Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies

Official fear, the foundation of the secular power and the legitimation of its disciplinary requirements is, according to Mikhail Bakhtin, formed after the pattern of cosmic fear that plays a similar role in relation to ecclesiastic powers. Powers-that-be present themselves as the shield and insurance against the dangers arising from uncertain future and existential insecurity. Having retreated from protection against uncertainty and insecurity generated by the markets, state powers refocus currently their claim to the subjects’ obedience on issues of personal safety.

This performative article/script serves as an extended functional definition and a practical exploration of the notion of ”racializing identity.” Through a series of individually labeled autopoetic movements, the performative article/script creates a typology that compares and analyzes the foci of each form, facilitating the definition and exposing the socially constructed intersection between race and Black queer identity. The performative article/script begins to question the limitations of race as a specified method of categorizing bodies and more specifically questions the conceptualization of “performing race” as a sign of racial authenticity.

Anthony Giddens argues that theoretical analysis in sociology can demonstrate why lay agents can have only “partial” and “confined” understandings of the larger structures in which they are embedded. His notion of double hermeneutic rests on the assumption that such partial and imprecise knowledge shared by the social agents can be corrected through the injection of the sociological knowledge “from without.” In this article, by juxtaposing and comparing Giddens’s externalist approach to the change of language game—his double hermeneutic—with what the author would call the internalist approach, the author will show why Giddens’s theory of double hermeneutic fails to do what it professes to do.

In recent years, Australian cultural studies has gained significant recognition internationally. However, despite its prominence, there have been few attempts to chart the history of this intellectual formation. This essay offers a historical account that is framed by the biography of the Australian cultural studies theorist Meaghan Morris. Morris’s intellectual development has been strongly influenced by a mixture of both local and foreign intellectual traditions. This article maps out her specific intellectual genealogy as a way of highlighting the complex interchanges between the local, the national, and the transnational influences that have contributed to the development of Australian cultural studies.

What has been variously termed the post-Fordist turn in the social and economic organization of Western societies describes (among other things) the demise of a middle class professional culture and the emergence of a new lifestyle morality of expressive self realization. This study examines the role played by selection of lifestyle innovators in this process: through an interpretive study of narratives of moral change, the shift from the old professional morality to the new lifestyle morality is interpreted as a story of learned relaxation and impulsive release. Drawing material from over 83 lifestyle publications and 34 open-ended biographical interviews, the importance of this vanguard lifestyle movement is related to a wider historical consideration of the moral culture of the American middle class, and to an overview of theories of the post-Fordist turn.

This article attempts to say something about love by examining how love defies being said (or written). One of its early propositions is that we have little choice but to plagiarize love, and the text proceeds by doing just that. But its plagiarism is selective, explicit, and carefully arranged, so that elegant inarticulations of love by Kristeva, Arendt, Geertz, and a host of others shape a determined narrative line. The text moves from writer to writer and from bodies to mystery, not to build an argument, but to pursue a gambit: Perhaps love is constituted in the very impossibility of its articulation. Of course, the inevitable implication is that the article can only succeed by failing. Still, such failures can be redemptive, for love itself suggests the simultaneous admission and defiance of futility—at least, that will be the author’s sort-of conclusion.

Marshaling the so-called universal model of music, the authors examine the conceits of traditional discursive scholarship. One of the epistemological challenges of postmodernism is (con)textual: How do people re-form narrowly tailored, methodologically formalized textuality? How do people deploy postmodern playfulness, hybridity, and bricolage effectively to displace reified methodologies with new ways of knowing? In this article, the authors mingle ethnography, literary criticism, aesthetic hermeneutics, and cultural studies to examine the movements, riffs, and flows of music, from Puccini to hip-hop. By emulating the varied structures of music (their subject matter), the authors work to perform textually the cross-cultural aspects of musical flirtations and, in the process, rehearse how postmodern epistemologies might innovate cultural scholarship, improvising new strains of historical and analytical discursivity.