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The Heart of Cultural Studies

In the past decades, “cultural studies” has gained public visibility both as something to be embraced and as something to be attacked (for many dif- ferent reasons from all sides of the various political spectra). It has moved rapidly across geographical, disciplinary, and political spaces. Of course, outside of and long before this public visibility, people have been doing cul- tural studies, some without ever naming their project as cultural studies, or even wanting such a shared identity. It has appeared, largely after the Second World War, in a variety of places, arising from a variety of disciplines and intellectual projects. Admittedly, defining cultural studies is a risky business. Lots of people claim to be doing it. Yet the fact is that few people working in or against cultural studies agree on a definition. Any definition is likely to disown at least some people who want to locate themselves within cultural studies. This is often taken as evidence of the need to avoid offering one. It is sometimes assumed that any definition would inevitably police the bound- aries, and that this would contradict the politics of cultural studies.

I think that we need to take the risk. Without some sense of the specificity of cultural studies, there is nothing to prevent it from becoming the latest administrative appropriation and marginalization of critical or politically inflected scholarship. More importantly, without this sense of specificity, precisely what it brings to the political-intellectual table is too easily lost, as it increasingly becomes an almost empty signifier of the study of culture, or the study of the politics of culture, which sends it back into a marketing strategy. So I hope that my efforts in this book will be read not as a glance backward, as if the relevant question were to judge various candidates, but rather as a projection forward, to embrace a project. I want to join a conver- sation about how we should use our energy and labor as scholars.

� Chapter One

Let me state it very clearly. I do not think cultural studies is about culture, although culture is crucial to its project. Cultural studies is not the study of texts or textuality; it does not aim to interpret or judge particular texts or kinds of texts. It is not about reading social power off of texts, or reading social realities as texts. It is not the practice of reading the world in a grain of sand. Nor is it the study of national cultures, nor a new approach to lan- guage or area studies, although I do think it has something to say to all of these. Nor can it be defined by a focus on mass culture, or popular culture, or subaltern cultures. It is not about theory as a metaphor for or a guarantee of the inscription of power, whether in texts or social life.

I might begin by describing cultural studies this way: it is concerned with describing and intervening in the ways cultural practices are produced within, inserted into, and operate in the everyday life of human beings and social formations, so as to reproduce, struggle against, and perhaps trans- form the existing structures of power. That is, if people make history but in conditions not of their own making, cultural studies explores the ways this process is enacted with and through cultural practices, and the place of these practices within specific historical formations. But this too is inadequate, so I might try again.

Cultural studies describes how people’s everyday lives are articulated by and with culture. It investigates how people are empowered and disempow- ered by the particular structures and forces that organize their everyday lives in contradictory ways, and how their (everyday) lives are themselves articu- lated to and by the trajectories of economic, social, cultural, and political power. Cultural studies explores the historical possibilities of transforming people’s lived realities and the relations of power within which those re- alities are constructed, as it reaffirms the vital contribution of cultural (and intellectual) work to the imagination and realization of such possibilities. Cultural studies is concerned with the construction of the contexts of life as matrices of power, understanding that discursive practices are inextricably involved in the organization of relations of power. It attempts to use the best intellectual resources available to gain a better understanding of the state of play of power as a balance in the field of forces constitutive of a particular context, believing that such knowledge will better enable people to change the context and hence the relations of power. That is, it seeks to understand not only the organizations of power but also the possibilities of survival, struggle, resistance, and change. It takes contestation for granted,

The Heart of Cultural Studies �

not as a reality in every instance, but as an assumption necessary for the exis- tence of critical work, political opposition, and even historical change.

Yet it seems to me that even this misses something crucial about cultural studies; in fact, it misses precisely that which is the heart of cultural studies, what defines its specificity and its passion. As Stuart Hall (1��2a, 2�2) put it once, talking about cultural studies in the United States:

It needs a whole range of work to say what it is in this context. What it is in relation to this culture that would genuinely separate it from earlier work or work done elsewhere. I’m not sure that Cultural Studies in the United States has actually been through that moment of self-clarification. . . . I do think it matters what it is in particular situations . . . it’s the precise insertion of a certain kind of critical practice at an institutional moment and that moment is precisely the moment of academic institutional life in this country.

That institutional life is only the most immediate context of our work as intellectuals, and it cannot be separated from its relations to other proximate and concentric contexts of social, political, economic, and cultural life—that is, from the entirety of the social formation.1

I believe that the project of cultural studies, which binds different people and work together, involves a commitment to a particular practice of intellectual-political work, and to the claim that such intellectual work mat- ters both inside and outside of the academy. Cultural studies is a way of inhabiting the position of scholar, teacher, artist, and intellectual, one way (among many) of politicizing theory and theorizing politics. The project of cultural studies is an effort to find an intellectual practice that is responsible to the changing context (changing geographical, historical, political, intel- lectual, and institutional conditions) in which it works. As such, it constructs for itself a more limited and modest claim to authority than one is used to from the academy; it refuses any and all dreams of universal, absolute, com- plete, and perfect truth, and at the same time, it refuses to give up the dream of truth to the burdens of relativism. Its modesty is based in its rigorous efforts to tell the best story that can be told, about any context, within that context. It accepts that knowledge and politics, as well as the tools of their production, are always, unavoidably, contextually bound. But it refuses to conclude that knowledge or judgments about competing knowledges are impossible; it wants to hold on to a more modest conception of the possi- bility and authority of knowledge. At the same time, its modesty undermines

10 Chapter One

any assumption that being a cultural studies scholar (or having an expertise in culture and in practices of interpretation) makes one into an expert on everything and anything. Instead, cultural studies takes work!

I want to try to define that common project, to perhaps explicate some- thing about the “heart” of cultural studies as both its center and the source of at least some of the passion behind the work. To do so I will start by tell- ing two stories: the first, largely autobiographical, retrospectively reads my desire for cultural studies out of my experience at the Centre for Contempo- rary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in the United Kingdom; the second will describe the project of cultural studies as the effort to produce knowledge based on a commitment to radical contextuality and a political engagement with the possibilities of social transformation.2 I will then try to conceptualize the category of context, identifying the conjuncture as the specific understanding of context in cultural studies. Finally I will briefly show how different formations of cultural studies can be seen as responses to different conjunctural problematics.

In Search of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies

In 1�6�, as a result of a number of fortuitous events and unfortunate politi- cal forces, I went to study—all too briefly—at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (cccs) at Birmingham University in England. This was the result, as are so many important life-defining events, of the intersection of a number of fortuitous events and determined social forces. I was caught up, as were so many others, in a set of struggles and changes that seemed momentous at the time. This moment has been somewhat mythologized as “the sixties,” defined by the emergence of a number of interconnected and competing political struggles (black power, the anti–Vietnam War move- ment, a popular anti-government and anti-capitalist democratic socialism, a revised marxism, anti-colonial liberation movements, feminism, environ- mentalism, etc.) and cultural changes (e.g., youth culture and the explosion of mediated popular culture, but also the appearance of various subcultures and countercultures built of new spiritualisms, drugs, etc.). For those of us at universities, myself included, it was often the Vietnam War, and the protests against it, that played a large role in shaping our immediate futures, and in my case, in sending me to the cccs.3

To be honest, I had no idea what the Centre was. I had never heard of Richard Hoggart or Stuart Hall (then the founding director and associate

The Heart of Cultural Studies 11

director, respectively). I went with an interest in the “social life” of ideas (philosophies) and popular symbols, and an abiding interest in how popular music functioned to bind together politics and the popular on the one hand, and the various political and cultural fractions of what was then known as The Movement on the other. I had no idea what cultural studies was—my professors at the University of Rochester assured me that I would feel intel- lectually at home there—but fortunately, most people at the Centre were equally uncertain. To repeat a common phrase (first used I think by Angela McRobbie [1��4, 4�]), we all understood that we were making it up as we went along. It was in the often fraught, contradictory, and tension-filled,4 but for me always exciting, generous, and open-minded space of the Centre that the trajectory of my intellectual and political life was initiated.

The Centre was a response to significant social and cultural changes char- acterizing postwar British life (e.g., immigration, the impact of U.S. culture, the “disappearance” of the working class, new international relations) and the political challenges they posed. More broadly, the Centre was a response, on the one hand, to the rapid processes of social change and the increasingly visible impact of cultural changes, which seemed to bring the messiness of the world onto the academic agenda, and on the other hand, to changes in and challenges to the institution of the academy and the forms of academic practice, which seemed to call for a reconsideration of at least a part of the function of the intellectual.

I did not stay at the Centre as long as I would have liked; I simulta- neously fled the traces of the Vietnam War in Britain and embraced the coun- tercultural possibilities of an itinerant Swiss anarchist theater commune. No doubt, the brevity of my sojourn at the cccs had consequences, both positive and negative. Most importantly, what I took away from the Centre was not any sense or even any particular part of the theoretical trajectory that defined the history of the Centre, nor did I leave with a specific set of problematics (as I will talk about soon) that came to be associated with different eras and groups at the Centre. Instead, what I took away was an understanding of cultural studies as a response to a series of frustrations with and criticisms of existing academic practices and as an attempt to do the work differently.

Hoggart had created the Centre to realize his particular vision that cul- ture (primarily literature and art but also expressive culture more broadly understood) made available, to those trained to find it, a distinctive kind of social knowledge that is unavailable through any other means. It is a kind

12 Chapter One

of knowledge that Hoggart (1�6�; 1�70) describes at various times as po- etic, metaphoric, intuitive, and subjective. It is a privileged knowledge of or access to what Williams (1�61) called the “structure of feeling.” Produc- ing such knowledge requires a careful scrutiny of “the words on the page” through “literary-critical analysis,” moving between what Hoggart (1�70) called “reading for tone” (in all its psychological, cultural, and aesthetic com- plexity) and “reading for value,” which was different from making value judg- ments. “Reading for value” seeks to uncover the complex field of values that is embodied, reflected, or resisted in the work. Crucially, Hoggart argued that such literary-critical methods could be fruitfully brought to bear on a wider range of human activities and products than traditional literary critics might have imagined. In particular, Hoggart wanted to move such analysis from the realm of high culture into the class, popular, and media cultures that increasingly occupied the center stage of modern Western societies.

This literary-critical practice defined one of the weekly seminars that constituted the regular business of the Centre. Once a week, Hoggart (or another faculty member or visiting researcher) presented the students with a mimeographed copy of passages from some text—at the beginning, from works of high literature, but as the year progressed, from more popular liter- ary works, and even excerpts from mass media. While the works were identi- fied at first, as the year moved on, we were often given works without any identification and asked to figure out where they might have come from. Sometimes we were asked to compare passages, determining by such careful scrutiny which were “high literature,” which popular literature, and which mass media. The entire year in that seminar was spent honing the skills nec- essary to read for tone and values.5

The other seminars were: (1) a reading seminar, later called the theory seminar, under the guidance of Stuart Hall, in which we read an enormously wide range of texts in sociological and anthropological theory, pragmatism, existentialism, semiotics, etc., and in which participants explored how to theorize the project, largely, if naively, in terms of the relations between culture and society as it had been formulated by Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart; and (2) a research seminar, in which individuals presented their own research, and eventually, a collective and collaborative—group— research project was formulated around a particular text, “Cure for Mar- riage.”6 It was here, in practice and in research, that the participants tried to figure out what cultural studies was, and what it meant to do it: what did it mean to understand culture in relation to society, and society through

The Heart of Cultural Studies 13

culture? And it was here that participants tried to come to terms with the demand for complexity and interdisciplinarity that was implicit in Williams’s (1�61, 63) definition of cultural studies as “the study of the relationships between elements in a whole way of life.” Cultural studies is “the attempt to discover the nature of the organization which is the complex of these relationships.”

I was attracted, not to the critical practice (e.g., reading values off of texts), but to the larger questions that, for Hoggart and Hall, founded the project of cultural studies. The question Hoggart (1�6�, 1�) posed to the texts was not, as it became at a later moment at the Centre, what people do with a text, but “What relationship does this . . . complex text have to the imaginative life of the individuals who make up its audience?” For Hoggart, culture gives us knowledge of life embodied, life lived in all its complexity, the experiential wholeness of life, or what Auden called (and Hoggart was fond of quoting) “the real world of theology and horses.” Culture gives us access to the texture of life as it is lived, as it develops in a particular histori- cal and moral context; it tells us what it felt like to be alive at a certain time and place.7

Of course, this vision was reshaped by its own material conditions. These included:

1. The physical marginality of the cccs (the Centre was housed in a Quon- set hut on the very edge of the campus), but also the academic marginality of the work of the Centre. After all, Hoggart was hired at Birmingham as an Auden scholar, not as the author of The Uses of Literacy (1�57); and while the English department and the university agreed to his condition that they allow him to establish the Centre, they refused to provide any real support.

