"Culture" & the Problem of the DIsciplines

In recent years the question of culture has become a focus of theorizing in several disciplines and intellectual currents. Postmodern theorists dispute the distinction between high and low culture. Anthropological theorists problematize culture as an object of knowledge as well as the position of the ethnographer and the “informant.” In literary theory deconstruction and new historicism revise the understanding of culture, raising a general question of the translatability among cultures. Historians open a field of “a new cultural history” to unsettle the treatment of culture in the older social and intellectual histories. Feminism and ethnic studies indicate limitations of theorizing culture in relation to masculine and Eurocentric presuppositions. Finally a newer tendency has emerged called cultural studies which draws upon diverse theories and analytic traditions to address the domain of culture as an autonomous region.

At the epistemological level, these initiatives raise doubts about the possibility of culture as a discrete object of knowledge, of cultural identity as a stable unity, and of the subject as the basis for aesthetic judgements. The Critical Theory Institute wishes to explore the issue of culture from the many theoretical perspectives that may shed light on it in order, if possible, to bring these various positions of questioning into defined loci of scrutiny, to develop theoretical postures that may clarify the issues at stake, and perhaps to propel them to a new level of understanding.

One area where collaborative work may be especially productive for a group like ours is that of the institutional framework of our own profession. Thus a focus on the culture of academia will enable us to examine assumptions underlying our professional-institutional practices (e.g., of criticism, of pedagogy) and to initiate specific investigations such as the following: the rationale of the disciples; the lifespan and mutation of theoretical schools or movements in academic principles; the interdependence and antagonisms in the relation of cultural criticism to the disciplines. In these examples we would like to focus on the way notions and assumptions about culture interact with disciplinary practices.

We understand Critical Theory and the problem of culture as dialectically constituted, not discrete or isolable theoretical practices or entities. Our goal is thus both to explore the role that cultural presuppositions and stated or implicit theories of culture have played in the constitution of various forms of Critical Theory and also to explore the theoretical presuppositions underpinning the notion of culture in its various historical and disciplinary forms.

Irvine Lectures in Critical Theory:
Sacvan Bercovitch (English and American Literature, Harvard)
“A Literary Approach to Cultural Studies”
November 30, 1994

James Boone (Anthropology and European Cultural Studies, Princeton)
“Listening For Hybridity: Post-colonial Cultural Studies, A Boasian Anthropologist, and the Show Business”
January 25, 1995

J. Hillis Miller (English & Comparative Literature, UC Irvine)
“The Other Other: Literary and Cultural Studies in the Transnational University”
April 19, 1995

Leslie Rabine (French & Italian and Women’s Studies, UC,Irvine)
“Essence, Mirabella, and the Racial Construction of Gender”
June 7, 1995

Suzanne Gearhart (French and Italian, UCI)
“Colonialism, Culture, and Psychoanalysis: Albert Memmi and the Problem of Interiorization”
November 17, 1993

Linda Williams (Film Studies and Women’s Studies, UC Irvine)
“Visual Culture and Spectatorial Discipline: ‘the Care and Handling of Psycho’”
January 26, 1994

David Lloyd (English, UC, Berkeley)
“Foundations of Diversity: Rethinking ‘The Idea of the University’ in a Time of Multiculturalism”
May 18, 1994

Nancy Armstrong, (Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media, Brown U)
“Modernism’s Body: The Arts of Overexposure”
January 13, 1993

Gerald Graff, (English, U Chicago)
“The Professional Humanities and Their Discontents”
May 6, 1993