Reconstruction 5.1 (Winter 2005)

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Michael Bérubé. The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies. Malden MA: Blackwell, 2005. 208 pp. Softcover. $24.95.

<1> Michael Bérubé has brought together a number of provocative essays that do more than defend cultural studies from the attacks of Harold Bloom, Elaine Scarry, and other partisans of beauty. Bérubé and his roster of heavy hitters, from Rita Felski and John Frow to Laura Kipnis and David Shumway, challenge cultural critics to fully articulate how aesthetics have always been at the center of cultural studies, and how the specific history of aesthetic engagement that defines cultural studies might be developed in the future. The collection as a whole thus reads as both a kind of critical genealogy and a call to take back aesthetic turf that formalists, devotees of Belles Lettres, and others suspicious of political urgency in art would deny our field.

<2> Perhaps the most intriguing essay in the book is thus Bérubé's introduction. Those who read his 1996 response (published in Clio, and then subsequently reprinted in the popular Falling Into Theory) to George Levine's similarly titled collection Aesthetics and Ideology, will recognize some familiar themes, from his call to reconsider the work of Jan Mukarovsky to his incisive interrogations of value and judgment in the work of both formalists and cultural critics. However, his positions are clearer here, and one quickly realizes that this collection is less a defense addressed to outsiders than, far more usefully, an analysis for those inside the field:

Perhaps then, its time to take the Return to Beauty, and the concomitant dismissal of the "old" cultural studies , not as a strange publicity moment but as an opportunity for revivifying questions that cultural studies, old and new, is especially well situated to ask. And if most readers now have little idea that cultural studies has any history of engagement with such questions, so much the better. The questions themselves are not going away anytime soon. Can politically motivated criticism have anything to say about forms? What is the role of aesthetic evaluation in such criticism? How should we understand the emergence of the aesthetic as a realm of experience, and its relation to the institutions of modernity? Can an understanding of the aesthetic augment an understanding of social movements, or is one necessarily a distraction from the other? And why should anyone bother with any of the above? (9)

The essays in the collection go a quite a way to engage all these questions, and happily, given the often uneven quality of anthologies such as this, every one is well worth reading, developing the arguments and issues in new and interesting ways.

<3> Though these essays cover quite a bit of ground, from pornography and Madonna to Bach's St. Matthew Passion and Picasso's Guernica, they all address the difficulties that cultural studies has with judgment and value. This issue is pivotal even in the title of David Sanjek's contribution, " 'I Give It a 94. Its Got a Good Beat and You Can Dance to It': Valuing Popular Music." Here Sanjek notes that accounting for judgment and affect are essential to developing cultural studies, for not only do we need a critical account of the cultural industry, but also a better account of its products and their place in people's lives: "in the end we will still want top know if this is a groove that can move us" (138). Sanjek's pithy formulation is echoed in Barry Faulk's call to reinvent judgment, "Cultural Studies and the New Populism":

Cultural studies should therefore do more than insist that it likes art just as much as any new populist. While it's true that cultural studies scholars are capable of liking beautiful things, and that we habitually concern ourselves with the aesthetic forms of social life, we also have a compelling case against aestheticism that we should not downplay, but elaborate. Displacing aesthetic codes in cultural studies in not mere play; it is a necessary prelude to building schemes of evaluation more in keeping with democratic norms on the ground it clears. Cultural studies should eschew traditional aesthetics, and its history of correlating artistic and social discrimination, in favor of the homely, ordinary practice of evaluating. Responding to art means making judgments, value calls, and choices, and a savvy cultural studies would do so not (for instance) by ranking the genre of epic as more elevated the genre of lyric, but by speaking in the vernacular language of Top Ten lists, Picks and Pans, thumbs up/ thumbs down, and Cheers and Jeers. (145)

<4> In many ways, some of the best contributions to this collection do just this, offering both judgments, and accounts of how the critics made those judgments. Steven Rubio's "Inventing Culture (Behind the Garage Door)" is a fascinating first person account of taste, while Laura Kipnis's "The Cringe Factor" is a first person account of the problems of such first person accounts. Other essays address the continually troublesome populism of John Fisk, the role of the aesthetic in enabling certain kinds of reading practices, and the complex relationship between those keywords, "culture" and "aesthetics."

<5> Given the continuing attacks on cultural studies, and the pseudo-populist cheerleading for reactionary forms of beauty and aesthetics championed by the likes of Harold Bloom, this is a timely book. However, its real strength is that it goes far beyond a defense of cultural studies, usefully suggesting new ways to research and account for affect, taste, and judgment.

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