Power, Desire, and American Cultural Studies

Author(s): Frank Shuffelton

Source: Early American Literature, Vol. 34, No. 1 (1999), pp. 94-102
Published by: University of North Carolina Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25057148
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 POWER, DESIRE, AND
AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES
FRANK SHUFFELTON

University of Rochester

The most important emergent critical movement in the last

and a half has been, arguably, cultural studies, that mode of in
"committed to understanding how texts acquire meaning, ex
ing the relations among texts and the nation's several cultures, expre
dissent based on these investigations, and fostering social change"
son and Ruff 9). Cultural studies has gained power as a movement
of its promise to include the inquiries and critiques launched by f
and multiculturalism as part of its own program, although not w
reservations on the part of some feminists and scholars of race a
nicity (Caughie 78), but its most immediate appeal has been its in
upon engaging in interdisciplinary studies of "infinite, interlocki
tions among 'literary' texts and the cultures these texts simultaneous
created by and help to create" (Smithson and Ruff 6). Because th
that occupy the attention of early Americanists never measured up t
well to New Critical definitions of "art," many of us have tended to j
our own scholarship in terms of these texts' relationality to ideologic
mation, historical situation, and social organization. (Buried som
in the origin stories of their discipline, American cultural studies th
often recount their victory over New Criticism as a delivery from th
hand of the father.) Furthermore, some of us have often felt our
be straining uncomfortably at the conventional bounds of our dis
feeling that we have at least as much in common with the historians
do with the scholars of Elizabethan drama or romantic poetics in
departments.
Cultural studies would seem to offer a rationale for what we ha
been doing as scholars, and recent books by scholars as different
Shields, Julia Stern, Jared Gardener, Christopher Looby, Jill Lep
David Waldstreicher would seem to be exemplary studies of "infinite,
locking relations" of texts and cultures. Yet before we rashly embrac
cultural studies movement, we ought to consider that perhaps no
study of culture is an example of cultural studies?although oppor
publishers and academics are often eager to blur this distinction?
need to keep this in mind if we are best to profit from the potential

94

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 The Round Table 95

the cultural studies movement. Thus, a posting on the electronic list spon
sored by the Institute of Early American History and Culture advises a
questioner, "If cultural studies means interdisciplinary scholarship using a
wide range of original sources, with an emphasis on written material both
'high brow' and 'low brow', then you want to read past issues of Early
American Literature & Eighteenth-Century Studies." These are fine publi
cations, but this definition of cultural studies seems both methodologically
impossibly broad even as its focus on "written material" seriously restricts
its scope. Unless we can meaningfully distinguish cultural studies from a
more general study of culture, we risk missing the opportunity to improve
our own critical practice, whether or not we choose to embrace any or all
of the positions occupied by cultural studies scholars. Perhaps, after all,
one of the most valuable elements of cultural studies may be its injunction
to interrogate power wherever it occurs, even in the cultural studies move
ment itself.
While cultural studies has origins in the work of Raymond Williams
and Richard Hoggart and in the founding of the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies at Birmingham, it has developed at many different sites as
a constellation of multiple discourses, with a dizzying range of knowledge
formations, presenting many different kinds of work, offering a number of
different histories (Hall, "Theoretical Legacies" 278). Denying it any dis
tinct methodology, the editors of a recent influential collection of essays
that assumed the definitive title Cultural Studies suggest that it can be best
thought of as a methodological bricolage, "pragmatic, strategic, and self
reflective" (Grossberg et al. 2). It claims to be variously interdisciplinary,
transdisciplinary, and counter-disciplinary, or even to be no discipline at
all in the sense usually recognized in academic settings. According to Lata
Mani, it seems to claim that it can "offer hospitality, if not centrality,
to practitioners of postmodern, postcolonial, transnational historiography
and ethnography, and provide a location where the new politics of differ
ence?racial, sexual, cultural, transnational?can combine and be articu
lated in all their dazzling plurality" (Mani 392). One can understand why
Fredric Jameson professes to see Utopia "secretly at work everywhere" in
many of its utterances (Jameson 51).
The project of cultural studies has arisen in response to the consequences
of global political crises since World War II: the collapse of European im
perial systems, the moral bankruptcy of Soviet socialism beginning in 1956
in Hungary, the disillusionment of the United States in Viet Nam. Cultural
studies has attempted to address the contemporary crisis in the humani
ties that has followed the recognition of disparities between the ideals of
humanistic liberalism enshrined in academic curricula and continuing pres
ence of hunger, sickness, and ignorance tolerated by our societies (Brant
linger 6). The crisis is not merely political, however, because the post

