On cultural studies,again

What is cultural studies?

What and where is cultural studies today? What is it becoming? What should or could it become? What is its meaning? What is at stake as we assess the ongoing development and maturation of cultural studies as field? The International Journal of Cultural Studies is soliciting provocative answers to these and related questions, from a range of scholars internationally. We will publish their responses as an ongoing series, across multiple issues.

What/how/where is cultural studies as we enter the third decade of the 21st century? Or what/how/where should it be? This is not the first time I have been asked to respond to such questions about the state of play of cultural studies – far from it. Since the 1990s I have been instigated to write quite a few papers which attempt to answer these questions (see e.g. Ang, 1998, 2005, 2013): cultural studies seems to invite constant self-reflection among its practitioners, arguably a sign of the persistent insecurity surrounding the endeavour we have come to call ‘cultural studies’. So what more can I say?

In much self-reflective writing about this thing called cultural studies, it appears as an object of love, something to be nurtured and cared for, protected not just from hostile external attacks (that is, from people who for various reasons are against cultural studies), but also from what some see as internal deviances (that is, people who, for various reasons, are supposedly not doing cultural studies in the right way). I may sound like a grumpy old woman, but I am quite tired of such discursive skirmishes surrounding what is or is not ‘real’, ‘true’ or ‘correct’ cultural studies. Such debates tend to consider cultural studies as the production of a politically engaged regime of truth, a disembodied intellectual pursuit often tinged with a kind of idealism that disregards (or downplays) its own institutional and material conditions of possibility. Precisely because I am a grumpy old woman (but one with experience), I will argue later that it is exactly those institutional and material conditions of possibility that are crucial in the struggle for cultural studies’ existence as a distinct intellectual field.

But first, let me stress that I ‘love’ cultural studies because it has always been very good to me. It was good to me because it was, from the 1980s onwards, an identity vehicle that allowed me to pursue the transdisciplinary, eclectic, and sometimes transgressive kind of work that I had wanted to do, whether it was Watching Dallas, On Not Speaking Chinese or, on a different, more institutional plane, the collaborative and engaged work that I have promoted at the Institute for Culture and Society in the past twenty years. The cultural studies label suits me because my intellectual approach to things tends to embrace what can be described as the cultural studies sensibility, as developed by Stuart Hall and his colleagues in Birmingham. (Many authors around the world have protested that Birmingham wasn’t the singular origin place of cultural studies, and that saying so was virtually an imperialist act, but there’s no doubt that Hall’s intellectual charisma has been decisive in facilitating the global proliferation of cultural studies as a distinct pursuit.) This sensibility is defined by a particular understanding of how we can best ‘know’ culture and the world: that the world operates through the intricate entanglements of active meaning-making and power relations; that ‘culture’ is an ongoing social process through which whole ways of life are constructed and reconstructed; that we can only understand ‘what’s going on’ by analysing practices in their complex contexts, and so on. As diverse as my own work has been in terms of empirical focus – from popular television to media audiences to the politics of diaspora and ethnicity to public art to urban development to public diplomacy – in terms of conceptual framework it has always been implicitly guided by such broad epistemological premises. Indeed, over the course of my career I have felt free to smoothly engage myself with such diverse topics while still legitimately calling myself a ‘cultural studies scholar’, precisely because the cultural studies sensibility (or its intellectual habitus) embraces such generic, overarching premises about how to know culture and the world.

Unlike, say, media and communications, another newish academic field which has considerable overlaps with cultural studies, the latter does not claim to specialize itself in a circumscribed object of study. Instead, cultural studies scholarship can roam across the whole landscape of the contemporary world, focusing on any particular issue or topic deemed relevant at a given time and place. Indeed, cultural studies is ‘a kind of specialism of non-specialty’, in the words of Birmingham veteran Richard Johnson (Johnson et al., 2004: 23). In cultural studies, ‘culture’ (or rather, ‘the cultural’) is not a distinct object of study, but functions as an ‘inexhaustible, fluid and sprawling category’, the terrain for multiple and endlessly proliferating and changing sites of struggle over signification. Cultural studies, as I have elaborated elsewhere (Ang, 2008), is an ‘inter-discipline’, interested in any cultural practices where contestation and negotiation over meaning is at stake. This is a very broad and general ambit, so much so that we often hear the complaint that cultural studies can be about ‘everything’ and, as such, doesn’t have a clear identity.

