Postmodern Cultural Studies and the Return of Liberalism

Postmodernism, then, is ultimately hostile to structural transformation, aided by totalizing forms of knowledge. Postmodernism therefore is able to recognize the power relations which, as Foucault has argued, are internal to subject and identity formation. However, it is unable to comprehend the socio-economic relations determining the relations between the pluralized identities and subjectivities which a postmodern politics seeks to construct. This is because it reads “representations” as “particular equivalents," which can only be exchanged against one another. It therefore cannot comprehend the processes of transformation by which a “particular” or an exchange of “particulars” becomes an instance in the reproduction of the “general."

It therefore supports a kind of pluralist politics based upon the self-referentiality of any specific political practice and the contingency of articulations which connect one kind of practice to another. At the same time, though, it supports an understanding of pedagogy which accounts for its usefulness to the late capitalist academy. Postmodernism creates a liberal pedagogy capable of containing the dangers implicit in the critique of liberal understandings of knowledge developed by the anti-establishment struggles of the 1960s. These struggles exposed the complicity of claims to neutrality and universality made by the representatives of official or mainstream knowledges within the academy with the practices of racism, sexism, and militaristic capitalism. In response to this danger, postmodernism has developed a pedagogy of inclusion based upon the proliferation of identities, as opposed to a pedagogy of critique based upon an inquiry into the implication of subjects in existing social relations through their respective and incompatible “identities," or subjectivities.

As I suggested earlier, then, postmodernism is a critique of specific, historically determinate forms (classical and social democratic) of liberalism which are no longer useful strategies of legitimation for late capitalist crisis management. What this means is that the postmodern critique of the universal subject of classical liberal theory and the universal subject of social rights of social democracy in fact reinscribes the internal homogeneity of the subject in the space of representation: as opposed to the right to liberty granted the classical liberal subject, or the right to need satisfaction granted the social democratic subject, the postmodern liberal subject is granted the right to the formation of identities and representations with a determinate social value: to put it another way, the “right to recognition." The deconstruction of identities and representations avoids the crude biological and humanistic essentialism of previous liberalisms by not attributing to any particular subject any single fixed identity. However, by keeping the category of “identity” intact as the “unstable” ground of politics, it simply allows for greater flexibility by supporting a mode of politics which enables the discarding and appropriation of identities in accord with global fluctuations and changing articulations of “private individuality” and collective or public modes of subjectivity. The subject, for postmodernism, is always already implicated in a set of discourses and relations, is always situated (unlike the abstract classical liberal subject). However, this situation is itself abstracted from the globalization of capitalist relations, and involves the immediate appropriation of the materials of experience (the securing of identities) through local articulations of “identity."

Late capitalism, based upon the publicly organized reproduction of collective labor powers, requires new modes of liberalism in order to combat and reverse the crisis in hegemony reflected in the anti-hegemonic struggles of the post-war era. More specifically, it is the delegitimation of social democratic liberal modes of crisis-management under the pressure, first, of anti-colonial movements and the “social movements” of the 1960s and, then, of the neo-conservative offensive and global capitalist restructuring of the 1980s, which has produced the need for a renovated postmodern liberalism. The shift to postmodern conceptions of democracy (based on the immediacy and irreducibility of representations) advanced by Laclau and Mouffe and adopted by postmodern culture studies is a product of the following effects of the contradiction between the forces and relations of production: the institutionalization of knowledges in accord with the collective modes of reproducing labor power in late capitalism; the consequent monopoly of oppositional knowledges by the petit-bourgeoisie situated within late capitalist institutions; the defeat of the radical goals of the oppositional movements of the 1960s and the exhaustion of the material resources for a renewal of the radical project at this point in time; and the consequent institutionalization of the “identities” produced by this project. Under these conditions, capitalism requires a liberalism which argues that the conditions of liberation are not in the struggle to abolish and transform dominant institutions and knowledges, but rather in specific articulations which establish “liberated zones” in the spaces made available by those institutions and knowledges.

This new postmodern liberalism requires theories of postmodernity as a new logic of the social governed by the incommensurability of different language games and postmodern theories of the public sphere (as the articulation of differences) which abstract from the contradiction between the forces and relations of production and class struggle and situate “politics” as the arena in which “identities” and “experiences” are constructed and negotiated. Postmodern cultural studies, in other words, connects post-marxist understandings of the social order and “communicative” theories of “democracy” in order to ground an amorphous “progressive” politics which can evade the centrality of conflict between contending social forces as the ground of social transformation.

In sum, postmodern mainstream or appreciative cultural studies is an “emergent" institutional and cultural form which facilitates the required (post)liberal modifications of pedagogical and other institutions. Its “postdisciplinarity” corresponds to the postmodern liberal politics of identity, which requires modes of knowledge “flexible” enough to manage the contradictions of post-welfare state capitalism. This argument, however, should not be read as supporting the existing disciplines, which is to say the existing intellectual division of labor and segmentation of knowledges. Rather, it is a critique of the privatization of theory and the de-politicization of pedagogy, a critique which is associated with a collective project of knowledge production directed at advancing a theorized and therefore contestable purpose. If explanation or theory only extends to the point at which identities are affirmed unproblematically, thereby allowing the category of “experience” to be introduced, then it becomes possible to produce flexible institutional sites which can reconcile “opposition” with the needs of dominant institutions in a populist manner, leading to merely local changes (and changes, moreover, which enable the institution to develop more up-to-date forms of authority).

The project of a critical cultural studies interested in the production of oppositional subjectivities must therefore involve a sustained critique of contemporary attempts to rearrange the disciplines in order to manage the crisis. In this case, it is necessary to occupy positions within the disciplines, in relation to the contradiction between the subordination of knowledge to capitalist exploitation and the claims of institutionalized knowledges to serve the cause of emancipation. Finally, this argument presupposes the transdisciplinary character of cultural studies (or any emancipatory knowledge), since theorizing the relations between economics, politics and culture provides the resources for contesting the reification of specialized knowledges. The purpose of such knowledges, finally, is to foreground the global social contradictions which determine any local “articulation," in the interest of producing revolutionary class consciousness.

The shift in cultural studies (which is also a continuation of existing tendencies) towards “appreciative” discourses has been an effect of the impact of the process of privatization upon all social institutions. A critical, oppositional culture studies would be interested in critiquing and contesting the (re)privatization of the categories of “gender," “race," “sexuality," and others through their articulation by the categories of “identity," “difference," and “experience." The class basis of this re-privatization is the new petit-bourgeoisie, which needs to represent collective labor forces but on terms acceptable to dominant institutions, which, in turn, require a postliberal, “multiculturalist” remaking of institutions in order to integrate oppressed groups while excluding the radical possibilities opened up by this “integration," and to produce more “complex” types of labor power in the form of individuals capable of managing contradictions by representing them as “diversity."

A historical materialist, critical cultural studies would be interested in critiquing and transforming—first of all by clarifying—the contradiction between (private) individuality and (collective) subjectivities which reflects the crisis of hegemony in late capitalism. In this case, the category of “culture" would no longer be a site (as it is in postmodern cultural studies) where the indeterminacy of the material and the ideal undergoes successive articulations which reflect fluctuations in “power relations” (understood as an independent dynamic or logic of the social). Rather, the category of “culture” would enable a theorization of the ways in which capitalist exploitation is reproduced and contested throughout existing social institutions and discourses. This is an urgent move toward a pedagogy aimed at enabling the conceptualization of the modes of obfuscation which represent the interests of the ruling, capitalist class as the “general interest”: and which is in turn a necessary condition of possibility for the production of proletarian class consciousness.