Nick Caldwell, who kindly helped me out yet again with the site design has asked me to write a post on what I like about cultural studies, following up similar posts on John Howard and postmodernism.
This is actually not a hard one. I’m a big fan of Raymond Williams, who’s pretty much the founder of the whole field. In particular, I really liked his book Keywords. For a while I was running a regular ‘Word for Wednesday’ feature that was going to add up to a new Keywords, but it was one of those projects that got shelved temporarily, then abandoned indefinitely. Maybe I’ll come back to it one day.
More generally, I agree with Williams’ central idea that we should study our own culture in all its manifestations, rather than accepting the claims made for 19th century categories like ‘Art’ at face value, and distinguishing some particular subset of activities (defined primarily by class) as constituting ‘high culture’, while everything is is dismissed as prolefeed.
That’s not the same as abandoning standards of judgement, and saying that Mills and Boon is just as good as George Eliot. Like any other human activity, cultural products like books can be made well or sloppily, can be beautiful or ugly, can be original or mass-produced. But if you want to understand society, you need to look at the whole culture, not at those bits of it that enjoy high status.
In any case, there is no close linkage between cultural status and any sensible criterion of merit. Opera, for example, enjoys very high status, because it’s expensive and patronised by the upper classes, but much of it has so little to say about the human condition that the work of writing the words (the libretto) was farmed out to unknown hacks.
Even if you want to dispute claims like this, it’s clear that the argument can’t be carried on in terms of the kind of 19th century framework in which Art is a transcendent category of human experience which (for reasons that are never clearly explained) can only be manifested in one of a limited number of forms (painting, music, sculpture, literature and so on) and then only by approved practitioners.
Williams says all this much better than me. ‘Culture is ordinary… culture is not a collection of special objects locked away in a museum …every society has its own shape, purposes, meanings. Every society expresses these via its institutions, arts, and learning. Making a society means finding common meanings and directions. At the same time, society is made and remade in every individual mind. We note two aspects of culture: the known meanings and directions and the new meanings and directions which must be tested. These are the ordinary processes of human society/individual minds”
So, if there’s so much to like, why have I been so negative in my references to ‘cult-stud’. The things I don’t like are pretentious obscurantism passing itself off as ‘theory’ (the kind of thing the Sokal hoax exposed) and the kind of pseudo-leftism that purports to find Bugs Bunny or ads for Pepsi ‘transgressive’ and ‘subversive’. I’ve had my say about these things already (probably more than enough times) and I won’t repeat it.
I’ve never actually followed through the intellectual history that took cultural studies from Raymond Williams to the sorry spectacles we observe today. I’d be interested if there’s anyone among the readers who can help with this.
John Quiggin 
Be careful what you ask for!
Thanks, John.
I’ll essay a couple of quibbles here. I would suggest that the obscurantist end of cultural studies largely derives from a US intellectual tradition, and in fact has a lot more to do with identity studies and postcolonialism than cultural studies, per se. Patrick Nielsen Hayden once commented that Americans talk about race because they can’t talk about class, and I think that contributes a lot to the very particular practice of a discipline that elsewhere is more interested in analysing class.
I’d also point out that the “transgression” stuff has largely been played out, and Fiske, the cheerleader of this line of thought, was actually a lot more careful a scholar than many of his imitators. And the point about “subversion” is that it was at the point of consumption, in the “reading” of culture, than in the production.
Overall, my point would be, I guess, that there’s quite a bit of cultural studies work out there now, for whatever reason. And about 90% of it is crud. But, as Theodore Sturgeon famously said, 90% of _everything_ is crud.
On the lighter side of this matter I would assume you are familiar with this site for the post modern essay generator (Monash School of Computer Science and Software Engineering) but for those who aren’t it is quite entertaining. Get yourself your own post modern essay. Post Modern essay
John, I certainly enjoyed your series of expositions on words while it lasted.
Williams is fabulous.
Nick’s right about American scholarship and class.
Here’s my potted history of cultural studies.
“prolefeed”,
‘cult-stud’.
“pretentious obscurantism”
My liitle oxford dictionary has been working overtime.
The nineteenth-century hierarchy of cultural value drew upon the romantic notion of transcendence. Prophets of the romantic revolution of sensibility proposed that there were avenues available for human beings to transcend the mean condition of human life.
Products of the human intellect achieved the status of “High Art” if and only if they were perceived to manifest in some way evidence of transcendence of the mean condition of human life.
The romantic revolution was, it hardly needs to be stated, an attempt to replace the blown claims of Christianity to numinousness. Later on, German biblical scholarship of the first half of the nineteenth century assigned the “sacred texts” of Christianity to the same status as the religious fetishes of West Africa. In other words, these texts were to be understood anthropologically rather than as a pathway to transcendence.
Thus it often surprises me when assorted RWDBs grumble into their beards or the scaly folds that gather around their maws about the central project of cultural studies, which is to assert that there is no privileged canon, that there is no master text, that nothing has a value beyond that which the market accords it.
After all that hoary old bugbear of the Right, Karl Marx, himself expressed a somewhat nostalgic regret that the first generation of secular RWDBs had done to European culture:
“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.”
Since when did RWDBs get off profaning all that is holy?
What, in short, is their problem with cultural studies?
Cultural studies arose as a theoretical response to the empirical fact of the “post-modern moment”, essentially the failure of the socialist grand ideological narrative. Culture was presumed to be a conservatizing force that somehow constrained the masses from radical constructive politics.
Modernism in art was all about depicting, in ambivalent ways, the means by which technological progress politically empowered the sociological masses. Hence much modernist art “socialist realism” celebrated the culture of the white, male working class hence. But the masses instead of taking up the banner of political progress, lapsed back into bourgeois career and home-making lifestyles “embourgeoisement”.
In short cultural studies was to the New Left what industrial workers studies were to the Old Left.Hence the Left went from the Old Left social revolution of the thirties to New Left cultural revolution of the Sixties. I think that there was a big debate about this launched by Williams et al in the New Left Review in the early sixties, after progressives post-1956 exodus rom the Old Left communist movement.
Contemporary cultural “politicals” tracked the cultural “professionals”. Multi-Cultural politicals allied wirh post-modernists to celebrate and emancipate the new agents of social progress that would replace the proles: the minority non-white, non-male, non-working classes.
Cultural studies itself is not especially modern, or post-modern, except in so far as the medium and process of cultural analysis is now under investigation as well as the culture itself. Somehow this new level of self-referentiality has made an earnest immersion in culture impossible. Hence the obsession that cultural studenst have with “irony” which now bols down to any form of quirk.
Cultural studies suffer most from an ignorance of technology, the prime driver of culture, which gives much of their analysis a dated air. As Steve Jobs said: regarding the first cohort of cultural students:
It always seems a prudent policy to judge something by its central claims rather than by the mistakes and illogicalities of its unintelligent or careerist disciples.
None of the no doubt lengthy catalogue of idiocies perpetrated in the name of “post-modernism” has anything to do with the validity of the central claims of the likes of Raymond Williams.
That is akin to criticising capitalism on the basis of the conduct of that other Raymond Williams (of HIH infamy.)
History’s full of the wreckage of technology that didn’t meet a cultural need. To say technology has a significant role in culture and cultural production is _trivially_ true. To say that it is the “prime driver” is an astounding claim.
I’m also wondering on what Jack bases his claim that cultural studies is ignorant of technology. I’ll not argue that there’s sometimes an anti-scientific thread in some misbegotten backwaters of CS. But that’s something quite different.
‘In any case, there is no close linkage between cultural status and any sensible criterion of merit. Opera, for example, enjoys very high status, because it’s expensive and patronised by the upper classes, but much of it has so little to say about the human condition that the work of writing the words (the libretto) was farmed out to unknown hacks.’
‘Even if you want to dispute claims like this…’
Boy, do I ever!
1. How do you measure status? My experience is that the majority of people I encounter, including well educated people, snigger at opera. Because of the (completely unfair) connotations of elitism and snobbery, it’s fair game for a cheap shot.
2. A night at the opera is not much more expensive than a rock concert, and if it were, this would be largely because of its unpopularity (see 1).
3. It’s patronised by people who, like me, love it. I love it because its beauty transports me to a level of delight that I get from no other form of music, though I love many other forms. The only thing better than listening to a CD of an opera is to see an opera on stage, where the drama further intensifies the impact of the music. Some lyrics are probably better than others, but if they’re in a foreign language you don’t understand every word anyway, and don’t need to if you follow the story.
4. You gave opera as an example of how high cultural status doesn’t guarantee merit, but it’s a bad example, and on reflection I think you’d be hard pressed to find a good one. Most of the art that enjoys high cultural status in some sense does so because of longevity, and art doesn’t stand the test of time if it lacks merit. But your thesis doesn’t in any way rest on ‘high art’ lacking merit (Williams’ certainly doesn’t), so you could drop this part of the argument at no cost.
Cultural studies is one of those things that I defend when it’s attacked. No one is allowed to attack it except *me*. Sure, there is more rubbish here than in most other fields. One reason for this is the dominance of “theory”, which means French philosophy. Most people in CS have no philosophy background, so it’s unsurprising that they make bad philosophers. And Continental philosophy, because it itself aspires to the condition of modernist art, has very few mechanisms for filtering out rubbish, so it’s hard to identify the charlatans. But (last time I looked, which was a while ago) there was plenty of interesting material in CS.
But what I wanted to know is how, exactly. Sokal exposed *anything*. He submitted a paper, under his own name, to a non-refereed journal. The editors didn’t understand it, but because he was a fairly well-known physicist, claiming that certain trendy ideas were relevant to his field, they published it. This seems somewhat less of an embarrasment to the field than, say, then the recent stunt by 2 MIT students who got computer generated text accepted by a cybernetics conference or (less well-known) Ramachandran’s paper on “Why Gentleman Prefer Blondes” intended as a spoof of evolutionary psychology, but accepted for publication by the Journal of Medical Hypotheses.
No, Katz. In general you should judge things by their results not their claims – properly interpreted, that is. If something has inherent flaws, that may well be revealed by results but not be immediately obvious in its claims – yet it will be an intrinsic defect.
Of course, you do have to interpret the results carefully.
“Most of the art that enjoys high cultural status in some sense does so because of longevity, and art doesn’t stand the test of time if it lacks merit.”
James, that’s spot on, I think.
Way back when I studied English Lit at uni (before they turned it into sociology) one lecturer said the great art was art that people with sensibility over three generations thought was great.
That sounds elitist, but you can’t just wander in and deliver opinions off the cuff. You have to know the whole body of what’s available, have experienced it, appreciated it, and then reflected on how it works.
Also great art does relate to the human condition and does so in a way that overcomes the particularities of one cultural setting.
Sure opera is fairly expensive to put on, but sound reproduction technology is excellent these days. I don’t think class is intrinsic to the enjoyment of opera. I have some rellies who are truck drivers who play the stuff in the truck cabin.
About opera – what James said.
It’s absurd, IMO, to talk of opera, or classical music more generally, as elitist. Where it is *treated* as such, it says more about the culture in which it is performed that about the medium. I’ve been to the opera at Covent Garden, and stood at the back with the plebs and the students, *not* sharing the smoked salmon sandwiches favoured by the more wealthy patrons. What did we experience? Tannhauser, Wagner’s great tour de force, his last adventure in ‘number opera’. erotic, sensual, magnificent. The impact of the music has nothing to do with elitism. It has everything to do with the capacity of art to wrench you into a different world, to experience different realities, to be elsewhere than where you actually are. In short, it’s a kind of magic.
I’ve seen Wagner’s Lohengrin at the Met, too. Much more democratic, much more eye contact at the bar, much more of a wild mix of people. It was about as elitist as a market fair. Wild enthusiasm from *everyone*, including the jeans- and leather-jacket mob, just possibly because Domingo sang the lead incomparably. Possibly because of the art. Possibly because they were not all snobs.
And as James said, you get it all for less than you’d pay to hear Madonna or the egregious Kylie. And I’m buggered if I accept that thinking Kylie is egregious stamps me as an elitist.
Oh dear PML, I expected better of you.
Note how you’ve conflated “flaws” and “inherent flaws”. And you’ve conflated “claims” and “claims — properly interpreted” (whatever that means).
Now we all know that no a priori statement emerges from a scrape with the world of facts completely unscathed. Any system of analysis of the world is therefore a better or worse simulacrum of the world and not the world itself.
Thus, the first test of an a priori statement about the world is whether it is internally consistent. This has absolutely nothing to to with results.
The second test is whether it is elegant or whether it has needless redundancies. This again has nothing to do with results.
The third test is whether it is robust in the face of experience. And it seems to me that post-modernism’s central claim is unusually robust. That is: all a priori systems are inherently factitious and are therefore unreliable systems for understanding the world. Moreover, many of the a priori systems that informed “western civilisation” are particularly flawed and perhaps fradulent.
These latter are claims that can be tested with robust research. (I again refer to German nineteenth-century biblical scholarship as a prime, early and brave example). Unfortunately, many supporters of post-modernism have decided that mere attitudinising suffices. They merit all the contumely they cop.
But that contumely does not add up to a refutation of the central claim of post-modernism.
Here is a mental experiment everyone can try at home. Try to think of a non-trivial a priori statement about the cultural world that escapes the snares of ontology.
If you can’t, then post-modernism seems to be robust.
The problem with a good deal of opera and classical music is not that its elitist but rather that it is so unoriginal and boring – the same old stuff churned out time after time. We are asked to believe that a small group of composers are superior to modern ones simply because they lived several hundred years ago at a time when the number of people playing music was miniscule compared to today. It’s a bit like reincarnation the mathematics doesn’t add up. Give me Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd any day. And has any modern opera singer written anything as moving as Eric Bogle’s Green Fields of France.
If anyone was going to say that, Michael, I’m so glad it was you.
While I’m sympathetic to your problems with “Cultural Studies” (and by extention, po-mo and critical theory), I think that it is somewhat unfair to link the “Sokal hoax” with the major thinkers that make up this area of 20th-century thought. It is unfortunate that Sokal managed to, essentially, trick some editors, I confounded that by this means he would manage to efface the positive aspects of Derrida, Lyotard et. al.
Certainly, I wouldn’t dispute that some people take these thinkers to places that they don’t mean, but that would imply a failure of interpretation, not culpability. As a quick “for instance,” I’ve never found Foucault and Derrida to propound an extreme relativism that their detractors (and some supporters) accuse them of. To say that things are contingent, or at least historically situated and defined, does not create a carte blanc situation wherin all truths are equal.
I don’t want to criticise the taste of people who enjoy opera, or to accuse them of being elitists.
I’m just making the point that, if you look at the claims commonly made for “Art”, for example that it expands our understanding of the human condition, or that works of Art are transcendent productions of individual creators, opera doesn’t fit them very well.
And in saying that opera is “expensive”, I meant expensive to produce, so that it requires some form of subsidy to offer ticket prices competitive with Kylie.
Does anyone here know of any economic analysis that distinguishes the strictly economic value of artistic output from its ‘public good’ aspects (e.g. that it promotes experimentation, diversity, opportunities for social reflection etc)?
I am currently trying to get to grips with government policy strategies that treat (and seek to evaluate) the visual and performing arts sectors in exactly the same way as commercial enterprises such as game design, film, tv and publishing.
I’m struggling to find examples of analytical approaches that delineate the social/cultural value of the ‘arts’ from the economic contribution made by those industries which rely on some form of ‘creative talent’.
Any references or pointers would be much appreciated.
Re. subsidies: yes, but this is because is the average fixed cost is high. If there was greater demand and more performances, it would be cheaper at factor-cost. At an efficient scale, real opera isn’t more expensive to produce than Phantom of the Opera.
The question of transcendence I’ll leave to the Bhuddists, but I don’t see why Monteverdi’s Coronation of Poppea is any less the inspired creation of an individual than Giotto’s paintings in the Scrovegni Chapel, or the Taj Mahal for that matter. In a big project, details will be delegated to competent technicians.
The human condition bit bamboozles me. Devotees of opera routinely say the opposite, i.e.that the great operas deal with universal themes – obsessive love, loyalty, betrayal, revenge and so on. They differ from Shakespearean comedies or tragedies (on which many of them are based anyway) only in that the drama is further intensified by music.
The Sokal hoax firstly served to demonstrate that their were active practicioners of the field who not only didn’t understand the things they read, but didn’t even believe they were supposed to. It’s that second level of idiocy, a misunderstanding of the intellectual processes underlying academic thought, and the fact that it went unchecked by the establishment that makes the hoax so effective to me and, I gather, to most who are familiar with it.
