Communicating Investment: Cultural Studies, Politics and Affect

Abstract

Over the past decade, publishers’ catalogues have continued to showcase an apparently ceaseless supply of introductory readers, taxonomies and evaluations of cultural studies. Writing this book I have often worried about the need to add yet another title to this by now surely satiated field. My anxieties only heightened recently when two respected mentors remarked (in a cultural studies conference plenary no less): ‘Nothing is more boring than when cultural studies talks about itself’.¹ This was hardly the most encouraging thing to hear when finishing a manuscript, particularly when the book itself arises out of concern that something fundamental has been missing from existing accounts of cultural studies. I describe this ‘something’ as cultural studies’ particular investment and commitment to scholarly practice, its sense of vocation, which is communicated through a contagious ‘affect’ in the forms of address adopted by its key figures. This investment in what Bruce Robbins (1993) calls a ‘secular vocation’ must be acknowledged if cultural studies is to resolve its disciplinary as well as institutional ‘bashfulness’ (Bennett, 1998: 8).

Narratives matter and the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about cultural studies, about how it has or has not passed an epistemological, ethical or political threshold which differentiates it from its disciplinary forebears, will influence how we envisage its future trajectories and seek to contribute to their development. (Bennett, 1998: 42)