Does Cultural Studies Have Futures? Should It? (Or What's the Matter With New York?)

Abstract This paper examines the state of cultural studies, primarily in the United States and Northern Europe. Arguing for a radically contextualist and conjuncturalist understanding of the project of cultural studies, it suggests that cultural studies emerged in particular forms as a response to a particular geo-historical conjuncture. However, while the conjuncture has changed significantly, these older forms of cultural studies have congealed into a ''center'' that has limited its ability to contribute to a better understanding of ''what's going on,'' of the possible future and the realities and possibilities of both domination and contestation. The paper suggests an understanding of the present conjuncture as a struggle, from both the right and the left, against liberal modernity and the attempt to shape an alternative modernity as the future. It suggests some of the ways cultural studies might have to rethink itself if it is to respond to this conjuncture. Keywords: cultural studiescontextconjuncturemodernityalternative modernities Notes 1. This paper was first given as the keynote at the Fifth Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference, Urbana, Illinois 2004. Some of the ideas are elaborated in my 'Stuart Hall, cultural studies and the philosophy of conjuncturalism', delivered at the University of the West Indies (Jamaica) in the summer of 2004 and to be published in Brian Meeks (Ed.). Culture, politics, race and diaspora: The thought of Stuart Hall (Kingston: Ian Randle 2006) I would also like to thank Stuart Hall, Eduardo Restrepo, Doreen Massey, John Erni, and Rainer Winter for their valuable critical responses to earlier drafts as well as my colleagues (John Pickles, Arturo Escobar) and graduate students for ongoing conversations. 2. I have in mind here such things as audience studies, consumption studies, subculture studies, etc, but also, various reifications of identity politics. 3. I use this phrase to both signal a connection with and a distance from the project of Foucault. Although I do think Foucault is a radical contextualist, his theory of the context – and the level of abstraction on which he operates – is significantly different from that which I will present here as the practice of cultural studies. To put it simply, Foucault does not operate at the level of the conjuncture but rather at the level of what we might call, with a nod to Heidegger, the epoch – although Foucault's epochs are not quite the same as Heidegger's. 4. See Laclau (1996 Laclau, E. 1996. Emancipations, London: Verso. Google Scholar). 5. Although I am primarily drawing upon the work and words of Stuart Hall, I believe this commitment is visible generally in the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, as well as in other cultural studies figures such as Raymond Williams. Let me be clear here. I am not claiming that Williams, or all the early people involved at the Centre were self-consciously radical contextualists. I do think that this is what the practice was pointing towards, although the vocabulary to describe it may not have been there. And of course, the commitment may have been more or less strong (and more or less conscious) in different practices and practitioners. But as Stuart Hall recently told me (personal conversation 10 April 2005), 'Never trust the teller, trust the tale'. 6. I do not see much evidence that much of what claims to be cultural studies, not only in the US but also in many of the other North Atlantic (Euro-modern) parts of the world, has gone through this moment of self-reflection. Instead, all too frequently, critical work has forged another kind of insularity by making self-reflection into a form of self-involvement, becoming too inward looking and personal. As Doreen Massey has observed (personal conversation, 18 April 2005) it has become too easy for critical intellectuals to focus on questions of personal – internal – identity and memory, on the West and the cities in which the authors live. 7. Stuart Hall, personal conversation, 10 April 2005. 8. This may be slightly different than Foucault's notion of the relations of a non-relation. 9. The conjunctural model of cultural studies that I am alluding to here is commonly associated with the work done in Britain, around the twin poles of race and Thatcherism, by Hall (1988 Hall, S. 1988. The Hard Road to renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left, London: Verso. Google Scholar), Gilroy (1987 Gilroy, P. 1987. There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, London: Hutchinson. Google Scholar), Clarke (1991 Clarke, J. 1991. New Times and Old Enemies, London: Harper Collins. Google Scholar) and others, in such important and exemplary works as Policing the Crisis (Hall et al. 1978 Hall, S., Critcher, T., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. and Roberts, B. 1978. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, London: Macmillan. Crossref , Google Scholar) and The Empire Strikes Back (Centre 1982 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. 1982. The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain, London: Hutchinson. Google Scholar) Of course, there is much more to the Gramsci invented by this reading than just a conjunctural model of cultural studies' contextualism; notions of hegemony, common sense, organic intellectuals, etc also played an important role in transforming cultural studies, and its approach to contemporary political struggles. I must add that too often, Foucault is read without the key concept of articulation (and as a corollary, the differentiated unity or totality. See Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); and Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended (New York: Picador, 2003). 10. Stuart Hall and Bill Schwarz, unpublished interviews, 2004. 11. Theories, like conjuncturalism, which assume a fractured sociality, have to face, it seems to me, the question – explicit in Marx, Weber, Durkheim, etc – of how society is possible without the assumed unity guaranteed through notions such as mechanical solidarity or the commonality assumed in images of community. How is society possible if one assumes difference, dissensus and even a certain limited relativism. Presumably one would want to avoid both the violent revolutionary utopianism of certain readings of Marx, and the self-legitimating narratives of organic solidarity (the contractual basis of social relations) or bureaucracy. How is a society built on dissensus without perpetual violence, possible? 12. Stuart Hall and Bill Schwarz, unpublished interview, 2004. 13. Stuart Hall and Bill Schwarz, unpublished interview, 2004. 14. This offers the possibility of conjuncturally rethinking the particular/universal dichotomy. 