Parallax
ISSN: 1353-4645 (Print) 1460-700X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tpar20
Cultural studies and philosophy
Steven Connor , Elisabeth Bronfen , Sadie Plant , Emily Apter , Couze Venn ,
Susan Buck‐Morss , Mieke Bal , Susan Rubin Suleiman & Mike Gane
To cite this article: Steven Connor , Elisabeth Bronfen , Sadie Plant , Emily Apter , Couze Venn ,
Susan Buck‐Morss , Mieke Bal , Susan Rubin Suleiman & Mike Gane (1995) Cultural studies
and philosophy, Parallax, 1:1, 93-117, DOI: 10.1080/13534649509361996
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534649509361996
Published online: 27 Feb 2009.
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Why cultural studies and philosophy?
What political project was envisaged by British Cultural Studies in its taking up of
continental philosophy as opposed to a British analytical or an Anglo-American
philosophical tradition? What have been the productive and detrimental effects/affects
of this decision? Has cultural studies canonised continental philosophy?
Cultural studies has invested in continental philosophy's reformulation of subjectivity,
but has the reverse been the case?
What are the implications of the recent return to 'ethics' as a site of love, friendship,
tolerance and the acceptance of difference within the discourses of cultural studies and
philosophy?
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Can the relations between cultural studies and philosophy negotiate a repoliticisation
of culture and philosophy?
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I think the answer must be in terms of institutional dynamics. Cultural studies looked
to philosophy during the 1970s - or a certain kind of philosophy - for grounding and
legitimation; even though what it derived from such philosophy was precisely an
antifoundationalist critique.
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Was there a 'decision' to 'take up' continental philosophy? I don't know where and
when it was taken, if so (and nobody solicited my vote for or against). Undoubtedly
British cultural studies has a much more significant relationship to certain kinds of
continental philosophy than to certain kinds of Anglo-American philosophical enquiry,
but this relationship is not, I think, given or self-evident in its forms and effects. Might
it not be the case that, far from continental philosophy being a resource or accessory
for cultural studies, cultural studies was in fact the precipitation of continental
philosophy into British cultural life - that cultural studies is the name we give to the
career of continental philosophy in Britain? Another, more cynical way to put this
might be to say that to displace philosophy into culture is a typically British gesture of
recoil from the grandiose and totalising ambitions of theory as such. In seeming to
reach for a philosophical theory of culture, cultural studies has been on the lookout for
forms of theory that were already, so to speak, 'culturized' - linguistic, libidinated,
subjectivised, bound up with experience and the body.
'Continental philosophy' is, in more senses than the most obvious one, abroad. For
indeed, it only exists in a condition of exportation, or deportation from itself. The
practices and preoccupations of what gets called continental philosophy derive their
prestige from, and have their forms of circulation in the Anglo-American academy.
Perhaps, in fact, continental theory only exists where it is not, in Britain and the US.
But as such, it cannot but be influenced, as it were, in advance, by the forms of enquiry
(cultural studies, feminism, ethnic studies, gender studies) that appear to be and
represent themselves as its by-products. The continuing concern with subjectivity in
the work of French philosophers, psychoanalysts and social theorists (or at least the
ones who are visible from the outside) is only one example of this structure of what
might be called 'retrolepsis' - in which the current and continuing concerns of
contemporary culture keep reproducing their own authoritative antecedents.
Ethics is returning, I think, as the alibi of a discredited politics. Where once everything
was held to be political, the discrediting of formal systems of political belief and
adherence makes it necessary to declare everything to be ethical instead. The return
of ethics is, therefore, a bit like the return of the party apparatchiks to power that we
saw in some of the East European elections - converted overnight to pluralism,
tolerance and the free market. We must be grateful for the enlargement, renovation
(and also restoration) of the languages in which we construe and imagine questions of
goodness and justice. But we must also distinguish between the varieties of feel good,
Blairite ethics that are breaking out everywhere and that kind of ethical reflection
which puts at stake the force or 'ethicity' of ethics at every point; in other words, an
Connor
94
ethics that allows and compels itself to ask in whose name, in what right, and on behalf
of what actual or imagined community do I uphold these rights and these forms of
community? The return to ethics has seemed attractive to many because it seems to
avoid the necessary commitments and violent normativities of formal politics. But the
only ethical thinking worthy of the name does not refrain from acknowledging its
perhaps paradoxically normative force, does not duck the impossible, unavoidable
question of what value these values of mine, or theirs, have.
Yes, but under the conditions demanded in my last reply; which is to say, under
conditions that do not determine in advance what the specific nature of a politicisation
of culture and philosophy might or might not, must or must not, turn out to be.
