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New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory

Page history last edited by Gary Hall 13 years, 5 months ago

 

Chapter One:

New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (Some Comments, Clarifications, Explanations, Observations, Recommendations, Remarks, Statements and Suggestions)

 

               The editors would like to use this space, traditionally reserved for what is known as the ‘Introduction’, to draw your attention to one or two things worth bearing in mind while reading this book.

 

The continuing importance of theory - to cultural studies, and to 'new cultural studies' in particular…

               First and foremost, we would like to begin by apologising to some of our readers for, in effect, pointing out the shark fin of theory just when you were beginning to think it was safe to go back into the surf of cultural debate. We realise that, while few would deny the impact of structuralism, Marxism, post-Marxism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, French feminist theory, postcolonial theory and so forth on cultural studies since at least the 1970s, when Stuart Hall taught a Cultural Theory course on the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) MA programme at Birmingham, the role and status of 'theory' within cultural studies has changed in recent years; so much so that the 'aura' of theory as 'contemporary and "cutting edge"' is for many now very much in retreat (Gibson 2004: 1), as conferences, journals, courses and schools which were once hotbeds of Foucauldian, Derridean and Lacanian 'high theory' increasingly (re)turn to a more humanist ethos and what are regarded as more politically or instrumentally 'useful' modes of research and analysis, such as those associated with sociology, social policy and political economy. What's more, we know that (for reasons we'll deal with shortly) a lot of people in cultural studies consider this to be no bad thing.

 

               But if for some the so-called 'theory revolution' has now more or less come to an end, recent years have also seen the emergence from the long shadow cast by the Birmingham School of a new generation of cultural studies writers, scholars and postgraduate students.1 It is a generation which can be described, at least in part, as being a product (albeit an indirect one) of those theorists who strove so hard to introduce European thought into the English-speaking academy in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, and whose work had itself developed out of an engagement with literary studies, Frankfurt School-style critical theory and continental philosophy (in the UK they're associated with postgraduate courses at universities such as Essex, Sussex and Warwickin particular). In other words, it is a generation whose whole university education has been shaped by theory, who have never known a time before theory, and who continue to see in it a means of testing and thinking through some of the most important issues and problems in contemporary culture and society - and, indeed, cultural studies.

 

                Perhaps the easiest and quickest way for us to illustrate just how important theory is to this new generation is by taking, as an example, the current sense of 'crisis' over cultural studies' politics, and in particular cultural studies' ability (or rather lack of it) to align itself with political forces and movements outside the academy.

 

One of the defining features that is often given of cultural studies, on which it is proposed that everyone in cultural studies will agree, is that it is a politically committed field.2 It was certainly in political terms that Stuart Hall positioned his own activities as a teacher, writer and academic. Speaking at the landmark 1990 conference 'Cultural Studies Now and In the Future' of his time at the Birmingham Centre in the 1970s, Hall remarked that 'Gramsci's account still seems to me to come closest to expressing what it is I think we were trying to do…  we were trying to find an institutional practice in cultural studies that might produce an organic intellectual'. And this is so even though, as Hall admits, the 'problem about the concept of an organic intellectual is that it appears to align intellectuals with an emerging historic movement and we couldn't tell then, and can hardly tell now, where that emerging historical movement was to be found' (Hall 1992a: 281). Now anyone attempting to translate this kind of politically committed role into the present historical conjuncture is immediately confronted by some rather difficult and challenging questions. Does the hope, for instance, that, in Hall's words, 'there could be, sometime, a movement which would be larger than the movement of petit-bourgeois intellectuals', continue to be one we can actually carrying on 'living with', given that we currently occupy a period in which the victory of capitalism's free-market economy and defeat of any political alternatives to neo-liberalism seem somewhat assured (1992a: 288)? Even if the rise of such a movement is still considered to be a possibility, is any historical alliance of progressive forces today really going to be discernible as the kind of radical political project with which cultural studies, and the work of Hall and the Birmingham School in particular, has traditionally been associated: that of the British New Left and the 'new social movements' (feminism, anti-racism, anti-imperialism, gay liberation and so on)? Or is it more likely to adopt the kind of 'disorganised', decentralised, multitudinous form that appears to characterise the new wave of large-scale, 'anti-capitalist' and anti-war protests that have emerged over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s? In which case, is the development of a new form of politics and a new political project not required if cultural studies is to retain its sense of political engagement in the twenty-first century - something perhaps more along the lines of that conceived by Agamben (1993), Derrida (1994) and Hardt and Negri (2004) in terms of the 'coming community', the 'new international' and the 'multitude' respectively?  And is cultural studies something that can connect with or otherwise assist such a 'movement of movements' anyway? It certainly doesn't seem to have had much success in this respect so far (as Jeremy Gilbert's chapter in this volume makes clear).

 

Now, for many, the raising of such questions is no doubt challenging enough given the importance of Birmingham School, New Left, new social movements style politics to cultural studies’ sense of its own identity. Yet difficult though they may be, these questions still all have their basis in a fundamental premise which underpins cultural studies but which, despite (or more likely because of) this, too often remains unaddressed. This is the assumption that historical and social movements of some kind, whether organised or disorganised, recognisable by cultural studies as traditionally conceived or not, do indeed continue to be possible or at least desirable. In fact, we would go so far as to argue that the continuing resort on the part of much of the left in general, and cultural studies in particular, to such progressive historical narratives  (even as, like Hall, they often simultaneously express certain reservations about the wisdom of doing so) is actually part of a far larger problem. It is a situation summed up most incisively by Wendy Brown, when she draws attention to the way in which, while many on the left have:

 

lost confidence in a historiography bound to a notion of progress or to any other purpose, we have coined no political substitute for progressive understandings of where we have come from and where we are going. Similarly, while both sovereignty and right have suffered severe erosions of their naturalistic epistemological and ontological bases in modernity, we have not replaced them as sources of political agency and sites of justice claims. Personal conviction and political truth have lost their moorings in firm and level epistemological ground, but we have not jettisoned them as sources of political motivation or as sites of collective fealty. So we have ceased to believe in many of the constitutive premises undergirding modern personhood, statehood, and constitutions, yet we continue to operate politically as if these premises still held, and as if the political-cultural narratives based on them were intact. (Brown 2001: 3-4)

 

It is consequently crucial, for Brown, that those of us who still consider ourselves as being of the left think about how we might 'develop historical political consciousness in terms other than progress, articulate our political investments without notions of teleology and naturalized desire, and affirm political judgement in terms that depart from moralism and conviction' (2001: 4). Brown gets right to the heart of the problem when she asks:

 

If the legitimacy of liberal democracy depends on certain narratives and foundational presuppositions, including progress, rights, and sovereignty, what happens when those narratives and assumptions are challenged, or indeed simply exposed in their legitimating function? What kinds of political cultures are produced by this destabilization of founding narratives and signal terms? … How do we live in these broken narratives, when nothing has taken their place? (2001: 14)

 

It is with questions of this kind, concerning some of cultural studies' fundamental and, indeed, founding premises, assumptions and presuppositions, that many members of this new generation of cultural studies writers and practitioners are currently engaged in speculating upon and experimenting with.3 And, significantly, at a time when it often seems theory is being increasingly marginalised, within cultural studies, the institution of the university and society in general,4 it is theory that they are  drawing on for help in doing so.

