IN PRAISE OF THEORETICAL NOISE

Abstract

ALTHOUGH IT IS NOW COMMONPLACE to find cultural studies invoked as one of the tributaries of Victorian studies — and the rubric for this journal is no exception — the precise relationship between these two interdiciplinary fields is still unsettled and seems likely to remain so. This is not, as is sometimes claimed, because cultural studies has felt able to dispense with the past, preferring to dwell in and upon the postmodernized present: to the contrary, some of the finest work currently linked to cultural studies has shown a keen awareness of the bankruptcy of contemporary posthistoire, insisting instead upon the continuing need to interrogate the historical record, to reexamine what was at stake both in the longues durées of culturally sedimented time and in the flashpoints and crises of yesteryear. Catherine Hall’s engagement with the changing configuration of “race” in the debates about the British empire between 1830 and 1870 has been exemplary in this regard, but she is far from being the only relevant exception that one might cite — Carolyn Steedman and Richard Johnson are among the many other names that immediately come to mind.