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A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader
(Eds) Antony Easthope and Kate McGowan
Allen and Unwin 1992
pp. 270 (summaries, biographies, bibliography, index)
A$25.00
[ philosophy, literary criticism ]

What is this thing called Postmodernism?  What do they teach in Cultural
Studies courses?  Who are these people - Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva - I
keep hearing mentioned?  It was in an effort to find answers to these and
related questions that I bought _A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader_,
having first looked at a friend's copy.

Since much of what I am about to say is rather negative and will
probably not be taken very happily by many people (ie anyone working in
a Cultural Studies department), before I go any further I had better
confess that I am a eurasian, middle-class, heterosexual male with a
background in the natural sciences.  No doubt someone will try to explain
that this is why I can appreciate Said but find Althusser and Cixous and
Spivak and Derrida "threatening".  (Actually, since a majority of the
people with access to the internet are still scientists, engineers, or
people in the computer industry, I rather fear that this review will
fail to provoke anyone at all, the most likely response being "Why on
earth did you take it seriously enough to bother reviewing it?  I could
have told you it was all garbage without actually reading it.")

In the words of its introduction, _A Critical and Cultural Theory
Reader_ "is meant to provide an accessible introduction to the analysis
of the texts of high and popular culture together." However many of the
extracts seem to have little or nothing to do with textual analysis.
There are twenty-seven extracts by twenty-two authors (there are two
extracts each from Foucault, Marx and Williams, and three from Barthes)
divided into seven sections (entitled Semiology, Ideology, Subjectivity,
Difference, Gender, Postmodernism and Documents in cultural studies).
Each section has an introduction written by the editors, and the back of
the book contains summaries of the included works and short biographies
of the authors and other important figures.  The introduction admits that
the editors' selection of texts is arguable and also points out that they
have concentrated on the textual wing of Cultural Studies rather than
the sociological wing.


It is clearly hard to say anything generally applicable about such a
diverse collection of extracts.  But my reaction to a large number of the
extracts (and those I feel are most "representative" for reasons
discussed below) was extremely negative.  The most notable thing about
these writers is that they are extremely hard to read - some of them use
language so obscure as to be almost indecipherable.  They also have a
tendency to claim authority by citation and exegesis of one another and
often equally obscure predecessors.  They tend to base their arguments on
this kind of appeal and literary and linguistic word games rather than
by reasoned argument or appeal to any kind of evidence.  They make
extravagant claims about the scope and validity of their particular
ideas/theories, while at the same time being amazingly parochial in
their use of other disciplines.  And finally, when one has sorted out a
kernel of content from the word games and exegesis, what remains is
mostly either banal or blatantly false.  We are looking at constructions
of dubious stability in their own right built on highly questionable
theoretical foundations.

What I am going to say applies mostly to those works that go way beyond
textual criticism - Derrida, Lacan, Cixous, Kristeva, Spivak, Lyotard
and to some extent to Althusser, Barthes, Baudrillard, Macherey and
others.  I devote most of this review to discussing these extracts, as I
feel they are the most representative in the volume, being the recent in
date and hence explicitly postmodern.  What follows certainly does not
apply to the earlier writings in the volume (Marx, Saussure, Freud,
Leavis, Tzara), or to all of the others.

It seems to me that the writers in question actually go out of
their way to be difficult to read.  Their sentence structure and syntax
seem designed to perplex, and they have a fascination with puns, plays
on etymology and grammar, apparently random use of quotation and other
linguistic games.  Now I have no objection to this (it is sort of
entertaining) provided it is taken as a purely literary exercise (or
perhaps as a kind of Zen Koan).  However it seems rather out of place in
any attempt to argue anything serious and, even worse, some of the
authors seem to think they can demonstrate something significant with a
play on words, or that particular aspects of French grammar or
difficulties in translation from the German actually have some kind of
universal significance.  And they cite one anothers puns!

The other way in which they abuse language is lexically.  They use
specialised jargon from different disciplines in inappropriate places,
introduce their own terms without definition, and use ordinary language
terms in what are clearly not the ordinary senses of the words.
Unexplained capitalisation of words like "subject" and "other" and the
use of untranslated Greek is commonplace.  It seems to me that this is
largely done in order to hide the otherwise manifest confusion of their
basic metaphysics.  The basic problem here seems to me to be that certain
ideas and theories, most notably semiology and psychoanalysis, have been
ripped from their proper domains and grossly misapplied.  Some of the
authors seem to feel they can use whatever metaphysical theories are
most convenient and then discard them when they sprout unwanted
consequences.