 

 

That whole ‘here’s a new generation’ thing we just slipped in back there…

               We'll come back to say more about why this new generation is so heavily invested in theory in a moment. Before we do so we'd just like to make it clear, once and for all, right from the start, so there can be no misunderstanding, that we are in no way trying to position either ourselves or our contributors as leaders of any such 'new generation'. In one respect at least, New Cultural Studies is simply an attempt on our part to draw attention to what appear, to us anyway, to be some interesting things that are happening in cultural studies at the moment, but which are often marginalised or otherwise overlooked, or at any rate don't get the attention we think they deserve. 

 

 In fact, as far as we're concerned this 'new generation' is not really a generation at all, at least if you understand this to imply that they're all of approximately  similar age. Although they perhaps share a common set of (often philosophically orientated) theoretical languages, they do not have a common approach or methodology: say, poststructuralist, post-Marxist, postfeminist, philosophical, literary, aesthetic or  'textualist' (whatever that last one is).  They don't constitute a group, movement or school in the way the Birmingham School is or was. We're not trying to name or establish a new school in that sense - partly because if it was recognisable as a new school it would be much the same as the old school. If anything, what's different about this 'generation' is that it is not recognisable as a school, but is rather more mobile: this ‘new generation’ is fluid, flexible and spatially diffuse, involving a multiplicity of often conflicting, contradictory and incommensurable theories, approaches, objects, pedagogies and styles. Hence the multiple-edited and -authored nature of this book. The various contributors to New Cultural Studies do not all say the same thing: about cultural studies; or about what in shorthand we are here calling 'theory', for that matter. Some of them would no doubt disagree with much of what we have said (about them) in this 'introduction' (the narrative of which is itself 'broken' and made up of multiple parts).

 

 Nor do the different members of this 'generation' all necessarily identify themselves primarily or even substantially with cultural studies. In fact, and as one participant in a recent online discussion on the state of cultural studies in Australia acknowledged, restricting any such account of cultural studies merely to what is explicitly called or calls itself (or aligns and identifies with) 'Cultural Studies', risks completely missing, among other things:

 

…a new generation of [in this case] students … who don't identify themselves as 'Cultural Studies' and probably don't subscribe to this list, cos it is too passe.  They effortlessly do publishing, poetry, new media, 'ficto-criticism' (awful word), and from within a very theoretically informed perspective, but with the theory worn lightly and perhaps even treated in a magpie fashion.  There's a huge world of that out there … This new terrain has not been mapped as a whole, probably because it is too diverse and ever-changing. (Jacka 2004)

 

Indeed, if we want to explore some of the most interesting developments that are taking place ‘in’ cultural studies today, it seems to us that we do often find these being forged by people operating at the margins and even 'outside' of 'Cultural Studies' spaces and institutions, at least as they are traditionally and most narrowly defined. And we're not just thinking of people associated with so-called ‘high theory’ either. One notable example is provided by the architect Rem Koolhaas' Project on the City. In the words of Fredric Jameson, 'These extraordinary volumes are utterly unlike anything else one can find in the print media; neither picture books nor illustrated text, they are in movement, like a CD Rom' (Jameson 2003: 65). However, with their formal innovations and 'performance' of the built space, the first two volumes of this project are perhaps 'closest to cultural studies' (2003: 65), in Jameson's view - albeit an experimental and creatively reimagined cultural studies, we would suggest. (J. Macgregor Wise's chapter in this volume is concerned precisely with the extent to which Koolhaas' project on the City provides a possible signpost to thinking 'cultural studies differently'.)  

 

Having said that, we did admittedly gather our contributors on the basis that they were identifiable as part of certain global, national and regional networks of communication, including many which are explicitly associated with 'Cultural Studies' (institutions, associations, journals, publications, conferences, email lists and so on). No doubt this mode of composition and assembly would suggest, at least to some, that 'the network', the organisational model which is supposedly most characteristic of the postindustrial 'information' or 'new economy', might indeed have been a more a useful way of conceiving this 'new generation'.5 Given that we have actually met only a few of our contributors face –to face, and have relied almost entirely on electronic modes of communication to put this book together, New Cultural Studies could certainly be said to have depended on a degree of 'abstract cooperation' in its production (Hardt and Negri 2000: 296). Yet while the network, or  the multitude for that matter (Hardt and Negri 2004), might both in their different ways have provided us with rival, and potentially extremely productive, ways of thinking about the relation between the people whose work is contained here (ways it would certainly have been interesting to have explored and experimented with further and more rigorously), we have for the most part preferred to privilege a generational model. We have done so for a variety of reasons, including those concerned with strategy (some of which will hopefully become clear in a moment), but also because it seems to us that this model, for all its problems and simplifications, perhaps comes closest to capturing something of the phenomenon we are endeavouring to describe.

 

 Still, we want to make it clear that, as far as we're concerned, to use any of these terms in this context - 'new generation', 'network', 'multitude' - is, as J. Hillis Miller observes with regard to attempts to understand the Internet as a net, web, mosaic, galaxy or superhighway, also:

 

to reduce to familiar and comprehensible patterns … what does not exist like that at all…

The rhetorical name for such figures is ‘catachresis’. ‘Catachresis’ means ‘against usage’ in Greek. 'Catachresis’ names the ‘abusive’ transfer of what  names  something known … to something unnamed and not an ‘identifiable entity’, something unknown … (Miller 1989: 117)

 

 

The somewhat disingenuous nature of our apology for theory…

               Of course we realise that in apologising for drawing attention to the continued presence of theory within cultural studies, as we did earlier, we have in fact merely created more opportunities to discuss it. Continuing with this theme, we'd now like to turn our attention to saying a little more about the apparent waning of theory's influence, and why some people in cultural studies do indeed consider this to be no bad thing.

 

     Various different explanations have been given for the decline of theory, all of which have their own local and regional variations. Some of these we've already raised questions for with our comments on left and liberal founding narratives of politics, progress, history and so forth; for others we'll proceed to do so throughout the course of this chapter. But here are ten reasons why some people at least have suggested that the time is right to move 'beyond theory':

 

1.     The crisis of the left - the current crisis in Marxist and more widely leftist politics - evident in the fall of the Berlin Wall, the challenge to the authorities in the People's Republic of China and the massacre in Tiananmen Square, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the declaration of independence of the former Soviet Republics, the reshaping of Eastern Europe, the weakening of the unions and so on - has meant that the kind of radical 'far left' thinking often associated with theory is  now regarded as being somewhat out of sync with the times.

