Table Of Content

To my colleagues at Trinity and All Saints who helped and encouraged me with this project, especially Derek McKiernan and Amy Kenyon. CONTENTS Introduction Stefan Herbrechter 1 Section A: Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinarity – Redirections 17 Cultural Studies at the Crossroads Michael Hayes 19 Popes, Kings & Cultural Studies: Placing the Commitment to Non-Disciplinarity in Historical Context Karl Maton 31 ‘Alarming and calming. Sacred and accursed’ – The Proper Impropriety of Interdisciplinarity Paul Bowman 55 ‘Theor-ese’, or the Protocols of the Elders of Cultural Studies Malcolm Quinn 73 Cultural Studies as Rhizome – Rhizomes in Cultural Studies Simon O'Sullivan 81 Section B: Anti-Disciplinary Objects and Practices 95 Space Between Disciplines Necdet Teymur 97 Bibliographic Boundaries and Forgotten Canons Andrew Carlin 113 Reading Phonography, Inscribing Interdisciplinarity Duncan Campbell 131 Cultural Studies and Aesthetics – Pleasures and Politics Jen Webb 147 Section C: The Translation of Cultural Studies - Translation Studies 159 Teaching Nomadism: Inter/Cultural Studies in the Context of Translation Studies Russell West 161 Mediating the Point of Refraction and Playing with the Perlocutionary Effect: a Translator’s Choice? David Katan 177 Visions of the Americas and Policies of Translation Eduardo J. Vior 197 Section D: Translating Cultural Studies 215 Building Cultural Studies for Postcolonial Hong Kong: Aspects of the Postmodern Ruins in between Disciplines Stephen C K Chan 217 British/Cultural Studies “Made in Germany” Sebastian Berg 239 Accommodating Difference: Cultural Studies, Translation and the Limits of Interdisciplinarity Laurence Raw 251 The Phantom Menace Strikes Down Under Mandy Oakham 265 Crossing the ‘Threshold of Intolerance’: Contemporary French Society Karima Laachir 279 Section E: Cultural Studies: Translation and Globalisation 297 Transatlantic Fears: Re-Configurations in a Global Context Holger Rossow 299 Postscript: Cultural Variety Or Variety of Cultures? Zygmunt Bauman 317 Contributors 331 INTRODUCTION: CULTURAL STUDIES – INTERDISCIPLINARITY AND TRANSLATION STEFAN HERBRECHTER The history of cultural studies is a contested issue. The extreme self-reflexivity which has always been characteristic of cultural studies – whether understood as a specific methodology, a particular set of questions, an (anti- or interdisciplinary) discipline (or ‘interdiscipline’), as a specific (academic or non-academic) analytical practice, or simply as a subject area of studies – prevents the establishment of traditional forms of (disciplinary) consensus. It is in fact this ‘foundation’ on productive dissensus that has made the rise of cultural studies such an impressive success story. The challenge – the future of cultural studies – will be to find a working compromise between tendencies of increasing self- centeredness, a detachment of theory from practice and the development of a specialised vocabulary (jargon), on the one hand; and the demand for disciplinarity (teachability, marketability, quality assessment, and all the requirements connected with the ongoing process of cultural studies’ institutionalisation within higher and possibly even secondary education), on the other. The practitioners of cultural studies – including the contributors to this volume – are drawing their strength from crossing, even ignoring, disciplinary boundaries and combining methodologies, without really being too concerned with the question of what ‘properly’ constitutes the ‘baggy monster’ called ‘cultural studies’. They either deliberately transgress boundaries and disown what is ‘proper’ (to) cultural studies, or problematise the notions of ‘propriety’ and ‘belonging’ as such (see for example Bowman and O’Sullivan). While the question: ‘What is cultural studies?’ – a question which has been asked all too often – might not reveal too many ‘useful’ answers, the discussion of interdisciplinarity promises to be more productive. In fact, it is the main concept – together with translation – that allows people working in and with cultural studies to think through issues like the relation between theory and practice. This is a concern which is voiced throughout the essays in this volume – sometimes in more theoretical discussions about the project of cultural studies (see Section A); sometimes in relation to cultural studies as an educational enterprise; sometimes in the form of a critique and a redirecting of cultural studies as a reading practice; or, indeed, all of these together. The strength of the essays in the first part of this 2 Herbrechter volume – which from one angle may appear quite eclectic – is that they all already constitute practical (or one might say ‘performative’) interdisciplinarity while remaining self-aware of the ‘praxical’ problematic. What they combine are theory, critical practice and praxis. From the start cultural studies as a more or less openly political movement was inspired by a desire for inter-, trans-, anti- and sometimes post-disciplinarity (see Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler 1992: 1ff). The fact of its institutionalisation within the academy – especially in the