Friends
and Enemies: Which Side is Cultural Studies On?
Jeremy Gilbert
What is cultural
studies for, and what is it against? There can be, of course, no single answer
to this question. There is a habit amongst commentators, especially those who,
being located outside the UK,
are understandably removed from the political contexts which produced British
cultural studies, of deploying the term ‘cultural studies’ as an adjective,
using it to describe certain determinate political positions as well as certain
specifiable methodologies. Such references to ‘cultural studies’ positions or
approaches effectively conflate cultural studies – an interdisciplinary field
of enquiry – with the political tradition which has informed its dominant
strand in the UK.
It’s important from
the outset to clear this up: ‘cultural studies’ is not, as such, a political
position, nor even, in and of itself, a political project. It is a field of
practice which can be informed by commitments to, in theory, any number of
political projects or ethical orientations. It happens to be the case that a
certain political tradition has been particularly influential on the
development of that field. This is a tradition which has its roots in the
British New Left and in particular in the moment when key figures such as
Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall came under the influence of the work of
Antonio Gramsci,[1]
a tradition which has subsequently been shaped most dramatically by encounters
with postmodernism, post-structuralism, the politics of the new social
movements and attempts to formulate creative left responses to the emergence of
post-Fordism.[2]
However, it is important to note that the political tradition of the New Left
and its descendants is not the same thing as cultural studies, and never was.[3]
I’m not saying this
in order to try to minimise the significance of the relationship between the
two projects. Quite the reverse: understanding that the two are not identical
should help us to put into proper perspective the relationship between them.
Seen in this light, the significance of the New Left and its progeny for
cultural studies was huge, lending to its mainstream a meaningful political
identity which could only ever have been acquired on the basis of a deep
affiliation to something bigger than itself. In concrete terms, it meant that
people working within cultural studies – as writers, researchers, teachers or
students – could with some justification feel themselves to be allied to
actually existing political projects. The key reason that Stuart Hall acquired
such totemic status as the pivotal figure within British cultural studies,
despite the fact that his only single-authored work was a collection of mainly
journalistic political commentaries,[4]
was precisely his crucial function as mediator between cultural studies as an
academic interdiscipline and these wider political tendencies.
Hall was the key
theorist of and commentator on British politics on the magazine Marxism Today, which was central to the
dissemination of Gramscian, postmodernist and post-Marxist ideas within the
British left in the 1980s and which popularised the analysis of Thatcherism as
a hegemonic project which had successfully demolished post-war social democracy
and could only be resisted with a counter-hegemony of equal daring.[5]
Marxism Today was itself often seen
as part of that wider formation which included its publisher, the Communist
Party of Great Britain, the New Left tradition and, most importantly, the
so-called ‘Soft Left’ of the Labour Party and its affiliated trade unions. At
the end of the 1980s, this was still considered to be very much the mainstream
of the party, back in the heady days when people like me considered Roy
Hattersley to be the unacceptable face of the Labour right and Marxism Today was known to be
influential in the private office of Labour leader Neil Kinnock.
From New Times to New Labour
While critics on the
left continue to see a natural continuity between the analyses and arguments of
Marxism Today and the emergence of
New Labour,[6]
I would argue that the moment of New Labour’s birth (at the latest the moment
of Tony Blair’s election as Labour leader, in 1994), marked the point at which
the project to create an inclusive, pluralistic and democratic version of
modernisation with which to counter Thatcherism was defeated in the British
Labour movement. This was the moment when, for example, the decline of the left
press began to look irreversible and the New
Statesman – a public place outside the academy where at one time the impact
of cultural studies could be discerned clearly and frequently – shifted itself
somewhere to the right of the Financial
Times. It was the moment when the November 1998 publication of a special
issue of Marxism Today, several years
after the magazine’s closure, and apparently having no real purpose other than
to point out that almost all of the old Marxism
Today writers considered New Labour to be a disaster, could have been
predicted with confidence.