 

2.     The marketisation of the university - successive neo-liberal governments have sought to compete in the international marketplace by cutting state budget deficits through decreases in public spending, not least on education. The ensuing drastic reduction in funding has led to profound changes in the institution of the university. Among them is the ever-growing pressure placed on universities to attract financial support from ‘external’ sources other than government. As Brett Neilson points out in this volume, this has meant paying 'increased attention to practical questions and applied outcomes' of a kind that a philosophically orientated theory is often held as being either unwilling or unable to provide, as academics endeavour to deliver research that is deemed economically and socially 'productive', and hence potentially fundable by grant-awarding bodies, research councils, business, entrepreneurs, industry and the like. One reason a humanist ethos and more sociological modes of analysis are today often prioritised over theory, then, is  because, as Neilson puts it, they are quite simply perceived as being 'more amenable to funding bodies'.

 

3.     The rise of the 'new economy' - Neilson is not alone in identifying a link between changes in the economy, the corporate transformation of the university and the decline of theory. Writing in a recent issue of the journal Continuum, Mark Gibson locates a 'surprising enthusiasm for humanist themes', as opposed to the 'anti-humanism' of theory, 'in business management and the educational programmes associated with it', in particular, 'with management gurus extolling the virtues of "creativity" and urging greater attention to subjectivity, intuition and emotion'. And a major factor behind this, for Gibson, 'has been the complex of developments summed up in the idea of  the "new economy", with the premium they have placed on intellectual property and "ideas" as material assets' (Gibson 2004: 1-2).

 

4.     The creation of the 'creative industries' - if neo-liberal cuts to funding for both universities and their students have led to a greater demand for courses with a more or less direct outcome in the job market, this has not resulted merely in the privileging of those areas of study most closely associated with the new 'information economy': business, management, science, technology, IT and so on. There has been a related effect within the arts and humanities, too, as academics specialising in humanist discourses and practices to do with creativity, subjectivity and emotion also now find themselves in favour with research councils, university managers and students-as-paying-customers alike. ('Anti-humanist' theory, by contrast, is not generally regarded as being particularly useful or profitable in this respect - and this despite the fact that theory actually has quite a lot to say about creativity, inventiveness and emotion.)6 Nor is this a one-way street, whereby those aspects of the arts and humanities deemed important and useful in the global 'knowledge economy' are extracted and incorporated into more commercially profitable areas of study. Terry Flew, in the same issue of Continuum, describes something of:

 

a feedback loop in operation, where discourses identified as having their origins in the arts have filtered through to business, and now returned to artistic and cultural practice through the concept of the 'creative industries', where artists are increasingly expected to view themselves as cultural entrepreneurs,  managing their creative talents, personal lives and professional identities in ways that maximise their capacity to achieve financial gain, personal satisfaction and have fun. (Flew 2004: 2)

 

So we're all supposed to be entrepreneurs now, whether we're in business (studies) or not.

 

 

5.     The celebration of the public intellectual - one interesting manifestation of the feedback loop between the arts and humanities and business is the current celebration of the figure of the 'public intellectual', who is able to write reader-friendly pieces for the press and generally get themselves featured in the media and who, by becoming a 'cultural entrepreneur' in this way, is praised for having escaped the restrictive and rarefied atmosphere of the university. It is a desire to make links with the 'outside' of the university that has a certain correspondence, both with the attempt of many within cultural studies to seek authentication and validation for what they do in terms of their ability to connect with some 'real world',  'out there'; and with the subsequent emphasis often placed on avoiding the difficult 'jargon' associated with theory, precisely in order to communicate better - whether as public or organic intellectuals - with ‘ordinary people’. Indeed, could this belief that, as a field of practice, cultural studies is only really important to the extent to which it is able to ally itself to social and political forces and movements external to the academy not be at least one reason why ideas concerning the 'creative industries', 'cultural entrepreneurship' and the 'public intellectual' appear to have found such a happy home within cultural studies at the moment, and have in some places even become dominant?7

 

6.     The lack of time - theory can often be extremely demanding in terms of the time and effort one is required to spend on it: not just thinking about it, but also reading, learning and even understanding it. Thanks to many of the above changes in the institution of the university, however, gone are the days when a scholar could take years, say, to research and write the definitive monograph on a given subject. The current emphasis on productivity, efficiency, league tables, measurable 'outputs' and so forth has placed the majority of academics in a position where they are now under pressure to squeeze out far more research in far less time than was generally the case previously, especially considering everything else they have to do nowadays (like securing external funding, delivering excellent teaching and learning that external reviewers and students rate highly, and dealing with the increased administrative load the contemporary university's 'audit culture' has also produced). The resulting sense of haste and urgency has left many researchers feeling that they just can't afford to spend too long reading and writing difficult texts that frequently require them to slow down, take their time and think, and thus threaten to make them appear unproductive and inefficient in the eyes of colleagues, departmental heads, university managers and funding bodies.

 

7.     Changes to the academic publishing industry - decreases in the level of funding that institutions receive from government sources and the associated corporatisation of the university have also had a marked effect on the academic publishing industry. As both institutions and their students have found it harder and harder to purchase texts, the traditional market for the academic monograph has experienced something of a decline. The response on the part of many academic presses has been to prune their lists, and to focus on publishing accessible Introductions and Readers designed to appeal to the relatively large undergraduate student market instead. Granted, the number of new journals that are regularly being established, in part to meet the need of academics for 'research impact', Research-Assesment-Exersice-submittable publishing opportunities, has compensated for such developments to a certain extent. However, the high and ever increasing prices charged by many publishers of medical, scientific and technical periodicals has meant that a lot of institutional libraries are unable to maintain their current holdings, let alone take out further journal subscriptions. The upshot is that, even if academics can still find the time to write theory-led texts, because theory is seen as 'difficult' and thus not necessarily suitable for undergraduates, it is becoming harder, for less established members of the profession especially, to get such work published and disseminated, in print form at least, and thus read, reviewed, discussed etc.

