Cultural Studies & the Sociology of Culture

This is one of my all time favourite critical essays. It has inspired me so much ever since I first read it. I know that the sociology of culture has had little, if any, penetration into the blogosphere, which quickly becomes obvious as soon as anyone looks into the predominant meeting of Continental philosophy and avant garde music (what I've elsewhere called "cultural journalism"). It is an interesting exercise to compare such work to some of the "musicological" examples Wolff takes to task, if memory serves correctly, in the introduction she coauthors with Andrew Goodwin to the volume edited by Elizabeth Long, From Sociology to Cultural Studies. That introduction is a marvelous companion piece to the essay I've linked to here. Afterall, criticism is fairly pointless unless it offers a constructive alternative.

I just figure, in the same spirit, that there should always be room for a few [more] contrarian bloggers. Given this blog's iconography of the mummified space jockey, it should be obvious that in principle I don't really have much of a problem with banishment to the outer limits. Maybe it is sometimes possible from this position to enjoy a greater latitude to be exploratory and critical than those constrained by the discourses Wolff describes.