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Unit 32: Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction and Cultural Studies

more action-oriented research. Cultural Studies is relatively undeveloped in France, where there Notes
is a stronger tradition of semiotics, as in the writings of Roland Barthes. Also in Germany it is
undeveloped, probably due to the continued influence of the Frankfurt School, which has developed
a body of writing on such topics as mass culture, modern art and music.

32.3.2 Importance

The importance for Cultural Studies of participating in oppositional public spheres is an underlying
premise of this essay. A counter disciplinary praxis undertaken by resisting intellectuals would
not be effective if it had as its only audience people in universities. Rather, it should take place
more extensively in public. Although many universities are public institutions, we rarely consider
them part of the public sphere.
If Cultural Studies is to be understood as an oppositional public sphere, it should not be conceived
as a 'department' or as part of the boundary separating professional activities from those of
amateurs. Instead of thinking of Cultural Studies in terms which more properly characterize
disciplines, we should reconceive traditional rationales in an effort to create counter practices. The
classroom, to take one instance, is viewed traditionally as a place where information is transmitted
to students. Experts in a discipline impart to apprentices the received knowledge about a particular
subject matter; students are not agents in this process, but passive and overtly uncritical receptacles.
However, as we have argued, if we grant students an active role in the process of cultural formation,
they can become agents in the production of social practices. To accomplish this we should become
involved in fostering forms of resistance; a critical pedagogy is required which will promote the
identification and analysis of the underlying ideological interests at stake in the text and its
readings. We are then engaged together as resisting intellectuals in a social practice that allows
both parties to construe themselves as agents in the process of their own cultural formation. An
obvious concretization of this praxis might be a woman resisting the view of women proffered in
a canonical novel. This instance is a reflection of resistance to large-scale social practices that
oppress women. Such resistance needs to be produced. Rather than abandon scholarship, resisting
intellectuals need to repoliticize it. Scholarly publications, the disciplinary criterion used to establish
the merit of professional opinions against those of a public made up of amateurs, do not reach the
public. Though it is not appropriate to argue the point here, we contend that the disciplines
presently concerned with the study of culture are unduly bound to the premise that their task is to
do disciplinary research, that is, to accumulate and store in a retrievable way descriptions of
cultural phenomenon. But, if we reconceive our activity as the production of rather than the
description of social practices, then what we do in our classrooms is easily extended into public
spheres. We cannot capitulate to the disciplinary notion that research has as its only audience other
experts in the field. Resisting intellectuals must legitimate the notion of writing reviews and
books for the general public, and they must create a language of critique balanced by a language
of possibility that will enable social change.
This means that we need to become involved in the political reading of popular culture. As Stanley
Aronowitz remarks in 'Colonized Leisure, Trivialized Work,' 'It remains for us to investigate in
what way mass culture becomes constitutive of social reality.' Training in disciplinary practices
leads us away from the study of the relation between culture and society and toward the
accumulation of descriptions of cultural material cut off from its connection to everyday life. As
Aronowitz points out:
To fully understand the ideological impact and manipulative functions of current media
presentations, it is necessary to appreciate the multi-layered character of contemporary mass
culture. In addition to the overt ideological content of films and television--transmitting new role
models, values life styles to be more or less consciously emulated by a mass audience--there is also
a series of covert messages contained within them which appeal to the audience largely on the
unconscious level ....Typically, [these] define the character of the spectator's experience of the
spectacle in terms of the...gratification of his or her unconscious desires....By creating a system of
pseudo-gratifications, mass culture functions as a sort of social regulator, attempting to absorb

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