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Birkbeck College, University of London
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To ask the question 'Why cultural studies and philosophy' means commenting on or
problematising the word 'and'. Seeking to move beyond more traditional Marxist
explanations of the relationship between the material conditions of a given social
system and the production as well as the function of cultural artefacts, British Cultural
Studies turned to continental philosophy so as to focus on the way that power is always
also engendered, produced, negotiated and perpetrated through discourses, with the
human subject always already inscribed by these symbolic exchanges, subject, that is,
to various discursive codes even as it seeks to orient itself within this symbolic network
in an individual or personally specific manner. The interest of cultural studies thus
shifted to include an analysis of the structure of social and cultural systems, of the
functions, the equations, die rhetorical figurations that constitute the relationship
between politics, representations and the subject; that is to say the exchange between
official, collective and private, personal identities. At die same time, however, the
enmeshment of cultural studies with continental philosophy enabled the critic to keep
insisting on the fact that these relations and exchanges are necessarily ambivalent,
shifting and contradictory, fraught with difference, hybridity and plurality. Reading
culture and society as a sign system meant asking questions about what any symbolic
system includes or excludes, about what oppositions necessarily construct any given
cultural system, serving as its tacit presuppositions, its ground or vanishing point, about
what is privileged in the production and exchange of representations and what is
effaced in the process, about what is central and what is marginal. At die same time
the cultural critic was able to develop a high level of self-consciousness, always also
questioning her or his own conceptual and investigatory framings, that is to say the
privilegings at work in any theoretical undertaking and the implications that emerge
from each theoretical project.
Turning to Derrida's deconstruction of western metaphysics' investment in notions of
the center, of the origin, of the integrated subject, to Lyotard's skepticism about the
validity of grand narratives as coherent explanatory models, to Foucault's discussion of
the way that the interplay between representation, power and knowledge emerges in
symbolic edifices like the archive, the hospital, the prison, to Lacan's reformulation of
the subject as the nexus between the imaginary, the symbolic and the real, or to
Bakhtin's definition of the text as a negotiation point for the rivalry of several edinic
and class specific voices, cultural studies was able to merge an interest in historical facts
with an awareness of die enmeshment of political, psychoanalytical and semiotic
elements in any discussion or analysis of representation; whereby representation was
understood as the privileged means by which a given cultural system transmits its
notions of power in a mitigated form, thus making these power relations appear more
acceptable, or as Barthes would argue universal, natural, essential. Cultural studies was
thus able to work out a meta-discursive position from which to comment on social
structures, on cultural needs, phantasies, desires and anxieties without jettisoning real
political concerns from tiiis analytic project. Preferring the Anglo-American analytic
philosophy would have made the effort at straddling a structural discussion of culture
with a political analysis less obvious.
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Oddly enough, cultural studies has thus canonized continental philosophy even if it has
done so at a dislocated academic site - precisely not within the discipline of philosophy
itself, but rather within the philologies - namely, the literatures, art history, film and
media studies. As fruitful as the intervention of certain aspects of continental
philosophy have been for a critical reassessment of culture, several potentially
detrimental effects have recently become clear. For one, the usage of, and dependency
on philosophical discourse by students and scholars of whom not all are formally
trained in traditional philosophy, history or psychoanalysis (with its connection to the
clinic) opens up what can be both useful and problematic - a misunderstanding and
misapplication of the terms and arguments at stake. Another potentially detrimental
aspect, which one could indeed call an affect, is the often no longer self-conscious
investment in technical language that forgets to openly display its theoretical
presuppositions and cornerstones and in so doing runs the risk of producing a critical
discourse which is as exclusive as it is inclusive, i.e. of repeating the very gesture of
marginalisation that cultural studies tries to explore and critique. This became most
clear to me recently when an uninitiated colleague of mine began to read Homi
Bhabha's work on post-colonial discourse because I had explained to him that this was
one of the best theoretical attempts currently available to define and analyse the
challenge posed by multiculturalism to any unified notion of Europe. He responded by
explaining that while reading he had understood what it meant to be a colonized
subject, excluded from the very discourse that as a reader presumed his inclusion. This
anecdote of course raises the issue of whether an objective, universally accessible metadiscursive position is really possible, whether the questions asked, the language used,
the analysis undertaken, however critically and self-consciously formulated, does not
always somehow ultimately reflect the position of the critic and her or his critical
community, thus necessarily entailing an obliteration of some presuppositions, even as
others are exposed. The still prevalent, indeed recently once again more vocal,
skepticism of post-structuralist language reflects to some degree a discomfort with the
fact that what has meanwhile become standard theoretical terminology is in danger of
depleting itself of meaning; that it is precisely this originally radical language which
itself no longer offers an innovative critical viewpoint meant to subvert stable categories
and ways of seeing in the process, but rather that precisely its gestures have become
derivative, it analyses predictable, in danger of being entrapped in hermetically closed
philosophical systems that refer more to themselves than to the late twentieth century
world of political conflicts or changes.
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The urgent question facing cultural studies in the nineties proves, indeed, to be that of
finding a common ground, a common project, a means of common understanding.