This was also the
moment when it became very difficult to say just what side in what political
struggles cultural studies was actually on. For the one thing that New Labour
and the Blair government have inherited from their more radical antecedents,
and the thing which distinguished the form of neo-liberalism implemented by the
Blair government, the Clinton administration, and many similar agencies
throughout the world from that implemented by the New Right of Thatcher and
Reagan is a commitment to a certain cultural modernisation and a certain social
pluralism. This is a government which has, albeit with some reluctance, allowed
the concept of institutional racism to become part of official discourse,
acknowledged as something which exists and must be stamped out in locations such
as London’s
metropolitan police. This is a government which has taken the first steps
towards the normalisation of the legal treatment of lesbians and gay men. This
is a government whose reforms of the welfare system, as unwelcome as they may
often be, do recognise that it is now normal for mothers below retirement age
to work. At the same time, we have seen massive shifts in social attitudes
towards race and sexuality over the past 15 years, shifts largely driven by the
commitment of broadcast media decision-makers to the dissemination of
metropolitan liberalism. Many of these phenomena have been reproduced across
those parts of the world where cultural studies has had an impact, and in all
cases one must ask the same question: in an age when many of the elements of
the dominant culture which cultural studies came into existence in order to
critique are simply no longer effective and explicit elements of hegemonic
discourse, can cultural studies now be opposed
to anything except the past?
Many self-identified
Marxists fear not. It has become a commonplace of Marxian attacks on cultural
studies to point out that contemporary capitalism does not only not abhor
cultural difference, but thrives on and produces it. Critics like the
irrepressible Slavoj Žižek see the politics of difference as simply the
ideology of neo-liberalism.[7]
Calling for a return to dialectics, political economy, class struggle and the
critique of commodity culture,[8]
they argue in precisely the same terms as those who see Marxism Today as responsible for New Labour. In both cases, the
Gramscian postmodernists are charged with being, at best, self-deceiving
pseudo-radicals, at worst, willing agents of the spread of capitalist social
relations.
What such criticism
entirely fails to deal with, however, is the set of problems that the analyses
of both Marxism Today and many
cultural studies writers were made in order to address in the first place. The
proliferation, penetration and intensification of capitalist social relations
has not produced a concomitant upsurge in class consciousness, nor is there any
evidence that remaining forms of raced, gendered or sexualised oppression can
be any more easily subsumed under the analytical categories of capitalism and class
oppression than they ever could. Nonetheless, it is entirely necessary that we
take seriously the challenge from these critics. The danger they alert us to is
real: that in preaching multiculturalism and social pluralism we may merely
coincide with the agenda of that socio-economic system which is in the process
of launching the most intense onslaught on the public services which the world
has ever seen, from here to Asia to South America.[9]
If we want to resist
this danger then it is necessary for people working in cultural studies to do
at least one thing, and that is to ask ourselves explicitly and rigorously what
our own political and ethical assumptions actually are. What, to be exact, are we for or against? If, presumably,
we are against the depredations which neo-liberalism is wreaking on the world,
and if, presumably, we are not simply
for the proletariat and its struggle against the bourgeoisie, then there must
be other answers to this question.
Cultural Studies vs. Bourgeois Individualism
I’d suggest that the
most useful answer is, in fact, a rather old one. It is the ideology of
individualism which is the key term which organises the field of hegemonic
discourse today, the linchpin which holds together the discourses of ‘culture’
so-called and ‘politics’ proper. It is individualism which is the common term
shared by that pluralistic discourse of cultural modernisation which is
actively hostile to explicit racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia and the
political discourse which seeks to implement market relations and market logics
in every possible sphere of life. It’s individualism which lies at the heart of
those discourses which are right now being mobilised by our enemies in the
great concrete political struggle of our time and our situation: the struggle
to defend a notion of the public – public space, public service, public
interests, public spheres – against the outright attack on all such ideas being
made by agencies such as the Blair government and the signatories to the
General Agreement on Trade in Services.[10]
In the current conjuncture this is the fundamental element which ties together
the ‘cultural’ and the political, and it is the presence of some critique of it
which distinguishes radical forms of politics – socialist, feminist, queer,
anti-racist, ecological – from their liberal counterparts.