 

8.     Fashion - no doubt partly for some of the reasons supplied above, theory, at least of the literary/philosophical/critical/cultural kind we are referring to here (there are many other types of theory being produced in places other than the university: by the media, the military, government think-tanks, policy institutes, management consultancies and so on), is not nearly as fashionable or sexy as it once was. When we first presented some of these ideas at an academic conference in the US, a conference very much concerned with the politics of cultural studies in relation to the second Gulf War, one review (in a tongue-in-cheek manner which we actually quite like) put it as follows:

 

A cadre from the UK bordered on heresy by arguing that theory might be our best hope, the last refuge for experimentation and possibility in an age that seeks to make everything function, to turn meandering into instruments, and surrender speculation to financial markets… From the perspective of the new economic turn, these Brits looked like they were auditioning for 'I Love the 80s, Francophile style' when the only nostalgia show allowed in town is the 'I Love the 70s, Birmingham edition'. (Anonymous 2004)

 

9.     The many deaths of theory - there is a feeling that an era has ended: that, especially with the death of Jacques Derrida in 2004, the golden generation of Althusser, Barthes, de Man, Deleuze, Lacan, Lyotard, Foucault et al. has finally come to a close (although one's tempted to ask 'What about the women: Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray and so on?); and that, for all the efforts to champion Agamben, Badiou, Nancy, Stiegler or whoever as the 'next big thing', a new generation truly capable of replacing them has yet to emerge.

 

Such attitudes to theory are of course inflected differently in different cultural analyses. At one end of the spectrum, they amount to the idea that the 'theory moment' was something we had to go through at the time, but it was just a fashion, a craze. Now it's over, now that we've done theory, we can put it back where it belongs in the box of tools labelled 'useful approaches to culture' and get on with the kind of teaching and research we should really have been doing all along, perhaps a little bit altered by the experience, perhaps not.

 

Towards the other end of this continuum is the view that presents theory as having once been radical, innovative and challenging, but as having now been accepted into the mainstream of teaching and research. From this perspective the 'theory wars' are over, the last battle having long since been won. So much so that theory doesn't even need stand-alone courses anymore - one reason it perhaps seems less visible nowadays. In fact, such is the extent of theory's integration that for some it has become almost a new orthodoxy or canon, concerned for the most part merely with the continued application of an unquestioned set of techniques, practices, approaches and strategies. The result is a seemingly endless series of readings producing more or less the same predetermined 'discoveries' of assemblages, aporias, becomings, decentrings, deterritorialisations, flows, immanences, intensities, hauntings, hybridities, networks, nomadic practices, phallocentrisms and spectres as previous generations of theorists. Consequently, most of the really interesting stuff, the cutting edge of intellectual work and thought, is now regarded as taking place elsewhere.

 

Somewhere in between is a position often adopted by those cultural analysts who have at times been willing to employ theory where necessary, at least to the extent that it doesn't create problems for their fundamental conceptions concerning politics, progress, morality, the socio-cultural, what it means to do cultural studies and so forth. This is a view which regards theory as having been useful and important, but which sees its declining influence as a sign that an intellectual reassessment is now taking place; that what is happening is a working through of many of the ideas and arguments that have been so influential since the 1970s, in order to decide what needs to be kept and what discarded, so that we can 'come out the other side' of theory (Gibson 2004: 3), 'after theory', as it were (Eagleton 2003).8

 

10.  9/11 and all that - there is also a sense of 'post-theoretical' political urgency apparent within cultural studies at the moment; an urgency which, especially after 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, is seen as leaving little time for the supposedly elitist, Eurocentric, text-based concerns of Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Irigaray, Kristeva, Butler, Bhabha, Spivak et al.

 

Having outlined some of the reasons that are often given for the apparent waning of theory's influence within cultural studies, we'd like to come back, as promised, to the question of why this ‘new' cultural studies 'generation’ continues to be so interested in theory.

 

There are a number of responses we could give to this question, but we're going to restrict ourselves here to privileging three in particular:

 

1.               The first reason is that theory is frequently concerned with examining and testing the kind of founding ideas, narratives and systems of thought that (as we saw previously with the example of Marxist-inspired left-historical progressive politics) cultural studies all too often relies upon.

 

What's more, we would argue that a lot of the narratives and explanations that have been constructed around theory's supposed demise - the '"decline" of the political left' (McQuillan et al 1999: p.xi), the marketisation of the university, the rise of the new economy and so forth - can and should be included in this. For the waning of theory's influence can no more be simply read off economic, cultural and political changes in history and society, for example, than its rise in the 1960s and 1970s can be attributed to the society of that period. Indeed, as far as we're concerned, if theory is about anything at all, it is about interrogating (which is different from rejecting) such narratives, such easy explanations (especially for what they may marginalise or ignore in their own drive for closure and will to power-knowledge), and acknowledging what remains unknowable and unreadable, and thus resistant to any exhaustive or systematising interpretation; and which, in doing so, draws attention to the limits of our own theory and thinking, too.9

 

It is important to emphasise that such interrogation of founding ideas and narratives is not for its own sake but can rather (and among other things) help us to avoid slipping into what Wendy Brown calls an 'anti-political moralism'. Brown uses this term to refer to a certain ‘resistance’ to thinking through the conditions and assumptions of one’s own discipline; and, in particular, to the consequences for both leftists and liberals of not being able to give up their devotion to previously held notions of politics, progress, morality, sovereignty and so forth. Significantly, theory has been a regular target for moralists, Brown observes, frequently being chastised for its ‘failure’ to tell the left what to struggle for and how to act (2001: 29). Indeed, Brown asserts that 'moralism so loathes overt manifestations of power… that the moralist inevitably feels antipathy toward politics as a domain of open contestation for power and hegemony'; and that 'the identity of the moralist is', in fact, actually 'staked against intellectual questioning that might dismantle the foundations of its own premises; its survival is imperiled by the very practice of open-ended intellectual inquiry’ (2001: 30).

 

Now part of what we want to argue here is that an anti-political moralism is also identifiable in cultural studies. It can be recognised in much of the work that has been done around identity and cultural politics, as Brown shows. But an anti-political moralism is also apparent in many of the calls that were made over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s for cultural studies to move away from the 'self-reflexivity' of theory and return to a concern with ‘real politics': be it in the guise of 'concrete' forms of political activity; or modes of social, historical and economic research and analysis (political economy, social policy etc.) regarded as being more directly connected to 'real-world' issues. Of course, for many, the moral righteousness of such calls to action has been amply borne out by recent events, not least among them the post-September 11 foreign policies of the UK and US governments, which, besides the invasion of Iraq, also include the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, the deployment of white phosphorous bombs during the attack on Fallujah, and use of 'enhanced interrogation techniques' - slapping, freezing, sleep deprivation, near-drowning - by the CIA in secret prisons established outside the protection of US law. Nevertheless, for us, clinging unquestioningly to 'left-political' conceptual frameworks and methods of analysis like this - as if things are basically the same now as they were even just pre-September 11, pre-George W. Bush or pre-Tony Blair and New Labour, at least to the extent it can be simply assumed that positions and practices forged in an earlier era continue to be relevant and applicable today - leads to the kind of anti-political moralism outlined by Brown. The problem is that such moralising occupies the place of and in fact replaces genuine critical interrogation. Indeed, Brown goes so far as to argue that:

 

Despite its righteous insistence on knowing what is True, Valuable, or Important, moralism as a hegemonic form of political expression, a dominant political sensibility, actually marks both analytic impotence and political aimlessness - a misrecognition of the political logics now organizing the world, a concomitant failure to discern any direction for action, and the loss of a clear object of political desire. In particular, the moralizing injunction to act, the contemporary academic formulation of political action as an imperative, might be read as a symptom of political paralysis in the face of radical political disorientation and as a kind of hysterical mask for the despair that attends such paralysis. (2001: 29)

 

               It is no doubt worth stressing that none of this is to suggest that left politics or left forms of political practice and analysis (including those associated with sociology, political economy and so on) should necessarily be abandoned; that all this collapses into some moral relativism on our part and that we are actually arguing against taking a position and maintaining particular political or ethical values when it comes to issues of social justice; or that we ourselves do not identify as being 'of the left'. What it does mean is that we cannot take our ‘politicality’ for granted. In fact, to have certain political 'convictions' fixed and defined in advance is not to be especially political:

 

We do no favour, I think, to politics or to intellectual life by eliminating a productive tension… in order to consolidate certain political claims as the premise of a program of intellectual inquiry…. If consolidated representations of identity and truth are the necessary premise of certain democratic political claims, they also necessarily destroy the openness which the intellectual life required by rich formulations of democracy depends. (2001: 41)

 

For us, as for Brown, we have to be able to 'live with this paradox' (2001: 41). In particular, we have to be able to place our political convictions in question and, in doing so, be open to the specific and contingent demands of each singular conjunction of the 'here' and 'now'. And as part of this, we have to face the possibility that the 'here' and 'now' may change us; that we may indeed have to change if we are to be capable of recognising each such singular conjuncture and respond to it responsibly. (Which is why we would argue that much of theory, while often appearing to be less political than political moralism, is actually capable of being more political: because it does not simply decide what constitutes politics and the political in advance but instead remains open to the complexities of a situation, including the 'real', practical, empirical, experiential, concrete, political or historical complexities.)10 In short, we have to be able to imagine and invent new forms of politics.

 

One way to think of the new cultural studies we are describing here, then, is as the invention of a cultural studies without the mourning, moralism or melancholia Brown sees as symptomatic of much of the left.11 From this point of view theory is regarded by this new generation of cultural studies writers and practitioners as presenting  rigorous, if risky, ways to think cultural studies without necessarily having to resort to teleological or historical narratives of progress, or, depend on epistemological or ontological systems which have their basis in 'nature, fetishized reason, the dialectic, or the divine' (Brown 2001: 42).

 

2. The second reason this ‘new generation’ continues to draw so heavily on theory is that, with its concern for what is ambivalent, complicated, marginalised, remaindered and repressed, theory offers cultural studies means of understanding and thinking through - rather than merely repeating - many of the ambiguities and anxieties, confusions and contradictions, urgencies and uncertainties that radically disrupt and even paralyse cultural studies, but which it has a tendency to deny, disavow, exclude or otherwise downplay in order to maintain its identity as cultural studies. Not least among these, as far as this book is concerned, are the difficult, multiplicitous and often paradoxical relations between politics and theory (see Jeremy Gilbert, 'Cultural Studies and Anti-Capitalism'), modernity and postmodernity, old and new (Gary Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and Deconstruction’), humanism and anti-humanism (Neil Badmington, 'Cultural Studies and the Posthumanities'), the human and the machine (Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, 'Cultural Studies and German Media Theory'), culturalism and structuralism, knowledge and experience (Gregory J. Seigworth, 'Cultural Studies and Gilles Deleuze'), immanence and transcendence, agency and application (Brett Neilson, 'Cultural Studies and Giorgio Agamben').

 

3. Additionally, by opening cultural studies to forms of knowledge and analysis it can comprehend only by reconceiving its identity, theory provides this generation with  ways of thinking cultural studies beyond some of the limits the latter has set to its own powerful and important thinking. To put it another way, this time using the words of Paul Bowman from his chapter in this book: if, as Slavoj Žižek says, cultural studies functions 'as a discourse which pretends to be critically self-reflexive, revealing predominant power relations, while in reality it obfuscates its own mode of participating in them', theory can help cultural studies appreciate and understand this, and even 'to apply some of its own stock insights to itself'. What's more, this is the case not just with regard to questions of politics (see Jeremy Valentine 'Cultural Studies and Post-Marxism'; Brett Neilson, 'Cultural Studies and Giorgio Agamben'; Gary Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and Deconstruction’; and Jeremy Gilbert, 'Cultural Studies and Anti-Capitalism'), but also those of ethics (see Joanna Zylinska, 'Cultural Studies and Ethics’), knowledge (see Clare Birchall, 'Cultural Studies and the Secret'), nationality (see Imre Szeman, ‘Cultural Studies and the Transnational’) and even the human (see Neil Badmington,  'Cultural Studies and the Posthumanities').

 

Our insistence on using terms we have yet to define…

               You may have noticed that we have not attempted to provide a closed definition of that broad range of discourses which are often, but not exclusively, 'associated on the one hand with philosophy, or rather with a critical response to the systematic, totalizing claims of philosophy; and on the other, with the study of literature and of language as the medium to which that critical response appealed'  - a range of discourses it is actually quite 'difficult to classify or to name univocally, for one of the things they share is precisely the radical questioning of all such univocity' (Weber 2000), but which, first in the US, and later elsewhere, have  regularly been placed under the heading of 'theory'. Nor have we sought to provide a tight definition of cultural studies here - assuming that cultural studies and theory can be so easily distinguished in the first place, which is actually by no means certain (see Hall forthcoming) - other than to say that the version with which we are most concerned is that associated with and derived from the work of the Birmingham School; or attempted to account for the differences between, say, British, American and Australian cultural studies (these being the countries perhaps most influenced by the Birmingham School and in which its versions of cultural studies have been most dominant - see Bowman's chapter in this volume; Hall forthcoming). We have instead, for the most part, preferred to leave such questions (relatively) open, and to let the different contributors to New Cultural Studies address the relation between 'theory' and 'cultural studies' in their own specific contexts, in their own singular ways.

 

     Our only condition in this respect has been to insist contributors to New Cultural Studies treat cultural studies with the same degree of care and rigour as any of the theorists or theories they're dealing with. Too often those associated with theory have lamented the way theoretical work has been condemned almost out of hand by people (journalists, the media, academics in other fields and so forth) who don't appear to have read it particularly carefully, if at all, only for the same theorists then to treat cultural studies in a similarly off-hand way. It is a trap we wanted to try to ensure wherever possible that New Cultural Studies did not fall into. We love cultural studies - even if ours is a complicated relationship - and so we've tried to include contributors who love it too.

