Caring for Cultural Studies

This essay both inaugurates the editorship of Ted Striphas and reflects on the contributions of Cultural Studies’ longtime editor, Lawrence Grossberg. It opens by reflecting briefly on the journal's transformations over the last 28 years before taking stock of the wellbeing of Cultural Studies, the field. The claim here is that Cultural Studies devotes less time and attention than it used to in thinking through first principles, and thus that the future of the field hinges, in part, on asking whether core concepts are up to the task of answering to the urgent political questions of our time. The essay then recontextualizes the concept of culture, specifically with respect to the much-maligned (indeed, deservedly-maligned) ‘high culture’ tradition. In its recesses the author identifies a fugitive theoretical line in which culture signifies care, as opposed to subordination to patrician interests and aesthetic styles. This conceptual move sets the stage for the central argument of the essay, namely, that for Cultural Studies to live up to both its name and intellectual-political ambitions, it must devote significant time to caring for the infrastructure that sustains its body of ideas. The piece concludes by highlighting some of Lawrence Grossberg's efforts, as an infrastructuralist, to care for Cultural Studies and by observing how, moving forward, neither the field nor this journal will take care of itself.     

Troubles With Textual Authority In Sociology

This text raises questions about the dilemma of the authorial voice in sociology texts that presume to present factual, data-based narratives about other people and their lives. The discussion bears particularly on so-called qualitative and historical forms of sociological writing although the issues are equally alive for other sociological genres. The dilemma of the authorial voice has beer given rather wide attention of late in literary studies and in anthropology. Relatively little attention thus far has been given to the topic in professional sociology. By drawing on variant reflexive forms, the text seeks to bring its own production and grounds under examination in such a way to suggest how the dilemma is present for those writing substantive narrative texts.     

Before,during and after the cultural turn: a ‘Baedeker’ to IR's cultural journey

This article, which is part of a broader attempt to construct a ‘Baedeker’ to IR's cultural journey, contributes to the contested debated on the (ir)relevance of cultural diversity to the study of international relations by providing a picture of where we come from, of where we are now situated and of some of the suggestions as to where we should be going in order not to get lost in this almost uncharted landscape. The first main section discusses why questions pertaining to cultural diversity traditionally have held a surprisingly marginal position within IR and shows how IR before the Cultural Turn was more ‘culture-blind’ than ‘cultureblank’. The second main section turns attention to IR during the Cultural Turn and examines how two influential bids for a culturalist alternative have been better at posing good questions than providing attractive answers, placing IR's cultural journey in a ‘blind-blinded stalemate’. Against this background, the last main section asks where the cultural journey should head after the Cultural Turn and identifies and evaluates four different suggestions for ‘routes’ to proceed by. While they may be at variance when it comes to the specific direction suggested, they all represent attempts to set a course between the culture-blind Scylla and the culture-blinded Charybdis, and indicate in this way that it would be premature to let the problems associated with the Cultural Turn lead to an expulsion of questions relating to cultural diversity from the IR agenda.     

Death and the Penguin: modularity,alienation and organising

ABSTRACT

The originality of this paper lies in the ways in which it explores how the depiction of organised crime within Andrey Kurkov’s novel Death and the Penguin can inform our understanding of organisational modularity. This non-orthodox approach might open up new avenues of thought in the study of organisational modularity while further illustrating how novelistic worlds can inform accounts of organisational realities. Two main research questions underlie the paper. How can Andrey Kurkov’s novel further our understanding of the complexity of organisational worlds and realities by focusing our attention on different landscapes of organising? How does Kurkov’s novel help us grasp the concept of modularity by drawing attention to new forms of modular organisation? Drawing from our reading of Kurkov’s novel, we primarily explore organisational modularity through Kurkov’s depiction of organised crime and consider the themes of alienation and isolation in the context of modular organising.     

