An economy of impossibility: a preliminary study for an ordinal approach to research methods in cultural studies

Abstract

Preface This 'Economy of impossibility' article is testament to Arnold Shepperson because it says something about what we have lost. The fact that it is a draft and unfinished precisely helps to pose questions to think about (see also Julia Clare's article). That's not a bad legacy! Ultimately Arnold was concerned with two troubling problems, both of which derive from his context: 1) being in the Centre for Cultural and Media Studies (CCMS) and 2) living in contemporary South Africa. He was deeply embedded in the CCMS project of deploying critical methodology within an activist struggle. But ultimately he could not help himself--he had to turn cultural studies methodology upon itself. So Arnold used cultural studies' critical methodology to examine the underlying premises of the field. In so doing he glimpsed a contradiction, for although cultural studies likes to think of itself as 'oppositional', cultural studies is actually 'embedded within' liberal discourse. Cultural studies and postie discourse (which believes itself to be 'revolutionary' and oppositional to liberal-capitalism), ultimately do not threaten liberalism--cultural studies ironically serves liberalism by generating a 'tamed' critique from within ('within' because it is grounded in liberal premises). The sentences below reveal Arnold's concern with this cultural studies embeddedness within liberalism: * 'The problem, in brief, is that the method of assigning such cardinal values entails a pre-existing value-judgement' * 'There can be no present cognition in the absence of a prior cognition' * 'One choice is favoured in advance'. Arnold recognised that the 'prior cognition', in which cultural studies is grounded, is liberal-democracy. This is the choice that is 'favoured in advance'. What Arnold wanted instead was to problematise this 'choice favoured in advance'. So he wanted a new kind of cultural studies, where 'unsettled preferences is what we believe should be analysed as the core subject matter of cultural studies'; that is, cultural studies should critically examine and deconstruct its prior cognition and assumptions. This brings us to the second issue troubling Arnold. He was part of cultural studies' opposition to apartheid and he was a part of South Africa's 1990s transition. I think Arnold was troubled by the resultant liberal-democracy that had resulted. His discussion of 'voter paradox' is rooted in his grappling with the South African context unfolding around him. If we look at the above two themes, Arnold does not offer answers--but he does offer questions ... and he challenges cultural studies to grapple with these questions. An economy of impossibility Arnold Shepperson The strength of cultural studies (CS) as a more-or-less self-proclaimed 'New humanities paradigm' that transgresses (as opposed to progress, regress, ingress, egress, and so on) the boundaries of traditional disciplines, hides a rather mundane reality. The burgeoning publication and teaching of the field's practitioners more and more takes on the appearance of a sort of 'nongress': a going-nowhere, a running-on-the-spot, or moving sideways, in the specific sense of not-having-anywhere-to-go. Hence the stress on 'ownership', 'origins', 'genealogy', that accompanies the legal defence of, and moral claim to, possession of some form of property on the one hand. On the other hand, conference papers, articles, textbooks and review volumes discuss, with a combination of scholastic minuteness and revolutionary fervour, whether 'method' is a relevant criterion for distinguishing CS from other 'Study this!' programmes, departments, and centres (Appleton, 2003, full details not supplied). Yet further reflection suggests that when Raymond Williams (1989: 158) ventured to suggest that CS had begun to look like a bit of a 'vague and baggy monster', he spoke not only of the growing multiplicity of topics that cultural studies practitioners studied; but also implied that the field had begun to turn in on itself, splitting into feminist, historicist, semiotic, communicationalist, structuralist, culturalist, and other paradigms, all asserting conflicting claims to 'ownership of cultural studies'. …