Globalization is ordinary The transnationalization of

John Kraniauskas

The institutionalization and codification of Cultural field of critical enquiry endowed, nevertheless, with Studies continue apace. This is evident, for example, a set of both languages and local histories. At its in the recurring debates and anxieties about dis- most institutionally radical it is an anti-disciplinary ciplinary boundaries, artistic and ethical values, discipline with a multitude of practitioners working, and the de-radicalization of Cultural Studies itself. on the one hand, at the boundaries between disciplines Meanwhile, an apparently endless stream of publica- and, on the other, in response to social movements and tions – readers, textbooks and collections of (more even political parties, with an eye to illuminating the or less) concrete analyses – feeds the demands of ways in which relations of power are experienced in teachers and students in higher education. Cultural everyday life.3 Studies has become a complex institutional UK- and USA-centred assemblage whose parameters are never- Consumption without production theless transnational, organized around publishers (Routledge, Sage, Duke University Press), journals However, in her important essay ʻBanality in Cul- (Cultural Studies, Public , New Formations, tural Studiesʼ, published in 1988, the Australian critic Positions, The Journal of Latin American Cultural Meaghan Morris had spotted the populist spectre haunt- Studies (Travesía), Social Text, differences, the ing the field in the form of a rhetoric or repeatable style recently launched Keywords) and key pedagogic that seemed to confirm not only its institutionalization sites (from the Birmingham Centre for Contem- but also its industrialization as an intellectual product: porary Cultural Studies, the Open University and having read one cultural study, one increasingly had 4 Goldsmithsʼ College in the UK, passing through the the feeling of having read them all. The key to this Duke and Chapel Hill universities of the North Caro- experience is to be found, Morris suggests, in a gen- lina Research Triangle in the USA, to the Center eralized overvaluation of the power of ʻthe peopleʼ to for Cultural Studies at Taiwanʼs National Tsing Hua read creatively and to appropriate the products of mass University). Recently, its programmes and confer- culture in such a way that the particularities of their ences have begun to attract sponsors – the Ford and mode of production, and its determinations, are erased. Rockefeller Foundations being interested players in Such a populism emerges in a narcissistic simulacrum the USA and beyond. There is even a star system of identity ʻbetween the knowing subject of cultural that provides a set of biographies around which to studies, and a collective subject, the “people”ʼ. The emplot its history (Richard Hoggart, Raymond Wil- latter, she goes on, 1 liams, Stuart Hall). For some time now, we have have no necessary defining characteristics – except been living through a boom in Cultural Studies. an indomitable capacity to ʻnegotiateʼ readings, Forty years after the publication of Raymond Wil- generate new interpretations and remake the materi- liamsʼs janus-faced pair of texts Culture and Society, als of culture. … So against the hegemonic force of the dominant classes, ʻthe peopleʼ in fact represent 1780–1950 and ʻCulture is Ordinaryʼ – the first the most creative energies and functions of critical bidding farewell to one tradition of thinking about reading. In the end they are not simply the cultural ʻcultureʼ and the ʻmassesʼ, and the second inaugurat- studentʼs object of study, and his native informants. ing another, more radical, engaged and democratic The people are also the textually delegated, allegori- 5 one2 – Cultural Studies is an almost unmappable cal emblem of the criticʼs own activity.

Radical Philosophy 90 (July/August 1998) 9 The textual alliance – or political ventriloquism this or that study being populist in intent. It is rather – Morris discovers in the populism of British Cultural that populism – its problematic as sketched by Morris Studies in the 1980s thus has an identifiable conceptual – is a constitutive dimension of the field of Cultural site: an idea of consumption without production – in Studies itself.8 There are theoretical and historical which ʻproductionʼ would stand for non-populist social reasons for this. particularity and/or the ignored materiality of historical The critical concept of ʻcultureʼ associated with and ideological determination, whilst ʻconsumptionʼ is Cultural Studies emerged in dialogue, and indeed transformed into a Bakhtinian realm of freedom.6 conflict, not only with the sedimented conservative This clearly demands to be read as an inversion of concept of ʻcultureʼ associated with the cultivation the position associated with the ideology-critique of of taste, but also with traditional Western Marxist the Frankfurt School, which can be formulated for our concepts of ʻideologyʼ, associated with Lukács (a com- purposes here as a production without consumption modity-centred ʻfalse consciousnessʼ) and Althusser (a – in which the abstract logics of commodification state-centred reproduction of structures via ʻinterpella- and instrumental reason (ideology) incorporate the tionʼ). It is possible to trace the history of this conflict consumer-reader into the realm of necessity, without and dialogue not only in the work of both Williams and remainder. There productivity of consumption was Hall but also in the hugely influential historiography reduced to reproduction. From this point of view, it is of E.P. Thompson and those such as Raphael Samuel possible to interpret ʻBritish Cultural Studiesʼ – or at associated with the journal History Workshop, as well least those examples with which Morris is concerned as in the studies of the Birmingham Centre. Such – as a populist and uncritical attempt at rescuing ʻthe conceptions of ideology, whilst enhancing the inter- peopleʼ (who consume) from the prison-house of ideo- pretative power (the ) of intellectuals logical determination.7 – who reveal the historical truth behind the ideological Arguably, in her critique of this particular turn in illusions that (a) institute a social process of forgetting, Cultural Studies, Morris delineates the core theoretical and (b) motivate always already recuperable political and political space of the field itself. It would not, action – radically de-historicize and disempower the therefore, be the case that it fell into populism in the constituencies they present themselves as represent- 1980s after the waning in influence of the Birmingham ing. In the uncritical use of the traditional concept of Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (which, like ʻideologyʼ there is always a danger of a redoubling so many other cultural critics, she mourns) and the of the ideological effect through which enlightened rise of Thatcherism. Nor is it merely a question of intellectual power is installed – the place from where

