The relevance and irrelevance of Harold Bloom

Part 6:

Last week I discussed Bloom's book 'Kabbalah and Criticism' and pointed out the general approach to literary exegesis that he advocates could spur us to re-visit our own classical texts with a renewed enthusiasm. In today's column, the last in the series on Harold Bloom, I wish to focus on his strictures on Cultural Studies and to point out how he misunderstood the true import of what Cultural Studies scholars are seeking to achieve. In that sense, his criticisms, at times bordering on paranoia, I submit, have little relevance for our own needs and projects.

What is Cultural Studies? Cultural Studies is an interdisciplinary approach that has been growing steadily during the past four decades or so. It has become a most influential mode of inquiry not only in the West but also in Asia, Africa and parts of Latin America. Cultural Studies has been described in a variety if ways. According to Raymond Williams, one of the scholars who paved the way for the emergence of Cultural Studies, culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. Consequently, it is hardly surprising that Cultural Studies has been typified in so many diverse ways. For, example it has been described as an 'interdisciplinary, trans-disciplinary, and sometimes counter-disciplinary field that operates in the tensions between its tendencies to embrace both a broad anthropological and one narrowly humanistic concept of culture'. The authors of this pronouncement are keen to underline the fact that unlike traditional anthropology, Cultural Studies has emerged from explorations into modern industrial societies, and that it seeks to embrace popular culture as a vital site of investigation.

Methodology

In terms of methodology, Cultural Studies is characteristically interpretive, and evaluative. As opposed to traditional assessments, it repudiates as untenable the exclusive equation of culture with high culture and categorically stresses the need to explore all available forms of cultural texts in relation to the prevalent cultural practices, social institutions and politics of representation. The idea of the politics of culture is crucial to the agenda of Cultural Studies.

Cultural Studies seeks to draw on a multiplicity of established disciplines, always reshaping the received ideas into newer configurations. These academic disciplines include anthropology, communication, history, sociology, literary studies, philosophy, media studies and feminist studies. However, Cultural Studies also aims to transcend the boundaries of these disciplines and bring about a realignment of thought. Originally, it was deeply inspired by Marxist thought' in more recent times it has also been influenced by thinkers associated with post-structuralism, post-modernism and new historicism.

It is, of course, important to bear in mind the fact that Cultural Studies has maintained important links with literary studies. Cultural Studies as we know it today grew largely out of the work of the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University England, established in 1964.Two of the most prominent scholars associated with the rise of Cultural Studies, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggarth, came out of literary studies. However, as Cultural Studies evolved as a mode of inquiry, it began to enter into a tensioned relationship with literary studies.

Cultural studies is a rapidly expanding field of investigation, and in many ways, it has displaced deconstruction as the privileged mode of inquiry in universities. This has generated a certain sense of unease among literary scholars. Literary theorists and critics such as Harold Bloom and J.Hillis Miller have expressed deep reservations about the possibilities of Cultural Studies, Some of the critics of Cultural Studies like Bloom voice the opinion that it has ushered in a period of philistinism where Shakespeare and Blake are being replaced by television soap operas and comics. It is indeed true that as with most fields of inquiry, some of the practitioners tend to move to extremes. However, taken as a whole it needs to be pointed out that Cultural Studies has provided us with important insights, methodologies, and pathways of inquiry.

Ideology

The concept of power, along with the sister concept of ideology, is central to the innovative work of Cultural Studies. The formulations of Michel Foucault compelled us to rethink the idea of power; it received a newer inflection, one that has been instrumental in generating much useful research into culture and society. In Foucault's hands, the notion of power assumed the status of an omnipresent phenomenon, and it propagated the idea that power can be productive as well. This line of thinking has had a profound impact on Cultural Studies as evidenced by the continuous stream of books and research papers published by practitioners of this mode of investigation.

What perturbs literary scholars such as Harold Bloom is the desire of students of Cultural Studies to focus on questions of politics of representation, the role of gender, race, ethnicity in their inquiries into literary texts. In addition, the focus on products of popular culture - popular films, television dramas, music - also has become a cause for worry. While literary critics focus on the complexities of the text, scholars of Cultural Studies pay equal attention to way texts are received, consumed, their impact in readers in specific political and social context in which these interactions take pace. Literary theorists like Bloom express their concern that Cultural Studies has resulted in the dilution of standards.