As Chantal Mouffe has
recently pointed out, the political culture of neo-liberalism is characterised
by the disarticulation of the two components of liberal democracy.[11]
The goals of liberalism in the current era – the spread of the free market and
the constitution of individuals as economic competitors and ravenous consumers
– are not compatible with any form of democracy worth the name. This view
chimes with that of Anthony Barnett, who describes the politics of New Labour
as exemplary of ‘corporate populism’,[12]
trying to win the support of the populace by offering them the kind of stake in
national life that shareholders or customers have in a corporation and its
products. In both cases it is clear that the central ideological operation of
this politics is the interpellation of citizens as wholly individualised
consumers, and that this latest manifestation of the ideology of bourgeois
individualism is wholly inimical to the realisation of any democratic,
socialistic or communitarian goals. It will be its success at offering
critiques of this ideology which will determine how far cultural studies can
contribute to the real struggles against the commercialisation of public
services which will characterise global left politics in the coming decade.
This shouldn’t be
difficult for cultural studies to do. Although, as I have argued, there is no
inherent political meaning to cultural studies as such, there is clearly a bias
in its history and in its most minimal assumptions towards an understanding of
human life as fundamentally social in character. The very concepts of
‘culture’, ‘community’ and ‘the social’ have been intertwined throughout their
history, and the work of Raymond Williams is clearly predicated on a common
commitment to the significance of culture and the value of community. This is
not to deny that those conceptions have always been problematic, and more
recent philosophical developments have done much to problematise their terms. The
influence of philosophies of difference in the work of thinkers such as Lyotard
and Deleuze, the postmodern emphasis on the value of plurality and the dangers
of its suppression, and the deconstructive refusal of all essentialism have
made it impossible for many of us to sustain a notion of community as a simple
commonality of substance or straightforward sharing of identity. However, the
risk which Marxist critics rightly discern in such moves is that in embracing
some simple ethics of alterity we abandon any notion of community whatsoever:
that openness to difference becomes the only basis for any posited ethics, in a
manner which offers no basis from which to criticise a system of social
relations which thrives on difference – even self-difference – but which
nonetheless wrecks human life and the very environmental conditions of its
sustained possibility.
It would be tilting
at windmills to suggest that anyone has ever really tried to delineate such a
‘pure’ ethics of alterity. The works of Lévinas, Lyotard, Deleuze and Derrida
can all be read as meditations on community itself, on the mechanics of its
possibilities and its necessary aporias. The ethics of alterity can only ever
be the obverse of a concomitant ethics of community, if it is to have any value
at all. In the work of Nancy
and Borch-Jacobsen[13]
this becomes explicit. Rather than try to set up some sectarian distinction
between different schools, or even between cultural studies and its critics, I
think it is crucial here to emphasise the extent to which a critique of what we
might still call bourgeois individualism is the common point of reference for a
radical tradition which can include Nancy, Derrida, Bourdieu, Deleuze,
Foucault, Williams, Lacan, Althusser, Habermas, Adorno, Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,
possibly Hegel, not to mention several traditions of feminism and anti-racism.
It is a point of reference which needs to be explicitly returned to and
re-activated by contemporary cultural studies if it is to play a role in the
struggle against neo-liberalism.
It might be objected
here that what I am saying is merely obvious, that we all know that
individualism possesses an account of human experience which is at once
materially false and extraordinarily destructive in its effects, and that of
course this opinion is shared by everyone from the Buddha to Jesus to Ernesto
Laclau. If this shared opinion is a point of view so common to so many, then
where can the interest lie in expressing it?