On being affected: feeling in the folding of multiple catastrophes

ABSTRACT

How possible is it for a life of ongoing feeling to hold, given the world’s current becomings? Much of this article will consider three of the most pervasive of the current disruptions as disruptions of living and feeling: climate change, social change, and, in more detail, what I will call a ‘third media revolution’. All three of these disruptions (and many others) are themselves multiple. They all fold through each other. Living and feeling thus find themselves in the midst of catastrophic multiplicity. This catastrophic multiplicity haunts much of what’s going on. Questions concerning what can be felt within this folding of catastrophes into each other are important contemporary questions. Feeling itself – what it is, what it does, and what the future of feeling might be – has become both a field of struggle, and a complex and open-ended question. A secondary set of questions here will concern the future of studies in relation to these questions of living and feeling – of Cultural Studies, Media Studies, disciplinarity in general, and finally ‘study’, as discussed by Moten and Harney (2013. The undercommons. New York: Minor Compositions).     

Not yet the postcolonial era: The (super) nation-state and transnationalism of cultural studies: Response to Ang and Stratton

Abstract

What is the epistemological and political status of the nation-state in the current practices of Cultural Studies? What is the relationship between the transnationalization of capital/super-states and the transnational turn of Cultural Studies? Through analyzing discursive sites of ‘regionalization’, ‘the Postcolonial’, ‘globalization’, this essay attempts to pinpoint unquestioned assumptions in the critical phase of ‘internationalizing’ Cultural Studies. Unless counter-hegemony positions and strategies can be collectively discussed, argued over and formulated, Cultural Studies as an internationalist project will run the risk of losing its critical edges and even reproducing the existing power structure of the nation-states and global capital. An openended geo-colonial historical materialism is proposed to revitalize Cultural Studies as part of a global decolonization movement.     

Cultural Studies and its local resources: discourse and practice in the Rural Reconstruction Movement

ABSTRACT

Emphasis on ‘context’ and ‘practice’ has been the tradition of Cultural Studies. Now Cultural Studies in Mainland China are facing the following difficulties: lack of attention to local issues and thoughts, lack of holistic horizon and sense of history. How can Cultural Studies in Mainland China search out more potential recourse and forces for critique and resistance from modern China and urban–rural China and confront Chinese problems and experiences which are of great complexity, by returning to its unique historical and social context and taking local resources into consideration? We try to return to the long-term engagement in ‘action-writing’ practice in the Rural Reconstruction Movement. Under the unique perspective of ‘practitioner-researcher’, they hope to explore plural spaces veiled by the mainstream and search out, in the historical context of China, local resources for Cultural Studies and possibilities for its advancement.     

Known-unknowns: Matthew Arnold,F. R. Leavis,and the government of culture

This essay reflects on the lives of two people whose publications, pedagogy, lectures, and crucially, whose experiences helped set the terms of the debate about so-called high culture in Cultural Studies: Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) and Frank Raymond (F. R.) Leavis (1895–1978). Who was Matthew Arnold? F. R. Leavis? What were the conditions of possibility of their work and words – that is, for the practices and positions for which they advocated? What new questions might emerge by sharing in detailed and perhaps unexpected stories of individuals who, presently, seem to function in Cultural Studies mainly as known-unknowns? The argument is that the details of both Arnold and Leavis’ lives are integral to understanding the conditions of possibility of their work, both individually and collectively, and indeed to more fully appreciating the meaning and implications their work holds for Cultural Studies. Apropos, this piece refines the methodology of keywords introduced by Raymond Williams [1958. Culture and society, 1780–1950. New York, NY: Columbia University Press; 1983.     

Lesbian Studies after The Lesbian Postmodern: toward a new genealogy

While Lesbian Studies is established as a commodity in the academic marketplace, its disciplinary contours are rather more obscure-and even more problematically, its disciplinary genealogy remains somewhat crude. The dominant genealogy of Lesbian Studies might best be characterized as a 'collision model,' a battle between politics and theory, even though much existing scholarship draws on both Lesbian-Feminist Theory and Queer Theory.1 This article proposes that the tools and methods of a sub-field called 'Lesbian Cultural History' might be useful in generating other historical accounts of the origins and evolution of Lesbian Studies. Such a project is vital because the writing of our disciplinary History clarifies how we envision a disciplinary future.     