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 96 Early American Literature, Volume 34,1999

modern explosion of new possibilities of aesthetic experience exposed the

emptiness of transcendental aesthetics. Because cultural studies combines
both political intention and critical reason in order to further "noncoer
cive knowledge produced in the interests of human freedom" (Said 29), its
practitioners have overwhelmingly directed their attention to contempo
rary cultural phenomena, or at least to those nineteenth-century practices
and ideological formations that have laid the ground for the contemporary
crisis. Cultural studies is not necessarily ahistorical, however, and the ori
gins of cultural studies in such work by Raymond Williams as Culture and
Society and The Long Revolution point to the relevance of a cultural studies
perspective when brought to bear on the past. The recently formed Group
for Early Modern Cultural Studies, for example, has in its first five meet
ings sought to interrogate forms of cultural representation and domination
between 1450 and 1850.
Cultural studies' pluralist approaches to a culture seen as fragmented,
in crisis, and not susceptible to interpretation through a single master nar
rative could be particularly useful when brought to bear on early Ameri
can culture. Its self-conscious insistence upon the contingent, provisional
nature of its methodologies might seem to offer important safeguards
against mindlessly presentist impositions upon the past, even as it allowed
for thoughtful applications of later conceptual developments in an attempt
to understand that past as an articulated cultural system. Fragmentation
and continuing crisis characterized early America, with its increasing di
vergence from European cultural norms and practices; its continuing prob
lems with ethnicity, race, and social violence; and above all its distinctly
different patterns of local settlement and development, which were in many
ways as distant from each other as from the reified Europe they thought
of as "home." Historians and literary scholars alike have given disciplinary
order to this material by subsuming it under a notion of "America" that, as
William Spengemann has pointed out, turns "early America" into a euphe
mism for "those colonies that eventually became the United States." While
this imposes a national narrative of founding, political and cultural devel
opment, and triumphant independence?variously registered as the victory
of democracy and freedom, the hegemony of white males, or some combi
nation of the two?upon the bewildering variety of American experiences,
it does so by reading the post-1787 nation, perhaps even the post-1865
nation, back into that age of crisis that was both like our own and ex
tremely unlike it.
The effort to read nationalist screen memories back onto the colonial
experience, however, has frequently been unsatisfactory; the Puritan ori
gins of the American self, for example, are perhaps only credible if we
can bring ourselves to ignore racial others, enlightened Americans, South
erners, even Puritan males who differed in significant ways from John

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 The Round Table 97

Winthrop and Cotton Mather. Literary Americanists have by and large r

sponded to this situation by ignoring early texts, except for the occasional
need to touch base with one of a limited number of supposedly found
tional texts such as Bradford's account of the Pequot War, Cr?vecoeur's
Letters, and Franklin's Autobiography. They have been encouraged to d
this by a notion of aesthetics shaped by late eighteenth-century Germa
critics who separated aesthetic from political and practical experience
Early American texts are thus either not American enough or not literary
enough, items of marginal interest only at both the MLA meetings and
those of the American Studies Association. American historians have bee
more successful in providing a thick description of early American life, but
their accounts of culture in that society often tend to show it as ornamen
tal backdrop to formations of institution and ideology. If they inevitabl
have had to rely on texts to gain access to social practice, they have too
often failed to see clearly that the texts themselves were social practice
Cultural studies' pluralist array of methodologies, conjoined to its critiqu
of idealist aesthetics, might seem more suitable, then, to specific, conti
gent analyses of early American cultural practices and representations that
could support a usefully contextualized understanding of the possibilitie
of culture in fragmented and strained conditions of social life. Further
more, cultural studies' postmodern assumption that cultural practices ca
be read and criticized analogously as texts are read and criticized (withou
falling into the de Man?an trap that asserts that practices are texts) prom
ises to overcome intellectual barriers drawn up by modern disciplines.
It should come as no surprise then that a few years ago in an issue of
Early American Literature Sharon Harris urged "the necessity of bringin
contemporary theories to bear upon early American literatures because
of... new demands on our knowledge of the period" (184). She explaine
that her own research introduced her to texts "that could not be explained
as such by the traditional aesthetic or cultural evaluative methods in which
I had been trained," and consequently she recognized the necessity to "find
new vocabularies for articulating their value in literary and cultural terms"
(184). Seeking to criticize the works of more than three hundred early
American women writers turned up by her research, she found her method
ology in feminist discourse, but she went on to suggest the usefulness for
other workers in this area of a whole range of postmodern discourses
Frankfurt School critical theory, Foucaultian analysis, Marxist critique,
psychoanalytic theory, discourses of race and postcolonialism. An answe
to the thorny intransigence and diversity of early American texts thus lies
in opening them to analysis by more methodologies than are contained
in traditional formalist aesthetics. She recognized that many methodol
gies?she cites postcolonial theories as a specific case?will need to b
reconfigured in order to apply to early texts, and in turn the engagement