Of course, this lack of fixed topical boundaries is precisely what makes cultural studies a potentially agile practice of inquiry, able to engage itself with new phenomena as they emerge on the world landscape. In this regard, some leaders in the field have argued that the defining characteristic of cultural studies is ‘conjunctural analysis’, described recently by Jeremy Gilbert (2019: 6) as ‘the analysis of convergent and divergent tendencies shaping the totality of power relations within a given social field during a particular period of time’. This is an apt description, and it underscores the openness of cultural studies to any new issues on the horizon, making the field, in Gilbert’s (2019: 6) words, ‘a notoriously unstable field of inquiry’. But I would suggest that this instability and lack of a clear identity, underpinned by the sensibility of openness to ‘everything’ that might bear a relation to understanding the current ‘conjuncture’, also causes problems for cultural studies, and increasingly so.

For Gilbert, cultural studies might be ‘best understood as a species of political sociology’ (2019: 6): this is what conjunctural analysis amounts to, in line with the idea that the focus of cultural studies is on ‘sites of struggle’. But if this is so, it might not be so understood by many. As Gilbert himself observes:

A reader who was unfamiliar with that field may well then ask why exactly the name ‘cultural studies’ should be the one adopted to name it, given the repeated claims of its advocates that what it really amounts to is a form of political analysis (albeit one that includes an expanded conception of ‘the political’). (Gilbert, 2019: 6–7)

And yes, given the generalised, but at the same time rather specific – that is, politicised – notion of ‘culture’ or ‘the cultural’ implicit in the cultural studies sensibility, it tends to be very hard to explain to outsiders what cultural studies actually involves. I have tried to respond to enquiries about this many times, generally without success: almost invariably, common sense understandings of ‘cultures’ get in the way (‘Which culture are you studying?’). This is a problem, described by Paul McEwan (2002) some time ago in this journal as the problem of cultural studies’ lack of visibility. He argued that cultural studies was ‘in danger of becoming a discipline for insiders, for those already “in the know” and those who stumble across it’ (McEwan, 2002: 427). In this regard, McEwan (2002) described cultural studies as a ‘hidden discipline’. Similarly and more recently, Andrew Hickey, Kelly McWilliam and Sally Hourigan (2019), in their analysis of undergraduate programs in cultural studies in Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa, diagnosed that there is a ‘“failure of presence” of Cultural Studies in wider public perception’ (Hickey et al., 2019: 405). In other words, there is widespread ignorance or incomprehension of what cultural studies stands for.

In my view, this is increasingly a problem, now that the first generation of cultural studies scholars – who are most likely to be ‘in the know’ about cultural studies’ origins and who may have greatest loyalty to cultural studies as a distinct endeavour – have started to retire (and I consider myself part of this generation . . .). Younger generations of scholars may have far less affective ‘love’ for the field, seeing their attachment to it in more pragmatic or provisional terms. Moreover, as we are now almost half a century from the early days of cultural studies’ emergence, in Birmingham and elsewhere, the world has irrevocably changed. So, if ‘conjunctural analysis’ is what cultural studies does, then it is clear that the key issues we face today, at the present conjuncture, are quite different from the ones preoccupying the social field in the last few decades of the 20th century, when the cultural studies toolkit of theories and methods was primarily developed. To simplify, I think it would be fair to say that, in that period, the politics of race, gender and sexuality (and to a lesser extent, class) were the defining terrains within which cultural power relations were struggled over. These were struggles over identity, representation, popular culture, and the social relations and subjectivities they uphold or contest. A lot of cultural studies work has focused on these issues over the decades, and of course, they have not gone away. On the contrary, the me-too movement, the growth of LGBTQI activism, and the persistence of racial injustice are testimony of the fact that these issues remain entrenched as important sites of struggle within the social field today. At the same time, however, we now live in a world where some other, major sites of struggle have come to dominate our ways of life, related to quite disparate but massively world-changing issues such as climate change, the rise of China, and technological transformation. So where does this leave cultural studies? Does cultural studies have the wherewithal to respond to this radically changed conjuncture?

To be sure, a growing number of scholars have begun to address new challenges such as climate change or the environmental crisis as sites of social struggle in their work, but much of this work is not seen as part of cultural studies. Instead it tends to be categorized under newer labels such as ‘science and technology studies’ or ‘environmental humanities’. One reason may be, as Canadian cultural studies scholar Jody Berland (2006) once observed, that issues of nature and the environment exceed the field’s prevailing theoretical concerns with identity and representation: indeed, such issues expose the very limits of cultural studies’ foundational understanding (that is, its paradigmatic sensibility) of ‘culture’ and ‘the cultural’ as constitutive of social life. Other epochal developments, such as the rise of China, foreground unprecedented geopolitical challenges on a global scale that have never been part of the focal concerns of cultural studies. Nevertheless, one could argue that a new scholarly movement such as ‘Sinophone studies’, initiated by UCLA scholar Shumei Shih (2011), is a critical intellectual response to China’s growing global power that is energized by a cultural studies frame of thinking, without any of the participants identifying as cultural studies scholars. In short, although it is questionable to what extent cultural studies as a field can actually ‘move with the times’, as it were, there is no doubt that much significant work across the humanities and social sciences today draws on cultural studies insights to address emerging social sites of struggle, without being named as such. Here, cultural studies operates as a hidden discipline indeed!

