Anticapitalism and Culture

Front matter

RADICAL THEORY AND POPULAR POLITICS

CULTURE MACHINE SERIES

Series Editor: Gary Hall

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction 1 A Political History of Cultural Studies, Part One: The Post-War Years 2 A Political History of Cultural Studies, Part Two: The Politics of Defeat 3 Another World is Possible: The Anti-Capitalist Movement 4 (Anti)Capitalism and Culture 5 Ideas in Action: Rhizomatics, Radical Democracy and the Power of the Multitude 6 Mapping the Territory: Prospects for Resistance in the Neoliberal Conjuncture 7 Beyond the Activist Imaginary: Nomadic Strategies for the New Partisans

Conclusion—Liberating the Collective

Index vii

Introduction

This book tries to stage a dialogue between the histories, concerns and abstract ideas of cultural studies and of the anti-capitalist movement. By the anti-capitalist movement, I mean primarily the World Social Forum and the campaigns, projects, struggles and ideas connected to it.

There are good reasons for wanting to stage such a dialogue because cultural studies and the anti-capitalist movement have some deep affinities. The both have their intellectual and spiritual roots in the radical movements of the twentieth century, they both tend to be informed by egalitarian, pluralist and libertarian critiques of contemporary societies, and they are both interested in the multifarious forms of contemporary and historical power relationships.

Here is a brief outline of what follows.

The first two chapters of the book make up a partial, idiosyncratic, political history of cultural studies, whose argument runs something like this: cultural studies began life as a self-consciously radical discipline which was influenced by its proximity to, and its dynamic relationship with, the politics of the British labour movement. Cultural studies wasn’t, in itself, a revolutionary political project or a substitute for any other kind of political activism, but it tried to look at issues like literature, social history, popular culture and political change as all connected to each other, and it attempted to look at them all from the point of view of an understanding of society and a set of values broadly derived from the traditions of the workers’ movement. At the same time, it always sought to generate new insights into the present and historical workings of culture and power that might challenge or transform some of the received assumptions of the labour movement. In particular, cultural studies emerged from the concerns of one strand within that movement, the so-called New Left. As it evolved during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, most research in cultural studies continued to be engaged with those concerns. At the same time, the ideas and priorities of the New Left themselves also evolved. Most importantly, the emergence (or re-emergence) of movements such as feminism, anti-racism and gay liberation brought new sets of concerns and priorities. In particular, these movements brought to light new forms of power relationships which cultural studies scholars had to take into account in their various investigations, but they also brought new risks and problems for the political Left which many of those scholars sought to confront. These investigations within cultural studies intersected with a much wider theoretical interrogation of left thought, which the chapter outlines under the heading of the anti-essentialist turn.

Despite the intellectual richness of this moment, by the 1990s most of the organised Left—from the socialist and communist movements to the New Social Movements—had ceased to be viable as coherent, consistent projects for social transformation. The defeat of communism, the dispersal of the women’s movement and the hegemony of neoliberalism all consolidated a situation in which there simply were no such radical movements for cultural studies to maintain such dialogues with. This has not prevented cultural studies from growing, proliferating and extending its project and its reach. Nor has it prevented the best work in the field from continuing to offer incisive analyses of contemporary culture in its many aspects. But it does mean that cultural studies has not had the benefit of that dynamic dialogue with radical political movements that was the source of some of its energy in the past. The second chapter therefore suggests that a dialogue between cultural studies and the anti-capitalist movement might be a good thing.

