|
Cultural Studies and the Academy
1. Cultural studies in the academies of the advanced capitalist countries
has transformed the object of studies in the humanities. In particular, in
English departments, cultural studies has challenged the predominance of
the governing categories of literary studies (the "canon," the homogeneous
"period," the formal properties of genre, the literary object as
autonomous and self-contained) in the interest of producing "readings" of
all texts of culture and inquiring into the reproduction of
subjectivities. To this end, pressure has been placed on disciplinary
boundaries, the methods which police these boundaries, and modes of
interpretation and critique have been developed which bring, for example,
"economics" and "politics" to bear on the formal properties of texts. In
addition, the lines between "high culture" and "mass culture" have been
relativized, making it possible to address texts in terms of their social
effectivity rather than their "inherent" literary, philosophical or other
values.
2. The two most significant categories which have supported these
institutional changes have been "ideology" and "theory." Althusserian and
post-althusserian understandings of ideology, which defined ideology not
in terms of a system of ideas or "world view" but in terms of the
production of subjects who recognize the existing social world as the only
possible and "reasonable" one, made possible the reading of texts in terms
of the ways in which the workings of ideology determined their structure
and uses. Marxist and post-structuralist theories, meanwhile, focused
critical attention on the conditions of possibility of discourses, and
upon the exclusions and inclusions which enable their articulation. In
both cases, critique becomes possible insofar as reading is directed at
uncovering the "invisible" possibilities of understanding which are
suppressed as a condition of the text's intelligibility.
3. I support these efforts to transform the humanities into a site of
cultural critique. I will argue that what is at stake in these changes is
the uses of pedagogical institutions and practices in late capitalist
society. If pedagogy is understood, as I would argue it should be, as the
intervention into the reproduction of subjectivities, then the outcome of
struggles over "culture" and "cultural studies" will determine whether or
not the Humanities will become a site at which the production of
oppositional subjectivities is made possible. Historically, the Humanities
has been a site at which the contradictions of the subjectivities required
by late capitalist culture have been addressed and "managed." For example,
the central concepts of post-World War Two literary criticism, such as
"irony," have the function of reducing contradictions to the "complexity"
and "irrationality" of "reality," thereby reconciling subjects to those
contradictions.
4. However, these recent changes in the academy have been very partial and
contradictory. They have been partial in the sense that much of the older
or "traditional" modes of literary studies have remained untouched by
these developments, or have only made some slight "accommodations" to
them. They have also been contradictory in the sense that cultural studies
has accommodated itself to existing practices, by producing new modes of
fetishizing texts and preserving conservative modes of subjectivity. In
this way, cultural studies continues to advance the ideological function
of the modern Humanities in a changed social environment.
5. The right wing attacks these changes, charging--as in the ongoing "PC"
scare--that the Humanities are abandoning their commitment to objectivity
and the universal values of Western culture. My argument is that these
commitments and values have been undermined by social developments which
have socialized subjects in new ways while concentrating global
socio-economic power within an ever-shrinking number of transnational
corporations. The intellectual and political tendencies coordinated by
cultural studies, then, are responding to these transformations by
allowing academic business to go on as usual, and providing updated and
therefore more useful modes of legitimation for capitalist society.
6. The contradictions of these changes in the mode of knowledge production
need to be understood within the framework of the needs of the late
capitalist social order. The emergence of "theory" and (post)Althusserian
understandings of ideology reflected and contributed strongly to the
undermining of liberal humanism (in both its "classical" and
social-democratic versions) as the legitimating ideology of capitalism.
The discrediting of liberal humanism, first under the pressures of
anti-colonialist revolts and then as a result of the anti-hegemonic
struggles in the advanced capitalist "heartlands," revealed a deep crisis
in authority and hegemony in late capitalist society. This discrediting
also revealed the need for new ideologies of legitimation, free from what
could now be seen as the "naivete" of liberal humanist universalism, now
widely viewed as a cover for racist, sexist and anti-democratic
institutions.
7. The institutional tendencies which have produced the constellation of
practices which can be termed "cultural studies" have, then, participated
both in the attack on liberal understandings and in the development of new
discourses of legitimation. The liberal humanism predominant in the
academy has increasingly been seen as illegitimate because it depends upon
an outmoded notion of private individuality-that is, the modern notion of
the immediacy with which the privileged text is apprehended by the knowing
subject. In this understanding, literature is understood in opposition to
science and technology, as a site where what is essential to our "human
nature" can be preserved or recovered in the face of a social reality
where this "human essence" ("freedom") is perpetually at risk. However,
the more "scientific" methods (like semiology) which have undermined the
hegemony of "new criticism" in the American academy, largely through the
use of modes of analysis borrowed from structuralist anthropology and
linguistics, have themselves been discredited by postmodern theories as
largely conservative discourses interested in resecuring disciplinary
boundaries (for example, through the classification of genres) and
protecting an empiricist notion of textuality.
8. Cultural studies, then, is the result of the combination of the
introduction of "theory" and the "politicization" of theory enabled by
these social and institutional changes. However, the postmodern assault on
"master narratives" ("theory") has responded to the discrediting of both
structuralism and Marxism in a conservative political environment by
redefining "politics" to mean the resistance of the individual subject to
modes of domination located in the discursive and disciplinary forms which
constitute the subject. This has opened up the possibility of a new line
of development for cultural studies: one in which the local supplants the
global as the framework of analysis and description or "redescription"
replaces explanation as the purpose of theoretical investigations. I will
argue that the set of discourses which have "congealed" into what I will
call "postmodern cultural studies" represents the definitive subordination
of cultural studies to this line of development. That is, the ideological
struggles carried out throughout the 1970s in such sites as the Birmingham
School for Cultural Studies in England and the French Journal Tel Quel
have now been stabilized into a different type of project: the full scale
reconstruction of liberalism on terms appropriate to late capitalist
social relations.
The Problematic of Cultural Studies
9. These opposing tendencies--on the one hand, cultural studies understood
as the explanation of the conditions of possibility for the production and
reproduction of subjectivities; on the other hand, cultural studies
understood as the description of "experience"--have been inscribed in its
logic from the start. Stuart Hall, in his "Cultural Studies: Two
Paradigms," distinguishes between a "culturalist" paradigm, which he
associates with the work of Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson, and a
"structuralist" paradigm, which he associates with the work of
structuralists like Claude Levi-Strauss and the Marxism of Louis
Althusser. The significance of the "culturalist" paradigm, according to
Hall, is that it insists on an understanding of culture not as a set of
privileged texts, but rather as the systems of meanings embodied in all
social practices. The strength of the "structuralist" paradigm, meanwhile,
is that it critiques the humanism and experientialism of the "culturalist"
paradigm: the structuralist paradigm decenters experience by showing it to
be an effect of social structures which cannot be reduced to the
"materials" of experience: "The great strength of the structuralisms is
their stress on 'determinate conditions'"(67).
10. What is at stake in the distinction between "culturalism" and
"structuralism" is the significance of theory. What the "structuralist"
paradigm defends, in contradistinction to the "culturalist" one, is the
necessity of providing explanations of social and cultural phenomena in
relation to the determinations which produce those phenomena. Theory, that
is, requires some notion of totality which can enable the understanding of
the specificity of social phenomena as effects of that totality; in this
case, experience does not contain within itself the conditions of its own
intelligibility. Experience, rather, is what needs to be explained. The
"culturalist" paradigm, meanwhile, undermines the possibility of
establishing a hierarchy between determinations by taking as its starting
point the activity of subjects in which social conditions and social
consciousness are "mixed" in an indeterminate way. At the same time, Hall
argues that culturalism's strength corresponds to the weakness of
structuralism. That is, structuralism is unable to account for precisely
those phenomena which culturalism privileges: "It has insisted, correctly,
on the affirmative moment of the development of conscious struggle and
organization as a necessary element in the analysis of history, ideology
and consciousness: against its persistent down-grading in the
structuralist paradigm" (69).