To the extent that doesn’t bother people much, Sokal’s follow-up book cites doezens of examples of pretty much the same bunk, flowing from pilars of the French establishment. So viewing the hoax in isolation invloves taking, frankly, a bizarrely charitable view of its victims. I note further that all the individual Impostures cited cited by Sokal were the beneficiaries of the same kind of culture of silence from which Social Text benefited. It’s one thing to have idiots, it’s another thing to have a whole field which seems to believe that one ought not be able to understand what other practicioners are writing.
John, I don’t think any artist – other than Shakespeare – has understood and articulated the human condition as well as Mozart. He captures the whole sad comedie humaine in The Marriage of Figaro, and wraps it up in three hours of glorious music that is physically impossible not to like. As for transcendance, try listening to Wagner’s Parsifal. That work takes you on an extraordinary journey through the landscape of the spirit.
I’m happy to make an exception for Mozart, and while Wagner isn’t that much to my taste, he’s clearly an important part of Western culture. But it still doesn’t seem to me that either transcendence or having something significant to say are necessary conditions for acceptance in the operatic canon.
As regards Giotto, the Taj Mahal and so on, they are also good counterexamples to 19th Century Romantic theories about art as inspired individual creation.
John
As a fan of pop music and pop culture, I like the idea of being willing to look at all forms of activity and expression on (in some sense) an equal footing.
But as some have noted above, the idea of cultural studies as the study of “lower” forms of culture can’t really be disentangled from the “postmodern turn”, post-structuralism, critical theory, social theory, even Womens’ Studies. There are influences other than French (the Birmingham school, for example), but we really need to acknowledge the heavy influence of French thinkers (Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Kristeva, Lyotard, etc.) who were drawn on in these various schools of thought and their various academic disciplines and departments.
An example of the hubris involved: A book called “Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers” published not too many years ago managed to avoid almost any reference to philosophy, science, economics. As an Amazon reviewer noted: “‘… an indispensable reference book on this century’s most important intellectual revolution’ – from the blurb.
Is it relativity or quantum theory? Does it overturn our ideas on the origin and fate of the universe, or elucidate the deep foundations of mathematics? No, it’s pomo.
Strange that a book calling itself ‘Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers’ could be published near the end of the twentieth century and contain not a word about about Russell, Carnap, Popper or Wittgenstein. I suppose that, as advertised, this tells us something about our culture.”
The combined effect of this whole enterprise was to treat everything as “a text”, whether it was Shakespeare, a Coca Cola advert, or the activity and output of the science professions. If any activity can be treated as a text, then it can be analysed and critiqued with textual tools, which is what all the clever social theory/cultstud bods were learning by reading all the fancy-talking continental theorists.
Sokal showed the effect of treating science as a “dominant culture patriarchal discourse” — that could be analysed as a “text”, critiqued without having to understand it on its own terms. I agree with the person above who said Sokal didn’t simply fool a few journal editors, he demonstrated the bizarre effects of whole disciplines attempting to critique other disciplines that they simply see no need to comprehend.
I had the following discussion with a leading Australian feminist economist about Sokal (whose work she had not read but had discussed with fellow travellers).
Her: “Sokal simply doesn’t understand post-structuralism.”
Me: “Well, it’s not like he was shooting at nothing. There were lots of examples in his spoof paper of humanities writers pontificating about mathematics and physics, and that’s what he was critiquing.”
Her: “So?”
Me: “So you think it’s ok for a cultural studies person to opine about physics?”
Her: “Sure, why not? Why shouldn’t non-physicists have opinions about physics, or non-economists have opinions about economics?”
Me: “Then if Kristeva can publish things about physics and mathematics, why can’t Sokal publish about post-structuralism?”
Her: [silence]
Later on.
Her: “I think the issue is his intention. He wasn’t making any serious comment, his intent was to ridicule.”
I didn’t bother to comment that post-structuralists weren’t supposed to take the idea of “authorial intent” seriously.
Anyway, if you want to read some of the critical literature (apart from Sokal’s), which you’re free to agree or not agree with, some suggestions are as follows.
John Ellis: “Against Deconstruction”
John Searle: “Mind, Language and Society”
Camille Paglia: “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders”
Fred Crews: “Postmodern Pooh”.
This last one is genuinely funny.
Oddly enough, my copy of Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers has a subtitle. It’s “From Structuralism to Postmodernity”. I rather think that the subtitle is a better key to the purpose of the book than Routledge’s breathless blurb writing.
Once again, I find large parts of these kinds of conversations to be baffling; they simply don’t match at all my experience of working and studying in this field. Perhaps I’ve been lucky. A good deal of what is being identified as horrific prose and incomprehensible warmed-over theory is actually being committed by po-cos and “hip” literary theorists, rather than cultural studies.
‘A good deal of what is being identified as horrific prose and incomprehensible warmed-over theory is actually being committed by po-cos and “hipâ€? literary theorists, rather than cultural studies. ‘
I’m sure that’s right, Nick. A lot of this discussion is pretty tangential, I would say without having much by way of expertise, anything by way of expertise for that matter, in this field. Isn’t cultural studies just a branch of sociology that describes and explains how key ideas, values, ideology and so on are crystralised, reproduced and transformed in popular culture? Maybe with a bit of theorising about base and superstructure? I can’t see why anyone would object to that. Nor why it couldn’t be done in plain English plus some jargon for useful analtyical concepts. Nor – least of all – what connection it has to aesthetics. Of course, in wading through the morass of cultural artifacts, one might come across the ocasional thing of beauty, wonder whether the artifact’s impact owes something to its aesthetic qualities, reflect on whether your aesthetic reaction is culturally conditioned and indeed whether beauty itself is a social construct – and so on, but these would on the whole be side-issues.
Hi James,
Actually, aesthetics is in via the back door — precisely through things like values and taste. The analysis of taste, and how it is determined (or otherwise) by social status, is increasingly being informed by thinking about aesthetics.
