Abstract
In this chapter, I suggest that cultural studies is, at its heart, a pedagogical project. It is a critical practice embodying a commitment to complexity, contingency, and contextuality, addressed to the politics of discourse and culture, but always performed as an ongoing conversation challenging the certainties that too often guarantee our claims to knowledge. The chapter offers some thoughts on how such a conversation might define both classroom education and public political debate—the latter through a consideration of the protests against Confederate monuments—in the context of the contemporary crises of education and knowledge.
I am deeply grateful to many of my students who have lovingly forced me to think about my own pedagogy. Most recently, I have to acknowledge how much I have learned from Andrew Davis and Megan M. Wood, whose commitment and intellectual rigor have pushed me further. I want to thank Paul Gilroy for generously sharing his forthcoming essay on Stuart Hall and for many conversations, and Heather Menefee for bringing John Trudell’s piece to my attention. I also want to thank Ted Striphas, Jaafar Aksikas, and John Pickles for invaluable criticisms. Finally, I owe a debt I can never repay to Henry Giroux, whose political passion and insight have always made me think about the pedagogy of politics and the politics of pedagogy.
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Notes
- 1.
After leaving CCCS, I joined an itinerant, anarchist theater commune touring Europe. After returning to the US, I taught what were described as ‘troubled’ kids at the Bank Street College in New York by helping them use (primitive) video equipment to gain new perspectives on their lives and environs. Without realizing it at the time, these experiences helped me come to terms with cultural studies and its pedagogies.
- 2.
For my own efforts to analyze the contemporary conjuncture, see Under the Cover of Chaos: Trump and the Battle for the American Right (Pluto, 2018) and We All Want to Change the World: The Paradox of the U.S. Left. https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/sites/default/files/free-book/we_all_want_to_change_the_world.pdf
- 3.
Paddy Whannel was the Education Officer of the British Film Institute from 1957 to 1971. His role in the history of film studies and cultural studies, and his passion for education, has yet to be fully told.
- 4.
I am thinking particularly of Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (University of Illinois, 1983) and Cultural Studies Now and in the Future (University of Illinois, 1990).
- 5.
To this list, I would add Richard Taylor and Paul Ricoeur, who nurtured my love of critical analysis and theory with true generosity and open-mindedness, but also the grade school and high school teachers, whose names I have unforgivably forgotten, who taught me to love reading and arguing. Each of my many wonderful teachers had their own expertise, styles, passions, and pedagogies. I could feel their pleasure, their passion, their intensity, and their intelligence in every class and every interaction I had with them. I have learned from some of the very best.
- 6.
For discussions of cultural studies, see Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983 (Duke University Press, 2016) and Familiar Stranger (Duke University Press, 2017). Also my own Cultural Studies in the Future Tense (Duke University Press, 2010); “Pessimism of the will, Optimism of the intellect.” Cultural Studies 32–6 (2018); and “Cultural Studies in search of a method, or looking for conjunctural analysis.” New Formations, no. 96/97 (2019), pp. 38–68.
- 7.
I find it helpful to remember Foucault’s observations that revolutions are defined and accomplished not by the vanguard leading it but by those watching it from the sidelines as it were, trying to decide their own place and response.
- 8.
Stuart Hall, “Life and Times of the First New Left.” New Left Review II, no. 61 (January–February 2010), 177–96.
- 9.
This image of cultural studies as pedagogy puts it in conversation with other projects that articulate the intellectual, political, and pedagogical through notions of complexity, contingency, and contextuality. I am, however, not claiming that such sympathetic interlocutors are all simply versions of or equivalent to cultural studies. One powerful and influential example is Wendy Brown’s States of Injury (Princeton University Press, 1995).
- 10.
I do not intend to re-assert the accusations made against ‘the left’ of illiberalism, brainwashing, and the denial of freedom of speech.
- 11.
Stories can always fail; they may fail because the pieces do not come together, or because they end with either a bang or a whimper.
- 12.
I am thinking here of the Buberian tradition, rather than the Bakhtinian; the latter is closer to what I have in mind.
- 13.
Cited in David Scott, Stuart Hall’s Voice. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
- 14.
John Trudell, “I’m crazy?” U.S. Social Forum 6-24-2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctUecTdPEO0
- 15.
The intellectual left has too often failed to provide the intellectual, cultural, and political histories that form the necessary backstory and that might serve as resources for contemporary analyses and strategizing. This is a problem of popular media/journalism as well as of the ‘content’ of institutional education.
- 16.
Stuart Hall. “The emergence of cultural studies and the crisis of the humanities.” October 53 (Summer 1990), 11–23.
- 17.
I am indebted to many critical pedagogy scholars, including Ivan Illich, Paolo Freire, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Patti Lather, Mike Apple, Roger Simon, and Cameron McCarthy.
- 18.
