Pussyfooting round "what 'we' study and how we label it"

Sloop, John, &* Mark Olsen. “Cultural Struggle: A Politics of Meaning in Rhetorical Studies.” At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies. Ed., Thomas Rosteck. 1999: 248-265.

Begins with the observation that everybody seems to want to get on the “CS” bandwagon. If you ask an English teacher at MLA what he or she does, “rhetoric and cultural studies” is what you’ll probably hear, according to this article written more than 13 years ago. Even though I personally haven’t kept up with the struggles over “what ‘we’ [English teachers] study and how we label it” (last sentence in article), I know that I was hired back in 1994 to teach composition in a program, which the director was calling the first cc cultural studies writing program in the US. I never did figure out what that was supposed to mean. The program was progressive in a sort of conventional way. We could select to teach from one of 4 anthologies with the usual sociological- oriented type articles therein. I still have the book somewhere. I remember an article (I had them read) about advanced industrial societies and the apparent necessity for some form of state sponsored welfare for some of its citizens. I liked this essay because it directly and factually contradicted what most Mormons (it seemed) held, regarding their own history, which they saw as independent of government subsidy. (This was in Salt Lake City, by the way). Mormon ideology celebrated an in-group coherence, independent of government subsidy, which took care of its own (Mormon charity, etc). It turns out, according to the article, that the western states of the US received and continue to receive the most government money. The West always needed, eg, the garrisoning of federal troops to pacify the Native population. They needed water projects.  To me the program seemed to be pretty much along the lines of Bartholomae (and Petrovsky’s) Ways of Reading, which put reading and writing from sources (sociological essays, Foucault, eg) at the center of the curriculum, but I still don’t understand what made our program there CS, other than just calling it such gave it the prestige and cachet of the new and up-to-date. This same head of the writing program there also wanted to us to inaugurate a “writing center,” another new and prestigious add-on, at the time, being acquired by almost all colleges and universities throughout the US.

As to the article by Sloop and Olson, it seems as though the authors want to preserve the critical political edge of each and avoid the “harm” that comes to both when one is conflated with the other, something which seems to be happening due to the [inexplicable] rise in popularity of cs some 12 years ago.

So what do they want? To answer this question, they study the use of the world “culture” in journals devoted to the study of rhetoric (have the word “rhetoric” in their titles). They decided that there are 3 ways the word is used, each of which merits a subheading in the essay as follows: 1) culture as logic, 2) culture as critical context, and 3) culture as the circulation and production of meaning in use.

Culture as logic is the study of persuasion within, more or less closed, rhetorical communities: egs, political culture, scientific culture, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Useful studies.

Culture as critical context, as dominant meaning. Jungian archetypes in Star Wars. George Schultz’s revisionist historicizing of Vietnam. It’s “readings of struggles [across time] over dominant meaning at the level of popular culture.”

Finally, cultural as the circulation and production of meaning in use. Here, they rely on the definition of cultural studies offered by Gilbert Rodman (Elvis after Elvis 1996) as: 1) entailing a radically contextual approach to scholarship, 2) a commitment to theory in that theory must be travelled through to deal with ‘real life’ problems, and 3) politics and political struggle. “Any serious discussion of popular culture must include questions of politics and attempts to carry out political projects through critical activity.” They go on to claim that neither (1) “culture as logic” (political culture, scientific culture) nor culture as (2) a space to study meaning (popular culture), [neither of these] “specifically entails a project contextualized in time and space (subgroup usage) nor explicitly pursues a political agenda.” These authors, above all, seem concerned to want cultural studies to entail a [leftist of course] political agenda or to at least preserve a place for that in cultural studies.

Conclusion: cultural and rhetorical studies. The conflation or partial conflation of rhetoric and cultural studies “endangers the potential of a critical practice.”  He wants a new generation of critics trained to “focus on meanings in specific acts of consumption and to take on proactive political projects.” Thus Cultural Studies ought to be an interdisciplinary space for critique, which can draw upon the discipline of rhetorical studies in the implementation of its [political] project.

What these guys are pussyfooting around about? It seems to be about how not to allow the conflation of rhetorical and cultural studies or the partial conflation of the latter within rhetorical studies. It harms both because, in the eagerness to jump on the cs bandwagon, we risk depoliticizing both. I’m not sure how.

It must have something to do with their refusal to discuss the why of this cs bandwagon phenomenon. It must have to do with a somewhat already depoliticized cs, how else could it be so popular? They insist on a kind of political critical cultural studies, qualities with which it was supposedly born [with Stuart Hall’s Birmingham school?], and they fear now it’s being defanged by reducing its interdisciplinary space into merely “a generalizable phrase employed in the study of culture.”

My guess is that these guys think of themselves as Marxists but are afraid to declare themselves so openly. They would like to inaugurate some version of a Marxist study of culture or even critical cultural studies, but know they could never get it endorsed by the powers that be (university governance, etc.), so they are pussyfooting around, trying to sneak in and maintain what they call “an interdisciplinary space” [cultural studies] for their practice, viz., if not of Marxism per se, at least a space where they can reproduce a new generation of critics trained to “focus on meanings in specific acts of consumption and to take on proactive political projects.” They remind me of myself, trying to practice Marxism under the guise of Freirian critical pedagogy, except that they wish to influence institutional change, something I was never in a position to do.

Regarding my own knowledge of the disciplines of rhetoric and cultural studies, as a graduate student in the late 1970s [comp. lit. at Univ of Arkansas], neither “rhetoric” nor “cultural studies” ever appeared on my academic horizon. Rhetoric was a subject studied by classicists (Greek and Roman) and had something vaguely to do with language use and especially its use in the art of persuasion. This was sometime before the explosion of composition studies leading to advanced degrees in writing instruction, in professional writing, in writing across the curriculum, and in writing program administration [or, as James Sledd, called them “composition bosses” (during the 80s and up to the present)].  My first exposure to so-called cultural studies was in the writings of Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School, which presented itself – I could be wrong about this --  as a kind of corrective to the original work by Adorno and Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School, The Culture Industry, which was an unforgiving indictment of capitalist or commoditized mass culture, as it was called. Cultural studies coming out of Birmingham took the position that “mass culture” by itself was only half the picture, and that one had to study its consumption as well, for which the term popular culture held sway. Mass culture was what got produced by, say, Hollywood, but popular culture was what consumers made of it and emphasis was put upon the relative autonomy of consumers to make what they made of it. The debate was similar to that surrounding the reception of a book by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (1976), which developed the correspondence theory between what schools did and the needs of an advanced industrial capitalist economy. Henry Giroux and others, calling themselves proponents of “critical pedagogy,” attacked it as insufficiently attentive to the relative autonomy of what actually went on in schools, where, despite rigid top-down control, enough space was still available for the practice of critical pedagogy. It’s the same (rather tired) debate between the (determinate) economic base/ super-structure model in orthodox Marxism, with postmodern Marxists such as Louis Althusser arguing for the relative autonomy of the superstructure.