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Inter-Asia Cultural Studies

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What matters for cultural studies?

Tom O'regan
Published online: 27 Jun 2013.

To cite this article: Tom O'regan (2013) What matters for cultural studies?, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 14:3,
458-462, DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2013.801620

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 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2013
Vol. 14, No. 3, 458–462, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2013.801620
What matters for cultural studies?
Tom O’REGAN
What matters cannot be the subject matter
because cultural studies’ attentions and
objects have grown and mutated and diversi-
fied in ways Tony Bennett and John Frow
have mapped earlier in this panel. Any
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large cultural studies conference is now
inevitably both an expression and a celebra-
tion of this diversification.
Some see what matters for cultural
studies as lying in a critical orientation and
a political commitment (a kind of speaking
truth to power). But that only touches the
surface of the quite broad “church” of criti-
cism and politics the field has become. Criti-
cal in critical orientation means then
something more like taking an issue
seriously and conducting an open-ended
inquiry into it using appropriate tools. In
terms of politics this ranges from the “mili-
tancy” advocated by Katherine Gibson
(Gibson-Graham 2006) to the kind of per-
spective Ian Hacking developed for science
and the history and philosophy of science
in his 1983 book Representing and Intervening,
when he wrote that we needed to consider
things like experiments not as represen-
tations but as interventions.
Another common idea of the matter
before cultural studies is its focus on the
present and its promise to do a history of
the present. But cultural history’s flowering
over the past 20 years reminds us that a cul-
tural studies without a sense of history is an
impoverished and impossibly anachronistic
undertaking.
What matters about cultural studies is,
perhaps, that it pursues those things that
do not quite fit other places and zones of aca-
demic activity. Cultural studies seems to be
about particular ways of approaching,
explaining and thinking about materials,
objects and knowledge. There are four
© 2013 Taylor & Francis
scenes that will help me stage what I am
talking about here.
Scene one: fractures in cultural and
media studies
Both John Hartley (2012) and Graeme Turner
(2011) have recently published books about
the future of cultural studies. When I first
read these two books I thought they
showed cultural studies to be coming apart
and at odds with itself in various ways. But
it is not so much a coming apart in any
global way but a fissure within a component
of it—cultural and media studies. Further,
this fissure seems to be speaking to lots of
different things not only different academic
perspectives and sites for action but social,
economic and cultural institutional re-order-
ings that stretch beyond the academy. I am
thinking here of the many social, economic
and political changes associated with digital
transformations and the pressures they are
placing upon existing ways of thinking and
knowing—and the opportunities these trans-
formations are creating for new fields to
emerge. These are putting considerable
pressures in terms not only of the objects to
study (as gaming studies, Internet studies,
apps studies, propose alternative starting
points to the familiar objects of cinema, TV
and print) but are also transforming screen
and print industries and how we think
about, use and dispose of them.
But I am also thinking of the not uncon-
nected institutional shifts within education at
all levels towards practice-led education,
which is downplaying the role of “studies”
subjects in the curriculum. This new “rhetori-
cal orientation” in higher education is also
being rolled out in primary and secondary
schooling. I call this a “rhetorical” turn to