10 Radical Philosophy 90 (July/August 1998) the diagnosis of ʻideologyʼ is enunciated – and the ʻideologyʼ needs a conception of culture. The early subaltern subalternized. work of Williams and Thompson has been identified The Cultural Studies concept of ʻcultureʼ thus strug- with the ʻself-makingʼ culturalist (and populist) side of gles with the idea that it is possible to recuperate the this tense theoretical space – the key contested term real knowledges, histories, memories and practices of in the 1970s being ʻexperienceʼ rather than ʻconsump- these constituencies – configured usually according tionʼ – whilst the Cultural Studies associated with to ʻraceʼ, class, gender or age – to be found in the the Birmingham Centre may be identified with the very heartland of ʻideologyʼ: for example, in reading side of the ʻideologistsʼ, in which recovered forms of as an activity that may use objects and texts in ways resistance were usually shown in the last instance to not established in their codification or production.9 be structurally overdetermined. In this sense, it extends the democratizing gesture The simulacral gesture of British Cultural Studies of the anthropological concept of culture as a ʻwhole as described by Morris – however problematic – would, way of lifeʼ into ideology, whilst – at its non-populist therefore, seem to respond to a constitutively anti- best – recognizing the power of existing structures, ideological and recuperative dimension of the critical including the intellectual elitism of the ideology of concept of ʻcultureʼ that produces Cultural Studies ʻideologyʼ: culture, now, as a ʻwhole way of struggleʼ.10 itself. Her example of populism – of consumption Rather than the mere valorization of popular or mass without production – even takes the step of appear- cultural forms as such, it is this cultural work of recov- ing to enable ʻthe peopleʼ to share in the speaking ery that constitutes the populism that Cultural Studies of cultural study. From a more literary point of view must – perhaps rightly – risk and pass through. For a than Morrisʼs, one might appreciate the radical char- concept of ʻcultureʼ that refuses to recognize the power acter of such a gesture as a symbolic act, a kind of of ideology, be it in the form of commodification and utopian fiction of intellectual de-subalternization: how interpellation, or in the epistemic violence that intel- is political responsibility re-presented in the grammar lectually disempowers, surely does fall into a form of of critique? But because it forgets ʻproductionʼ and populism that is, in effect, a celebration of the given, displays no appreciation of the real effects of ʻideol- reproducing the ʻideological effectʼ of which it is criti- ogyʼ – which in this case seem rather to be disavowed cal: hegemonic capture through ʻmisrecognitionʼ. From – such a gesture remains entrapped by a populism (the this point of view, a critical concept of ʻcultureʼ needs political diagnosis of ʻculturalismʼ) that is voluntaristic a conception of ideology, just as a critical concept of at best, a ventriloquism at worst, but that is, never-

Radical Philosophy 90 (July/August 1998) 11 theless, in some sense a stylistic extension of a demand of subjecthood) so that consent to rule is ideology;12 which is constitutive of the Cultural Studies endeavour or, it can seem to weaken it, in so far as it also in the first place. envisions a politics of alliance which would include negotiation with, and the satisfaction of, alternative ‘Critical culture’ corporate needs, desires and fantasies (ʻinterestsʼ in a The problematic constitutive of the radicalized field of more Leninist theory of ideology). In this case, forces Cultural Studies in the 1970s is perhaps best formu- of counter-hegemony are endowed with transformative lated as follows: ideology without culture is (histori- agency, a material ʻothernessʼ that hegemonic rule cally) empty, culture without ideology is (politically) must recognize so as to incorporate. Here negotiation, blind. These are the parameters of the conceptual site even rearticulation (as in Hallʼs analysis of Thatcher- from which the critical concept of culture emerges, ism as an ʻauthoritarian populismʼ), disturbs the power in a ʻpopulistʼ tussle with ʻideologyʼ. At this point of ideology. Second, when the political field is thought another keyword must be brought to bear: hegemony. from the point of view of hegemony, the more abstract One of the main theoretical functions of the concept of determinations associated with the economic instance hegemony is precisely to mediate the tensions outlined (such as class) tend to recede with concretion. Their above between the concepts of ʻcultureʼ and ʻideologyʼ. place is taken by new subject positions that are at once It is the theoretical space from which it is possible to polarized and meshed:13 the dominant and the domi- describe Cultural Studies as simultaneously a move nated, the hegemonic bloc and the subaltern, the ruling away from Marxism and a move into Marxism.11 classes and ʻthe peopleʼ – which, of course, doubles as ʻHegemonyʼ works in two directions at once: making the key legitimizing concept of modern politics. Thus ideology concrete, and everyday life political. It is the concept of hegemony produces counter-hegemony the principal mechanism through which the ideas of as popular, the work of ʻthe peopleʼ, and suitable for the ruling class become general (ideology) so that cultural recuperation against ideology. their rule is lived (culture) as consent. Hegemony This is a minimal diagram of the relations between fastens the state into everyday life and everyday life the core concepts of Cultural Studies established during into the state. This is one way in which ʻhegemonyʼ, the 1960s and 1970s. According to Dennis Dworkin, famously, undermines the epistemological value of the the not-so-secret cargo of Cultural Studies was the ʻbase–superstructureʼ metaphor. production of a postwar local cultural Marxism in Although not populist as such, the concept of Britain, which reached its peak in the second half of ʻhegemonyʼ does tend to reinforce the populist dimen- the 1970s.14 I agree. Indeed, I would go so far as to sion of Cultural Studies in two related ways: by weak- suggest that the critical concept of culture developed ening the grasp of ideology and focusing attention on in dialogue with the concepts of ideology and heg- popular agency. First, the idea of ʻconsentʼ can either emony constitutes an extension and renewal of Western strengthen the power of ideological incorporation Marxism in a post-imperial UK, the intellectual subject without remainder (as in Althusserʼs development of of which would be collective, dispersed and even it in the theory of interpellation – the misrecognition internally antagonistic, although centred on the work

* Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay and Keith Negus, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, Sage (in association with the Open University), London, Thousand Oaks CA and New Delhi, 1997. 151 pp., £37.50 hb., £11.99 pb., 0 7619 5433 3 hb., 0 7619 5434 1 pb. Hereafter cited as DCS. Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, Sage Publications (in association with the Open University), London, Thousand Oaks CA and New Delhi, 1997. 400 pp., £39.99 hb., £13.99 pb., 0 7619 5431 7 hb., 0 7619 5432 5 pb. Hereafter cited as RCRSP. Kathryn Woodward, ed., Identity and Difference, Sage Publications (in association with the Open University), London, Thousand Oaks CA and New Delhi, 1997. 358 pp., £39.99 hb., £13.99 pb., 0 7619 5433 3 hb., 0 7619 5434 1 pb. Hereafter cited as ID. Pual du Gay, ed., Production of Culture/ of Production, Sage Publications (in association with the Open University), London, Thousand Oaks CA and New Delhi, 1997. 356 pp., £40.00 hb., £13.99 pb., 0 7619 5435 X hb., 0 7619 5436 8 pb. Hereafter cited as PC/CP. Hugh Mackay, ed., Consumption and Everyday Life, Sage Publications (in association with the Open University), London, Thousand Oaks CA and New Delhi, 1997. 320 pp., £40.00 hb., £13.99 pb., 0 7619 5437 6 hb., 0 7619 5438 4 pb. Hereafter cited as CEL. Kenneth Thompson, ed., Media and Cultural Regulation, Sage Publications (in association with the Open University), London, Thousand Oaks CA and New Delhi, 1997. 248 pp., £40.00 hb., £13.99 pb., 0 7619 5439 2 hb., 0 7619 5440 6 pb. Hereafter cited as MCR.

12 Radical Philosophy 90 (July/August 1998) of key individuals.15 It is from this decentred tradition and private spheres against the grain of ʻthe increasing that the recently published six-volume series of texts privatization of cultural lifeʼ to become, uncannily, Culture, Media and Identities emerges, incorporating ʻout of placeʼ. It does this, of course, by undoing the and summarizing many, if not all, of the mutations and opposition and inverting the norm – that is, by facili- transformations of the critical concept of culture.* tating private listening and entertainment in public Of all the readers and introductions to Cultural (DCS, p. 120). Studies that have appeared over the last few years, It is hardly surprising, then, that when the trans- this series is probably the most interesting. This is gressive dimension of listening under the heading of because it shows Cultural Studies at work, as both ʻconsumptionʼ is discussed, the spectre of populism an analytical disposition and as an alternative peda- as diagnosed by Meaghan Morris in the 1980s – con- gogy. Nevertheless, a fundamental characteristic of the sumption without production – emerges again, as history of the field it evokes is a theoretical inflation does the relation between Cultural Studies and the of the concept of culture as a way of thinking about Frankfurt School. And it emerges with regard to one of relations of power, and the simultaneous waning – to the same critics referred to by Morris – Iain Chambers near invisibility – of the power of the concepts of – upon whose account of the Walkmanʼs blurring of ideology and hegemony as critical markers of class rule.16 If the 1970s witnessed a critical moving into Marxism by Cultural Studies, these texts reflect upon the subsequent moving away.

