War and Culture Studies

Regrettably I'm too swamped these days with other projects to update as much as I should. I can only check in irregularly for the next 8 months or so. Sometimes this can be a dispiriting experience, giving sense to the old adage, "the more things change, the more they stay the same". I experienced this sensation recently when this blog was flamed on account of some passing comments I'd made about one of my favourite topics; "cultural journalism". I found it curious to be targeted as an academic gatekeeper prepared only to give short thrift to the blogosphere, which is the exact position I defended against in my earlier debate with a philosopher on this blog, along with comments on "scholarshit" etc etc (and this is to say nothing of the pairing of such an accusation with the contradictory characterisation of this blog as dedicated only to the reproduction of the commodified banality Adorno described in terms of "the culture industry"!!).

Therefore what is really at stake in these kinds of debates is the ambiguous status of "popular culture". No wonder it confuses the taxonomies of both [some] academics and bloggers alike. Cultural studies has taken this fight up to the academy, but any proper sense of a "double hermeneutic" or the "public sphere", should make us wary of tracing to an origin. What interested me in the "crash" post was the self-reflexive attempt to describe this process, and to acknowledge that while it has an institutional history, the associated "interpretive community" respects no such institutional boundaries, and this is a fact that trends in the blogosphere can alert us to. Interestingly enough, the details of that particular case are relativised further in acknowledgement of the dynamic I've described, so as soon as you start speaking about interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary developments, you are not far from speaking about a "postdisciplinary" era in which our traditional idea of what a "university" is becomes more problematic...

Encountering the following new journal got me excited as I thought in these terms; not only does it have the potential to speak to elements of this blog's mission statement, it also appears that its very existence attestifies to the relativisation of disciplinary boundaries I have been describing. I will try to monitor it in the future, as I wonder will this extend to a dialogue with the journal FUTURES, regarding future studies, and even the cultural manifestation of dystopian/utopian treatments of these themes in a popular culture context? Will this be Manuel de Landa, Paul Virilio and Ken Wark again?

The first issue can be accessed free online, so I've picked one piece here to follow up:

Journal of War and Culture StudiesVolume 1 Issue 1 (free issue)Cover Date: August 2007View Table of Contents
Opening up the battlefield: War studies and the cultural turn
Authors: Martin Evans
DOI: 10.1386/jwcs.1.1.47/0
View PDF article
Keywords: military history,cultural studies,war history,war and gender,war and memory

Abstract

This paper considers the evolution of war studies from its beginning as what was essentially military history, to the ‘cultural turn’, when scholars began to challenge these restrictive disciplinary boundaries to produce a more inclusive vision of the study of war.