I don’t know if I’d call CS a branch of sociology. Certainly it shares some methodology and terminology. But it does the same with anthropology and film studies, for example.
Condemning post-modernism on the basis of the Sokal fiasco has the same persuasive power as condemning evolution on the basis of the Piltdown hoax.
Anti-evolutionists had as much fun with Piltdown as some of you folks have had with Sokal.
Nervous laughter is not an uncommon response of people when their sustaining myths are shattering.
“Oddly enough, my copy of Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers has a subtitle. It’s “From Structuralism to Postmodernityâ€?.”
Oddly enough, I knew of the subtitle. I’m just not sure in what other discipline or scholarly enterprise would have such a brazen title, leaving the disciplinarfy specificity to the subtitle. (“Ooops, in case we forgot to mention, we’re not talking about THE fifty key contemporary thinkers…”)
I agree some of the discussion has been tangential, and cultural studies is copping some of the flak that really should be aimed at “critical theory” and whatnot. Cultstud shouldn’t be held responsible for Judith Butler and Homi K Bhabha’s incomprehensibility. I really DO like the de-emphasising of (ex ante) “high/low” distinctions around art that cultstud has wrought (or helped to).
Yet, I don’t know where the dividing line between cultstud and literary theory or critical theory, and I suspect there’s been more than some seeping of weirdness from one into another.
Nor am I sure what the connection is between Piltdown and Sokal. Piltdown involved tampering with evidence, the evidence then being locked away, preventing further detailed scrutiny. Sokal didn’t “tamper with evidence”, he played the ill-informed science critics at their own game, and they fell for it.
Post-modernism in the context of Sokal is much more like Creation Science in the context of Piltdown. If a hoax was played that sought to discredit evolution by messing around with fossils, and the Creationists thought it was just wonderful because taken at face value it made evolutionists look all silly, then we might have a serious comparison.
MH, whethr by good luck or good management, your final sentence states the case more or less precisely.
So you can see that, in terms of the motivations of the hoaxers, the Sokal/Piltdown parallel is quite exact.
However, with regard to the following:
“Post-modernism in the context of Sokal is much more like Creation Science in the context of Piltdown.”
If you had demonstrated how you arrived at this conclusion, I might have taken the trouble to address it.
Katz, the point is it is the Creationists who look silly. Evolutionists thought they had to take the Piltdown evidence at face value because it was EVIDENCE. Some combination of the internal cultural biases of the evolutionists, and the fact the evidence was not available for close inspection, led to them being fooled (or allowing themselves to be fooled) for an extended period of time.
The hoax was discovered not because the hoaxer revealed it, but because the scientists eventually figured out that it was a fraud.
To make your comparison with Sokal would require an expectation that if he hadn’t fessed up, the Social Text crew would have eventually realised it was complete bollocks. Now why would they have done that? All Sokal was doing was (ostensibly) validating what the likes of Kristeva had been saying already.
That’s by no means restricted to CS, I assure you. The number of history or anthropology books I’ve picked up with “broad and intriguing title” but “desperately specific subtitle” would fill a remainder table at the UQ bookshop.
Michael, are you aware of Bruno Latour’s work? He’s a “science critic” who goes on field trips with scientists to study them in their native habitat. Not all analysts of science are ignorant of it.
Without us wanting to get dragged down into nitpickery, I’d respond with:
– Yes, I do get the phenomenon of the Big Title followed by the Specific Sub-Title. But “Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers” goes beyond Big Title, into the league of Huge Claim. Such a title is really selling a bill of goods, one I think it doesn’t live up to.
– Science criticism is fine by me. It’s a flawed human activity. Sokal wasn’t commenting about the process of science, and the views he was satirising weren’t about the process of science. He was dealing with the fundamental CONTENT of science.
I don’t know if that’s clearer, but anyway, I’m signing off for the evining. 🙂
“The hoax was discovered not because the hoaxer revealed it, but because the scientists eventually figured out that it was a fraud.”
But it took them 41 years! How long did Sokal give them?
In any case, my argument is that the successful perpetration of a hoax against proponents of a theoretical system is NOT persuasive evidence about the fraudulence or incapacity of that theoretical system.
Moreover, post modernism is the victim, like any other system of thought, of its self-proclaimed disciples.
I suggested above how post-modernism, or any other set of general or axiomatic statements might be refuted.
Further useful discussion about post-modernism might follow those lines if the crime of nit-pickery is to be avoided.
Katz, is it actually your claim that had Sokal only left the good people of social text alone they would have (notwithstanding their stated commitment never to study science itself) eventual have realised that the axiom of choice had nothing to do with abortion?
Does this also apply to the dozens of theorists, in works over several decades, demolished in intellectual impostures? Did Irigaray have corrections to her “Gendered theory of relativity” on the drawing board before Sokal cruelly scooped her? Has the response of these writers been “oh yes, we did get that wrong, and with a little more time we would certainly have discovered and corrected it” or open hostility?
Honestly, that defence beggars belief.
It’s also worth noting that not all hoaxes are created equal. It is of course possible to trick any discipline into accepting something bogus provided one is willing to make the effort. All Sokal had to do however was to submit a clearly hilarious piece of gobbledygook to a journal, cite the editors’ work, and wait for them to publish. The subjects of Impostures simply had to be left alone and allowed to crank out stuff like Lacan’s:
“Thus, by calculating that signification according to the algebraic method used here, namely:
the erectile organ
… is equivalent to the of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier (-1). ”
The elipsis does him a lot of favours unfortunately, but the full quote (and “equation”) is reprodcued here: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/dawkins.html about half way down.
So your claim seems to be that Cultural Studies does just fine until it is asked to distinguish real examples of its theories from fake ones by reading them, then it falls apart.