2. The political contradictions of the lived experience of the 1�60s. 3. The enormous diversity, bordering on the chaotic, at the Centre. This

diversity was a constant and consistent feature of the Centre, although it is often eclipsed in histories that present only “the diversity that won” (to use a phrase John Clarke taught me).

4. The rather atypical postgraduate students who populated the Centre. Many were part-time and commuter students who had jobs and lives elsewhere. Almost all of them had what can only be described as atypi- cal interests and atypical backgrounds (at least for English higher edu- cation at the time), but most importantly, most of them were involved

14 Chapter One

with their subjects in other than purely academic ways—as participants (having been shaped by the practices and relations they were studying) who were somehow politically invested in the questions they were trying to pose.8

Cultural studies was put forth as a kind of discursive imaginary at the Centre, which assumed that culture (symbols, language) mattered, but just as importantly, that intellectual work mattered, both inside and, even more importantly, outside the academy. In that sense, the Centre seemed to be attempting to make the academy listen to the demands of politics, the de- mands of the world outside of (or intersecting with) the academy, and to produce something worth saying outside as well as inside the academy, so that those engaged in social and everyday politics would want to listen to such intellectual work and even, just maybe, to participate in its production. When some notion of cultural studies had to be proffered, it was usually as a result of pedagogical demands, and it was more often than not conceptual- ized in terms that made pedagogical sense.

Even more, it seemed to me, a young man searching for a project that could weave together my various passions, commitments, and interests, that the Centre was not trying to create a new academic norm or field, but to articulate a different kind of intellectual project, a different way of ask- ing and answering questions. That is to say, it was propelled by a sense of the inability of the dominant academic norms to provide adequate answers to the compelling and important questions of the age, questions that de- manded a new approach to the project of understanding social actualities and human possibilities. But even more, it was the failure of the dominant academic norms to even ask the questions that mattered to students and the population more broadly, questions that had little to do with the norms of academic disciplines and canons. The questions were precisely about the cultural and social changes that were visible “out on the streets,” so to speak, but that rarely made their way into the academy—for example, questions about new forms of culture and changing norms of social relationships.9

In this early life of the Centre, the project was lived more as a sense of dis- comfort and dissatisfaction, and it was articulated as a critique and a quest rather than as a completed and positive vision of coherent alternatives. The objects of these frustrations and critiques were a set of interrelated assump- tions about the “proper” way to carry out intellectual work: the disciplinary organization of knowledge; the dialectical (negative, binary) logic of theo-

The Heart of Cultural Studies 15

retical arguments; the commitment to reductionism and simplification; the claim of universalism and the desire for completion; the demand for an ob- jectivity that bracketed out not only any passion and commitment, but also questions of culture and change. These seemed to characterize the dominant practices of the human sciences, even within the humanities, and yet to be fundamentally inadequate to the demands of, and the changes taking place in, the world those at the Centre were living in.

In the Centre’s early vision, its epistemological commitments were often offered as implicit and sometimes even rather inchoate refusals of these basic dominant logics of the academic enterprise. First, cultural studies was predi- cated on a sense of discomfort with (but not a complete rejection of) the disciplinary organization of knowledge, as it struggled with how to bring together the diverse bodies of expertise. But the fundamental assumption of the work of the Centre, that human existence could only be understood relationally, encapsulated in the early conceptions of the field as “culture and society,” meant that cultural studies was bound to transgress the bound- aries between disciplines. It would have to take up the objects that “consti- tuted” a number of disciplines, but it would have to change those objects as well, precisely because such disciplinary objects were not yet understood relationally.

Just as importantly, the sense that no aspect of human life (as well as hu- man life in its lived totality) could be separated from questions and effects of culture also meant that cultural studies would transform disciplinary objects even further, since they would have to be understood partly through the lens of culture, as always discursively constructed, at least in part. As a result, cultural studies would have to be interdisciplinary and antidisciplinary; it would need to transform the disciplines even as it drew upon them, and it would have to be reflexive about the ways it accomplished this, becoming self-conscious about its own conditions of knowledge-production. Thus, if the early work of British cultural studies is often described as bringing to- gether literary and sociological studies, it is better thought of, I think, as having rewritten what it means to do either of these, precisely because they must be done together. Thus, cultural studies embodied a certain risk. It demanded speaking outside of or beyond one’s disciplinary and credential- ized competences.

Second, cultural studies was predicated on a sense of discomfort with the logics of argumentation and disagreement of the humanities, which tended to work in terms of opposition, negation, and contamination.10 Thus,

16 Chapter One

disagreements are usually thought of as contradictions, or binary opposites, from which one must choose, and the choice of one entails the negation of the other. Moreover, the negated other, the road not taken, so to speak, is usually condemned, not simply as a mistake but also as a somehow danger- ous alternative that threatens assumed values, standards, desires, etc. This was true whether one was thinking of paradigms (humanism/structuralism, ma- terialism/idealism), politics (domination/subordination, power/resistance, capitalism/socialism), or problems (individual/social, structure/agency, sta- bility/change). The logic of cultural studies is and always has been, I believe, to occupy the middle ground, not in the sense of a compromise (the Aristo- telian golden mean), but in the sense of operating in the between, to open up possibilities, to see multiplicities instead of simple difference.

Third, cultural studies was predicated on a sense of discomfort with the normalization of reductionism as the practice of most modern forms of knowledge-production. These forms assume that “explanation” or un- derstanding necessarily moves from the complex to the simple, from the concrete to the exemplary, from the singular to the typical. Cultural studies is built on the desire to find a way to hold onto the complexity of human reality, to refuse to reduce human life or power to one dimension, one axis, one explanatory framework. It refuses to reduce the complexity of reality to any single plane or domain of existence—whether biology, economics, state politics, social and sexual relations, or even culture. Each of these planes exists in relation to the others without being reducible to any other. Thus, contrary to some other contemporary cultural theories, cultural studies be- lieves that there are material (nondiscursive) realities that have real, measur- able effects. It does not make everything into culture! Cultural studies does not treat the world as if it were all and only culture; it does not deny the material existence of the world apart from the ways human beings make sense of and communicate about it. Cultural studies is not a form of radi- cal idealism in which the real world disappears into the meanings that we (as minds or as speakers) construct for it. Its constructionism is not simply a version of social constructionism, but rather an acknowledgment of the multiplicity of agencies.

Cultural studies tries, as best it can, to accept the fact that things are always more complicated than any one trajectory, any one judgment, can thema- tize. If the world is complex and changing, then it would seem obvious—al- though it seemed profoundly new to me—that the practice of knowledge- production demanded that one do more than constantly discover what you

The Heart of Cultural Studies 17

already know. In other words, where you end up (in your analysis of what is happening) will rarely be where you began, or even where you might have expected to arrive. Instead of the disjunctive (either . . . or . . . ) rhetoric of the modern academy, cultural studies adopts a conjunctive rhetoric, “yes (that is true), but so is . . . (and so is . . . and so is . . . ),” a logic of “yes and . . . and . . . and,” where each additional clause transforms the meanings and effects of all the previous ones.

Nor were the participants in this project willing to postpone the difficul- ties, the contradictions, the excesses, the resistances, which always rendered such singular explanations inadequate, to an afterthought, an addendum, a last chapter as it were. Cultural studies recognized that people (groups, in- stitutions, states, etc.) attempt to accomplish all sorts of things, but that the attempt is not the same as success, and that human actions are often as much about managing failure as building on success. Reality is as much about configurations of disarrangements, failures and fixes, pressures, forces, and possibilities, as it is about visions and success. The complexities are, in fact, precisely what lived reality is all about, and have to be included from the very start. This commitment to complexity, then, also embodies a funda- mental political commitment: namely, that change is never well served by reducing complexity to simplicity. Cultural studies is, therefore, decidedly antireductionist!

Fourth, those at the Centre were suspicious of the claims of universalism carried by so much of academic work: theories, concepts, and relations are supposed, within whatever stated conditions are included within the theory itself, to be universally applicable. Now, while many contemporary intel- lectual projects oppose such universality, usually in the form of particular theories that often seem to imply (or offer little resistance to the charge of) relativism, what I saw in the work that took place at the Centre was an at- tempt to think about knowledge contextually,11 to offer knowledge that did not claim to necessarily encompass the whole world. I have always thought (and I will try to argue this shortly) that this effort to do radically contextu- alist work—to bring such contextualism to bear not only on the object, but on theory and politics as well, to stand against scientific and epistemological universalism—defines the specificity of cultural studies.

Closely connected to the desire for universalism, especially in the hu- manities, is a desire for completeness (and a desire to protect oneself from the possibility of criticism). Such a dream—of a perfect analysis—would not only provide the measure of our scholarship, but also guarantee the politics

1� Chapter One

(the political purity and utility) of our labor; it aims to guarantee that our work can produce only the effects we want and to insulate us from the pos- sibility of being co-opted. The mirror image of this desire is the increasingly common practice of critique in the humanities, which dictates that we are always and inevitably disappointed with any analysis since it can never be complete. Most commonly, this takes the form of arguments by absence: you did not speak about “whatever.” Even more, and even more damaging, such failures mark the complicity of every incomplete analysis in the very systems of power it seeks to understand and challenge. Again, the work of the Centre seemed to stand against such practices and assumptions. Cul- tural studies simply rejected the idea that any such guarantees were possible; the complexity of the world simply meant that one would have to keep on working, continue theorizing, accepting that failure is a part of the path to telling better stories.

And finally, there was in the Centre a fundamental refusal of the demand, so powerfully enforced in the academy, that one bracket one’s passions, one’s biographical sympathies, and one’s political commitments, in the name of a (spurious) intellectual (read scientific) objectivity. Cultural studies knew, as did the pragmatists (who so strongly influenced my doctoral advisor, James Carey) that without such investments in the world, in our lives, and in the lives of others, there is no desire, need for, or possibility of knowl- edge. Knowledge always depends on a visceral relevance. And while one seeks a better understanding in order, to some extent, to find other political possibilities, there can never be any guarantee of political utility, outcome, or purity. Cultural studies seeks to combine academic rigor and competence with social passion and political commitment.

At the same time, there was a modesty about the Centre’s sense of it- self and its practice, which I hope continues to mark cultural studies. No one at the Centre thought that what they were doing was necessarily or absolutely better or more important than other forms of intellectual work. They did not think that everyone should be doing cultural studies, or that they were telling the only stories worth telling. This modesty is too often denied by some, who dislocate the work of the Centre from its context, and hence, from its own questions. Cultural studies diligently tries to avoid what I might call the “hyperinflation of (small) disciplines,” and often, even smaller differences. I am referring here not so much to the universalization of theories, but of analytic categories, where notions like culture, commu- nication, performance, cartography, or rhetoric increasingly claim not only

The Heart of Cultural Studies 1�

omnipresence (that everything is “x” or that “x” is everywhere, rather than that everything may exist in relations with “x”) but also that this concept is somehow crucially central. I must admit that I am always suspicious of any intellectual formation that thinks its focus, its theoretical founding con- cept, is what we really have been searching for all along. Rarely are these concepts defined or located in anything other than a purely theoretical or even ontological way. That is, without making clear the specific empirical consequences of the concept, it is impossible to know what the stakes of the argument are or what difference such a concept makes. Such hyperinflation is accomplished in any number of ways: (1) read every intellectual work that one likes as an example of “x,” whether or not the author is aware of it; (2) if an author uses “x” at a particular moment in the larger argument, read the whole as if it exemplified the part (and so becomes an example of “x”); (3) surreptitiously appropriate polysemy without theorizing it, so that one can play on the ambiguities; and (4) apply the concept to an expanding universe of objects. And while there is often such an imperializing discourse attached to cultural studies, I think it fundamentally violates the spirit and practice of cultural studies at the Centre.

The Centre seemed to me to be trying to do something I had not en- countered before: to bring together a faith in the importance of the best— most rigorously produced—knowledge, a recognition of the messiness of the world outside academic categories, and a commitment to the political responsibility of the intellectual. This search for epistemological counter- logics, for a different way of doing intellectual work, was what I saw at the Centre, at least as I looked back on my experience. And that experience, as well as the relations that I made with people at the Centre, especially Stuart Hall (and then later participants in the Centre), has shaped my academic career ever since. Most of what I have described was at best implicit, even nascent, in the early days of the Centre. What was clear was that there was an epistemological problematic; what was clear was that the challenge, the project, was to find a different practice of knowledge-production, one that not only rejected the dominant intellectual practices of the human sciences but that also found a positive expression, in its very epistemology, of its deeply held commitment to (an ontology of) relationality and the necessary effectivity of culture. These logics were also what bound together, as intel- lectual practices and projects, British cultural studies with the work of Jim Carey, my teacher in the United States, to whom Stuart Hall sent me as the only person he knew of trying to do cultural studies in the United States at

20 Chapter One

the time. And while I was unaware of it at the time (and would embarrass- ingly remain so for quite a while), they bound me to other intellectuals in other parts of the world, and in other kinds of institutions, working with a similar project.

Cultural Studies as Radical Contextuality

I have been arguing that cultural studies is defined by its practice; I want now to suggest that that practice defines its project as a rigorous attempt to contextualize political and intellectual work so that context defines both its object and its practice. In an unpublished interview with Bill Schwartz, Hall is quite explicit about the “intellectual perspective” of cultural studies as an interrogation of contexts (Hall uses the term “conjuncture,” which I shall explain shortly as a particular way of constructing contexts): “It has an intellectual vocation to produce a critical understanding of a conjuncture, a cultural-historical conjuncture.” And again, speaking of the collective proj- ect of the Centre: “The commitment to understanding a conjuncture is what from the beginning we thought cultural studies was about.”

It starts with an assumption of relationality, which it shares with other projects and formations, but it takes relationality to imply, or more accu- rately, to be equivalent to, the apparently more radical claim of contextual- ity: that the identity, significance, and effects of any practice or event (in- cluding cultural practices and events) are defined only by the complex set of relations that surround, interpenetrate, and shape it, and make it what it is. No element can be isolated from its relations, although those relation- ships can be changed, and are constantly changing. Any event can only be understood relationally, as a condensation of multiple determinations and effects. Cultural studies thus embodies the commitment to the openness and contingency of social reality, where change is the given or norm. This radical contextualism is the heart of cultural studies.12

This is why, for example, writing about Policing the Crisis (Hall, Critcher, et al. 1�7�), Hall (1���b, 1�2) says:

If you’d just taken race as a black issue, you’d have seen the impact of law and order policies on the local communities, but you’d have never seen the degree to which the race and crime issue was a prism for a much larger social crisis. You wouldn’t have looked at the larger picture. You’d have written a black text, but you wouldn’t have written a cultural studies text because you

The Heart of Cultural Studies 21

wouldn’t have seen this articulation up to the politicians, into the institu- tional judiciary, down to the popular mood of the people, into the politics, as well as into the community, into black poverty and into discrimination.

Similarly, Hall always locates (i.e., contextualizes) his work on race, as when he declares (1��5, 53–54): “I have never worked on race and ethnicity as a kind of subcategory. I have always worked on the whole social forma- tion which is racialized.” The result is, of course, that any discussion of is- sues of race and ethnicity cannot be separated from the particular context in which it is located and into which it is directed. Hall (1��7a, 157) is rig- orously consistent about this: “I don’t claim for my particular version of a non-essentialist notion of race correctness for all time. I can claim for it only a certain conjunctural [for the moment, read ‘contextual’] truth.” It is too easy to forget—and too often forgotten—that the work on racism and, moving out from there, on identity in its various forms, is undertaken in the context of and as a response to questions about a specific changing social formation. That is to say, cultural studies’ radical contextuality, while theo- retical, is never purely theoretical; it is both defined and limited by its politi- cal concerns. In Hall’s (personal communication, April 10, 2005) terms, it approaches its contextualism “practically.”

This radical contextualism is embodied in the concept of articulation. Ar- ticulation names both the basic processes of the production of reality, of the production of contexts and power (i.e., determination or effectivity), and the analytic practice of cultural studies. It is the transformative practice or work of making, unmaking, and remaking relations and contexts, of establishing new relations out of old relations or non-relations, of drawing lines and mapping connections.13 But articulation is not a single or a singular practice. Different connections will have differing forces in particular contexts, and these must be measured; not all connections are equal, or equally important. In fact, there are as many different practices of articulation as there are forms of relationship. Using the notion of context must not be allowed to flatten all realities, as if talking about contexts necessarily makes every system of relationality equivalent, or puts them on the same plane or scale. Cultural studies’ sense of context is always of a complex, overdetermined, and con- tingent unity. If a context can be understood as the relationships that have been made by the operation of power, in the interests of certain positions of power, the struggle to change the context involves the struggle to map out those relations and, when possible, to disarticulate and rearticulate them.

22 Chapter One

Articulation calls for both deconstruction and reconstruction: one must first see that what appears to be a harmonious whole without seams or cracks, or a natural unity whose contradictions are inevitable and unavoidable, has been forged from diverse and divergent pieces, as has the very appearance of wholeness and naturalness. That is, the very processes of articulation have been erased and must now be rediscovered in the possibility of disarticula- tion. Articulation begins by discovering the heterogeneity, the differences, the fractures, in the wholes. But it cannot end there, in the negativity of critique, because heterogeneity never remains purely and simply there as heterogeneity. It is always rearticulated into other wholes; that is the very being of the relation of life and power. And if cultural studies intellectuals do not enter into this struggle, with all the work (of analysis and imagina- tion) that it requires, if they do not attempt to think through the realities of articulations and the possibilities of rearticulation, then cultural studies abandons the very sense of political possibility that drives it.

This does not mean that reality is entirely open. Cultural studies operates with a logic of “no guarantees,” what Paul Gilroy (1��3a) has called “anti- anti-essentialism.” Essentialism embodies a logic of guarantees; it assumes that the relations that constitute social and historical existence are necessar- ily the way they are. Essentialism is the assertion that all the relations that make up lived and knowable reality had and have to be the way they are, because the relationships are already and always intrinsic to the terms of the relationship themselves. In essentialist positions, the answers are guaranteed and everything is sewn up in advance. Identities are fixed. Effects are deter- mined before they are even produced, because all the important relations in history are necessarily contained in the very fact that something is what it is, in its very origins. If history doesn’t appear to be unfolding according to this inevitable trajectory, it is the result of some external interference or principle of negation, such as false consciousness.

Cultural studies, like all anti-essentialisms, denies that the shape and structure of reality is inevitable. But it also refuses the universalization of contingency that characterizes many versions of anti-essentialism, which too easily deny any stability or reality to relationships or the structures they define. Cultural studies is committed to the reality of relations that have determining effects, but it refuses to assume that such relations and effects have to be, necessarily, what they are. They did not have to be that way, but, given that they are that way, they are real and they have real effects. Cultural studies operates in the space between, on the one hand, absolute contain-

The Heart of Cultural Studies 23

ment, closure, complete and final understanding, total domination, and, on the other hand, absolute freedom and possibility, openness, and indetermi- nateness. It rejects any claims of “necessary relations” (guaranteed) as well as of “necessarily no relations” (also guaranteed), in favor of “no necessary relations” (while accepting that relations are real). Thus, cultural studies can be seen as a contextual analysis of how contexts are (or even better, of how a specific context is) made, challenged, unmade, changed, remade, etc., as structures of power and domination.

Articulation is cultural studies’ version of what is generally called con- structionism, the claim that reality is constructed rather than given; reality is always a complex organization or configuration that is being put together constantly. Putting it this way lets us see one very simple truth: the fact that something is constructed does not make it any less real, regardless of what the pieces are that go into its construction. The fact that cultural studies asserts that some of those pieces are, of necessity, discursive, and even mean- ingful, similarly does not make it less real. A table is not imaginary because it was put together from separate pieces of wood, and the fact that other sorts of elements were used—nails or screws, for example—does not make it any less real. Cultural studies does not deny that there is a material reality, but it does argue, contrary to some, that it is impossible to separate what some would call brute facts from social facts. The fact that some facts are treated as brute facts, as if they were not constructed, says more about the particular organization of reality in which such a distinction is necessary than it does about the facts themselves. Constructionism, then, refuses to assume that there are two kinds of modes of being: the real and the discursive or sym- bolic, which exist on ontologically separate planes that can only be bridged by distinctly human acts of consciousness. Constructionism asserts that the world is made up of complex organizations of various kinds of events, some of which are expressive (or discursive). That is, just as a table is made up of wood and nails, glue and varnish, all reality is a complex articulation of many different kinds of elements or events.

Cultural studies believes that cultural (or discursive) practices matter be- cause they are crucial to the construction of the specific contexts and forms of human life. Human beings live in a world that is, at least in part, of their own making, and that world is constructed through practices (of many dif- ferent forms of agency, including individual and institutional, human and non-human) that build and transform the simultaneously and intimately interconnected discursive and nondiscursive (both material) realities. Not

24 Chapter One

only is every human event or practice culturally articulated, cultural practices are constantly involved in the ongoing production of reality, not necessarily as the intentional accomplishment of human actions. To put it simply, what culture we live in, what cultural practices we use, what cultural forms we place upon and insert into reality, have consequences for the way reality is organized and lived. Cultural practices contribute to the production of the context as an organization of power, and construct the context as a lived everyday experience of power. That is why culture matters, because it is a key dimension of the ongoing transformation or construction of reality. But that does not mean, as much contemporary theory would have it, that culture, by itself as it were (e.g., as the production of signification or subjectivity), either constructs reality or is a modality of power.

Cultural studies tries to understand something about how an organiza- tion of power is being constructed through the disarticulation and rearticu- lation of relations, by taking culture as its starting point, its entrance into the complex balance of forces constructed out of the even more complicated relations of culture, society, politics, economics, everyday life, etc. Cultural studies is, in the first instance, concerned with cultural practices, as its en- trance into the material context of the unequal relations of force and power. But the context itself cannot be separated from those cultural practices and the relations of power, because they articulate the unity and specificity of the context as a lived environment. And this leads to one of the most visible commitments of cultural studies: its practice is necessarily interdisciplinary. This is often misunderstood as some sort of a priori commitment (or as a political attack on the disciplinary organization of the academy) rather than as a conclusion of the logic of radical contextuality. Cultural studies work has to be interdisciplinary, because contexts—and even culture—cannot be analyzed in purely cultural terms; understanding contexts and, within them, specific cultural formations, requires looking at culture’s relations to every- thing that is not culture. But where, how, and how much interdisciplinarity is necessary? Again, the answer has to be contextual and practical. Its inter- disciplinarity has to be shaped by the need to produce useful knowledge, even while it is limited by the strategic possibilities of the context, that is to say, limited by a grounded sense of what is possible, what can be accom- plished, in the present.

Raymond Williams’s (1�61, 63) influential definition of cultural studies, given above, posed two problems: first, where is the privilege of culture located? and second, how does one specify the concept of a whole way of

The Heart of Cultural Studies 25

life so as to identify the most pertinent elements and relations, thus making the task possible? We can advance Williams’s vision by recognizing, as he sometimes did, that the space of a whole way of life is a fractured and contra- dictory space of multiple contexts and competing ways of life and struggle.14 (As I shall argue, this mode of contextualization is what cultural studies re- fers to as a conjuncture—a complex articulation of discourses, everyday life, and what Michel Foucault would call technologies or regimes of power.) Within any given space, such contexts are always plural. Moreover, within any context, as a result of its complex relations to other contexts, power is always multidimensional, contradictory, and never sewn up.

Cultural studies attempts to strategically deploy theory (and research) to gain the knowledge necessary to describe the context in ways that may enable the articulation of new or better political strategies. It takes what Marx (Hall 2003a) called the “detour through theory,” in order to offer a new and better description, moving from “the empirical” to “the concrete,” where the concrete is produced through the theoretical work of the inven- tion of concepts. But it also must take a detour through the real, through the empirical context, in order to be able to go on theorizing. It attempts to arrive at a different and better understanding of the context than that with which it began (or which it could have predicted solely on theoretical grounds) based on the political demands and questions placed before it at the beginning. Cultural studies is not supposed to rediscover what we already know. That is why it is only at the end that one can raise the critical ques- tions of politics, why politics and strategy are only available after the work of cultural studies. While it puts knowledge in the service of politics, it also attempts to make politics listen to the authority of knowledge (and hence its refusal of relativism). Thus, I want to defend cultural studies as a rigorous knowledge-producing activity, without disconnecting it from other sorts of activities and engagements.

This radical contextuality affects every element of the very practice of cul- tural studies, starting with its object, which as I have said, is always a con- text. Consequently, the object of cultural studies’ initial attention is never an isolated event (text or otherwise) but a structured assemblage of practices— a cultural formation, a discursive regime—which already includes both dis- cursive and nondiscursive practices. But even such a formation has to be located in overlapping formations of everyday life (as an organized plane of modern power) and social and institutional structures. That is, ultimately, there can be no radical break between the initial object or event and study

26 Chapter One

and the context in which it is constituted. As Hall, Critcher, et al. (1�7�, 1�5) put it in Policing the Crisis:

There are, we argue, clear historical forces at work in this period, shaping so to speak, from the outside, the immediate transactions on the ground be- tween “muggers,” potential muggers, their victims, and their apprehenders. In many comparable studies, these larger and wider forces are merely noted and cited; their direct and indirect bearing on the phenomenon analysed is, however, left vague and abstract—part of “the background.” In our case, we believe that these so-called “background issues” are indeed, exactly the critical forces which produce “mugging” in the specific form in which it appears.

Unfortunately, that “background” all too often inhabits the opening chapter or is relegated to the footnotes of so many academic works. That background is precisely the context which constitutes any possible object of study, but even more importantly for cultural studies, that traditional notion of an ob- ject of study is only the opening, the point of articulation, through which one enters into the context that is the very object of analysis.

This initial object of study must never displace the context as the real object of concern and investigation. It is the entrance point into the context, an assumed point of articulation or a crystallization of lines of determina- tion, which is not the same as a symptom, since the latter can be read in Hegelian terms, and suggests a hidden cause. A symptom is always a symp- tom of something else.15 Such small moments distill or articulate larger mo- ments, movements, contradictions, and struggles. They are strange attrac- tors. These points of entry are social facts as it were, which tell us—at least that is the gamble we take when we choose them—that there is a story to be told but we do not yet know what it is. Most commonly, that story is told in terms that connect the point of crystallization to the contradictions at work in the various domains of the social formation: social, economic, political, and cultural contradictions—and the relations among them. The work of contextualism involves mapping the configuration that surrounds and constitutes that social fact, for example, around the “fact ” of mugging in Policing the Crisis, or the changing treatment of kids in my own Caught in the Crossfire (2005).16

Cultural studies’ radical contextuality also reshapes its relationship to the- ory. While cultural studies is committed to the necessity of theoretical work,

The Heart of Cultural Studies 27

it sees theory as a resource to be used strategically to respond to particular problematics, struggles, and contexts. The measure of a theory’s truth is its ability to enable a better (re-)description of the context, where “better” is defined first in terms of a relationship to the complex realities of the context, without reducing that relationship to some notion of some simple or direct correspondence, and second, in terms of its ability to open up new pos- sibilities, perhaps even new imaginations of possibilities, for changing that context. The choice of theoretical paradigms is always a wager about what will work.

In cultural studies, theory and context are mutually constituted, mutually determining. In that sense, cultural studies “desacralizes” theory in order to take it up as a contingent strategic resource. Thus, cultural studies cannot be identified with any single theoretical paradigm or tradition; it has, and continues to wrestle with various modern and postmodern philosophies, including marxism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, pragmatism, poststruc- turalism, postmodernism, and with the theoretical (and political) agendas of feminism, critical race theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, discourse theory, etc.17

This is the significance of Hall’s (1��7a, 152) eloquent refusal of the mantle of theorist: “I have a strategic relation to theory. I don’t regard myself as a theorist in the sense that that is my work. I am interested always in going on theorizing about the world, about the concrete, but I am not interested in the production of theory as an object in its own right. And therefore I use theory in strategic ways. . . . It’s because I think my object is to think the concreteness of the object in its many different relations.” For Hall, this de- fines a different practice of theory: “This may be theoretical work of a seem- ingly loose kind, porous but not unrigorous. It is always connected to the specifics of a concrete moment” (Hall, Interviews). This particular relation to theory is at the center of cultural studies: “Cultural studies . . . can only really work by moving from historical conjuncture to historical conjuncture using an evolving theoretical framework which is not conceptually purified” (Hall, Interviews). Consequently, cultural studies is not driven by theoreti- cal questions; it does not derive its questions from its theoretical concerns. Otherwise theory becomes a way of avoiding the risks of research. By defining the questions and the answers in advance, theoretical investments often reduce the very possibility of telling a different and better story, of surprise and discovery.

2� Chapter One

At the same time, cultural studies does not deny the importance of ab- stract or general categories, such as commodification, racism, or coloniza- tion, which seem to transcend particular sites and territories. The appeal to certain logics or processes that seem in some way to escape the context is not necessarily a retreat from radical contextualism, but a demand for further analysis of the complexity of the context in terms of both spatial scale and temporal duration, expanding the possibility that the analysis of a context (as a conjuncture, as we shall see) opens onto a multiplicity of overlapping contexts, of contexts operating at different scales, and of what we might call embedded contexts. Such abstractions and concepts are themselves always contextual and have their own material conditions of possibility; they can be seen now as regional concepts. This is not simply a question of the level of analysis at which critical work has to be done. While an abstraction like commodification may tell us something about what distinguishes capitalism from feudalism, it does not necessarily help us distinguish capitalism from other forms of market economy, and it does even less to help us under- stand historical and geographical differences among specific configurations of capitalism—precisely what we need to understand if we hope to imagine new futures, and new strategies for realizing them.

The same is of course true of the theory of culture. Even if culture de- fines the beginning of one’s trajectory into and across a context, there is no essential operational mode of cultural practices, no guarantee of how they are working in a particular context. Cultural studies does not have a general theory of culture. It views cultural practices as the site of the intersection of many possible effects. It does not start by defining culture or its effects, or by assuming ahead of time the relevant dimensions within which to de- scribe particular practices. Instead, cultural practices are places where differ- ent things can and do happen, where different possibilities intersect.

If cultural studies is politically driven, it also believes that politics is con- textual. Assuming that one knows in advance the political stakes, or the po- litically correct solution, guarantees that one tells the same story by substi- tuting political commitments for the intellectual work necessary to come to a contextually appropriate analysis of the political complexities and to formulate viable strategic and imaginative interventions. The sites, goals, and forms of struggle can be understood only after one has done the work of reconstructing the context so as to better understand the relations of power. One cannot assume, despite appearances, that the political stakes or con-

The Heart of Cultural Studies 2�

stituencies of any particular context can be taken for granted. One cannot simply assume that because a certain kind of political struggle made sense in the 1��0s, it will make sense in the 2010s. One cannot assume that because a certain kind of political struggle made sense in England, it will make sense in America. Cultural studies must always seek to balance political desire, theoretical resources, and empirical work.

Cultural studies sees power as complexly and contradictorily organized, along multiple axes and dimensions that cannot be reduced to one another. One cannot explain gender or sexual relationships solely through economic and class relationships, for instance, nor can one explain economic and class relationships solely through gender and sexual relationships. If gender and sexual relationships are changed, there is no guarantee that class relation- ships will change (in a similar or comparable way), and if class relation- ships change, there is no guarantee that gender and sexual relationships will change (in a similar or comparable way). Power is, unfortunately, more complex than that. But on the optimistic side, power is never able to totalize itself. There are always fissures and fault lines that may become active sites of struggle and transformation. Power never quite accomplishes everything it might like to everywhere, and there is always the possibility of changing the structures and organization of power. One cannot describe relations of power in the simple terms of domination and resistance, where the latter is always and only a response that at best limits rather than shapes power it- self. The relations, within power, of forms of control and countercontrol are themselves both contextual and complex. Moreover, while power operates in institutions and in the state, it also operates where people live their daily lives, and in the spaces where these fields intersect. Cultural studies is always interested in how power infiltrates, contaminates, limits, and empowers the possibilities that people have to live their lives in just, dignified, and secure ways. For if one wants to change the relations of power, if one wants to move people, even a little bit, you must begin from where people are, from where and how they actually live their lives. And that means you must do the work of figuring out “where” that is.

I am aware that cultural studies has been accused of simply producing a new mantra, ritually invoked, of complexity (contingency and contra- diction). Yet often, invocations of complexity end up returning to forms of reductionism, or specify in advance the terms of the complexity as, for example, “race, class, and gender.” Complexity is commonly equated with

30 Chapter One

the specific, local, and empirical as opposed to an assumed equivalence of abstract, global, and theoretical. I hope it is clear that none of these practice the kind of complexity that is at the heart of cultural studies.

Theorizing Contexts

If cultural studies is a practice of radical contextuality, it would seem neces- sary to reflect on the category of context itself, and to approach it as con- textually as any other category, offering a contextual theory of contexts. Cultural studies has to construct a notion of context that allows it to avoid reproducing the very sorts of universalisms and essentialisms that have, all too often, characterized the dominant practices of knowledge-creation. In fact, any analyst is confronted by a chaos of contexts, both empirically and conceptually, clearly related but usually in unspecified ways to notions of place, the local, and locality. Cultural studies has to find a way of think- ing about complexity in a structured/overdetermined way, rather than as a theory of “the way things really are.”

Most discussions of context do not acknowledge two conflicting assump- tions: first, context is spatial, defining a bounded interiority, a stable island of ordered presence in the midst of an otherwise empty or chaotic space; second, context is relational, constituted always by sets and trajectories of social relations and relationalities that establish its exteriority to itself. As Massey (2004, 11) asks: “If the identities of places are indeed the product of relations which spread way beyond them (if we think space/place in terms of flows and [dis]connectivities rather than in terms only of territories), then what should be the political relationship to those wider geographies of construction?” Even the sophisticated theorization of places in the works of Escobar (2001; 200�), for example, and Raffles (1���, 324), leaves the relations unaddressed: “Locality is both embodied and narrated and is, as a consequence, often highly mobile: places travel with the people through whom they are constituted. Locality, then, should not be confused with lo- cation. It is, rather, a set of relations, an ongoing politics, a density, in which places are discursively and imaginatively materialized and enacted through the practices of variously positioned people and political economies.”

I propose theorizing the concept of context—in response to the demands of the present conjuncture—as a singularity that is also a multiplicity, an active organized and organizing assemblage of relationalities that condi- tion and modify the distribution, function, and effects—the very being and

The Heart of Cultural Studies 31

identity—of the events that are themselves actively implicated in the produc- tion of the context itself. Contexts are produced even as they “articulate” the “facts” or individualities and relations that make them up. Contexts are al- ways in relations to other contexts, producing complex sets of multidimen- sional relations and connections. They are the result of and embody multiple technologies—residual, dominant, and emergent—that are actively engaged in the (self-)production of the context. These technologies define the mecha- nisms and modalities of articulation or becoming—the condensations, of multiple apparatuses, multiple processes, multiple projects, and multiple formations—that impose a particular organization, individuality, and con- duct on the “populations” of the context (Deleuze and Guattari 1�77).

There are at least three ways of constituting contexts, three modalities of contextuality, three logics of contextualization: milieu (or location); terri- tory (or place); and ontological epoch (or diagram). They describe the in- terconnected dimensions of every context, although the nature of that inter- connection (e.g., a hierarchical/scalar relation) is itself contingent. Hence, one cannot read the specific logic of one dimension onto or off of another. They also describe ways of selectively mapping contexts. The best map is not always the articulation of all three together. How one maps a particular event/context will depend upon the questions one is asking or that one must ask. (I will describe these later as the problematics or problem-spaces of a context.)

I will begin to describe these three modes of contextualization by briefly considering Deleuze and Guattari’s (1��7) distinction between the milieu and the territory. In the first instance, space is a multiplicity of (overlap- ping) milieus as heterogeneous blocks of space-time. Milieus are the sum of the material relations within a particular space-time, densely filled mate- rial blocks of time-space. They are bounded singularities, marked by em- pirical boundaries, however uncertain, fluid, and porous they may be. The boundaries of a milieu are defined by material regularities. Such contexts are neither random nor chaotic; they are “constituted by the periodic repeti- tion of the component” or elements (313). Every milieu exists in complex spatial relations with other milieus: for example, “the living thing has an exterior milieu of materials, an interior milieu of composing elements and composed substances, an intermediary milieu of membranes and limits, and an annexed milieu of energy sources” (313).

Territories exist when there is a resonance or rhythm that articulates, co- ordinates, or communicates across milieus, so that aspects or portions of the

32 Chapter One

different milieus come together at a different level from the milieus them- selves. The territory holds together some of the heterogeneous elements of already heterogeneous milieus, creating a kind of consistency: “ There is a territory precisely when milieu components cease to be directional, becoming dimensional instead, when they cease to be functional to be expres- sive. . . . What defines the territory is the emergence of matters of expres- sion (qualities)” (Deleuze and Guattari 1��7, 315). Territories have a different mode of existence than milieus, for they signal the emergence of matters of (nonsubjective) expression, created by everything from the song of the bird to the rites that found a city.

The identity of the territory is not defined by its inside alone, nor does it simply negate its outside. Expression constructs porous and mobile bound- aries, an inside (of “impulses” and activities) and an outside (of “circum- stances”), and, in the process, it reorganizes functions and regroups forces within the milieus. A territory holds together heterogeneities by the expres- sion of a rhythm among the elements. It is not a bit of space-time, but an ar- ticulation across space-times to produce something else; it opens onto other territories and milieus, making it a space of passages and relays. It is an in- teriority that is inseparable from its outside, because the outside is only that onto which the boundary opens. A territory always has “the interior zone of a residence or a shelter, the exterior zone of its domain” (Deleuze and Guattari 1��7, 314). A territory cannot be separated from the directional vec- tors of the milieus and the dimensional—expressive—resonances that move across milieus; it is neither origin nor destination. It is the organizing of a limited space, a dynamic site for carrying out actions and producing a sense of belonging (an abode), a way of constantly holding back and opening up to the chaos, which is never only chaotic since it is also the space of milieus. “How very important it is, when chaos threatens, to draw an inflatable, por- table territory ” (320).

A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Per- haps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginning of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment. . . . Now we are at home. But home does not preexist: it was necessary to draw a circle around that uncer-

The Heart of Cultural Studies 33

tain and fragile center, to organize a limited space. Many, very diverse, com- ponents have a part in this, landmarks and marks of all kinds. . . . The forces of chaos are kept outside as much as possible, and the interior space protects the germinal forces of a task to fulfill or a deed to do. . . . A child hums to summon the strength for the schoolwork she has to hand in. A housewife sings to herself, or listens to the radio, as she marshals the antichaos forces of her work. Radios and television sets are like sound walls around every household and mark territories (the neighbor complains when it gets too loud). For sublime deeds like the foundation of a city or the fabrication of a golem, one draws a circle, or better yet walks in a circle as in a children’s dance, combining rhythmic vowels and consonants. . . . A mistake in speed, rhythm, or harmony would be catastrophic because it would bring back the forces of chaos, destroying both creator and creation. (311)

The territory moves us away from a logic of boundaries (the milieu as a bounded space that encompasses all sorts of activities, practices, and rela- tions) and into a logic of connectivity that locates milieus themselves within “webs of relations and practices.” Territories only exist across milieus, as “constellations of connections with strands reaching out beyond” (Massey 2005, 1�7). Unlike milieus, territories can never be comfortably defined by spatio-temporal boundaries.

It is not hard to see how these two modes of contextualization can be used to describe contexts at the level of human social life. The milieu, or what we can call a location, describes a “socio-material” context, an assem- blage of the discursive and nondiscursive, the human and the non-human, of physical, biological, and social practices, structures, and events. But it is not simply what fills a bit of space-time; it is the very existence of that bit of space-time as the condition of possibility of what fills it, even as what fills it produces the space-time of the milieu. And it is constituted by the repetitions, the regularities, of the elements in the location. We can think about locations interacting, in terms of the boundaries between them and the flows that cross them, although the identity of each location is relatively available on its own terms. But such relations introduce (vertical) scale—as extension—into a geography of contexts.

The milieu is the object of a theorized empiricism, as in Stuart Hall’s (2003a, 12�) description of the method of cultural studies: “ The method thus retains the concrete empirical reference as a privileged and undissolved ‘mo- ment ’ within a theoretical analysis without thereby making it ‘empiricist ’:

34 Chapter One

the concrete analysis of a concrete situation.” It is also Foucault’s description of the connectedness of a transient order (Philo 1��2, 150). But Foucault (2007b, 176) himself recognizes that such a description is insufficient by it- self: “ There is indeed a task to be done of making the space in question precise, saying where a certain process stops, what are the limits beyond which something happens—though this would have to be a collective inter- disciplinary undertaking.” Gilroy’s (1��3a) concept of the “Black Atlantic,” as a refusal of thinking in terms of national spaces in favor of a certain kind of regionalism, might serve as an example of how milieus are constituted as particular sites of research/politics. Gilroy was not advocating a universal demand for geo-regional logics, but reacting to the doubled demands of a particular context: on the one hand, the Atlantic slave trade as it was consti- tutive of Atlantic modernity and as it continues to leaves its marks on con- temporary Atlantic (and especially European) politics; and on the other, and certainly related to that inheritance, the limits of nationalism as an analytical and political category.

The territory or what we can call a place is the context of lived reality.18 It describes an affective reality, or better, a complex set of affective articula- tions and registers that constitute different ways of living in already socially determined locations, different possibilities of the forms and configurations of investment, emplacement and orientation, change and security, atten- tion and mattering, pleasure, desire, and emotions. It sets up complicated relations between belonging and alienation, identity and identification, subjectivation and subjectification. A place is an expressive organization of socio-spatio-temporal investments, transforming extensive space-time (the location), through intensive relations, into a livable space-time. A place defines an orchestration of the affective tonalities that give resonance and timbre to our lives. As Meaghan Morris (1��2a, 467) suggests, it is “an organization of the various time/spaces in which the labor, as well as the pleasure of everyday living is carried out.” It is an expressive and affective contextuality—marked by densities, distances, and speeds—of access and agency, mobility and sta- bility, an assemblage of practices, discourses, experiences, and affects.

Places have a different mode of demarcation; their boundaries are always unstable, fragile, and porous, always somewhat indeterminable. In fact, one cannot think of the contextuality of places with a logic of boundaries; in- stead one needs a logic of connectivity, which Massey (2005, 175) describes as “an ever-shifting constellation of trajectories [which] poses the question of our thrown togetherness,” that is, of our common existence in a common

The Heart of Cultural Studies 35

“place.” Places are contexts constituted by transits and translations, always defined by their relations to other places. As a result, they introduce (hori- zontal) scale—as intension—into a geography of contexts. The notion of the territory takes us back to the founding texts of British cultural studies; both Williams and Hoggart argued that the analysis of culture gave one access to a unique kind of knowledge constituting the territory as a lived totality. Hoggart (1�6�) described it as the sense of what it felt like to be alive at a certain time and place, and Raymond Williams (1�61; 1�77), as the structure of feeling.

The third modality of contextualization, the diagram, involves the onto- logical—or transcendental—conditions of any context. Such diagrams have to be seen as historical or contextual ontologies, rather than universalist, essentialist, or transcendent; they describe the forms of existence, the ways of being in space-time, that are possible and that constitute the contingent conditions of possibility of milieus and territories and their relations. These diagrams as ontologies of contexts are crucial in the attempt to theorize the context in ways that enable us to understand not only what is going on but also the ways contingencies have been realized and possibilities opened.

Let me briefly offer some sense of what such ontologies offer that has influenced current critical work. The starting point of much of this onto- logical work is the hermeneutic ontology of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1�62), which enacts an analytic that moves from the ontic (empirical) to the ontological “modes of being-in-the-world” of any being, including that sort of being that Heidegger calls Dasein (which includes the human) as well as “the world-hood of the world.” Dasein is constituted by/as a set of spatial and temporal relations and involvements. But in his later writings, after at- tempting to dehumanize and desubjectivize ontology, Heidegger offered a more explicit ontology of contexts. In Heidegger’s terms, an epoch is not only that which makes possible any mode of being in the world, it is that in which we find ourselves. (In fact, it is that which is given to “Man.”) It is a matrix of spatial-temporal possibilities, a structuring of involvements in which particular configurations of both locations and places can be speci- fied, particularized, and made intimate.

In Heidegger’s terms, the epoch specifies the possible ways in which “Man” can “dwell” in and with the world. Such forms of dwelling define both the ways the world gives itself to us and the ways we can organize and relate to the world: for example, the current (ontological) context, defined so completely by technology in terms of what Heidegger calls the Gestell

36 Chapter One

(“enframing”) and the “world-picture” (Heidegger 1��2). The Gestell is an ontological diagram in which we as humans find our own existence, as well as the existence of the world and the beings that inhabit the world. It defines a particular mode in which the world gives itself to us, and a particular mode of our opening up and relating to the world. In the Gestell, reality exists as resources to be used and used up. For Heidegger, humans do not create the epoch and they cannot choose to end it. But epochs do end, and new ones come to be.

These days, when one approaches ontological questions, one is more likely to encounter Deleuze and Guattari’s (1�77) notion of reality produc- ing itself. Standing against the anthropocentrism and semiocentrism of much of contemporary theory, they offer a realist ontology in which reality is constantly producing itself, and hence that change (or becoming) is the only ontological given. Their philosophy of immanence stands in opposi- tion to Kantian transcendental philosophies, which are built upon the as- sumption of an unbridgeable gap between the subject and the object (the phenomena and the noumena), and which call into existence any number of universal structures/processes of mediation. Against this, Guattari (1��6, 210–11) writes, “Everything that’s written in refusing the connection with the referent, with reality . . . puts itself into the service of all hierarchies.” Deleuze and Guattari take reality to be both real (productive) and contingent (produced). They refuse to reduce reality to a single dimension, whether semiotic, social, unconscious, or material, or to bracket the efficacy of any dimension.

They start with the assumption that reality has two modalities of existence, both of which exist on a single plane—hence, a flat ontology. They refer to these two planes as the planes of consistency and organization. The former modality, the virtual, is the realm of unrealized but realizable capacities to af- fect and be affected (which they distinguish from the possible, which is not real). On the plane of consistency, reality is the substantial multiplicity—rhi- zomes—of lines of intensity or becoming. But the plane of consistency is always and already organizing itself—organized—on the same plane; a par- ticular configuration of reality is actualized—produced—by the operation of multiple and specific machines or technologies. These machines—they use the term to avoid humanistic and voluntaristic notions of agency—create, distribute, and organize populations (modes of individuation) and impose regimes of conduct, agency, and effectivity on them. Such an actual reality, while ontologically flat, is also articulated into and across many different

The Heart of Cultural Studies 37

plateaus (e.g., inorganic, organic, human, etc.). Unlike other philosophies (e.g., pragmatism), Deleuze and Guattari do not assume that the same ma- chines operate everywhere, on every level, in the same ways. This produc- tion of the actual is accomplished by three kinds of machines—stratifying (or abstract machines), coding (inscribing), and territorializing—embody- ing three forms of relationality or articulation—connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive, respectively.19

Every plateau, or level, of an actual reality is stratified into two assem- blages, or populations: expression and content. The former is an assemblage of “functional or transformational” populations—that is, of individualities characterizable as forms of activity and agency. The latter describes a “precise state of intermingling of bodies . . . including all the attractions and repul- sions, sympathies and antipathies, alternations, amalgamations, penetra- tions and expansions that affect bodies of all kinds in the relations to one another” (Deleuze and Guattari 1��7, �0), populations given as self-evident. If the former describes the forms of active perception and action (includ- ing discourse), the latter describes the modes of givenness or self-evidence, assemblages which, while never passive, are nevertheless not constituted as agencies; it is that which is perceivable, say-able, etc. The stratifying machine produces two assemblages defining what we might naively call a nonsubjec- tive agency and a nonpassive materiality. It is important to realize that there is nothing inherent or essential about particular events (virtual lines of be- coming) that guarantees in advance to what strata they will be “assigned.” What varies from one reality to another, or from one plateau to another, is the nature of this real distinction, the location of the line separating these assemblages (and the respective position of different individualities), and the specific effectivities of these assemblages. It is this organization of mat- ter and functions, of content and expression, in multiple stratifications of contexts, that defines the real as a practiced and practice-able reality. One might consider Hardt and Negri’s (2000) theory of empire to be offering a description of an emerging abstract machine.