To this
understandable objection I would reply that this may be a view common to us, to
radical professional intellectuals, but it is clearly not one common to the
majority of our students, and that it is primarily as participants in a general
pedagogic project that we have to understand the possibilities of our political
efficacy. This does not mean at all that everything we write has to be readable
by undergraduates, but it does mean that at the end of the day even the most
rarefied piece of theorising must come to inform some piece of teaching
somewhere if it is to be politically effective. In this context it is
absolutely crucial for us to pay attention to the specificity of the culture in
which we operate, and to try to encourage students to interrogate the
ideological assumptions which constitute their subjectivities. One of the most
basic pedagogic operations in cultural studies is to point out to students
that, just because they don’t know what their implicit ideological assumptions
are, does not mean that they don’t have any. I can’t be the only lecturer who
habitually says to students ‘everyone has a theory, they just don’t always know
what it is’. This is clearly one of the founding claims of cultural studies.
And yet, how often do we as professionals fully apply its implications to the
consideration of our own work, and especially our teaching? Rarely, in my
experience.
To me this failure is
a fundamental one, as we can hardly ask our students to interrogate their
inherited ideological positions if we don't interrogate our own. So of course,
we often don’t ask them to do that at all – we ask them to interrogate
those of a now-residual moment, when explicit racism and sexism were clearly
identifiable elements of the dominant ideology. The effect, I think, is
frequently disastrous. Students enter with their subjectivities constituted by
a hegemonic liberal ideology which is hostile to the explicit racism, sexism,
homophobia, classism and elitism of that earlier moment, and they leave with
that ideology having been reinforced and never challenged: perfect neo-liberal
subjects.
But what else can we
do? The answer from the orthodox Marxists is ‘nothing’. For many of them, the
answer seems to be that cultural studies should just get out of the way and
make room for real politics, allowing true radicals to focus on the real
business of the economy, on issues of material justice, on the class struggle,
to which cultural politics can be at best a minor hand-servant, at worst an
outright foe. This isn’t the course I would recommend. Rather, I’d like to
suggest that a radical cultural studies needs to do what it has always done
best: rigorously to examine the contours of the current conjuncture, and to
deconstruct those elements of contemporary culture which reinforce and
reproduce relations of subordination and exploitation, and that in the current
conjuncture that is not simply a matter of exposing imbalances of power as they
work along the axes of class, race, gender and sexuality.
This is not to say
that power has ceased to work along these axes. Nor is it to downplay the
importance of that fundamental term which unites critical attitudes to gender,
sexuality, race and class in current post-structuralist thought:
anti-essentialism. I agree with Laclau and Mouffe that anti-essentialism is the
sine qua non of an effective radical
politics today, but essentialisms, as they would be the first to acknowledge,
come in many forms and can only be effective – and effectively deconstructed –
in specific contexts. Far too often, students receive the critique of
essentialism as nothing more than a re-statement of individualist liberal
humanism: ‘these cultural differences are not essential, therefore they are
superficial to our real individualities’. The only way to overcome this, I
would suggest, is to take on the one essentialism which defines all the others
in neo-liberal culture, the term that organises the field of hegemonic
discourse in the West today: the essentialism of the asocial individual.
In particular, I
think that cultural studies needs to continue to pay close attention to the
prevalence of consumerist individualism as the key term of neo-liberal culture.
This is crucial because it is essential to realise that contemporary forms of
individualism are not simply manifestations of the old liberal subjectivities
of the past. The old bourgeois subject was a very different being to the new
one. Possessive individualism as it was actually lived inherited a great deal
from the moment of radical Protestantism and was constituted by the
intersection of phallogocentric discourse with the experience of early
capitalism.[14]
The hegemony of the Puritan subject – the hard-working, un-demanding,
self-possessed man of reason – has been deeply eroded by the spread of consumer
capitalism and its dependence on an ever greater market for the decadent and
feminising pleasures of the flesh. In this postmodern context, the
configuration of patriarchy, capitalism, racism and logocentrism is very
different to what it was even 15 years ago, and only careful attention to the
specificities of contemporary culture can enable us to unpick these connections
and retain a radical agenda without finding ourselves in complicity with the
most destructive forces on the planet. The work of those who studied consumer
culture, its conditions and effects, is obviously central to any proper
consideration of these issues.[15]
The Politicality of Culture: A Radical Democratic Perspective
The question this
leaves open is: how exactly do we understand contemporary formations from the
point of view of such an analysis? How do we take on the forces of liberal
individualism without relying on the essentialist and anachronistic models of
earlier moments? The solution I would propose is fairly straightforward: to
look to a moment of communitarian cultural studies – the work of Raymond
Williams – and ask what it can share, and how it must still differ, from a
perspective informed by anti-essentialism and the philosophy of difference. The
most consistent and significant attempt to reformulate a radical political
position on the basis of the latter has been, without question, the work of
Laclau and Mouffe, and it is in the name of a politics which is communitarian
in its aspirations and assumptions, but is so only in a sense which is fully
compatible with the project of radical democracy, which I believe a radical
cultural studies can constitute itself in this new century.
