[This is a slightly modified version of a position paper I gave recently in Iowa City at "Communication and Cultural Politics," the National Communication Association's summer conference. While I've reworked this slightly since then (mostly to clean up specific references to conference events that would make little sense to readers who weren't there), and I've added a brief conclusion (of sorts) that wasn't part of the Iowa talk -- I've retained the basic style and polemical tone of the original presentation here.]

Jonathan Sterne has recently argued that "someone should write a cultural studies book titled The Internet in the style of Raymond Williams' Television": i.e., a richly nuanced, critical examination of the Net as a cultural and technological phenomenon as it has become (and is becoming) stitched into the fabrics of people's daily lives. It's an argument that I agree with wholeheartedly -- and I'm actually hoping that the someone in question turns out to be Sterne (or at least someone as smart as he is) -- but for my purposes here, I want to turn his idea on its head. Rather than looking at what cultural studies might do with the Internet, I'd like to address the question of what the Internet might do (and has done) with cultural studies, with a specific focus on CULTSTUD-L.

Every so often, people will tell me how much they love the listserv -- which is always nice to hear, but it's also a bit perplexing. For starters, I'm never entirely sure why they're telling me this, given that the list's finest moments -- the ones involving extended, intelligent, and enlightening conversation -- depend far more on the contributions of other people than they do on anything I might bring to the table in my role as list manager. Put another way, if there are moments when the list deserves such praise (and there are), there are serious limits as to how much of that rightfully belongs to me.

More to the point, though, is that -- happy as I generally am with the list as a forum for productive and stimulating discussion -- there are moments when I worry seriously about the quality and value of our conversations. Moments when I look at our ongoing threads and ask myself: is this really cultural studies? who are these people? and what on earth do they think they're doing?

I want to suggest that many of these moments arise out of the implicit -- and misguided -- need/desire felt by some listmembers to "fix" cultural studies in two senses of the term: both to repair it and to pin it down. [And, as several people suggested to me in Iowa City, a third sense of the term -- to neuter -- might also be applicable.] And so what I want to do here -- briefly -- is discuss three different inflections of this "will to fix" cultural studies, and then to offer a couple of tentative suggestions -- though no clean conclusion -- for why trying to do/live/talk about cultural studies online may make this problem harder to avoid and/or solve.

1. The first of these inflections revolves around an implicit desire to see cultural studies as having some sort of fixed and clearly delineated object of study -- usually, though not necessarily, popular culture and/or the mass media. For example, when Princess Diana was killed, the list erupted (albeit belatedly) with an unprecedented torrent of posts attempting to describe, explain, and/or critique the ensuing media spectacle. And, from the very start of the flood, a number of listmembers claimed that this was precisely the sort of phenomenon that constituted cultural studies' "natural" object of study: as if cultural studies was somehow obligated to tackle this topic, or as if any cultural studies practitioner worth his or her salt had to have something to say about it.
   
   On a smaller (albeit more recurring) scale, the list occasionally suffers from what I've taken to calling CFHs -- Calls For Help -- posts that ask for the list's assistance (and indulgence) in tackling exceptionally broad and under-explained research projects (e.g., "songs about love" or "films involving violence"). The logic that seems to inform such requests is one that assumes -- mistakenly -- that a community of cultural studies practitioners is the natural and obvious place to seek aid in compiling these sorts of lists, since (presumably) these are the primary objects that cultural studies is dedicated to studying.
   
   The problem here isn't so much that cultural studies has nothing to say about music or movies (or what have you), but that there's no automatic or necessary connection between cultural studies and any specific object of study. People can study popular culture (or cultural diversity, or any of the other usual suspects that get cited when people claim to be naming the research object(s) of cultural studies) without doing cultural studies at all, and people can do cultural studies without having any particular interest or expertise in popular culture. While trying to define cultural studies is always a risky business, I'd argue that the crucial questions at the heart of such definitions are those concerned with "how" and "why" cultural studies practitioners go about their work than with "what" it is they're working on.
   
