Against universality: Founding cultural studies

Arguments against universality play a crucial role in cultural studies. In this dissertation I reach outside of literary studies—especially, though not at all exclusively, to contemporary analytic philosophy—to work at a well-articulated, anti-objectivist, and therefore (I argue) anti-universalist mode of analyzing and understanding the structures and contents of cultural production. The first three chapters of the dissertation survey work from a number of academic disciplines, and work between them, to set out the general arguments about universality that are of most concern and interest in the rest of the dissertation. In the fourth chapter, I discuss some commonalities and differences among some recent work on categories and categorization, especially in cognitive science and in cultural studies. In the fifth chapter, I put forth perhaps the central philosophical arguments of the dissertation: that any attempt to establish a right canon of reason or rationality for all humans, and as well for specific human groups, is not only doomed to failure, but inherently inflected with politically and culturally conservative consequences. In the sixth chapter I take seriously the challenge of cultural studies to ground such theoretical speculations in specific products of culture, in this case through a sustained reading of Toni Morrison\u27s Beloved. I discuss the dynamics between universality and difference in that work, and show how the critical reception of the work at first focused on its supposedly universal aesthetic aims, which I suggest drastically misconstrues the novel. The seventh, concluding chapter summarizes cultural-theoretical anti-universalis in and discusses its philosophical, disciplinary and theoretical consequences. In a brief epilogue I extend these consequences into an area of crucial interest across many disciplines, namely the putative barrier or dichotomy between the broad areas of human experience commonly described by the terms “nature” and “culture.