The worst offender in this regard is Derrida's essay _Differance_.
(This is included in its entirety and is the longest extract in the
volume, so the editors clearly feel it is important and representative.
It is also cited by other writers included in the volume.)  Since no
amount of description will give the uninitiated any idea of what it is
like, here is an extract (an unusually clear paragraph.)

> Retaining at least the framework, if not the content, of this
> requirement formulated by Saussure, we will designate as differance
> the movement according to which language, or any code, any system of
> referral in general, is constituted 'historically' as a weave of
> differences.  'Is consitituted', 'is produced', 'is created',
> 'movement', 'historically', etc.  necessarily being understood beyond
> the metaphysical language in which they are retained, along with all
> their implications.  We ought to demonstrate why concepts like
> production, constitution, and history remain in complicity with what
> is at issue here.  But this would take me too far today - toward the
> theory of the representation of the 'circle' in which we appear to be
> enclosed - and I utilize such concepts, like many others, only for
> their strategic convenience and in order to undertake their
> deconstruction at the currently most decisive point.  In any event, it
> will be understood, by means of the circle in which we appear to be
> engaged, that as it is written here, differance is no more static than
> it is genetic, no more structural than historical.  Or is no less so;
> and to object to this on the basis of the oldest of metaphysical
> oppositions (for example, by setting some generative point of view
> against a structural-taxonomical point of view, or vice versa) would
> be, above all, not to read what here is missing from orthographical
> ethics.  Such oppositions have not the least pertinence to differance,
> which makes the thinking of it uneasy and uncomfortable.

"Uneasy and uncomfortable" indeed!  Anyone can *claim* immunity from
metaphysical prosecution, and I am tempted to respond by playing the
positivist and arguing that this is completely meaningless nonsense.
However that would be asking for trouble so I will instead steal a line
from Feyerabend [1], and just say that it bores me to tears - I have no
intention of reading any more Derrida, as life is too short and there
are too many interesting things to read.

This linguistic and metaphysical confusion is paralleled by a worrying
anti-empirical streak.  I don't suppose it would ever occur to some of
these people to look at the real world.  Of course they probably don't
accept that there is a "real" world and hold more or less extreme
relativist positions, but they make no effort whatsoever to make their
position explicit, and certainly do not face up to the problems that
come with such views.  Marx criticised his fellow philosophers for
interpreting the world instead of trying to change it, but some of these
writers aren't even interested in interpreting the world, only in
interpreting one another's interpretations...

Another very obvious tendency is towards argument by exegesis of certain
authors who have been "canonised" by the postmodern movement.  So there
is a tendency to quote Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein or even
Derrida himself the way Fundamentalists use the Bible - as if they were
divinely inspired sources of truth.  For this kind of "proof by citation"
the more difficult and obscure the author cited is the better [2].  The
inclusion of the passages by Marx in the volume seems to me similar in
nature.  They are not necessary to understand the other extracts, and
seem to serve mostly to "authenticate" the discipline (and "legitimate"
it politically) by claiming Marx as a spiritual ancestor.

None of these things would upset me so much, except that the writers in
question insist on making massively extravagant claims.  So the
introduction to the section on gender begins "Every sign is gendered" -
a claim from which we can rule out a priori the possibility of an
asexual alien species with culture!  And on the basis of psychoanalytic
theories which are arguable enough as explanations of human neuroses
people feel they can make pronouncements about epistemology in general.
Everyone wants *their* discipline, *their* pet theory to be more
fundamental than all other disciplines.  (Not that this isn't a failing
of some physicists and biologists too, of course, but they very rarely
achieve the kind of idiocy evidenced by several of the authors in this
volume.)

This extravagance of claims is matched by an amazing parochiality of
knowledge.  While cultural studies claims to embrace sociology and
literary criticism and anthropology and linguistics and psychoanalysis,
what its exponents have in fact done is to take the bits and pieces from
each discipline that suit them and ignore the rest.  They have completely
turned their backs on the natural sciences, not even deigning to
acknowledge their existence by denying their importance.  One wonders
whether some of these authors actually know of their existence.  At any
rate it certainly wouldn't occur to them to them that if they want to
understand consciousness or perception of time then the work of
cognitive psychologists, neurobiologists and philosophers of mind might
be relevant.  So Lyotard (in an extract from _The Postmodern Condition: A
Report on Knowledge_) is prepared to make general statements about
science despite the fact that he appears to know nothing about science,
the history of science or any work on the philosophy of science done
since Wittgenstein.  Apparently to understand modern science all we need
to do is to read Kant and Hegel and assorted other 19th century thinkers
in the right way...