 

A summary (of sorts)…

               Having so far (conspicuously) failed to provide one of those condensed summaries or orientating overviews that can be helpful when reading a book of this kind, we would now like to go some way towards rectifying this omission. Basically, New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory addresses the question: whither theory's place, position and future with regard to cultural studies now?

 

It does so, first, by introducing some of the most interesting members of this new 'post-Birmingham-School’ generation of cultural studies writers and practitioners: Neil Badmington, Caroline Bassett, Dave Boothroyd, Paul Bowman, Jeremy Gilbert, Julian Murphet, Brett Neilson, Gregory J. Seigworth, Imre Szeman, Jeremy Valentine, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, J. Macgregor Wise and Joanna Zylinska.

 

Second, it does so by providing a guide to the main theories and thinkers that influence and inform their work: Jacques Derrida and deconstruction; the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze; the radical, democratic post-Marxism of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe; Donna Haraway on techno-science; Giorgio Agamben on biopolitics; the Hegelian-Lacanianism of Slavoj Žižek; the ethical philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Alan Badiou; Georges Bataille’s general economics of expenditure; and the German media theory of Friedrich Kittler and Niklas Luhmann - all of which are for the most part still largely marginal in mainstream cultural studies, certainly in the UK, although perhaps slightly less so in the United States and Australia.

 

Having said that, if New Cultural Studies provides a guide to these different theories, it is one that does not simply introduce and explain them; instead it tries to engage readers with such theories head on. In this respect New Cultural Studies is not a book that is uncritical of theory: it is not, for instance, concerned merely with the kind of continued application and enactment (for which one could also read banal and clichéd repetition) of a pre-given set of theories that have been inherited from previous generations of theorists. Far from it. If there is a certain dissatisfaction with cultural studies among this new generation, something similar is recognisable with regard to this kind of easy ‘theoretical fluency’, which, as Paul Bowman notes, also 'indicates institutional comfort and political complacency'.

 

In one attempt on our part to avoid slipping into such institutional comfort here, as well as looking at instances where there is already a recognised relation between cultural studies and certain theorists - Deleuze, Haraway, Laclau and Mouffe, Žižek and so on - New Cultural Studies also examines the work of a number of thinkers who are relatively new even to the arena of theory, and whose work has to date been somewhat underappreciated and underutilised within the English-speaking academy (and certainly within cultural studies). Agamben, Badiou, Kittler and Luhmann could all perhaps be included in this latter category, albeit to varying degrees and extents.

 

Third, this book approaches the question of the place, position and future of theory by exploring some of the new directions and territories currently being mapped out across, and at the intersections of, cultural studies and theory - often, as we say, by people operating outside 'Cultural Studies' spaces and institutions as they are traditionally and most narrowly defined. So, again, New Cultural Studies is concerned with politics, with post-Marxism and with anti-capitalism, of course (and with them Seattle, the 'war on terror’, the attack on Iraq, Guantánamo Bay, the re-election of Bush and Blair, the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes in the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings in London…). But it also looks at recent developments in fields as diverse as architecture, science and new media technology (see Caroline Bassett, 'Cultural Studies and New Media'), not to mention a number of other themes and topics which might initially appear to be somewhat marginal to the cultural studies project, such as the secret and the extreme.

 

          In this way, New Cultural Studies endeavours to provide a guide to theory's past, present and possibly future role in cultural studies, from a perspective that is sympathetic to, but not uncritical of, theory and theoretical ways of thinking.

 

That pesky term ‘new’ in our title…

               In our title, and indeed throughout this book, we use the word 'new' to refer to the particular kind of cultural studies we are describing here.  No doubt some of you will be thinking that:

 

a.      Strictly speaking this is incorrect, and is in fact somewhat contradictory. 'The new proclaims a break, the emergence of something unprecedented, different, and forward looking', James Donald (2004: 2) writes with regard to the 'New Humanism' of Gibson and Flew (2004). Yet the idea of producing something new within cultural studies is of course not new at all, and is actually quite old. The term 'new’ itself provides a case in point, as it is by now quite a well used one, having already been adopted within cultural studies to refer to the 'New Left', 'New Times' (Hall and Jacques, 1990), 'new ethnicities' (Hall 1992b) and indeed 'New Humanism', to name but a few.

 

b.     This is somewhat disrespectful to those who have been doing cultural studies much longer than us and really do know better. We would like to take this opportunity to apologise for any offence we may have caused. We're really very sorry. Honestly, we are. To those committed to the development of cultural studies, we hope that this ‘new’ will excite rather than offend.

 

     Rather than using ‘new’ blindly, then, we are using it provocatively, while being aware of the contradictions and tensions it carries. We understand that positioning something as ‘new’ looks as if we are saying that existing cultural studies work is ‘old’ and somehow ‘out of date’. But we’re not making a point about fashion. We’re not interested in fuelling a passing fad or trend. This is the future of cultural studies we’re talking about, after all, which is something extremely important to both of us. As far as we're concerned, many of the questions that cultural studies has hitherto asked can and must still be asked – it's just that there might be ways of thinking those questions and the answers to them differently. At the same time there also needs to be room in cultural studies for ‘new’ questions and answers.  It is these possibilities that we are endeavouring to explore and experiment with here.

 

     This is perhaps the place to point out that we did actually have a number of alternative titles we were considering, including:

 

·       Experiments in Cultural Studies - this would definitely have captured something of the experimental, inventive, alchemical, provisional feel we wanted. But to be honest, it just seemed a little too a 'hard' science or avant-garde in some of its connotations.

 

·       Adventures in Cultural Studies - we liked this. A lot. Not least because it seemed less dialectic, more provisional and speculative than New Cultural Studies. The reason we didn't go for it in the end is because it also conjured up images of 'boy's own annuals' and men in pith helmets colonising new lands and territories (an obvious 'no no' as far as cultural studies is concerned).

 

 

The mysterious ‘missing’ chapters…

               A reluctance to decide on our politics in advance, and keenness to avoid resorting to 'moralism as anti-politics' especially, is one reason we haven't adhered to a 'checklist formula' when deciding on themes, subjects, contributors and contributions for this volume. You know the kind of thing: 'Have we got a chapter on gender? Check! Race? Check! Sexuality? Check!… '

 

               Among other reasons for passing on such chapters are these:

 

·       We didn’t want to succumb to the pressure to be 'politically correct' – or, at the same time, to resort to knee-jerk, stereotypical condemnations of 'political correctness'. Both responses would have represented a kind of moralistic 'righteousness' and 'defensiveness' on our part, and would in effect have constituted an 'anti-political' 'refusal of the very intellectual and political agonism that one expects to find celebrated in left and liberal thinking' (Brown,, 2001: 37).