There is only time
here to offer the briefest sketch of what such a practice would look like. I’d
suggest that it would firstly need, to some extent, to look to Williams’
attempts to formulate a vocabulary by which to describe the political status of
given formations in terms consistent with a fairly rigorous set of political
assumptions, political assumptions which we may want to revise, but which we
cannot hope to operate without some equivalent to. Williams’ distinctions
between hegemonic, alternative, and oppositional formations and between
residual, dominant and emergent formations remain a model of a clear and
precise set of political classifications for cultural forms, notwithstanding
the epistemological and ontological problems inherent in any such framework.[16]
It clearly spells out the issues at stake for the cultural critic who is
ideologically committed to a programme of revolutionary transformation and who
understands social and historical reality in classical Gramscian terms,
identifying the most politically desirable projects with those which combine a
certain radical newness, a position on the ‘leading edge’ of historical change,
with a direct opposition to the hegemony of the ruling class. It’s important to
note that his way of looking at things implies a certain set of convictions not
just about politics, but about politicality
itself. According to this model, what actually renders a given formation political
and what lends it its political identity is its relationship to bourgeois
hegemony and it position in history, conceived more-or-less teleologically in
terms of the narrative of successive modes of production and historical change
through class struggle. It seems to me that any form of cultural studies which
wants to retain any kind of political radicalism must assert a similar – if
different – set of assumptions about what it is that actually renders political given cultural
formations, text, projects, etc.
I’m not an expert on
ethics or on the debate on the relationship between politics and ethics, but it
seems to me that this is where the relationship between politics and ethics
occurs. It is a certain set of ethical commitments – which may be, following
the meditations of Derrida or Kierkegaard on the irreducibility of the
decision, at some level untheorisable – which will give rise to a set of
assumptions as to what it is that constitutes the politicality of given phenomena. In these terms, a possibly
pre-theoretical ethical commitment to community-in-difference is the logical
concomitant to, and perhaps the basis for, a radically democratic, radically
communitarian politico-ethical position, and such an ethics will lead to a set
of assumptions as to what actually constitutes the politicality of cultural –
political phenomena and what the desirable and undesirable features of such
phenomena might be.
So, what would the
political parameters of such a radically democratic cultural studies be? There
isn’t time to go into details here, but I think that it would ask certain key
questions of any formation, text, or project. Firstly, it would ask to what
extent it facilitates the breaking-down of concentrations of power, and this
question would be refined into one around the issue of how far any formation
successfully enables or at least allows the unimpeded proliferation of
difference. On the other hand, any position informed by the work of Laclau and
Mouffe would have to acknowledge the necessary hegemonic dimension of any
project qua project or, I would
suggest, any community qua community.
From this perspective the politicality of a given formation must also be
understood in terms of its capacity to sustain itself as a formation and to
widen its boundaries beyond those of a narrow region of the social. This would
be the difference between a cultural criticism informed by Laclau and Mouffe
Gramscianism and one committed to the implicit anarchism of a Lyotardian ethics
of alterity, or to a Deleuzean position as that is widely understood. Rather
than simply valorising cultural forms which promote the proliferation of
difference, such a position would emphasise the limitations of such a politics
in the context of the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic struggles which
characterise politics in the real world, recognising that the realisation of
greater degrees of autonomy and difference for a range of subjects may at times
require those subjects to suppress parts of their difference in the name of a
wider hegemonic project.
