Cultural Studies Should Be… Unsettled

Several people have asked for the text of my 3-minute plenary talk at the CSA. Bruce Burgett, the CSA president, asked CSA members to contribute to the plenary by responding to this prompt:

• Cultural Studies should…
• Cultural Studies is…
• Cultural Studies could…

I approached this with my own idiosyncratic biography, anxieties, and hopes in mind. It is not meant to be taken seriously. I also wanted to approach it as a sort of Latour litany. Here is what Isaid:

• Cultural Studies should be unkempt, unsavory, disturbing.
• It should speak Spanish to French philosophers.
• It should quote Marx in board meetings.
• It should swear in polite company.
• It should wear muddy boots and drink whiskey in the art gallery.
• It should take pleasure in popular culture when others are critical, and it should critique pop culture when others get too comfortable.
• Cultural studies should not resign itself to adjunct positions, but it should instead agitate for benefits and full-time work for contingent faculty, as well as faculty unions and faculty governance.
• Cultural studies should never just say “Race, Class, and Gender” as if they were Hail Marys that absolve us of sin.
• It should not repeat things as if they were mantras. It should instead question how such repetitions arise.
• CS should infiltrate other fields, steal ideas from them, change them from within like double agents.
• CS should point out who’s actually doing the work at the catered party. Hint: it’s not the host.
• CS should theorize about the world as it can be, not just the world as it is.
• CS should read those theorists and authors who are declared “off limits” by other fields.
• CS should synthesize ideas that everyone knows are irreconcilable.
• CS should pirate everything it possibly can get away with.
• CS should give its knowledge away to anyone who wants it.
• CS should do interviews with journalists.
• CS should do interviews with Bill O’Reilly and tell him to shut up for once.
• CS should regularly declare where stuff comes from.
• CS should be a tour guide to where stuff is dumped.
• CS should keep secrets and be anonymous, and work behind the scenes.
• CS should make animated GIFs and wear day glow clothes.
• It should not limit itself to 140 characters.
• It should not have a Facebook profile or a Linkedin account.
• It should not go to conferences to network, but rather go to conferences to drop off socialist propaganda.
• It should go to socialist meetings and drop off libertarian propaganda.
• It should put political organizing on its CV.
• It shouldn’t play so many video games.
• It should make video games.
• It should be methodologically anarchistic.
• It should study boring things and find beauty in them.
• It should study beautiful things and find terror in them.
• When Cultural Studies speaks, presidents should choose early retirement.
• Cultural studies should be: unsettled.