 

·       The assumption that often underpins this 'checklist' approach - that the ultimate aim of all examination and enquiry is to arrive at the politics of a given subject, be it seen in terms of  class, race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality or whatever - marginalises and excludes other possible readings: readings which do not place politics, moralistically, in a position where it is always already known and decided  upon in advance; and which make allowances both for a text's singularity and its performative possibilities.

 

·       There is no guarantee that someone from, say, India or Korea or Chile will not harbour 'Western' or 'Northern' ideas. To think otherwise is to essentialise such identities. To quote Wendy Brown one last time (and if we have referred to her  more than most in this chapter, it's because Brown's work is one of the places in which the relation between cultural theory and politics has been addressed most interestingly and productively in recent years), including a diversity of perspectives is too often simply 'equated with populating a panel or a syllabus or an anthology with those who are formally - or, more precisely, phenotypically, physiologically, or behaviourally - marked as “diverse”' (2001: 38).

 

·       Let's face it, there are already a lot of books in cultural studies and cultural theory which deal directly and explicitly with class, race, gender and sexuality.

 

·       Besides, we are still dealing with these issues, albeit often in less direct or obvious ways. The chapter by Neil Badmington on 'Cultural Studies and the Posthumanities', to take just one example, engages with the way in which theory has reconceived identity politics. In doing so this chapter prompts us to think through developments in post-feminism and sexuality as well as ethnicity.

 

 

Talking about new cultural studies before it happens…

               It's important to realise that our earlier claim to be merely describing the work of this 'new generation' of cultural studies writers and practitioners is not entirely accurate, and perhaps even a little disingenuous.

 

OK, for ease of access we have divided the book up into four parts: First, there are the chapters that position the concerns of cultural studies in relation to another more or less coherent and distinct form of thought: deconstruction, post-Marxism, ethics and German media theory.  A second group of chapters does something similar with the work of a single author: Deleuze, Agamben, Badiou, Žižek.  A third confronts cultural studies with sites of recent social, political or technological transformation: anti-capitalist movements, the transnational, and new media.  Four final chapters, on Koolhass' Project on the City, the posthumanities, the extreme and the secret respectively, bid to rethink cultural studies from the point of view of a particular theme, approach or concept that is actually incredibly important to it, but that cultural studies has, to date, otherwise tended to marginalise, exclude, delimit or ignore.

 

However, we're not just introducing this 'new cultural studies' and describing some ready-made end product here. We're also inventing it, in the sense that this book may play a part in transforming and so creating the context and environment in which this new cultural studies can be read and understood. In other words, as well as plotting the development of previous and existing traditions of cultural studies, New Cultural Studies is gesturing towards the forging of its own - a cultural studies which (at least in the case of the contributors to this book) is conceived and thought through the work of Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Giorgio Agamben, Friedrich Kittler, Donna Haraway, Alain Badiou, Emmanuel Levinas, and/or Georges Bataille et al as well as that of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Lawrence Grossberg, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Tony Bennett, bell hooks, Angela McRobbie, Meaghan Morris, Tricia Rose, Henry Giroux, Paul Gilroy or the Birmingham School. Indeed, diverse though they may be, a feature we would suggest most of the contributors to this book can perhaps be said to share or have in common in one way or another is precisely a willingness to rethink and reinvent cultural studies -to question what the possibilities of doing cultural research can be and to explore and experiment with thinking them differently and otherwise, and thus, by remaining open to the irruption of otherness or alterity, to imagine a new cultural studies - and to draw on theory in some shape or form for help in doing so. In short, this book and its account of new cultural studies and this new generation are performative, in that the book is producing the very thing of which it speaks: it is inventing this new cultural studies, and also the new generation that is creating it. (Since one of the things that links writers as diverse as Agamben, Deleuze, Derrida and even Koolhaas is the emphasis they place on the performative aspect of their work - the way their texts function as catachresis, producing the things of which they  write, as well as the norms and laws which validate and legitimise them, thus constituting singular, active, 'practical' events, gestures and interventions into the here-and-now space and functioning of culture and the institution - responding to a cultural studies that is being thought through theory in this way seems to us rather appropriate.) As Macgregor Wise (quoting Elizabeth Grosz) contends with regard to Koolhaas' Project on the City, then, the chapters in this book:

 

…could, more in keeping with the thinking of Gilles Deleuze, be read and used more productively as little bombs that, when they do not explode in one’s face (as bombs are inclined to do), scatter thoughts and images into different linkages or new alignments without necessarily destroying them. Ideally, they produce unexpected intensities, peculiar sites of indifference, new connections with other objects, and thus generate affective and conceptual transformations that problematize, challenge, and move beyond existing intellectual and pragmatic frameworks. (Grosz 2001: 58)

 

Producing a 'little bomb' of our own …

               With this performative aspect in mind, we wanted to experiment to some extent with making this opening chapter slightly different in its form, too.  Sure, for the most part New Cultural Studies adopts the familiar guise of a cultural studies collection or 'critical reader', consisting of a number of essays devoted to introducing a specific aspect of cultural studies' relation to theory. In line with our commitment to what we might hesitatingly call a 'performative' cultural studies, however, we have supplemented this traditional book format with an experimental, playful, provocative 'introduction' intended to disrupt the reader’s expectations a little. In this way, New Cultural Studies not only provides a guide to some of the most interesting new ways currently available of thinking about culture, but also endeavours to (keep) open a future for cultural studies, and for theory, that is somewhat different from many of those currently on offer. In short, this book is at once catering to an existing audience and trying to encourage that audience to reinvent itself, to think cultural studies differently and otherwise, and create a 'new cultural studies'. In this sense, this opening chapter, and with it this book, could indeed be seen as cultural studies 'stuttering, trembling, trying out new resonances, new rhythms', to quote J. Macgregor Wise once again.

 

On not copping out…

               It's perhaps just worth stressing that by turning to these self-reflexive questions and to theory, we are not seeking shelter from the 'global uncertainty' about

 politics (as the  mandate of the 2004 'Crossroads in Cultural Studies' conference put it). Nor are we advocating political silence or moral indifference. Rather, New Cultural Studies is endeavouring to reposition cultural theory and reaffirm its continuing intellectual, and indeed 'political' (and 'ethical'), relevance to cultural studies, and to culture and society at large. By so doing New Cultural Studies is attempting to invent a cultural studies which comes after Gramsci, Hall the Birmingham School and so on in all senses of the word after: not just as in following on from, coming afterwards and in reaction to, but also in the footsteps and in the tradition of. A cultural studies, in other words, which neither abandons nor simply affirms the cultural studies tradition, but which rather repeats the difference and the inventiveness of that tradition, along with its disruptive force and performative affect, in order to explore and experiment with some of the possibilities for doing cultural studies after Birmingham, but after theory, too.