James I was with you on Opera until you mentioned Montaverdi.Aggh!
give me Puccini or Verdi anyday.
michael, Uma Gumma is the best Pink Floyd album!
Paul, all your rodomontade suggests is that some idiots are bigger idiots than others.
Cultural studies does nothing. To assert otherwise is to commit the pathetic fallacy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathetic_fallacy
Practitioners of cultural studies do things. Sometimes they do clever things. Sometimes they do dumb things.
As I said higher up, “real examples” of the axioms of cultural studies, which is a subset of a “post modern” trend in humanities and social sciences, include the proposition that there is no master or transcendent text against which everything can be compared for “value”.
This is an important, radical and challenging axiom that renders problematic values that have been assigned to cultural products for at least two millennia.
Frankly Katz, we’re both making specific claims, me explicitly, you by implication, as to what actual Cultural Studies propenents actually do in the real world. It’s revealing that when challenged on those grounds, you continually retreat to some platonic ideal of what cultural studies could be if only it would get back to it’s intellectual roots.
I’m happy to concede, for the sake of argument, that treating cultural products as, in some sense, equal is a useful insight- and as you point out it’s now a rather dated one. In order to justify an ongoing role in academic discourse, and in order to justify being taken seriously in fora like this, it ought to produce actual practicioners who are producing actual intellectual output.
Let me put it another way: I, personally, have no intention of persuing serious research in cultural studies. For my purposes, the value of cultural studies is relevant in how it influences the value I should place on the (apparently incomprehensible and/or ridiculous) Cultural Studies proponents I encounter. If the evidence suggests that the emperor does indeed have no clothes then the issue is resolved to my satisfaction, notwithstanding the existence of defenders who (impliedly) concede that those people are idiots but who that maintain that “comics can be art too” is an important observation.
I have to add, Katz, that there’s a delicious irony in your defending cultural studies on the basis of a definition which explicitly excludes any role for historical mutability or the interpretive community. Cultural studies is and always will be defined as what it was at the point I, Katz, identify as having been its starting point. It’s more than a little like suggesting that one is a socialist if and only if one accepts “from each according to his abilities…” and it’s even more out of context here.
It tells me all I really need to know that Cultural Studies’ defenders effectively style it as a great source of one sentence insights, provided that you don’t accidently go and adopt it as a theoretical basis for analysing anything.
Paul, I agree with everything you said in your last post, except for the charge that I’m a Platonist.
I’m referring to the best work done by post-modernists, like Raymond Williams, with which this thread began several days ago.
Raymond Williams does not exist in ideal form.
Paul, our posts must have crossed.
1, I don’t recognise myself at all in your characterisation of me as one who rejects “historical mutibility” etc.
2. I believe that you have mistaken my comments about the origins of this thread as a statement of the origins of cultural studies.
You are correct, however, that post-modernism does tend more to entail a series of axioms that warn against the unsustainable assertions and outright frauds that have informed so much of western culture. That may be worth discussion.
Katz,
You are rejecting any definition of cultural studies which incorporates the activities of its modern proponents, up to an including Lacan. Instead you assert that cultural studies is defined by a few “real examples” of its “true nature” and that everything else, though it may purport to be cultural studies, is not, because it idiotic, and cultural studies is not idiotic.
You seem to have backed yourself into an unfalsifiable corner, and as I suggest above, this is quite odd from my point of view and very, very odd for a proponent of cultural studies. May I suggest that an unwillingness to defend the thing everyone calls cultural studies produced by people who people call cultural studies practicioners means you’re actually not that much of a fan?
No Paul, not “defined”, “exemplified”. I’m sure you recognise the difference.
Cultural studies shares at least one aspect of its “true nature” with every other intellectual current: its fair share of idiots (and even, perhaps, more than its fair share). These idiots no more “define” post-modernism than the participants of the Children’s Crusade “define” Christianity. Although they both may be said to “exemplify” excesses more specific to the world views and habits of mind conditioned by those systems of thought. In other words, post-modernist idiots are unlikely to behavelike Christian idiots, and vice versa.
Oh, I recognise the difference all right. When you use your examples as the basis for concluding that some other examples are not members of the class then you are seeking to “define” the discipline, not provide an example of it.
Look at it another way: you are suggesting your comment was intended to mean “here is someone I consider to be a proponent of cultural studies” – in which case it was completely irrelevant to the point you were intending to prove – that Lacan et al are not propopents of cultural studies. So on the basis of your new construction of that comment you’re about four posts behind the flow of this argument and will need to explain why the individuals commonly seen as falling under the cultural studies umbrella don’t in fact belong there. It will not be sufficient, in a discussion about whether cultural studies is intellectually vacant, to suggest that they couldn’t possibly represent cultural studies because they’re intellectually vacant. Similarly, giving an example of someone you consider to represent cultural studies will have no probative value either way.
I’ve never mentioned Lacan.
Ergo, I have neither included him in nor excluded him from the ranks of exponents of cultural studies.
P.S., I don’t mind captiousness at all.
Katz, now you’re playing cultural studies with me. Let’s recap:
You imply a factual claim that the victims of Sokal hoax would have discovered his deception and, one presumes, their own errors had he given them time.
I took issue with that and asked you to detail the evidence for it and the mechanism by which it would have occured. I cited Lacan by way of example. I further suggested that the type of errors commited by Lacan and social text were qualatatively different to those you raised by way of analogy.
You only response was to draw a distinction between cultural studies and things done by practioners of cultural studies – which suggests that there is some “essence of cultural studies” theoretically discoverable and that we cannot define a discpline relative to its output as recognised by the relevant interpretive community – and you gave what you now (implicitly) suggest was an irrelevant example of “real” cultural studies, which I took to mean that Lacan et al, which I cited and on which you purported to respond were not “real examples”. So you dismiss Lacan, refuse to discuss him, and counter with your own view of who you will discuss, which is emerging as something of a theme.
