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and was positively useful as an adjunct in hermeneutic undertakings. But
it could also be deployed against internal judgments of importance, against
determinations of value and any effort to establish assessments or discrim–
inations or relative worth, or standards of excellence as between claimants
of all sorts. If it can not be
proved
that Shakespeare is superior to Superman
(as it cannot be, in any reasonable sense), then who is to say that
Shakespeare and not Superman is what should be studied or included in
curricula? This is the tendency at its most extreme and most annoying; we
are not through with it yet; its applications have extended far beyond aca–
demic courses of study. And we in America are particularly susceptible,
given our history and traditions, to this kind of argument or reasoning.
Nevertheless, this notion of culture has been important in the beginning
of the reconceptualization of certain projects.
As cultural studies began to emerge as a broad, reshaping tendency
within the humanities, the organizational model that was customarily pur–
sued was that of the interdisciplinary programs of American studies, many
of which had gotten underway themselves in the late 1940s and 1950s, and
then, paradoxically, the area studies programs of the Cold War. The titles
and interests of such programs are now too numerous to list; but they
include prominently African-American studies, women's studies, ethnic
studies and post-colonial studies in general, new historicist studies, and gay
and lesbian studies. They are, as the saying goes, where the action has been,
and it isn't difficult to see why-they are doing something that is intrinsi–
cally interes ting, however much one may want to hold concretely and
specifically in reserve.
Two large influences are to be located in the family history of this latest
movement of development. First, there is the return,
in
an untimely or
in
unseasonable sense, of Marxism. The reaffirmation of Marxism as a program
in the humanistic academy when it is for the historical moment dormant or
in an expired state almost everywhere else creates an awkward situation for
its most perceptive adherents. In addition, the universalist perspective of
Marxism does not accord comfortably with those anti-Enlightenment, anti–
Eurocentric, anti-American, and anti-university sentiments which seem often
to be passionate driving motives within certain cultural sub-groupings.
The second such flow of influence is connected with the first, though
it is not immediately or solely derived from it. I am referring to the gen–
eral notion of the cultural construction of knowledge-a powerful
conception both in theory and application. It has itself a diversity of
affil–
iative roots:
in
certain Marxist dealings with ideology, in cultural
anthropology as a whole, in a number of the larger motions of the nine–
teenth-century historicist modes of thought, and in the sociology of