Harold Bloom's approach to texts is very different from that advocated by Cultural Studies practitioners. For example, in Discussing Shakespeare's Hamlet, Bloom makes the following observation. 'The central question then becomes ; how did hamlet develop into so extraordinarily ambivalent a consciousness/ I think we may discount any notion that the double shock of his father's sudden death and his mother's remarriage has brought about a radical change in him. Hamlet always had had nothing in common with his father, his mother and his uncle. He is a kind of changeling, nurtured by Yorick, yet fathered by himself, an actor-playwright from the start, though it would not be helpful to identify him with his author. Shakespeare distances Hamlet from himself, partly by appearing on stage at his side, as paternal ghost and as player king, but primarily by endowing the prince with an authorial consciousness of his own, as well as with an actor's proclivities.'

This is a very different approach to a literary text from one customarily urged upon by practitioners of Cultural Studies. Let us take another example from Bloom's voluminous writings. Here he makes an interesting conjunction between Dostoevsky and Shakespeare in terms of his preferred literary values.

’Dostoevsky emulates Shakespeare by identifying the reader’s imagination with Raskolnikov, even as Macbeth usurps our imagination. Porfiry, the police inspector who brilliantly tortures Raskolnikov with uncertainty, presents himself as a Christian, but clearly causes distaste in Dostoevsky who regards Raskolnikov’s nemesis as Western-influenced mechanist…..we have no place to go but Raskolnikov’s consciousness, just as we have to journey with Macbeth into his heart of darkness.

We might not murder old women or a fatherly monarch, but since in part we are Raskolnikov and Macbeth, perhaps in certain circumstances we might.

Like Shakespeare, Dostoevsky makes us complicit in his hero-villain’s murder. Macbeth and crime and punishment both are authentically frightening tragedies that do not purge us of pity, let alone of fear.’

In these passages are reflected Bloom’s preferred approach and guiding interests. They are very different from those privileged by practitioners of Cultural Studies.

Harold Bloom feels that Shakespeare – to him the greatest writer – enables us to put things in perspective and dispel what he thinks are some of the myths perpetrated by those inclined towards cultural studies.

As he says, it is his conviction that a deep reading of Shakespeare will enable us to exorcise certain phantoms put there by cultural studies types. ‘One such phantom is the death id the author; another is the assertion that the self is a fiction; yet another is the opinion that literary and dramatic characters are so many marks upon a page. A forth phantom, and the most pernicious, is that language does the thinking for us.’ All these so-called phantoms identified by Bloom are associated with the work of Cultural Studies.

Aggresive

Harold Bloom’s approach to Cultural Studies, as the years wore on, became more aggressive and hostile. Bloom has always been opposed to reading literary texts in relation to the wider social and political forces. He feels that Cultural Studies scholars have taken this predilection to an unacceptable extreme. Speaking of common readers, as defined by Virginia Woolf, Bloom says that, ‘they do not ‘read for easy pleasure or to experience social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence. So fantastic has the academy become that I have heard the kind of reader denounced by an eminent critic, who told me that reading without a constructive social purpose was unethical and urged me to re-educate myself through an immersion in the writing of Abdul Jan Mohammad, a leader of the Birmingham (England) school of cultural materialism.

As an addict who will read anything, I obeyed, but I am not saved, and return to tell you neither what I read nor how to read it, only what I have read and think worthy of reading, which may be the only pragmatic test for the canonical.’

It is Harold Bloom’s deeply held fear that Cultural Studies has so radically displaced literary studies that the latter virtually has no future. He maintains that literary studies are threatened in a fundamental way and that literary criticism will survive but not within the academy.

He expresses his anxiety in graphic terms. ’What are now called departments of English will be renamed departments of cultural studies where batman comics, Mormon theme parks, television, movies, and rock will replace Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Wallace Stevens..’

Harold Bloom, in addition to finding fault with Cultural Studies, has also focused on what he sees as the pernicious influence of feminists, Marxists, Lacanians, new historicists, deconstructionists and semioticians.

All these disciplines, in one way or another, have shaped Cultural Studies as we know it today. Bloom refers to the six disciplines I identified earlier as constituting what he calls school of resentment. He sees them as promoting the concept of ideology in a counter-productive way. ‘Ideology plays a considerable role in literary canon-formation if you want to insist that an aesthetic stance is itself an ideology, an insistence that is common to all six branches of the school of resentment.’

School of resentment

Harold Bloom is disconcerted by the fact that thinkers associated with Cultural Studies as well as the School of Resentment tend to over-emphasize race, gender, class, ideology, powers as crucial analytical tools in reading literary texts.

He is far more interested in focusing on the work itself, the consciousness and imagination of the creators. He goes on to say that, ‘if literary canons are the product only of class, racial, gender and national interests, presumably the same should be true of all other aesthetic traditions, including music and the visual arts…….when the school if resentment becomes as dominant among art historians and critics as it is among literary academics, will Matisse go unattended while we all flock to view the daubings of Guerilla Girls?’