I respond that you appear to be defending an idealised version of cultural studies.
You suggest that this is not the case, because you are defending a specific author. However, whether or not this author exists in a concrete form he is not coextensive with cultural studies. He is thus incapable of constituting a defence of cultural studies generally, which was, I had thought, the point of this discussion and certainly the point of my post, to which you were responding.
I suggested that your definition of Cultural Studies is unduly narrow, and you respond that you have not attempted to define cultural studies, merely given me an example of it, and that some examples of a doctrine may be misleading. These two points rather address each other.
I suggested that constantly addressing an example and then asserting that my examples are, for some unspecified reason, either outside the definition of cultural studies or provide a misleading view of it was unhelpful. I challenged you to return to a discussion of cultural studies generally and the extent to which (apparent) widespread intellectual vapidity ought to influence our view of the discipline as a whole.
You responded by saying that you’ve only been talking about one example and therefore I am wrong to characterise your response as relating in any way to the protaganists of the Sokal hoax, with which you opened this discussion. If this is true, then it is a problem with your argument, rather than a source of comfort for you.
Paul, some comments and some admissions:
Katz, now you’re playing cultural studies with me. Let’s recap:
You imply a factual claim that the victims of Sokal hoax would have discovered his deception and, one presumes, their own errors had he given them time.
[Incorrect. I suggested someone MAY have discovered the deception, given time. On the other hand, because so little of substance was a stake in the Sokal article, it may have just sunk into oblivion. Paul commits the fallacy of quibbling.]
I took issue with that and asked you to detail the evidence for it and the mechanism by which it would have occured. I cited Lacan by way of example. I further suggested that the type of errors commited by Lacan and social text were qualatatively different to those you raised by way of analogy.
You only response was to draw a distinction between cultural studies and things done by practioners of cultural studies – which suggests that there is some “essence of cultural studiesâ€? theoretically discoverable and that we cannot define a discpline relative to its output as recognised by the relevant interpretive community – and you gave what you now (implicitly) suggest was an irrelevant example of “realâ€? cultural studies …
[Incorrect. I never used the world “real� in this context. The word I used, or implied was “successful�, meaning intellectually honest or defensible. Paul commits the fallacy of semantical distortion],
… which I took to mean that Lacan et al, which I cited and on which you purported to respond were not “real examplesâ€? …
[Incorrect. This is a repetition of the fallacy of semantical distortion mentioned above.]
So you dismiss Lacan, refuse to discuss him, and counter with your own view of who you will discuss, which is emerging as something of a theme.
[Incorrect. My major interest enunciated in my first post in this thread was post-modernism, of which cultural studies is a subset. I agreed with JQ’s praise of Raymond Williams and suggested that German biblical scholarship (Strauss and Bauer to be explicit) were shining and early examples of post-modernism. Paul commits the converse fallacy of difference.]
I respond that you appear to be defending an idealised version of cultural studies.
You suggest that this is not the case, because you are defending a specific author. However, whether or not this author exists in a concrete form he is not coextensive with cultural studies. He is thus incapable of constituting a defence of cultural studies generally…
[Incorrect. This was never my intention. Paul commits a fallacy of motivation]
…which was, I had thought, the point of this discussion and certainly the point of my post, to which you were responding.
I suggested that your definition of Cultural Studies is unduly narrow, and you respond that you have not attempted to define cultural studies, merely given me an example of it, and that some examples of a doctrine may be misleading. These two points rather address each other.
I suggested that constantly addressing an example and then asserting that my examples are, for some unspecified reason, either outside the definition of cultural studies or provide a misleading view of it was unhelpful. I challenged you to return to a discussion of cultural studies generally and the extent to which (apparent) widespread intellectual vapidity ought to influence our view of the discipline as a whole.
[Not proven. The only alleged vapidity is the aftermath of the Sokal hoax. Paul is in danger of committing the fallacy of generalisation – reliance on the “lonely fact.�]
You responded by saying that you’ve only been talking about one example and therefore I am wrong to characterise your response as relating in any way to the protaganists of the Sokal hoax, with which you opened this discussion.
[Incorrect. My first contribution was about post-modernism in general. I do admit, however, that I erred in citing cultural studies as an example of post-modernism without making my intentions explicit. I committed the fallacy of composition.]
If this is true, then it is a problem with your argument, rather than a source of comfort for you.
[Correct. In my contributions to this thread I allowed the conflation of cultural studies with post-modernism in general to persist too long.]
Katz,
A continued return to “but my first post said…” isn’t going to get us very far. Let’s look at the posts with which I took issue again, since we seem to be in the process of forgetting them:
“Condemning post-modernism on the basis of the Sokal fiasco has the same persuasive power as condemning evolution on the basis of the Piltdown hoax.
Anti-evolutionists had as much fun with Piltdown as some of you folks have had with Sokal.
Nervous laughter is not an uncommon response of people when their sustaining myths are shattering.”
““The hoax was discovered not because the hoaxer revealed it, but because the scientists eventually figured out that it was a fraud.â€?
But it took them 41 years! How long did Sokal give them?
In any case, my argument is that the successful perpetration of a hoax against proponents of a theoretical system is NOT persuasive evidence about the fraudulence or incapacity of that theoretical system.
Moreover, post modernism is the victim, like any other system of thought, of its self-proclaimed disciples.
I suggested above how post-modernism, or any other set of general or axiomatic statements might be refuted.
Further useful discussion about post-modernism might follow those lines if the crime of nit-pickery is to be avoided.”
