Everyman an Ubermensch: The Culture of Cultural Studies

Abstract

The rise of cultural studies within the United States, predominantly in English departments, has been greeted with no small measure of disquiet within French departments, and not only on the part of traditionalists unwilling to move with the times. Though a certain pressure to stay up to date without a doubt making itself felt, it still unclear what this movement means for the future of French studies. Indeed, even as the announcements of jobs within French departments for specialists in cultural studies proliferate on the MLA job list, the question of exactly what such specialists in fact do within the context of French studies as yet undefined (Petrey 382). While this question continues to work itself out within hiring committees and editorial boards, it nevertheless behooves us to ask the question: What cultural studies? Its practitioners in other disciplines have long been loath to offer much in the way of a definition, for reasons which, they tell us, have everything to do with the intellectual originality of the burgeoning field. As the editors of the influential collection cum stocktaking Cultural Studies take great pains to point out, cultural studies is not merely interdisciplinary but is often ... actively and aggressively anti-disciplinary. It also anti-methodologicalits method being a kind of bricolage-and this so by design (Nelson, Treichler, and Grossberg 1-2). To ask what cultural studies is, they imply, to misunderstand this fundamental anti-or post-disciplinarity. Nevertheless, some work fits easily under the rubric of cultural studies and some work does not. A critical leftist rhetoric of progressivism, activism, and intervention-'cultural reading' as an act of resistance (Wallace 656), for example-is clearly a necessary and perhaps even a sufficient condition for having one's work accepted as work in cultural studies. Moreover, the cultural studiers themselves, for want of a better term, do have a relatively clear idea of what does and does not count as work in cultural studies, despite