What Should Cultural Studies Do?

November 29, 2016

In the joint class discussion with the 2nd year cohort, I was grouped with Daniel, Noir and Huda. Much of the our time together was dominated by a discussion on the inaccessibility of theory outside of the academy, and how might we each resist being professionalized and ejected as products of the university. I believe that to be a critically engaged member of the university, it is necessary to struggle against institutional disciplinization and constantly interrogate the role one plays in operating within a white supremacist institution.

Cultural Studies acts as the possible academic entryway into Moten and Harney’s “Undercommons,” a subterranean study space for intellectuals to use the tools of academia to subvert the university’s exploitation of workers, anti-blackness, and preservation of white patriarchy. In the interview with Stevphen Shukaitis, Moten talks about the usefulness of actors and theories not as inherent, but as residing in their dynamic relationships to one another. In his words, it’s the “new way of being together and thinking together that’s important, and not the tool, not the prop” (106). The practice of cultivating a mind to do Cultural Studies research is just as important as the outcomes of the research. To draw from readings from another class, J. K. Gibson-Graham spends the last half of the introduction of A Postcapitalist Politics mapping out techniques for creating spacious thinking. The ability to move toward the new and away from the familiar is key to enacting other futures. To those two economic geographers, the mind is for “providing an incubating environment for half-baked ideas, while at the same time working against impulses to squelch and limit" (xxviii). I observed Moten and Harney exhibiting a serious playfulness in their “Use and Usufruct” lecture at UW Bothell when re-imagining the uses of the terms service, freedom and enslavement. Their phrase “enslavement to the struggle for freedom” was shocking because it was at complete odds to the current social justice discourse based on a strict freedom/slavery binary. Rather than putting too much effort into searching for meaning in their counterintuitive concept, the Cultural Studies scholar notices the small tear in conventional understanding, and the space that is cleared for experimental thinking.

Cultural Studies should be close partners with political activism and resistance. Cultural Studies and activists ask similar questions regarding power in society. In From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, Taylor employs a Cultural Studies framework to investigate what has changed and what hasn’t in the material living conditions of the Black populations in the US. While providing an extensive historical accounting of the criminalization of Black communities by the US government, Taylor focuses on the sites of knowledge production as the vehicle for creating and evolving these conditions. Keywords include “culture of poverty,” “colorblindness” and “post-racial.” Post Cold War, anthropologist Oscar Lewis denoted poverty as ingrained in the culture of people of color, which created a victim-blaming ideology that left no space for interrogating unjust economic and social systems as sources of poverty (36). Following the legal wins of the Civil Rights movement, the national conversation about race and addressing the deep needs of the Black communities vanished with the widespread adoption of American now having entered a “colorblind” era. Because overt racism was outlawed, Nixon and his conservative counterparts used the ideology of colorblindness to deny government’s responsibility to provide aid to continued Black impoverishment (53).

This first quarter of MACS has prepared me for cultivating what C. Wright Mills calls “the sociological imagination,” which is the ability to move across concepts, possibilities and disciplines without dropping the anchor of emotional investment in any place (4). I am excited to practice this form of open and curious thinking on my work as a designer, as that is an industry rife with popular judgments of “good” and “bad” design. Rather than accepting these judgments and trends, Cultural Studies trains me to ask questions, such as who is this design idea for? Whose experiences is it omitting? What are its assumptions? Even if the idea or design benefits me, what can be gained from critiquing it? Skills I look forward to acquiring as I advance in this program are historical research and analysis, and identifying deep connections between seemingly disparate texts and experiences. Again, I want to learn to keep asking better questions, beyond “what does this mean?”, and move beyond full acceptance or rejection of a theory to a more complicated engagement. I struggle with knowing what to do with what’s bothering the author enough to study and research a topic, how to tie it to my research interests or lived experience. Perhaps the Cultural Studies scholar sees themselves as a voracious collector of ideas which can one day be assembled and expanded to produce knowledge.

References

Gibson-Graham, J. K. (2006). A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta (2016). From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Moten, Fred, and Stefano Harney (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions.

Mills, C. Wright (1959). The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.

My crayon renditions of my colleagues, and their current research interests: