Crusoe's Footprints

Cultural Studies in Britain and America

Patrick Brantlinger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136038143
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

"Cultural Studies" has emerged in British and American higher education as a movement that challenges the traditional humanities and social science disciplines. Influenced by the New Left, feminism, and poststructualist literary theory, cultural studies seeks to analyze everday life and the social construction of "subjectivities." Crusoe's Footprints encompasses the movement of many colleges and universities in the 1960s towards such interdisciplinary and "radical" programs as American Studies, Women's Studies, and Afro-American Studies. Brantlinger also examines the role of feminist criticism which has been particularly crucial in both Britain and the U.S.

1
The Humanities

(and a Lot More)
in Crisis

Nightmare Island

“It happened one day about noon going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprized with the print of a man's naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the sand” (Defoe 162). So Robinson Crusoe tells us; his discovery is the start of nearly two years of living in terror, panic-stricken that his isolation will end with the advent of cannibals or, what he imagines would be just as bad, devils. Yet at first he nearly convinces himself not to be afraid, because “this foot might be the print of my own foot, when I came on shore from my boat” (165). This thought cheers him for a while, until he considers both that he had not come ashore at that spot and that the footprint is too large to be his own. So commence the years spent in “dread and terror of falling into the hands of savages and cannibals” (170).

Commenting on the episode, Michel de Certeau writes:

The conquering bourgeois is transformed into a man “beside himself,” made wild himself by this (wild) clue that reveals nothing. He is almost driven out of his mind. He dreams, and has nightmares. He loses his confidence in a world governed by the Great Clockmaker. His arguments abandon him. Driven out of the productive asceticism that took the place of meaning for him, he lives through diabolical day after day, obsessed by the cannibalistic desire to devour the unknown intruder or by the fear of being devoured himself, (de Certeau, Practice 154)

Crusoe, who has so often served economists—from Adam Smith through Marx and beyond—as the model of bourgeois rationality and productivity, might just as easily have served as the model of bourgeois irrationality and repression. Despite the fact that the “cannibals” eventually do break into his isolation, for two years Crusoe is haunted by his footprint—not his, of course, literally, but haunted by his own mental image of the footprint, pressed into his thoughts like the original footprint into the sand. He possesses it; it possesses him. It becomes the inescapable image of the Other—of all the others—whom he in his isolation has left behind, discovering (it seems) through self-sufficiency that he can very well live alone.

Of course all this changes when “the Other” arrives. At first, the “cannibals,” from whom he rescues “Friday.” With his guns, the element of surprise, and now Friday as his amanuensis, he is more than a match for “the other” cannibals. Later on he confronts his European “rescuers.” He thus escapes the fate he most feared after seeing the footprint—that is, of being devoured by the savages. But he also discovers in one savage—Friday—the opposite of savagery: despite cannibalistic inclinations from which Crusoe must wean him, Friday proves to be incredibly docile and grateful: “for never man had a more faithful, loving, sincere servant, than Friday was to me; without passions, sullenness, or designs, perfectly obliged and engaged; his very affections were ty'd to me, like those of a child to a father” (211).

What Crusoe cannot master—or get to call him “master”—he sees only as savagery and desert island. Friday, on the other hand, is no more than a dark copy of Crusoe, a shadow-self, prepared always to do his bidding. Crusoe's first intuition is right after all: Friday's footprint—or the footprint—was his own; what so terrified Crusoe for two years was his shadow. Crusoe names Friday, teaches him English, and speaks to him mostly in commands, the imperative mode of imperialism. Therefore Crusoe remains just as profoundly isolated after he has rescued Friday as before—the isolation implied by mastery, as opposed to equality, solidarity, the recognition of self in the voices and gestures of others. Perhaps the footprint after all was only hallucination, mirage, the result of too much sun, too much isolation. And perhaps the cannibals and Friday, too, are only phantoms, the shadows of an objectless fear and a desire for mastery that Crusoe himself fails to understand. No doubt they are “real,” in the same sense that the footprint was “real”: but they might as well just be the images projected on sand, sky, and water by Crusoe's fear and desire. Just as Crusoe is unable, in some ultimate sense, to decipher the clue of the footprint by matching it to a living reality, a living person, so he is unable to say or learn anything at all about the “cannibals.” Even Friday is his creature, who speaks only the words “Master” Crusoe gives him to speak, more parrot than man. Crusoe never learns to speak Friday's language. Crusoe's language speaks for both.

Perhaps there was a real foot corresponding to the footprint Crusoe discovers; perhaps there were real cannibals corresponding to the images and shadows of cannibals he dreads, fights, and either kills or drives away. But he knows only the images; he finds in the island and in his experience only that which he wishes or dreads to find. The discovery of the footprint doesn't end his isolation; it only underscores it. Even his rescue of Friday doesn't end, but only increases his isolation in a different form—the “master” now of his selfless/unselfed servant. Crusoe's solipsism can be read as a parable of all the forms of imperialism and political divisiveness that have divided people through history into masters and servants, the dominant and the dominated. No doubt the moral Defoe intended stresses mastery—including self-mastery—as the primary value. But it seems just as possible to see in Crusoe's mastery—of the island, of the cannibals, of Friday, of fate—a kind of madness, the antithesis of self-mastery. Crusoe seems almost to will his isolation, and to cling to it even when it is being invaded. He never learns the lesson which, as I shall try to show, is the main one “cultural studies” has to offer: in order to understand ourselves, the discourses of “the Other”—of all the others—is that which we most urgently need to hear.

Disciplining the Disciplines

In both American and European universities since the 1960s, the perception of a crisis in the humanities and social sciences is now common. Between 1968 and 1988, a deluge of decline and fall rhetoric has swept through educational institutions. Perhaps the only aspect of education today which is not in “critical” or perhaps comatose condition is such rhetoric. While Jonathan Kozol has announced that one-third of the adult population of the U.S. is now functionally illiterate, E. D. Hirsch, Jr. has raised the perhaps equally frightening specter of “cultural illiteracy” and Allan Bloom has declared that higher education is “closing the mind” of America. In 1982 Harvard English professor Walter Jackson Bate declared that “the humanities are … plunging into their worst state of crisis since the modern university was formed a century ago in the 1880s.” Quoting this remark in “To Reclaim a Legacy,” his 1984 director's report to the National Endowment of the Humanities, William J. Bennett agreed with Bate in tracing the crisis back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when occurred, he claimed, “a collective loss of nerve and faith on the part of both faculty and academic administrators [which] was undeniably destructive of the curriculum” (Bennett 16–21).

To Bate's and Bennett's declarations of crisis can be added many others which, like theirs, locate the origins of the current moribund state of the humanities and more generally of education in the radical tendencies of the 1960s. According to the editors of a recent anthology recollecting (favorably) that radical decade, “Trashing the 60s has become a strategic feature of the current struggle for hegemony” (Sayres 8). In Britain, too, the sixties have been “the leading target of Tory demonology,” as Simon Frith points out; “for Margaret Thatcher and her colleagues the 60s were when Britain went bad” (Sayres 59). In a speech on May 17, 1988 (reported the following day on National Public Radio), Ronald Reagan blamed the “drug crisis” on “the permissiveness of the 60s.” (But at the same time the press was blaming Nancy Reagan for believing in astrology—remember the “Age of Aquarius”?) What does it mean to blame the ills of a society on an earlier decade, particularly one that ended almost two decades ago? Reverse nostalgia? What is a “crisis” anyway, and how has it happened that universities under the supposedly calm, well-disciplined (star-blessed?) political regimes of Reagan and Thatcher, in the 1980s and not the 1960s, have fallen into such disarray?

According to the now trite and invariably trivializing conservative myth of what happened in the sixties, youthful aggression caused knee-jerk liberalism to cave in to radical demands—ironic in light of the supply/demand metaphors Bennett employs:

When students demanded a greater role in setting their own educational agendas, we eagerly responded by abandoning course requirements of any kind and with them the intellectual authority to say to students what the outcome of a college education ought to be. With intellectual authority relinquished, we found that we did not need to worry about what was worth knowing, worth defending, worth believing. The curriculum was no longer a statement about what knowledge mattered; instead, it became the product of a political compromise among competing schools and departments overlaid by marketing considerations. (Bennett 19–20).