English-speaking countries, but also increasingly outside (which raises all sorts of issues related to its translation, some of which are addressed in Sections C, D, E and the Afterword) – poses the question of its inter- and antidisciplinarity anew. The problem is often that of the discrepancy between the current ‘sexiness’ of interdisciplinary programmes and a de facto lack of funding and expertise in institutions. For marketing purposes, cultural studies very often is represented as the interdisciplinary field, or even as being founded on interdisciplinarity, or as interdisciplinarity itself. But if cultural studies claims interdisciplinarity as its own, while in practice it continues to be hostile to disciplinary boundaries as such, it seems quite inevitable that its situation within the academy will remain precarious and its relation to the traditional disciplines rather superficial. The resulting ‘lack’ of identity might also explain why cultural studies has been so obsessed with problems of identity and its construction(s) – a theme that, in the present volume, quite deliberately, plays a less prominent part. The prefix ‘inter-’ (e.g. in interdisciplinarity) is, of course, polysemous. Its meaning is not fixed, which is precisely, what makes a conceptual discussion possible and necessary. The contributions reveal the great variety of meanings the word ‘interdisciplinarity’ can acquire. ‘Inter-’ is one of many possible notions signifying ‘inbetweenness’. These fuzzy, deconstructive conceptual areas carry the potential for change (for better or for worse), affirmation, consolidation, but also destruction, dissolution, dissemination, etc.; but ‘inbetweenness’ cannot be prescribed, captured, declared. It ‘happens’ – which is why it seems extremely difficult, if not undesirable, to develop a didactic, prescriptive methodology for cultural studies that is founded on interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity rather seems to ex-sist, in scholarly events and projects of radical singularity, as the result of something radically different each and every time. The kind of phenomena cultural studies sets out to describe and analyse usually demand specific adaptation rather than prefabricated conceptual frameworks. This is also due to the ‘anti-disciplinary’ objects of study and ‘non-disciplinary’ practices to which cultural studies applies itself: texts, images, discourses, phenomena, the notion of culture and its production. What unites – without agreement – the contributions in this volume is a certain interdisciplinary eventfulness. Interdisciplinarity and cultural studies ‘happen’ in these pages. Acknowledging the problematic nature of the ‘inter-’ seems to be the only way of respecting the political project of cultural studies and its undeniable past achievements, safeguarding its radicality and its dynamic involvement in the Introduction 3 politics of cultural change. The essays therefore also aim to regenerate the discussion on interdisciplinarity as the motor of the cultural studies project. What seems political about cultural studies, which loses, finds and reinvents itself through interdisciplinary transgressive acts, differently every time, is this singularity of the transfer (or translation – between disciplines, but also between languages, cultures, methodologies, mentalities) and the possibility and the specificity of a dialogic knowledge this process may encourage. What is political is the difference that is also the driving force for any act of translation and transgression, and for ‘dissent’ (see Nelson and Gaonkar 1996). Interdisciplinarity is therefore always connected with a certain economy of desire and anxiety (see Coles and Defert 1998), an economy which reveals itself within the history of its concept (Klein 1990). It is these anxieties and desires of interdisciplinarity which constitute not only the common thread of the essays to follow, but they also are what demands the continual self-questioning and thus the (im)possible identity of cultural studies. As Andrew Carlin in his contribution points out, it is the ‘editor’s work’ to provide coherence to an essay collection. The price for this identity work is that it is achieved via the (implicit or explicit) appeal to (disciplinary) boundaries. What this volume does is, of course, to legitimate ‘performatively’ (i.e. by speaking about it) and to (re)create/rewrite cultural studies as a discipline, merely by providing a framework. So in creating coherence where there may be none, a selection process is already underway – e.g. ‘good’ interdisciplinarity versus ‘bad’ interdisciplinarity. While this process seems inevitable it is also culturally, historically and contextually specific. It is not only the editor who merely constructs or ‘invents’ the coherence but also the context. It is for example no coincidence that certain themes recur in several contributions. There is frequent reference to Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins (1996). It seems that the anxiety about ‘the university of excellence’ and the role attributed to cultural studies by Readings seems to have caught on (see e.g. Maton, Bowman, and Quinn). There is a certain (however critical) hope