   
2. Inflection #2 of the "will to fix" cultural studies is centered on an implicit vision of cultural studies as having some sort of fixed methodology. On the listserv, I think this vision manifests itself most clearly in the semi-regular posts that find people searching for suggestions and assistance for how to teach cultural studies to undergraduates. Now it's possible that what I'm hung up on with these requests is simply a bit of semantic slipperiness: that these listmembers don't really expect undergrads to finish their courses with a rich understanding of and ability to do cultural studies themselves, but rather that these scholars see their own work within cultural studies as an important and valuable influence on their teaching. Maybe. But probably not, as the tone and character of many of these requests suggests that the instructors in question actually want to try and teach college sophomores how to do cultural studies (or at least some small scale version of it) in a fifteen-week semester.
   
   And, to be a bit polemical about it, I would argue that -- with very few exceptions -- there's no such thing as an undergraduate course in cultural studies. Not in the US anyway. Put simply, cultural studies involves a commitment to theoretical, political, and intellectual work that most US undergraduate programs aren't equipped to nurture in their students. Which isn't to say that there aren't undergraduate students who can do cultural studies (there are) or that the courses mentioned on the list can't still be valuable educational experiences for the students (they can be), but that there's more to teaching cultural studies than simply providing a crash course in semiotics (or ideological analysis or identity politics), watching a few TV shows and movies, and then asking students to write some sort of analytic paper on those texts. Which, as far as I can tell, is what most of these courses are aiming for. And while it's not an unworthy target (by any means), it's not one that's going to produce a host of people who actually do cultural studies. Not by itself anyway.
   
   
3. The final "will to fix" inflection that I want to address is one where cultural studies is implicitly seen to be a fixed discipline of some sort. Here, I would point to the flame war we went through last December centered around a listmember who called himself "Phactual." Viewed in the most generous light, Phactual was a cultural studies neophyte who turned to the listserv to learn more about what cultural studies is, framed his initial questions in inadvertently antagonistic tones, and then focused more on defending himself from the angry responses his posts generated than on engaging the genuinely helpful attempts some people made to answer his questions. Viewed in the least generous light, Phactual was simply a troll: i.e., he deliberately baited the list into a flurry of petty name-calling and insults, and then fanned the flames further by hurling insults back at the people whose buttons he'd successfully pushed.
   
   Even a generous reading of Phactual's posts, however, displays a clear need on his part to pin cultural studies -- and much of the rest of the world, for that matter -- down to an unambiguous, soundbite-sized definition of the discipline. Claiming that:

   "History" is the study of "significant persons and past events," "Psychology" is the study of "the functioning of the mind," "Sociology" is the study of "the functioning of groups," and "Communication" is the study of "symbolic behavior,"

   Phactual went on to insist that equally pithy definitions could and should be offered up for cultural studies -- and that the list's reluctance/inability to do so (and to do so immediately) revealed cultural studies' inherently fraudulent nature. Shrugging off pointers to the list's FAQ and a wide range of "further reading" that actually answered his questions in the detail they deserved, Phactual doggedly insisted that such "help" was an attempt to evade his simple request with abstract jargon and excess verbiage. In his eyes, a field of study should evidently never be so fraught with ambiguities, complexities, or internal tensions as to resist being summed up in a single declarative sentence (e.g., quantum physics is the study of really, really tiny things).
   
   On the flip side of the coin, however, part of what I found distressing about the debate generated by Phactual's posts was the way that many listmembers rushed to close ranks against the "interloper." Phactual's obnoxious and condescending tone notwithstanding, he raised a number of valuable questions that cultural studies practitioners should be willing and able to address more openly. I would actually agree with him (and did so on the list at the time) that there are significant ways that those of us who do cultural studies contribute to our own public relations problems. And I see (and saw) nothing inherently wrong with an attempt to have a discussion about how we -- collectively and/or individually -- can actually change whatever it is that we do that makes it easier for non-cultural studies types to misunderstand what cultural studies "really" is. If pressed, I would probably even go so far as to say that cultural studies needs to be more self-reflective when it comes to such questions.
   
   Too many of the contributors to this discussion, however, clearly wanted no part of such self-reflection. In their eyes, the field had been challenged (however sloppily) and it was easier (more comfortable?) to respond by insulting the challenger than to actually have an open and honest discussion about whether or not any of his charges rang true. To be sure, a handful of people -- most notably, Tim Burke from Swarthmore -- piped up on the list in ways that attempted to engage the issues at stake while avoiding the flame war, but this particular angle on the discussion wasn't ever taken up in earnest. After the brouhaha died down, a number of people wrote me offlist to say that they were disturbed by some of the ways that much of the list seemed more concerned with "protecting their turf" than with examining the question of what cultural studies might actually be doing to encourage such attacks. "I am afraid I do not think we did well," one person said . . . but then also recognized that, like many other people on the list who could have tried to steer the debate in more productive directions, he had remained silent through the whole thing.