Harold Bloom’s unhappiness with Cultural Studies arises from his perceived decay of artistic standards supposedly promoted by Cultural Studies. It is indeed true that Cultural Studies, like all other fields of study, have produced works that are of inferior and questionable quality.

At the same time it also needs to be recognized that scholars of Cultural Studies have produced works that are innovative and of an exceptionally high order. Scholars associated with Cultural Studies such as Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggarth, Stuart Hall, Lawrence Grossberg, Meaghan Morris have authored critical works that repay close and sustained attention.

Much of what Bloom says about Cultural Studies can be dismissed as misplaced criticism; he tends to caricaturize Cultural Studies for easy demolition. However, he does raise an important issue, namely, the practical value of Cultural Studies as a field of inquiry. In what way does it further our understanding of human society and enable us to make greater sense of it. In this regard, I wish to point to the possible conjunction of Cultural Studies and policy issues.

There is a tendency, fairly widespread I might add, to dismiss policy as the special and exclusive domain of governments and officialdom, and cultural critics committed to scholarly research should play no role in shaping policy. This betrays an unnecessarily restrictive attitude towards policy.

It should be noted that cultural policy includes a broad range of cultural practices and products, modalities of circulation, and consumption of cultural texts that are a vital part of our lives and ways of eliminating the harmful impact of these and enhancing the positive aspects. In this sense, cultural policy and cultural critique are vitally connected.

Cultural policy

Tony Bennett who has paid close attention to this topic sees the value of cultural policy not as a way of promoting a government’s interests but as a way of paying due attention to the highly complex, differentiated and often mutually contradictory frameworks and agendas that serve to define and delimit the possible political choices within a given cultural space.

Hence, cultural policy cannot be usefully separated from critiques of cultural formation, production, circulation, consumption. Cultural critics like Tony Bennett, to my mind, have persuasively argued – and with a large measure of justification in my view – that Cultural Studies should not be seen only as a form of cultural critique but also as a set of tools needed for productive political engagement.

Indeed, it is his contention that Cultural Studies should insist upon a specific set of knowledge claims and methodological procedures that will be usable in shaping the contours of practical life.

This connection between Cultural Studies and policy is one that should be nurtured. It is one way of avoiding the sense of triviality that critics like Harold Bloom associate with Cultural Studies.

What I have sought to do in this column is to point out, contrary to Bloom’s stated views, that Cultural Studies has much to offer by way of production of new knowledge and extending the boundaries of cultural awareness that would prove to be useful to both academics and enlightened citizens alike.

Let me end by sharing some of my own experiences in the field of Cultural Studies. A few years ago, Prof. Moti Gokulsing of the University of East London and I edited a book on Cultural Studies that dealt with modern India.

It was titled, ‘Popular Culture in a Globalized India’ and was published by Routledge (London). Our focus was on the complex ways in which India was seeking to encounter the interdictions of globalization as reflected in its popular cultural texts. We adopted a broadly Cultural Studies approach which focused on issues of politics of representation, the role of ideology, the engagements with history and changing patterns of cultural consumption.

We made an attempt to focus on specific events and practices and discursive formations even as we had within our sights the larger picture of Indian national change.

Contributors to our volume, who were experts in their respective fields in Indian popular culture, chose to explore such topics as regional cinemas of India, representation of women in television dramas, the music industry, Bollywood, visions of heroism in Indian comic books, advertising in modern India, cyberspace in India, discreet charm if Indian street food etc.

Through explorations of such topics, the volume established the relevance of Cultural Studies to a complex and nuanced understanding of a globalized India. In fact, it became abundantly clear that Cultural Studies through its investigations into popular culture can complement in interesting ways the important work done by sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists and economics in promoting a deeper understanding of contemporary India.

In this series of columns on the eminent literary theorist and critic Harold Bloom, what I sought to do was to examine his critical writing in terms of some of our own interests, concerns, preoccupations in Sri Lanka and see what aspects of it could be relevant to us.

I explained his signature concept of the anxiety of influence and how it could prove to be beneficial in our own endeavors of literary understanding and literary analysis.

His concept of misreading with all its ambivalences, I pointed out, was one we should ponder carefully. I also spent considerable time in explicating Harold Bloom’s deep and productive engagement with the past.

In his writings, a critical consciousness moves in concert with a serious engagement with the past. He was not only an insightful reader of Blake and Milton and Shelley but was also an innovative scholar of classical rhetoric and medieval Jewish mystical thought. Indeed he drew on these confidently in formulating his critical concepts.

I tried to point out how his engagements with these traditional texts should encourage us to mine the rich resources of our own cultural traditions. This can yield a rich harvest of new insights.