My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

n~ar s ~Tt ~ot to ~o UJit~ It 1
The Status of the Subject of the Humanities
in an Age of Cultural Studies
The gradual shift from literary studies to cultural and multicultural studies
is probably the most useful change to have occurred within the American
academy in the past decade.
The literary studies approach to the humanities tended to make a clearcut
distinction between works of art and works of mass or popular culture.
Works of art were the primary field of study for the critic, whose secondary
role was to explicate or illuminate these art objects. Yet it is difficult
to provide a rule for distinguishing great art from cultural artifact, and
the ideological biases of much of the prevailing literary and art connoisseurship
have served literary studies poorly.
In contrast, the cultural studies approach seems both more reasonable
and more malleable. We start not with art and its others but with a variety
of signifying practices. The field of possible attention is vast and might
just as well include film comedies of the thirties as Dickens's novels, Kewpie
dolls as much as Picassosi although, for practical purposes, the focus
of any given study will be narrowed.
The shift to poststructuralist cultural studies has been precipitated by
an intriguing variety of frames of interpretation-theoretical, historical,
psychological, and sociological. I say interpretative frames rather than
methods, for within each of these frames there are a number of distinct,
and competing, methodologies. The present crisis of cultural studies
results from the seeming autonomy of the frames of interpretation from
what they are to interpret; we have less objects of study than what Stanley
Fish calls "interpretive communities". What is to be interpreted is by
no means secure, nor are the objects of interpretation necessarily of any
determining significance. This is a somewhat awkward, even anxious situation.
But it is not fundamentally different from the methodological
approach of much modernist and contemporary art, where forms of interpretation
constitute the subject.
In large measure, the controversy in the national media over the political
crisis of higher education-whether characterized in terms of "political