11. Hall's discussion of these contesting paradigms is part of a
historical narrative of the emergence and development of cultural studies.
According to Hall, cultural studies emerged as a distinct problematic
through the interventions in literary studies of, especially, Richard
Hoggart and Raymond Williams. The structuralist intervention, meanwhile,
constituted a powerful challenge to this paradigm, making work along
similar lines impossible. Hall is then attempting to chart a course for
the future of cultural studies, one which would appropriate the
"strengths" and avoid the "weaknesses" of each approach, which would go
beyond both paradigms in "trying to think both the specificity of
different practices and the forms of the articulated unity they
constitute" (72).
12. Insofar as cultural studies is constituted by opposing theoretical
discourses which, taken separately, are both necessary but limited,
clearly some kind of conceptual transformation or "epistemological break"
is necessary. That is, if, as I suggested above, the problem facing
cultural studies is that of theorizing determination, the resolution of
this difficulty cannot be a question of "combining" the strengths and
weaknesses of two incompatible theories, but of starting from one set of
premises and developing a new theoretical paradigm "by way of criticism"
(Marx and Engels 105). The attempt to combine the results of incompatible
premises is in practice a capitulation to the "culturalist" paradigm, the
problems and contradictions of which Hall has already noted. This is the
case because the consequence of such an attempt would be a theoretical
eclecticism, unable to comprehend social phenomena as an effect of more
abstract determinations in a consistent way. This means, finally,that the
categories privileged by the "structuralist" paradigm--"theory," different
levels of abstraction, "conditions of possibility," and so on--must be the
starting point if cultural studies is to be adequate to the tasks Hall
sets for it in this essay.
13. Hall's response to this "crisis" in cultural studies--merely
adumbrated in "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms," but more fully developed
in The Hard Road to Renewal, and elsewhere--was to turn to Gramsci, and in
particular, his notion of "hegemony." The usefulness of Gramsci is,
according to Hall, twofold: first, in his understanding of the
"conjuncture" as a specific combination of a variety of determinations;
second, in his critique of a kind of "economic reductionism" which sees
cultural and ideological phenomena as direct expressions of some class
position while still connecting these phenomena to social struggles
between contesting groups. That is, the category of "hegemony" enables us
to see political domination both as contested and uncertain, and as
encompassing the whole domain of social and cultural life (as opposed to
being restricted to struggles articulated in relation to the state).
14. However, Hall's use of the categories of hegemony and "articulation"
does not in and of itself solve the problem of determination, or even
provide the elements of such a solution. It still leaves the two sides of
the equation--class domination, on the one hand, and the reproduction of
the conditions of that domination, on the other--unarticulated. If the
dominant ideology and culture are instrumental in securing class
domination in however indirect or mediated a manner, then the analysis and
critique of ideology and culture must proceed from a theoretical
understanding of the needs, capacities, and problems faced by the ruling
class in some specific relation to other classes with opposing and/or
aligned interests. In this case, the significance or content of
ideological struggles, or struggles over representations and meanings,
cannot be "in" those struggles themselves but in the contradiction between
the forces and relations of production and the class struggles they
determine. In other words, one is still working within the framework of
determination by the economic (but not necessarily an economic
"reductionism").
15. If, however, ideological struggles cannot be "read back" (i.e.,
subordinated) to class interests and class struggles, but are actually the
site of the construction of these interests and struggles, then one is
left with another, "discursive" kind of reductionism: that is, social
positions are the results of positions constructed through discursive
articulations and ideological struggles (in which case, of course, the
problem of who is struggling, and over what, becomes highly problematic).
Even though Hall, in the essays I am discussing, explicitly rejects this
kind of position, which he associates with poststructuralist and
especially Lacanian and Foucauldian approaches, he is left with what is
ultimately an eclectic position: on the one hand, a specific form of
social domination from which nothing necessarily follows; on the other
hand, struggles over meaning and representations whose outcome or
significance cannot be determined by structures external to the struggles
themselves.
16. An example of how this tension determines Hall's work can be seen in
his discussion of the kinds of questions a Gramscian approach poses for
the left in Thatcherite England. Hall argues as follows in The Hard Road
to Renewal:
Gramsci always insisted that hegemony is not exclusively an ideological
phenomenon. There can be no hegemony without "the decisive nucleus of the
economic." On the other hand, do not fall into the trap of the old
mechanical economism and believe that if you can only get hold of the
economy, you can move the rest of life. The nature of power in the modern
world is that it is also constructed in relation to political, moral,
intellectual, cultural, ideological, and sexual questions. The question of
hegemony is always the question of a new cultural order. The question
which faced Gramsci in relation to Italy faces us now in relation to
Britain: what is the nature of this new civilization? Hegemony is not a
state of grace which is installed forever. It's not a formation which
incorporates everybody. The notion of a "historical bloc" is precisely
different from that of a pacified, homogeneous, ruling class. It entails a
quite different conception of how social forces and movements, in their
diversity, can be articulated into strategic alliances. To construct a new
cultural order, you need not to reflect an already-formed collective will,
but to fashion a new one, to inaugurate a new historical project. (170)
Both the "economic" and the "cultural-ideological" aspects of social
domination are recognized here, but in a way that separates them in an
absolute way and makes it impossible to theorize the relations between
them. The two possible courses of action posited by this passage are
either to reflect an already existing collective will which is to be found
in the "economy," or to fashion a new collective will. The very notion of
the "economy" as something that one could "get a hold on" presupposes the
economic reductionism that Hall is presumably contesting: that is, it
accepts the notion of the "economic" as something self-contained and
independent. In this case, as soon as the contending classes step outside
of the "economy," they are no longer "classes" in any meaningful sense,
but rather positions struggling for power in relation to political, moral,
intellectual, cultural, ideological, and sexual questions. This rigid
antinomy is reproduced in the "choice" between reflecting an already
formed collective will and fashioning a new one. The possibility of
constructing a new collective will out of the contradictions situated in
the economic structure, contradictions which are articulated in relation
to other cultural structures where the elements of such a will are
emerging as a result of differentiated arenas of struggle, is excluded
here. Instead, the collective will can be "fashioned" through a synthesis
of positions immanent in these specific struggles themselves.
17. This becomes more evident in Hall's concluding chapters to The Hard
Road to Renewal. There he argues that
[e]lectoral politics--in fact, every kind of politics--depends on
political identities and identifications. People make identifications
symbolically: through social imagery, in their political imaginations.
They "see themselves" as one sort of person or another. They "imagine
their future" within this scenario or that. They don't just think about
voting in terms of how much they have, their so-called "material
interests." Material interests matter profoundly. But they are always
ideologically defined. (261)
Once again, there is a reference to the importance of material, ultimately
class interests, and Hall also mentions that people have conflicting
"interests" as well as conflicting "identities." However, the claim that
both the economic and the ideological are "important"--by itself, a
commonplace observation--can lead in one of two fundamentally opposed
directions. One possibility is to theorize the material interests of
social classes and engage in ideological struggle for the purpose of
clarifying the contradictions which structure the ideologies and
"identities" of oppressed groups, thereby making the production of
oppositional class consciousness possible. The other possibility is to
construct "images" and "identities" that are immediately accessible and
intelligible within the framework of those contradictions, thereby
resecuring subordinated subjects' "consent" for the social order which
produces them. This latter possibility becomes the unavoidable consequence
insofar as politics is defined as "'a struggle for popular identities'"
(282). In addition, this possibility is also inevitable given Hall's
reductive understanding of "material interests" as little more than
"income levels" ("how much they have"), rather than in terms of the
reproduction of all of the social and institutional conditions of the
production of "effective" subjects.