This is true in part because the turn to continental philosophy by cultural studies has
resulted in a theoretical insistence on difference, fragmentation, loss, plurality,
indeterminacy, and oscillation to such an increasing degree that it has become ever
more difficult for the cultural critic to formulate a clear and coherent standpoint from
which political action can emerge. Faced with cultural issues that move beyond
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discursive, symbolic systems even as they include them - such as the tormented bodies
of the victims of recently erupted civil wars, to name only Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the
dying bodies inflicted with AIDS, the re-emergence of racial conflict and violence in
Europe direcdy resulting from a desire for new nationalisms, and the redefinition of
concepts like body, location and identity as cyberspace and virtual realities are
developed further - it seems more urgent now than ten years ago to formulate an
integrated or unified subject. In this new context the subject needs to be thought of
again as a locus for agency, creativity and responsibility on the basis of which this
subject can formulate committed decisions and act. It now seems more crucial to
explore not the loss or difference at the centre of post-modern societies and their
subjects, but rather our desire and need for coherence, for common visions and
common stories. Not, of course the formulation of a theory that embraces notions of
universality, essentialism or morality naively, but one that makes us aware of how each
identity - be it personal or collective - requires difference to define itself at all, at the
same time this theory should point to what connects us in certain beliefs, in certain
causes, in certain historical responsibilities. That is to say an awareness of the
connections possible over and against difference, a respect for fragmentation, conflict
and difference that allows us precisely to see ourselves as knotted subjects, and as
cultured subjects bound together by mutual implication, shared responsibility and
political solidarity. This ethical gesture - formulated in recent critical discussion in the
form of a call for embodiment, ensoulment, and for agency can move in several
directions. On the one hand, following Slavoj Zizek's repoliticisation of psychoanalysis
by virtue of splicing Lacanian and Freudian theory with a Marxist re-reading of Hegel
and Kant, leads to a continual exploration of our encounters with the Real. On the
other hand, accepting the human need for coherence and closure (A.S. Byatt), for
coherent life stories and an enlarged mentality (Seyla Benhabib), for sentimental stories
(Joan Didion) or for mythic signifiers and narratives (Roland Barthes), leads to
narratives about stable meanings, shared visions, common goods and working
communities. With the closing scene of his film Grand Canyon - where the protagonists,
traumatized by natural and social violence and dissolution come together as a mixed
grouping of gender, race and class, to stand together before the abyss of one of the
most privileged examples of American iconography, the Grand Canyon, - Kasdan
recently offered us a timely image of how a respect for difference of the other can
nevertheless knot the group into a shared vision of connectedness.
University of Zurich
Bronfen
98
As someone with a first degree and doctorate in philosophy who now works in cultural
studies, the connections between these two areas has a particular importance. My first
encounters with cultural studies left me in little doubt that the field was in urgent need
of something which might be called a philosophical. awareness of both its own
underpinnings and the directions in which its future might be found. There is also little
question that philosophy needs to become far more culturally engaged if it is not to
become - or remain - an academic irrelevance. But the question of this or that
discipline is increasingly redundant: there are CDs, not canons, upstream.
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Cultural studies has taken up some of the themes and issues from the so-called
continental tradition of philosophy, but it seems to me that there was little deliberation
involved in this move. Cultural studies has taken on board only those ideas it could
recuperate and integrate within an already existing - and now moribund - political
project, an ethics based on a Western Marxism which had already taken the kinder,
gentler elements of Marx and rejected materialism for a primarily moral agenda.
Elements of psychoanalytical theory, deconstruction and Foucauldian analysis have
been adopted in the service of an idealist and humanist tradition, and any ideas which
might have disturbed this picture have been left on the shelf. The consequence of this,
is that cultural studies has adopted watered down versions of the antihumanism and
post-dialectical thinking implicit in (some of) the work of Foucault, Lyotard, Irigaray,
and Deleuze and Guattari, all of whom, at their most interesting, are undermining the
entire Western philosophical perspective which cultural studies continues to support.
Having said all this, there have been few new ideas from France in more than fifteen
years, and the situation is even worse with Anglo-American philosophy. Given the scale
of material changes in motion - the shift of markets to the Pacific, the rise of China
and India, and the emergence of cyberspace to name but three - there is little doubt in
my mind that any cultural studies worthy of the name will seek out connections with
those philosophical strands which are able to deal with these changes, and then do
some thinking for itself. I see little in the Anglo-American tradition capable of helping
here, but plenty of rich pickings in the ruins of continental philosophy.
Cultural studies may have been invested in reformulations of subjectivity to some
extent, but it has rarely allowed this interest to disturb the predominance of its concern
with the subject at the epistemological, ontological, and political level. In any case,
philosophical reformulations of subjectivity are literally academic when compared to
the material reprocessing of the subject underway in capitalist cultures, AI labs and
MDMA-laden club nights. Philosophy notices even less of this than mainstream
cultural studies.
If there has been a "return to 'ethics' as a site of love, friendship, tolerance and the
acceptance of difference", this only serves to illustrate the extent to which cultural
studies has remained unchallenged by anything of interest in the "continental"
tradition to which you refer, much of which would have made such a return impossible.
Plant
100
Maybe it's not surprising that cultural studies should find itself going back to basics
with the rest of the culture, but this is a reactionary move with disturbing implications
for the future of the area.
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If cultural studies and philosophy can indeed renegotiate an effective repoliticisation of
.
both culture and philosophy, this is clearly one of the directions in which it will go.
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conceals its own authoritarianism. If, on the other hand, they are willing to completely
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scope and definition of both "culture" and "philosophy", they may find it possible to
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move beyond the obsolete left-right distinction and position themselves on the antiauthoritarian side of the battles to come.
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University of Warwick
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Identifying Deconstruction
Cultural studies in North America is difficult to identify without the legacy of
deconstruction, but the jury is still out on whether deconstruction will have much of a
future within the future of cultural studies. Perhaps deconstruction will 'come back',
much like seventies fashion, reconstrued as a kind of 'mode destroy' - a tendentiously
deviant rhetoricity that gives cultural good face...
