486
PARTISAN REVIEW
combines those who never lost their taste for Marxism with those for
whom Marxism remained doubly-forbidden fruit: frowned upon by the
culture as a whole and by academic leftists more attracted to theory than
to political commitment. Revised to make race and gender coequal with
class as categories of oppression, cultural studies engages itself with the
twenty-first century in culture while upholding the nineteenth century in
politics. Its ideal of a cultural product is science fiction or cyberspace,
while its ideal of a political concept is the class struggle or Gramsci's no–
tion of hegemony.
One does not generally find in cultural studies tortuous efforts to jus–
tify the impossibility ofjustification, as one does in postmodernism and its
various offihoots. For this reason alone, its lack of philosophical preten–
sion is an advantage; it rarely claims to be anything other than an effort to
keep "progressive" politics alive among faculty and students. But the self–
conscious Marxism of cultural studies is also an oddity in a post-Marxist
world. Cultural studies is significant, not because of its critique of popular
culture, but because it so readily accepts, and celebrates, popular culture.
In so doing, cultural studies brings to a close an era in which intellectuals
felt a responsibility to serve as the opposition party to capitalism in lieu of
a working class which chose to shun the job.
Cultural studies is haunted by the ghosts of the anti-Stalinist intellec–
tuals of the thirties, forties, and fifties. They, too, felt a tension between
their political and their cultural commitments, one that was eventually
resolved when their taste for high culture weakened to the point of non–
existence their inclinations to Marxism. Cultural studies stands this choice
on its head: Marxism will be kept alive by praising the achievements of
what used to be called mass society. Although the anti-Stalinists were ac–
cused by later generations of having accommodated themselves to
capitalism, their cultural predispositions retained a radical edge: one could
always distance oneself from the ephemeral commodities of the market by
appealing to a higher aesthetic standard.
Cultural studies, while politically radical, offers no cultural vantage
point from which capitalism can be criticized: its praise of mass culture
thus becomes an apology for the very capitalism against which its favored
constituents are presumed to be struggling. Cultural studies finally comes
to speak for no agent other than the academics who are speaking. And
they, in turn, have nothing critical to say. Inspired by opposition to the
political disengagement of high theory, cultural studies demonstrates the
inevitable political disengagement of low practice. Between the mandar–
ins of deconstruction and the populists of cultural studies, the humanities
in America, dominated by leftists, contains remarkably little leftism.