By examining his notion of “marketing considerations,” Bennett might have been forced to acknowledge that, with certain strategic exceptions, the demands of multinational corporations and government rather than the counter-demands of radical students and faculty carried the day. The exceptions were a small number of academic trends and initiatives—in the U.S., Women's and Afro-American Studies programs are the key examples—which took as one of their aims the democratization of the curriculum. Through “political compromise” these achieved marginal status in the higher educational establishment in the late 1960s and early 1970s (in Britain, the development of “cultural studies” programs followed a roughly similar path). But it was not “marketing considerations” that won these programs their current positions in higher education, except in a sense Bennett does not mean: university administrators often only grudgingly agreed to their establishment, worried about bad public relations if they balked.

As Thorstein Veblen long ago pointed out, the modern university is “a business house dealing in merchantable knowledge” (Veblen 85). Although its primary customers are students, if they become uppity or too radical, the university can always expel them. For the most part, students wish to acquire “merchantable knowledge” which they in turn can sell to other business enterprises. And the largest customers for the research services of universities, of course, are corporations and government. Have Women's and Afro-American Studies or have “marketing considerations” precipitated the current crisis in the humanities? Bennett is no critic of capitalism; his answer is therefore unequivocal, as a headline in The Chronicle of Higher Education for February 17, 1988 makes clear: “Scholars defend their efforts to promote literature by women and blacks, decry attack by Bennett.”

Bennett thinks that feminists and Afro-American scholars are “intellectual lightweights.” But in the face of the Vietnam War and systemic racism, poverty, sexism, and environmental spoliation at home and abroad, all blithely downplayed or ignored by neoconservatives like Bennett, marketing considerations certainly did produce university curriculums that are now careerist smorgasbords instead of intellectually coherent programs. That outcome was as unsatisfactory to radical students and faculty as to Bennett. Thus, the 1962 Port Huron Statement, manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), declared that “our experience in the universities [has not] brought us moral enlightenment.”

Our professors and administrators sacrifice controversy to public relations; their curriculums change more slowly than the living events of the world; their skills and silence are purchased by investors in the arms race; passion is called unscholastic. The questions we might want raised—what is really important? can we live in a different and better way? if we wanted to change society, how would we do it?—are not thought to be questions of a “fruitful, empirical nature,” and thus are brushed aside. (SDS 109)

A similar demand for “moral enlightenment” characterized the student movements in western Europe in the sixties, culminating in the events in France of May, 1968. Although these events—and the decade as a whole—did not produce major political revolutions in western Europe or the U.S., there was a worldwide trend toward liberation—the dismantling of the last remnants of the old colonial empires (of which the Vietnam War was only one highly spectacular instance), the civil rights movement, feminism, the various youth “countercultures.” Even without political revolutions in the West, the political gains were major ones, and so were the cultural gains. As during similar revolutionary eras in the past—the aftermath of the American and French Revolutions, for instance—creative energies were released in the sixties that are still active. The latest crisis in education is occurring not because students are again mounting the barricades, but because the humanities and social science disciplines are cracking at the seams, unwilling or perhaps unable to take the new, threatening, creative energies into account. Above all, the authority of the academic disciplines has been challenged from several directions. In the 1980s, perhaps the weakest of these challenges has come from student radicalism; yet what Jürgen Habermas wrote about students in the sixties continues to haunt academic memories: “the rising generation has developed a particular sensitivity to the untruth of prevailing legitimations.” The young have always expressed “outrage against the double standards of the older generation's morality,” Habermas declared. The difference in student protest from the sixties forward has been the acute awareness of living in a society with the capacity to fulfill “the emancipatory ideals of the eighteenth century”—that is, to create a world of freedom, enlightenment, and prosperity for all—which instead does just the opposite. Despite abundance, “it has not abolished hunger … while it has widened the gap between industrial and developing nations, exporting misery and military violence” (Habermas, Toward 25).

