inglis review by blake seidenshaw-2

8/3/2019 Inglis Review by Blake Seidenshaw-2

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/inglis-review-by-blake-seidenshaw-2 1/3

FRED INGLIS ON CULTURAL STUDIES AND CELEBRITY

Blake Seidenshaw ([email protected])

Recently, we were blessed with the presence of Dr. Fred Inglis, Emeritus Professor

of Cultural Studies at the University of Sheffield who, in addition to giving a series

of lectures for the TC Program in Arts and Education, presented two lectures on

Cultural Studies. As an incoming student, hearing Inglis' lectures served as an

introduction to the TC community; it could not have been a more stimulating and

exciting way to begin my studies here.

The first presentation was on the subject of his forthcoming

book, the phenomenon of celebrity, and the second a more

general meditation on the history and contemporary prospects

of Cultural Studies as a field of inquiry. Both lectures were delivered with Inglis'

characteristic wit and good humour, and followed by illuminating discussions with the

audiences. Although I am going to attempt a summary of Inglis' talks, I will begin with

the disclaimer that I will, without a doubt, be unable to do justice to the subtlety of his

arguments; indeed, it is probable that, lacking the benefit of a closereading of his works, I may misstate certain of his claims in favor of my own blunt

understanding of what he said. So I must apologize in advance for this indelicacy, rather than trying to

represent Inglis adequately, take responsibility for my own understanding of the fascinating problems and

issues that he raised. I hope that he and you all will forgive my impropriety; his many

excellent books are available for clarification of his positions.

In the first of Inglis' lectures, on the subject of celebrity, he focused generally

on the fascinating period around the 1950s and 60s, in which a particular kind of

celebrity figure came to prominence within the potent sphere of Hollywood's

international influence. John Wayne, James Stewart, Marilyn Monroe, and Cary

Grant were offered as idiosyncratic examples of Inglis' thesis. Each of these stars,

Inglis explained, were recognizable by their unique and identifiable personalities,

patterns that remained characteristically stable across the many different characters

that each of them played. John Wayne, for example, tended to project a strong senseof moral and sexual authority, which must have been felt as a kind of antidote to the

moral ambiguities of the times. James Stewart, on the contrary, conveyed a sense of nervous restlessness

that perfectly brought out the ambiguities of post war politics and culture. In a

way, these two figures were one another's perfect compliments; the tension

between them, as portrayed directly in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty

Valance, seems symbolic of a tension between the wild and domestic

elements within American masculine identity. This tension found its

unattainable capitulation in the figure of Cary Grant, whose effortless coolness

offered an image of ideal masculinity, "a democratic symbol of gentlemanly

grace.” Marilyn Monroe projected a similarly unattainable aura of perfection;

her enigmatic mix of power and innocence continues to highlight the

complexity of sexuality even as her death still speaks to the tragic dimension of fame and objectification.

Although Inglis' own sketches of these larger-than-life characters were subtler than I'm able to paraphrase,

their details framed a careful investigation of celebrity as a sociocultural phenomenon, whose contemporary

manifestation he described as a kind of collective psychosis, "a cycle of sentiments from which one cannot

escape,” characterized by repetitive patterns of alternating attraction and aversion (or, vicariously, envy and

disappointment). These sentimental structures, he suggested, should be considered very carefully; one

should avoid the tendency to reify them -- i.e., to treat of them solely in terms of their global level of

influence- at least to the extent that such treatments tend to miss the fact that the

individual personalities in question are in a crucial sense inseparable from the

cultural effects that they engender. Indeed, Inglis seemed to want to highlight

the fact that the collective symbolic architectures that make up what we call

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]



culture, the paradigmatic entities that he referred to as "sentimental structures" or "moral assemblages,”

always find themselves figured , dependent on the specific instantiations of individual characters and

characteristics. The individual and the collective are thereby peculiarly collapsed together, short-circuited by

the mass media in its (our) exploration and experimentation (there-)with (of) the persistence and integrity of

individuality itself -- of

character , with all its attendant ethical and sentimental connotations.

These considerations underline the power and relevance of the lines of inquiry pursued by Inglis

over the course of his distinguished career; his reluctance to revert either to overly credulous empiricism or

to overly critical rationalism and his respect for both the individual and the collective dimensions of 20th and

21st century culture. In his second lecture, Inglis highlighted the need for "a theory of the sentiments,”

required as a corrective for the "moral hypochondria" of an academic culture paralyzed by the postmodern

valorization of critique. He referred to "the missing discipline of a politics of emotion,” needed to make sense

of contemporary cultural phenomena -- celebrity, terror, democracy, humour -- that are increasingly coming

to dominate international political arena(s). These lines of inquiry force us to ask

the broad questions -- What is culture? What is politics? -- that are the mark of a

classical education and of the democratic civility for which Dr. Inglis stands. His

persistent concern with "those deep evaluations to which we each give our

allegiance and which guide the conduct of our lives" (see his faculty webpage)

exemplifies a stance toward study which sees it as a means of revealing, rather

than obscuring, complexity and uncertainty. This stance may make it difficult forCultural Studies to establish its legitimacy vis a vis more traditional disciplines, but it

marks an absolutely essential contribution to the future of education itself ; of our

shared cultural traditions, and indeed, of our species.

In this rather heroic attempt to (re)place the moral sentiments within the strange contemporary

space between politics and culture, Inglis recommended William James' essay On a Certain Blindness in

Human Beings, where he describes the mysterious fullness of experience, the strange omnipresence of

sentimental structures; their implosive, indeterministic supercession of spatiotemporal rationality; their

privileged emergence into everyday experience through what he calls

"The holidays of life [;...] its most vitally significant portions, because they are, or

at least should be, covered with just this kind of magically irresponsible spell."

Read in this light Inglis' description, on his webpage, of what he calls his favorite among his own books; The

Delicious History of the Holiday:

" a loving rendering of what I take to be a magnificent [...] egalitarian and democratic

movement of popular culture, in which the people at large excuse themselves from

the abominable demands of capitalism in order to create a little space in which to

renew the best, the most fulfilling and happiest relations of their lives: with those they

love best, in the places they love best, in new and thrilling geographies also, and in

the modest luxury life mostly denies them."

Inglis' great service to contemporary scholarship is to have opened up these

"little spaces" to the vast complexities that they are irreducibly constitutive of. James'

essay concludes with what sounds like a mission statement for a Cultural Studies

which could live up to the example set by Fred Inglis. Not a discipline that seeks to

govern against the grain of a cold and heartless world, nor a tradition which seeks toperpetuate itself and its mastery at any cost, but a tradition far older, wiser, and more

powerful than humankind; a tradition in the sense that what persists ecologically is

traditional; a kind of tradition whose cultivation might finally allow us to recover from

the technoeconomic shattering of what Alasdair MacIntyre called "the metahistorical

framework of Christianity,” with its tragic horizon of absolute knowledge and power.

Such a tradition, as James put it,

"absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms

of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge



those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however

unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole

of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial

superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons and

sick-rooms have their special revelations. It is enough to ask of each of us that he

should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the most of his own blessings,

without presuming to regulate the rest of the vast field." (read the rest of the essay at:

http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/jcertain.html)

Many thanks then, to Dr. Inglis for his ingenuity and his integrity.



inglis review by blake seidenshaw-2

Documents