18. The way in which these contradictions have been resolved in
contemporary cultural studies can be seen in John Fiske's Understanding
Popular Culture. Fiske is critical of radical understandings of culture
which focus on the way in which capitalist culture functions to reproduce
ruling class domination, at the expense of trying to understand the
multifarious ways in which subordinated groups appropriate the resources
available within the dominant culture in order to gain more power relative
to their oppressors. Fiske distinguishes between the "radical" and the
"progressive," and claims that critics of culture who measure cultural
practices according to the standard of "radicality" (systemic
transformation) are unable to comprehend or support the wide variety of
oppositional practices which undermine or limit the power of dominant
groups without necessarily challenging their dominance. Such critics
therefore lose the opportunity--at this historical moment, for Fiske, the
only opportunity which actually exists--for intervening in progressive
articulations of the "popular," in order to enable them to take on more
radical forms in the future. At the same time, Fiske acknowledges that the
"popular" is only potentially progressive, not necessarily so. In
addition, there are many practices of the "popular" which have both a
progressive and a reactionary dimension. He also recognizes that the
relation between progressive popular articulations and radical politics
are often distant, difficult to produce or analyze, or non-existent.
However, the problems these reservations point to can be put even more
strongly. If the popular is defined in terms of a kind of "guerrilla
warfare" or "poaching" of the texts of the dominant culture which
increases the power of the subordinated subject in relation to a specific
articulation of power relations, then not only is it impossible to
theorize the connections between progressivity and radicality, but the
entire distinction between "progressive" and "reactionary" loses its
meaning. This is because one cannot move, either conceptually or
politically, from reversals in local power relations to systemic
transformations. If one takes such reversals as a starting point, it will
be impossible to account for their structural consequences: that is, they
could have the effect either of strengthening or of weakening power
relations elsewhere, and there is no way of theorizing this from the
interior of the local reversal. Thus, when Fiske associates the
"progressive" with the popular, and understands it as at least a potential
"stage" in the movement towards radicalization, his notion of
"progressiveness" is necessarily external to his theoretical position. In
other words, it is "borrowed" either from the cultural commonsense, or
from those "radical" theories which Fiske critiques, and which would
themselves arrive at a substantially different assessment of the practices
Fiske includes in his notion of the "popular." (For example, radical
theories would argue that it precisely by conceding local power reversals
that global domination is maintained.)
19. Graeme Turner, in his British Cultural Studies, specifically refers to
Fiske's work as an example of the way in which the increasingly powerful
tendency within cultural studies (influenced by de Certeau) to focus on
popular, "bottom-up" resistance to domination may have gone "too far."
With the now prevalent use of the category of "pleasure" to refer to a
space outside of ideological domination, Turner argues that cultural
studies is in danger of celebrating rather than critiquing the dominant
ideology and culture. Turner claims that "it is important to acknowledge
that the pleasure of popular culture cannot lie outside hegemonic
ideological formations; pleasure must be implicated in the ways in which
hegemony is secured and maintained. (221)
However, Turner's own account of the positive effects of "The Turn to
Gramsci" in cultural studies support the same theoretical incoherencies
that lead to Fiske's conclusions. Turner argues that
[h]egemony offers a more subtle and flexible explanation than previous
formulations because it aims to account for domination as something that
is won, not automatically delivered by way of the class structure. Where
Althusser's assessment of ideology could be accused of a rigidity that
discounted any possibility of change, Gramsci's version is able to
concentrate precisely on explaining the process of change. It is
consequently a much more optimistic theory, implying a gradual historical
alignment of bourgeois hegemony with working class interests. (212)
Leaving aside the question of why an alignment of bourgeois hegemony with
working class interests provides an "optimistic" outlook, this more
"optimistic theory" is possible because, like Hall, Turner establishes a
rigid and caricatured dichotomy between domination as "automatically
delivered" and domination as "won." However, with what "weapons" is
domination "won"? If it is "won" by the ruling class or hegemonic bloc as
a result of the advantageous position their control over the means of
production grants them, then we are still left with the problem of
theorizing the perpetuation of domination as a result of processes
determined by the class structure, as domination which is "won" from the
dominant positions already occupied. In this case, it is possible to
understand "popular culture as the field upon which political power is
negotiated and legitimated" (Turner 213), as long as it is clear which
agents are engaging in the "negotiations" and under what conditions.
However, once the theory of popular culture "dispos[es] of a class
essentialism that linked all cultural expression to a class basis" (213),
then one can only understand the "winning" of domination as a victory on
an indeterminate terrain which is constituted in such a way that the
contestants cannot be identified in advance, nor can the conditions for
any particular outcome be specified. In other words, it is impossible to
maintain a notion of systemic domination without an understanding of
determination which sees cultural practices as effects of the general
system of domination, rather than as inherently indeterminate and
reversible entities.
20. The turn to Gramsci in contemporary cultural studies, then, is a turn
away from Marxism and any other theory which abstracts from the specific
and sees the specific as an effect of more general structures. This
assessment is confirmed in a more recent text of Stuart Hall's, "Cultural
Studies and its Theoretical Legacies," his contribution to Cultural
Studies, where he argues that the importance of Gramsci to cultural
studies is that he "radically displaced" (281, emphasis in original) the
entire Marxist problematic. This turn from theory is also the significance
of Turner's "optimistic" representation of the progress made since the
replacement of Althusser's more "rigid" and "deterministic" one by
Gramsci's more "flexible" and "subtle" one. Turner argues that the
emphasis on the "creative power of the popular" has led to a "pendulum
swing" from "containment to resistance... leading to a retreat from the
category and effectivity of ideology altogether" (224), and he is mildly
critical of this. However, this "swing" is a necessary consequence of the
evacuation of the category of domination of any content, so that in
Turner's discourse as well it (like Fiske's notion of "progressiveness")
is little more than an untheorized "background" to an understanding of
"indeterminate" ideological struggles which would otherwise appear (as
Turner fears) completely apologetic.
The (Post)Discipline of Postmodern Cultural Studies
21. It is this "resolution" of the contradictions constitutive of cultural
studies which has enabled the articulation of cultural studies within a
post-marxist, postmodern problematic. This is not to say that postmodern
cultural studies is a completely homogeneous field of ideology production.
It is precisely through its tensions and antagonisms that it is
constituted. These tensions and antagonisms may be over the articulation
of postmodern categories, or even over the viability or usefulness of the
notion of postmodernism itself. However, this does not mean that the field
of postmodern cultural studies is therefore inherently plural and
non-totalizable. The struggles and conflicts within the mainstream of the
postmodern humanities today are over the relative force of competing
claims to possess legitimate knowledge; legitimate, that is, in terms of
the institutional resources a given project can attract. These struggles
and conflicts are therefore necessary to the circulation and validation of
ideological discourses; in global terms, then, it is possible to speak of
a unified field of ideological production in which the differences are
only apparent.
22. So, for example, Angela McRobbie, in her narrative of the development
of cultural studies, celebrates the flexibility of the new tendency in
cultural studies, which seeks to distance itself from "fixed" theoretical
models:
[t]here is a greater degree of openness in most of the contributions
[i.e., to the volume Cultural Studies to which McRobbie' s essay is a
"Conclusion"] than would have been the case some years ago, when the
pressure to bring the chosen object of study firmly into the conceptual
landmarks, provided first by Althusser and then by Gramsci, imposed on
cultural studies a degree of rigidity. (McRobbie 724)
However, McRobbie's celebration of this new "openness" is an ambivalent
one. Earlier in the same essay she expresses concern that "what has now
gone, with Marxism, and partly in response to the political bewilderment
and disempowerment of the left, is that sense of urgency [which had
characterized culture studies at an earlier historical moment]" (720).
However, McRobbie does not theorize the relations between the new
"openness" and this loss of "urgency." Rather, she sees the changes she is
describing as an "undecidable" mixture of "benefits" and "dangers": "This
new discursiveness allows or permits a speculative 'writerly' approach,
the dangers of which I have already outlined, but the advantages of which
can be seen in the broader, reflective and insightful mode which the
absence of the tyranny of theory, as it was once understood, makes
possible" (724).