Cultural Studies in Black and White

Political intervention is deeply etched in the history and theory of Cultural Studies. The vehicle of intervention is typically understood as textual and the measure of success as ‘has it changed the world?’ This graphic and textual essay argues for and enacts thinking of and practising intervention more innovatively and more modestly: as equally extra-textual, and as a site for experimentation in the folds among theory, practice, and the quotidian. The author’s original black and white charcoal and pastel images are paired with text to explore the potential for an articulation of the visual and the textual to engage, convey, actualize, and produce concepts and insights of Cultural Studies. In evocative images and accessible language it enacts a new mode of engaging the theory and practice of Cultural Studies, specifically engaging concepts of articulation and assemblage, movement and things, questions of identity, the importance of affect, the power of transformation, youth cultures and resistance, The Black Lives Matter movement and matters of race, the struggles of women, the challenge of overcoming culturally engendered hatred of difference, and the difficulties of negotiating change in the precarious circumstances of contemporary culture.     

Mining,indigeneity, alterity: or,mining Indigenous alterity?

In this special issue on ‘extraction’, we think critically about two urgent and entangled questions, examining the political economy of mining and Indigenous interests in Australia, and the moral economy of Indigenous cultural difference within Cultural Studies and Anthropology. In settler colonial states such as Australia, Indigenous cultural difference is now routinely presented as commensurate with, rather than obstructive of, extractive industry activity. Meanwhile, the renewed interest in ‘radical alterity’ across these disciplines has seen a movement away from regarding authoritative claims about ‘others’ as morally suspect – as only extracting from or mining Indigenous worlds for insights and academic prestige. The ‘ontological turn’, however, leads us to question the empirical status of the ontologies circulating through academic discussions. What happens when Indigenous people disappoint, in their embrace of environmentally destructive industries such as mining, for example? We argue that in cases where ‘they’ are not as different as ‘we’ might hope them to be, scholars should be concerned to foreground the potential role of colonial history and processes of domination in the production and reduction of ontological difference. Second, we call for critical assessment of the political, epistemological, and social effects of both academic and societal evaluations of difference. We conclude by urging for a scholarship that does not pick and choose between agreeable and less agreeable forms of cultural difference.     

Cultural studies of extraction

The special double issue at hand offers Cultural Studies engagements with extractivism and the myriad of conflicts, struggles and other processes and phenomena that have risen together with the on-going intensification and expansion of extractivist industries and exploitation. In this article, we examine the political and epistemological stakes of these engagements, and introduce the different perspectives from which the notions of extractivism and extraction are approached within this issue. We argue that as a conceptual framework loaded with political meaning and potential, and able to address the on-going moment of dwindling resources, environmental degradation and heightened social and economic inequality, extractivism and studies of extraction are crucial for the discipline’s efforts to engage contemporary culture politically, and to examine on-going processes of exploitation and subjectification through specific context and cases. Many of the articles included in this issue expand understandings of extraction, and present a broad range of methods and analytical frameworks through which different forms of ‘extractivism’ and its consequences might be examined, deciphered and discussed within Cultural Studies. And yet, what emerges out of these efforts eventually, is the ultimate centrality of the war between climate and capital for contemporary politics of globalization.     

The Codex,the Codicil and the Codpiece: Some Thoughts on Diminution and Elaboration in Identity Formation