Chapter 3 outlines and reflects upon the emergence of this movement, which is sometimes called anti-capitalist or anti-globalisation or global-justice or altermondialiste. Since the early 1990s a range of projects and institutions have arisen around the world which try to challenge the global dominance of liberal capitalism, and which are informed by a set of libertarian and egalitarian values very similar to those which typified the New Left. This anti-capitalism is different from the traditional labour and socialist movements in ways which were to some extent prefigured and called for by the ideas of the New Left, and by the ideas of philosophers and theorists associated with the anti-essentialist turn. The chapter therefore argues that this movement can be said to be radical democratic in its aspirations, provided that we clear up some common confusions as to what the term radical democracy means. On the other hand, this movement is informed by, at best, some woefully simplistic ideas about culture and political strategy. It is precisely this poverty of thought which the best cultural studies work of the past has often tried to remedy in radical movements. As such, Chapter 3 contends that it is worth thinking through some issues about culture and political strategy from a position informed by the legacy of cultural studies and the concerns of anti-capitalism.

Chapter 4 considers a range of different ways of conceptualising the relationship between capitalism and culture, and it considers reasons as to why one might or might not want to take up a political or analytical position which is explicitly anti-capitalist. Although it rejects a classically Marxist anti-capitalism, it finds good reasons for taking up a position which sees capitalism in general—and neoliberalism in particular—as inimical to any democratic culture, and worth opposing on those terms. It concludes, however, that the anti-capitalism of the movement of movements might have to be mobilised under names less abstract than anti-capitalism if it is to prove politically effective in concrete contexts.

Chapter 5 tries to think about what would be involved in developing such a position, by comparing the theoretical ideas of a number of philosophers who have written in a spirit close to that of both New Left cultural studies and of the anti-capitalist movement. This chapter is unashamedly abstract in its approach because getting beyond the kind of simplistic thinking about culture and politics which often typifies the anti-capitalist movement demands some rigourous abstract thought. The chapter expounds some of the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, Laclau and Mouffe and Hardt and Negri in terms that will be comprehensible to a reader with no great prior familiarity with their work; the chapter also offers some rigourous comparison of those ideas. The chapter organises its discussion of these ideas partly in terms of a number of themes which are central to cultural studies—creativity, complexity, power and hegemony—because one of its aims is to think through what the use of those ideas might be for engaged cultural analysis. The chapter largely concludes that, despite the tendency of these writers and their supporters to polemicise against each other, their ideas can all be deployed very usefully in the attempt to think through what a contemporary, radical democratic, post-Marxism might be both for cultural studies and anti-capitalist politics.

Chapter 6 takes some of these ideas and tries to use them to make an analysis of key configurations of power in contemporary British culture. Ultimately, it asks what scope there might be for effective opposition to neoliberalism in the United Kingdom today, by looking at the ways in which neoliberalism is both implemented and destabilised in the current context. I would argue that it is this kind of so-called conjunctural analysis which is the core task of cultural studies, and that this is what cultural studies, at its best, can do for a radical movement such as anti-capitalism; to try to map its terrain and warn it of obstacles. I don’t claim that such a task can be undertaken with any authority by one person in one chapter of a largely theoretical work such as this one. I would also argue that a great deal of current work going on in cultural studies already does this—although it may not be explicit or even conscious about for whom the work it being done. The point of the chapter in itself is therefore not to offer a definitive analysis, but to illustrate the kind of thing that cultural studies can do with the kinds of theories outlined in the previous chapter.

Chapter 7 continues the effort to think through the major obstacles to the success of any contemporary anti-capitalism, but it does so in a largely theoretical register. This chapter tries to deconstruct what it calls ‘the activist imaginary’. Put simply, ‘the activist imaginary’ is an attitude which makes a fetish of the so-called outsider status of activists: this attitude prevents activists from really engaging in the kind of risky politics which might produce real change (because real change would ultimately threaten the outsider status of activists). The chapter discerns elements of this activist imaginary in elements of contemporary political theory and tries to deconstruct them on their own abstract terms, which takes a while, but is necessary. It ultimately argues for the importance of an anti-capitalist partisanship which is not tied to any political or social identity, and for a strategic orientation in radical-democratic thought and practice which is not tied to any singular homogenous strategy. Once again, it finds that the polemics between supporters of Deleuze and Guattari and Laclau and Mouffe tend to obscure important points of agreement between them, which might be better treated as opportunities for mutual-intensification as opposed to sterile sectarianism.

