Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen: Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, and American Studies

Abstract

ion may forget that is marginal from one perspective may be central to another. In a wickedly clever and perceptive article, Michelle Lamont has shown how the emergence of Jacques Derrida as a philosopher owes a great deal to his ability to benefit from the capital institutionalized in the power structures of academic discourse.'3 Similarly, Judith Lowder Newton notes the disturbing unwillingness among many European cultural theorists to acknowledge their debt to feminism and to the women's movement which initially raised the issues of subjectivity and representation that now serve as the basis for the more generalized critique of power raised within cultural theory.'4 Indeed, feminists have legitimate reasons to be suspicious of theories that proclaim the death of the at a time when women are finally beginning to emerge within cultural discourse as speaking subjects that celebrate the end of at the precise moment when cultural criticism is beginning to deal more fully with the consequences of historically grounded oppressions. Beyond the problem of internal contradictions within European cultural theory lie larger questions about its reification as a method and its application to the context. Few scholars engaged in any form of cultural studies over the past decade have been able to avoid the acrimonious debates provoked by the rise of European cultural theory. At one extreme, they have seen a resistance to theory, an anti-intellectual dismissal of new methods and approaches (especially of deconstruction and post-structuralism). At the other extreme, This content downloaded from 207.46.13.122 on Wed, May 2016 05:37:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms CULTURE, THEORY, AND AMERICAN STUDIES 621 they have seen a reification of theory into a magic bullet that can by itself position scholars outside the oppressions and exploitations of history.'5 The tragedy of this debate -as is often the case in such moments of antagonism-is that each side often misses the other has to offer. Sometimes seems like anti-intellectualism on the part of critics of theory is really a justifiable critique of theorists who become (in the words of one of my colleagues) spiritless automatons designing ever more elaborate theoretical machines.1 On the other hand, sometimes seems like self-serving jargon and intellectual-speak to non-theorists is in reality an important effort to create a language capable of interrupting and opposing the dominant ideologies of the past. In my view, Studies would be served best by a theory that refuses hypostatization into a method, that grounds itself in the study of concrete cultural practices, that extends the definition of culture to the broadest possible contexts of cultural production and reception, that recognizes the role played by national histories and traditions in cultural contestation, and that understands that struggles over meaning are inevitably struggles over resources. One of cultural theory's great contributions has been to challenge the division between texts and experience. Literary critic Terry Eagleton especially has taken pains to affirm that the construction of texts is a social process, while at the same time insisting that no social experience exists outside of ideology and textualization. However, Eagleton's healthy warning sometimes has led to an unhealthy result-the fetishizAng of texts through the interpretation of reality as simply one more text. It is one thing to say that discourse, ideology, and textualization are inevitable and necessary parts of social experience, but it is quite another thing to say that they are the totality of social experience. As a quip reported by Jon Wiener phrases it, Tell that to the veterans of foreign texts.'7 Stuart Hall describes the goal of cultural criticism as the reproduction of the concrete in thoughtnot to generate another good theory, but to give a better theorized account of concrete historical reality. 18 Hall's formulation combines high theory and low common sense and is an essential corrective to uses of theory that lose touch with particular historical and social experiences. It prevents the self-reflexivity of contemporary theory from degenerating into solipsism, seeing theoretical work itself as a part of larger social processes. Finally, it enables cultural critiques to evolve into cultural interventions by engaging dominant ideology at the specific sites where it may be articulated and disarticulated. ' Innovations within European cultural theory over the past twenty years This content downloaded from 207.46.13.122 on Wed, May 2016 05:37:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 622 AMERICAN QUARTERLY have raised issues and concerns that seem to threaten the traditional practices of Studies. They bring a specialized language to bear on key questions about the creation and reception of culture in modern societies, and their methodological sophistication seems to render obsolete traditional Studies questions about what is American? On closer inspection, however, contemporary European cultural theory resonates with the categories and questions of Studies traditions; indeed, it is fair to say that the development of Studies itself anticipated many of the cross-disciplinary epistemological and hermeneutic concerns at the heart of contemporary European cultural theory. As Michael Denning has argued, American Studies emerged as both a continuation of and a response to the popular 'discovery' and 'invention' of 'American culture' in the 1930s. '2O Ethnography and folklore studies by New Deal-supported scholars, the cult of the common man pushed by Popular Front Marxism, and the use of American Exceptionalism to stem the country's drift toward involvement in World War II, all combined to focus scholarly attention upon the contours and dimensions of culture. Anti-communism and uncritical nationalism during the early years of the Cold War transformed the study of culture in significant ways, imposing a mythical cultural on previously had been recognized as a history of struggle between insiders and outsiders.2' While the hegemony of the consensus myth in the 1950s and 1960s served conservative political ends, it did not prevent Studies scholars from asking critical questions about the relationship between the social construction of cultural categories and power relations in society. As Giles Gunn so convincingly demonstrates, scholars of the myth-and-symbol school consciously sought to overcome the split between fact and value by explaining how value-laden images influence social life. He points out that the principal project of these scholars revolved around increasing comprehension of the historical potentialities and liabilities of different ways of construing the relationship between consciousness and society.22 Most important, Gunn reminds us that their project was both diagnostic and corrective because they recognized the interpenetration of symbolism and semiotics with power and privilege.23 In their sensitivity to language as a metaphorical construct with ideological implications, the myth-and-symbol scholars anticipated many of the concerns of contemporary cultural theory. In his introduction to the 1970 edition of Virgin Land, Henry Nash Smith claimed that perceptions of objects and events are no less a part of consciousness than are This content downloaded from 207.46.13.122 on Wed, May 2016 05:37:00 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms CULTURE, THEORY, AND AMERICAN STUDIES 623 our fantasies, and he described myths and symbols as collective representations rather than the work of a single mind.24 Similarly, in his 1965 study of the Brooklyn Bridge, Alan Trachtenberg insisted that surely the conventions of language themselves suggest predispositions among Americans to react in certain ways at certain times.25 Yet for all their attention to the role of language in shaping and reflecting social practice, the mythand-symbol scholars still tended to make sweeping generalizations about society based upon images in relatively few elite literary texts, and they never adequately theorized the relationship between cultural texts and social

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