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For a generation 'formed' in graduate school during an era of high deconstruction,
cultural studies has become in some respects the nearest object of intellectual
transference. The destabilizing reading practices that one learned are now applied to
the 'texts' of popular culture, virtual reality, politics and so on. Problems arise from this
residual propensity to textualize objects of analysis when textualization itself is
understood to be a culturally freighted philosophical occidentalism. With its
profoundly discomfited relationship to 'role models' or 'positive images, deconstruction,
such as it is today, proves to be incompatible with an identity politics that often shores
itself up through heroic histories of cultural subjects. And yet identity politics and
deconstruction, remain, at strategic junctures, joined at the hip. By undoing the fixity
of ontological stereotypes, and making common cause with a more polysemous
definition of performativity, deconstruction and cultural studies alike have made the
whole question of the epistemology of identity (seemingly) more supple and less
foreclosed. Figuring the stereotype (as Homi Bhabha has done) as an identity without
a signature, as a fixity whose fetishism desublimates the postcolonial unconscious and
thereby politicizes subject relations, deconstruction has also helped identity politics deal
with the recalcitrance of ethnic, racial and gender stereotypes in art, pedagogy,
technology and mass culture.
Though deconstruction has been stigmatized for its elitist internationalism and
'difficult' rhetoricity, it has also entered the age of cultural studies with strong
interrogations of nation-ness, femme-ness, and race matters. In 'being there' with a
language of cultural ambivalence, of 'deviant' or queer discursive invention,
deconstruction remains in some respects indispensable for the non-reductive exfoliation
of identity and cultural discourses. Though the intellectual gongorism of 'late'
deconstruction often lead to a displacement of agency, location and reference, these
problems of the subject cannot simply be relinked felicitously to a cultural studies
without guilt or pain. Cultural studies interrogates these issues today with a kind of
retro deconstructive angst.
University of California, Los Angeles
Apter
102
What does cultural studies want?
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This question about the desire of cultural studies is not a sign of exasperation with the
constant self-analysis which has attended its development; rather, it is a way of shifting
the focus toward what is misrecognised when the interrogation of cultural studies
immediately wresdes with the problem of what it is or what its goals ought to be. The
range of material and the issues that are bundled inside cultural studies readers amply
illustrates the extent to which cultural studies have been the discontinuous response to
the reconstructions and disruptions that have been transforming modern culture since
the end of the second world war.1 The briefest inspection of its discursive field
confirms that nothing escapes its gaze, everything is, in principle, subject to its
appropriating impulse. Furthermore, the narrative of cultural studies is punctuated by
metonymies of contestation, intervention, opposition, transgression; it is a tale of its
wish to subvert and to mark a difference from the adjacent discourse from which it has
borrowed or deviated or with which it ambivalendy cohabits. In speaking about desire,
I want to draw attention to the standpoint of a questioning about cultural studies, the
interrogation of what it "enframes".2
The apparendy totalising ambition and the critical commitment should alert us to the
strange familiarity that begins to take shape when we pay attention to the question of
desire. For, another discourse, more general in its form, less concerned with the detailed
analysis of the way we are, shares that desire. It is philosophy, at least the critical
elements in philosophical discourse from Rousseau to Kant to Marx and beyond mat
have harboured a dissenting voice nourishing resistance and the will to transform the
present. It has often provided the radical intellectual with the conceptual tools and the
differential space for the critical distantiation, the displacement in point of view that
provide a purchase for renewing narratives of resistance or the leverage to elude the
hold of power.
If cultural studies has developed a special, yet deeply uneasy relationship with
philosophy it is because the claims of the former to be an "insurrectional
consciousness"3 are affiliated to the emancipatory and critical ideals of Enlightenment
philosophy. Whilst this is not die place to address the issue of the despotic and
universalising reason which supports much of Enlightenment discourse, I think that
what underscores the unease is the ambivalent relation that they both constitute with
modernity as a project. Indeed, structuralist and post-structuralist theory has proved
to be so fruitful for cultural theory precisely because its critique of the foundational
narratives of modernity has contributed to the crisis in the project of the emancipation
of humanity through the progress of rational understanding, a project that interiorised
the systematic subjugation and exploitation of modernity's 'others' widiin its telos. For
the same reason, feminist theory and postcolonial theory have drawn sustenance from
the dissonances within critical philosophy and contributed to the rewriting of
modernity.4
Venn
104
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It is the deconstruction of the philosophy of presence - the founding of the stability of
the subject in the notion of self-presence anchored in Reason, the privileging of Logos
in the foundation of truth - that have shown the intrinsic imperialism and the violences
that such an ontology of being entails in terms of how it inscribes the 'other' within the
logic of supplementarity structuring phallogoEurocentrism, that is, as other: erased,
written over, yet liminally present and constitutive for the unitary subject. Derrida and
Foucault, or Lacan have exposed the discursive subterfuges, the doublings and splittings
which have produced the illusion of unitariness and self-sufficiency of the modern form
of subjectivity.
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Affirmative deconstruction is the insurgent practice of 'reading' that searches for the
trace of the absences and silences that point to the erasures in the discursive strategies
and mechanisms whereby subjection and subjectification are produced. It means
placing oneself in such a way as to detect in the mirror of the text the tain or stain that
shows up its secret doubles: reading as a stratagem of positionality. But this is not
something that a practice of reading in itself generates, for a prior question motivates
the interrogation, concerned with the effects of power in the production of statements,
and thus with politics and the principles and values that are the stakes in making visible
that which a particular discourse invisibly puts into place in the interest of a particular
form of sociality and a particular regime of power. It is how a critical philosophy enters
the game, not as a privileged site of critique, but as a border discourse, a transitional
space enabling the crossing of counter-narratives of subjectivity and sociality through
the minefield of politics and our own investments in the everyday. Philosophy marks
off the agonistic terrain upon which the struggle of a politics of truth is fought out.
