On "Cultural Studies": a response to Remo Ceserani.

Theory travels, as Edward Said taught us, and where there is travel, there is an economy of loss and gain. Cultural Studies is no exception. Born in Birmingham, UK, it made its way across the Atlantic in what Georges van Den Abbeele has argued is merely the latest move in a longer itinerary in which Cultural Studies itself "chunneled" its way to the United Kingdom from France, where poststructuralism had packed its bags that, in turn, were arguably stitched together from a rereading of German philosophy in post-Nazi Europe. In his note, Remo Ceserani documents its return across the Atlantic, its delayed arrival both in Italy and, to be honest, to Italian Studies. But let us not be drawn into a rhetoric of belatedness; it is less important to note that this train "viaggia in ritardo," than to inspect the baggage it has lost or gained as a result. It is already a commonplace of discussions of Cultural Studies in the US that the term has become so amorphous and all-inclusive that attempts to define it are futile. Some of the names included in the volumes cited by Ceserani testify to the additional miles traveled: the deconstructionist Marxist feminist Spivak and the post-Marxist Lacanian Zizek, are two figures who would not huddle uncritically under the Cultural Studies umbrella in the US, indeed, Zizek has been openly critical of its lack of a coherent theoretical framework. The brand name of their umbrella instead is "Theory," by which I mean that particular form of discourse whose US birthplace was the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference on "The Structuralist Controversy." Those who continue to claim this mantle (for example, those who belong to what Tilottama Rajan has recently referred to as the "deconstructive diaspora") are among Cultural Studies' most unrelenting critics, yet the voyage back has them all in the same boat. In fact, the entries in the Michele Cometa's Dizionario degli studi culturali range from "deconstruction" to "queer theory," "ecriture feminine" to "New Historicism," "Jewish Studies" to "Women's Studies." One is tempted to say, as Said wrote of Foucault's conception of power, that Cultural Studies has traveled too far, and in its Italian debut, gobbled up every critical intervention of the past 40 years. Lost is the fierceness of debate and attack that has surrounded Cultural Studies, from both left and right. At the same time, of course, "Theory" also facilitated Cultural Studies' application for a green card by loosening the boundaries between disciplines in the American academy in the 1970s and early 1980s. Like Cultural Studies, "Theory," itself already an amalgam of philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, semiotics, Marxism, and literary criticism, crossed disciplines with agility. (Unlike Cultural Studies, however, "Theory" did not aspire to go beyond literature, but rather worked through it to produce some of its most enduring formulations; without Rousseau, there would be no Derridean supplement; no Jamesonian realism without Balzac, and so on.)

Ceserani is certainly not alone in suggesting that Cultural Studies is a marketing ploy. As we have all seen, academic publishers have seized upon it like a life jacket on that sinking ship called the Humanities, and shoehorned all manner of "studies" into its plump folds. An ambiguous success, to be sure, since it is itself the symptom of the continued crisis in the humanities in the US, and their position as site of the "culture wars." Is the move to Cultural Studies purely pragmatic and driven by the logic of capital itself? On the one hand, one is tempted to say yes; institutions have not been blind to the cost-cutting benefits of amalgamating departments and the disciplines they represent, and one suspects a cynical adoption on the part of administrators who dangle "interdisciplinarity" before us as the key to gaining access to diminishing resources. What's more, a devil's advocate might argue that US Cultural Studies is generated by the very thing it posits as its object, that it is less a critique of globalization than its product. In fact, Fredric Jameson, in his extensive review of the biblical Cultural Studies edited by Lawrence Grossberg et. al. (Routledge 1992), notes the lack of commodity analysis in the volume, as though it were the repressed of the new field itself.

But on the other hand, one would say no; in the US context, the arrival of Cultural Studies was preceded by the founding of departments and programs of African American Studies, Women's Studies, Latin American Studies, Asian Studies, Film Studies, and Communications. Themselves a mixture of fields fought for by social movements, such as Women's Studies and African American Studies, or fostered by the state, such as international area studies, these programs had placed gender and race, the dynamics of oppression and resistance, and a questioning of canonical high culture on the agenda. The ground, both intellectual and institutional, was laid for the reception of what was in Britain a pedagogical practice committed to radical social change. When transplanted to this US context, British Cultural Studies, with its own emphasis on identities as formed through the articulation of contradictory interpellations, provided an important methodological tool at the same rime as its "presentist" political concerns appealed to those for whom Theory's claim to offer a political critique appeared too mediated and too oblivious of historical context, when not utterly compromised by the so-called revelations about Paul de Man.

