High anxiety: cultural studies and its uses

Abstract

A long and diverse line of commentators from W. H. Auden and Paul Tillich to Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard have pronounced ours an age of anxiety. Unhinged from former orthodoxies and subject to constant, multiple transformations, the post/modern era, they contend, is characterized by a Zeitgeist of fragmentation, ambiguity, and pervasive anxiousness. In these terms, cultural studies may very well lay claim as the contemporary knowledge formation par excellence. Not only is it a field constitutively marked by plurality and indeterminacy, it is in its own way equally prone to a persistent, unsettling anxiety. Devoid of either fixed object or method, stable definition or agenda, cultural studies is beset with uncertainties and has, as a result, developed an insistently anxious disposition. Open almost any introductory book to the field and one is immediately struck by the tenor of overt solicitude with which cultural studies is discussed and represented. Take, for example, the following passages drawn almost at random from a range of classic and more recent reflections: