'Postmodern Cultural Studies Essay\r'

' pagan Studies and the Academy 1. Cultural studies in the academies of the forward-looking capitalist countries has transformed the object glass of studies in the human beingsities. In particular, in English departments, ethnic studies has ch solelyenged the predominance of the politics categories of literary studies (the â€Å" hind endon,” the homogeneous â€Å"period,” the formal properties of genre, the literary object as autonomous and self-contained) in the interest of producing â€Å"readings” of all texts of ending and inquiring into the reproduction of subjectivities.\r\nTo this end, pressure has been fit(p) on disciplinal boundaries, the methods which police these boundaries, and systems of interpretation and revue work been developed which bring, for example, â€Å"economics” and â€Å"politics” to exculpate on the formal properties of texts. In addition, the lines between â€Å" spirited culture” and â€Å"mass cult ure” have been relativized, fashioning it manageable to address texts in terms of their societal effectivity rather than their â€Å"inherent” literary, philosophical or other values. 2.\r\nThe two most significant categories which have indorseed these institutional changes have been â€Å"ideology” and â€Å" system. ” Althusserian and post-althusserian understandings of ideology, which be ideology not in terms of a system of ideas or â€Å"world view” exactly in terms of the production of subjects who recognize the animate loving world as the only possible and â€Å"reasonable” one, made possible the reading of texts in terms of the slipway in which the workings of ideology determined their structure and uses.\r\nMarxist and post-structuralist theories, meanwhile, focused searing attention on the conditions of porta of discourses, and upon the exclusions and inclusions which enable their articulation. In both cases, critique beco mes possible insofar as reading is directed at uncovering the â€Å" hidden” possibilities of understanding which are suppressed as a condition of the text’s intelligibility. 3. I support these efforts to transform the humanities into a target of ultural critique. I get out argue that what is at stake in these changes is the uses of pedagogical institutions and practices in tardy capitalist society. If pedagogy is still, as I would argue it should be, as the hitch into the reproduction of subjectivities, and so the outcome of struggles over â€Å"culture” and â€Å" ethnic studies” will determine whether or not the Humanities will become a site at which the production of oppositional subjectivities is made possible.\r\nHistorically, the Humanities has been a site at which the contradictions of the subjectivities required by late capitalist culture have been addressed and â€Å"managed. ” For example, the interchange concepts of post-World War Two literary criticism, such as â€Å"irony,” have the function of reducing contradictions to the â€Å"complexity” and â€Å"irrationality” of â€Å"reality,” thereby reconciling subjects to those contradictions. 4. However, these recent changes in the honorary society have been very partial derivative and contradictory.\r\nThey have been partial in the sense that much of the older or â€Å"traditional” modes of literary studies have remained untouched by these developments, or have only made many slight â€Å"accommodations” to them. They have also been contradictory in the sense that cultural studies has accommodated itself to existing practices, by producing impudently modes of fetishizing texts and preserving conservative modes of subjectivity. In this way, cultural studies continues to advance the ideological function of the upstart Humanities in a changed social surroundings. . The right wing attacks these changes, chargingà ¢â‚¬as in the ongoing â€Å"PC” scareâ€that the Humanities are abandoning their commitment to objectivity and the universal values of occidental culture. My argument is that these commitments and values have been undermined by social developments which have socialized subjects in new ways while concentrating global socio-economic power within an ever-shrinking consider of transnational corporations.\r\nThe intellectual and political tendencies coordinated by cultural studies, then, are responding to these transformations by allowing academic handicraft to go on as usual, and providing updated and therefore more than than useful modes of legitimation for capitalist society. 6. The contradictions of these changes in the mode of knowledge production sine qua non to be understood within the framework of the needs of the late capitalist social order.\r\nThe emergence of â€Å"theory” and (post)Althusserian understandings of ideology reflected and contributed pote ntly to the undermining of innocent secular humanism (in both its â€Å"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 innovative capitalist â€Å"heartlands,” revealed a deep crisis in sanction and hegemony in late capitalist society.\r\nThis discrediting also revealed the need for new ideologies of legitimation, free from what could now be seen as the â€Å"naivete” of liberal humanist universalism, now astray 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 â€Å"cultural studies” have, then, participated both in the attack on liberal understandings and in the development of new discourses of legitimation.\r\nThe liberal humanism predom inant in the academy has increasingly been seen as illegitimate because it depends upon an outmoded notion of private unmarriedity-that is, the modern notion of the immediacy with which the privileged text is dig by the knowing subject. In this understanding, literature is understood in opposition to science and technology, as a site where what is essential to our â€Å"human nature” can be preserved or recovered in the face of a social reality where this â€Å"human essence” (â€Å"freedom”) is perpetually at risk.\r\nHowever, the more â€Å"scientific” methods (like semiology) which have undermined the hegemony of â€Å"new criticism” in the American academy, largely through the use of modes of compend 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 gen res) and protecting an empiricist notion of textuality. 8.\r\nCultural studies, then, is the result of the combination of the introduction of â€Å"theory” and the â€Å"politicization” of theory enabled by these social and institutional changes. However, the postmodern infraction on â€Å"master narratives” (â€Å"theory”) has responded to the discrediting of both structural anthropology and Marxism in a conservative political environment by redefining â€Å"politics” to mean the resistance of the individual subject to modes of domination located in the discursive and disciplinary forms which constitute the subject.\r\nThis 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 description or â€Å"redescription” replaces news report as the purpose of theoretical investigations. I will argue that the set of discourses which have â€Å" congealed” into what I\r\n'