for cultural studies and its interdisciplinary character to play a major role in the change towards a ‘postmodern’ and ‘postdisciplinary’ university. The other event that has inscribed itself into several contributions is the ‘Sokal affair’. Cultural studies, of course, could not remain indifferent towards the accusations Alan Sokal (and Jean Bricmont) put forward in their Intellectual Impostures (1997; see Quinn below). From a certain perspective the Sokal hoax may be seen as an attack not only on institutionalised programmes of cultural studies, on cultural studies as an intellectual enterprise, as a field of knowledge, a discourse, but also on the practice and the idea of interdisciplinary work as such. It remains to be seen whether any productive discussion can be generated from this latest of a long series of ‘wars’ (Culture Wars, Science Wars, etc.) or contests between faculties (Derrida 1992), or between human, social, natural etc. sciences. 4 Herbrechter Section A (‘Redirections’) groups essays by scholars from a variety of backgrounds who start their analysis of cultural studies and interdisciplinarity from a theoretical point of view and then go on to argue for changes in cultural studies’ practices. Michael Hayes argues for a “marriage between Saussure’s structuralism and Bakhtin’s dialogics”. While structuralism can be said to reveal the relative positioning of all the cultural events that go to make a culture, dialogics analyses the dynamic human processes that inform the cultural scheme of things. Hayes believes that, in this way, cultural studies becomes the systematic regulated search for, rather than assertion of, the myriad preconceptions that inform, maintain and evolve our cultural life. Karl Maton’s analysis of the ‘current state of cultural studies’ focuses on the contradictory nature of an ‘antidisciplinary discipline’ that has been institutionalised ‘against itself’. Vibrant and in disarray, the two faces of cultural studies are intermingled in accounts. Maton asks how cultural studies has come to be in such a curious position and why, and whether there is something intrinsic to cultural studies, something internal to the way it is structured as a knowledge formation, which enables its strange position in higher education. While the central theme of legitimation in cultural studies is non-disciplinarity, the emphasis lies on people rather than procedures to guarantee its identity. What Maton’s analysis shows is that: “any account of cultural studies – past, present or future – needs to address not only issues of agency or social structure but also the internal features of cultural studies as a knowledge formation”. Paul Bowman’s contribution provides a rereading of some central Derridean texts to elaborate on the question of the ‘proper’ of cultural studies. He is interested in the avoidance of the question of cultural studies’ identity. He argues that: all disciplines impose enabling limits; that is, a set of conditions within which one can work, in a well policed, ‘legitimate’, ‘correct’, or ‘proper’, way. To transgress, ignore or refute these conditions is to question the validity of everything done within and in the name of that discipline. It is to move ‘outside’ of that space, to call it into question, and also to incur the wrath of its judgement, a judgement that will inevitably come from a position that agrees with the premises, hypotheses, and proper procedures, that have been transgressed. This ‘wrath’ that cultural studies continues to attract seems endemic to interdisciplinarity itself. The inevitable paradox (or aporia) of interdisciplinarity, following Derrida, is thus that: On the one hand, the claim of interdisciplinarity signals an eminently pure academic activity, consisting, as it would seem, of a redoubling of academic effort, in order to master more than one discipline, to be hyper-academic, to be more and do more than ‘single’ disciplines themselves. But, on the other hand, the ‘interdiscipline’ will be less, or at least other than, improper in terms of, each discipline it travels between. Introduction 5 The ‘interdiscipline’, according to Bowman, therefore, cannot help but both reassure and upset the academy. It at once promises to add a new dimension in its overall aim of omniscience; yet it threatens to rattle the order of things, to reorder and potentially disorder; it is both promise and threat. A (properly?) deconstructive move therefore consist in focusing on the risks of the opening towards, and the resulting strategies of containment, of interdisciplinarity. Malcolm Quinn’s essay starts off from a reading of the Sokal affair as a sign of academia losing the form of its translation from ‘academic’ to ‘nonacademic’. In a bold, almost Baudrillardian, move Quinn claims that the institutionalised versions of cultural studies are merely there to promote the double meaning that academic work is both itself and cultural, in order to retain a fantasy of distinction through a discourse on transgression. He asserts that: “Transgressing the Boundaries” was simply another reminder that the multivocal, multidisciplinary cultural debate that academia wants to see itself as engaging in with is a fiction, and