23. At the same time, the "bewilderment" and "disempowerment" of the left,
which figured into McRobbie's explanation of the "disappearance" of
Marxism, itself disappears in her assessment of the new "openness" in
culture studies. This she attributes to the replacement of one discourse
by another: Ernesto Laclau's displacement of the unified class subject by
an understanding of "identities" as contingent and inherently plural.
This, apparently, has nothing to do with the weakness of the left. On the
contrary, McRobbie argues that the "collapse of Marxism need not be
construed as signaling the end of socialist politics; indeed the beginning
of a new era, where the opportunities for a pluralist democracy are
strengthened rather than weakened, is now within reach" (724).
24. The strength of Laclau's discourse, then, is, according to McRobbie,
simply an effect of its greater insight into social mechanisms than
Marxism: she cites with approval Laclau's claim to be going "beyond"
Marxism. By thus positing the greater explanatory power of Laclau's
discourse, McRobbie is able not only to equate "socialism" with "pluralist
democracy," but to affirm the ultimately beneficial effects of the new
openness in culture studies: that is, if "pluralism" is equivalent to
progress towards "socialism," then this must also hold true for the
greater pluralism within cultural studies.
25. There is still, for McRobbie, not only the problem of the loss of
political urgency in contemporary cultural studies, but also the problem
of some "obfuscation" in Laclau's own account of subject formation. In
particular, Laclau is not able to account for the "actual processes of
acquiring identity." In fact, it "is his commitment to the historically
specific which allows Laclau to not be specific. He cannot spell out the
practices of, or the mechanics of, identity formation, for the very reason
that they are, like their subjects, produced within particular social and
historical conditions. This permits a consistently high level of
abstraction in his political philosophy. But the work of transformation
which is implicit in his analysis is exactly concurrent with the kind of
critical work found in the contributions on race in this volume" (725).
26. In other words the problem with Laclau's discourse is its level of
"abstraction." The solution to this problem, for McRobbie, is to produce
"concrete" and "specific" analyses, which will be "concurrent" with
Laclau's claims. She clarifies this claim at the end of her essay, which
calls for more detailed ethnographic studies of "everyday life." "This,
then, is where I want to end, with a plea for identity ethnography in
cultural studies, with a plea for carrying out interactive research on
groups and individuals who are more than just audiences for texts" (730).
Although McRobbie does not say so explicitly, it would follow from her
argument that such "concrete," "detailed" studies would also resist the
decline in political effectivity of cultural studies, since they would
then be more directly connected with the "actual processes" of "identity
formation" which take place in the "fleeting, fluid, and volatile
formations" (730) of everyday life (and, therefore, cannot, presumably, be
grasped with an "abstract" theoretical discourse).
27. In the context of McRobbie's absolute privileging of Laclau's
discourse, and her acceptance of his claim that we now live in a
post-Marxist universe, it is impossible to take seriously her rhetoric
regarding the "openness" of contemporary cultural studies. Instead, what
she is describing is the replacement of one set of limits by another: the
"sense" of openness is simply the privileging of the new set of limits by
those who benefit from it, whose relative power is supported and increased
by this set of limits. That is, McRobbie's assessment of the "strengths"
and "weaknesses" of contemporary discourses in cultural studies reflects a
transformation in the political economy of discourses, and is carried out
from the standpoint of the most "valued" discourse within that political
economy.
28. It is the problem of the legitimation of these "valuable" discourses
which explains the "panic" which, according to McRobbie, she was "gripped
by" on her first reading of the papers in the volume. She began "to lose a
sense of why the object of study is constituted as the object of study in
the first place. Why do it? What is the point? Who is it for?" (721). This
anxiety over the loss of the object, I am arguing, is a professionalist
anxiety over the impossibility of maintaining both the institutional
legitimation of cultural studies as a (non)field of study, and its radical
character (which constitutes the only legitimation of its existence as a
critique of dominant forms of knowledge).
29. In this sense, the narrative McRobbie constructs, like the volume
Cultural Studies itself, has the purpose of producing an "identity" out of
the various kinds of work being done in cultural studies. It is this need
for identification which accounts for the uncritical valorization of
pluralism (as opposed to contestation and critique). An instance of this
is that, despite McRobbie's broad criticism and apparently deep "anxiety"
over the present state of cultural studies, she can find no particular
contribution to the volume which she considers deserving of criticism. In
fact, she takes great pains to assure us that the general criticism she
makes regarding the effects of the introduction of deconstruction into
cultural studies is not applicable to any of the specific texts in the
volume (or elsewhere) that actually make use of deconstruction: she
explicitly exempts, for example, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha from the
"formalism" to which deconstruction tends. This, of course, undermines her
apparent criticism of deconstruction as an ideological discourse, because
the problem would therefore be not with its political effects, but with
its misuses by individuals.
30. Contrary to McRobbie's claims about "openness," then, the purpose of
her "criticism" of deconstruction, like her participation in the removal
of Marxism from the theoretical and political landscape, is to establish a
set of inclusions and exclusions which will support the current
constitution of the political economy of institutional values. Not too
much "formalism," not too much "abstraction," no "Marxism," and so on.
However, as opposed to the "tyrannical" regime of "theory" that McRobbie
is glad to be rid of, these inclusions and exclusions are measured not
against determinations of political effectivity which are rigorously
theorized, but rather against an untheorized notion of their "proximity"
to the "actual processes of identity formation." Anyone who is presently
excluded from the pluralist institution of cultural studies could then at
some point be included, not on the condition that they account for their
project by proposing some critical rearticulation of the general project
of cultural studies, but rather by moving a bit "closer" to the details of
everyday life, by uncovering some previously neglected aspect of the
processes of identity formation.
31. I would therefore refer to McRobbie's discourse as an "appreciative"
one in the sense that it attempts to assess the relative values
represented by discourses within a political economy of discourses which
remains itself unquestioned. To "appreciative" discourses I would oppose
"critical" ones, which are interested in the way in which discourses
function to reproduce that political economy of discourses, that is, to
maintain the existing system of values. Appreciative discourses, such as
the ones presently dominant in the field of cultural studies, are
appreciative both in the sense that they are assessments of the various
objects which they account for (the details of everyday life) and also
self-reflexively so: that is, they are interested less in the theoretical
and political effectivity of their own discourse than their institutional
value. Of course, one type of appreciation supports the other: the most
valuable institutional discourse will be the one with the "investment" in
some field of inquiry which can yield the highest "return": as I suggested
before, this will take the form of the "discovery" of some "interesting"
object, or tradition of texts, which had previously been neglected or
undervalued. These operations preserve the "newness" and importance of the
field, and therefore "legitimate" it according to current academic
standards. Likewise, discourses which are too "formalistic" are
"embarrassing" because they are too much like traditional literary
studies, while "Marxism" is problematic because it excludes too much and
therefore disenables the constitution of a unified political economy of
discourses by threatening the coherence of the field and its acceptability
within liberal academic discourse. Finally, this eclectic pluralism
requires a re-understanding of political effectivity as intervention in
local processes of "identity formation," such as that provided by Laclau,
since without some claim to be doing "urgent" work, culture studies will
appear too close to traditional humanistic studies (too "formalist") and
therefore irrelevant.
32. It is the category of "culture," as it is understood in contemporary
discourses, and the displacement of the category of "ideology," which has
enabled the reconstitution of cultural studies on the terms McRobbie
describes. In Marxist understandings, "ideology" refers to those
discourses which contribute to the reproduction of capitalist social
relations by "educating" individuals in the inevitability or desirability
of those relations; that is, ideology works by producing the subjects
required by capitalist social relations. This assumes a relation of
determination between production relations and class rule, and the
mechanisms which guarantee or reproduce those relations and that rule.
