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Anacoluthon: On Cultural Studies

To study cultural studies seems to risk entering a hall of mirrors-a place familiar, but no less uncanny-where the object of study and the method become images of each other. Can one study cultural studies as anything other than culture? If not, does one not then have the object re-enfold the method, and its study become a further instance of its practice before possibly becoming any autonomous act of scholarly knowledge? Cultural studies could keep reflecting back to its investigators that they are appearing as and, indeed, doing what they want to seize and know as knowledge, and that this is the very principle and point of cultural studies: scholarly representations, like all semiotic representations of which they are but a class, are the communication, the exchange, the transaction of cultural values; they are part of the practice of culture. The distortion that must occur in this hall of mirrors-the practice of cultural studies qua object growing larger, the effort to know it forever shrinking in its absorption and virtual disappearance into its alter image-is the fun of the funhouse, and perhaps also the source of its exhilarating delirium, its current energy. If life can't be true, at least it should be fun, Rainer Werner Fassbinder might have said (except when he thought its sadness closer to its truth). In the funhouse that cultural students cohabit with others who would know what the former do, the epistemological dilemma-how does one know what cultural studies is and does?-