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This is not to excuse the fact that the naive deconstructionist can be seduced into
imagining that the referent is the spectral creation that discourse has called up and can
conjure away or transform without appeal to any other process save that of its own
invocations. The error is philosophical.5 Cultural studies deals with the here and now
concreteness and the embodied character of culture. It may be that the affinities
between philosophy and literature, instantiated in the aesthetic and in the privilege of
the authorial voice in modernity, have allowed a style of criticism to emerge that has
become insensitive to the different objects and questions the two discourses address.
Going beyond deconstruction of the just gaming variety, in order to pay attention to
the practices of production of culture and their locatedness, does not entail
abandoning philosophy or theory (there are, in any case, no theory-independent
observation statements). Both philosophy and what is called art assuage the desire for
ontological security by giving form to and exteriorising that desire in a discourse of the
'truth' or in the experience of the 'sublime'. They suspend for a while the experience
of the void that opens up for the subject when confronted by the fragmentation of
consciousness that the temporality of being produces.6 Cultural studies is the
postmodern form of that interrogation of culture that has been part of the subject's
anxious self-fashioning project since the renaissance.
parallax
105
The questioning of cultural studies from the standpoint of desire brings to light the
disavowals buried deep in its own soil that through the long revolution of humanist and
liberal critiques surfaced in the youthful cultural studies. The disruptions and
discontinuities which a rewriting uncovers mark the place of the irruption of the
repressed in the narratives that have validated oppressions of class, gender, and 'race'
through the uses to which literary studies, history and the human sciences have been
put in the consolidation of the hegemonic authority of modernity, by way of a
manichaean aesthetics and the deployment of power/knowledge in the apparatuses of
the constitution of subjectivity and the social domain.7
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The relationship between philosophy and cultural studies must remain subject to
constant reappraisal because of the danger inherent in the conviction that "a once
insurgent theory is still insurgent"8 after its appropriation or translation into another
discourse. This complacency can result in a practice of "sophisticated intellectualism"
that feeds "political quietism".9 Theory, as Said points out, must not lose sight of the
"essential untidiness, the essential unmasterable presence that constitutes a large part of
historical and social situations".10
I think this has to do, in part, with the belatedness of critical theory in relation to
history. In contrast to the 'positivity' of the sciences, critical or reflexive theory comes
late on the scene of history (though it then has an effect in the real) - think, for example,
of postcolonial theory coming after the struggles for decolonization, postmodern
theory retrospectively thinking through the changes that have disrupted the trajectory
of modernity.''
The crisis of the intellectual today is located in the temporal disjunction of the post that
prefixes every current theory. The institutionalisation of insurgent theory exacerbates
the crisis by confining the intellectual under (mainly voluntary) house arrest in the
relative comfort of academia. Yet cultural studies must remain the unhomely place,
chafing in its discomfort with the ties of power. Its alliance with a critical philosophy
is premised on the shared disrespect for the authority of texts and political systems
which has so far fed its dynamism and relevance.
Notes
1 See S. Hall, "Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies", in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, P. Triechler, eds.
Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992): 282ff.
2 I am borrowing the notion of enframing from M. Heidegger's analysis of technology in, "The Question
Concerning Technology", in Basic Writings, ed. D.F. Krell (London: Routledge, 1993).
3 E.Said, The World, The Text, The Critic (London: Faber & Faber, 1984): 237.
4 I allude here to J-F Lyotards essay, "Reécrire la Modernité", in Cahiers de Philosophie 5 (Spring, 1988) in which
he argues for a 'working through' of the history of modernity in order to put an end to the cycles of repetition
and repression inherent in writing that history as one of progress and supercession.
5 And also ethical, if we take seriously the theme of ethics in J. Derrida's Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1993).
6 This is a shorthand for a complex theme - developed for example in Ricoeur, Lacan, Lyotard, Levinas,
Derrida - that I can only intimate here.
Venn
106
7 Much of postcolonial theory is concerned with the critique of the discourses that helped fashion Western
imperial culture; its engagement with critical philosophy shares this common concern.
8 E. Said op cit., 247.
9 Ibid., 245.
10 Ibid., 241.
11 A fashionable response to this belatedness is a perverse celebration of contingency. But, is contingency
the 'state of emergency' about which Walter Benjamin wrote or does it cohabit too easily with the 'culture of
choice' of the new right?
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parallax
107
Between Cultural Studies and Philosophy
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The relationship between philosophy and cultural studies is a two-way street. Cultural
studies can inform philosophy, and vice versa, without either being reduced to the other:
Philosophy is not explained away by cultural context; culture is not rationalized by
philosophical interpretation. The fruitfulness of their interplay occurs, rather, when
cultural studies demystifies philosophical concepts by translating them back into the
historical reality from which they were drawn; whereas philosophy saves cultural studies
from relativism when it demonstrates culture's transcendent significance, using the
critical power of the subject to blast the cultural elements out of their historical context,
in order to reveal their transformative meaning for the present.