15. We need to investigate the emerging form of what Carl Schmitt called the 'nomos' of the world. See Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 16. I am not suggesting any necessary relation between knowledge and politics here, but rather mean to point to the possibilities of their articulation. I am grateful for Eduardo Restrepo for pointing this out to me. 17. Stuart Hall and Bill Schwarz, unpublished interviews, 2004. 18. I realize that much of what I am ungenerously describing as boring is not boring to many other people. What I mean by boring is: politically irrelevant, oversimplified, built on intellectual and political guarantees, lacking the unique articulation of theoretical and empirical work that characterizes the best of cultural studies, and hence, work that fails to cut into the concrete complexities of the conjuncture. 19. It is unclear what happened to the 'feeling' in Williams' notion of a structure of feeling. 20. This has opened up recently into an emergent – and interesting – alternative center for cultural studies, one more engaged politically, built at the intersection of social movements and community activism, although in the end, for the most part, I do not think this formulation escapes the problems I am describing here. 21. In an Althusserian rather than a Foucauldean sense. 22. I am grateful to Charles Acland for sharing with me some of his ongoing researches that seem to lend credibility to this hypothesis. 23. Might this help to explain why the US continues to be so strongly and deeply anti-communist, while it seemingly allows articulations of fascism to exist within its political and geographical spaces? 24. As in Laclau and Mouffe's notion of a frontier, or in terms of a logic of difference (or incorporation) and the threat of transgression. Such formalist solutions are simply examples of a broader tendency to assume that social analysis can be replaced by philosophical and/or aesthetic categories, as if the social world simply exemplified our theoretical solutions. 25. See Dubois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880, New York: Free Press, 1992. 26. For example, my research with youth suggests that kids today organize their musical relationships differently. If in previous moments since the Second World War, kids tended to define themselves by the necessity of certain exclusive definitions of their musical tastes, kids today seem to have more flexible, fluid and eclectic tastes apparatuses. And so, being an aficionado totally devoted to and defined by a single musical form or genre has become increasingly 'uncool'. I do not claim to know what this means, but it does seem to challenge much that we have taken for granted about how music matters and works. 27. Bob Jessop's work on 'cultural political economy' is a good example of the limits. 28. At its best, in the work of Tony Bennett, James Hay, George Yudice, Toby Miller, etc 29. Let me assure you that I am not assuming empirical stands opposed to discursive. I just mean that the empirical cannot be reduced to the discursive, that it exceeds the discursive. 30. There is a lot of interesting and sophisticated analysis taking place outside the academy, around the Social Forum movement, the Global Justice movement, the precariat movement, etc This journal is hoping to publish translations of some of the work around the notion of the precariat soon. 31. Recently, the EU announced that companies would be allowed to submit their financial reports according to the accounting requirements of the United States rather than those of the EU under certain circumstances. Oddly, no one I asked understood what this meant, or what its consequences might be, or how to talk about it in cultural studies terms as it were. Some of this work is already in process – in economics, heterodoxy flourishes, whether in the various Marxist schools, including regulation school, and the Rethinking Marxism group, or various institutional and social economics (including followers of Veblen, Polanyi and Braudel), feminist economist, economic geographers, post-autistic economics networks, postmodern and complexity economics, various histories of economics, and various autonomous movement groups, etc. Not surprisingly, much of this work is marginalized within the disciplines. But we should have always and already known that the apparent unity of disciplines usually hides rich diversity. Also not surprisingly, much of heterodox economics is unhelpful for cultural studies. Within cultural studies and affiliated disciplines (anthropology, geography, etc), there are also many people who have already begun to do some of this work. There are also interesting developments in business schools (e.g. work on the history of accounting as discursive formations). 32. See the important work of Gibson-Graham here. 33. Some of this work is already in process – within the disciplines of political science by people as diverse as: Jodi Dean, Mike Shapiro, Wendy Brown, William Connolly, Etienne Balibar, etc. 34. I might offer the trivial example of how changes in book distribution (and publishing) have transformed the terrain of political possibilities. 35. Eduardo Restrepo, personal conversation, May 2005. For the beginnings of such a project, see my 'The Victory of Culture, part 1 (Against the Logic of Mediation), Angelaki, vol. 3, no. 3 (1998), pp. 3–30. 36. We have not yet had the conversation about how we are using context – and we have not debated the relative merits of the various philosophical elaborations of context (and nominalism): Marx's historical specificity (and mode of production, or Jameson's cognitive mapping), Foucault's discursive formation (and diagram), Deleuze and Guattari's milieu (and machinic assemblage), pragmatism's situation (and symbolic action), etc. It remains an open question whether each of these views is equally useful for cultural studies and what the consequences or implications of adopting each would be for cultural studies. 37. Consequently, a commitment to relationality is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a commitment to radical contextuality. 38. See the important work of Warren Montag on rereading Spinoza. 39. Here, one might look at the exemplary work embodied in the InterAsia project, or in the work of various networks operating in Latin American cultural studies, including the Coloniality/Modernity group. A future issue of Cultural Studies will present some of the work of this latter group. 40. The 'red states' refers to those in which the electoral majority supported Bush over Kerry in the election. Closer examination of the voting patterns completely contradicts the assumption that there are red states and blue states (the latter being those that voted for Kerry). Not only does the assumption ignore the multiplicity and complexity of electoral results (citizens voted for more than just president, often in complicated patterns), it also demonstrates that there are red and blue areas within every state.