Cultural Studies

Author(s): John Beverley

Source: Latin American Literary Review , Jul. - Dec., 1992, Vol. 20, No. 40 (Jul. - Dec.,
1992), pp. 19-22
Published by: Latin American Literary Review

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20119618

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Latin American Literary Review is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Latin American Literary Review

This content downloaded from

223.176.9.195 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 20:09:31 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 CULTURAL STUDIES

JOHN BEVERLEY

Hern?n Vidal has observed that Latin American literary criticism "finds
itself in a crucial moment of its history; the tradition of canonizing and
privileging certain texts of official high culture as fundamental instruments in
the creation of national identities has no meaning before the effects of a
transnational culture industry. Faced with this, the only road for renewal is for
this criticism to constitute and recognize itself as a Latin American form of
cultural studies." * Similar pressures are evident on the social sciences side of
Latin American studies, increasingly concerned with problems of identity and
subjectivity, deterritorialization, multiple social logics, new social movements,
critiques of modernization and development paradigms and of their anchoring
in positivist epistemologies, interfaces with advanced literary theory, etc. The
recent work of figures like Vidal himself, Nestor Garc?a Canclini, Jos? Joaqu?n
Brunner, Nelly Richard, Jes?s Mart?n Barbero, Carlos Monsivais, Beatriz Sarlo,
Roberto Schwarz, John Rowe and Vivian Schelling, Michael Taussig, and the
Latin American Subaltern Studies Group constitutes something like an initial
corpus of this emerging field of Latin American Cultural Studies, The Rockefeller
Foundation is planning an international congress of Latin American practitio
ners of Cultural Studies in Mexico City in 1993.2
If we are heading in the direction of Cultural Studies, however, we should
bear in mind some dangers that may lie along the road. In spite of its character
istic appeal to the local and everyday, ?o petites histoires instead ofgrands r?cits,
there is a kind of aesthetic utopianism in the celebration of popular culture or
mass culture that has been a central strand of Cultural Studies from Thompson's
The Making of the English Working Class to the current idealization of Madonna
as a poststructuralist heroine. There is the danger that such a celebration (which
I have both shared and protagonized)3 may involve simply a new variation of the
ideology of the literarature it purports to critique, via the displacement of a
modernist program from the sphere of high culture to the popular, now seen as
more aesthetically dynamic and effective, as if the shift from high to low
involved something like the Formalist principle of estrangement or ostranenie.4
Cultural Studies was in part the consequence of the deconstructive impact
of mass culture itself in the human sciences. But to the extent that mass or popular

This content downloaded from

223.176.9.195 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 20:09:31 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
20 Latin American Literary Review

culture can be re-aestheticized, as a sort of "supplement" to economic

transnationalization, it is possible for the humanities and social sciences to
regroup around their disciplinary specificities, against the threat that Cultural
Studies was going to usurp their territory or blur its frontiers. The fact/value
distinction, which previously regulated the separation of the humanities from the
sciences and which it was the main challenge of "theory" to weaken, can now
be reinscribed within Cultural Studies itself. In such an articulation of the field,
the relation between humanities and social and natural sciences becomes
dialogical, in the sense that they both can "speak to" and "learn from" each other.
But the point of Cultural Studies was not so much to create a dialogue between
disciplines as to challenge the integrity of disciplinary boundaries per se,
"infiltrating" into them?the metaphor is Gayatri Spivak 's?a trans-(rather than
inter-) disciplinary practice, whose models included new forms of Marxism,
feminism, structuralism and poststructuralism, and deconstruction.5
While in its inception, particularly in the work of the Birmingham School
and of figures like Fanon or Foucault, Cultural Studies seemed precisely the
pedagogic embodiment of cultural materialism and radicalism, its rapid institu
tionalization (along with a multicultural curriculum) in the United States,
suggests that it may have become more or less compatible with a revision of the
forms of academic knowledge in and around the humanities demanded by the
present stage of capitalism, however one chooses to characterize it. It seems
clear now that the MLA-style "liberals" like Stanley Fish, Catherine Stimpson
or Henry Gates have in fact won the debate with the New Right over the future
of the humanities in the North American university, and that multiculturalism
and Cultural Studies are being prepared as the places for a redefinition of
educational curricula and disciplinary structures in the coming period.
This suggests that the axis of ideological struggle is shifting in the academy
from the opposition of a broad center-left coalition to the New Right offensive
in higher education (in the U.S. the form of this has been Teachers for a
Democratic University) to emerging conflicts between the components ofthat
coalition itself about who will define the future of projects like Cultural Studies.
The conversion of Cultural Studies from a form of academic radicalism?
a "postmodernism of resistance," if you will?to the avant garde of bourgeois
hegemony will be driven by three major concerns: 1) making Cultural Studies
acceptable to faculty, administrators, and trustees rather than to students
(whereas Cultural Studies in its inception aimed to liberate students from
disciplinary requirements by allowing them to vote with their feet, so to speak,
in elaborating their own research projects); 2) diluting its potential to become a
form of ideological-epistemological agency of the social groups and movements
outside the university whose subalternity it is precisely concerned with theoriz
ing; and, 3) keeping Cultural Studies from impinging too strongly on the Natural
Sciences and the sphere of technology and the professional schools (Education,
Law, Business, Medicine, International Administration and area studies), where
its consequences?given the foundation of these schools in various forms of

This content downloaded from

223.176.9.195 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 20:09:31 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Cultural Studies 21

usually unquestioned and often vulgar positivism?would be dramatic.