indicate the analogous space it occupies with
traditional rhetoric in a classical education in
that its orientation is towards a “how to do”
rather than to a “what to know.” This prac-
tice-led turn with its attentions to various lit-
eracies—digital literacies, screen production,
creative and professional writing—should
not be confused, however, with the texts
and terminologies of classical rhetoric (see
Hartley 2009). This is because this practice-
led turn with its emphases upon creativity
and expression has tended to see itself as
pursuing a wholly new agenda rather than
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as returning, albeit with new attentions, to
previous educational orientations, and
knowledge.
What do Turner and Hartley propose in
their respective books? Loosely, the contrast
is between, on the one hand, a cultural
studies that is imagined as an intensification
of what it has been with the adoption of new
perspectives for cultural studies such as cul-
tural geography and media anthropology
renovating the discipline; and, on the other
hand, a new agenda for cultural studies
modeled upon an engagement with evol-
utionary economics and entrepreneurship
in a new enterprise called cultural science.
It could seem that the critical distinction
here is between a cultural studies engaging
with the traditional humanities and one
engaging with economics as Hartley
suggests.
But cultural studies has had a longstand-
ing and multifaceted engagement with econ-
omic perspectives. How could it be
otherwise given how close institutional per-
spectives in economics and political science
can be to what we often do in cultural
studies? Cultural and media studies has
never been just about audiences and their
uses of texts in everyday life but also the
practice of media producers, the institutions
of the media and the political economy of
media. As the moorings of the media have
changed so too has its political economy.
The media have also attracted the attention
of economists, human geographers, business
and management folk. This means that the
tools we use to do political economy in cul-
tural and media studies have had to not
What matters for cultural studies? 459
only take into account broader media trans-
formations but also to take into account
how the media and these changes have
become known and described—and in
being known have become transformed
across a number of disciplinary perspectives.
So what looks like a fissure in cultural
and media studies is a response to both
rapid media transformation and the many
different ways of knowing the media and
acting with and on it. This makes it an excit-
ing time to be involved in cultural and media
studies research. Our objects are constantly
mutating and changing before our eyes,
raising new objects and prospects for disci-
plinary connections. But there is also less
scope for common ground.
But for all these opportunities we also
have to face up to a “crisis” in our own insti-
tutional reproduction that is attending it.
How can cultural studies manage its new
inter-disciplinary engagements effectively
given the distances among the perspectives
now informing and being engaged with?
And how can it preserve its own sense of
scholarly focus with this “rhetorical turn”
in education leading more and more insti-
tutions to resemble cut down versions of
film schools and as communication and
media becomes paraprofessional versions of
PR, creative advertising, journalism, and
writing?
Scene 2: ERA and the tenuous cultural
studies (professional) reader
I was the convener of my University’s Huma-
nities and Creative Arts submission to Austra-
lia’s research evaluation/audit of University
research (called ERA) in both 2010 and 2012.
Mostly, this work involved identifying bound-
aries. One was where “Cultural Studies” as a
designated “Field of Research” ended and
other fields began. This was not a small
problem. On my last count it involved figur-
ing out “Cultural Studies’” relation to other
“Fields of Research” such as “Film, TV and
Digital Media,” “Communication and Media
Studies,” “Journalism and Professional Com-
munication,” “Political Science,” “Anthropol-
ogy,” “Literary Studies,” “Linguistics” and
 460 Tom O’Regan
“History and Philosophy of Specific Fields,”
“Historical Studies” and “Sociology.” The
major principle we followed in making this
distinction was to get a person’s writing to
the readers and panel where it would be best
read and understood.
What struck me from this exercise and
the carriage of this principle was that there
was indeed a Cultural Studies readership.
We do have a family of ways of posing a
problem, of seeing a site or a place; this
enables us to recognize a certain common
way of looking and negotiating the matters
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before us. We used to think of this readership
as inhabiting a certain politics and as having
an orientation towards a set of almost pre-
scribed objects and “theoretical perspec-
tives.” It entailed a particular sort of
activism in the world. But over the past 20
years it has become clearer, as Tony Bennett
has suggested, that cultural studies is more
now an orientation and a way of negotiating
other knowledge and practices and finding
connections between them and ways of illu-
minating the political stakes and issues at
hand.
My own work provides an example—
and a cautionary note—on the politics of
this negotiating “other knowledges.” Once
my collaborators and I sought to understand
the strange rolling out of Hollywood stan-
dard sound stage infrastructures globally at
a time when Wired magazine was proclaim-
ing that digital media had killed off such
studios—we found we had to engage with
the work of economic geographers, political
economists, media and cultural economists,
business studies and management perspec-
tives, and tourism studies. But where did
we publish? In the political economy book
series with a cultural studies inflection of
Andrew Calabrese (Goldsmith and
O’Regan 2005), and various cultural studies
journals such as the International Journal of
Cultural Policy and Continuum. However,
the folks that have most taken up our work
have not been in cultural studies but in econ-
omic geography, business studies and media
economics. And this raises the question of
whether such engagements are leading Cul-
tural Studies scholars to become someone
and something else through their encounters
with the “worlds” they investigate.
Scene 3: cultural studies and social
epistemology/intellectual history
It is notable that among the first fellows
elected to the newly established category of
Cultural Studies in the Australian Academy
of Humanities was Ian Hunter. Anyone
who has done a cursory reading of my co-
panelists’ and my own work would know
the importance of Hunter’s work to our
own (see Hunter 1988, 1994). I am having
Hunter stand in here for a particular orien-
tation to “knowledge”—Hunter would call
it “intellectual history” but I think Cultural
Studies is better described by its commitment
to doing a certain kind of “social epistem-
ology.” I say this because Cultural Studies
it seems to me is more often than not doing
a form of intellectual history of the present;
rather than an intellectual history.
Like social epistemologies, cultural
studies scholars are preoccupied with
“knowledge as a means to produce certain
affects” (Fuller 2002, x). We are likewise
driven by wanting “to show how the pro-
ducts of our cognitive pursuits are affected
by the changing relations in which the
knowledge producers stand to one
another.” Both of us are concerned with
making distinctions among the various
actors involved and insisting that tight
control on the use of knowledge or texts
and their subsequent uptake cannot be
taken for granted. Rather we want to both
recognize the several groups that may have
an interest in the acceptance of a knowledge
claim, a technology, a service or a text. We
want to distinguish as a social epistemologist
might those who are motivated to make a
claim in the hope they might benefit from
its acceptance and uptake, from those who
actually do benefit from it having been
made, and those who make use of it in the
course of doing something else with it (see
Fuller 2002, 12). Cultural Studies also
shares with social epistemology a normative
orientation—in Fuller’s original formulation,
the social epistemologist describes “our