33. The advocates of a postmodern cultural studies, meanwhile, privilege
the category of "culture" precisely because it undermines this relation of
determination. As Michael Ryan argues in Politics and Culture,
[a]nother name for that boundary between reason and materiality that I
have described as form might be culture, since culture is generally
applied to everything that falls on the social and historical side of
materiality, and it can also be a name for everything that falls on the
rhetorical and representational side of reason. Culture includes the
domains of rhetoric and representation, as well as the domains of lived
experience, of institutions, and of social life patterns. (8)
For Ryan, the usefulness of the category of culture is that it breaks down
boundaries between ideality and materiality, between "rhetoric" and
"reality," between "culture" and "extra-cultural" (like social) relations.
It then becomes impossible to critique any cultural process for its role
in reproducing existing relations of exploitation: "The point, therefore,
of emphasizing the culturality or rhetoricity of such things as trade and
dwelling is to underscore both their role in the elaboration of political
power and their plasticity as social forms that can change shape and
acquire new contents" (17). In this case, any particular cultural form can
be equally important in supporting some power relation and therefore as a
site of intervention: at the same time, any cultural form is equally open
to being filled with some new content. So, for example, the existing state
could just as easily become a instrument in emancipating oppressed classes
as it is now one for oppressing them.
34. Ryan arrives at his "poststructuralist approach to culture" in part
through a critique of the Birmingham School's model of hegemony, which
"still implies that the primary agent of cultural activity is the ruling
class" (18). By contrast, the "poststructuralist approach to culture thus
places a much more positive emphasis on popular forces and on the
potential of popular struggles. And it can be extended to the cultural
sphere. Rather than being understood simply as an instrument of hegemony,
cultural forms can be read as sites of political difference, where
domination and resistance, the resistance to the positive power of the
dispossessed that is domination and the counter-power, the threat of
reversed domination, that is the potential force of the dispossessed,
meet" (19). In other words, any form of domination contains within it some
mode of potentially effective resistance. In fact, the domination is
itself nothing more than the resistance to that resistance. Since,
according to this argument, domination is not domination for some purpose,
or in defense of some interest, no priority can be established between one
mode of resistance and another, nor can the consequences of any mode of
resistance be accounted for.
35. According to appreciative cultural studies, the meanings of identities
and struggles over them are immanent to those identities themselves. In
this case, as McRobbie argues,
[w]hen contingency is combined with equivalence and when no social group
is granted a privileged place as an emancipatory agent, then a form of
relational hegemony can extend the sequence of democratic antagonisms
through a series of social displacements (724).
If no group or practice can be privileged over any other, then the problem
of the site and effectivity of critique must be raised: that is, critique
in the name of what? In order to address this question it is necessary to
take sides, to enter into conflicts over the construction of emancipatory
agency. However, if emancipatory politics amounts to nothing more than ad
hoc arrangements between "popular forces" which emerge contingently, then
the moment of critique and contestation can be evaded. That is, any
practice that one might be engaged in is potentially as important and
useful as that of anyone else, or at least there would be no grounds for
denying this. In this case, if various practices are "combined," there is
always the possibility that they will "add up" to emancipatory results. Or
not. At any rate, there are no grounds for critique as a central element
of political struggle.
36. It is in this context that the indeterminacy of cultural studies
itself can be valorized. As Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler write,
"Cultural studies needs to remain open to unexpected, unimagined, even
uninvited possibilities. No one can hope to control these developments"
(Grossberg, et al. 2). "Its methodology, ambiguous from the beginning,
could best be seen as bricolage" (2). They then go on to define cultural
studies as follows:
cultural studies is an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and sometimes
counter-disciplinary field that operates in the tension between its
tendencies to embrace both a broad, anthropological and more narrowly
humanistic conception of culture. Unlike traditional anthropology,
however, it has grown out of analyses of modern industrial societies. It
is typically interpretative and evaluative in its methodologies, but
unlike traditional humanism it rejects the exclusive equation of culture
with high culture and argues that all forms of cultural production need to
be studied in relation to other cultural practices and to social and
historical structures. Cultural studies is thus committed to the study of
the entire range of a society's arts, beliefs, institutions, and
communicative practices. (4)
By establishing cultural studies as operating in the tensions between
incompatible understandings ("broad, anthropological," which is to say
structural and historical, and "more narrowly humanistic," that is,
experiential), Grossberg et al. interpret the eclecticism of contemporary
cultural studies as a form of diversity abstracted from rigorous
contestations over the meaning of "culture" or "culture studies."
Furthermore, they agree with Raymond Williams that the word "culture"
"simultaneously invokes symbolic and material domains and that the study
of culture involves not privileging one over the other but interrogating
the relation between the two" (4). Therefore, the indeterminacy of culture
studies merely reflects the indeterminacy of culture itself: in both
cases, one is only able to produce specific "articulations" with no
necessary relation to a broader field of economic and political relations.
As with McRobbie, investigators in the field of culture studies are free
to explore their own specific area of knowledge, in other words to
accumulate intellectual capital in the various disciplines and the
interstices between them, without the "productive tensions" between
different knowledges ever taking the form of contestation, or being
directed at the transformation of the disciplines, much less the entire
structure of disciplinary knowledge.
37. Postmodern philosophical and theoretical categories and
presuppositions have been essential to the constitution of what I will
call "mainstream" or "appreciative" cultural studies. I understand
postmodernism as consisting of all those discourses and practices governed
by the assumption that reality is constituted by an unbounded plurality of
heterogeneous forms. As with cultural studies, though, I do not limit the
field of postmodernism to those discourses which openly support this
assumption, or refer to themselves as "postmodernist." Rather, I
understand postmodernism as constituted by a political economy of
competing positions which function to reproduce the legitimacy of those
areas of knowledge and practice governed by the presupposition and
privileging of heterogeneity. I would include within the category of
"postmodernism," then, discourses which consider themselves indifferent to
or even hostile to postmodernism. For example, Jurgen Habermas' attacks on
postmodernism, based on his understanding of communicative rationality and
the project of modernity, by situating these attacks within the framework
of how one adjudicates between different forms of established knowledge
and discourse, simply reproduces the terms of the debate as constituted by
postmodernism: a debate, that is, which is actually a struggle over the
terms of a new mode of liberalism adequate for a late capitalist global
order in crisis (and over who will "possess" those terms). Habermas'
discourses fulfill this function by understanding the conditions of
possibility of communication as immanent to specific and autonomous
communicative situations and forms themselves. In fact the legitimation
and hegemony of postmodern culture studies within the arena of culture
critique depends upon the existence of a range of competing positions
which, as in the logic of the market as studied by Marx, "average out" in
"the long run."
38. The discourses of postmodern cultural studies are unable to theorize
in a rigorous way the politics of the institutions in which they are
situated. Therefore, the incoherencies and contradictions of these
discourses are most evident in relation to the question of devising a
politics of resistance to these institutions, in particular the academy.
So, for example, Grossberg et al. acknowledge from the start of their
"Introduction" that the volume they are presenting emerges at the height
of a "cultural studies boom" (1) of international dimensions. Later, they
argue that "it is the future of cultural studies in the United States that
seems to us to present the greatest need for reflection and debate" (10).
This is understandable, because, as they argued earlier, it is in the U.S.
that the "boom is especially strong," and has "created significant
investment opportunities" (1).
39. However, they go on to argue, the "threat is not from
institutionalization per se, for cultural studies has always had its
institutionalized forms within and outside the academy" (10). Rather, the
"issue for U.S. practitioners is what kind of work will be identified with
cultural studies and what social effects it will have... Too many people
simply rename what they were already doing to take advantage of the
cultural studies boom" (10-11). That is, it is not the institutional
situation--with its limits and possibilities--which is at stake, but
policing the intellectual property and copyright of the new
(non)discipline. The "multi," "non," and even "anti," disciplinary
character of cultural studies, on this account, enables the formation of a
site of accumulation of institutional capital whose "unfixity" also frees
it from accountability to critiques of its institutional positioning. As
far as its "social effects" goes, we have already seen that these are
wholly contingent and therefore can also not be theorized or critiqued in
any systematic way.
