THE CELEBRITY ECONOMY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

it describes and perhaps hopes to comprise. In making this equation, however, it leaves big question about its own practice unanswered. If, as Stuart Hall has argued, cultural studies comes out of Marxist heritage (A Theoretical Survey, Literature, Society, and the Sociology of Literature [1977]) and, as Mary Poovey claims, it turs its own critical lens on itself (Cultural Criticism: Past and Present, College English [1990])-a characterization borne out and expanded in the editors' introduction to this book-why are the economic identities of the book, the conference out of which it grew (Cultural Studies Now and in the Future, held at the University of Illinois in April, 1990), and the cultural studies movement itself never directly interrogated here? Not that the book doesn't refer to them (it does so almost obsessively); the editors' introduction makes clear that the conference was set up partly in response to the dangers they saw in the way that cultural studies is being institutionalized and marketed within American context. What distinguishes this book is simultaneous recognition of the economic grounding of cultural studies and blindness to (or denial of) its own implication in-and profit from-that grounding. In making this critique, I want to stress that this book is at least able to act out, to retain at its margins (even if it cannot directly address it), problem that has been very difficult for oppositional academic intellectuals: what does it mean when profit from the very structures also critique? That this is not as homogeneous or equitable as is often assumed (and was assumed at this conference), that class is not absolute, but the various positions within it relative and hierarchical, is one of the lessons this book may have to teach, sometimes in spite of itself. What we have in Cultural Studies is document from class struggle (what Janice Radway calls in another context an intra-class dispute over the right to dictate . . . particular contents [525]), but the precise nature of that struggle may not be just what the editors claim. The editors emphasize that this book, and the conference it grew out of, are interventions in what Hall characterizes as a moment of extraordi-