Key Words a JOURNAL of CULTURAL MATERIALISM
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Key Words A JOURNAL OF CULTURAL MATERIALISM 2 (1999) edited by Roger Bromley Macdonald Daly Jim McGuigan Morag Shiach Jeff Wallace and Carol Watts Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism Editors: Roger Bromley (Nottingham Trent University), Macdonald Daly (University of Nottingham), Jim McGuigan (Loughborough University), Morag Shiach (Queen Mary and Westfield College, London), Jeff Wallace (University of Glamorgan), Carol Watts (Birkbeck College, London). Editorial Advisory Board: Ien Ang (University of Western Sydney), Anthony Barnett (Charter 88), Marilyn Butler (University of Oxford), Terry Eagleton (University of Oxford), John Eldridge (University of Glasgow), Nicholas Garnham (University of Westminster), Stuart Hall (The Open University), John Lucas (Nottingham Trent University), Meaghan Morris (Lingnan University), Bruce Robbins (Rutgers University), Bernard Sharratt (University of Kent), Dai Smith (BBC Wales), Carolyn Steedman (University of Warwick), Will Straw (McGill University), Chris Weedon (University of Wales). Contributions for prospective inclusion in Key Words should comply with the style notes printed on pp. 140-41 of this issue, and should be sent to Jeff Wallace, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Glamorgan, Pontypridd, Mid Glamorgan, CF37 1DL, United Kingdom (fax 01443 482138; email [email protected]). Books for review should be sent to Jim McGuigan, Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leicestershire LE11 3TU, United Kingdom. Key Words is a publication of The Raymond Williams Memorial Trust Society, Postgraduate School of Critical Theory and Cultural Studies, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, United Kingdom. Contributions copyright © The Raymond Williams Memorial Trust Society 1999. Cover design by Andrew Corbett. Printed by Antony Rowe Ltd., Chippenham, Wiltshire. ISSN 1369-9725 Contents Editorial Jeff Wallace 5 Articles Reading Nostalgia: Histories and Fictions of the Struggling Unemployed Jago Morrison 7 ‘The problem is always one of method...’: Cultural Materialism, Political Economy and Cultural Studies Paul Jones 28 Reinventing England Declan Kiberd 47 Keywords 'Work Provider' Deborah Cameron 58 Ecocriticism Wordsworthian and Darwinian Excursions: Ecology, Colonialism and Cultural Materialist Criticism David Amigoni 63 Raymond Williams and Contemporary Political Ecology Hilary Wainwright 81 Hippies, Liberals, and the Ecocritical Sublime Gerry Smyth 94 BSE Stories Richard Kerridge 111 Conference Reports John Parham, Ross Dawson, Sean Homer 122 Reviews Jim McGuigan, John Tomlinson, Chris Bilton 131 Key Words 3 (2000) Contributions are now invited for the third issue of Key Words, to be published in 2000. Articles for prospective inclusion, which may be on any topic of relevance to the journal, are warmly welcomed, and should reach us no later than 31 December 2000 (see p. ii for the appropriate editorial address). We would particularly welcome contributions on the theme of ‘Futures’. Please present submissions according to the style notes which appear on pp. 140-41 of the present issue. We also encourage publishable correspondence and suggestions for books to review. Editorial Jeff Wallace Ecocriticism is the dominant theme of Key Words 2. The German elections of 1998 saw the Green Party secure an unprecedented degree of influence. British politics make for an interesting comparison. It now seems clear that Prescott's plans for a re-integrated, modernised transport system, which might begin to address the chaos left by deregulation and privatisation, have switched to a slow track in the Parliamentary agenda of Labour's first term in office. More prominently, at the time of writing, the debates around genetically modified food intensify, and Tony Blair gives Britain the benefit of his own personal conviction that 'GM' food is safe. Does the apparently extended courting of GM food concerns underline the Government's lack of interest in ethical or environmentally conscious questions which might seriously challenge the smooth working of the global market economy? Hilary Wainwright here highlights a gap between mainstream British politics and emergent modes of ecological politics which exemplify, both nationally and internationally, successful interventions in the production and distribution process, and in the organisation of work. She issues a timely reminder of the missed opportunity of the 1975-79 Labour Government, failing to build on the possibilities of democratic modernisation suggested, for example, by the 'Lucas Plan', and thereby leaving the way clear for the devastating alternative modernities of Thatcherism. But there is reason to think that changes in the contemporary public domain increasingly problematise the notion of a mainstream/periphery political divide. Ulrich Beck has argued that the very nature of 'risk society', committed headlong to industrial overproduction and thus to the generation of global and incalculable global risks, principally in the form of radioactivity, but also in toxins and pollutants, simultaneously precipitates an 'unbinding of politics’, characterised by a reflexivity implicit in the flourishing of 1 alternative sources of knowledge and modes of political participation. Richard Kerridge presents a set of less optimistic reflections on the power of the cultural sphere. Faced with the indeterminacies of the ecological crisis, environmental narratives such as the contemporary 'ecothriller', TV news bulletin or documentary, solicit an apocalyptic anxiety which is invariably contained in the security of closure or resolution. This sets 'a pattern for our responses to real ecological crisis' — a crisis which is, as Kerridge has elsewhere argued, 'also a cultural crisis, a crisis of representation. The inability of political cultures to address 1 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (London: Sage Publications, 1992). Key Words 2 (1999), pp. 5-6 Jeff Wallace 2 environmentalism is in part a failure of narrative.' Both essays remind us of the central question within environmentalism of agency or activism — of how to move or animate, and thus to intervene. It is worth noting that Paul Virilio's recent critique of 'dromospheric' pollution is based on a model of the cybernetic future as a condition of immobility and disability, 'attack(ing) the liveliness of the subject and the moblilty of the object by atrophying the journey to the point where it 3 becomes needless.' How far might an environmentally informed literary criticism constitute practical intervention? The debate initiated in Key Words 1 by Dominic Head is extended here in essays by Gerry Smyth and David Amigoni, each demonstrating that heightened reflexivity which for Beck distinguishes the environmental consciousness and its emancipatory potential. Thus, for Smyth, and somewhat paradoxically, an embrace of the 'ecocritical sublime' as a mode of critical engagement inspired by the 'anti- disciplinary' work of Benjamin, de Certeau and Derrida is qualified by Aijaz Ahmad's misgivings about the inwardness of reflexivity itself. Contesting the terms of Jonathan Bate’s comparison of Darwin and Wordsworth as, respectively, scientific and humanistic ecologists, Amigoni argues for a cultural materialism which can overcome this binary opposition in order to see them as engaged in a common discursive struggle within a specific but complex historical paradigm of ecology. We continue to publish a selection of work outside the dominant theme. Paul Jones argues that the mediation between political economy and cultural studies evident in Raymond Williams's work warns against reductive versions of either discipline. Declan Kiberd projects a post-colonial revision or re-invention of Englishness which might draw on the historically 'parabolic' nature of Irish culture's relation to its imperial oppressor. Jago Morrison finds familiar ideological representations of the deserving and undeserving poor underpinning New Labour's vision of welfare and society. And Deborah Cameron's analysis of 'work-provider' initiates her regular supplement to Williams' Keywords project. University of Glamorgan 2 Richard Kerridge, 'Introduction', in Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammels (eds.), Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature (London: Zed Books, 1998), p. 4. 3 Paul Virilio, Open Sky, tr. Julie Rose (London: Verso, 1997). Key Words 6 Reading Nostalgia: Histories and Fictions of the Struggling Unemployed Jago Morrison In the 1998 government green paper New Ambitions For Our Country1 the first New Labour Employment Secretary Frank Field set out a privatised vision of welfare and society in 2020. Full employment is not amongst Labour’s new ambitions. Instead, a community is envisaged 'with people not only taking more personal responsibility for their own and their families’ well- being, but also more collective responsibility for policing the new system and preventing fraud' (81). After two decades of Labour government we can expect nothing more utopian than a 'reduction in the proportion of working age people living in workless households' (82). In the twenty-first century, the policy for people with chronic illnesses, disabilities or children is to render them 'in touch with the labour market' (82). In the ‘New Welfare Contract’ the duties of the individual are to be those of work, independence, saving, the subsidy of other family members and the undertaking 'not to defraud the taxpayer' (80). Within a