40. What Grossberg, et al. do not consider is the possible uses to the
institution of the "free floating," unfixed character of culture studies.
In other words, they do not see that the "post" disciplinary location of
culture studies that they celebrate in fact allows the academy to provide
a space for "radical" discourses without any pressure to transform the
existing disciplinary structure. The question that needs to be raised here
is not, of course, in regard to the legitimacy and necessity of working
within late capitalist institutions (like the university). Rather, what is
at stake is the identification of "institutionalization" with
"institutionality" in postmodern cultural studies, along with the
institutional and ideological forms which naturalize this conflation. In
other words, there is a difference between working within and against
dominant institutions and becoming an integral part of the functioning of
those institutions. Working against dominant institutions from within
requires the contestation of the various institutional forms which
reproduce institutional power and more generally ruling class domination
while becoming "institutionalized" entails fulfilling the need of the
institution for new modes of reproducing that domination. The relation
between cultural studies and the existing disciplines proposed by
Grossberg, et al. is inadequate in this respect because of its ultimately
"laissez-faire" approach to institutional forms and their uses. In
contrast, I would argue that it is necessary to occupy positions within
the disciplines, to exploit the contradiction between their claims to
universality and their specialist partiality in order to challenge their
very separateness and legitimacy.
41. These contemporary discourses of the local and specific find their
theoretical and ideological support in the theories of the "founding"
texts of postmodernism: in particular, those of Jean Baudrillard, Gilles
Delueze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques
Lacan and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Despite the local differences among their
texts, all of these theorists develop justifications for the privileging
of the local and specific, of whatever is irreducible or incommensurable
to global structures and processes. For example, in Derrida's notion of
the "bricoleur," according to Grossberg, et al. a prototype of the
practitioner of cultural studies, practice is understood as the piecing
together into new combinations of elements which have been left
unarticulated by dominant institutions and knowledges. There are two
aspects of this conception which are most urgent for my discussion here:
first, the resistance to totalizing abstraction, which can identify the
structure of dominant institutions and their mode of operation; and,
second, the privileging of the immanence of local constructs and "unique"
combinations of heterogeneous elements which could not have been
anticipated or the result of a plan.
The Critique of Universalism and the Politics of Identity
42. These discourses provide the necessary legitimation for the
"extra-disciplinary" spaces and institutional interstices privileged by
postmodern cultural studies. In other words, the categories of
"heterogeneity" and "difference" operate in postmodern cultural studies in
the interest of institutional reformism and establishing a political
economy of institutional values capable of legitimating and protecting the
work already being done. The effectivity of these categories as an
oppositional and anti-hegemonic force in relation to the discourses that
previously prevailed in the humanities has been the critique of liberal
humanism they provided. This critique, in fact, has been the source of
their apparent radicality--and, hence, the resistance to them--and their
current legitimation. This critique has amounted to an undermining of the
claims of universality made by and on behalf of liberal humanism. For
example, postmodern theorists have pointed to the ways in which liberal
humanist understanding of subjectivity have evaded its discursive and
institutional construction, while feminists have pointed to the implicit
masculinity of this supposed "universal" mode of subjectivity.
43. At the same time, postmodernism has assimilated Marxism to this
critique of liberalism, thereby enabling the elimination of Marxism as a
governing discourse in cultural studies. Baudrillard, for example, has
argued that the Marxist category of labor, understood, ahistorically, as
the basis for social relations, simply reproduces the abstract liberal
subject, who only needs to be "liberated" from external restraints (in
this case, the rule of capital) in order to realize "his" true nature and
desire. In addition, postmodern culture studies, following the analyses of
Laclau and Mouffe, have argued that the understanding of "the" proletariat
as a unified subject "for-itself" is not only unable to deal with the
actual heterogeneity of the proletariat (which calls into question the
validity of the category itself) but encourages a "vanguardist" politics
based upon the real, objective interests and "putative" class
consciousness of the working class.
44. The extension of the critique of liberalism to Marxism has enabled
postmodern cultural studies to establish a theoretical space in which it
can make a claim to have "superseded" existing discourses on society and
culture, and therefore legitimate its institutional "independence."
(Angela McRobbie, for example, notes with relief that the "debate about
the future of Marxism in cultural studies has not yet taken place.
Instead, the great debate around modernity and postmodernity has quite
conveniently leapt in and filled that space" [719].) However, the very
"inflexibility" of the anti-Marxism insisted upon by cultural studies
provides the clearest possible proof that it is not at all "beyond left
and right" but has become a force of the liberal center, developing new
ways to suppress revolutionary knowledges. Contrary to the claims of
Baudrillard, Laclau and Mouffe, the category of labor in Marxism does not
project an "identity" but rather accounts for the basis of the capitalist
social order and thereby explains what subjects--however they "identify"
themselves--are struggling over and why. The supposedly
"anti-authoritarian" opposition to vanguardist politics is therefore
really advanced in the interest of preventing such knowledges from being
publicized and thereby making social transformation possible.
45. For example, the argument in support of working class unity, and
therefore of a specific kind of "homogenization" of working class
revolutionary practices should be understood not as an a priori claim or a
moral imperative, but as the theorization of the conditions of possibility
of combined and transformative practices under historically determinate
and transient conditions. Such an understanding does not "deny" the
heterogeneity of the working class, or the "remainder" that exceeds any
particular combined practice. Rather, it takes this heterogeneity and
excess as a site of critique of the historical limitations of any
practice. Furthermore, Marxist understandings are interested in inquiring
into their own institutional conditions of possibility: in other words,
what is at stake is not primarily a defense of Marxism as a "better"
discourse or theory than postmodernism. Rather, what is at stake is the
use of Marxism in relation to the totality of political and social forces.
Marxism as a mode of critique is therefore not interested simply in
"proving" that it is "still" one viable position among many others
available in the academy or elsewhere, but rather in entering into
contestation with other positions by pointing out their complicity with
global capitalist interests and institutions. The truth of Marxism is
therefore in its explanation of all social phenomena as effects of the
global political economy and, therefore, its struggle against all
practices which support existing social relations by obscuring the class
antagonism underlying them.
46. For example, postmodern critiques of the "universal" liberal humanist
subject formulate this critique in terms of a "de-stabilization" of the
discursive categories--like essentialized forms of identity, or
self-present consciousness--upon which that subjectivity depends. In this
way, these discourses take "credit" for this "destabilization," and are
able to evade their complicity with the attempts of late capitalist crisis
management to develop modes of subjectivity appropriate for changed
historical conditions. I would argue that it is the emergence of
collective modes of practice and public mechanisms for reproducing labor
power which have produced a crisis in the liberal humanist subject. In
other words, the target and "model" of cultural categories under late
capitalism is no longer the individual property owner presupposed by
"classical" liberalism, but the subject charged with circulating within
and managing late capitalist institutions involving extensive divisions of
labor and therefore an objectification of tasks and subjective capacities.
The "valued" subject under such conditions is no longer the autonomous
individual capable of tending to "his" own property, which presumably
bears his own personal imprint, but one able to situate him/herself into a
wide variety of essentially interchangeable collective practices which are
indifferent to the personal qualities of the individual except insofar as
"individual differences" correspond to some classification determined by
the needs of the institutions and the stability of the system.
