The (Post)Discipline of Postmodern Cultural Studies

However, McRobbie's celebration of this new “openness” is an ambivalent one. Earlier in the same essay she expresses concern that “what has now gone, with Marxism, and partly in response to the political bewilderment and disempowerment of the left, is that sense of urgency [which had characterized culture studies at an earlier historical moment]" (720). However, McRobbie does not theorize the relations between the new “openness” and this loss of “urgency." Rather, she sees the changes she is describing as an “undecidable” mixture of “benefits” and “dangers”: “This new discursiveness allows or permits a speculative 'writerly' approach, the dangers of which I have already outlined, but the advantages of which can be seen in the broader, reflective and insightful mode which the absence of the tyranny of theory, as it was once understood, makes possible” (724).

At the same time, the “bewilderment” and “disempowerment” of the left, which figured into McRobbie's explanation of the “disappearance” of Marxism, itself disappears in her assessment of the new “openness” in culture studies. This she attributes to the replacement of one discourse by another: Ernesto Laclau's displacement of the unified class subject by an understanding of “identities” as contingent and inherently plural. This, apparently, has nothing to do with the weakness of the left. On the contrary, McRobbie argues that the “collapse of Marxism need not be construed as signaling the end of socialist politics; indeed the beginning of a new era, where the opportunities for a pluralist democracy are strengthened rather than weakened, is now within reach” (724).

The strength of Laclau's discourse, then, is, according to McRobbie, simply an effect of its greater insight into social mechanisms than Marxism: she cites with approval Laclau's claim to be going “beyond” Marxism. By thus positing the greater explanatory power of Laclau's discourse, McRobbie is able not only to equate “socialism” with “pluralist democracy," but to affirm the ultimately beneficial effects of the new openness in culture studies: that is, if “pluralism” is equivalent to progress towards “socialism," then this must also hold true for the greater pluralism within cultural studies.

There is still, for McRobbie, not only the problem of the loss of political urgency in contemporary cultural studies, but also the problem of some “obfuscation” in Laclau's own account of subject formation. In particular, Laclau is not able to account for the “actual processes of acquiring identity.' In fact, it “is his commitment to the historically specific which allows Laclau to not be specific. He cannot spell out the practices of, or the mechanics of, identity formation, for the very reason that they are, like their subjects, produced within particular social and historical conditions. This permits a consistently high level of abstraction in his political philosophy. But the work of transformation which is implicit in his analysis is exactly concurrent with the kind of critical work found in the contributions on race in this volume” (725).

In other words the problem with Laclau's discourse is its level of “abstraction." The solution to this problem, for McRobbie, is to produce “concrete” and “specific” analyses, which will be “concurrent” with Laclau's claims. She clarifies this claim at the end of her essay, which calls for more detailed ethnographic studies of “everyday life." “This, then, is where I want to end, with a plea for identity ethnography in cultural studies, with a plea for carrying out interactive research on groups and individuals who are more than just audiences for texts” (730). Although McRobbie does not say so explicitly, it would follow from her argument that such “concrete," “detailed” studies would also resist the decline in political effectivity of cultural studies, since they would then be more directly connected with the “actual processes” of “identity formation” which take place in the “fleeting, fluid, and volatile formations” (730) of everyday life (and, therefore, cannot, presumably, be grasped with an “abstract” theoretical discourse).

In the context of McRobbie's absolute privileging of Laclau's discourse, and her acceptance of his claim that we now live in a post-Marxist universe, it is impossible to take seriously her rhetoric regarding the “openness” of contemporary cultural studies. Instead, what she is describing is the replacement of one set of limits by another: the “sense” of openness is simply the privileging of the new set of limits by those who benefit from it, whose relative power is supported and increased by this set of limits. That is, McRobbie's assessment of the “strengths” and “weaknesses” of contemporary discourses in cultural studies reflects a transformation in the political economy of discourses, and is carried out from the standpoint of the most “valued” discourse within that political economy.

