Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 14, June 2003
Daniel Keyes
The Context for Reproducing Knowledge:
MacCabe's _The Eloquence of the Vulgar_
Colin MacCabe _The
Eloquence of the Vulgar: Language, Cinema and the Politics
of Culture_ London: British Film
Institute, 1999 ISBN
0-85170-677-0 184 pp. Colin MacCabe's _The
Eloquence of the Vulgar_ consists of 13 essays that situate
the ascendancy of cultural studies [1] as an
institutional force in western academia. To approach this
text from the perspective of a critique in terms of film
studies or philosophy would necessarily miss the ethos of a
book that delights in crossing disciplinary and
institutional boundaries with the aim of reaching a broader
public. Nevertheless, the subtitle 'Language, Cinema and the
Politics of Culture', indicates that the subjects of cinema
and linguistics are woven into the project of analyzing
culture's politics. MacCabe's aim and modus operandi
throughout is to historicize and thus politicise the
aesthetic experience. The title, _The Eloquence
of the Vulgar_, reflects an unfinished discourse in Latin by
Dante who, as part of an emergent merchant class in 14th
century Italy, championed the vulgate Italian over Latin as
a way of using his art to challenge the authority of church
and state (147-149). MacCabe invokes Dante to assert that
art is essentially about life or at least embedded in life,
and that the study of art must necessarily account for its
institutional production. This move of invoking highbrow
literary history to explore popular cultural is indicative
of a book that analyses the impact of media like film and
television by invoking the weight of historic materialism
and comparative historical analysis. For example, the
parallel with Dante is strategic since MacCabe senses that
in the 20th century, with the emergence of television and
film as dominant forms of knowing, we are on the cusp of a
parallel social revolution like the Renaissance (149).
MacCabe's varied
institutional initiatives at the British Film Institute and
the Universities of Cambridge, Strathcylde, Exeter, and
Pittsburgh attempt to insure this revolution does not result
in a backlash that restores Thatcherite Victorian models of
morality and individualist hegemony, but instead advance
postcolonial difference. The value of this book is located
in how MacCabe resolutely negotiates institutional practices
to advance this agenda. From the cries of literary scholars
seeking to insure the canon of great art is not marred by
television, to the need to cut costs and limit access to low
income students, MacCabe traces how cultural studies grew
out of English literature studies (166). This collection is
an important account of the evolution of cultural studies in
America and England, and certainly points away from more
formalist approaches to cultural studies popular in
America. The book's far ranging
essays make it difficult to critique or regard as a unified
work on one topic. Nevertheless, what emerges in all these
essays is a pattern of political engagement with the world
of art and culture that appears to witness the demise of
monolithic master narratives, and the creation of a series
of localized and subaltern narratives. Apropos of this approach,
the book offers two organizational strategies: thematic (v)
and chronological (viii). I suspect the chronological order
of publication is offered as another way of tracing the
evolution of the essays. The thematic table of contents
offers four parts. Part One deals with theories and
practices of authors, writing, Standard English, and popular
culture. Part Two explores 'Cultural Forms and Social
Change' (79) by offering three very distinctive essays: the
first studies puritan accounts of the Shakespearean stage;
the second explores how 1960s English television
deconstructed the nation into identity politics; and the
third offers a post-national exploration of Derek Jarman's
_The Tempest_ and _Edward II_. Part Three of the book,
'Intellectuals in Transit', praises and explicates the
*difficult* writings of poststructuralist Marxist Frederick
Jameson, African American scholar James Snead, and feminist
and postcolonialist theorist Gayatri Spivak. The choice of
these three theorists indicates trajectories for the
institutional evolution of cultural studies. Part Four:
'Institutional Initiative' sums up the trajectory of the
first three parts of the book by focusing on the growth of
institutions under MacCabe's tenure: The MA program with the
British Film Institute, the postgraduate Cultural Studies
program at the University of Pittsburgh, and the doctoral
program at the London
Consortium which
draws on resources from the Architectural
Association,
Birkbeck
College, the
British
Film Institute,
the Institute
of Contemporary Arts,
and the Tate
Gallery. All three
of these initiatives call for a blending of theory and
practice by honing students' political savvy and
technocratic skills. One recurrent conundrum
that appears in these essays is the struggle between the
potential for ahistoricism in poststructuralism, and the
need to provide a form of analysis that goes beyond the
'Traditional Left positions, whether couched in the
pessimistic tones of the Frankfurt school or the more
nuanced accents of Gramsci' (78). For example in his chapter
'The Revenge of the Author', he attacks Barthes's 'Death of
the Author' for offering 'some atemporal and idealist
account of significations' (39), instead of one 'rooted in a
historical and materialism account of meaning' (39). MacCabe
does not desire to return to an overarching singular master
view of history championed by writers like Theodor Adorno,
but instead champions Walter Benjamin's _Charles Baudelaire:
A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism_, where history
is read through a necessarily selective and fragmented
account of the past that is consciously a product of its own
epoch and audience (38-40). [2] Thus the act of
writing is always a social act that anticipates the
utterances of the reader. Both reader and author are the
products and producers of Epochs. MacCabe recovers
poststructuralism within a dialectical historical project
that does not strive to offer a defining master narrative
but instead offers glimpses of possible critical narratives.