Is there an "Italian" specificity to Cultural Studies? Here we can differentiate between an analysis of the consequences of its traveling to Italy, and a reflection on the possibilities it might offer to those of us who work in Italian Studies (itself an innovation ambiguously positioned between a survival strategy in tough rimes for "small" languages" in the American academy, and a genuine attempt to work across disciplines, legacy of Theory's interdisciplinary impulse) in the US. In the former case, "Italy" names a particular social, political, economic, intellectual, and institutional configuration that constitutes a context that will shape the reception and further transformation of Cultural Studies. From that point of view, it does not come as a surprise that the arrival of "Cultural Studies" on Italian soil should produce resistance in the form of anxiety about the centrality of literature and literariness. Ceserani's concern about literature's continuing "cultural" (in the old sense of the cultivation of educated minds and citizens) role will resonate with Italian intellectuals in a context in which "literary history" remains the dominant mode, and the university has recently undergone the shock of a much-discussed reform. (Italianists in the US who have resisted the changes wrought by Theory may share this anxiety; from this perspective, they might be said to constitute a transnation, in Arjun Appadurai's sense, holding on to an ideological link to a putative point of origin.) At the same time, one would have to calculate into the picture the survival of semiotics in Italy (long after its demise in France and the US) as the established domain of reflection on popular culture, and the relative rigidity of disciplinary boundaries in the academy. Geography is still the province of geographers, Derrida remains in the hands of philosophers, Freud and his legacy remain marginal, and feminism a social movement whose foothold in the academy is shaky at best. The publishing house Meltemi, whose website proclaims the "necessita insopprimibile di scardinare ottuse barriere disciplinari, asfissianti specialismi" is bringing into the picture a number of postcolonial theorists, especially in the "Biblioteca" series edited by Armando Gnisci. Here Italian readers can find Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Edouard Glissant, Zizek, as well as Judith Butler. A quick search on the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unico website, however, suggests that only one work by Stuart Hall (arguably the most authoritative voice of Cultural Studies) has ever been translated into Italian, nothing by Simon During, including the Cultural Studies Reader brought out by Routledge in 1993, nor has the Cultural Studies volume edited by Lawrence Grossberg, et. al. appeared in Italian. All of these factors will contribute to the morphing yet again of Cultural Studies as it travels.

But if we look toward future work in the US, the "Italian" specificity is even more difficult to name, if it should be named at all. Indeed, Cultural Studies defender Cary Nelson has declared that no one who works entirely within the confines of one nation state can do Cultural Studies. (And in this one sees a marked difference from New Historicism, a critical method arguably wedded to early modern England). With its eye trained on the world system, globalization, popular culture, mediality, and above all nodes of articulation, Cultural Studies at its best constructs an object for which national borders are not checkpoints but contact zones. This is not to say that borders are not rigidly enforced in worlds past or present, but rather that the Cultural Studies scholar thinks across them, relationally. From this point of view, attempts to claim an "Italian" genealogy for Cultural Studies appear wrong-headed reinforcements of national identity, whether they be attempts to wrest Gramsci from Stuart Hall, resurrect Croce, or celebrate Umberto Eco as precursor. The point instead would be to take up the fundamental methodological concept of articulation, and work the contingency and contradictoriness of all identifies, national and otherwise. The "Italian culture" that we construct may well not be recognizable to those "inside" it; after all, as Jameson writes, "culture is the nimbus perceived by one group when it comes into contact with and observes another one" (271). The questions we pose are necessarily bound in part to our own intellectual, political, social, and institutional context in the US. But a loss of "authenticity" does not concern me. What does, instead, is that, in traveling, Cultural Studies might have lost its oppositional edge, or worse, might content itself with celebrating its own radicality.

WORKS CONSULTED

Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996.

Jameson, Fredric. "On Cultural Studies." The Identity in Question. Ed. John Rajchman. New York: Routledge. 1995. 251-95.

Lawton, Ben, and Oraziella Parati, eds. Italian Cultural Studies. Boca Raton, FL: Bordighera, 2001.

Nelson, Cary. "Literature as Cultural Studies." Cultural Studies and the Politics of Disciplinarity. Ed. Cary Nelson and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar. New York: Routledge, 1996. 63-102.

Rajan, Tilottama. "In the Wake of Cultural Studies: Globalization, Theory, and the University." Diacritics 31.3 (Fall 2001): 67-88.

Said, Edward. "Traveling Theory." The Edward Said Reader. Ed. Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin. New York: Vintage Books, 2000. 195-217.

Van Den Abbeele, Georges. "Theory and the 'Chunnel': Cultural Studies and the Retreat of Ideology." Symploke 11.1-2 (2003): 77-95.

Meltemi Editore http://www.meltemieditore.it

Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unico http://opac.sbn.it/

BARBARA SPACKMAN

University of California, Berkeley