Michael Bérubé on Cultural Studies (hat tip: Bill Benson):
(...) cultural studies now means everything and nothing; it has
effectively been conflated with "cultural criticism" in general, and
associated with a cheery "Pop culture is fun! " approach. Anybody
writing about The Bachelor or American Idol is
generally understood to be "doing" cultural studies, especially by his
or her colleagues elsewhere in the university. In a recent interview,
Stuart Hall, a former director of the Birmingham Centre and still the
most influential figure in cultural studies, gave a weary response to
this development, one that speaks for itself: "I really cannot read
another cultural-studies analysis of Madonna or The Sopranos."
Finally, cultural studies has had negligible impact on the American academic left in a political sense. (I make this argument at greater length in my forthcoming book, The Left at War.) That is because much of the American academic left continues to subscribe to the "manufacturing consent" model, in which people are led to misidentify their real interests by the machinations of the corporate mass media. The point to be made in response is not that corporate mass media don't dupe people; on the contrary, they do it every day. The point, rather, is that work like Hall's on the ideological underpinnings of deregulation and privatization under Thatcher (which he called "authoritarian populism") shows that the situation is much more complicated than that propaganda model. The left's task would actually be easier if all it had to do was expose lies as lies. Instead, you have to do a great deal of groundwork in civil society to try to forge an egalitarian response.
Finally, cultural studies has had negligible impact on the American academic left in a political sense. (I make this argument at greater length in my forthcoming book, The Left at War.) That is because much of the American academic left continues to subscribe to the "manufacturing consent" model, in which people are led to misidentify their real interests by the machinations of the corporate mass media. The point to be made in response is not that corporate mass media don't dupe people; on the contrary, they do it every day. The point, rather, is that work like Hall's on the ideological underpinnings of deregulation and privatization under Thatcher (which he called "authoritarian populism") shows that the situation is much more complicated than that propaganda model. The left's task would actually be easier if all it had to do was expose lies as lies. Instead, you have to do a great deal of groundwork in civil society to try to forge an egalitarian response.
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