Thus the wide-ranging essays in this volume can be said to
exist within this aesthetic and politics. Some of these essays have
their genesis as public lectures and thus address a wider
audience than the average academic essay. This ethos concurs
with MacCabe's institutional efforts to combine cultural
studies and production in his work with the British Film
Institute as a head of production in the mid-1980s, and
later with the London Consortium (12-29). Thus readers
unfamiliar with the evolution of English studies,
poststructural theories of the author, the politics of
teaching Standard English, the history of the Shakespearian
stage as it relates to early Hollywood, or the work of
Jameson, Snead, and Spivak, will find these topics offered
in an engaging manner that may provoke further exploration.
These essays may seem a jumble of divergent topics, but what
ties them together is the notion of how theory and practice
combine in institutional practice. In the Introduction, and
prefaces to each essay, MacCabe grounds the production of
the texts in detailed histories that account for his growth,
the evolution of English studies into cultural studies, and
the evolution of film studies from psychoanalytical theories
towards meaningful engagement with the practical side of
filmmaking. He attempts to wed close textual analysis with
consideration for production and reception in whatever text
he studies. MacCabe's gift is to focus
on the importance of institutional practices in generating
knowledge. For readers unversed in the politics of English
departments at British universities in the 1980s and 1990s,
portions of this book may seem a hard slog; however, these
details make the argument for creating an institutional
space where criticism does not languish in the academy but
has a place in shaping the production and popular reception
of texts. I can provide one example
of the impact of his writing on the institutional practice
of English literature from my own experience as a doctoral
candidate in the early 1990s with York University's English
Department in Toronto, Canada. MacCabe's timely 'Cultural
Studies and English' (published in 1992 in _Critical
Quarterly_) forcefully asserts that a textual scholar could
and should study popular ephemeral electronic texts, an
article that helped me convince reluctant members of the
English department that a dissertation on daytime talk shows
was indeed viable. The account of his time at
British Film Institute in production and then setting up a
graduate program is fascinating from the North American and
Canadian perspective because such a union of government
sponsored institution and commerce is unlikely: increasingly
corporate sponsorship at Canadian universities drives
research and teaching. Canada's National Film Board produces
films but not degrees; and in America state sponsorship of
the arts is limited in comparison to other industrialized
nations. The creation of the British Film Institute
postgraduate program and the London Consortium suggests
critical and productive forms of art can be married and lead
to democratizing institutional knowledge (20). The cost of
these innovative schools and their financial welfare remains
problematic. The last essay inaugurating the Consortium
notes the state will not sponsor them, and that it must 'be
a nil-cost activity' (178) where the entire cost is borne by
the students. This financing seems to undercut MacCabe's
efforts to make cultural studies more inclusive when tuition
is set at 11,250 UK pounds (18,891.91 US dollars) for
overseas students, and 2,976 UK pounds (4,997.97 US dollars)
for domestic students. [3] However, in the current
academic climate, where corporate interests drive much
research and tuition is spiraling upward with declining
funding from the state, there seems to be no other
alternative than to offer these programs to whoever can
afford them. MacCabe's materialist critique that undergirds
so much of the book seems to be swept away in the final
paragraph of the final essay by the optimism that the
Consortium's project is an enlightened one that will result
in more democratic initiatives with graduates who support
not just teaching and research but public outreach.
In sum, this book provides
a cogent and compelling road map for the institutional
development of the study of film within cultural studies
democratizing project where the vulgar is made eloquent.
Penticton, British
Columbia, Canada Footnotes 1. MacCabe tends to define
cultural studies as film and television; I sense MacCabe
would readily agree that the objects of study in cultural
studies are far wider than these media. 2. MacCabe's theory is
reminiscent of M. M. Bakhtin's theory articulated in his
'The Problem of Speech Genres' regarding the notion of the
inner sociality of all communication. See M. M. Bakhtin,
'The Problem of Speech Genres', in Bakhtin,
_Speech
Genres & Other Late
Essays_, trans.
Vern W. McGee, Caryl Emerson, and Michael Holquist, eds,
(Austin: University of Texas P, 1986). 62-102. 3. For the academic year
of 2003-4; see the London Consortium website
<http://www.londonconsortium.com/students.htm>;
accessed 16 June 2004. Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 Daniel Keyes, 'The Context
for Reproducing Knowledge: MacCabe's _The Eloquence of the
Vulgar_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 14, June 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n14keyes>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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