The conclusion offers a nice little polemic and is very short.

I am now going to offer some problematic clarifications of terms which I will be using, mainly in the first two chapters: the terms cultural studies, cultural theory and politics. Readers with strong opinions about the proper uses of these phrases should read this section carefully, lest they become annoyed by the way I use these words later. Readers who are indifferent to such issues, or find semantic quibbling frustrating, should probably just skip ahead to chapter one.

Some Terms of Reference

Although the overall aim of this work is to set up a dialogue between cultural studies and anti-capitalism, much of it is centrally concerned with questions of cultural and political theory. This is because theory is the zone in which ideas derived from apparently quite different sets of concerns and activities (for example, political activism and cultural analysis) can reach a level of abstraction at which they can be effectively compared and exchanged.

As such, much of the substance of this book is concerned with the relationship between cultural theory and politics. But the book is also concerned with the history and potential of cultural studies.

So it seems like a good idea to explore, very briefly, the relationships between these terms, before going any further.

Cultural Studies and Cultural Theory

Firstly, I want to clarify my understanding of the relationship between these two terms: cultural studies and cultural theory. Why do I want to do this? Simply because there is quite a widespread tendency today to regard these terms as interchangeable, and I don’t want this book to contribute to that confusion.

So what is the relationship between cultural studies and cultural theory? These are themselves both quite loose terms, and I am not going to try to offer final definitions of them. But thinking about their relationship is important.

Cultural theory as the phrase has come to be used today is a capacious term which includes large chunks of what might otherwise be called philosophy, social theory, political theory, psychology, anthropology or linguistics, but it does not include everything in any of one those fields. Would it be possible to offer a coherent abstract definition of what it actually is and what it actually does? I don’t think so: largely because within the field of cultural theory there is no agreement on what either culture, cultural or even theory necessarily mean. That doesn’t mean that we can’t recognise cultural theory when we see it. Rather cultural theory is defined by how it is used, by whom and for what. Put very simply, cultural theory is the set of theoretical tools—of abstract ideas and particular ways of deploying them—which is used within the discipline of cultural studies.

This produces a rather odd situation, in which we can say that the existence of cultural theory as a recognisable field is dependent on the existence of cultural studies as a discipline, even though, having identified it as such, we could say that cultural theory is actually much older than cultural studies. This is partly because cultural studies has always used ideas which pre-date its own formation as a distinct discipline, but also because, once the discipline of cultural studies emerged, it became possible to look back and see earlier thinkers as having been concerned with similar issues even though they could not have seen themselves as engaged in cultural studies or cultural theory because those terms were not in use. The result is that one could write a history of cultural theory which traces it back to the work of Vico (1999) or even Plato or Lao Tzu, but one could not begin a history of cultural studies as such any earlier than the 1950s, and it is only within this time frame that it can be strictly accurate to talk about cultural theory as a coherent field. In other words, many of the elements which make up cultural theory are much older than cultural studies, but their existence as part of a set of ideas and debates called cultural theory is a byproduct of the emergence of cultural studies.

So what do we mean by cultural studies? Countless attempts have been made to offer a firm definition of cultural studies, and they not only disagree over what it is, but over what kind of thing it is. For some, cultural studies is simply a discipline concerned with the study of contemporary culture, whatever that might mean, and by whatever means a given researcher finds congenial. For others, cultural studies is a disciplinary project aiming to break down old disciplinary boundaries and perhaps to establish a whole new concept of useful knowledge. For some, cultural studies is particular methodological approach to the study of culture or its various manifestations which tends to stress the importance and relative autonomy of signifying practices and their inseparability from power relationships across a whole range of fields (from cinema to particle physics). For others, cultural studies is a straightforward political project, almost a movement in its own right, to further socialist, feminist and anti-racist ideas in universities and elsewhere.

In offering a partial history of cultural studies in Chapters 1 and 2, I am going to allow some credence to the first and simplest of these definitions, but I want to stress that it does not necessarily exclude any of the others. Commentators often object to calling cultural studies a discipline because this seems to overlook cultural studies’ radically interdisciplinary character: that is, the fact that it has always borrowed from various disciplines in the social sciences and humanities rather than emerging from just one of them, and that it continues to do so rather than firmly distinguishing itself from other disciplines. However, my response to this is simply to point out that all disciplines have always existed in an unstable relationship with others: sociology could never be firmly separated from economics or history, or biology from physics and chemistry, for example. Disciplinarity is itself an inherently unstable condition. There is nothing particular to cultural studies in its instability. At the same time, any discipline, especially a relatively new one, will to some extent amount to a project simply insofar as the constitution and perpetuation of that discipline will require some active and ongoing intervention into the general field of academic knowledge and the institutions which legitimate it. Any new discipline has to be a project simply in order to emerge, carve out some space for itself, and survive. What’s more, any discipline at given points in its history will have one or more prevailing methodological approaches, and there may be moments when one such approach is so dominant, so distinctive to the discipline in question, and so widely applicable that people come to think of the discipline and its prevailing methodology as identical; conceptually, however, they are not.

Finally, we come to one of the big questions for this book; the status of cultural studies as a project for the furtherance of left-wing political ideas. To a large extent this is what the first two chapters will be about. For now, however, let us be clear about the approach that I am going to take to this question, which is a resolutely historical one. Historically, cultural studies was pioneered and largely dominated by people who were themselves deeply committed to left politics in everything they did, including cultural studies. They wanted cultural studies to contribute as far as possible to the wider and deeper development of left politics, which is why although cultural studies has often been critical of received ideas and practices on the Left, it also helped to disseminate leftist ideas in the wider society. While the aim of their work was often to develop analyses of culture which were to some extent impartial and objective, those analyses were always being produced in the hope that they might ultimately be of use to particular political projects from the progressive Left. All of this does not mean that the very idea of cultural studies is inherently leftist, but it does mean that there is a very widespread identification of cultural studies as a whole with the political tradition to which most of its key contributors have belonged; the tradition of the New Left. However, we can only fully understand the political relationship between cultural studies and this tradition if we separate them conceptually, recognising that there is nothing inevitable about the association between cultural studies and left politics.

So that leaves us nicely back where we started: cultural studies is that discipline concerned with the study of contemporary culture, whatever that might mean, and by whatever means a given researcher finds congenial. As with any discipline the meanings of even its most fundamental terms (culture, for example) and the means appropriate to it are subjects for debate within it, but with that proviso, the definition of cultural studies as a discipline concerned with the study of contemporary culture can hold.

Or can it? The trouble with this definition is that it leaves us open to the situation in which cultural studies is more-or-less whatever anyone does who claims that they are doing cultural studies. Stuart Hall, for example, has argued that this very open definition allows people to claim to be practising cultural studies who have no interest at all in basic issues—such as the question of the imbrication of symbolic relationships with power relationships—which pioneers, such as Hall himself, have regarded as fundamental to their own researches (1997).

So now I want to do justice to Stuart Hall’s repeated injunction that cultural studies shouldn’t mean just anything, and I also want to do justice to a particular tradition of writing which has been at the heart of the cultural studies tradition. The work of figures such as Hall, Raymond Williams, Angela McRobbie, Paul Gilroy and Lawrence Grossberg has touched upon many areas: philosophy, political commentary, anthropology, art criticism and literary criticism, for example. Yet I would argue that there has generally been one objective, whether explicitly central or obliquely tangential, to whatever they were doing that might be called cultural studies. That objective is simply to make sense of the precise configurations of power which shape contemporary life, without prior assumptions as to the relative importance of economics, politics or the arts. It is this attempt to analyse conjunctures—complex configurations of power relationships—using whatever conceptual tools are necessary, which I think characterises the central project of cultural studies (Grossberg 1995). This should not be regarded as a prescriptive definition, however.

Many kinds of work today go on under the rubric of cultural studies, from phenomenological art criticism to ethnographies of the media industries to speculative philosophy and broad social commentary. Cultural analysis—the wide-ranging attempt to understand the power relations which organise contemporary life—is very far from being the only thing that goes on within this open field. But insofar as all of this work has anything to do with cultural studies as such, it at least has some possible use in the pursuit of such analysis. We might conclude then, that while cultural studies is a name for a very broad field of work in which elements of contemporary culture are studied, the core tradition of cultural studies is always concerned with the analysis of power relations within and through that culture.

The cultural studies which I am going to examine the history of in the two chapters that follow is therefore a field which is very broad and loosely defined—including cultural criticism, political sociology, various strands of philosophy, ethnography, social theory and psychology—but whose elements all interconnect and intermesh in various ways with this core tradition of conjunctural analysis, most strikingly represented by the work of Stuart Hall.

Politics and politics

The other key term to consider here is politics. Now, it is especially difficult to offer a concise definition of politics in this context, because one of the premises of almost all cultural studies to date has been the idea that the concept of politics needs to be expanded way beyond the traditional focus on contestation for state power between organised groups. Indeed, some might say that, along with the other definitions offered above, cultural studies simply is the result of a radical expansion of the concept of politics within the humanities and social sciences. This expanded conception regards politics as involving all those processes whereby power relationships are implemented, maintained, challenged, or altered in any sphere of activity whatsoever. Given that important traditions in philosophy and social science—which have both influenced cultural studies and been influenced by it—regard power relationships as infusing all aspects of human existence, and in some cases all aspects of all existence whatsoever (Nietzsche 1968: 297-300; 332-47), it seems like it might be possible to describe almost any situation in so-called political terms. This, in fact, is one of the great sources of anxiety within recent debates over the nature and practice of cultural studies: if everything is political, then does that mean that nothing is specifically political, as some commentators seem to fear (Eagleton 2000)? Is there any difference between offering a political analysis of a situation and a non-political one?

This, once again, is a highly controversial area to which several whole books could be devoted without exhausting the range of possible positions. However, it is also a debate within which this book will have to take a tentative position before it can proceed any further. For the sake of argument, then, I am going to propose a distinction between two levels of political engagement: the political and the micropolitical. With the phrase micropolitical, I am referring to that level of interaction at which all relationships (even those between non-human entities such as animals, plants or even, arguably, sub-atomic particles) might be described as political insofar as they can involve relative stabilisations, alterations, augmentations, diminutions or transfers of power. At the level of human culture, for example, even such a localised and historically insignificant incident as a university deciding not to offer a degree course in modern French might be understood as the outcome of micropolitical processes involving conflicts, disagreements and decisions over the allocation of resources, or the relative prestige attributed to different disciplines within the university, and so forth.

In the next two chapters, I am going to use the term politics, on the other hand, in the more widely understood sense of the general field of public contestation between identifiable and opposing sets of ideas about how social relationships should be ordered. Politics in this sense is the sphere in which social movements, political parties, large-scale ideologies and powerful institutions (such as governments and corporations) struggle to determine the outcomes of the big questions about what kind of societies we want to live in. In this sense, the struggle to keep open our university French department would only be political to the extent that it located itself in a wider context of struggles against public service cuts, ‘dumbing down’, xenophobia, or something beyond the immediate career concerns of its staff. I could use the term macropolitics for this level of engagement instead, and it might be more accurate, but it would sound clumsier and take up more space. Now, the relationship between these two levels is clearly unstable and at times conceptually problematic.