Now these three inflections of the "will to fix" cultural studies aren't inherently bound up with the question of what happens when cultural studies goes online -- one might just as easily ask them of other texts, practices, people, and institutions who lay claim to the "cultural studies" label -- but I think that they become more vexed in the case of CULTSTUD-L because of the differences between online "communities" (an overworked word, I know, but this isn't the time or place to try and do full justice to such issues) and those that exist in "real" space.

There are lots of ways that people have of talking about the specificity of cultural studies -- its relationship to particular disciplines, historical moments, theoretical paradigms, objects of study, etc. -- but perhaps the most common of these is the way that it arises from, speaks to, and operates on particular geopolitical spaces. And so observers -- from both within and outside of cultural studies -- invoke distinctions between, say, British cultural studies, US cultural studies, Canadian cultural studies, Australian cultural studies, and so on. And these distinctions matter, to a large extent, because they reflect real differences between the cultural, political, and intellectual terrains associated with those points in space -- differences that, in turn, lead to significant differences in the place and shape that cultural studies occupies in those locales. In fact, one of the more common features of attempts to explain cultural studies' history is a description of the changes that it's undergone when it has "migrated" from one place to another.

Online, however, cultural studies loses that sort of grounding. Put too simply, cultural studies as it's practiced in "real" space has typically been able to assume at least a plausible fiction of community within its respective geopolitical spheres. For example, even given Stuart Hall's repeated insistence that the recurring trope of "the Birmingham school" is something of a misnomer because of the contentious and fractious nature of the CCCS' various approaches to cultural studies, there are still ways that this misnomer marks a productive distinction between the varieties of cultural studies practiced in Britain in the ‘60s and ‘70s and the varieties practiced at other times and in other places. On a listserv like CULTSTUD-L, however, it's hard to imagine that all (or even most) of the 800+ subscribers have enough shared experience or context independent of the listserv itself to call themselves a community, even in the quasi-fictional ways that we might speak of Birmingham or Champaign-Urbana or Montreal or Sydney as examples of particular cultural studies communities.

Related to the questions of physical space and community is the way that an online forum such as CULTSTUD-L muddies the distinction between the "inside" and "outside" of cultural studies. While these lines are never 100% clear, the discursive, interpretive, and/or intellectual communities that may exist around particular offline versions of cultural studies have more firmly established boundaries between "insiders" and "outsiders" -- or at least more sharply defined sets of rules (explicit and implicit) for the ways that these groups interact with one another. Cultural studies novices, for instance, don't simply wander into our seminar rooms, our offices, our reading groups, our conferences and start making loud and unruly demands of the people gathered there to help them with their research projects, or to explain the field to them in 25 words or less. While such spaces may actually be the sites where people first come to learn of (and about) cultural studies, those spaces are also typically structured and organized in ways that involve a greater deal of control over who can speak and how they can do so.

On a listserv, however, things are not so neat. Much of the discussion that takes place on a listserv like CULTSTUD-L is "insider" business -- conversations about theoretical, political, and pedagogical questions related to the field; calls for papers; job announcements; etc. -- yet membership in the list is (and should be) open to anyone with an e-mail account who chooses to join. The list's defining purpose -- cultural studies -- may frame it as a semi-exclusive club of some sort (e.g., subscribers presumably join the list because they have an interest in cultural studies), but the actual set-up of the list (e.g., who can join, who can post, etc.) is more akin to a public park: i.e., the sophomore who wants nothing more than a quick fix for a term paper has no more -- and no less -- access to the listserv soapbox than the full professor who's looking for a stimulating theoretical discussion about "articulation" or "hegemony." All of which can make for some pretty oddly juxtaposed on-list discussions, where philosophically rich, Seigworth-ian mini-essays are intermingled with people looking for lists of "novels involving dramatic tension" (or some such). Mind you, I don't think there's any neat solution to this particular problem -- if for no other reason than that the very set-up of the listserv more or less guarantees than a fairly broad range of people (at least with respect to their pre-existing familiarity with cultural studies) will constantly come and go. But those nagging questions still haunt me anyway: what on earth are we doing? who are we? and is what we're doing here really cultural studies?