 

Our reticence to summarise our contributors’ arguments before they do…

               To summarise the different ways in which each member of this ‘new generation' featured here engages with such questions would not only take too long, it would lack the ‘performative’ aspect we are saying is for us a crucial feature of this ‘new’ cultural studies (in the sense that we would be trying to describe and explain it rather than enacting it and making it happen). So the editors would like to move the proceedings on and let the contributors to this book perform this new cultural studies each in their own singular ways…

 

                                   … But not before noting that, as we hope the reader has by now realised, this list of what one could almost call 'errata' is intended to flag up the risks that any investment in the ‘new’ entails. What may to some appear like ‘errors’ are exciting to us; we feel that cultural studies is robust enough to experiment with what Lyotard would call ‘paralogic moves’ (Lyotard 1984). Cultural studies can face the challenges of a future we do not yet, or perhaps cannot ever, know, not by assimilating the ‘new’, but by opening itself to it.

 

 

 

Endnotes

1. As Johan Fornäs writes, 'Cultural studies has widely diverse roots and routes in different world regions, and though globally dominant, the one that goes through the Birmingham CCCS is only one of several trajectories' (Fornäs 2005: 4-5). There are many other important and interesting versions of cultural studies - and of theory - associated with other times, countries and regions throughout the world. Indeed, a strong feature of cultural studies is its inter- and transdisciplinarity, intellectual diversity and geographical dispersion.  Any rigorous and responsible engagement on our part here with the whole of cultural studies - even presuming such a thing were conceivable, which it's not, not least because, for us (as with culture for Derrida), what is proper to cultural studies is to not be identical to itself - is thus clearly impossible. Consequently, it is the version of cultural studies that was developed in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and which is most closely associated with Britain and Birmingham that we have for the most part chosen to focus upon and engage with in this book: not least because, for many, this is where cultural studies first emerged; but also because this is the version that still tends to dominate (see Fornäs 2005: 3).

 

For more on the history of cultural studies at Birmingham, see: Grossberg (1997); Hall (1980, 1990, 1992, 1996); Hoggart (1992); Johnson (1983); Webster (2004). For a recent attempt to capture something of the flavour of cultural studies internationally, see Abbas and Erni (2005), as well as Szeman in this volume.

 

2. Different attempts to encapsulate or otherwise define cultural studies occur throughout this book. Julian Murphet's chapter on Badiou, for instance, cites both Nick Couldry's description of cultural studies as a quest for a ‘common culture’ (2000: 142), and Simon During's grouping of the 'panoply of cultural studies trajectories under three modalities: Cultural studies "takes into account the perspective of the marginalized and oppressed; it nurtures cultural celebration and affirmation, and encourages fandom; and it aims to frame its analyses and critiques in relation to everyday life"' (2005: 214).

 

3. It’s important to point out that not all of this new generation would entirely agree with Brown's reading of history here (or with every aspect of our interrogation of cultural studies' politics, for that matter). After all, is Brown's own analysis not itself underpinned by a resort to a legitimating grand narrative: the idea that something has changed historically; that where certain narratives and foundational presuppositions concerning politics, progress, rights, sovereignty and so forth once held, now they have been eroded; that the epistemological and ontological bases of sovereignty and rights have recently been 'challenged' or 'exposed' where once they weren't?

 

4. For an interesting recent exception that introduces and explains the importance to cultural studies of a number of cultural theorists, including Judith Butler, Fredric Jameson and Homi K. Bhabha, see McRobbie (2005).

 

5. See Castells (1996) for what is merely one of the best-known instances. A more recent example is provided by Rossiter's research on 'organised networks'. See Lovink and Rossiter (2005).

 

6. For two recent examples drawn from the field of literary studies, see Attridge (2004) and Clark (2005). For more on the revived emphasis on creativity, imagination, experience and so on within contemporary cultural studies, see Gregory J. Seigworth's chapter on 'Cultural Studies and Gilles Deleuze' in this volume.

 

7. With respect to cultural studies in Australia, for example, Simon During writes:

 

Nowadays Australian cultural studies is increasingly normalised, concentrating on cultural policy studies and, often uncritically, on popular culture and the media. Indeed it is in Australia that the celebration of popular culture as a liberating force… first took off through Fiske and Hartley’s contributions. The young populists of the seventies now hold senior posts and what was pathbreaking is becoming a norm. The readiness of a succession of Australian governments to encourage enterprise universities has empowered the old tertiary technical training departments in such areas as communications, allowing them to have an impact on more abstract and theorised cultural studies in ways that appear to have deprived the latter of critical force. Furthermore, the structure of research funding, which asks even young academics to apply for grants, has had a conformist effect. Perhaps Australian cultural studies offers us a glimpse of what the discipline would be like were it to become relatively hegemonic in the humanities.

(During 2005: 26; cited by Gregg 2005. See also the ensuing discussion on the csaa forum http://www.csaa.asn.au/discussion/emaillists.php)

 

8. Gibson gives the example of Paul Gilroy's 'turn from his anti-humanist past' to talk in recent books such as Between Camps (2000) and After Empire (2004) of a 'planetary humanism' (Gibson 2004: 3). Yet can theory simply be added to ideas and concepts - of politics, progress and so forth - it is frequently concerned with placing in question? And what is the other side of theory anyway? Can modes of thought as taken up with interrogating ideas of identity and difference as psychoanalysis or deconstruction be said to have an 'other' side in any such simple sense? Is theory - or even French feminism, say, or post-Marxism - so self-identical a body of thought as to enable it to be treated in this way?

 

It's also worth remembering that announcements of the death of theory are almost as old as theory itself. As Derrida put it with regard to deconstruction:

 

from the very beginning… people have been saying… it's waning, it's on the wane. I've heard this for at least twenty-five years: it is finished, it is dying. Why do I say dying? It is dead! I tell you it's dead!… I'm totally convinced that deconstruction started dying from the very first day. (Derrida 1996: 224-5)

 

In a strange kind of way nothing could be said to provide more evidence of the continued life of theory than the regular pronouncements of its death - as the fact that it is felt necessary to keep on repeating at regular intervals that something is dead or dying only testifies to its continuing survival.

 

9. For more on the limits of theory, see Dave Boothroyd's chapter in this volume and Hall (forthcoming)

 

 

10. For instance, given that, as we saw earlier, the current tendency in cultural studies to move away from theory and towards politics is in many ways motivated by neo-liberalism and the 'new economy', we would argue that this is not necessarily nearly as radical a 'political' thing to do as many on the left seem to think. In fact, it is often quite conservative.

 

11. For more on cultural studies as moralism, see Birchall (2006) as well as Zylinska (2005) and in this volume.

 

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