47. In this case, the "de-stabilization" of the liberal subject is one
aspect of a process which also involves the "re-stabilization" of the
private individual on the terms set by the collectivized structures of
late capitalism. The category of the "bricoleur," for example, enables the
privileging of individualist modes of "free" activity which take into
account the institutional limitations of late capitalism. That is why this
category is so useful for legitimating the creation of "islands" of
extradisciplinary practice for the subject of postmodern cultural studies,
that is, the petit-bourgeois intellectual attempting to make use of
his/her monopoly on the production and legitimation of valued knowledges
to position him/herself advantageously within late capitalist
institutions. Within this framework, it is also possible to see that the
"differences" or pluralized "identities" privileged by postmodern cultural
studies aid in the segmentation of "heterogeneous" sections of the global
workforce; heterogeneous, that is, in relation to the varied needs of a
global capitalist order. Thus, I would argue that postmodernism's
"universalizing" critique of "universals" simply takes one historical form
of universality as absolute in the interest of resisting the possibilities
of producing new modes of universality on the basis of a conscious
realization of the collectivization of social relations.
48. The logical consequence of the prevailing tendency in cultural studies
is therefore the replacement of classes by "identities" as the agents of
social transformation. However, rather than a transcendence of class
politics, "identity," as the product of an identification produced by
affiliations grounded in common conditions and struggles, marks the site
of a contradiction. The social identities most often evoked in postmodern
cultural studies, in particular those articulated around the categories of
race, gender and sexuality, are the products of the representation of new
forms of collective labor power which take shape in late capitalism. With
the entrance of previously excluded groups or classes into the economic
and cultural institutions of the capitalist order, and the more favorable
conditions of struggle this provides, categories such as "women" and
"black" cease to be merely the signs marking the subordination of groups
designated as "inferior" or "external" to the social order. Rather, these
categories take on a new meaning, representing the demand that outmoded
forms of authority be eliminated in the interest of democratizing all
social relations. However, this transformation in the significance of
terms, if it is not resituated within a global analysis, tends to
reproduce those very categories which these struggles have problematized,
and to do so in abstraction from the overall development of the relations
and forces of production.
49. In other words, cultural studies is constituted by, the very
contradiction that is articulated by its privileged categories of
"experience" and "identity." That is, cultural studies and related
political and intellectual tendencies articulate the contradictory
situation of subordinated classes, intellectual work, and emancipatory
politics under the conditions established by the regime of private
property as it becomes dependent upon the publicly organized reproduction
of labor power. Cultural studies has never superseded this contradiction,
which is why, as is evident in Stuart Hall's narratives of cultural
studies, each new "identity" or "problem" that confronted cultural studies
(feminism, race, the linguistic turn, etc.) has induced a "crisis" which
brings this contradiction to the fore (see, for example, the discussion in
"Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies"). Furthermore, each such
"crisis, instead of enabling a sustained critique of the basic assumptions
of cultural studies, instead reinforces the hegemony of the culturalist or
experiential pole of cultural studies. Thus, McRobbie's celebration of a
cultural studies which is in the process of becoming an ethnography of
"identities," with which the investigator identifies in an appreciative
way, in a sense returns cultural studies to the practices initiated by
Richard Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy and Speaking to Each Other, in
which a working class individual "destabilizes" academic discourse by
analyzing the working class culture with which he identifies from a
distance.
50. But categories like "instability" (the basis for the formation and
consolidation of "identities" according to postmodern cultural studies)
only take on meaning insofar as they are measured against some standard of
"stability," i.e., against the subordination of the term to meanings
required by the ruling class. That is, it only takes on significance in
relation to global class struggles. To take "de-stabilization" as a
necessarily "progressive" move is to misrecognize its significance, since
the ruling class itself requires such "de-stabilizations" in order to
reform and up-date its modes of reproducing the relations of exploitation
upon which its existence depends. All the notion of "destabilization"
enables one to do is assert that "more" ("identities," "antagonisms") is
"better."
51. Thus, the very possibility of establishing criteria according to which
one kind of social change could be considered more "desirable" than some
other kind is undermined as a result of the replacement of "class" by
"identity." Furthermore, contrary to the economistic understandings of
class which writers like Hall "accept" in order to dismiss, Marxism
understands classes not only as a position within an economic system but
in relation to the antagonistic possibilities regarding the arrangement of
the entire social, political and cultural order which follow from the
class struggle. The primacy of working class power in Marxist theory and
practice, as I argued earlier, is not a result of the exceptional degree
of suffering experienced by the working class, or any moral virtues they
possess, but the fact that the proletariat "organized as the ruling class"
represents the potential for exploiting the socialization of the forces of
production created by capitalism in the interests of freer, more
democratic and egalitarian social relations. However, this criterion
regarding the possibilities represented by any struggle or agent is
excluded from the category of identity, which can only reverse the
criteria or values contained in the dominant system. This idealizes those
agents in the form in which the dominant culture has produced them,
leading to a utopian or moralizing politics. "De-stabilization," which
opens the possibility of local reversals and revaluations in the interest
of a more favorable insertion within the existing order, becomes the limit
of oppositional politics. This does not mean that the social identities
imposed upon subjects due to their imbrication within a culture based on
exploitation do not have a (secondary) role in political struggles: their
significance is in the necessity to indicate, analyze, and oppose the
reproduction of reactionary forms of authority in myriad ways within all
practices, including oppositional ones.
52. The replacement of "class" by "identity" and "ideology" by "culture"
furthermore requires an attack on conceptual abstraction. Postmodernism
takes abstraction to be an instance of domination insofar as it attempts,
first, to establish a critical position outside of the object under
investigation and, second, insofar as it attempts to reduce the intrinsic
heterogeneity of the object to a single aspect or category taken to be the
principal one. Politically, this is understood as an imposition of a rigid
grid of interpretation upon the irreducibility of the experience of the
oppressed, and a violation of that experience through an exclusion or
devaluation of the self-representations produced by oppressed groups
themselves.
53. However, abstraction does not imply a suppression of difference or
heterogeneity. Rather, it provides a reading of heterogeneity in terms of
a hierarchy of contradictions. This in turn enables a politics based upon
critique and contestation, through the identification and analysis of
social possibilities which take shape in uneven and combined opposition to
other possibilities: what postmodernism takes to be the variety of
self-representations, none of which can make a claim to "correctness," can
then be shown to be the effect of the subordination of one social
possibility to another which nevertheless registers its effects: for
example, the subordination of more radical feminisms to a hegemonic
liberal one, which must nevertheless respond to the pressure of the former
by "decentering" its own authority. The significance of conceptual
abstraction therefore lies in the necessity to comprehend the
possibilities of global transformation which are concealed within an
apparently "self-evident" local "self-representation."
Postmodern Cultural Studies and the Return of Liberalism
54. Postmodernism, then, is ultimately hostile to structural
transformation, aided by totalizing forms of knowledge. Postmodernism
therefore is able to recognize the power relations which, as Foucault has
argued, are internal to subject and identity formation. However, it is
unable to comprehend the socio-economic relations determining the
relations between the pluralized identities and subjectivities which a
postmodern politics seeks to construct. This is because it reads
"representations" as "particular equivalents," which can only be exchanged
against one another. It therefore cannot comprehend the processes of
transformation by which a "particular" or an exchange of "particulars"
becomes an instance in the reproduction of the "general."
55. It therefore supports a kind of pluralist politics based upon the
self-referentiality of any specific political practice and the contingency
of articulations which connect one kind of practice to another. At the
same time, though, it supports an understanding of pedagogy which accounts
for its usefulness to the late capitalist academy. Postmodernism creates a
liberal pedagogy capable of containing the dangers implicit in the
critique of liberal understandings of knowledge developed by the
anti-establishment struggles of the 1960s. These struggles exposed the
complicity of claims to neutrality and universality made by the
representatives of official or mainstream knowledges within the academy
with the practices of racism, sexism, and militaristic capitalism. In
response to this danger, postmodernism has developed a pedagogy of
inclusion based upon the proliferation of identities, as opposed to a
pedagogy of critique based upon an inquiry into the implication of
subjects in existing social relations through their respective and
incompatible "identities," or subjectivities.
56. As I suggested earlier, then, postmodernism is a critique of specific,
historically determinate forms (classical and social democratic) of
liberalism which are no longer useful strategies of legitimation for late
capitalist crisis management. What this means is that the postmodern
critique of the universal subject of classical liberal theory and the
universal subject of social rights of social democracy in fact reinscribes
the internal homogeneity of the subject in the space of representation: as
opposed to the right to liberty granted the classical liberal subject, or
the right to need satisfaction granted the social democratic subject, the
postmodern liberal subject is granted the right to the formation of
identities and representations with a determinate social value: to put it
another way, the "right to recognition." The deconstruction of identities
and representations avoids the crude biological and humanistic
essentialism of previous liberalisms by not attributing to any particular
subject any single fixed identity. However, by keeping the category of
"identity" intact as the "unstable" ground of politics, it simply allows
for greater flexibility by supporting a mode of politics which enables the
discarding and appropriation of identities in accord with global
fluctuations and changing articulations of "private individuality" and
collective or public modes of subjectivity. The subject, for
postmodernism, is always already implicated in a set of discourses and
relations, is always situated (unlike the abstract classical liberal
subject). However, this situation is itself abstracted from the
globalization of capitalist relations, and involves the immediate
appropriation of the materials of experience (the securing of identities)
through local articulations of "identity."
57. Late capitalism, based upon the publicly organized reproduction of
collective labor powers, requires new modes of liberalism in order to
combat and reverse the crisis in hegemony reflected in the anti-hegemonic
struggles of the post-war era. More specifically, it is the delegitimation
of social democratic liberal modes of crisis-management under the
pressure, first, of anti-colonial movements and the "social movements" of
the 1960s and, then, of the neo-conservative offensive and global
capitalist restructuring of the 1980s, which has produced the need for a
renovated postmodern liberalism. The shift to postmodern conceptions of
democracy (based on the immediacy and irreducibility of representations)
advanced by Laclau and Mouffe and adopted by postmodern culture studies is
a product of the following effects of the contradiction between the forces
and relations of production: the institutionalization of knowledges in
accord with the collective modes of reproducing labor power in late
capitalism; the consequent monopoly of oppositional knowledges by the
petit-bourgeoisie situated within late capitalist institutions; the defeat
of the radical goals of the oppositional movements of the 1960s and the
exhaustion of the material resources for a renewal of the radical project
at this point in time; and the consequent institutionalization of the
"identities" produced by this project. Under these conditions, capitalism
requires a liberalism which argues that the conditions of liberation are
not in the struggle to abolish and transform dominant institutions and
knowledges, but rather in specific articulations which establish
"liberated zones" in the spaces made available by those institutions and
knowledges.
58. This new postmodern liberalism requires theories of postmodernity as a
new logic of the social governed by the incommensurability of different
language games and postmodern theories of the public sphere (as the
articulation of differences) which abstract from the contradiction between
the forces and relations of production and class struggle and situate
"politics" as the arena in which "identities" and "experiences" are
constructed and negotiated. Postmodern cultural studies, in other words,
connects post-marxist understandings of the social order and
"communicative" theories of "democracy" in order to ground an amorphous
"progressive" politics which can evade the centrality of conflict between
contending social forces as the ground of social transformation.
59. In sum, postmodern mainstream or appreciative cultural studies is an
"emergent" institutional and cultural form which facilitates the required
(post)liberal modifications of pedagogical and other institutions. Its
"postdisciplinarity" corresponds to the postmodern liberal politics of
identity, which requires modes of knowledge "flexible" enough to manage
the contradictions of post-welfare state capitalism. This argument,
however, should not be read as supporting the existing disciplines, which
is to say the existing intellectual division of labor and segmentation of
knowledges. Rather, it is a critique of the privatization of theory and
the de-politicization of pedagogy, a critique which is associated with a
collective project of knowledge production directed at advancing a
theorized and therefore contestable purpose. If explanation or theory only
extends to the point at which identities are affirmed unproblematically,
thereby allowing the category of "experience" to be introduced, then it
becomes possible to produce flexible institutional sites which can
reconcile "opposition" with the needs of dominant institutions in a
populist manner, leading to merely local changes (and changes, moreover,
which enable the institution to develop more up-to-date forms of
authority).
60. The project of a critical cultural studies interested in the
production of oppositional subjectivities must therefore involve a
sustained critique of contemporary attempts to rearrange the disciplines
in order to manage the crisis. In this case, it is necessary to occupy
positions within the disciplines, in relation to the contradiction between
the subordination of knowledge to capitalist exploitation and the claims
of institutionalized knowledges to serve the cause of emancipation.
Finally, this argument presupposes the transdisciplinary character of
cultural studies (or any emancipatory knowledge), since theorizing the
relations between economics, politics and culture provides the resources
for contesting the reification of specialized knowledges. The purpose of
such knowledges, finally, is to foreground the global social
contradictions which determine any local "articulation," in the interest
of producing revolutionary class consciousness.
61. The shift in cultural studies (which is also a continuation of
existing tendencies) towards "appreciative" discourses has been an effect
of the impact of the process of privatization upon all social
institutions. A critical, oppositional culture studies would be interested
in critiquing and contesting the (re)privatization of the categories of
"gender," "race," "sexuality," and others through their articulation by
the categories of "identity," "difference," and "experience." The class
basis of this re-privatization is the new petit-bourgeoisie, which needs
to represent collective labor forces but on terms acceptable to dominant
institutions, which, in turn, require a postliberal, "multiculturalist"
remaking of institutions in order to integrate oppressed groups while
excluding the radical possibilities opened up by this "integration," and
to produce more "complex" types of labor power in the form of individuals
capable of managing contradictions by representing them as "diversity."
62. A historical materialist, critical cultural studies would be
interested in critiquing and transforming--first of all by clarifying--the
contradiction between (private) individuality and (collective)
subjectivities which reflects the crisis of hegemony in late capitalism.
In this case, the category of "culture" would no longer be a site (as it
is in postmodern cultural studies) where the indeterminacy of the material
and the ideal undergoes successive articulations which reflect
fluctuations in "power relations" (understood as an independent dynamic or
logic of the social). Rather, the category of "culture" would enable a
theorization of the ways in which capitalist exploitation is reproduced
and contested throughout existing social institutions and discourses. This
is an urgent move toward a pedagogy aimed at enabling the
conceptualization of the modes of obfuscation which represent the
interests of the ruling, capitalist class as the "general interest": and
which is in turn a necessary condition of possibility for the production
of proletarian class consciousness.
go to this issue's index
go to the current issue's index
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note
1 This article was first published in The Alternative Orange, Volume 5,
number 1, Fall/Winter 1995-96, and is re-printed here with permission of
the editors.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. The Mirror of Production. Trans. Mark Poster. St.
Louis: Telos Press, 1975.
Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989.
Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler, eds. Cultural
Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Habermas, Jurgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Trans.
Frederick Lawrence. Boston: MIT Press, 1987.
Hall, Stuart. The Hard Road to Renewal. London: Verso, 1988.
-----. "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms." Media, Culture, Society, no. 2
(1980): 57-72.
-----. "Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies." In Grossberg, et
al. eds.: 277-294.
Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy. New Jersey: Transaction, 1992.
-----. Speaking to Each Other. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.
Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. Selected Correspondence: 1846-1895. New
York: International Publishers, 1942.
McRobbie, Angela. "Post-Marxism and Cultural Studies: A Postscript." In
Grossberg, et al., eds.: 719-730.
Ryan, Michael. Politics and Culture. Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press, 1989.
Turner, Graeme. British Cultural Studies: An Introduction. Boston: Unwin
Hyman, 1990.
Contents copyright ? 1997 by Adam Katz.
Format copyright ? 1997 by Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087, Volume 1,
Number 1, Fall 1997.
|
用户登录 
新用户注册 
网友评论：（只显示最新10条。评论内容只代表网友观点，与本站立场无关！） 