It is the problem of the legitimation of these “valuable” discourses which explains the “panic” which, according to McRobbie, she was “gripped by” on her first reading of the papers in the volume. She began “to lose a sense of why the object of study is constituted as the object of study in the first place. Why do it? What is the point? Who is it for?" (721). This anxiety over the loss of the object, I am arguing, is a professionalist anxiety over the impossibility of maintaining both the institutional legitimation of cultural studies as a (non)field of study, and its radical character (which constitutes the only legitimation of its existence as a critique of dominant forms of knowledge).

In this sense, the narrative McRobbie constructs, like the volume Cultural Studies itself, has the purpose of producing an “identity” out of the various kinds of work being done in cultural studies. It is this need for identification which accounts for the uncritical valorization of pluralism (as opposed to contestation and critique). An instance of this is that, despite McRobbie's broad criticism and apparently deep “anxiety” over the present state of cultural studies, she can find no particular contribution to the volume which she considers deserving of criticism. In fact, she takes great pains to assure us that the general criticism she makes regarding the effects of the introduction of deconstruction into cultural studies is not applicable to any of the specific texts in the volume (or elsewhere) that actually make use of deconstruction: she explicitly exempts, for example, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha from the “formalism” to which deconstruction tends. This, of course, undermines her apparent criticism of deconstruction as an ideological discourse, because the problem would therefore be not with its political effects, but with its misuses by individuals.

Contrary to McRobbie's claims about “openness," then, the purpose of her “criticism” of deconstruction, like her participation in the removal of Marxism from the theoretical and political landscape, is to establish a set of inclusions and exclusions which will support the current constitution of the political economy of institutional values. Not too much “formalism," not too much “abstraction," no “Marxism," and so on. However, as opposed to the “tyrannical” regime of “theory” that McRobbie is glad to be rid of, these inclusions and exclusions are measured not against determinations of political effectivity which are rigorously theorized, but rather against an untheorized notion of their “proximity” to the “actual processes of identity formation." Anyone who is presently excluded from the pluralist institution of cultural studies could then at some point be included, not on the condition that they account for their project by proposing some critical rearticulation of the general project of cultural studies, but rather by moving a bit “closer” to the details of everyday life, by uncovering some previously neglected aspect of the processes of identity formation.

I would therefore refer to McRobbie's discourse as an “appreciative” one in the sense that it attempts to assess the relative values represented by discourses within a political economy of discourses which remains itself unquestioned. To “appreciative” discourses I would oppose “critical” ones, which are interested in the way in which discourses function to reproduce that political economy of discourses, that is, to maintain the existing system of values. Appreciative discourses, such as the ones presently dominant in the field of cultural studies, are appreciative both in the sense that they are assessments of the various objects which they account for (the details of everyday life) and also self-reflexively so: that is, they are interested less in the theoretical and political effectivity of their own discourse than their institutional value. Of course, one type of appreciation supports the other: the most valuable institutional discourse will be the one with the “investment” in some field of inquiry which can yield the highest “return”: as I suggested before, this will take the form of the “discovery” of some “interesting” object, or tradition of texts, which had previously been neglected or undervalued. These operations preserve the “newness” and importance of the field, and therefore “legitimate” it according to current academic standards. Likewise, discourses which are too “formalistic” are “embarrassing” because they are too much like traditional literary studies, while “Marxism” is problematic because it excludes too much and therefore disenables the constitution of a unified political economy of discourses by threatening the coherence of the field and its acceptability within liberal academic discourse. Finally, this eclectic pluralism requires a re-understanding of political effectivity as intervention in local processes of “identity formation," such as that provided by Laclau, since without some claim to be doing “urgent” work, culture studies will appear too close to traditional humanistic studies (too “formalist") and therefore irrelevant.

It is the category of “culture," as it is understood in contemporary discourses, and the displacement of the category of “ideology," which has enabled the reconstitution of cultural studies on the terms McRobbie describes. In Marxist understandings, “ideology” refers to those discourses which contribute to the reproduction of capitalist social relations by “educating” individuals in the inevitability or desirability of those relations; that is, ideology works by producing the subjects required by capitalist social relations. This assumes a relation of determination between production relations and class rule, and the mechanisms which guarantee or reproduce those relations and that rule.