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 98 Early American Literature, Volume 34,1999

with these texts will require adjustments in the theory to take account of
the implications of the work of early Americanists (187). She concluded by
bringing the issue of understanding past texts back to contemporary prac
tice by quoting Andrew Wiget on the necessity of a critical pedagogy when
teaching Native American texts (187-88).
This is an intelligent and commendable essay to which one can feel
strongly allied, and I suspect that Harris is sympathetic to the cultural
studies project, which in many ways seems to be adumbrated here. Never
theless, this essay does not finally emerge in its present state as a discursive
formation of cultural studies. Stuart Hall has noted that while cultural
studies is certainly open-ended, it is not simply pluralist in the sense of
being an unpoliced disciplinary area. "There is," he says, "something at
stake in cultural studies, in a way that I think, and hope, is not exactly
true of many other very important intellectual and critical practices" (Hall,
"Theoretical Legacies" 278). Harris is sensitive both to the need to expose
or demystify ideologies of gender, race, and class and to avoid what Edward
Said has called "a rhetoric of blame" in order to "formulate a clearer under
standing of . . . destructive discursive and political confrontations" (187).
Yet the primary goal seems finally to understand these texts in order to en
courage enlightened, progressive attitudes in ourselves and in our students,
whereas a thoroughgoing cultural studies critique would seek to change
the practice of the world itself. It comes close, in other words, to doing
what Hall says he fears most for American cultural studies, a "textualiza
tion of [its] own discourses [that] somehow constitutes power and politics
as exclusively matters of language and textuality itself" (Hall, "Theoreti
cal Legacies" 286). That is to say, Harris's concern in this essay with texts
and representations touches upon but does not fully engage what may well
be the master trope of cultural studies, power, nor is it fully self-conscious
of its own involvement in the reproduction of hegemonic relationships. (In
her pioneering work on early American women writers, however, Harris
is very much aware of what is at stake and seeks to disrupt a patriarchal
history of American letters.)
Tony Bennett, contributing to the Cultural Studies essay collection, de
fines it "largely as a term of convenience for a fairly dispersed array of
theoretical and political positions which, however widely divergent they
might be in other respects, share a commitment to examining cultural prac
tices from the point of view of their intrication with, and within, relations
of power" (Bennett 23). The critique of power is inescapable for anyone
who professes, as the cultural studies theorists do, a wish to intervene
"in a world in which it would make some difference" (Hall, "Theoretical
Legacies" 286), because occurring in "the continuous dialectic between
'knowledge' and 'power' " are the significant breaks?where old lines of
thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old

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 The Round Table 99

and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes"
(Hall, "Two Paradigms" 610). Harris's decision to present the problem of
bringing postmodern theory to bear on early American texts as a problem
of knowledge, i.e., what we must know or learn to understand texts better,
subtly evades those questions about relations of power in the text and in
the reflections on it that might genuinely intervene in our world. Her desire
to bring new sets of premises and themes to the study of early American
literature aims not to disrupt the world but to reform an ongoing critical
and pedagogical process, and in doing so she silently risks extending a pat
tern of cultural domination. We have been supplied by our teachers with
inadequate tools, the argument here seems to suggest, but we will improve
our toolkits and teach our students better. But our teachers thought they
were doing that for us, and in the end, because we were unable to critique
our own intrication in the power relationships of teacher and student, we
simply pass on a model of education as flawed indoctrination rather than
as genuine emancipation. As Jacques Ranci?re has recently pointed out,
under the guise of d?mystification and de-idealization we reproduce the
student as an always subordinated subject (7).
Yet, there is perhaps a real wisdom in Harris's disavowal of radical inter
vention, her refusal to appeal simplistically to the discourse of power that
itself can work to hinder the freedom and effectiveness of critical think
ing. Power, whether invoked by New Historicists as "a relatively weak
overlay... which itself threatens to become a universal solvent in explana
tion and interpretation" (LaCapra 191), or constructed by cultural studies
practitioners as a discursive constant, paradoxically threatens to constrict
the open-ended critique of subject and society that is aimed at. Fredric
Jameson suggests "as a form of philosophical hygiene that for the next ten
years or so we simply stop using the two words power and the body," for
if power "is everywhere, then there is not much point in talking about it"
(Jameson 44-45). The seemingly obsessive invocation of power leads to
reifications of culture, and of human life itself, as merely "the terrain on
which hegemony is struggled for and established" in which the only pos
sible positions are "of those who hold power or of those who contest it"
(Hartley 71, 73). The suppressed narrative of power inherent in a view of
culture simply as the site of "cultural struggles" limits the range of critical
reason to either an expression of hegemonic positions or to a mirroring re
sistance that holds the subordinated and subaltern captive to the categories
of the dominant order, albeit negatively. The ability to produce knowledge
does not signify freedom when what counts as knowledge is uncontested.
Or as Jameson puts it, power is a "dangerous and intoxicating slogan for
intellectuals, who thereby feel themselves closer to its 'reality' than they
may actually be" (44).
The question, then, really is about power, not about the power relation

