social purlieu. . The right wing attacks these changes, chargingas in the ongoing PC scarethat the Humanities are abandoning their commitment to objectivity and the universal values of Western culture. My argument is that these commitments and values have been undermined by social developments which have socialized subjects in sweet ways while concentrating global socio-economic post in spite of appearance an ever-shri nking number of transnational corporations.The intellectual and political tendencies coordinated by cultural studies, then, are responding to these transformations by allowing academic business to go on as usual, and providing updated and therefore more useful modes of legitimation for capitalist society. 6. The contradictions of these changes in the mode of knowledge production need to be understood within the framework of the needs of the late capitalist social order.The emergence of system and (post)Althusserian understandings of ideology reflected and contributed strongly to the undermining of heavy(p) humanism (in both its classical and social-democratic versions) as the legitimating ideology of capitalism. The discrediting of liberal humanism, first under the pressures of anti-colonialist revolts and then as a result of the anti-hegemonic struggles in the advanced capitalist heartlands, revealed a deep crisis in authority and hegemony in late capitalist society.This discredi ting also revealed the need for new ideologies of legitimation, free from what could now be seen as the naivete of liberal improver universalism, now widely viewed as a cover for racist, sexist and anti-democratic institutions. 7. The institutional tendencies which have produced the constellation of practices which can be termed cultural studies have, then, participated both in the attack on liberal understandings and in the development of new discourses of legitimation.The liberal humanism predominant in the academy has increasingly been seen as outlaw(a) because it depends upon an outmoded printing of private individuality-that is, the modern notion of the immediacy with which the permit text is apprehended by the knowing subject. In this understanding, literature is understood in opposition to science and technology, as a site where what is inbred to our human nature can be preserved or recovered(p) in the face of a social reality where this human mettle (freedom) is perpe tually at risk.However, the more scientific methods (like semiology) which have undermined the hegemony of new criticism in the American academy, largely through the use of modes of digest borrowed from structuralist anthropology and linguistics, have themselves been discredited by postmodern theories as largely conservative discourses interested in resecuring disciplinary boundaries (for example, through the classification of genres) and protecting an empiricist notion of textuality. 8.Cultural studies, then, is the result of the combination of the introduction of theory and the politicization of theory enabled by these social and institutional changes. However, the postmodern assault on master narratives (theory) has responded to the discrediting of both structuralism and Marxism in a conservative political environment by redefining politics to mean the resistance of the individual subject to modes of subordination located in the discursive and disciplinary forms which constitut e the subject.This has opened up the possibility of a new line of development for cultural studies one in which the local supplants the global as the framework of analysis and comment or redescription replaces explanation as the purpose of theoretical investigations. I will argue that the set of discourses which have congealed into what I