These two
considerations – the degree to which a given formation enables difference and
its capacity to sustain and extend itself – will exist on one level of analysis
in a kind of paradoxical tension. On another level, however, it is possible to
see both of these as aspects of a single question: how far is the formation in
question characterised by a certain dynamic openness? Such openness is,
arguably, what characterises any social space in which difference is not
suppressed, but it is also what characterises the relationships between
subjects-in-community and what characterises any community – political,
cultural, national – which is vibrant and porous enough to sustain and extend
itself in the possibility of its own transformation. This indeed would connect
with the final feature which I would posit of any potentially radically
democratic cultural formation: its openness to the radically unknowable
possibilities of the future (and here we find an echo of Williams’ implicit
valorisation of the emergent over the residual or the dominant). A radical
democratic cultural studies would therefore recognise that it is the dynamic of
openness, the problematisation of boundaries – the very mechanism of politics
itself – which at once constitutes communities in breaking down the boundaries
between subjects and which constitutes the dynamism of communities, of breaking down the distinctions
between their interiors and exteriors, in realising them not as hypostatic
entities but as spaces of shared self-difference. According to this
configuration, and following Jean-Luc Nancy, all of these terms might be
reduced to a basic opposition between the ‘political’ and the ‘anti-political’:
‘“Political” would mean a community ordering itself to the unworking of its communication,
or destined to this unworking: a community consciously undergoing the
experience of its sharing’.[17]
This is another way of understanding that that problematisation of the
boundaries constituting individual subjects
which makes community itself possible (as something other than a random
collection of atoms) must in some sense be maintained at the boundaries of the
community itself for it to continue to exist as such.
We can see from this
argument that individualism – which in any form is predicated on the insistence
that the boundaries around subjects be kept static and stable – is one of the
basic obstacles to the realisation of any radically democratic objectives. The
logical conclusion of such reflection, it seems to me, must be that an ethical
commitment to community-in-difference, such as is shared by thinkers from Marx
to Nancy, must
lead to a political critique of individualism and vice-versa. At the same time,
the concrete struggle of our times, the struggle to defend the public sphere against
the market, demands a similar critique. Whatever forms of intervention a
radical cultural studies might seek to make in the near future, be it from a
perspective such as that recommended here or one committed to classical Marxism
or Lacanian Leninism, or Deleuzean anarchism, the critique of individualism
must be one of its key points of orientation.
What is to be Done?
Now, this is all very
well. Yet still it leaves open the question of what interventions cultural
studies, armed with this knowledge, might actually make. Firstly here, I want
to return to the question of the relationship between academics and their
audiences. There’s a lot of nonsense talked about this, most of which is the
result of a failure to grasp the complex ways in which academic knowledge is
mediated. The typical complaint that academics spend too much time talking to
each other misses the point that the teaching which those academics deliver to
students is in large part a result of the talking they do with each other:
either literally or via publications. The fact that an article in a refereed
journal may only be read by, indeed, may only be comprehensible to, a few
hundred specialists, does not mean that those people will be its only effective
audience. Presumably it will have some effect on their teaching and their
research and the teaching of people who read that research. So it’s direct
audience may be small, but its ‘mediated audience’, if you like, may be much
larger. It’s this complex process of mediation which has to be taken into
account. On the other hand, by the same token, the ideal of maintaining a
‘research-based teaching culture’ is too often appealed to by academics who
don’t want to do anything but lecture on their own research. Thinking about
what to teach and to whom has to be a process of weighing up the existing
knowledges and situations of students and judging what they can make the best
use of in a given context. Again, it has to be understood that what students,
as students and as members of a wider public, will receive, is largely an
effect of the contexts in which it is delivered.
However, despite such
qualifications, it seems strange that left academics should experience such a
gap between themselves and the broader public at the present time. If it is students
who constitute the primary audience for radical intellectual work such as that
represented by the dominant strand of cultural studies, and if there are more
students in higher education now than ever before, then why do academics
working in this field feel an increasing sense of impotence and frustration?