that what seems to guarantee the ‘conversation’ is a mute, unreadable and meaningless object no longer attached to the ‘enculturation’ of disciplinary orthodoxy but instead solely to a process of modernisation which is ultimately driven by extra-academic forces; new objects discovered by constantly updated modes of production for new markets such as ‘science studies’, as exemplified in the ‘Science Wars’ edition of Social Text in which [Sokal’s hoax] article appeared. The quasi-disciplinary, quasi-intellectual project of institutionalised cultural studies may, thus, be one of the few remaining means of securing a difference between the University sector and the free market in knowledge goods, of retaining the connection between the institution and its historical devotion to ideals of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Simon O’Sullivan follows a somewhat different trajectory. Equally critical of institutionalised forms of cultural studies, he turns towards Deleuze’s and Guattari’s work and calls for a ‘re-invention’ of cultural studies as a project that does not rely on disciplinary notions of knowledge; instead he understands: “cultural studies as an affirmative and strategic mapping of the possibilities of life”. For O’Sullivan the project of cultural studies as ‘rhizomatics’ might provide an access to the (virtual) potentialities of culture, a pragmatics that would go beyond traditional disciplinary analysis and instead would take into account the work of (cultural) imagination. Necdet Teymur’s essay is a witty and original deliberation on the first of a series of non- or anti-disciplinary concepts that have migrated across disciplines and have also traversed cultural studies: space. To be more precise, the space of the ‘inbetween’, e.g. of interdisciplinarity. With its focus on cultural studies’ ‘anti-disciplinary objects’ (see Mowitt 1992) and practices, the contributions in Section B deal with ‘conceptual’ objects/practices like space, music, art, bibliography, and the ways in which they have been appropriated or translated by traditional disciplines but also by cultural studies. The questions these essays ask 6 Herbrechter are whether cultural studies’ interdisciplinary or anti-disciplinary practices allow for a different form of appropriation, one that could do more justice to the complexity of these objects/practices. Teymur, for example, argues that all practices, arts, institutions and disciplines have some concern with space. Space is not entirely culturally specific but to a large extent intercultural. His ambition is to demonstrate the “incredible combination of the mysterious undefinability of space on the one hand, and its concrete materiality on the other”. Andrew Carlin, in his essay, focuses upon bibliographies as disciplinary boundaries. He understands textual artefacts (bibliographies, footnotes, textbooks) as loci of disciplinary boundaries and, therefore, of interdisciplinary bases. Bibliographies, in this context, are “texts in which are embodied the interpretive practices whereby [scholars] realise their disciplinary boundaries”. Bibliographies are ‘sites of interdisciplinarity’ and, as such “they define a field of study”. Although Carlin’s case study focuses on sociology textbooks, he is, of course, right in claiming that: Whether Cultural Studies constitutes the attempt to reinvent wheels, or invent different kinds of wheels with different kinds of spokes, its bibliographic bases and boundaries are not exempt from scrutiny in terms of disciplinary provenance and the history of ideas. In conclusion, Carlin reiterates one of the most fundamental points to remember for ‘good’ interdisciplinary practice: the realisation of cognate forms of inquiry. When doing interdisciplinary work, Carlin argues, we must avoid the creation of “category-mistakes”, which result from analysts making moves between incompatible “language games”. The translation of concepts within and between disciplines, should not undermine their logical coherence. Thus, appreciating the endogenous ‘rules’ of disciplines is crucial to the realisation of any meaningful programme of interdisciplinarity. Duncan Campbell focuses on the ways in which music (and popular music in particular) has been appropriated as an object of study and submitted to, and changed by, traditional ways of reading. His key target in this context is inscription which “as an operator opens the way to reconceptualization of the relationship between the sensible and the intelligible, between the two senses of sense, that is, as the meaning of the body and the body of meaning.” The result is that despite the vast proliferation of readings of popular music that treat it seriously, either as another branch of cultural studies or as a discipline in its own right, the gesture of phonographic inscription, with which Campbell is concerned, is still reduced, placed as secondary to other disciplines which determine its form and function: Popular music is thought of as a sociological phenomenon, a debased classical music, a literary-critical narrative (personal, political, and so on), always determined from the outside by a disciplinarity that pays no attention to the status of the musical