The key moves in this direction will be to detach Cultural Studies from its
connection to discourses like Marxism, feminism and the more oppositional
forms of poststructuralism that imply both the inadequacy of existing forms of
academic disciplinarity and the need for structural transformation of the existing
social relations. The code words of this project will be "pluralism" and
"interdisciplinarity," but the underlying effect will be depoliticization.6
This is in fact more or less what, after seven years of successful operation,
has happened to the graduate program in Cultural Studies that I was involved in
forming at the University of Pittsburgh. Admittedly, that experience (which
involved very specific local factors and personalities) colors my vision. I
understand that for many of you the problem is how to get a Cultural Studies
perspective in your departments or programs in the first place. Nevertheless, I
believe that even as the struggle to institutionalize Cultural Studies is still going
on at many places, the likelihood is that it will be naturalized in the curriculum
as something like an epistemological (and elite) "Faculty Club," rather than as
a way of carrying into the academy issues of decolonization, subalternity, anti
racism, women's liberation and the like that vitally concern us as Latin
Americanists. This means that instead of seeing Cultural Studies as an automatic
solution to the problems of reforming knowledge, we must begin to subject it to
the same kind of critique we have levelled against the limits of our disciplines.
I believe it is still worth making the struggle for (and in) Cultural Studies,
but just at the moment when its presence in the contemporary university seems
assured in both North and South America, Cultural Studies has begun to lose the
radicalizing force that accompanied its emergence as a field.

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH

NOTES

1 Hern?n Vidal, "Postmodernism, Post-leftism andNeo-vanguardism: The Case

of Chile's Revista de Cr?tica Cultural," forthcoming in J. Beverley and J. Oviedo, eds.
The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America, a special issue of boundary 2 (Spring,
1993).
2 One factor in this development was undoubtedly the powerful impact on Latin
American studies of poststructuralist theory in the late seventies and eighties. But Latin
America has been a pioneer as well as a follower in the area of Cultural Studies. The
nineteenth century "national essay" a la Sarmiento or Mart? was already an incipient
form of Cultural Studies discourse, and it has been seconded by the work in a modernist
vein of figures like Fernando Ortiz, Octavio Paz, Ezekiel Mart?nez Estrada, Mariategui,
etc.
3 See e.g. "La ideolog?a de la m?sica postmoderna y la pol?tica de izquierda,"
Nuevo Texto Cr?tico 6 (1991) m?Revista de Cr?tica Cultural 7 (1992); and"'By Lacan':
Pol?tica cultural y crisis del marxismo en las Americas," Atoevo Texto Cr?tico 8-9 (1992).
4 Lyotard himself has often noted that aesthetic postmodernism in its desire to be
ruptural and "new" is an extension of the very modernist ideology that it supposedly

This content downloaded from

223.176.9.195 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 20:09:31 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 22 Latin American Literary Review

displaces. One example is the tendency in certain forms of postcolonial discourse?I am

thinking of Homi Bhabha in particular?to make what is in effect a modernist aesthetic
program the locus of "oppositional" political-cultural agency. I am more sympathetic to
Michael Taussig's appropriation of Walter Benjamin's aesthetics in his studies of Latin
American shamanism, but I think it involves a similar problem. Any number of essays
in the new canonic Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and
Paula Treichler (New York and London: Routledge, 1992) illustrate the persistence of
vanguardism in what seems nominally a populist discourse of decanonization and
multiculturalism.
5 "Both varidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity models (like political pluralism)
are modes of eclecticism?forms of (acknowledgement" accumulating knowledge
without having to confront the ideology of the production of knowledge.
Transdisciplinarity, on the other hand, is as aware of the status of knowledge as of the
modes of the ideological construction of reality in any given discipline and thus through
its self-reflexivity attempts not simply to accumulate knowledge but to ask what
constitutes knowledge, why and how and by whose authority certain modes of under
standing are certified as knowledge_Transdisciplinarity is a '/ra^ygressive' space in
which configurations of knowledges are displayed as ultimately power-related." Mas' ud
Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton, "Theory Pedagogy Politics: The Crisis of 'The S ubject'
in the Humanities," boundary 2 15,1-2 (1986/87). They credit this distinction in turn to
Teresa Ebert.
6 Stuart Hall puts his finger on what I think is the main problem that is entailed in
the "interdisciplinary" institutionalization of Cultural Studies. Admitting that even as
coherent a model of Cultural Studies as the practice of the Birmingham School was
constructed out of radically different conjunctures, concerns, methodologies, and
theoretical positions (which would then seem to suggest that the organization of the field
must an "open-ended" one), he asks:
(D)oes it follow that cultural studies is not a policed disciplinary area? That
it is whatever people do, if they choose to call or locate themselves within
the project and practice of cultural studies? I am not happy with that
formulation either. Although cultural studies as a project is open-ended, it
can't be simply pluralist in that way. Yes, it refuses to be a master discourse
or a meta-discourse of any kind. Yes, it is a project that is always open to
that which it doesn't yet know, to that which it can't yet name. But it does
have some will to connect; it does have some stake in the choices it makes.
It does matter whether cultural studies is this or that. It can't be just any old
thing which chooses to march under a particular banner. It is a serious
enterprise, or project, and that is inscribed in what is sometimes called the
"political" aspect of cultural studies.
Stuart Hall, "Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies," in op cit Cultural Studies,
p. 278.

This content downloaded from

223.176.9.195 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 20:09:31 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms