The biodiesel of academia

Rant alert...

I've written about this a little before, but I'm more and more convinced that cultural studies is the biodiesel of academia.

Biodiesel is, simply put, a wolf in sheep's clothing. Though it purports to be an environmentally friendly, homegrown alternative to Middle East oil, it's nothing more than a plot to burn food to support agribusiness and keep the world starving. The point is not "environmentally friendly," it's "homegrown." America is the world's largest food exporter, and produces so much surplus of food that there needn't be a single starving person on this planet. To decide that we should use that most precious of resources to line the pockets of oversubsidized corporate farming is so offensive it makes me ill just to think of it.

So, what about cultural studies? In the guise of a thoroughgoing left-liberal project to examine power relationships and problematize hegemonies by studying lived culture, cultural studies distracts us from the problems of economic injustice and the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of inherently totalitarian transnationals and other nodes of private power.

Pluralism is about recognition, not redistribution (Nancy Fraser). And even redistribution is not restructuring or revolution—it doesn't necessarily reject out of hand the immanent injustices of capitalism. The reason pluralism (recognition) has advanced in the US over the past several decades is that it is the unimportant debate. Who cares whether we problematize the exclusion of minorities from history, so long as we (or at least most of us) submit to increasing economic injustice, the strengthening of the nanny state, and isolation and control by consumerist technologies? Who cares? Well, clearly not the folks at the top. If they did, we'd be talking about something else.

Cultural studies may be right in many of the things it claims, but it's still got it all wrong. Morons who can't see that removing both class and a polemical political element from discourse on power relations are just capitalist fanboys. The irruption of class into academic discourse got too close to the problems of truly lived cultures (real economic and political conditions), so it's been slowly erased.

Not to say that class is what it's all about. Class is an element of the problem, but certainly not the whole issue at stake. What's at stake is "the fact...that mass culture has won; there is nothing else." (Denning, in Modernity and Mass Culture, 257) Or, more pointedly, that a cultural studies scholar like Denning can offhandedly make that statement and miss its significance entirely in the rest of his article. He fails to see that mass culture itself is the ideology of the ruling class, and does so to our detriment and the rulers' great benefit. Subsuming everyone, including most of the wealthy and powerful, in a system of mass culture modalities that foreclose the imagination of a non-capitalist, non-consumerist society is the goal of contemporary mass culture.

Naturalizing capitalism, naturalizing a dysfunctional political system, naturalizing consumerism, etc. while simultaneously precluding the imagination of anything else.

Penetrating deeper and deeper through technologies of mass production and mass dissemination.

Witness television and advertising for infants, conscious of indoctrination from the day of birth. If they could wire the womb for inculcation, they would.

Cultural studies glorifies oppositional and resitant readings of social texts, but doesn't understand that the problem is the texts themselves. The power is not the message of the text. The power is the text. The production of the text, the proliferation and distribution of the text, and the ability of the text to be replaced endlessly by a litany of other recycled and recyclable texts that all delineate meaningless message. The success of message is no longer in its content, but in its omnipresence. In its form. In its production.