Commodification

There are very few things that don't present themselves, demand to be seen directly, as commodities. Even these things might be forms of "cultural capital" or commodities on some more sophisticated model, but they don't have an immediate exchange value.

Now the form of cultural studies that values objects just because they are popular, or have a widespread currency (best-selling novels, hit films and songs), just lets the market itself be a yardstick of value. I continue to defend a concept of value that resists commodification. In other words, something valuable that has no monetary value is, for that very reason, something that resists that overpowering logic. It may be futile, but at least we can try.

Defenses of the humanities that try to "cash in" their value are doomed, because surely the Humanities themselves are the valuable thing. Bécquer has the right idea when he said that the value of the poem written on a bank-note is the same as the value of the bank-note.

Aesthetic Judgment and Its Suspension

The suspension of aesthetic judgment can be liberating. Not having to worry at every moment about "how good it is" is a foundational gesture in contemporary literary and cultural studies. The raw material for many kinds of investigation would simply not be available if it first had to pass an acid test of judgment. "First prove it's good enough, belongs in the canon, and then we'll admit that studying it is worthwhile, that it is a valuable subject for a dissertation." With that sort of logic, obviously, we limit the field to things already accepted according to sometimes rather questionable canonical standards.

That being said, aesthetic judgment is never suspended for very long, nor should it be. Even scholars who think they are suspending judgment are really not doing so: they are temporarily bracketing it, or making a surreptitious claim that this text, too, is beautiful, if you look at it in a way. Saying that value is contingent, as Barbara H. Smith does in Contingencies of Value, does not get us very far either. Ok, we know that already, now let's get back to the real work, which is arguing about value from our various contingently defined positions. John Guillory's devastating critique of Smith in Cultural Capital, it seems to me, restores the aesthetic to its rightful place.

An aesthetic sense is like the nose of a hunting dog. When writing Apocryphal Lorca, I noticed that the obvious aesthetic flaws in homages to Lorca and translations of his work were often hints about other failures, intellectual, sentimental, and ethical. And, yes, an aesthetic failure is also an aesthetic failure in its own right.

A critic without a nose cannot be trusted.

I never liked the idea of a "symptom" very much (in cultural studies). In the first place, symptom implies disease, something wrong, so a poem, a story, a song, or a dance being "symptomatic" of some larger phenomenon implies that it's like a rash that is a symptom of an infection. Something is wrong and the painting or building or motet is a sign of that. Secondly, the larger, seemingly more significant phenomenon the symptom is a symptom of is going to be something less interesting than the drawing or movie or cantata. The idea of the symptom, however, reduces the novel or play or fugue to a secondary status.

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Make two piles, in one put the human condition, getting along better together, what makes us truly human, what it means to be American, learning about other cultures...

In the other put, the works of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, Paul Klee, Robert Creeley, Frida Kahlo, Basho, Issa, Bach...

Which pile would you choose? In other words, can you only justify the second pile by using the vague humanist rhetoric of the first? Isn't it, rather that we want to have the pile of actual works and feel the need to use some kind of mealy-mouthed rhetoric to justify our interest in them?

In order to distract myself from this election, which is driving me crazy and will until Obama is actually inaugurated in January, I have been thinking about the "aesthetics of cultural studies." I checked out a book with this title from the library, ed. by Michael Bérubé about 10 years ago. The book seems a defensive move aimed at the "return to aesthetics" movement. Bérubé in the intro and Rita Felski in her essay argue that aesthetics was always part of cultural studies in the first place. Yet other authors in the book point out that the view of aesthetics in CS is mostly "instrumental." Many of the contributors still skirt around aesethetics per se, and rarely consider any aesthetic dimension of any cultural or literary text. It is still a game of positionings. If your main context for responding to particular piece of classical music is Bugs Bunny cartoon you saw as a child, I suppose that's somewhat interesting, but it's still doesn't tell me much about aesthetics, not even about the aesthetics of Warner Brothers cartoons.

The first problem is that CS places two other sorts of values in primary position: political and commercial. Secondly, it is still caught up in categorizing culture as popular and elite, and deriving ideological conclusions from this division. An "aesthetic" approach would be not to care too much whether a particular cultural artifact belongs to the realm of popular, middle-brow, or elite culture, losing the self-congratulation inherent in studying popular (or elite) culture. The "coolness" of studying popular culture is essentially a mirror image of the snobbishness of studying elite culture. Also, the idea of "edification" persists in both enterprises: whether one becomes a more cultivated person by reading Rilke or uses popular culture for empowerment, the basic goal is a kind of personal edification. Culture is still "nutritional." (A few of the essays point in the direction of this critique.)

There seems to be a lack of imagination about what kind of cultural artifacts might be interesting to study. MB points this out in the intro, when he talks about the proliferation of Madonna articles in the 1990s.

If aesthetics is the product of the 18th century, it might be useful to talk about what aesthetics was before it was aesthetics. In other words, what existed in an analogous position before the word aesthetics was invented? We know that literature came into existence, as a concept with that name, in the 18th century (though that concept is not exactly our own either), but that there were other equivalent concepts before, mostly poetry. Cultural Studies still seems caught up in that 18th century dynamic, rather than looking for an approach that goes beyond those kind of conventional ways of looking at things. If there was an aesthetics before "aesthetics," there can be one after "aesthetics" as well.

The way "the body" or "the voice" or "the material" become just metaphors and thus disembodied, dematerialized. Not really anybody's body, but "the body." The way "forms of feeling" seem to lose the form part. The way culture starts to mean everything that isn't culture, the non-cultural part of culture, in other words. There's the culture of culture, and the non-culture of culture, and cultural studies wants to always move to the second. It's all studies and no culture.

The way the least interesting parts of literary studies are held over into cultural studies. For example, the lack of interest in anything real and tangible, the use of the "cultural" or "literary" product as grist for the critical argument, the positioning of oneself in a particular critical debate.

The way the interdisciplinary doesn't really involve any other real discipline, just gestures in the direction of other disciplines.

All this by way of my anxiety. Would it work to do my approach to questions of culture, in a setting where I am bucking against this tendency? Can I even articulate what I'm doing in a way comprehensible to those who would want to take the course.

My field is a ghetto. There is a good deal of integration between those who study film, culture, and novel of contemporary Spain, between Cultural Studies and studies of the novel. Those who study poetry, however, usually just study poetry, and people who are (otherwise) quite well-read often confess their near total ignorance of poetry, as though that were just some minor insignificant corner of the literary world that could be safely ignored.

Of course, ultimately every academic field is a ghetto. It's just a matter of the size of the particular ghetto.

Anyway, what I often try to do is to publish places where my article will be seen by people who wouldn't normally read an article on "poetry." My favorite in this respect is the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies published in the UK.

Why doesn't "culture" include "poetry"? This is a tricky question that has to do with the way disciplinary boundaries are drawn. My attitude toward all of this is that everyone should study what they want, but just don't leave me out of it.

When did the novel get to be so important? Obviously it's not because Spanish novels are more accomplished than Spanish books-of-poems. The opposite is the case. Cela gets the Nobel prize? That's just ridiculous. Marías is ok, but don't tell me his work has the historical weight of Gamoneda's. Is it as simple a matter of the fact that more people read novels? Or is it because novels talk about the "issues" people want to talk about, and therefore can integrated seamlessly into a certain vision of cultural studies?

If you want to look at the consumption of cultural products, then you'd have to say that dubbed Hollywood movies are an extremely significant part of contemporary Spanish culture. Or translations of books by Michael Crichton or Paul Auster (not to put them in the same category).