See, for example, Tony Bennett, Outside Literature. London: Routledge, 1990.
- 19.
See my “Seeking interdisciplinarity: The promise and premise of Cultural Studies.” In Cultural Studies 50 Years On: History, Practice and Politics edited by Kieran Connell and Matthew Hilton. Rowman and Littlefield, 2016, pp. 123–33.
- 20.
See the contributions of Davis and Wood in this volume.
- 21.
I think that similar questions and conversations need to be raised, for example, around the Me Too movement. There have been numerous interesting attempts to start such a conversation by JoAnn Wypijewski, Margaret Atwood, and many others. I have no doubt that such conversations are continuing—although they are also too often simply ignored or the authors castigated—but they seem too hidden to affect the actual course of events. These questions might interrogate the place of law and legal protections (including the ways colleges handle complaints of sexual assault), demands of punishment, the possibilities of personal change, forgiveness and redemption, the relation of suffering (and rage) to politics and the utility of shame and humiliation, the embrace of Twitter politics, and, most importantly for me, the question of how one changes what is clearly a sexist and heteronormative culture.
- 22.
A few years ago, students, staff, and faculty protested against the name of an academic building (Saunders Hall) after a man who had been a leader of the KKK. The protestors had wanted to rename it after Zora Neale Thurston who, in her later life, had been a member of the faculty of the North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University) in Durham. The result was that the name was changed—to Carolina Hall, as innocuous a name as one can imagine, and a small education presentation was mounted in the entrance hall. And the Board of Governors of the university declared a ten-year moratorium on renaming campus buildings.
- 23.
I know, through my own conversations, participation, and research, that some versions of the sorts of conversation I am calling for in the paper do take place. I also know that I am overgeneralizing to some extent in the following comments and that there are important exceptions to my criticisms. Nevertheless, my sense is that these conversations often take place locally, around the tactical choices for a particular struggle or event, or among particular dimensions and communities of resistance (e.g., Black Lives Matter), or even just among friends. Often, they assume that real conversations can take place through social media. In some locations, such as the Social Forums, they are taking place in larger communities and contexts. But such conversations do not generally include the full range of voices (including intellectuals/experts, and those with longer histories of experience of opposition). I do not think they do enough to invite and embrace disagreements. I do not often see a willingness to risk the possibility that their certainties may not be right or, at least, may not define the best strategic options. I do not see them questioning the relations between analyses and strategies, and between strategies and tactics.
Moreover, given the context of the continuing victory of the conservative/capitalist agenda, and the recent victories and voices of reactionary right formations, these conversations cannot remain only local or uni-dimensional (and I do not think intersectionality solves the latter problem) or limited to pre-defined political communities and struggles. There has to be a way to make the conversation national and even regional—and that requires us to move beyond our assumption that we already know what is going on in these larger contexts. While the right has, for 60 years, found ways to manage, organize, strategize, and even at times control (the Tea Party has destabilized its ability to do this) its own internal chaos, the opposition continues to operate with what I might call an imagined anarchic unity. Again, I am not calling for homogeneity and consensus, but for better maps and stories, for strategic thinking and a cooperative politics that articulates the many struggles, that recognizes but is not ruled by heterogeneity, difference, and dissensus: unities-in-difference.
And perhaps most controversially, I think such conversations have to involve serious self-criticism. Given the ongoing successes of conservative/capitalist efforts to redirect and reshape the political culture of the nation, they have to be willing to ask why, despite the real battles that have been won, the progressive, oppositional forces seem to be losing the war or, at the very least, seem to have to fight the same battles over and over. We need to recognize and celebrate what feminisms, anti-racism, anti-militarism, environmentalism, et cetera have accomplished but we also need to be able to ask, critically but in solidarity, about the limits of the politics of the last 50 years or more. At the very least, can we not start by admitting that we have often failed to change the culture within which racisms, sexisms, consumerisms, militarism, xenophobias, exclusionary nationalisms, et cetera continue to assert or re-assert themselves—in popular culture, politics, and everyday life?
- 24.
For example, circling the statue or perhaps the entire quadrangle on which it stood, with remembrances not only of slaves but of civil rights struggles, of musicians and artists, of scientists and intellectuals, of leaders and politicians.
- 25.
For a discussion of affect, see my We Gott Get Out of this Place (Routledge, 1992), Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, and “Pessimism of the will, Optimism of the intellect.”
- 26.
I am thinking here of the absolutely crucial work on race and racisms by such thinkers as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy. Both argue that race and racism have to be understood as always syncretic, fractured, multiple, processual, and contextually specific. Additionally, Gilroy has argued persuasively that race as a political category (as opposed to a cultural discourse) is always and only constructed in the struggles of racism and raciologies. See the collection of Hall’s essays on race, forthcoming from Duke University Press, and Paul Gilroy’s Against Race (Harvard University Press, 2002), a rather misleading title. For a popular version of these arguments, see Asad Haider’s Mistaken Identities (Verso, 2018). There is, additionally, in recent literatures, the question of what one might call the ontology of difference—as negation, positivity, singularity, exception, positionality, ambivalence, displacement, et cetera.
