Date: Thu, 1 Jan 1998 16:43:28 -0500 (EST)
From: Howard Hastings <hhasting-AT-osf1.gmu.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Cultural Studies


On Thu, 1 Jan 1998, Stirling Newberry wrote:

> At 4:09 PM -0500 12/31/97, Howard Hastings wrote:
> >I find it interesting that what started this thread was a post
> >by Greg Downing on the problem of tone in list debates. I responded
> 
> Whine, bitch, moan.
> 
> You are the one going around accusing me of beign unthinking just for
> disagreeing with you. Now you are complaining about tone only because you
> aren't able to expel from the department people who don't agree with you.

I responded to some questions from Walter O. about cultural studies.
You responded by dismissing CS as a religion (apparently misunderstanding
the issue Walter and I were discussing) and writing a parody of it.
My respone to Paul Stone received a similar one line "sneer" from you,
followed by a post in which you accused me of sneering and smearing. 

When I urge you to accompany your accusations with a little demonstration,
you complain I am "the one going around accusing [you] of being unthinking
just for disagreeing with you." 

When I complained about your tone, I offered passages from your own post
to support my claims. In the same post, I pointed out that   I am having
great difficulty in getting you to respond in kind.  

Also, I have pointed out that because CS questions whether it is possible
to pursue knowledge within disciplines without reproducing the dominant
culture and its ideology, one cannot object to CS by simply claiming that
it is "partisan"--thereby taking for granted the very point under
question, namely that traditional disciplines represent de-politicized
pursuit of knowledge.

You are not "merely disagreeing" with me, Stirling. You are making claims
which you cannot support with evidence or close reasoning.

> You';re the one who claims to study power relationships - and yet you use
> the same tropes of trying to marginalise, expel and silence that all of the
> older partisan ideologs do.
>
Again, accusations accompanied by neither evidence nor a reconsturction
of how my premises lead to the conclusions you draw from them.. And why
should a desire to study power relationships disqualify me from trying
establish a program which studies the interrelation of power and culture?
Why would that automatically "expel and silence" anyone?

It is logically impossible to affirm one thing without negating something
else.  An attempt to distinguish a field of practice called cultural
studies from other fields and other types of interdisciplinary program is
no more inherently evidence of "partisan ideology" or "expulsion" or
"silencing" than an attempt to define a field of study for English or
American literature, or Gay and Lesbian STudies, or linguistics.  
 
If a field like womens studies comes into being because the gendered 
nature of so-called "objective" research in human life has excluded much
knowledge about women (and therefore much about humanity as a whole).
and if a womens studies professor refuses to teach literature or history
from a traditional "masculinist" viewpoint, I would have trouble seeing
this as "silencing" and "expulsion."  Such programs certainly exercise
power and compete for limited resources with other programs, but they
are hardly "the status quo," and they must work twice as hard to seem
half as legitimate as "legitimate" disciplines.  

No doubt, there are domineering professors of womensstudies, but contact
with such would not lead me to suppose womens studies programs were just
one more attempt to create personal fiefdoms in academia--unless, of
course, I saw no reason to think traditional approaches to scholarship
were gendered and saw womens studies as open politicization of
scholarship.  In the absence of knowledge of womens history I might see
only "personalities" at work in the constitution of such programs--
women accusing men of the very vices they themselves exhibit (i.e.,
excluding a masculinist perspective and so being just asdomineeringe as
the men, etc.)

> You claimed that I was a supporter of the status quo. On the contrary -
 it
> is people like you who are the status quo - setting up a little fief inside
> of a university for that intense ecstatic experience of having everyone
> agree with you by definition - or they aren't doing cultural studies under
> an *objective* definition.

I believe I implied that the status quo in U.S. universities is upheld
by the view that "professionals" within disciplines pursue knowledge
without any political agenda.  Those who are "ideology-free" may then
denounce those who are not as representing partial rather than general
or universal interests.  

For very good reasons, CS questions this dominant, liberal ideology,
which does not perceive itself as an ideology, let alone a dominant one. 
But CS practitioners do not work by repeating the liberal assumption
that critics of ideology stand upon ground which is itself ideology free.
(But you did not know this, did you?) 
  
There is only one Ph.D program in the world which bills itself as a
Cultural studies program.  And even there, what I have been calling
Cultural Studies is a not the dominant tendency.  In other places,
especially in this country, Cs programs have been founded at the
undergraduate level and then converted to liberal studies programs.

This hardly constitutes a status qu.
> 
> The reason *cultural studies* as you define it has no credibility is not
> because of some dark power scheme to marginalise it, but because it is so
> transpearantly a power scheme to marginalise others. That it claims not to
> be one puts in the same class as Objectivism - a pile of principles for the
> protection of its practioners egos and not a discipline at all.

I know of no practitioner of CS who claims that CS other disciplines or
critical practices are "power schemes" while CS is not.  And, of course,
you have no evidence that any practitioner of CS has said anything like
this.  Unfamiliar with the alternative approaches to scholarship which
are not liberal, you simply construct a cultural studies making a liberal 
critique of power (as if ideology-free critique were the goal) and then
you "see through" this transparent power scheme--and precisely because
CS does not hide, or hide from, the issue of power

 You are
> guilty every single intellectual vice that accuse the status quo of
> practicing - you merely think you ought to be in charge.


If one assumes that CS is trying to be consistent with premises of
liberal ideology--especially its presumed freedom from ideology--then
yes, it will seem I am "guilty" of the "vices" which I see in the 
status quo.  But such a perception would rest upon a misunderstanding,
hence the point made in my earlier  post to Greg: when people argue
from radically different positions, the effort to reconstruct an
opponent's argument becomes a crucial means of maintaining construc-
tive dialogue.

I have not had much success in getting you to deal with specific
claims made in my posts, and their interrelation with one another.
So far it seems your procedure has been to claim that CS is a religion,
Then deduce your claims about CS from this premise.

Still, I am going to suggest that you go back to my posts and reread
them, now armed with the knowledge that neither me nor any other per-
son working in the field of CS presumes that "power" and "ideology"
are only to be found in other people and other practices. 

If you respond to this post, I am hoping that further accusations of
"religion" and "silencing" and such like will be accompanied by 
a little demonstration that you are familiar with the position you
are criticizing.


hh






     --- from list phillitcrit-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---