This article is about the way in which the processes of diminution and elaboration can be detected in gendered accounts of identity formation. Firstly, it considers the ways in which power is denied to women through a series of reductions, restrictions and controls, and looks at the ways in which men, in contrast, elaborate their identities via a range of enlargements and extensions. The codex of the title refers to the role of the ‘Law’, in Kristeva's sense of the term, in authorizing such arrangements. The codpiece offers a metaphor for elaboration and extension: a male form of extension and elaboration. The codicil, an appendage to a last will and testament, is intended to convey the position of women as appendages, afterthoughts, marginal notes. The article is an example of what Pullen and Rhodes have called ‘dirty writing’, that is to say, it is written with the purpose of allowing the intrusion of the author into the text: with a deliberate confusion of the authorial standpoint and the content. Dirty writing contaminates. This article is written with the intention of contaminating the regulatory mechanisms of the production of the codex, to reveal the enormity of the codpiece and to permit the codicil to assume a role within the codex rather than simply occupying the position of appendage to it. The article is not auto‐ethnographic, although it has elements of autobiography. Rather this article seeks to ‘undo’ gender by fragmenting the coherence of the codex. More tentatively, it seeks to lay bare the male erection which is concealed by the codpiece and to expose it for what it is: an elaborate construction — an elaborate creation masking a less adequate membership. And so this piece of writing attempts to undermine the extravagance of masculine forms of writing; of writing to produce the codpiece, writing as conceit; writing which is antagonistic to fragmented experience. It will not satisfy some, it will irritate others. The article is unbalanced, unresolved: like life itself. It is about stories, illustrations, asides, observations. It is also, with all its attempts to subvert, (with all its attempts to make it ‘dirty’), a piece of male writing.     

On ‘telling better stories’*

Over the course of his forty-year career, Lawrence Grossberg has modelled a form of rigorous, politically-engaged, radically contextual social research. Writing about Cultural Studies in the abstract, he has often characterized this work as, principally, about ‘telling better stories,’ and he attempts to tell them in his work on the contemporary conjuncture through analyses of political struggles in the United States. However, in a moment where calls for and claims of ‘better’ cultural stories abound on both the Left and the Right, what exactly does it mean for Cultural Studies to tell them better? I suggest we can locate attempts to grapple with Cultural Studies’ ‘better stories’ problem in the space between Grossberg’s conjunctural work and his work on the identity and future of Cultural Studies. Highlighting these efforts, I clarify what it means for Cultural Studies to assume the responsibility of telling better stories given the specific contours of the present context.     

Homework: Routine,social aesthetics and the ambiguity of everyday life

Routine is a central feature of everyday life, yet its peculiar rhythms, and the range of experiences associated with it, are often neglected within cultural studies and sociology. Simmel’s attempt to provide a sociological aesthetics is seen as a project that needs reanimating for the study of everyday life routines. This does not mean, however, that Simmel is the only, or the best, guide to the aesthetic dimensions of everyday routine life. In an attempt to provide some co-ordinates for instigating a socio-aesthetic approach to routine, this paper discusses a number of writers who couple aesthetics and the everyday, and who might provide frameworks for the study of experiential aspects of routine life. It also suggests that an inverted reading of John Dewey could provide socio-aesthetic study with the ‘formless’ forms required to bring everyday background routines into the foreground. The socio-aesthetic study of cooking undertaken by Luce Giard provides an example of the complexity of such an approach. Lastly the article looks briefly at new directions for ‘everyday life aesthetics’, more specifically at Henri Lefebvre’s unfinished project of rhythmanalysis.     

The wageless life of the subaltern

ABSTRACT

One of the most striking legacies of the Subaltern Studies project has been the innovative methodologies and archives that it has mobilized to articulate the singular position of the subaltern outside the hegemonic terms of representation. Yet in its sweeping classification of non-hegemonic social groups and classes, Subaltern Studies has often tended to elide the precise economic determinants that define the subaltern as a class, and thereby foreclose the forms of agency that are available to people who occupy such singular positions of radical alterity that cannot be identified in hegemonic terms. Spivak’s deconstructive rethinking of the labour theory of value enables us to consider how the body of the gendered subaltern performs an important economic function in the contemporary global economy. But to what extent can such a theory account for the economic conditions of people dwelling in the slums and shantytowns of postcolonial cities, or what Michael Denning has aptly called the wageless life of the global poor? And how might we begin to address the gendered dynamics of wageless life? Through a reading of Abderrahmane Sissako’s film Bamako (2006), this essay considers how the film’s juxtaposition of a fictional courtroom narrative in which the World Bank is put on trial and the everyday lives of characters who populate the courtyard in which the courtroom is situated raise questions about the limitations of the law and civil society to alter the socio-economic conditions of wageless life. With reference to Gayatri Spivak’s reflections on the relationship between the subaltern and the economic policies of global financial institutions the essay suggests that the narrative structure and mise-en-scène of Bamako offer a means of addressing the global economic conditions as well as the power relations that circumscribe the agency and voice of the subaltern.     