The circuit of culture Open University Course D318, Culture, Media and Identities, is organized around five cultural processes: representation, identity, production, consumption and regulation. Each process has a volume dedicated to it. Together they make up what the course organizers (and volume editors) call ʻthe circuit of cultureʼ. In addition, an excellent introductory volume dedicated to the cultural significance of the Sony Walkman analyses a specific articulation of all five processes together. The boundaries between public and private spheres the series is exemplary in its range, combining theoretical authors of the volume rely. exegesis and an interdisciplinary approach with inves- According to du Gay, Hall et al., consumption tigations of a variety of histories, practices, objects is best interpreted as ʻthe production of meaning and subjects that are, furthermore, cross-referenced to through usageʼ – the populist recuperative (and anti- other moments in the circuit of culture contained in ideological) moment of Cultural Studies – and as other volumes. The idea of complex multi-determina- always inscribed in a ʻcomplex power geometryʼ that tion throughout the circuit is thus enhanced. ʻrecognizes the uneven and differentiated nature of Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman useʼ (pp. 108, 109).17 The volumeʼs authors Walkman, written by five members of the course marshal difference against Chambersʼ totalizing and team, introduces the student-reader to the idea of ʻthe binarized version of the opposition of consumption circuit of cultureʼ and sets it to work in relation to a to production, tracing instead both the continuities particularly well-chosen cultural object that condenses between the codes governing the manufacture, mar- many of the issues dealt with in the series, some of keting and use of the Walkman (including those which are not named in the circuit. Globalization deemed transgressive) and the discontinuities. The is one, to which I shall return below. The relation recuperative paradigm of Cultural Studies thus between private and public spheres is another. The remains in operation but is radicalized in a non- latter is dealt with here in the chapter dedicated to populist direction through an appeal to differential regulation. This is the process within the circuit of contextualization – or ʻcontingencyʼ – rather than a culture that looks at the roles of the law and the Western Marxist sense of ideological recuperation; market in regulating culture, and the role of culture for example, as a contradictory intensification of the in regulating the law and the market. The main point bourgeois notion of possessive individualism, however is that use of the Walkman tends to cut across public liberating, through entertainment. Although recogniz-

Radical Philosophy 90 (July/August 1998) 13 ing a degree of reproduction in consumption, the The chapters that follow focus their attention on a authors resist ideology- critique and political diagnosis variety of regulative signifying practices, concentrat- in favour of a radical – or ʻnewʼ – historicism (see ing in the main on iconic, visual forms of address – so ʻIntroductionʼ, CEL, pp. 1–11). The ʻarticulationʼ of important to psychoanalysis – and questions of looking the different moments of the cultural circuit, they and display: in postwar French photography (Peter insist, are ʻnot necessary, determined, or absolute and Hamilton), museums (Henrietta Lidchi), soap opera essential for all time; rather … [their] … conditions (Christine Gledhill), ʻnew manʼ advertising (Sean of existence or emergence need to be located in the Nixon), and colonial and post-colonial spectacles of contingencies of circumstanceʼ (DCS, p. 3). 18 In this ʻraceʼ (Hall). In ʻThe Body and Differenceʼ (ID, pp. new mutation of the paradigm of Cultural Studies, 63–107), meanwhile, Chris Shilling foregrounds the ideology – and, some might add, history – is lost extraordinary importance of Pierre Bourdieuʼs social between necessity and contingency. anthropology for contemporary Cultural Studies in his The other five volumes, dedicated to the different reflections on ʻphysical capitalʼ, suggesting that we do but related processes constitutive of the circuit of not forget the historical and social configurations of culture, similarly investigate a variety of cultural prac- ʻembodimentʼ beyond the purely semiotic. Thus, apart tices and forms (photography, story-telling, film and from the specific investigations the series contains, it music) while at the same time outlining the shifting also evokes an intellectual history of Cultural Studies: paradigms of Cultural Studies since the 1970s. The from Williams and Barthes in the 1960s and 1970s to linguistic and psychoanalytic turns in cultural criticism Bourdieu and Foucault in the 1980s.20 are important parts of this story, as they are of the As is now well known, all relational and structural- analyses of the gendered, sexualized and racialized ist definitions of ʻidentityʼ presuppose ʻdifferenceʼ. But subjectivities which are reflected upon in the series, identity does not always successfully impose itself on especially in Representation: Cultural Representations difference; nor does difference only buttress identity. It and Signifying Practices, edited by Stuart Hall, and also disrupts identity, including the identity of and Difference, edited by Kathryn Woodward. Studies. The two major transformations of Cultural What emerges with particular clarity for the reader- Studies and its critical concept of culture were the student in these volumes is that Cultural Studies has product of feminist and anti-racist cultural criticism in not only been concerned with recuperating the experi- the mid-1970s and 1980s. They were felt on both the ences of modernity, hegemony, colonization, the culture culturalist and Marxist sides of the late 1970s para- industries and so forth, but also with the ways in which digm of Cultural Studies: its very own critical concept the social and the psychic realms intersect to constitute of ʻcultureʼ was revealed now to have been not only subjects, identities and social agents. The ʻwork of culturally and historically empty but also ideologically representationʼ (Hall, RCRSP, pp. 13–64) is, of course, and politically blind to the particular experiences of crucial in this regard, and Stuart Hall, in his chapter more than half the population of Britain, let alone on the subject, reminds his readers of the centrality the world! Gay and queer studies would subsequently of the semiotic paradigm in Cultural Studies, from further trouble and dynamize the field. The effects of the study of myth and fashion in Roland Barthes and these critiques are evident in all six volumes of this its anthropological (Lévi-Strauss) and psychoanalytic series, but particularly in the two mentioned above (Lacan) inflections, through to the socio-dialogics and in Media and Cultural Regulation, edited by of Voloshinov, and beyond to Foucauldian notions Kenneth Thompson. Again the work of Hall is impor- of discourse and knowledge-power. In combination tant here (apart from co-authoring the first volume and with psycho-analysis, semiotics and discourse theory editing the second, he has written three chapters for became important ways for Cultural Studies to con- the series), but the also includes excellent sider the social grammar of subjectivity as it traverses chapters by Lynne Segal on the social and gendered the psyche, offering up diverse social positions to be configurations of sexuality (ID, pp. 183–228), Bhikhu taken up, desired, disavowed. In this sense, Cultural Parekh on the pros and cons of (MCR, Studies in the 1970s and 1980s picked up and critically pp. 163–94), and Paul Gilroy, who, continuing his transformed older aestheticist conceptions of ʻcultureʼ critique of ʻethnic absolutismsʼ, writes on the terror designed then to actually fashion – that is, ʻimproveʼ and migrancy constitutive of diasporic identities (ID, – subjects.19 The main ideas under which such cultural pp. 299–343).21 transformation is imposed today are, of course, ʻmod- There is a very real sense in which both the feminist ernizationʼ and ʻdevelopmentʼ. and anti-racist critiques revealed the critical concept of