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 ioo Early American Literature, Volume 34,1999

ships in a textualized world that can be unmasked, but about the power
to acquire emancipatory thinking that can free us even from the bonds of
reified culture itself. Theodor Adorno admonished traditional cultural crit
ics who tried to assume a position outside compromised mass culture for
"the dazzled and arrogant recognition which criticism surreptitiously con
fers on culture" (Adorno, "Cultural Criticism" 19), and a similar admon
ishment might be laid upon the very different critics in the cultural studies
movement. Ironically, one way to escape possible enthrallment to culture
may be to return to the repressed discourse of aesthetics. As Ian Hunter has
argued, cultural studies has sought to limit the aesthetic domain by con
textualizing it within "spheres of labor and politics, where humanity takes
shape in the processes of securing its material existence and governing
itself" (Hunter 347), but these restrictions have become increasingly diffi
cult to sustain. As long as aesthetics could be constructed as a knowledge
or as an ideal cultivation, the aesthetic education of man independent of
material contingencies, it could be understood as merely an ideology, but
when perceived ethically as a contingent strategy for conducting one's life,
it emerges, in Hunter's words, as "one of the technologies of our present
existence" (349). In a very general way this distinction between new and old
understandings of aesthetics is prefigured in Kant's distinctions between
the analytic of beautiful and that of the sublime. For Kant "natural beauty
(such as is self-subsisting) conveys a finality in its form making the object
appear, as it were, preadapted to our power of judgment" (Kant 91), and it
follows from this that beauty can be made a science and that taste can be
cultivated in accordance with law. Where the beautiful can become a form
of knowledge, the feeling of the sublime "may appear, indeed, in point of
form to contravene the ends of our power of judgment, to be ill-adapted
to our faculty of presentation, and to be, as it were, an outrage on the
imagination" (Kant 91). A "negative pleasure" to the "positive pleasure"
of the beautiful, the sublime signifies emancipatory, disruptive experience,
beyond the limits of knowledges and ideologies. It is perhaps no accident
that the analytic of the sublime has in recent years begun to receive new
attention as relevant to conditions of life in the late twentieth century.
While he was well aware that "it is nothing new to find that the sub
lime becomes the cover for something low" (Adorno, Jargon xxi), Adorno
uncovered a negativity in dialectics that in effect reintroduced the sublime
into critical reasoning, stating, "The name of dialectics says no more, to
begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving
a remainder" (Adorno, Negative Dialectics 5). Adorno's "remainder" is
in important ways Kant's "outrage on the imagination," the point of re
sistance to ideologies of hegemonic culture and of hegemonizing cultural
studies, yet Adorno's version of the sublime, unlike Kant's, resists mystifi
cation as "natural" or "transcendental" or "universal." When we bring the

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 The Round Table ioi

perspectives of cultural studies to bear on early mo

tions, we must be attentive always to these remainders
practices that resist our own theorizing because here
will allow us to escape momentarily from the limits
pose on us as intellectuals, teachers, students, people
century. Implicit at the center of Sharon Harris's c
understanding early American texts is, I think, a red
centrality of the texts with all of their power to resist
explanations that seek to tame them. Because early
strange and fragmented, the strategies of cultural stud
ise to those of us working in the area, but it is equally
ber that a part of it, a sublime remainder, is not reduc
power or the body. The attraction of early American li
been this highly peculiar sublimity, its outrageousness
and if we are to use it to intervene in the life of our wo
that always-residual strangeness. It is in that sublime r
beyond the limits of imagination or knowledge, whe
desire?the word that I have held back so long?that c
the desire for signifying in an immanent world, the d
with the lives of strangers, the desire to recognize the

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