The stratifying machine accomplishes a second production: each strata— expression and content—is itself articulated as a relation between form and substance. For example, the forms of the plane of content impose a statisti- cal order, while those of the plane of expression are functional structures. The plane of content is the plane of formed matter; the plane of expression is the plane of formalized function. It is upon these two dimensions—form and substance—that the remaining two machines operate. Coding machines

3� Chapter One

inscribe grids of differentiation on forms of both content and expression; territorializing machines distribute the substances of both content and form. Coding machines produce disjunctive lines that inscribe formal dif- ferences on and across the strata, producing a logic of propriety (either/or/ or . . . ). Codes work extensionally to bind apparently independent realms through mechanisms of normalization and logics of identity and differ- ence. The territorializing machine performs an intensional distribution that produces a spatial distribution, according to a conjunctive logic of alterity (and . . . and . . . ). It conjunctively links events into relations of proximity and distance, defining distances and proximities, mobilities and stabilities.

The operation of these machines, however, is not so straightforward. Apart from the fact, as I have said, that there are always many different ma- chines operating, every machine—every line of becoming in fact—works in both directions: becoming, unbecoming, rebecoming: stratifying, de- stratifying, restratifying; coding, decoding, recoding; territorializing, deter- ritorializing, reterritorialziing. Moreover, machines always fail to control the actualization of the virtual, producing lines of flight that are both the product of and the escape from the diagram, whether because of their very makeup or because they are always confronting other machines on the same field. Consequently, such machines are always bound to fail, if only because each machine produces the very possibility of escaping (“lines of flight”). The machines producing reality are constantly changing, even changing themselves—and according to some calculations, improving—because they fail. We might say that the malfunctioning of such machines is not an error but the very possibility of their continuing operation. That is how reality changes.

It is worth noting that this ontology offers critics two analytic possibili- ties. The first is a kind of deconstructive strategy that dismantles the plane of organization, the specific configuration of an actualization of the virtual, to get back to the virtual so to speak: we can always discover the rhizomatic, the flat ontology, the plane of consistency (immanence).20 This strategy, moving from the “molar organizations” to “molecular becoming,” is crucial if we are to hold together the recognition that any empirical reality is both a construc- tion (reality produces itself machinically) and, simultaneously, a contingent and stochastic outcome. Any struggle to change the world—even in ways that we know we cannot control—must begin with the understanding that the world does not have to be the way it is. Although this is perhaps the most common appropriation of Deleuze and Guattari, the second strategy

The Heart of Cultural Studies 3�

will prove more central in my argument in the rest of this book. It involves the analysis of the particular machines21 by which a concrete actual reality is produced and sustained, often in ways that make it appear to be inevitable. This is captured, for example, in their statement (1��7, 210) that “the ques- tion is not whether the status of women or those on the bottom is better or worse but the type of organization from which that state results.”

This second possibility takes us back to the work of contextual analysis— whether or not one is a Deleuzean—and the moment in which an ontology of contexts demands to be complemented on the one hand by theories of both locations and places, and on the other by the actual empirical work of describing what is going on (as a production of power). While one may not adequately grasp the contemporary contexts of human life—the possi- bilities and limits of locations and places—without an understanding of the diagram in which we live, that ontological context is far from an adequate description of the contextual realities of human life. Too often, ontological analysis is substituted for the necessarily complex effort to offer better un- derstandings of what is going on in particular contexts. The ontological and the empirical are necessarily articulated, but they are also necessarily not the same. Ontologically, reality may be rhizomatic, or flat, and social existence may be conditioned by the inoperative community (Nancy) or the multi- tude, but these are hardly descriptions of the concrete contexts in which people live their lives. In fact, it is precisely the distance from the ontologi- cal that we have to measure, for it is here that power operates to produce the actuality of specific configurations of the ontological possibilities. For example, Marston, Jones, and Woodward (2005) seem to argue that the De- leuzean flat ontology renders the concept of scale irrelevant to any analysis of reality, whereas I would argue that the actual is itself produced in a scalar and even a vertical way, out and by the virtual.

Hence, when considering some aspect of existence—for example, reli- gion or derivatives or popular culture—one must carefully disentangle and distribute the questions into their appropriate dimensions of contextuality. Many analyses of the contemporary world conflate the different logics of contextuality. For example, they equate the material processes and structures of milieus and the embodied ways they are lived (territories). It is important to hold these two concepts—milieu and territory—apart, at least tempo- rarily, and not assume that the lived reality of the territory necessarily cor- responds to the material specificity of the location. The ways these various modalities of contextualization are articulated at any moment are always

40 Chapter One

contingent, overdetermined, and unpredictable.22 A self-reflective theory of contexts—and an adequate contextual analysis—will have to theorize not only these different dimensions or modalities but also the articulations among them.

From Context to Conjuncture

There are a number of models of critical analysis that offer practices of radi- cal contextualization, which have, to varying degrees, been taken up to ar- ticulate different formations of cultural studies: Marx’s practice of histori- cal specificity; Foucault’s analysis of dispositifs and discursive apparatuses; pragmatism’s sense of situated knowledges and actions; and Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the production of the actual. And while these all have had or might have an impact on cultural studies, they do not define the pre- dominant way in which context is understood in cultural studies. If context is the real object of study of cultural studies, that context is generally under- stood as a conjuncture. The concept of conjuncture emerged out of debates with and within marxism and political theory, especially in and around the work of Althusser and the revitalization of Gramscian theory.23 But the con- cept was reworked within the cultural studies’ project in the empirical and theoretical researches of the Centre, as well as that of others like Martin- Barbero, Canclini, and Guha.

For cultural studies, conjuncturalism is a political choice based on the assumption that there are certain kinds of political struggle and possibility that are best approached at a certain level of analysis, understood as the at- tempt to establish a temporary balance or settlement in the field of forces. Thus, Hall (Interview) makes it clear that he is “not driven to a general philosophical proposition that conjunctures are all that we can study. . . . There are many other different forms of working. Not all histories . . . need be conjunctural histories.” It is at the level of the conjuncture that cultural studies believes that knowledge can be usefully and concretely articulated to political struggles and possibilities.

A conjuncture is not defined a priori by a location, territory, or diagram. It is constituted by specific articulations of these different modalities of con- textuality. But more specifically, it is characterized by an articulation, accu- mulation, and condensation of contradictions, a fusion of different currents or circumstances. A conjuncture is a description of a social formation as

The Heart of Cultural Studies 41

fractured and conflictual, along multiple axes, planes, and scales, constantly in search of temporary balances or structural stabilities through a variety of practices and processes of struggle and negotiation. It is the complex prod- uct of multiple lines of force, determination, and resistance, with different temporalities and spatialities. Yet a conjuncture has to be constructed, nar- rated, fabricated.

Conjuncturalism is a description of change, articulation, and contradic- tion; it describes a mobile multiplicity, the unity of which is always tempo- rary and fractured. A conjuncture is constituted by, at, and as the articulation of multiple, overlapping, competing, reinforcing, etc., lines of force and transformation, destabilization and (re-)stabilization, with differing tempo- ralities and spatialities, producing a potentially but never actually chaotic assemblage or articulations of contradictions and contestations. Thus, it is always a kind of totality, always temporary, complex, and fragile, that one takes hold of through analytic and political work. Contexts and conjunc- tures have complex relations. Potentially, any context may encompass more than one conjuncture, and both contexts and conjunctures have to be seen as multiple, overlapping, and embedded.

A conjuncture is that accumulation/condensation that produces a particu- lar problematic (or set of problematics)—a term I will explain shortly—that constitutes the conjuncture. Conjunctural analysis focuses on the social for- mation as a complexly articulated unity or totality (that is nevertheless not an organic totality). Conjuncturalism looks to the changing configuration of forces that occasionally seek and sometimes arrive at a balance, or temporary settlement. It emphasizes the constant overdetermined reconfiguration of a field producing only temporary stabilities. Conjunctures have differing tem- poral scales: some are protracted, and some are relatively short in duration. However, such conjunctural analyses cannot be understood as totalizing projects (in which everything is connected to everything else).

What constitutes the unity of the conjuncture then is its problematic(s), which is usually lived (but not necessarily experienced per se) as a social cri- sis of sorts. According to Hall (1���, 127), the concept of a conjuncture de- scribes “the complex historically specific terrain of a crisis which affects—but in uneven ways—a specific national-social formation as a whole.”24 These are moments when the instabilities and contradictions appear at almost ev- ery point of the social formation and when the struggles become visible and self-conscious. At a certain moment, this collocation of contradictions

42 Chapter One

and struggles is itself articulated as a sociopolitical (organic) crisis. While some conjunctures may be characterized by a profound—organic—crisis, others are characterized by smaller uncertainties, imbalances, and struggle, and still others may appear to be settled, or at least characterized, by more “passive revolutions.” The crisis is neither objectively given nor the direct creation of the analyst; it becomes the point-sign of a struggle to consti- tute the conjuncture, and, as such, the framing of a larger political struggle built upon forms of coalition and alliance across the various contexts rather than a battle between two completely distinguishable and separable camps. Moreover, since the crisis is a general one, the struggle can only be fought across the full spectrum of social issues and differences. This is what Gramsci described as a war of positions between competing political blocs (alliances). These blocs seek neither total domination nor ideological consensus, but the ability to define the crisis and to lead in instituting solutions across the entire expanse of the social formation.

The common assumption that the conjuncture is always and necessarily defined by the nation-state may fail to see the possible complexity and con- tingency that the concept of conjuncture brings to the analytic table, pre- cisely because it enables us to see the complexity and contingency of the nation-state as a conjuncture. The nation-state is, precisely, an articulation of a multiplicity of contexts under the sign of a particular regime (or re- gimes) of euro-modernity. Thus, on the one hand there is no doubt that the nation-state continues to assert itself as a dominant modality and trope of contextuality. And yet, as various analysts have argued, it is also an im- possible form—a doubling tied together by an “unstable hyphen” (Gupta 1���). While some suggest that the current crisis is the undoing or rearticu- lation of that hyphen, I agree with John Clarke’s (2004) suggestions that such views of a break in the history of the nation-state assign too much solidity to its past incarnations, and that we are better off seeing it as “a partial and unsettling dislocation” of an always loose and contingent articu- lation that has to be constantly worked upon and maintained. A conjuncture must always be seen as the result of a complex and fragile set of articula- tions, which requires various labors to maintain its ever-changing shape and density. I will suggest that we locate contemporary struggles over and around the nation-state within the broader conjuncture of struggles over modernity.

Conjunctural analysis (as a theoretical-analytical-political practice) poses at least three key interrelated tasks. The first involves judging “when and

The Heart of Cultural Studies 43

how we are/are not moving from one conjuncture to another.” That is why the primary question for cultural studies is always “what is the conjuncture we should address” (Hall Interview). The second, closely related, demands that every analysis must try to get the balance right—between the old and the new (or, in Raymond Williams’s [1�77] terms, the emergent, the domi- nant, and the residual), between what is similar and what is different, be- tween the organic and the conjunctural (and the accidental). The final task is to interrogate the articulations within and across what I call the dimen- sions of locations, territories, and regions. Suffice it to say that conjunctural analysis has to look at the non-necessary articulations of the socio-material, the lived-experiential, and the ontological realities of the conjuncture. That is to say, above all, conjuncturalism remains committed to complexity and work!

The Problem-Spaces of Cultural Studies

At the same time, the point of cultural studies is not simply to constantly discover or assert that everything is contextual, complex, etc., for these are merely the assumptions that set cultural studies to work. Cultural studies requires a “rigorous application of . . . the premise of historical specificity ” (Hall 1��0b, 336). Hence, the task of cultural studies cannot be assumed be- forehand, independently of the context. To put it another way, the very ques- tions cultural studies asks—its problematics—have to be defined in the work of the analysis. Consequently, the common assumption that cultural studies is—necessarily—a theory of ideology and representation, or of identity and subjectivity, or of the circulation of popular communication (production- text-consumption), or of hegemony, is mistaken, even though cultural stud- ies often does address such issues. Its radical contextuality undermines any assumption that the questions we ask, the challenges we face, are somehow universal—as if the whole world were always driven to answer the same (or even more narrowly, our) questions. Too often we act as though there were no limits to the pertinence of the debates in which we are involved, the theories that we find useful, and the conditions or circumstances that have conditioned them. Such forms of “parochialism,” including its contempo- rary cosmopolitan forms, can make it difficult if not impossible for us as critical social and cultural analysts to come to terms with the complexity of the contemporary struggles, and thus they can undermine our own ability to join into broader discussions and to imagine alternative futures.

44 Chapter One

Cultural studies begins by allowing the world “outside” the academy (which is often also inside the academy in specific ways) to ask questions of us as intellectuals. Its questions then are derived from the researcher’s own sense of the context and the political questions and possibilities at stake. There is, I am aware, an apparent contradiction here: the “real” context is both constructed in the analysis and yet asks the questions before the analy- sis. It is not a matter of letting the context speak for itself, but cultural stud- ies does believe that the material and discursive context can speak back as it were (if only as measured in political possibilities). Cultural studies starts by recognizing that the context is always already structured, not only by relations of force and power, but also by voices of political anger, despair, and hope. If cultural studies tries to begin where people are, then it must also begin with already constituted articulations of popular hope and disap- pointment in everyday life. This is not, of course, to say that the analysis should or will end up in the same place, or even using the same terms. But cultural studies does self-consciously try to bring the messy (and sometimes painful) realities of power, as it operates outside and inside the academy, into the practice of scholarship, without thereby reducing it to the logics of scholarship.

To understand the Centre’s efforts to invent cultural studies as it were, we must return it to its context, or more specifically now, its conjuncture. That conjuncture, it seems to me, is always about social change, as Hall (1��0, 12) puts it:

For me, cultural studies really begins with the debate about the nature of so- cial and cultural change in postwar Britain. An attempt to address the mani- fest break-up of traditional culture, especially traditional class cultures, it set about registering the impact of new forms of affluence and consumer society on the very hierarchical and pyramidal structure of British society. Trying to come to terms with the fluidity and undermining impact of the mass media and of an emerging mass society on this old European class society, it regis- tered the cultural impact of the long-delayed entry of the United Kingdom into the modern world.

As Hall (1��0) has written about it, at least a part of the conjuncture determining the emergence of cultural studies in the 1�60s was a crisis of the university. This crisis was defined most powerfully by the growing power of a narrowly defined scientific model of knowledge and the consequent rise of

The Heart of Cultural Studies 45

“scientism” as an ideology throughout the cultural, political, and economic spheres. But it also involved a complex set of developments unsettling both the social sciences (in an emergent left critique of their pseudo-objectivity and of the ease with which they were co-opted into the service of the opera- tions of the existing relations of power) and the humanities (in a broader critique of their growing irrelevance, elitism, and esotericism).

This was a crisis not only of the university but also of knowledge itself, lived and experienced not only in the academy but also in many of the domi- nant cultural institutions of the West. It seems to me that Hoggart and Hall and the Centre, as well as Williams, and Carey (1��7a) in the United States, who had in 1�63 proposed a formation to be called cultural studies, were responding to a context that, for them, posed an explicitly epistemological challenge. Here I might recall one of Hoggart’s favorite quotations, one he frequently cited during my time at the Centre: “May god us keep / From single vision and Newton’s sleep” (William Blake). This fundamental chal- lenge was posed, especially in the postwar context, largely by the ever- expanding status and power of science, and more specifically, by the growing perception that the hard or so-called bench sciences provided the only valid ways of knowing. Hence, the “radical” nature of the claim of another form of knowledge—whether Hoggart’s reading of cultural texts,25 or Williams’s effort to locate any practice in the social totality, or Carey’s notion of a cul- tural theory of communication—as a way of contesting not only the single vision of scientism (whether behaviorism, functionalism, utilitarianism, economism, or even more recent forms like cognitive theory, chaos theory, or network theory) but any claim to a privileged single vision (including, I suggest, aesthetic formalism or religious fundamentalism). It is but a small step to the broader critique of any assumption, any reduction, that makes the intellectual’s work easier than it should be, that reduces one’s ability to be surprised by the results of inquiry.

In this early effort to create cultural studies, the response to this episte- mological challenge or problematic was organized around the central cate- gory of experience, in the attempt to find what Hoggart (1�57) described as “what it felt like to live at a particular time and place,” or what Williams (1�61) conceptualized as the community of process and the structure of feel- ing, or what Carey (1���) championed in the notions of ritual and commu- nity. The effort to respond to such a problematic need not have centered on questions of experience, however. For example, Foucault’s (2003, �) work

46 Chapter One

can be seen in large part as a comparable response to the same problematic: “Genealogies are, quite specifically, anti-science . . . an insurrection against the centralizing power-effects that are bound up with the institutionaliza- tion and workings of any scientific discourse organized in a society such as ours. . . . Genealogy has to fight the power-effects characteristic of any discourse that is regarded as scientific.”

But I do not want to suggest, or let people assume, that this epistemo- logical problematic is no longer relevant for cultural studies, that it was somehow associated with elements of the postwar context that have disap- peared. In fact, this problematic has continued to be relevant since the 1�50s, and if anything, it has become even more urgent in recent years, albeit in a different form. We, too, today, at least in the United States (for that is the conjuncture I have been studying), are in the midst of an epistemological crisis, one partly of our (intellectuals’) own making. It is, I believe, a much more generalized and a much deeper crisis, one that is not limited to the institutions of higher education, or to the corporatization, capitalization, and deprofessionalization of the academy. We are or should be disturbed by the fact that funding trumps ideas, and process (the illusion of rational democracy) trumps vision, but there is more going on. We are or should be disturbed by the corporatization of the university, but even more by the forms of corporatization that universities seem to be appropriating. The questions are in fact much broader. For many people, of many different po- litical stripes, education is “in trouble.” Of course, the content of the diag- nosis, and its supposed political consequences, varies widely. Nevertheless, one might say that the very notion, meaning, and value of education seem to be at best uncertain and at worst under attack. Even more, the concepts and values of knowledge, evidence, and rational adjudication seem uncertain. In fact, a key site in the contemporary struggle over the future configuration of U.S. society’s struggle over modernity (Grossberg 2005) involves the at- tempt to redefine the very meaning of knowledge, and with it, the value of educational secularism, and, at the same time, to reconstruct the loci of “intellectual” authority.

We should not assume that scientism is no longer a part of the problem. On the contrary, the situation is more contradictory than we usually admit, for science still seems to hold sway not only in the university but also in a variety of public arenas. And, increasingly, many cultural intellectuals who should be suspicious of the continuing power (and reductionisms) of sci- ence have hitched their wagons to what appear on the surface to be more

The Heart of Cultural Studies 47

sympathetic paradigms (such as complexity, or chaos, or the new paradigms of the life sciences) because they use language that sounds similar to our own (without ever acknowledging that the human sciences have been say- ing these sorts of things for a long time)—and of course, without sharing their research grants. We forget at our own peril that scientism is not a mat- ter of specific paradigms, but about authority and the power of particular speaking positions, as well as about what counts as knowledge and evidence. Just because science is speaking about concepts we use, like complexity or autopoiesis, just because science is speaking of multiplicities (and multiple realities), there is little evidence that the sciences are willing to share their authority.

The critique of science in the human sciences is often predicated on its assumed “foundationalism,” which is the faith in the existence of a singular compass or calculus for either ethical or epistemological decisions. This en- tails the possibility of universally true knowledge, predicated upon a direct empirical observation and manipulation of the world and/or the ability to model the world through logical (or mathematical) representations. While, traditionally, such views also assume that observer-independent objectivity is not only possible but also the norm of knowledge, this is increasingly challenged in a variety of scientific perspectives. Therefore, the old assump- tion that a single model could describe all realities, an assumption of the mo- nological possibility of knowledge, has also been shattered by recent devel- opments in science. Yet what appears to be the renunciation of monologics of knowledge continues to operate as a pluralization only within the larger regimes of science.

We find increasingly common claims that the mind is the brain, assuming that the language of mentality can be reduced to the language of cognitive science and neurochemistry. The defense of evolution against creationism has contributed no doubt to the growing power of evolutionary and genetic biology in popular discourses, so that everything apparently can be explained as matters of survival or reproduction. The defense of science against G. W. Bush’s attack on intellection of all types has left science in an even more privileged position as the singular form of knowledge than where it began. This has gone hand in hand with the increased visibility of science and sci- entists in popular media and with the continuing prestige of economics as science. What is most ironic about the current power of science is that it is often used to “discover” what we already knew but now it can be presented as authoritatively scientific.

4� Chapter One

My point is that the epistemological problematic, including the questions of scientism and reductionism, which in part called cultural studies into ex- istence at the Centre, has continued to shape the discursive and political space in which cultural studies has evolved, and to which cultural studies must respond. But I think that at different times and in different spaces the epistemological problematic has been articulated to and inflected by other questions, other problematics.

To some extent, then, in different conjunctures, cultural studies has had to be made again (or has remade itself) in response to different and changing “problematics.” I am arguing that cultural studies takes its shape in response to its context—that cultural studies is a response in part to “experienced” changes, to changing political challenges and demands, as well as to emerg- ing theoretical resources and debates. Without such a sense of the complexity of the project and history of cultural studies, one is likely to fall into a trap common to many of its critics (e.g., see Mulhern 2000), of identifying all of cultural studies with a single vision—for example, the cultural critique of social change—and with the questions that Williams (1�5�) identified as constituting what he called the “culture and society” tradition and missing what, for Williams, constituted cultural studies—precisely, its break with that tradition in its refusal to separate culture and society (within a radical contextualism).

Let me try to explain this notion of “problematics” by briefly taking up David Scott’s argument that too much of cultural criticism is content to challenge taken-for-granted answers—in the name of deconstruction, his- toricization, or anti-essentialism, for example—but rarely questions the questions themselves. Scott proposes that we think of conjunctures as “problem-spaces”: “think of different historical conjunctures as constitut- ing different conceptual-ideological problem-spaces; and . . . think of these problem-spaces less as generators of new propositions than as generators of new questions and new demands” (7). In other words, if cultural studies responds to conjunctures, they must be understood as posing their own specific questions and demands. Of course, while the problem-space is only available in what might be metaphorically called a conversation be- tween analyst and context, the identification of the problem-space is crucial to the constitution of the conjuncture. Moreover, since conjunctures are themselves constructed out of overlapping contexts, one cannot assume that there is only one problem-space at stake. Still, to misanalyze a conjuncture, to misidentify its problem-space, is to fail to understand what’s going on

The Heart of Cultural Studies 4�

and, likely, to fail to formulate political strategies that can get us from here to some other imagined/better place. It is the problem-space that constitutes the context or conjuncture, both in terms of its boundaries and in terms of the pertinence of various possible elements and lines of determination. As Massey (2005, 175) puts it, “The real political necessities are an insistence on the recognition of [the location] specificity and an address to the particular- ity of the questions they pose,” but without a “vision of an always already constituted holism.”

Similarly, Foucault (n.d.) suggests that a location is circumscribed (and pertinence assigned) through what he called a “problematization,” a term he used to distinguish his “nominalism” from both realist and social construc- tionist positions:

When I say I am studying the “problematization” of madness, crime, or sexuality, it is not a way of denying the reality of such phenomena. On the contrary, I have tried to show that it was precisely some real existent in the world that was the target of so much real discourse and regulation at a given moment. The question I raise is this one: How and why were very different things in the world gathered together, characterized, analyzed, and treated as, for example, “mental illness”? What are the elements which are relevant for a given “problematization”? And even if I won’t say that what is char- acterized as “schizophrenia” corresponds to something real in the world, this has nothing to do with idealism. For I think there is a relation between the thing which is problematized and the process of problematization. The problematization is an “answer” to a concrete situation which is real.

I want to use the notion of problem-spaces, or problematics, to suggest that over the past four decades cultural studies has taken on different shapes (what Williams [1���b] called formations, as opposed to the common proj- ect) by responding to at least six different problematics (and often, the in- teractions among them) which it took to be posed by the conjunctures in which it located itself, but always, as I have suggested, on the foundations of an epistemological problematic. I do not mean to suggest that these are the only problematics, or that they are ever simply and singularly determining. Often, work in cultural studies is a complex and hybrid response to a num- ber of problematics as they are articulated around a particular moment or struggle (e.g., the Women’s Studies Group). I have already described the first problematic in terms of the epistemological struggles that, to some extent, called cultural studies into existence in the English-speaking world. And I

50 Chapter One

have pointed to the second, quoting Hall above, on the Centre’s formula- tions of cultural studies as a response to radical and rapid cultural change. In Britain this was often debated as the “Americanization” of “English” culture, and as a threat to “working-class culture.” It was inseparable—not only in Britain but around the world—from the global explosion of mass media and (often, U.S.) popular culture.

Third, we can identify a problem-space (or problematic) of agency and resistance, which constructs a narrative the object of which is “to displace a story of submission with a story of resistance” (Scott 2004, 117). This prob- lematic explicitly refuses to assume a simple opposition between domina- tion and subordination, the former having the potential (if not actually suc- cess) to completely “colonize” and render the latter passive. It emphasizes people’s ability to bend the resources they are given to their own needs and desires, even to the point of various modes of resistance. This is, I think, the driving force behind two of the paradigms most closely associated with British cultural studies: subcultural theories of symbolic resistance; and a theory of culture as communication, understood on a model of production and consumption or encoding and decoding.26 Both of these paradigms em- phasized notions of the active audience. This problematic is one that has reappeared throughout twentieth-century history—as the question of the revolutionary subject on the left, and as the question of the liberal subject in the so-called mass culture debates in the United States. It was this work at the Centre that was responsible for an image of cultural studies as ethnogra- phy in conjunction with various forms of ideological analysis as well.

Fourth, we can identify a problem-space (or problematic) of subjectivity, aimed against realist and essentialist notions of identity and appeals to the authority of experience. Here culture is understood not as communication but as the production of experience and consciousness, inevitably tied to notions of identity and subject-positions, which are themselves produced through the semiotic construction of difference. Thus, it rethinks the form and practice of domination itself. This work was largely based in semiotic and poststructuralist theories of textuality (grounded in Lacan and Derrida, and Althusser ’s [1�71] theory of ideology and interpellation), and was most visible in literary and film studies, and in feminist and critical race theory, especially in the English-speaking world. Such work often is taken to define cultural studies in the United States, and has led many to identify cultural studies with a multicultural politics.

The Heart of Cultural Studies 51

Fifth, we can identify a problem-space (or problematic) of hegemonic state politics, as the contour of contemporary national political/economic struggle. While its roots can be traced to various twentieth-century marxist theorizations of the nature of state power, its most visible exemplar emerged from cccs with the research around and publication of Policing the Crisis (Hall, Critcher, et al. 1�7�) and The Empire Strikes Back (cccs 1��2) and de- veloped most clearly in the analytic work on Thatcherism and its aftermath by scholars such as Hall (1���), Hall and Jacques (1��3), Clarke (1��1), Gilroy (1��7), McRobbie (200�), and others. The problematic, however, appeared in many parts of the world as a response to three developments: the reglob- alization of capitalism and capitalist culture after the global crisis of the 1�70s; the clash between various postwar liberalisms and a range of libera- tion movements in both the “first ” and “ third” worlds; and the eventual rise of various new conservative (and anticollectivist) movements. This work is concerned with the struggle, on the part of a historical bloc or alliance, to win popular consent to particular forms of state-political and economic power by operating on the terrain of and within the spaces of the popular and common sense. This war of positions, theorized originally by Gramsci, posed a different model of state power against the assumption of a war of maneuver as a struggle fought out in one great battle between two internally homogeneous camps. Hegemonic struggles demand constant and continu- ous political work across the entire range of social and cultural sites, defining a mode of power that is differentiated from both the total reliance on coer- cion on the one hand, and the illusory effort to achieve complete ideological consensus or colonization on the other. Surprisingly, given how important this problematic was to bringing cultural studies into an international arena, there was little work engaging this problematic among cultural studies schol- ars in the United States, despite its obvious relevance (see Grossberg 1��2).

Finally, we can identity a problem-space (or problematic) of historical pe- riodization, concerned with more conjunctural and even “epochal” changes, including the contemporary debates ranging from postmodernity through globalization to neoliberalism, societies of control, and empire, etc. In Brit- ish cultural studies, such concerns resulted in the less well-known body of work on “New Times” (Hall and Jacques 1���). In other work, it has raised anew questions of coloniality and postcoloniality. I hope it is obvious that this is where I would locate my own efforts in this book by foregrounding what I will describe as the problematic of (multiple) modernities.

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Conclusions

One of the most common complaints about cultural studies is that it does not seem to have any methodology. The contemporary academy is too often obsessed with questions of methodology as the source of and guarantee of rigor. I consider the search for a method to be, at best, misplaced in cul- tural studies, which does not have a “method,” unless one thinks of articula- tion—the reconstruction of relations and contexts—as a method. And, at worst, the search for method represents a fetish constituted in response to our insecurity in the face of both scientific claims to “rigor” and the dissolu- tion of disciplines (which largely functioned, in the past decades, to police rigor as defined by discipline-approved methodologies). I am suspicious of the notion of methods outside of specific contexts; they are unlikely to be self-reflective and likely to be mystified.27

In fact, whatever method one uses, it is always necessary to ask: what do I actually know when I know the result of this method? The answer is often less exciting and less insightful than one had presupposed. Moreover, from within cultural studies, any method will have to be rethought in the light of cultural studies’ own commitments to relationality, contextuality, and contingency. So I suppose the questions remain, how does one do re- search under the sign of cultural studies? And what is its analytic practice? I can only answer by saying something about how I think of my own practice of research and teaching.

The crucial moment and I believe the hardest moment of the practice of cultural studies is to figure out what the question is, to begin to identify the problem-space, for it is what constitutes the conjuncture. The question is formulated through a confrontation if you will between the researcher’s interests and the demands of the conjuncture, however difficult it may be to hear them, and however inchoate they may initially be. That is to say, the question has to be responsible to the messy and complex political realities of the world, and—just as importantly—it has to be answerable. Finding the question is the hardest part of the research endeavor!

The question leads one to ask what sorts of data one needs, and what “methods” would enable one to gather or produce such data. In my own re- search, I assemble data from wherever I can find it (collecting it—usually in the form of clippings and notes—into ever more subdivided folders, quite literally). I try as hard as I can to be somewhat systematic, but do not ever assume that I can reach some point of completion, or even statistically jus-

The Heart of Cultural Studies 53

tifiable representativeness. I believe in treating all modes of producing data as relatively equal, and with equal suspicion, recognizing that within any mode (whether interpretation, ethnography, or statistics), there are qualita- tive distinctions that can and have to be made. For each sort of data one collects, one has to ask, what can I know, what can I learn, from such data? I take the same approach to practices of data analyses. I am in favor of using whatever seems to help address the question. But again, whether one is do- ing ethnography (e.g., of audiences, to discover what people do with texts, or what they think texts mean) or some form of textual analysis, one needs to ask, what do I know now that I did not already know?

But all of this is preparatory to the real work of cultural studies. One has to begin to put the data/analyses together in an effort to articulate a conjunc- ture, to fabricate the real. This is a practice of articulation and assemblage. I often use the metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle (or a Lego project, or, harkening back to an older moment, an Erector Set), although ideally it should be a puzzle that is constantly changing—in fact, changing itself. Imagine some- one has dumped the pieces of many different puzzles into a box and thrown away the cover pictures. You may start out with only a vague sense of what you are trying to construct, and where any piece belongs; what its function is will not be readable from its appearance. The pieces will not always, perhaps not even usually, fit neatly together, because other pieces are missing and one is always trying to manage rather than be overwhelmed by complexity. The pieces will articulate together in many different ways, and there will often be frictions, overlaps, antagonism; they will often transform one an- other as easily as they will play against each other. Obviously, the metaphor cannot be sustained, but it perhaps does help describe the process whereby one reconstructs the context as an embodiment of and a set of struggles that articulate the problematic.

It follows that any formation of cultural studies has to continuously re- flect on its own contextuality, on the questions it poses for itself, and on the tools it takes up in response to those challenges. Such a contextualizing— and therefore concrete—self-reflection is necessary if cultural studies is to respond to the demands (the questions posed), the constraints and the pos- sibilities of the context, including the dispersed possibilities for intellectual practices and resources that can constitute committed political-intellectual work in that context. Cultural studies always has to reflect on its assump- tions about the context it is analyzing, and its place within or relation to it. It has to question its own questions—and the categories and concepts within

54 Chapter One

which such questions are thinkable—and this is why the most difficult part of any project in cultural studies is figuring out the question. The context is the beginning and the end of our researches. The trajectory from the begin- ning to the end provides the measure of our success at mapping and arriving at a better description/understanding of the context.

Such radical contextualization interrupts any desire that we speak before we have done the work, for then we are likely to abandon the commitment to complexity, contingency, contestation, and multiplicity, which is a hall- mark of cultural studies. Too often, in the face of seemingly urgently felt political necessities, even cultural studies scholars may too easily embrace the very sorts of simplifications, reductionisms, and essentialisms against which cultural studies is supposed to stand. Too often, as intellectuals, we are unwilling to start by assuming that we do not understand what is go- ing on, that perhaps what worked yesterday over there will not work today over here. Instead, we carry with us so much theoretical and political bag- gage that we are rarely surprised, because we almost always find what we went looking for, and that what we already knew to be the explanation is, once again, proven to be true. Cultural studies is, I believe, committed to telling us things we don’t already know; it seeks to surprise its producers, its interlocutors, its audiences, and its constituencies, and in that way, by offering better descriptions and accounts—again, accounts that do not shy away from complexity, contingency, and contestation—it seeks to open up new possibilities.

Therefore, cultural studies has to avoid two increasingly seductive traps that let the analyst off the hook. The first takes its own political assumptions (however commonsensical they may be) as if they were the conclusion of some analysis, which is always assumed to have been completed somewhere else (but always remains absent). Political desire trumps the actual empirical and theoretical work of analysis. At its extreme, partisan political journal- ism (sometimes deteriorating into rants), substitutes for intellectual work. Cultural studies has to combat the self-assurance of political certainty by recognizing that whatever the motivations, hopes, and assumptions that brought one into a particular study, politics arrives at the conclusion of the analysis. The second assumes that the world exists to illustrate our concepts. Instead of a detour through theory, it substitutes theory for social analysis, as if theoretical categories were—by themselves—sufficient as descriptions of a conjuncture. It often mistakes philosophy and ontology for the contex- tual analysis of the concrete. Cultural studies requires that one brings the

The Heart of Cultural Studies 55

conceptual and the empirical (although the separation is never so clear-cut) together, with the possibility that the latter might actually disturb the for- mer even as the former leads to a new description of the latter. It is this pos- sibility that seems to often recede in some versions of contemporary critical work.

Finally, cultural studies refuses to go along with the increasingly com- mon effort to reduce all intellectual work to a single logic of productivity and efficiency (usually functionalist), as if all scholarship operated within the same temporality. On the contrary, cultural studies, reflecting on its own existence as a cultural practice, has to accept and even defend the almost (but not quite) inevitable displacement of its own effects and effectiveness. After all, one of the things cultural studies has made visible is that the effects of cultural practices are rarely where and when you expect them to be. They are almost always somewhere else, at some other time. While it would be nice if the effects of intellectual work (and interventions) were as immediate and obvious as we imagine some other forms of political interventions to be, it is unfortunately not usually the case.

While cultural studies seeks to change the context of its own work, it is rarely able to point, with any confidence, to the immediate benefits of its own work. Yet cultural studies continues to believe that its intellectual work matters, even if it is not our salvation. Cultural studies is not going to save the world, or even the university; rather, it is a modest proposal for a flexible and radically contextual intellectual-political practice. It attempts to produce the best knowledge possible in the service of making a better world. And as such, it may help us get a little further toward our goal of making the world a more just and equitable place for all people. After all, the fact that bad stories make bad politics does not guarantee that better stories make good politics. There is no necessary relation between knowledge and politics, only the possibilities of their articulation.28