Buck-Morss
108
If there is a historical method here, it is dialectical and materialist. It presupposes and
puts into practice an epistemology that can be expressed in two brief premises 1) the
priority of the object, and 2) its non-identity with the subject. 'Object' here means the
material world (including its cultural objects and historical events) which, however
much it is subjectively 'represented' or socially 'constructed', maintains a prior claim to
truth (the real world can prove thought wrong, but not vice versa). But if subjective
experience is always of a particular, material reality, if thought always has this reality as
its content and is in this way determined by it, the claim of non-identity means that the
subject nonetheless has the power to think, critically (negatively) against reality. The
redemption of the forgotten past is vital for this critical process, since it allows us to see
that there is nothing inevitable about history's course; things could have been (can be)
otherwise. And because collective history, like that of the individual, is always
constructed "afterwards" (Freud's temporality of Machtraeglichkeitj just how the facts of
the past congeal, just what picture they reveal, matters to the present. If history is
explored uncritically, as the explanation of why things were as they were and how they
became what they are, the effect is to make sense out of the course of events (— such
sense-making is precisely the subject's power). History itself appears to be reasonable
(Hegel's error), while the present is submerged as a mere moment in its course. Only
those facts that can be read as leading, logically, in the direction history has actually
taken are rescued from oblivion; everything else is marginalized as insignificant.
Historical vision is dius robbed of the subject's critical strength, its power to retrieve the
past in new constellations that could give different meanings to the present, and hence
the future. The philosophical task proper to history is the construction of such
constellations. The goal is to make visible the potential of the past underneath, and in
opposition to the layers of empirically actualized history. To those who say that the
philosophical use of history is dangerous politically, it can be countered that today it is
precisely the lack of critical, historical vision which harbors the greatest danger. In a
century which has brought us, in the name of progress, two world wars and countless
local ones, multiple genocides and the anticipation of irrevocable, human-caused,
ecological disasters, the fact that things keep going on like this is not one to be passively
accepted. History needs to be re-visioned, constructed "afterwards" against the grain.
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Philosophy needs factual knowledge of the past in order to discover it anew. Recent
historical research in cultural studies begins to make this possible. Monographs
published in the past several decades have unearthed such a treasure of factual
knowledge, particularly about those groups who have been the victims of history's
course, that we cannot help but see even conventional history in a new and astonishing
light. Much of this research has been politically motivated, as groups marginalized in
history have struggled to reclaim their past. Yet, such passionate, personal involvement,
rather than distorting truth, for the first time lets it be seen. What began as a plurality
of partial, particular quests thus doubles back as a contribution to universal history,
even against these writers' intent. This assertion may sound disturbingly Hegelian —
despite its rejection of Hegel's faith in progress — but the 'priority of the object' turns
Hegel inside out (if not, also, upside down). In fact, it is precisely by reading
philosophers like Hegel in new conceptual constellations made possible by this
historical research, that I believe one can demonstrate the philosophical and political
power which cultural studies can have, when it rubs history against the grain.
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parallax
109
I see two main reasons for the connection between cultural studies and philosophy.
Firstly, the need to do more than intuitively claim attention for art and artists
considered non-mainstream has made cultural studies look at some theoretical
frameworks that could help them substantiate such claims, and generalize them so as
to provide a framework for future inclusions. Looking at philosophy seemed the right
venue: philosophy stands in for the vaguer notion of 'theory' as in 'theoretical
foundations'. We turn to philosophy when we are in need of justification, but also of
directions in which to work.
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Secondly, philosophy itself has been involved in theorizing artistic practices, and thus
was able to offer the theoretical 'foundations' we needed (more or less). Perhaps the
disenchantment some of us are experiencing today comes from our overextended
expectations: philosophy cannot provide us with all the foundational concepts we need.
This is the case because philosophy's own object is not art or literature but its own
traditions, its own texts, its own issues. The attention to art has always been a side-issue,
and I have never been convinced that philosophy is where we should look to
understand art. It helps understand aesthetic views, traditions, but not specific effects
and objects. What got lost in this bargain is the keen understanding of specific works
of art and literature, the yield - in spite of the problems of unwarranted assumptions of the practice of 'close reading' in the anglosaxon critical tradition. No turn to
philosophy can compensate this loss.
The interest in this particular orientation, continental philosophy, is, I think, due to this
tradition's focus on subjectivity. If I may grossly simplify the difference: in analytical
philosophy, for example, intention is a given, and the analysis concerns the relationship
between intention and effect. In continental philosophy, intention itself is questioned,
as is the autonomous individual 'having' the intention. Subsidiarily, continental
philosophy took up, or is more congenial to, psychoanalysis. I think the interest in
psychoanalysis in cultural studies can be explained as an attempt to mediate between
philosophy's interest in human agency and responsibility, and cultural studies' interest
in the cultural expressions, or 'traces' of that agency, which psychoanalysis in its guise
as a semiotic theory has addressed from its inception on.
What got lost in this preference is, I think, not so clear, but from my perspective, I think
a framework like speech act theory could have been usefully integrated (if critically and
perhaps in a revised form) in a further probing of 'textual subjectivity'. Paradoxically,
although it is obsessed with intention, it is also geared toward effect, and that could
have been taken up more keenly than it has, connecting it to the good old rhetorical
tradition which, I think, has been developed much more productively in the literary
tradition than anywhere else (except in logic, of course).