cognitive pursuits primarily as a means of
prescribing for them” (Fuller 2002, 3). Yet
there are differences of course. Social
epistemology for all its cross-disciplinary
provenance is concerned with disciplines
and disciplinarity; while Cultural Studies is
concerned with different sorts of “knowl-
edge domains”—closer to the practices of
everyday life in de Certeau’s (1984) still
relevant formulation—in which often
quite different knowledges and practices
are deployed and brought into contiguity
with each other with often unpredictable
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effects.
Scene 4: relation with “organizations”
A decade and a half ago we would be debat-
ing the “cultural policy” moment and
whether cultural policy studies was the
future for cultural studies (Cunningham
1992; Bennett 1998). Nowadays, although
we have in Australia and elsewhere govern-
ments intent on developing cultural policies,
Cultural Studies does not recognize itself so
centrally as cultural policy studies. Part of
the reason for this is the thoroughgoing
and multifaceted imbrication of cultural
studies researchers with a large slew of
organizations, from government depart-
ments to museums to agencies and to
NGOs, and private sector organizations.
We do not talk much these days about “gov-
ernmentality”, neither do we exhort the field
to enter into relations with government. This
is because the engagement has become so
reflexive and multifaceted and the tasks of
analysis and description so tailored and
bespoke that “more than governmentality”
has been clearly needed to undertake “cul-
tural research” (see Ang 2006). It is, in
short, part of our reflex as a field. Like so
many patterns in cultural studies this one
is also in a direction of complexification
and diversity. In many ways these patterns
of engagement have given rise to what has
been called the “material turn” in Cultural
Studies.
I’ve talked variously of fissures, reader-
ships, social epistemology as an organizing
practice, institutional engagements, as all
What matters for cultural studies? 461
matters for cultural studies and its future.
That is my Cultural Studies. It implies inten-
sifications of these several changes. And a
bumpy ride. But perhaps that’s also the
way it has always been and what we must
expect of it operating as it does in interstitial
spaces pursuing those things that do not
quite fit other places and zones of academic
activity.
Acknowledgment
This paper was first presented as part of the
plenary discussion panel “What Matters to
Cultural Studies?”, Cultural Studies Associ-
ation of Australia Conference, December 3–
6, 2012.
References
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Research: Engaged Scholarship in the Twenty-
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 462 Tom O’Regan

Turner, Graeme. 2011. What’s become of Cultural Business (2011), Local Hollywood (2010), and The Film
Studies? London: Sage. Studio (2005).

Contact address: School of English, Media Studies &

Author’s biography
Art History, University of Queensland, Saint Lucia,
Tom O’Regan is Professor of Cultural and Media Brisbane, Qld, Australia 4072, Email: t.oregan@uq.
Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. edu.au
Recent co-authored books include The Ratings
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