14 Radical Philosophy 90 (July/August 1998) culture to be in its own way thoroughly ideological, ated with the idea of globalization, including its own, and thus not critical enough of the dominant conception in the guise of ʻhybridityʼ. with which it was now seen to be complicit, in so far as it reified historically constituted power relations – the The ‘‘ 22 white, male and English paradigm – as natural. Thus The concept of culture available to Cultural Studies whilst critical of Western Marxismʼs own ideological has become potentially both more self-reflexive and blindness, they nevertheless shared its critical concern historically self-conscious: from simply naming an for the distortions produced by ideology – now a object of knowledge available for empirical descrip- marker of gendered and ethnic, as well as class, rule. tion and/or populist recuperation, it is perceived Similarly, whilst critical of the implied monolithic now as an active and regulative signifying practice, identity of the culture – for example, ʻthe peopleʼ, in which naming itself – ʻthat culture!ʼ – may be ʻthe nationʼ, ʻthe communityʼ – evoked by British revealed, for example, as a racialized marker of differ- , they shared its democratizing concern for ence and stereotypification (see Hall, ʻThe Spectacle recovering experiences that had been erased from the of the “Other”ʼ, RCRSP, pp. 223–79). The history historical record. In this sense, having had the ideology of its emergence needed to be rewritten too, empha- of its concept of culture revealed, Cultural Studies sizing not only the contradictory responses to the was potentially radicalized within a transformed para- democratizing of the institutions of higher education digm (which would include the anti-racist critique of in postwar Britain, on the one hand, and the effects feminism and the feminist critique of anti-racism). of the Hollywoodization of cultural practices, on the But both forms of critique clearly, and understand- other, but also a perceived crisis in post-imperial ably, also unravelled the critical concept of culture, hegemonic culture. In this regard, the observations providing the ground for an academic identity politics made by Homi Bhabha on culture as an enunciative centred on ethnic and gender claims. This is still the practice are crucial: dominant paradigm within the field today, especially Culture only emerges as a problem, or a problem- in the USA.23 Interestingly, however, it too is resisted matic, at the point at which there is a loss of mean- ing in the contestation and articulation of everyday in this series, partly because of the invocation, via life, between classes, genders, races, nations.24 the circuit of culture, of complex multi-determination and contingency, and partly because of the perceived With the post-colonial critiques of the national framing transformations in the identity paradigm itself associ- of Cultural Studies, its critical concept of ʻcultureʼ