Well that sums up my general feelings about those extracts, but what
about the others?  First of all the passages from Saussure, Marx and
Freud do not suffer from the problems above, however due to their age
and positions they can hardly be considered part of the cultural studies
program per se.  (And some people would do well to remember that Freud
thought of himself as a scientist, not a literary critic!) The extract
from Saussure's _Course in General Linguistics_ was particularly
interesting as I had never seen it before, despite its frequent citation
in linguistics.  In the two extracts from Foucault (particularly the
first, from _Discipline and Punish_) he stays just close enough to
reality to be interesting, and I could be tempted to read more of his
work.  I have come across references to Said's _Orientalism_ in several
other places, and the extract contained in here has encouraged me to go
and buy myself a copy.

In general, where "postmodernism" is restricted to literary criticism
and critical studies (as the introduction claims is its domain) it is a
lot more reasonable.  So in the hands of Barthes semiology appears to be
a useful tool for the analysis of mythology and of a short story of
Balzac's (extracts from _Mythologies_ and _S/Z_), and the same holds for
the extract from McCabe about realism in the cinema.  But even within
literary criticism, however, the theoretical background of postmodernism
often seems more of a hindrance than an aid.  So extracts from Macherey
(semiology applied to the production of literary texts), Baudrillard
(Disneyland as reality), Mulvey (psychoanalysis of cinema narrative) and
Jameson (_Postmodernism or, the Logic of Late Capitalism_) share many of
the problems of the authors discussed above.  The final section
(Documents in Cultural Studies) is the only one which really seems to
address what the introduction claims is the topic of the volume.
However none of the extracts really seems to have much to do either with
postmodernism (as explained in the previous section) or with the rest of
the volume.  The extract from Leavis' _Mass Civilization and Minority
Culture_ is a straightforward defence of "high culture" and the passages
from Adorno and Williams seem to draw a lot more on Marxism than on
"postmodernism".

And what about the "sociological wing" of the "cultural studies program"
which was omitted from this volume?  I don't know anything about Habermas
or Bakhtin or Bourdieu, but I have delved fairly extensively into the
works of Levi-Strauss and Geertz (these are the five writers listed as
representative in the introduction).  As far as I can see Geertz and
Levi-Strauss are *anthropologists*, and it makes no sense whatsoever to
incorporate them into "cultural studies" along with Derrida and Kristeva
and company.  They have a lot more in common with Malinowski and
Evans-Pritchard.  I also can't see that either of them would personally
want to be associated with the kind of anti-empirical nonsense this
volume is full of.

So what is left of the "cultural studies programme" when one removes the
linguistic games, metaphysical drivel, arguments by exegesis, etc.?  I
would argue that one is left with a collection of many different strands
of thought - some of value, some of dubious interest - without any real
unity.  It seems to me that those parts of "cultural studies" which are
of interest are more sensibly labelled "sociology" or "psychoanalysis"
or "anthropology" than lumped together.  So I cannot see what Derrida has
in common with Williams, or why Foucault should be classified along with
McCabe.  I suspect that they are tied together only because their
"followers" share certain beliefs, and that Cultural Studies departments
are the result of academic empire building as much as anything else.

Conclusion:

In the name of pluralism cultural studies tries to cram everything into
a narrow theoretical framework built on semiology and psychoanalysis, a
framework entirely incapable of carrying the weight put on it.  In the
name of interdisciplinary studies postmodernists have sealed themselves
into their own narrow degree programmes and courses, and turned their back
on the rest of the universe.  While many of the works that are labelled
"postmodern" and taught as "cultural studies" are interesting, the
subject/discipline as a whole is a non-starter.

-------
[1] Talking about astrology in the postscript to _Three Dialogues on
Knowledge_.
[2] Has anyone noticed how rarely Russell is quoted compared to
Wittgenstein?  The reason is that one can read Russell, understand what
he is talking about and then rewrite it in one's own words.  You can't
get any kudos for interpreting him.  But with Wittgenstein and Nietzsche
it isn't possible to do this, so one can show of how clever one is by
finding new and different interpretations of their writings.  This, to
me, is the way one tells philosophy from literature.

Danny Yee ([e-mail])
28/6/93