- 27.
As often happens, I think there is a gap between how the concept is introduced (in this case, by authors like Kimberle Crenshaw) and how it is taken up by others in a variety of contexts.
- 28.
One way to think about the range and specificity of racisms is to start with the notion of whiteness as a ‘norm’ in US society. But as Foucault and others have taught us, norms can take many forms and operate in many ways, always contextually.
- 29.
Many Jewish intellectuals, myself included, have received death threats recently. I would hope that my comments here are taken, not as coming from a simple position of privilege, but as a gift offered on the basis of research, thinking, conversations, and, yes, experience.
- 30.
See, for example, Ted Striphas, “Known-unknowns.” Cultural Studies 31 (2017).
- 31.
While I agree with those who are increasingly pessimistic about whether the changes in the political and cultural economies of the university have virtually eliminated the possibility of doing the sort of work/teaching I am advocating, I think there are too many who seem to think that technology will transform both the micro-practices of research/writing and the constitution of intellectual communities.
- 32.
See my “Tilting at Windmills: A Cynical Assemblage of the Crises of Knowledge.” Cultural Studies, 32–2 (March 2018).
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
As Megan M. Wood has pointed out to me, the internet has given rise to the almost immediate production of ‘crowd-sourced’ syllabi that respond to the immediate demands of the situation, such as Trump’s election, or the white supremacist and anti-Semitic rally at Charlottesville, VA, in August 2017. The problem is that all too often, such ‘syllabi’ respond to these immediate events by presenting you with everything you need to read to reaffirm what you already think you know, reinforcing the conditions of certainty. They almost always presume to know in advance the questions that need to be posed.
- 35.
See my “Cultural Studies in search of a method, or looking for conjunctural analysis.”
- 36.
Thus, when I say that the task of telling better stories about the conjuncture demands that we embrace the complexity, I do not mean to suggest that the work of conjunctural analysis is simply a matter of amassing more and more empirical detail; rather it is about finding structure in the complexity, order in the chaos. If we are committed, as I believe cultural studies is, to a popular politics that speaks to people where they are, then we will have to find ways of telling stories that people can both understand and care about. We need to find ways of telling simple stories that capture the complexity. Isn’t that just what the best story-tellers—the best historians—do?
- 37.
When I taught my graduate seminar in cultural studies in Spring 2017, I proposed using the class to at least think out what a conjunctural analysis might look like, one which begins with the moment of Trump’s selection, but seeks to open up to and construct the conjuncture. In addition to trying to introduce the students to the project of cultural studies, the students were divided into groups defined by their own (common) interests, to research some of the vectors that one might follow out of the election into the larger contexts. I keep asking myself if it was a success. Unfortunately, perhaps predictably, a majority of the students were unable to leave aside their own research questions and professional identities. On the other hand, for some of the groups—on race and class, for example—the work actually led them to change the questions they posed, and as a result, they actually learned and taught things they/the class did not already know. Some of this work has been published and contributes to the conversation that I keep hoping will emerge. In addition, I should acknowledge that the class certainly helped me write my own book (Under the Cover of Chaos. London: Pluto, 2018).
- 38.
Buckley famously refused to support Goldwater’s presidential campaign in part because he suggested that the right had not done the analytic and educative work necessary to create a new constituency enabling the country to be moved to the right in particular ways.
- 39.
Recent attacks on critical academic research—such as recent scandals of ‘grievancy studies’—have to be taken more seriously and answered. I would think an adequate response needs to address at least: (1) the changing history of such attacks, from the Sokal affair (an attack on forms of social constructionism) to ‘political correctness’; (2) an analysis of the deleterious effects of the current political economy of the academy, and its changing metrics of success, emphasizing that these are both imposed on the humanities and even the university, and also derived from more externally-funded scientific research; (3) the paradoxical absence of attacks on the bench sciences given their histories of much more serious scandals; and (4) a serious reflection on the state of critical humanities and social science research, and its response both to number (2) and to the demands of the current moment, including a discussion of the ways it is shaped by ever-narrowing forms of over-specialization in terms of objects, theories, and politics.
- 40.
Cited in Paul Gilroy, “Race is the prism,” his introduction to the forthcoming collection of Stuart Hall’s essays on race and racism, Duke University Press.
- 41.
At the very least, should we think about sharing our salaries with the students?
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Grossberg, L. (2019). What Did You Learn in School Today? Cultural Studies as Pedagogy. In: Aksikas, J., Andrews, S., Hedrick, D. (eds) Cultural Studies in the Classroom and Beyond. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25393-6_2
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