The Task of Cultural Critique

233 Pages·2009·1.99 MB·English

by  Teresa L. Ebert

CRITICAL THEORY / CUL TERESA L.
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TERESA L. EBERT
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The Task of Cultural Critique
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Teresa L. Ebert
The Task of
Cultural Critique
University of Illinois Press
Urbana and Chicago
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© 2009 by Teresa L. Ebert
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 c p 5 4 3 2 1
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ebert, Teresa L., 1951–
The task of cultural critique / Teresa L. Ebert.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-252-03434-3 (cloth : acid-free paper)
isbn 978-0-252-07626-8 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
1. Culture—Study and teaching—History. I. Title.
hm623.e25 2009
306.07—dc22 2009009426
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For
Clara Elizabeth,
Chuck, Linda,
and Paula
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Contents
Preface: The Critique of Interpretive Reason ix
Part 1 Anatomy of Contemporary
Cultural Critique
1. The Spectral Concrete 3
2. The Abstract of Transformative Critique 27
3. Desiring Surfaces 46
Part 2 The Work of Critique
4. Affective Pedagogy and Feminist Critique 69
5. Chick Lit: “Not Your Mother’s Romance Novels” 97
6. Red Love 118
7. Globalization, the “Multitude,” and Cynical Critique 134
8. Reading Ideology: Marx, de Man, and Critique 169
Coda: Reclaiming Totality 195
Bibliography 197
Index 211
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Preface: The Critique
of Interpretive Reason
I argue in this book that contemporary cultural critique has
been reduced to the “interpretation” of representation, thereby translat-
ing the social world into culture and equating culture with meaning. It
then makes meaning itself an antimimetic melodrama of fragmented
letters, signs, and traces that are at odds with themselves, and therefore
the only meaning they might have is their difference from themselves.
The world that emerges from contemporary cultural critique is a world
of self-difference made of representations, which are ultimately self-rep-
resentations, because signs are seen as always pointing to themselves and
not to a reality “outside.” This is a world without an outside. Contrary
to canonic theory, this missing outside is the effect not of epistemologi-
cal critique but of ideological mystification. It is a cultural opacity or
“unreadability,” to use Paul de Man’s term (Allegories 245), that func-
tions with absolute lucidity to shield capital by rendering its effects on
collective social life—from layoffs and bad schooling to poor diet and the
absence of health care—a matter of representation and the interpreta-
tion of that representation. Cultural critique, in other word, has made
it impossible to understand social injustice, class differences, and the
violent rule of capital as objective historical reality. It has turned them
into effects of oscillating signs that disrupt the formation of meaningful
words and coherent statements. By rewriting the social as representation,
canonic cultural critique obscures the underlying structures of material
social relations such as class and instead focuses on the technologies of
signs and their concrete surfaces. According to Elizabeth Grosz,
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