Canadian Cultural Studies
The 2005 annual conference of the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies was an unusual experience. It was held at the University of Alberta in a building that looked like a giant glass-and-steel canoe. In a sense, the space was too large for a conference of this size and as a result, the plenary sessions were held in a vast auditorium space that would be difficult to fill at the best of times. However, perhaps unknowingly, this did exactly reflect the ‘Canadian’ element of the conference (at least from an outsider’s point of view).
The programme was extremely diverse in terms of both topic areas and quality of papers. I expecially enjoyed the risk-session and the two space and culture sessions (the latter were grouped under the concept of the ‘virtual’). However, there were some good and interesting papers spread around in other sessions as well.
If there is anything to be said about ‘Canadian Cultural Studies’ as a generic term that can be gauged from the content of the programme, then this would be related to the more generic ‘default’ position of cultural studies as a vehicle for ‘identity politics’. The normative validity of left-liberal concerns with the marginalised and oppressed is taken as a given and this sometimes results in a lack of critical self-reflexivity regarding the spatial practices of such politics in the context of everyday life. What I found particularly lacking was a critical engagement with the desire for transgression. That is, too many papers assumed that ‘transgression’ implied something inherently good. Whereas there are undoubtedly many transgressions that have positive qualities, our task as analysts is not to put our value judgements before those of others. If we fail to address, for example, issues of why some transgressions are deemed deeply offensive or problematic by large sections of the general public, we set ourselves up for the same kind of criticism that our own identity politics would disavow as ‘elitism’. For example, we may want to speak for the marginalised voices of drug addicts, but how many of us would want to live next door to a crack house?
If cultural studies cannot make sense of popular culture and popular opinions because these are outside of the realm of ‘the transgressive’ or simply deemed ‘dangerously hegemonic’, then something is wrong with cultural studies rather than culture itself.
October 27th, 2005 at 6:58 am
I think you raise an excellent point regarding the tacit acceptance of transgression, or what I sometimes refer to as the privileging of the marginal. (It reminds me of the current trend to avoid technological determinism by taking a rather inflexible humanist position glossed as being “user-centred”.) And frankly, I find the question of whether we would want to live next to a crack house, or have a prostitute daughter, to be far more transgressive than the too-often patronising attempt to give voice and visibility to “crack whores”.
October 27th, 2005 at 2:15 pm
ha ha ha
you cracked it again!