Subject: Re: Lord, those rings - msg#00100

Chiming in a bit late here, but I think this conversation sums up pretty densely what's wrong with cultural studies as a scholarly tendency: it has created a highly mobile, transplantable critical-historical apparatus which can be dropped indiscriminately like a bomb from a high altitude based on little more than a casual viewing or quick reading of any text.

It's not merely that to "read out" racism, or at least in a slightly more grounded fashion, a kind of historically situated manicheanism, from either the films or the books is done by many at the first casual sighting of a vaguely dreadlocked orc or the first mention of a lightness/darkness symbolic scheme, without even the vaguest whiff of a close reading strategy, or a sense of the circulation and interpretation of the text among its various audiences, or an investigation of the conditions and intentionalities and sources of its production. That's bad enough, methodologically. It's a kind of "will-to-interpretation" that reminds me of Wilson Bryan Key's remarkable ability to find subliminal images of copulation in any advertisement or commercial packaging that crossed his vision, a sense of predestined, prepackaged, always-already-there hermeneutics.

It goes beyond that, though, often. It's not merely that the mobile reading gets deployed wherever and whenever a critic views anything within the domain of mass culture, but also that there is an assumed and often tautologically inferred relationship between representation and power, representation and society, representation and action. So some not only see the barely hidden edifice of a particular kind of racial and cultural order within LOTR, but accuse--often without saying so explicitly--that representational scheme of an instrumental relation to structures of discrimination or consciousness, a quasi-ideological relation to some undesignated but nudge-nudge all-understood object of critique.

And yet, it strikes me that both of these things are in reality extraordinarily difficult, dense and interesting to explore with a rigorous methodology, and cultural studies could provide that, if it were willing to restrain its quick-draw impulses.

Let me add that I'm perfectly willing to make some casual guesses about the actually existing historical associations between many tropes, devices, themes, forms and genres of popular culture, but as hypotheses and very tentative ones at that. What looks easy, on second pass, often turns hard. I once had students try to write about why the "Boss Nass" character in The Phantom Menace was perceived by some to invoke cinematic representations of "African chiefs", something I was sure was a reasonable reading. My students and I worked on it for a while, and I think we all came to the conclusion that to make that argument well, you had to actually see a boatload of films representing Africa; read or view a wide array of popular-culture iterations and circulations of those images across a span of some years; locate processes of transmission between audiences and production and back again; and develop a sustained idea about a kind of "cultural ether" where certain kinds of iterated representations survived as loosely unmoored figurations. That was tough enough, but then you also had to acknowledge that if it was that hard to actually specify the historical relations between one class of representations and another, what did that mean for reception? If the only people who could "see" that Boss Nass was a transmogrified "African chief" were those who already partook of a disciplined historical understanding of that trope's circulation, then all one is describing is a tumultuously undirected process of cultural production that has no particular mapping to power or consequence. Most audiences did not "see" an African chief; the only audiences who readily did were those scholarly or intellectual audiences predisposed to find that sight something which repudiated the film itself--and which were really seeking the repudiation of mass culture as a whole, and fixating on the alleged instrumentality of particular representations as a vehicle for that larger rejection.

There's so much infrastructure missing from the mobile, transplantable form of cultural studies: readings of text, knowledge of circulation, understanding of production and I think often, most achingly, a disciplined, specific argument about the relationship between representation and outcomes, culture and practice. Obviously the "canon" of American or British cultural studies doesn't suffer at all, or relatively little, from these sins--but the associated critical tendencies that trail in their wake often do.
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