I don't think cultural studies should be in a position to canonize anything; I hope it will
stay away from a fixed identity itself long enough to refrain from having such effects.
If anything, cultural studies can be defined as an anti-canonization movement.
Bal
110
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On the question of philosophy and subjectivity, the lack of interest in textual form is,
why I think that philosophy has not been interested in reversing the relationship.
Interested in subjectivity and human agency, it wasn't interested in the semiotics of
subjectivity as it is 'expressed' in art and literature. It has no need to be, either. I am
very keenly involved in interdisciplinarity, but precisely because I believe disciplines can
benefit from interacting, not necessarily merging. Philosophy has its own agenda, and
cultural studies cannot mime it, nor vice versa.
The turn to "ethics" comes out of the need to be firmly involved in society and its
needs. Cultural studies rightly takes on a function in the societal vanguard. However,
there is another element to this: the traditional claim of humanism to moral authority
lurks in it. Let's keep in mind that patriarchal humanism has always been 'ethical', and
would no doubt cheerfully subscribe to these slogans. I think there is a danger, a real
trap here. Much of what I see in cultural studies is outrightly moralistic, and this on
the basis of a claim to authority which nobody would overtly put forward.
There are, of course, good and bad examples. Ethical thought need not be moralistic.
Let me explain through an example. I have looked closely at one publication coming
out of philosophy in the neo-Kantian tradition.1 The woman writing this book
proposed "friendship" as an alternative model or paradigm for rational thought and the
pursuit of knowledge, over the standard paradigm of cartesianism, and "knowing other
people" over physics. She explains in detail the epistemological advantages of this
model. It also "happens" to be politically more responsible. As a cultural analyst, my
response to this book is triple: first, I don't particularly care about the neo-Kantianism,
but then, it doesn't bother me either; my focus is elsewhere; second, I am convinced,
entirely so, by the gain in knowledge production the proposal can yield; hence, I am
interested in adopting it; third, I am happy that it is also, but almost incidentally,
politically more responsible. Now, I am convinced that this will always tend to be the
case; that looking at the third aspect while neglecting the second will lead straight to
moralism and, eventually, to irrationalism. Hence, my response to this question is a
cautious welcoming one.
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On the problematics of the repoliticisation of culture and philosophy, I suppose that,
the same response is in order prior to answering in the affirmative. I think chances are
best if each thinker does what she or he does best. I am personally certain that
analyzing art in detail from a theoretically sound perspective, but in so much detail that
the work is enabled to resist or 'speak back', is a way of highlighting the politics in
culture without imposing my own politics on culture. And I don't mean that art is by
definition politically progressive or even sophisticated. I am just weary of finding what
we already (think we) know. But if I believe so strongly in the value of close analysis,
it is also because this is what I know I am good at, and I know I can make it work for
theoretical and philosophical thought. Others have a different take on this. But
imposing ways to go about it risks falling back into the moralism that patriarchal
humanism has always promoted.
parallax
111
But if well conducted, with enough of an open mind and the willingness to enact the
cultural openness and democracy cultural studies promotes in theory, I think that yes,
it can negotiate a repoliticisation of culture and philosophy, but under the condition
that "politics" itself, as a notion and as a set of positions, is kept dynamic.
Notes
1 Lorraine Code, What Can She Know? Feminist Epistemology and the Construction of Knowledge (Ithaca and
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London: Cornell University Press, 1991).
University of Amsterdam
Bal
112
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A crucial word that I think is missing from your questions about ethics and politics is
history. It seems clear that the recent "return to 'ethics'" among students of culture and
philosophy is closely linked to the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, which
brought to the fore the paradoxes (as well as horrors) of twentieth-century history.
What was undoubtedly a positive, 'velvet' revolution that caught everyone by surprise
in 1989 was followed by the now all too well known aftereffects: the resurgence of
virulent nationalisms, ethnic warfare, xenophobia, racism. These too caught people by
surprise.
Suleiman
114
The fact that, as we approach the twenty-first century, we are seeing a fascist party as
"part of the government in Italy must give one pause; as must the fact that, all over
Europe, narrow conceptions of national or ethnic identity are threatening to displace
earlier hopes for a 'Europe without frontiers'. A certain awful sense of deja vu all over
again strikes me from time to time. "This century began with Sarajevo and is ending
with it", a sardonic friend in Budapest said to me last year. Like many Hungarian
intellectuals, he is a pessimist with a strong streak of gallows humour. Following that
sentence came an untranslatable pun on Sarajevo: Szarajovo, "the future is shit".
Personally, I am more hopeful. For one thing I believe that one can learn from history;
for another, I maintain a stubborn (if occasionally faltering) optimism about the
peaceful possibilities of human beings.
What does this have to do with cultural studies and philosophy? Everything! I would
say that it is impossible, today, to think about culture or philosophy without some
consideration of history: not (or not only) as the story of the past, but as the unfolding
of the present. It's not a matter of "negotiating a repoliticisation of culture and
philosophy", for in a broad sense culture and philosophy have always been political
(Plato already knew that, witness The Republic). It's a matter, simply, of not closing your
eyes.
