Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. Cary Nelson

recognize.

      In the end we need to admit that we will never know for certain what it was like to live in an earlier period. Of course we need the kind of empathy that allows us to construct a simulacra of access, but the experience of gaining full access to another author’s consciousness is a fantasy. And the histories we devise are constructed in the service of our own needs, compulsions, plans, and interests. That is not to say, however, that the desire to make repressed and forgotten traditions visible again, or to give them special moral and ethical claims on the present, is illicit. But the process of recovery is as much a process of current cultural critique as it is one of restoration. And what we “recover” in many ways will never have existed before. Nor is it inappropriate to try to understand the dynamics of an earlier period. It is merely that we will never finally distinguish ourselves from them, and we will never have in hand a set of unmediated facts that are clearly of the past and not of the present.

      In writing Repression and Recovery I confronted these issues as a problematic, as an arena of work rather than as a problem to be solved. A partly Marxist recognition of my own social and economic positioning and the necessarily historically determined nature of my own interests was frequently in tension with an older and admirably passionate Marxism that aimed straightforwardly to give voice to what our culture had repressed. A poststructuralist doubt about what can be known was in conflict with a desire to know and often with a sensation of having gained access to a past we had quite forgotten. Not infrequently I was dealing with letters and diaries and poems that were not only unpublished but unread. At times an unpublished, unheard tape or record of an author’s voice was available. As historians will agree, it is hard to imagine circumstances in which a sense of recovering the past would be much stronger. I did not try to resolve these conflicts but rather to play them off against one another. At times, indeed, my book is a record of self-correction and theoretical counterpointing, as these aims and recognitions reflect on one another. At other times, succumbing to a certain will to power, to a wish to persuade and provoke change, I write over the seams between doubt and certainty, in a prose of advocacy and conviction.

      This tonal instability seems to me to reflect the mix of relativism and commitment appropriate to an informed and responsible engagement with history. Once we realize that history’s meaning is always open to dispute, the work of interpretation and persuasion becomes crucial, not irrelevant. The situation is exactly parallel with relativism’s impact on moral and ethical standards, a subject continually exploited by the political Right over the last decade. The New Right’s attacks on relativism have made calm, serious discussion of this important issue nearly impossible. When academics argue that the world exists but is in some ways unknowable—a position with a credible history dating back to Kant—conservatives counter that we are clowns who believe there is no external reality. When poststructuralists point out that we have no unmediated access to material reality—that all sensation is interpreted, mediated, organized, and made meaningful by language—conservatives shout again that we believe the world does not exist. When we warn that moral values are not transcendent and guaranteed—that they must be continually rearticulated, defended, and relearned in context—reactionary commentators wail that we have opened the door to barbarism.

      If we concede that there are no universally guaranteed human values—that being human can mean anything at various times and places, as our century has repeatedly proven—then the work of winning consent to certain judgments about history and to certain standards of behavior becomes more, not less, urgent. History shows us that human beings are capable of anything. Knowing that does not empty values of meaning but rather grants them the only meaning they have ever had—contingent meaning that is open to negotiation, transformation, and dispute.

      We cannot plausibly argue for transhistorical values but we can argue on behalf of the purchase particular values should have on our own time. That is actually the only power we have ever had in such matters. Conservative critics have claimed to the contrary that poststructuralism—and particularly its deconstructive incarnation—makes all moral argument empty. And indeed American deconstructive critics like Paul de Man were inclined to avoid larger moral issues. But Jacques Derrida, the founder of deconstruction, has for years regularly written cultural and political essays of clear moral urgency; he has written about apartheid, nuclear war, racism, and the politics of academia. Recognizing how fragile and contingent both moral and historical consensus is only increases the need for advocacy and interpretation. The lesson is admittedly a painful one, especially when we see how quickly historical events that matter to us can be emptied of the meaning we thought was guaranteed. The interpretive claims need to be made anew for each generation; the work never ends. False certainty about the permanence or historically transcendent status of what are actually vulnerable local assertions is no substitute for the work of rearticulating meanings to new cultural contexts. Thus I argue for the purchase these forgotten poems should have on our lives, indeed for the moral value inherent in recovering repressed traditions, but I can do so only for my own time.

4 ALWAYS ALREADY CULTURAL STUDIES

ACADEMIC CONFERENCES AND A MANIFESTO

      The rapidly increasing visibility of cultural studies in the United States over the past few years gives us an opportunity to see how an emerging body of theory is realized politically and professionally, to reflect on its articulation to existing institutions in medias res, before those articulations are fixed for any period of time. One of those institutions is the large academic conference, two of which took place within a few months of each other, “Cultural Studies Now and in the Future” at the University of Illinois in April of 1990, a conference I helped to organize, and “Crossing the Disciplines: Cultural Studies in the 1990s” at the University of Oklahoma in October of 1990, a conference organized by Robert Con Davis and Ron Schlieffer where I presented an earlier version of this chapter. Cultural studies has also recently been the subject of special sessions at regional and national meetings of the Modern Language Association, all of which events together give a fairly good indication of what the future of cultural studies—especially in English—is likely to be. Though cultural studies has a much longer and very different, if still contested, history in U.S. Communications departments, it is on its very recent commodification in English that I want to focus here.

      I might begin by posing a single strategic question: what does it mean that Robert Con Davis and Ron Schlieffer, in the papers they gave at the Oklahoma conference quite properly felt it appropriate and necessary to refer to the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in Britain and Hillis Miller, presenting the keynote talk at the opening of the same conference, gave no evidence of knowing anything about it and yet felt fully empowered to define both the history and future of cultural studies? I suppose in the broadest sense it means that the spread of American power and American culture across the globe has led some Americans to believe Disneyland is the origin of the world. I have the uneasy feeling that if one told Miller he ought to find out about the Birmingham tradition he’d reply that he didn’t know such interesting work had gone on in Alabama.

      At a regional MLA conference in 1988 I argued that people who claim to be commenting on or “doing” cultural studies ought at least to familiarize themselves with the British cultural studies tradition, beginning with Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart and moving through Birmingham and beyond. I must emphasize, however, that almost nothing in this tradition is simply transferable to the United States. Williams was partly concerned with defining a distinctly British heritage. The interdisciplinary work at Birmingham was often deeph ollaborative, a style that has little chance of succeeding in American depart* \ts and little chance of surviving the American academic system of rewards. But the struggle to shape the field in Britain has lessons we can learn much from, and British cultural studies achieved theoretical advances that are immensely useful in an American context. So that would be part of my answer to the question Jonathan Culler posed, with an air of whimsical hopelessness, in Oklahoma: “What is a professor of cultural studies supposed to know?” A professor of cultural studies might, in other words, be expected to know the history of the field. Professors of cultural studies need not agree with or emulate all the imperatives of British cultural studies, but they do have a responsibility to take a