With that in mind, let’s go through your responses:
On the issue of discovery, which was the prime question raised in my first post:
“I said might, not would have”. No further effort is made to support this assertion. Clearly, this is a part of the discussion with which you are uncomfortable but unwilling to concede – and you have the hide to accuse me of quibbling. As a further note, the significance of the hoax is at issue in this argument, so assuming that it is insignificant in order to defend your case is impermissible.
On the issue of your attempting to define the examples exposed by Sokal out of the debate:
“I have been taken out of context” – which is niether a novel nor a persuasive defence. Let’s reestablish the context:
““real examplesâ€? of the axioms of cultural studies, which is a subset of a “post modernâ€? trend in humanities and social sciences, include the proposition that there is no master or transcendent text against which everything can be compared for “valueâ€?.”
Now, I had cited some examples of axioms urged by cultural studies practicioners. In order to be saying anything relevant about my claims that these reduce CS’s claim to intellectual legitimacy, your claim to have discovered “real examples” of its axioms necessarily implies:
a) that there are “not real” examples of its axioms; and
b) that the examples identified by me in the preceding post were said “not real” examples.
As a general guide, and hopefully to forestall another round of snappy one liners, I’m going to hold each individual claim you make during this argument to the standard of its being relevant to refute the claim to which it responds. To the extent that you are throwing out non-sequiters about some cultural studies which you like you will need to be explicit about that decision in order to establish it as the governing context for your statements.
You suggest in the alternative that you meant “real” in the sense of “good” – in which case I invite you to join our debate, which relates to the quality of cultural studies as a whole. To the extent you felt that a valid response to a list of cultural studies’ flawed outputs was to say “I have some, in fact only one example, of good cultural studies” then you chose to respond to a post, the content of which you were incapable of disagreeing with.
On your failure to address my examples:
“I was talking only about Raymond Williams” Yet you failed to mention him in either of the posts to which I responded, nor did you explicitly limit your comments in such a fashion, nor would they have been relevant if so limited. Rather, you chose to engage in a discussion on another topic entirely and have since been engaged in a retreat while squirting out clouds of ink to cover you as you flee.
On attempting to defend a single example of cultural studies:
“No I didn’t” This is yet another example of where providing some information on your actual motivation would move things forward. In this particular exchange, I suggested you defended an idealised form of cultural studies. You replied that you did not, you defended Raymond Williams. This leaves open two possibilities, which I have to enumerate in full because you seem to view a snappy one liner as a substitute for explaining yourself:
a) You believed that by defending Williams you defended cultural studies to someone not criticising Williams. You explicitly reject this conclusion.
b) You did not believe that a defence of Williams constituted a defence of cultural studies. In which case, again, while your apparent non-sequiters are delightful, they might be better flagged as such, so people do not mistakenly believe you to be participating in a discussion.
On defending cultural studies by reference to a single example while refusing to address other examples:
No response except, hysterically, to accuse me of reliance on “lonely fact”. Adopting a simple numerical approach, my reliance on Sokal’s book and your morbid Raymond Williams obsession makes me approximately one fifteenth as reliant on “lonely fact” as you.
On the contradiction of relying on a single example while warning that individual examples can give a skewed impression:
No response
On my challenge to address and defend cultural studies generally:
“You have not proven that cultural studies is vapid”. This is indeed the case, and is an important element of our (purely notional) ongoing discussion. It does, however, rather misconceive your intend role in said argument, which is not, you may be surprised to learn, as an adjudicator. You are intended to offer argument to the contrary, some of which, with luck, will not rely exclusively on the work of Raymond Williams.
On whether your response does or should relate to the Sokal hoax:
“I was only talking about Raymond Williams” As a look at the posts to which I responded will reveal, this is not true. Were it true, it would neatly underline the problem with your contributions to date. I have no problem at all with your decision to restrict yourself to a single issue on which you feel yourself to have expertise. In future however, this decision will need to be made before, not after, you enter into discussion on different subjects entirely.
Let’s reframe the debate:
1) I assert with some certainty that the victims of Sokal would not have “discovered” the hoax, and that this is revealed most clearly in their response to its revelation. This is an arguable question of fact, and does not relate to Raymond Williams.
2) I assert, as a matter of fact, that a large portion of the modern CS output is tainted by Sokal’s observations, either directly, by having their work demonstrated as nonsense indistinguishable from the hoax itself, or as being complicit in praising the charlatans, failing to speak out against or detect their distortions or attacking the messenger who brought them the bad news about their contemporaries. To the exent that you are able to demonstrate tha Raymond Williams falls in none of these categories then he will count on the other side of the ledger, but he is not otherwise significant to this limb of my claim.
3) There is a special intellectual sin associated with the kind of practices which Sokal exposed, relative to the run of the mill hoax. This, I assert, is that the behaviour of social text and Lacan et al demostrates a consciousness that the work they publish is not intended to mean anything. This, I believe, suggests something about the values of the discipline. No Williams here I’m afraid, unless he has written explicitly on this question.
4) I believe that the discipline of cultural studies either ought not to be, or is not usefully on for my part, assessed as the sum of its useful insights when it is practiced at its best. Rather, I wish to assess it as an academic endeavour, and propose to do so by measuring the average quality of those who study it and the work they produce. Like cultural studies practicioners themselves, I view the work done by people who are called cultural studies practicioners to usefully described as “cultural studies” for this purpose. To the extent exclusions are to be made, this will be on the basis of academic credit given to work within the interpretive community. Obviously bad cultural studies will not be defined out solely because it is bad, nor will favourite academics be given extra weight regardless of how often they are mentioned. This will be a difficult balancing exercise, and it will be necessary to weigh the good against the bad. To the extent that the work produced by Raymond Williams offsets some of the more egregious tosh churned out by Lacan et al then he counts on the positive side of the ledger.