The Port Huron Statement lays bare the dilemma of humanistic liberalism in a society that enshrines it in academic institutions, yet systematically thwarts the realization of its ideals. This blockage between theory and practice is the crisis Bate and Bennett deplore. Unless the ideals expressed in great works of literature and art (not to mention religion, which the humanities sometimes claim to have reluctantly superseded) can and do become politically empowered, there seems to be no point in teaching them. Departments of English, for example, could just as easily and even more practically teach great advertisements as great books, if the only purpose is the merely rhetorical one of learning to read and write effectively. In much academic discourse, “esthetic appreciation” is a mystified and mystifying category, used as a cover for innumerable nonesthetic purposes (for instance, publishing scores of “critical” essays on a single “great” novel like Middlemarch—the “greatness” or intrinsic esthetic worth justifies the scholarly attention). But in its unexamined forms the notion of esthetic appreciation is usually little more than a disguised or unrecognized utilitarianism: whatever gives pleasure is valuable, or whatever leads to scholarly productivity and publishing is valuable, or both—as Jeremy Bentham said, if the game of pushpin gives as much pleasure as poetry, then it is just as valuable as poetry.

I am not denying that esthetic concerns should be a primary focus of humanities teaching. On the contrary, in the present over-disciplined and over-technologized condition of the humanities, esthetic concerns have little or no genuine place. Of course esthetic appreciation is central to those theories of the humanities which see them as in some manner “humanizing” or “civilizing” those who study them. But this traditional line of reasoning has been frequently called into question, not least by the events of the twentieth century which have belied the very idea of the progress of civilization. Against such increasingly untenable theories, I will argue that a more reasonable line of defense for both the humanities and the social sciences is presently offered by the idea of cultural and historical representation—although, if this idea is taken seriously, it will lead beyond the narrow and narrowing limits of the academic disciplines as now established, in the direction of cultural studies. Further, as Herbert Marcuse argued in The Aesthetic Dimension and elsewhere, for esthetic values to take their proper place in education and in society at large would entail a revolutionary transformation that, of course, is simply unthinkable for the neoconservative and liberal defenders of the traditional humanities and the status quo.

The crisis in education only reflects the larger crises of American and European world-hegemony. Upheaval in the humanities and social sciences must and will continue so long as the U.S. and other powerful, industrialized nations continue exporting “misery and military violence.” If the humanities offer the profoundest expression of our society's ideals, then social crisis must necessarily be reflected in academic work. As Terry Eagleton remarks, the humanities are a “body of discourses” about the “most imperishable values”; they are “pitched into continual crisis” by the negation of those values in actuality. Crisis is thus the “permanent and structural” condition of the humanities; the cure cannot come completely from within the schools and universities. Moreover, “it is part of [the humanities'] chronic bemusement … never to know whether they are central or peripheral, grudgingly tolerated parasites or indispensable ideological apparatuses” (Eagle-ton, “Foreword”). Within the university's hierarchy of disciplines, humanists are likely to feel more peripheral than central. Tradition gives the humanities an importance that current funding and research priorities belie. At giant public “multiversities” like the Big Ten schools, humanities courses are taken by many students only as requirements—a sort of force-feeding in writing skills, history, great books, and appropriate “values” before they select the chutes labeled “pre-professional”—pre-med, pre-law, and so forth. About half of the freshmen entering my university (Indiana) say they want to major in business (although the School of Business admits only a portion of these). Clearly, one doesn't need to blame the radical sixties for the current marginalization and sense of irrelevance that pervades the humanities today.

If crisis is the permanent condition of the humanities, moreover, that is also true of the social sciences. A fairly typical declaration appeared in the first issue (1972) of the British journal Economy and Society: “All the social sciences are in a state of crisis.” Such pronouncements usually lead to calls for “a ‘critical’ sociology or ‘critical’ theory and … for ‘relevant’ as well as interdisciplinary research,” though the editors hasten to add that “these new interests … have tended to be unsupported by serious scholarship and have consequently too often degenerated into blind dogmatism, confused eclecticism or mere polemic.” More recently, with the “Critical Theory” of the Frankfurt Institute...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• CULTURAL STUDIES
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Humanities (and a Lot More) in Crisis
• 2 Cultural Studies in Britain
• 3 From Althusser to Gramsci: The Question of Ideology
• 4 Class, Gender, Race
• 5 Mass Culture, Postmodernism, and Theories of Communication
• Works Cited
• Index