material, from memos, legal briefs, and white papers to ad campaigns, databases, and electronic newsmagazines.
And if we want to gauge the relative status (as cultural capital) of literature and cultural studies, we should have yet one more question for Guillory’s account of the field. If, as Cultural Capital claims, the new professional-managerial class no longer requires the old cultural capital of the bourgeoisie, then it is not clear whether all kinds of cultural capital are now utterly superfluous to the accumulation and distribution of productive capital (as Bill Readings emphatically argues in The University in Ruins), or, by contrast, whether a redesigned curriculum in the humanities might actually be of greater use to the credentialization of the professional-managerial class. In forwarding the latter suggestion (since I disagree strongly with the former),4 I do not want to be understood assaying anything so simpleminded as “we must substitute Toni Morrison’s Beloved for Milton’s Lycidas because this is what the new global economy requires”; to date I have heard of only one employer who asks such things of his job applicants: Milton Rosenberg of Chicago, who quizzes prospective college interns for his radio program as to whether they can name three nineteenth-century British novelists. (When I asked him whether it might not be more pertinent to a job in mass media that students be able to name three contemporary non-American novelists writing in English, I was dismissed in somewhat predictable terms, but I do not generalize from this that William Thackeray and Elizabeth Glaspell are necessarily more conducive to mass media employment than Margaret Atwood and Chinua Achebe.) Rather, I want to ask whether the advent of cultural studies can be understood as a response to the market value of literary study. This is not simply a question of whether English professors are offering courses on music video in order to remain somehow “relevant” to the cultural lives of their students (though it does participate in that question to some extent); more fundamentally, it is a question of whether the distribution of cultural capital serves a purely discriminating function, to naturalize and legitimate socioeconomic inequality, or whether the content of cultural capital might matter in some substantive way to the traditional liberal-progressive project of “critical thinking.”
Bruce Robbins raises precisely this question in his trenchant review of Guillory’s book: does the content of the curriculum signify in a meaningful sociopolitical sense, or is the curriculum primarily a means of marking and enforcing distinctions among our students regardless of whether those distinctions are built on Shakespeare or on Madonna? Robbins writes,
[E]ven if we believe that knowledge of Latin and Greek was no more than an empty diacritical mark differentiating rulers from ruled, it does not follow that either vernacular literature over the past seventy-five years or the content of today’s far more democratically accessible curriculum is equally irrelevant, that these too could serve only to differentiate. And if they are indeed functional, then it would also seem, for example, that the ability to get one’s own experience re-classified as part of cultural capital—which is one description of what multiculturalism is about—should also be classified as a genuine if not necessarily momentous redistribution of power. From the moment when knowledge of rap music or rape statistics or the genealogy of the word “homosexual” is measured on examinations and counts toward a degree, there has been some change, pace Bourdieu, in access to credentials. (373)
Note that neither Robbins nor Guillory is making the obvious (and, by now, quite tired) argument about curriculum change—the demographic argument, which says that new student populations require new course offerings. Both are rightly skeptical of that “representational” logic. Instead, they ask, as I am asking, whether the content of the curriculum in the humanities might have any important relation to the social standing of the humanities (and, as a result, to the health of the humanities in terms of enrollments, job placement, faculty lines, and cultural authority). Can we say that on some level, the profession somehow knows, structurally, that its prestige is not what it once was (for whatever reasons), and is trying to recoup some of its lost authority by redefining its object—not as the study of great works, but as the enhancement of rhetorical techniques of interpretation that can be applied to a vast variety of cultural “texts”? David Simpson, in his recent book The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature, argues that this is exactly what’s going on when English departments start including “cultural studies” in their self-descriptions:
Both in Britain and the United States, humanities intellectuals are particularly vulnerable, because of our association with those very qualities [Thorstein] Veblen attributed to us, qualities of the occult and the liminal. This shared anxiety must be part of any comprehensive explanation of our current turn to cultural criticism, which paradoxically provides us with a rhetoric of referentiality, a posture of speaking about the world, even as we admit that the world is made up largely of representations. Cultural studies, as we now see it, is a form of survivalism, and those who deplore its incursion into the universities would do well to reflect upon the degree to which it ensures their own continued existence. (7)
Cultural studies as survivalism: that, in a nutshell, is both the desire and the fear driving the debates about cultural studies, as far as the near future of English is concerned. In this corner, David Simpson, cautioning us to think that cultural studies might actually be propping us up; in the far corner, George Levine, cautioning us to think that the prop might just deprive us of our public legitimacy as stewards of the aesthetic.
Interestingly, this polarized scenario comes in other versions; more interestingly still, they all lead to the same dystopian conclusion, as I’ll show in a moment. From the Left, especially the British Left most closely identified with cultural studies, there is the well-founded fear that in American universities, “cultural studies” will eventually come to be understood as a rough synonym for “the humanities.” The fact that the term has been appropriated by English departments, anthropology departments, communications and speech departments, and the foreign languages (where it is often seen as very much a survival mechanism that might compensate for the drop in enrollments for advanced language study) is ample evidence, to this wing of the academic Left, that the term “cultural studies” has lost its critical force and has become another name for business as usual on the leafy side of the quad. Conservatives have a similar story to tell. From Alvin Kernan’s book The Death of Literature to the proclamations of the ALCS, the message is pretty much the same: the kids just aren’t reading anymore. They come to college, their heads brimming with Beavis and Butt-Head but without the faintest notion who Chaucer is; and the professors, deserting their posts as educators, have given up trying to offer students the great books of the ages, either because they no longer believe in the concept of great books, or (more cynically) because they no longer believe they can sustain enrollments by professing the faith of the great books. Accordingly, departments of English are gradually becoming places that offer courses on Barbie dolls, rock stars, and the Disney empire, while seekers of truth pine desperately for the courses in Milton and Wordsworth the department no longer offers.
At least in this one respect, both the left and right wings of the culture wars can look at the American academy, hold their heads in their hands, and bewail what cultural studies hath wrought.
The reason Guillory’s theory of cultural capital is so germane to the future of literary study, then, is not that it clarifies matters but that it helps to explain why matters are as cloudy as they are. Depending on how one draws the connections among literary study, cultural capital, and meaningful employment, one can lament the turn to cultural studies and call for the restoration of literature to the central place in the curriculum, on the grounds that this will at once preserve the intellectual legitimacy of English and revive the discipline’s level of public support, or one can applaud the turn to cultural studies as that which will preserve the intellectual legitimacy of English and revive the discipline’s level of public support. And, in turn, each of these options can be cast quite differently, as a blueprint not for the revival of English but for its demise.
In The Western Canon for instance, Harold