For Ryan, the usefulness of the category of culture is that it breaks down boundaries between ideality and materiality, between “rhetoric” and “reality," between “culture” and “extra-cultural" (like social) relations. It then becomes impossible to critique any cultural process for its role in reproducing existing relations of exploitation: “The point, therefore, of emphasizing the culturality or rhetoricity of such things as trade and dwelling is to underscore both their role in the elaboration of political power and their plasticity as social forms that can change shape and acquire new contents” (17). In this case, any particular cultural form can be equally important in supporting some power relation and therefore as a site of intervention: at the same time, any cultural form is equally open to being filled with some new content. So, for example, the existing state could just as easily become a instrument in emancipating oppressed classes as it is now one for oppressing them.

Ryan arrives at his “poststructuralist approach to culture” in part through a critique of the Birmingham School's model of hegemony, which “still implies that the primary agent of cultural activity is the ruling class" (18). By contrast, the “poststructuralist approach to culture thus places a much more positive emphasis on popular forces and on the potential of popular struggles. And it can be extended to the cultural sphere. Rather than being understood simply as an instrument of hegemony, cultural forms can be read as sites of political difference, where domination and resistance, the resistance to the positive power of the dispossessed that is domination and the counter-power, the threat of reversed domination, that is the potential force of the dispossessed, meet" (19). In other words, any form of domination contains within it some mode of potentially effective resistance. In fact, the domination is itself nothing more than the resistance to that resistance. Since, according to this argument, domination is not domination for some purpose, or in defense of some interest, no priority can be established between one mode of resistance and another, nor can the consequences of any mode of resistance be accounted for.

If no group or practice can be privileged over any other, then the problem of the site and effectivity of critique must be raised: that is, critique in the name of what? In order to address this question it is necessary to take sides, to enter into conflicts over the construction of emancipatory agency. However, if emancipatory politics amounts to nothing more than ad hoc arrangements between “popular forces” which emerge contingently, then the moment of critique and contestation can be evaded. That is, any practice that one might be engaged in is potentially as important and useful as that of anyone else, or at least there would be no grounds for denying this. In this case, if various practices are “combined," there is always the possibility that they will “add up” to emancipatory results. Or not. At any rate, there are no grounds for critique as a central element of political struggle.

By establishing cultural studies as operating in the tensions between incompatible understandings ("broad, anthropological," which is to say structural and historical, and “more narrowly humanistic," that is, experiential), Grossberg et al. interpret the eclecticism of contemporary cultural studies as a form of diversity abstracted from rigorous contestations over the meaning of “culture” or “culture studies." Furthermore, they agree with Raymond Williams that the word “culture" “simultaneously invokes symbolic and material domains and that the study of culture involves not privileging one over the other but interrogating the relation between the two” (4). Therefore, the indeterminacy of culture studies merely reflects the indeterminacy of culture itself: in both cases, one is only able to produce specific “articulations” with no necessary relation to a broader field of economic and political relations. As with McRobbie, investigators in the field of culture studies are free to explore their own specific area of knowledge, in other words to accumulate intellectual capital in the various disciplines and the interstices between them, without the “productive tensions" between different knowledges ever taking the form of contestation, or being directed at the transformation of the disciplines, much less the entire structure of disciplinary knowledge.

Postmodern philosophical and theoretical categories and presuppositions have been essential to the constitution of what I will call “mainstream” or “appreciative” cultural studies. I understand postmodernism as consisting of all those discourses and practices governed by the assumption that reality is constituted by an unbounded plurality of heterogeneous forms. As with cultural studies, though, I do not limit the field of postmodernism to those discourses which openly support this assumption, or refer to themselves as “postmodernist." Rather, I understand postmodernism as constituted by a political economy of competing positions which function to reproduce the legitimacy of those areas of knowledge and practice governed by the presupposition and privileging of heterogeneity. I would include within the category of “postmodernism," then, discourses which consider themselves indifferent to or even hostile to postmodernism. For example, Jurgen Habermas' attacks on postmodernism, based on his understanding of communicative rationality and the project of modernity, by situating these attacks within the framework of how one adjudicates between different forms of established knowledge and discourse, simply reproduces the terms of the debate as constituted by postmodernism: a debate, that is, which is actually a struggle over the terms of a new mode of liberalism adequate for a late capitalist global order in crisis (and over who will “possess” those terms). Habermas' discourses fulfill this function by understanding the conditions of possibility of communication as immanent to specific and autonomous communicative situations and forms themselves. In fact the legitimation and hegemony of postmodern culture studies within the arena of culture critique depends upon the existence of a range of competing positions which, as in the logic of the market as studied by Marx, “average out” in “the long run."

The discourses of postmodern cultural studies are unable to theorize in a rigorous way the politics of the institutions in which they are situated. Therefore, the incoherencies and contradictions of these discourses are most evident in relation to the question of devising a politics of resistance to these institutions, in particular the academy. So, for example, Grossberg et al. acknowledge from the start of their “Introduction” that the volume they are presenting emerges at the height of a “cultural studies boom” (1) of international dimensions. Later, they argue that “it is the future of cultural studies in the United States that seems to us to present the greatest need for reflection and debate” (10). This is understandable, because, as they argued earlier, it is in the U.S. that the “boom is especially strong," and has “created significant investment opportunities” (1).

However, they go on to argue, the “threat is not from institutionalization per se, for cultural studies has always had its institutionalized forms within and outside the academy” (10). Rather, the “issue for U.S. practitioners is what kind of work will be identified with cultural studies and what social effects it will have... Too many people simply rename what they were already doing to take advantage of the cultural studies boom” (10-11). That is, it is not the institutional situation—with its limits and possibilities—which is at stake, but policing the intellectual property and copyright of the new (non)discipline. The “multi," “non," and even “anti," disciplinary character of cultural studies, on this account, enables the formation of a site of accumulation of institutional capital whose “unfixity” also frees it from accountability to critiques of its institutional positioning. As far as its “social effects” goes, we have already seen that these are wholly contingent and therefore can also not be theorized or critiqued in any systematic way.

What Grossberg, et al. do not consider is the possible uses to the institution of the “free floating," unfixed character of culture studies. In other words, they do not see that the “post” disciplinary location of culture studies that they celebrate in fact allows the academy to provide a space for “radical” discourses without any pressure to transform the existing disciplinary structure. The question that needs to be raised here is not, of course, in regard to the legitimacy and necessity of working within late capitalist institutions (like the university). Rather, what is at stake is the identification of “institutionalization” with “institutionality” in postmodern cultural studies, along with the institutional and ideological forms which naturalize this conflation. In other words, there is a difference between working within and against dominant institutions and becoming an integral part of the functioning of those institutions. Working against dominant institutions from within requires the contestation of the various institutional forms which reproduce institutional power and more generally ruling class domination while becoming “institutionalized” entails fulfilling the need of the institution for new modes of reproducing that domination. The relation between cultural studies and the existing disciplines proposed by Grossberg, et al. is inadequate in this respect because of its ultimately “laissez-faire” approach to institutional forms and their uses—in contrast, I would argue that it is necessary to occuppy [sic.] positions within the disciplines, to exploit the contradiction between their claims to universality and their specialist partiality in order to challenge their very separateness and legitimacy.

These contemporary discourses of the local and specific find their theoretical and ideological support in the theories of the “founding” texts of postmodernism: in particular, those of Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Delueze [sic.] and Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Despite the local differences among their texts, all of these theorists develop justifications for the privileging of the local and specific, of whatever is irreducible or incommensurable to global structures and processes. For example, in Derrida's notion of the “bricoleur," according to Grossberg, et al. a prototype of the practitioner of cultural studies, practice is understood as the piecing together into new combinations of elements which have been left unarticulated by dominant institutions and knowledges. There are two aspects of this conception which are most urgent for my discussion here: first, the resistance to totalizing abstraction, which can identify the structure of dominant institutions and their mode of operation; and, second, the privileging of the immanence of local constructs and “unique” combinations of heterogeneous elements which could not have been anticipated or the result of a plan.