Radical Philosophy 90 (July/August 1998) 15 takes on the scars of its own historical formation and between modes of entertainment, financial transactions use.25 and smart weaponry; it is this continuity that has In sum, Cultural Studies has become radically made Florida one of the most dynamic economies of decentred. This is not only a matter of the breaking up recent years, and the pleasures of the Sony Walkman of the national frame of its critical paradigm through available to all. The real expansion of culture thus has critique, but also a question of the poly-centred charac- epistemological significance: its experience demands ter of the institutionalized practice of Cultural Studies that it become an object of knowledge and recogni- itself: its dissemination from UK institutions to the tion. From this point of view, the emergence and USA, Australia, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and complex history of the Cultural Studies concept of beyond, all of which have transformed it according culture is no longer merely the sign of a populist to local traditions of radical thought – the ʻcultural democratization of existing cultural apparatuses (as frontsʼ whose history in the USA has been written in the recuperative dimension of the anthropological recently by Michael Denning, for example – and the conception), nor just a way of reconstituting identities specific political agendas produced by local state and that have been historically disavowed, but is also an capital forms. 26 Such intellectual production circulates effect of the cultural revolution that has created a new unevenly, producing critical reflections that potentially ground for thinking the social, political and economic. further transform operative concepts of culture. The Hall calls this change in knowledge the ʻcultural turnʼ, post-colonial meets the transnational, and Cultural for in it social totality becomes cultural totality and, Studies becomes as ʻhybridʼ as the cultural practices it symptomatically, in the volume Production of Culture/ increasingly purports to take as its object of study.27 Cultures of Production edited by Paul du Gay, political In the concluding chapter of the series, ʻThe Cen- economy becomes cultural economy. trality of Culture: Notes on the Cultural Revolutions of That cultural technologies are simultaneously forces Our Timeʼ, Stuart Hall, chair of the course for which of production is nothing new. It is their social form the six volumes were devised, provides both the series that is crucial. This is the point where Hall et al. enter and the field of Cultural Studies itself with a context into the cultural terrain of critical postmodernists and rationale: ʻIn the twentieth century there has been such as Fredric Jameson and David Harvey, who have a “cultural revolution” in the substantive, empirical underlined the particular visual and spatio-tempo- and material senses of the wordʼ (MCR, p. 209). Two ral dimensions of contemporary global capitalism. keywords stand out in his account of this historical ʻTodayʼ, says Hall, transformation: ʻexpansionʼ and ʻglobalizationʼ. cultural industries … sustain the global circuits of In Hallʼs account, culture has left its previous elitist economic exchange on which the worldwide move- – and even populist – symbolic domain and entered ment of information, knowledge, capital, invest- the social, political and economic arenas, practically ment, the production of commodities, the trade in reconstituting them according to the rules of new raw materials and the marketing of goods and ideas cultural formats, to be used by them in turn as a depend. … They have made a reality of what Marx resource (e.g. in the form of ʻcorporate cultureʼ – see only dimly foresaw – the emergence of a truly ʻglo- balʼ market. (Hall, MCR, p. 209) du Gay, ʻOrganizing Identity: Making Up People at Workʼ, PC/CP, pp. 285–322): There is good reason for the inverted commas the cultural industries have become the mediating around the word ʻglobalʼ, because the cultural experi- element in every other process … [T]he media both ence of globalization is always in fact ʻlocalʼ – although form a critical part of the material infrastructure of ʻthe localʼ is always in its turn constituted by ʻthe modern societies and are the principal means by globalʼ. This particular configuration is referred to as which ideas and images are circulated. (Hall, MCR, the ʻglobal–local nexusʼ, and as an idea it arguably p. 209) provides the dominant tone for the series as a whole, In such an expansion, contemporary technologies of explaining to its student-readers that they too, in their communication and representation have both realized own homes and localities, belong to such a nexus. and transformed the anthropological theoretical pos- Indeed, this is an important part of its pedagogy. tulate: culture is not just a ʻwhole way of lifeʼ whose What was once an experience of colonized and eco- rituals are to be described, but is constitutive of the nomically dependent nations and peoples within a very social relations, institutions and knowledges that ʻcentre–peripheryʼ politico-economic configuration is make up everyday life. As is well known, todayʼs now still uneven, but general – that is, it happens in cultural technologies display very real continuities different measure to rich and poor alike, everywhere.

16 Radical Philosophy 90 (July/August 1998) In ʻWhat in the World is Going On?ʼ, one of the In the words of Nederveen Pieterse, also quoted by best chapters in the collection, Kevin Robbins sets Robbins, ʻthe other side of hybridity is transcultural out the difficult issues, addressing his student-reader convergenceʼ (PC/CP, p. 43). From this point of view, as follows: the chapters on the cultural economy of globalization, I want you to think about globalization … in terms and the tendential merger of capital and culture, are of your own experiences and encounters, and in a pedagogy into ideology; but, of course, the heart of terms of what you may see on television or read ideology has always been the prime site – the locale about in newspapers and magazines. Globalization – for cultural study at its most radical.28 is ordinary: we are all now exposed to, and increas- The problem with the series, however, is that it ingly aware of, its consequences. We are all im- mersed in the globalization process. (PC/CP, p. 12) functions without a concept of ideology. Preferring contingent analyses, it resists critique of the contem- In other words, the text asks the reader to narrate porary transnational culture–capital formations into him- or herself into the circuits of global cultural which the hybrid cultural practices it recovers are processes, and by implication into the circuits of nevertheless inscribed. With the apparent ʻreturnʼ of capital too – that is, its ʻcultural economyʼ, to make the economic instance in Cultural Studies, the series ʻglobalization ordinaryʼ. Now, this may seem a thor- explicitly refuses to think it politically. The shed- oughly ideological demand, projecting readers into ding of the ʻpoliticalʼ for the ʻculturalʼ – in political new hegemonic formations. But it is also part of a economy – also means that there is no sign of political critical pedagogy, a kind of ʻcognitive mappingʼ that negativity either, only ʻlocalʼ forms of managed resist- asks student-readers to become critically aware and ance within global–local configurations of capital. This reflect upon the spatial complexity of their locations. may be because the idea of ʻproductionʼ that forms Furthermore, within the global–local nexus, the ʻlocalʼ part of the circuit of culture is more like ʻworkʼ and, is a privileged site of cultural hybridizations which, moreover, explicitly anti-Marxist – indeed, one of whilst in some circumstances the sign of cultural loss the key rhetorical strategies of many of the texts in and tendential homogenization, may also become the the series is to create their own intellectual space by sign of creative resistance. On the other hand, Robbins locating themselves between neoliberal and Marxist refuses to forget the incorporating power of capital, versions. It is, in other words, a production without quoting an excellent article by Richard Wilk – ʻThe relations of production; or, drawing again on Morrisʼs Local and the Global in the Political Economy of critique of populism, a production without production. Beauty: From Miss Belize to Miss Worldʼ – included Of course, just as it has become difficult to draw as one of the chapterʼs readings: the outline of a shifting and phantasmagoric ruling The new global system promotes difference in- transnational bourgeoisie, it has also become increas- stead of suppressing it, but selects the dimensions ingly difficult to recognize its modes of negation. But of difference. The local systems of difference that perhaps the post-Gramscian concept of subalternity, developed in dialogue with western modernism are created by critical Indian historians during the 1980s, becoming globalized and systematized into structur- al equivalents of each other. This globalized system might provide for such a negativity, socializing and exercises hegemony not through content but through politicizing – by splitting – ʻhybridityʼ and ʻthe localʼ form. In other words, we are not all becoming the within the global, which, without such theorization, same, but we are portraying, dramatizing and com- themselves become fetishistic replicas of what capital municating our differences to each other in ways desires.29 In other words, ideological. A Cultural that are more widely intelligible. The globalizing Studies without ideology-critique threatens to become hegemony is to be found in what I call structures of common difference, which celebrate particular kinds again the anthropology it had left behind. Perhaps not of diversity while submerging, deflating or supress- a populist anthropology, because of the contingent ing others. (PC/CP, p. 43) geometries of power it evokes, and even historically full; but also potentially blind. What this means is that the ʻlocalʼ is a prime site for transnational capital and fundamental – from the labour Notes power it offers to the advertising it may demand – for 1. See the complaints of Bill Schwarz against this type of the configuration of particular global–local capital- biography-based history in his aptly-titled ʻWhere is and-cultural formations. Coca-Cola Incorporated Cultural Studies?ʼ, Cultural Studies, vol. 8, no. 3, 1994, pp. 377–93. recently claimed ʻwe are not a multinational, we are 2. Francis Mulhern, ʻA ? Hoggart and Wil- a multilocalʼ. Sony might have added: ʻand personalʼ.