Within this
institutional context, the difficulty facing cultural studies as a project for
the production and dissemination of radical knowledge via universities is the
marketisation, commercialisation and vocationalisation of higher education. The
commitment to interdisciplinary revolution which cultural studies has
spearheaded in the humanities and social sciences is a major, and welcome
transformation of academic institutions. However, in the absence of any
effective critical politics, the results of such a process can be a fragmentary
student experience in which an embarrassment of student choice – between
institutions, degree programmes and individual courses – undermines the
possibilities for sustained intellectual engagement, subjecting teachers and
teaching institutions to the same logic of competitive commodification which
already affects academics as researchers, encouraged as they are to auction
themselves to the highest bidder in the international marketplace.
As Lyotard already
saw happening at the end of the 1970s,[18]
students and government agencies increasingly judge the success of education
purely in terms of measurable outcomes, specifically in terms of the rate at
which it delivers graduates with the skills which the commercial sector wants.
In this context, any self-consciously radical pedagogic project has a problem.
Many students are simply not interested in internalising radical critiques of
neo-liberal culture: they want to be turned into marketable commodities in the
neo-liberal job market. Worse, those students who do maintain an interest in radical ideas have virtually no means of
pursuing that interest after graduation.
One of the most
direct and effective responses to this problem is that represented by the
recent work of Angela McRobbie, which offers an explicit political critique of
the conditions and ideologies prevailing in the ‘creative industries’.[19]
What’s missing from such an approach, however, is any real sense of how those
conditions might be changed. McRobbie’s recent essay on the institutional
politics of higher education in the UK merely concludes by appealing to
the government to pursue egalitarian and democratic policies for the training
of academics, not wholly governed by the imperatives of neo-liberalism.[20]
Clearly the chances of this cry being heeded are negligible, and the
recognition of this fact raises the question of what might be done about it.
This, in my
experience, is the other thing that both students and a wider public demand
from radical intellectuals: some sense of where the possible points of agency
might lie, not merely a catalogue of existing forms of resistance, but ideas as
to how others might be created. It is here that the disconnection of cultural
studies and radical academic work in general from actual political struggles is
felt most acutely. This in itself is the result of a very specific
structural/cultural transformation of recent times. Twelve years ago students
with a more than vocational interest in cultural studies could be referred to
publications like Marxism Today which
interpellated them as part of a wider public for new thinking and a larger
constituency for progressive movements. It’s the decline of a left press which
was receptive to and interested in developments originating in the academy (and
I note here the increasing centrism and anti-intellectualism of liberal media
outlets such as The Guardian and
Channel Four) which has created a situation in which any project which has the
university as its primary site of effectivity finds itself cut off from wider
debates and struggles. The contraction and virtual disappearance of a public
sphere in between the academy and the wider political world is certainly a
function of the general decline of public institutions, including the parties
and organisations which supported the radical press, but this itself is a
direct and reversible effect of the political assault on all public space which
neo-liberalism undertakes. As long as this assault goes unresisted, the answer
to the question ‘Does cultural studies have any significance outside of the
university?’ can only be: ‘It did once; it could again; it should, but right
now it doesn’t’.
This is a problem
which ‘radical’ academics could do something about. Born in the Workers’
Education Movement and the extra-mural programmes, nurtured at the polytechnics
and the Open University, cultural studies always inhabited the interstices
between academic institutions and more public arenas. A handful of institutions
with stronger or weaker links to the mainstream of cultural studies still
struggle to constitute something like such public spaces (Signs of the Times,[21] Soundings,[22]
Red Pepper,[23]
Open Democracy[24]).
On the whole, however, UK
academics, especially the post-Thatcher generation of which I am a member, seem
largely resigned to their own marginality and the apathy of whatever audience
they might once have aspired to beyond the profession. It is no accident that
at just the moment when cultural studies is making inroads into the heart of
the establishment – chairs at Harvard, Yale and Manchester; new programmes at
the older, richer universities – those very interstitial spaces which gave it
birth seem to have vanished almost completely. It is hardly surprising that
this newly-respectable (in/ter-)discipline should retreat into traditional
sites of academic safety and privilege as its former habitats are colonised or
destroyed. Nevertheless, this is a move which could spell the end of any
cultural studies with meaningful aspirations to political radicalism.
