[Nettime-bold] Re: The Institutional Embarassment of Cultural Studies

["Lachlan Brown" <l.brown@london.com>]

Perhaps you did not read my message.

Please post.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lachlan Brown" <l.brown@london.com>
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2003 23:03:50 -0500
To: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net
Subject: Re: The Institutional Embarassment of Cultural Studies

> 
> Something of a blockage at CULTSTUD -L
> 
> perhaps you could repost in nettime
> and elsewhere.
> 
> I mean, if scholarship isn't 
> open as to sources then it isn't scholarship 
> is it?
> 
> We cite sources so that we may understand
> how people arrived at particular conclusions
> and do scholarship to find out how they arrived 
> at these conclusions. Your readers will be
> interested.
> 
> Basic stuff really.
> 
> 
> Lachlan
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Lachlan Brown" <l.brown@london.com>
> Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2003 09:34:00 -0500
> To: "Lachlan Brown" <l.brown@london.com>, "CULTSTUD-L: A listserv devoted to Cultural Studies" <cultstud-l@lists.acomp.usf.edu>
> Subject: Re: The Institutional Embarassment of Cultural Studies
> 
> > 
> > Karl thanks for your reply,
> > 
> > It's good to see someone addressing the question of 
> > the Institutionalisation of Cultural Studies in the 
> > field of Education which is where our study of culture began. 
> The WEA of course built upon traditions of organisation toward 
> education that have some history.
> >  
> > >Any sense of a heirarchy of approaches and subject 
> > > matters, >etc is the subject of struggles within the 
> > > field (as >Bourdieu would tell you). [...] We're talking 
> > > here not of >self-organising groups but of people working 
> > > >in institutions, teaching and writing, who have a number 
> > > of >audiences, from the local audience in the lecture hall and >classroom to the 
> > > >potentially international one of intellectuals worldwide.
> > > 
> > Yes, Bourdieu. One can only work _through_ the institution  so long, 
> before the institution begins to work through you.
> > Cultural Studies has been weak in institutional analyses.
> >  -- I do know a little bit about the institutional 
> > contexts of 'cultural studies' (Goldsmiths College, Liverpool 
> John Moores, University of East London, 
> >  McGill University and to some degree York University in Ontario), 
> Teaching and Research. I researched the 
> >  emergence of Intenret in culture 1993 - 2001.
> >  
> > Your reply is a good one, and indeed 'the potentially 
> > international' audience of intellectuals involved in 
> > knowledge work worldwide has been proven through 
> > career academic networks, while the engagement in
> > arts and cultural life indeed cultural industrial life
> > that was the political imperitive in CS has not.
> > 
> > And isn't your reply the 'stock', or 
> > 'on message' reply in Cultural Studies in Britain, scripted in 
> the mid eighties in response to the threat 
> > to the cultural life of London during the defence of 
> > the GLC during the period leading to its abolition? I 
> > mean,things have moved on a little. Margaret Thatcha 
> > who? Does CS really need to be so bunkered and defensive,
> > protective of the 'message' to be bourne through disturbing 
> conservative times in little read academic journals with some 
> pretense to more general readerships?
> > 
> > The idea that arts, industry, and collective cultural 
> engagment might be carried out through the academy -
> > protected by the institution as a legal framework - 
> travelled well to other cultural contexts in the late 
> > 80s ad early 90s, particularly Australia and to some 
> extent Canada (the case of Canada is one I am familiar with) 
> where National cultures counterposed to dominant 
> > declining and emerging 'global' cultures (UK+american)
> > were in process of public and policy definition. 
> > 
> > But haven't we all moved on a little from the late
> > 80s? I wonder whether it isn't time to revise the 
> 'official institutional and academic publishing industry 
> version' of what it is we all think we are doing? Isn't the 
> 'political imperitive' in cultural studies bound up in its 
> two interrelated genealogies: the genealogy of 
> > pegagogy combined with the genealogy of publishing? 
> > 
> > It's this history I reference in relation to 
> > contemporary history in the development of new media 
> > and internet practice, practise and praxis in London. 
> > None of the 'captains' mentioned in my New Model 
> > Cultural Studies post would be happy to be described as 
> 'doing cultural studies', indeed they would 
> > positively resist the idea as we all should (::perhaps 
> > with technical expertise to match their cultural 
> > networking expertise) but they were doing the study 
> > and praxis of culture rather more effectively than the 
> 'Grandees' in that awful period of the mid-late 
> > nineties or what can only be termed the 'institutional
> >  embarassment of cultural studies and all involved in 
> > it'. One can work 'through' the institution only so 
> > long before the institution begins to work through you. 
> > I include an embarrassed Stuart Hall who has lived to see 
> his students David Morley and Angela McRobbie in 
> >  particular behaving worse than their students. 
> > 
> > Your Python reference, by the way, about the moment of the
> > new left, the divergence from crude Marxism to a
> > post marxist analysis of culture brought about by the 
> > crisis on the left over events in Hungary in 1956, 
> > and by the several interruptions since is unwelcome. 
> > Some respect for the intellectual tradition you are 
> > working in.
> > 
> > I liked your thoughts in an earlier post about a 
> 'web site' critiquing  and providing independent commentary on 
> > academic publishers and their lists.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> 
> > 
> > Toronto
> > (416) 666 1452
> > 
> > -- 
> > __________________________________________________________
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> > 
> 
> 
> 
> Lachlan Brown
> 
> Toronto
> (416) 666 1452
> 
> -- 
> __________________________________________________________
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> 



Lachlan Brown

Toronto
(416) 666 1452

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