CULTURAL STUDIES IN THE CORPORATE UNIVERSITY

This essay is about the fate of Cultural Studies in the new context of the market-based reform of Higher Education and the resurgence of liberal capitalism. As the global corporate demand for educational services increases, universities are becoming more like businesses. The trend toward a corporate style university can be seen in the way that its educational mission is being subordinated to the criteria of the flexible labour market. Neo-Liberal forms of governance introduce economic calculation into what were previously social and bureaucratic domains. The emergence of Cultural Studies in the 1960s was a challenge from the New Left to both the humanities and to the historic national mission of the university. The rise of the corporate university and its Benthamite utilitarianism in the 1980s confronted Cultural Studies with its own hiatus. The essay argues that we need to revisit Cultural Studies’ early rejection of humanism and work out a new kind of'humanism without guarantees, if we are to adequately confront this conjuncture and find the moral and intellectual resources to restore Cultural Studies as a critical and engaged practice.     

Ontological Politics. A Word and Some Questions

This is a chapter that asks questions about where we are with politics now that actor network theory and its semiotic relatives have reshaped ontology . They have reshaped it by underlining that the reality we live with is one performed in a variety of practices. The radical consequence of this is that reality itself is multiple. An implication of this might be that there are options between the various versions of an object: which one to perform? But if this were the case then we would need to ask where such options might be situated and what was at stake when a decision between alternative performances was made. We would also need to ask to what extent are there options between different versions of reality if these are not exclusive, but, if they clash in some places, depend on each other elsewhere. The notion of choice also presupposes an actor who actively chooses, while potential actors may be inextricably linked up with how they are enacted . These various questions are not answered, but illustrated with the example of anaemia, a common deviance that comes in (at least) clinical, statistical and pathophysiological forms.     

Sardonic Atheists and Silly Evangelicals: the Relationship between Self-Concept and Humor Style

Humor is widely used as a means of supporting group solidarity, but what determines the direction that this humor takes (i.e. its quality and targets)? I suggest that the answer lies in an interaction between self-concept, perceptions of outgroups and micro group culture. Aspects of self-concept that are central for a group’s identity work, especially how the group imagines outsiders, open possibilities for certain types of humor while closing off others. Then micro-cultural processes, heavily dependent on the exact persons present in a given interaction, influence the humorous forms used. This process explains why groups in roughly similar structural positions often make use of humor to generate solidarity in strikingly different ways, as well as why styles of humor vary, within limits, within groups. I provide illustrations of this process in two religious minority groups with very different humorous styles: atheists in the Bible Belt and evangelical Christians in Chicago.     

Queering the Palimpsest: Affective Entanglement Beyond Dichotomization

In Cultural Studies, the affective turn is a response to the so-called crisis of representation. Insisting on a crucial difference, some theorists separate representation as it is addressed in psychoanalytic accounts of the subject, from pre-individual bodily capacities, as they are developed in affect theory. In our article, we are revisiting Freud’s model of the mystic writing pad and present a metaphor enhancing an inclusive approach to both: the palimpsest. Following Ahmed and Butler, we understand subjectivity as a constant process of affective surfacing, in which intrapersonal and interpersonal dimensions constitute each other. The metaphor of the palimpsest offers a way to theorize subjectivity as structured by power relations yet open to potentiality, paying attention to the intrapsychic as affective force within encounters between subjects. “Queering the palimpsest” disrupts the dichotomization of ontology versus epistemology, the dichotomous ways of gendering the subject and the “either-or-option” of affect theory and psychoanalysis.