This is a desperately
unnecessary situation. The proliferation of the world-wide web and the historic
expansion of higher education create a vast range of possibilities for cultural
studies to renew its radical project at the interface between academe and the
global struggle against neo-liberalism. However, unless more action is taken to
reconstitute that project – more work published, events organised, initiatives
taken which are aimed at bridging the gap between academe and other cultures –
then it seems likely that the situation will only get worse. It will, after
all, be the simplicities of orthodox Marxism, adolescent anarchism,
communitarian essentialism and ethno-religious fundamentalism which remain the
currency of resistance in the ‘real world’. Cultural studies will survive only
as an agent of neo-liberal culture, transforming the university into a
market-place and our students into just the hyper-reflexive post-subjects which
informational capitalism requires. It doesn’t have to be this way, but nobody
can improve the situation except ourselves.
[1] See Raymond Williams Problems
in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980); Stuart Hall,
‘Introduction’, in Roger Simon, Gramsci’s
Political Thought (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1988).
[2] See David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London:
Routledge, 1996).
[3] For an interesting history of the very early pre/history of
cultural studies and its relationship to the early New Left, see Tom Steele, The Emergence of Cultural Studies 1945-65
(London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1997); also Michael Kenny, The First New Left (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1995).
[4] Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to
Renewal (London: Verso, 1988).
[5] See Stuart Hall & Martin Jacques (eds.), New Times (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990).
[6] See Paul Smith, ‘Looking Backwards and Forwards at Cultural
Studies’, in Timothy Bewes & Jeremy Gilbert (eds.), Cultural Capitalism: Politics after New Labour (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2001).
[7] See, for example, Slavoj Žižek, ‘Multiculturalism – A New Racism?’,
in New Left Review 225 (London:
Verso, 1997). The argument is obviously related to Fredric Jameson Postmodernism: the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991).
[8] See Žižek’s contributions to Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau &
Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony,
Universality (London:
Verso, 2000).
[9] See Dexter Whitfield, Public
Services or Corporate Welfare? (London:
Verso, 2000).
[10] See the web-site of the World Development Movement: http://www.wdm.org.uk/
[11] Signs of the Times
seminar, London,
March 2001.
[12] Anthony Barnett, ‘Corporate Populism and Partyless Democracy’, New Left Review3 (London: Verso, 2000).
[13] Jean-Luc Nancy The
Inoperative Community, Peter Connor (ed.) (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1991); Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Emotional Tie, trans. Douglas Brick et. al. (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1992).
[14] See Daniel Bell, The Cultural
Contradictions of Modernity (London: Heinemann, 1976); Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Unwin 1930); Jeremy Gilbert
& Ewan Pearson, Discographies: Dance
Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound (London: Routledge, 1999), pp.
46-62.
[15] E.g., Don Slater, Consumer
Culture and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1997).
[16] Raymond Williams, Marxism and
Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
[17] Nancy,
op. cit., p. 40.
[18] Jean-François Lyotard, The
Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Brian Massumi
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).
[19] See Angela McRobbie, British
Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry (London: Routledge, 1999); In the Culture Society: art, fashion and popular music (London: Routledge, 1999); and ‘Everyone is
Creative: artists as new economy pioneers?’:
http://www.openDemocracy.net/forum/Document_Details.asp?DocID=594&CatID=18
[20] Angela McRobbie, ‘Stuart Hall: The Universities and the ‘Hurly
Burly’, in Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg and
Angela McRobbie (eds.), Without
Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall (London:
Verso, 2000).
[21] http://www.signsofthetimes.org.uk
[22] http://www.l-w-bks.demon.co.uk/soundings-project.html
[23] http://www.redpepper.org.uk/
[24] http://www.openDemocracy.net/
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