Lachlan Brown on Fri, 28 Feb 2003 05:05:01 +0100 (CET)


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[Nettime-bold] Re: The Institutional Embarassment of Cultural Studies



Something of a blocage at CULTSTUD -L

perhaps you could repost in nettime
and elsewhere.

I mean, if scholarship isn't 
open as to sources then it isn't scholarship 
is it?

We cite sources so that we may understand
how people arrived at particular conclusions
and do scholarship to find out how they arrived 
at these conclusions. Your readers will be
interested.

Basic stuff really.


Lachlan


----- Original Message -----
From: "Lachlan Brown" <l.brown@london.com>
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2003 09:34:00 -0500
To: "Lachlan Brown" <l.brown@london.com>, "CULTSTUD-L: A listserv devoted to Cultural Studies" <cultstud-l@lists.acomp.usf.edu>
Subject: Re: The Institutional Embarassment of Cultural Studies

> 
> Karl thanks for your reply,
> 
> It's good to see someone addressing the question of 
> the Institutionalisation of Cultural Studies in the 
> field of Education which is where our study of culture began. 
The WEA of course built upon traditions of organisation toward 
education that have some history.
>  
> >Any sense of a heirarchy of approaches and subject 
> > matters, >etc is the subject of struggles within the 
> > field (as >Bourdieu would tell you). [...] We're talking 
> > here not of >self-organising groups but of people working 
> > >in institutions, teaching and writing, who have a number 
> > of >audiences, from the local audience in the lecture hall and >classroom to the 
> > >potentially international one of intellectuals worldwide.
> > 
> Yes, Bourdieu. One can only work _through_ the institution  so long, 
before the institution begins to work through you.
> Cultural Studies has been weak in institutional analyses.
>  -- I do know a little bit about the institutional 
> contexts of 'cultural studies' (Goldsmiths College, Liverpool 
John Moores, University of East London, 
>  McGill University and to some degree York University in Ontario), 
Teaching and Research. I researched the 
>  emergence of Intenret in culture 1993 - 2001.
>  
> Your reply is a good one, and indeed 'the potentially 
> international' audience of intellectuals involved in 
> knowledge work worldwide has been proven through 
> career academic networks, while the engagement in
> arts and cultural life indeed cultural industrial life
> that was the political imperitive in CS has not.
> 
> And isn't your reply the 'stock', or 
> 'on message' reply in Cultural Studies in Britain, scripted in 
the mid eighties in response to the threat 
> to the cultural life of London during the defence of 
> the GLC during the period leading to its abolition? I 
> mean,things have moved on a little. Margaret Thatcha 
> who? Does CS really need to be so bunkered and defensive,
> protective of the 'message' to be bourne through disturbing 
conservative times in little read academic journals with some 
pretense to more general readerships?
> 
> The idea that arts, industry, and collective cultural 
engagment might be carried out through the academy -
> protected by the institution as a legal framework - 
travelled well to other cultural contexts in the late 
> 80s ad early 90s, particularly Australia and to some 
extent Canada (the case of Canada is one I am familiar with) 
where National cultures counterposed to dominant 
> declining and emerging 'global' cultures (UK+american)
> were in process of public and policy definition. 
> 
> But haven't we all moved on a little from the late
> 80s? I wonder whether it isn't time to revise the 
'official institutional and academic publishing industry 
version' of what it is we all think we are doing? Isn't the 
'political imperitive' in cultural studies bound up in its 
two interrelated genealogies: the genealogy of 
> pegagogy combined with the genealogy of publishing? 
> 
> It's this history I reference in relation to 
> contemporary history in the development of new media 
> and internet practice, practise and praxis in London. 
> None of the 'captains' mentioned in my New Model 
> Cultural Studies post would be happy to be described as 
'doing cultural studies', indeed they would 
> positively resist the idea as we all should (::perhaps 
> with technical expertise to match their cultural 
> networking expertise) but they were doing the study 
> and praxis of culture rather more effectively than the 
'Grandees' in that awful period of the mid-late 
> nineties or what can only be termed the 'institutional
>  embarassment of cultural studies and all involved in 
> it'. One can work 'through' the institution only so 
> long before the institution begins to work through you. 
> I include an embarrassed Stuart Hall who has lived to see 
his students David Morley and Angela McRobbie in 
>  particular behaving worse than their students. 
> 
> Your Python reference, by the way, about the moment of the
> new left, the divergence from crude Marxism to a
> post marxist analysis of culture brought about by the 
> crisis on the left over events in Hungary in 1956, 
> and by the several interruptions since is unwelcome. 
> Some respect for the intellectual tradition you are 
> working in.
> 
> I liked your thoughts in an earlier post about a 
'web site' critiquing  and providing independent commentary on 
> academic publishers and their lists.
> 
> 
> 

> 
> Toronto
> (416) 666 1452
> 
> -- 
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> 



Lachlan Brown

Toronto
(416) 666 1452

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