For example, if we take to extremes the molecular perspective associated with thinkers such as Gabrel Tarde, Michel Foucault and Félix Guattari, then we can argue that all political processes are simply the aggregate outcomes of micro-political ones— so, for example, elections which produce changes in government are only really the outcomes of millions of individual decisions over how to cast a vote—and as such it is micropolitics which is really important and really worth paying attention to. However, I don’t think that any writer (certainly not these three) has ever actually taken such a simplistic view. Were they to do so, it would be possible to reply to them that it is only once certain micropolitical processes coagulate into political ones that they take on any wider historical importance (so, for example, no one cares how particular individuals voted and it doesn’t matter: what matters is who got elected and what they will do).

Of course, in fact, the two perspectives are clearly not necessarily mutually exclusive. On the one hand, we can say that micropolitical processes are fundamentally constitutive of all social reality (and perhaps all material reality; Delanda 2006); on the other hand the (macro) political outcomes of those processes can go on to have real and concrete effects in their own rights and to condition the contexts within which further micropolitical processes take place: so while it is true that the outcome of the election is the result of millions of individual decisions, those decisions are taken in the context of the consequences of the policies pursued by the existing government, whose election was itself a macropolitical outcome of prior micropolitical processes, and so on, and so on ... Of course, there is nothing at all original in this understanding, which is arguably identical to Marx’s famous assertion that people ‘make their own history, but they do not make it ... under circumstances chosen by themselves’ (Marx 1934, p. 10).

We will return to some of these issues later. For now, it is important to be clear that what we are going to be looking at in the first part of the book is the relationship between cultural studies and politics. I suggest that the core tradition of cultural studies has derived great dynamism from its relationship to wider political contests outside the academy; not merely from its micropolitical endeavours to open up new disciplinary spaces within the academy (as valuable as they may be in their own right) but from relationships to wider political contests.

I should be clear that I am not trying to establish a moral hierarchy between these different types of engagement, rather I would like to make a useful (if necessarily unstable) conceptual distinction. Effective micropolitical interventions are clearly more useful than empty political gestures. Finally, I would add that many of the types of engagement which I am here designating micropolitical might also be understood as not political but nonetheless ethical engagements. In this, I am perhaps in agreement with Joanna Zylinska’s recent suggestion that much of cultural studies’ practice has always been primarily ethical rather than political (Zylinska 2005). In another register, the level of analysis that I am designating ‘micropolitical’ might be called ‘ecological’ (Guattari 2000; Fuller 2005), insofar as it is often concerned with the symbiotic dynamics of relatively discrete systems. Such analysis is clearly extremely important, even where it has little to say about the relationship between those discrete systems and wider formations of power.

So I am not saying that politics is more important than micro-politics or ethics or ecology. I am not saying that any intellectual project that aspires to real radicalism has to engage with politics as conventionally understood. I am not saying that at all. My only contention is that the relationship between cultural studies and politics is worth thinking about.

Having thought through some of these preliminary terms, the next two chapters will look at the history of the relationship between cultural studies and politics. The story of cultural studies is very well known. Whether we think of it as an academic discipline, a looser tradition of ideas and texts, a particular methodology, a political project or movement, or a vague name for almost any kind of contemporary work in the humanities and social sciences, there already exist numerous accounts of its emergence and subsequent history. What is interesting is that the widespread shared account of cultural studies’ emergence and development tends to stress the importance of the macro-political context and the political commitments of the key participants to the early formation of the discipline but tends to pay less and less attention to this set of issues as it brings its attention closer to the present. Cultural studies is generally seen as emerging from the context of the British labour movement and the New Left in the 1950s but tends to be depicted as evolving increasingly according to its own endogenous logic as it developed as a discipline, especially after the late 1970s (e.g. Lee 2003). The main purpose of the following two chapters is to correct this emphasis, examining the development of cultural studies up to the present in terms of the ongoing relationship between its disciplinary formation, the various micropolitical interventions which constituted it, and the political context in which they occurred.