In my 2008 overview essay on cultural studies, I remarked that the development of cultural studies has displayed a double movement of both expansion and dispersal (Ang, 2008: 243). That is, while a lot of the cultural studies sensibility has actually influenced many younger scholars working in a range of other, more conventional disciplines (sociology, anthropology, geography, history, area studies . . .), what is explicitly recognized as cultural studies work is being hollowed out by the blossoming of a disorganized array of discrete, yet overlapping specialisms such as – to name but a few – queer studies, trauma studies, disability studies, food studies, as well as, of course, media and communications, science and technology studies and Sinophone studies, etc., etc. This bewildering proliferation of new ‘fields’ has taken place in a context where the conventional disciplines are still powerful institutional building blocks in the academy, at the same times as ‘each discipline is always already infiltrated by some other discipline(s)’ (Leitch, 2003: 170). It is in this complicated context of what Leitch (2003) calls ‘postmodern (inter)disciplinarity’ that cultural studies would need to secure a space for itself – make itself visible – if it wishes to continue to exist as a distinct, recognizable (inter)discipline. This is especially important in the current, neoliberal regime of research quality audits, university and subject rankings, and competitive student recruitment: here visibility and presence are crucial.

Hickey et al. (2019) argue that to overcome what they call its ‘image problem’, there needs to be much greater clarity about what cultural studies represents as a ‘brand’. In this regard, they see it as imperative to generate ‘a wider sense of the presence and purpose of Cultural Studies’ (2019: 419). I agree, although – as I have sketched in this article – this is easier said than done, given the paradoxical situation that cultural studies, as it is actually exists, is both an expansive and a dispersed assemblage of discourses and practices, a profoundly unstable, heterogeneous field of inquiry where ‘conjunctural analysis’ can take on different shapes in widely diverse contexts. What, then, can be the ‘unifying’ element that can be said to bring cultural studies, in all its heterogeneity, together as a distinct, ‘brandable’ discipline?

I myself have proposed that the distinctiveness of cultural studies – its virtual object, as it were – be described as serious engagement with cultural complexity: ‘Whatever theme is addressed, the cultural studies analyst’s penchant is to emphasize the context-specific, multidimensional, and contingent, in short, complex nature of the subject matter, and a corresponding effort to represent and do justice to that complexity’ (Ang, 2008: 207–8). The point of this endeavour is not just intellectual, but broadly political: ‘cultural studies grapples with cultural complexity to advance more effective ways of seeing and intervening in the world’ (Ang, 2008: 208); that is, the purpose is to provide tools and resources to better navigate cultural complexity (Ang, 2011). Whether or not such a demarcation of the field works, is up for debate. Crucially for me, however, it was the institutional context in which I worked that made me attempt to formulate this overarching definition for the field. As a designated Professor of Cultural Studies at Western Sydney University, I had the task to create a research centre that would be supported by the university leadership, bring a diverse range of colleagues together under one umbrella, and get traction from varying constituents (or ‘partners’) outside the university. This became, in the early 2000s, the Centre for Cultural Research, which in 2012 was upgraded to become the Institute for Culture and Society (for an early account, see Ang, 2006). While the institute is now an entity that hosts a very broad range of activities, research foci, and disciplinary specialisms – so much so that it is sometimes difficult to see how everything and everyone belongs – I would argue that it is the cultural studies sensibility, and a broad commitment to serious engagement with cultural complexity, that ultimately provides the intellectual glue for this institutional community.

In his own reflections on the state of play of cultural studies, Swedish cultural studies scholar Johan Fornäs (2020) has remarked that: ‘All disciplines are historical constructions that are often internally very heterogeneous, merely held together by a shared history and a set of institutional arrangements.’ This is a critical statement, and it brings home the crucial importance of the hard work required to create the institutional and material conditions within which cultural studies work can be pursued. For me, it has meant becoming part of ‘management’ – all too often dismissed by academics as a hindrance to their ‘real’ intellectual interests – and helping to tweak the university’s orientations in such a way that the institutional environment is hospitable to cultural studies work. It is beyond doubt that this institutional politics is frequently boring and time-consuming, requiring careful diplomacy and strategic manoeuvering – things to make one grumpy indeed. But as I am moving closer to the end of my career, I have felt it was the most important thing I could do. Others have done institutional work through the development of teaching programs, as well as editing journals, organising conferences, running professional associations, and so on. This is perhaps the real hidden work behind the discipline, but without it cultural studies would not be able to exist.