Radical Philosophy 90 (July/August 1998) 17 liams in the Fiftiesʼ, Radical Philosophy 77, May–June with Cultural Studies at this time might be seen as a kind 1996, pp. 26–37. of ironic response to Perry Andersonʼs complaint that 3. See Richard Johnson, ʻReinventing Cultural Studies: Re- reflection on ʻcultureʼ, especially literary culture, stood membering for the Best Versionʼ, in Elizabeth Long, ed., in for the emergence of a national sociology or a strong From Sociology to Cultural Studies: New Perspectives, local (Western) Marxist tradition. See his essay ʻCom- Blackwell, Oxford, 1997, p. 462. ponents of the National Cultureʼ, in Alexander Cockburn 4. Meaghan Morris, ʻBanality in Cultural Studiesʼ, Dis- and Robin Blackburn, eds, Student Power, Penguin, Har- course, vol. X, no. 2, Spring–Summer 1988, pp. 3–29. mondsworth, 1969, pp. 214–84; and Considerations on 5. Ibid., p. 17. Western Marxism, New Left Books, London, 1976. 6. For reflections on the ʻpopulistʼ dimension of Bakhtinʼs 16. For the tendency whereby the idea of ʻcultureʼ tends to representation of carnival, see Peter Stallybrass and replace ʻideologyʼ, see the interview with Stuart Hall, Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, ʻCulture and Powerʼ, Radical Philosophy 86, Novem- Methuen, London, 1986, pp. 1–26. ber/December 1997, pp. 24–41. 7. The specific works to which Morris is referring are John 17. A section from Chambersʼ ʻA Miniature History of the Fiske, ʻBritish Cultural Studies and Televisionʼ, in Rob- Walkmanʼ is included as one of the volumeʼs ʻread- ert C. Allen, ed., Channels of Discourse: Television and ingsʼ (DCS, pp. 141–3). Rey Chowʼs ʻListening Other- Contemporary Criticism, University of North Carolina wise, Music Miniaturized: A Different Type of Question Press, Chapel Hill, 1987; and Iain Chambers, Popu- about Revolutionʼ may be read as a more contextualized lar Culture: The Metropolitan Experience, Methuen, counterpoint (DCS, pp. 135–40). New York, 1986. The term ʻBritish Cultural Studiesʼ is 18. Such a historicism is even more radical than Gramsciʼs Fiskeʼs. historical materialist version: ʻThe philosophy of praxis 8. For a similar outcome, although from a different point is absolute “historicism”, the absolute secularization and of view, see Jon Beasley-Murrayʼs important article earthliness of thought, an absolute humanism of his- ʻPeronism and the Secret History of Cultural Studies: toryʼ, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and Populism and the Substitution of Culture for the Stateʼ, translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, Cultural Critique (forthcoming). See also Jim McGui- Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1978, p. 465. ganʼs Cultural Populism, Routledge, London and New 19. See David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, Culture and the York, 1992, p. 13 (quoted in Beasley-Murray): ʻa non- State, Routledge, New York and London, 1998. populist cultural studies is very nearly a contradiction 20. The key figure for the 1990s may be Gilles Deleuze. in termsʼ. See Hall in ʻCulture and Powerʼ, p. 25; and, in particu- 9. The most important work to establish this principle in lar, Lawrence Grossberg, ʻHistory, Politics and Post- Cultural Studies was Michel de Certeauʼs The Practice modernism: Stuart Hall and Cultural Studiesʼ, in Morley of Everday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall, University of and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds, Stuart Hall, pp. 151–73, and California Press, Berkeley, 1984. See Morris, ʻBanality Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on , in Cultural Studiesʼ, pp. 23–8, who makes clear that his Duke University Press, Durham NC, 1997. work is not reducible to the ʻrecuperationʼ she is criti- 21. For Hallʼs negotiation of the impact of feminism on the cizing; and Angela McRobbie, ʻLooking Back at New Birmingham Centre, see the interview with Stuart Hall Times and its Criticsʼ, in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing by Kuan-Hsing Chen, ʻThe Formation of a Diasporic In- Chen, eds, Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural tellectualʼ, in Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds, Stuart Studies, Routledge, London and New York, 1996. Hall, pp. 484–503. 10. See E.P. Thompsonʼs classic critique of the early Wil- 22. See Paul Gilroy, ʻThere Ainʼt No Black in the Union liams, ʻThe Long Revolutionʼ, New Left Review 9, Jackʼ: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation, Hutch- May–June 1961, pp. 24–33; also the famous ʻPrefaceʼ inson, London, 1987; and Angela McRobbie, ʻSettling to his The Making of the English Working Class (1963), Accounts with : A Feminist Critiqueʼ, Screen Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1979, pp. 9–15. Education 34, Spring 1980, pp. 37–49. 11. ʻI came into marxism backwardsʼ, writes Stuart Hall. 23. This is the institutional form taken by what Fredric See ʻCultural Studies and its Theoretical Legaciesʼ, in Jameson calls the ʻdesire called Cultural Studiesʼ. See David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds, Stuart Hall, his ʻOn “Cultural Studies”ʼ, Social Text 34, 1993, pp. p. 264. For the transformation of the anthropological 17–52. concept of culture and the enlightenment concept of 24. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, ideology by the concept of hegemony, see Raymond London, 1994, p. 34. From this point of view Dworkinʼs Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford University history is too national. Press, Oxford, 1977. 25. A key moment of this process was Stuart Hallʼs recent 12. In ʻThe Antinomies of Antonio Gramsciʼ, New Left critique of Raymond Williams in ʻCulture, Community, Review 100, November 1976–January 1977, pp. 5–78, Nationʼ, Cultural Studies, vol. 7, no. 3, 1994. See also Perry Anderson concludes that it is formal democracy Gilroy, ʻThere Ainʼt No Black in the Union Jackʼ. itself that provides the best articulation of ideological 26. Michael Denning, ʻCulture and the Crisis: the Politi- incorporation into bourgeois society. cal and Intellectual Origins of Cultural Studies in the 13. See the discussion of ʻthe popularʼ in Stuart Hall, ʻNotes United Statesʼ, in Cary Nelson and Dilip Parameshwar on Deconstructing “the Popular”ʼ, in Raphael Samuel, Gaonkar, eds, Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural ed., Peopleʼs History and Socialist Theory, Routledge, Studies, Routledge, New York and London, 1996, pp. London, 1981, pp. 227–40. 265–86. 14. Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: 27. Local ʻorders of readingʼ are also important. In Argenti- History, the New Left and the Origins of Cultural Stud- na, cultural critics like Beatriz Sarlo turned to Raymond ies, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 1997. Williams, escaping Althusser in a context of military 15. In this sense, the critical concept of ʻcultureʼ associated dictatorship, enforced ʻflexibleʼ modernization, and radi-