Harvard University
Cultural Studies and Philosophy: Culture Does Not Exist
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Can I say immediately that I think the way that parallax has posed the issues for
discussion seems to be a reflection in of current problems? There is a 'stalemate'
situation at the moment, but does mis arise from 'a failure to recognise and strategically
deploy the multiple discourses that intersect in cultural studies'? If I have really
grasped this diagnosis, it does not seem a very adequate one: are we to develop a new
eclecticism or a new intervention? And does the opposition, posed by parallax,
'continental versus anglo-american' philosophy still make sense? Of course there are
very marked differences between say British and French philosophy (look at the way
that philosophy and sociology are divided up in each tradition, especially say in locating
Foucault, in the strategic place of philosophy in the Lycees, in the lack of gender studies
and gender sections in French bookshops reflecting a wider underdevelopment etc).
And it seems to be an error to think that British cultural theory is simply a
'cannonisation' of French theory (or continental theory), just as it would be wrong to
say that Spencer and Mill canonised Comte. The debate in Britain in so far as it is a
response to continental debates has been very uneven in quantity and quality and has
given rise to entirely separate developments. Thinking in terms of conservative 'us' and
radical 'continentals' as was fashionable in the 1960s is no longer fruitful. The theatre
is global.
My second point is that there is a certain false nostalgia about the idea of 'repoliticising
culture and philosophy'. If once again I pretend to understand this idea it seems to
want to try to suggest that cultural criticism transform itself into a social movement.
The problem with this view is that the changes that have occured since the 1960s have
yet to be thought through and registered adequately in theory. One of the great
mistakes in analysis in the 1960s was the thesis that British political culture was
fundamentally blocked to radical change: the complex that made up Thatcherism
from British cultural sources was not seriously envisaged on any horizon. Curiously,
Thatcherism has not so much 'politicised' culture as 'econo-politicised' it: the truly
vulgar (marxist) idea that 'you can't buck the market'. Thatcherism altered the
structural balance of forces in British society, so that resistance no longer gravitates
towards the form of 'industrial action', or if it does stalemate soon sets in.
Deindustrialisation, privatisation etc, have radically refashioned the system: what does
'repoliticising' mean in a situation where econo-politicisation of culture has occured in
every sphere and is continuing to do so? This tendency continues against the
supportive background of the collapse of communism, communist parties and
ideologies, and the effective withering of the industrial proletarian and professional
solidarities of earlier periods. Marxism in an earlier period could provide the
millenarian schema of revolutionary negation in the political and social order. In effect
of course in Britain there was an industrial proletariat but no revolutionary
communism (quite different in France and Italy etc, where Marxist theory had some
basis in social realities). Leninism in particular, or Trotskyism, seems so remote it is
impossible even to describe it as an obsolete model of emancipation. The very idea of
the industrial proletariat as a culturally dominant class inspires no adherents at all as a
Gane
116
l
mode of liberation, indeed it now seems this conception was deeply flawed as a
liberation model right from its inception. It could well be that the proletariat could not
and never did constitute itself culturally as a revolutionary class in the way that the
bourgeoisie was capable of doing, that is by affirming its own radical alterity to
bourgeois culture. Its 'ideology' and its culture always developed within a bourgeois
framework. Even the idea of revolutionary seizure of power, class dictatorship, is
essentially a bourgeois one.
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If it is not to the classical proletariat that one must look to as the agent of radical anticapitalist struggle, what possible agents are there? Can there be a 'repolititicisation'
without an agent? Surely it cannot be 'cultural studies' itself? Surely it is crucial to ask
what changes have occured in the last quarter of a century, an analysis of the
consequences of the radical political economy of Thatcherism. What consequences
follow from these changes for our perception of revolution, industrialism,
enlightenment rationalism, freedom, social solidarity, popular culture? And under
Thatcherism there was also a radical restructuring in general of the state and political
culture in the direction of 'managerialism' as ethos, culture of 'enterprise' (against
dependency) and insistence however hypocritical on individual responsibility. The
most radical slogan 'there is no such thing as society', like 'there is no such thing as the
proletariat' might as well have been followed by 'there is no such thing as culture'. Can
the left match this radicalism?
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If there is a 'stalemate' in cultural studies and philosophy I think a central cause is that
faced with these Thatcherite axioms the left continues (in the main) to cling to the old
1960s frameworks. These are essentially counterproductive in the new circumstances
and become corporatist obstacles to rethinking the main issues at stake because they
interject 'the social' too soon. Even to think in terms of multi-culturalism, ecology,
feminism, animal rights, peace witness etc, in terms of new social movements within a
liberal democracy, does not go beyond the social cliches of conventional political and
cultural alliances. In a sense the already established framework of the social-humanist
bloc against the individualist-entrepreneurial bloc contains this alternation: ie
oppositional forces have already embraced 'postmaterial' values assoicated with radical
humanists linked to the professions and trade union organisations. The link with
women's organisations is weaker, and in Britain the 'right to work' movement and old
people's movements remain marginal. This is a political culture where the only
negative poles are 'other cultures'.
It is in this perspecitve that one must at least consider taking up a position outside this
system, at least if one is serious in posing 'contentious' points of view as parallax
demands. If something fundamental has happened to the system (ie that it has indeed
exploded its own negative principle, and thereby its prospect of historical supercession),
perhaps it does become vulnerable nonetheless in new ways. But new ways to think
about them we do not possess. As yet.
Loughbrough University
parallax
117