18 Radical Philosophy 90 (July/August 1998) cal rethinking of revolutionary and socialist projects. 28. In the work of Fredric Jameson on postmodernism there In Australia, according to Meaghan Morris, Cultural is a tendency also to think of all cultural production as Studies was rearticulated through the importance there simultaneously ideological. It is his refusal to risk the of ʻhistoryʼ rather than ʻEnglishʼ as state-craft as in the recuperative populist gesture of critical Cultural Studies, UK. See Meaghan Morris, ʻA Question of Cultural Stud- however, that makes his critique both so abstract and so iesʼ, in Angela McRobbie, ed., Back to Reality? Social productive. In his view, of course, one of the defining Experience and Cultural Studies, Manchester Univer- charcteristics of postmodernism is precisely its cultural sity Press, Manchester, 1997, p. 52. For developments populism. See Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of in Southeast Asia, see Kuan-Hsing Chen, ʻNot Yet the Late Capitalism, Verso, London, 1991. Postcolonial Era: The (Super) Nation-State and Trans- 29. That is, a form of ʻneo-orientalismʼ. See Gayatri nationalism of Cultural Studies: Response to Ang and Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, Strattonʼ, Cultural Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, 1996, pp. Routledge, London, 1993; Dipesh Chakrabarty, ʻMarx- 37–70. On ʻhybridityʼ and Cultural Studies, see my ʻHy- ism after Marx: History, Subalternity, and Differenceʼ, bridity in a Transnational Frame: Latinamericanist and in Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino and Rebecca E. Karl, Postcolonial Perspectives on Cultural Studiesʼ, in Avtar eds, Marxism Beyond Marxism, Routledge, New York, Brah and Annie E. Coombes, eds, From Miscegena- 1996, pp. 55–70; and Alberto Moreiras, ʻHybridity and tion to Hybridity? Re-thinking the Syncretic, the Cross- Double Consciousness: A Subalternist Perspectiveʼ (un- Cultural and the Cosmopolitan in Culture, Science and published manuscript). Politics (forthcoming).

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