Continuing the theme and the related one of the politics of cultural studies, I love this quote from Edward Said:
To read most cultural deconstructionists, or Marxists, or new historicists is to read writers whose political horizon, whose historical location is within a society deeply enmeshed in imperial domination. Yet little notice is taken of this horizon, few acknowledgements of the setting are advanced, little realization of the imperial closure itself is allowed for. Instead, one has the impression that interpretation of other cultures, texts, and peoples - which at bottom is what all interpretation is about - occurs in a timeless vacuum, so forgiving and permissive as to deliver the interpretation directly into a universalism free from attachment, inhibition, and interest.
We live of course in a world not only of commodities but also of representation, and representations - their production, circulation, history, and interpretation - are the very element of culture. In much recent theory the problem of representation is deemed to be central, yet rarely is it put in its full political context, a context that is primarily imperial. Instead we have on one hand an isolated cultural sphere, believed to be freely and unconditionally available to weightless theoretical speculation and investigation, and on the other, a debased political sphere, where the real struggle between interests is supposed to occur. To the professional student of culture - the humanist, the critic, the scholar - only one sphere is relevant, and more to the point, it is accepted that the two spheres are separated, whereas the two are not only connected but ultimately the same.
A radical falsification has become established in this separation. Culture is exonerated of any entanglements with power, representations are considered only as apolitical images to be parsed and construed as so many grammars of exchange, and the divorce of the past and the present is assumed to be complete. And yet, far from this separation of spheres being a neutral or accidental choice, its real meaning is an act of complicity, the humanist’s choice of a disguised, denuded, systematically purged textual model over a more embattled model, whose principal features would inevitably coalesce around the continuing struggle over the question of empire itself.
Since Aristotle, anti-politics has been a continuing theme of Western thought (manifested in canonical Marxism as well as liberalism). In the 60s and 70s, the priests of the Canon were overthrown by scholars who believed that an apolitical notion of culture concealed a deep complicity with the powers that be, and a deep conservatism that mitigated against change. A number of writers have traced the later turn towards a textualist appropriation of post-structuralism and postmodernism to the disappointment of the seeming failure of the 68 events to radically change societal power structures. Another factor is disillusion with the working class as a vanguard (a probable cause as well for much left elitism) and the inevitable failure of the Marcusean dream of intellectuals as a revolutionary class. The irony, of course, is that many (though by no means all) of the left-wing postmodernists in their cultural studies redoubts have reinscribed in their texts the disdain for getting down and dirty with politics and material as opposed to symbolic struggles which such movements developed to contest. Left culturalism needs to get real.
I also like what the Sydney sociologist Bob Connell said recently:
There seems to me to be a very strong moral obligation to have contacts with groups outside academia, who often aren’t the beneficiaries of academic research, and in this neo-liberal age are going to be even less. Because we’re now being pushed very powerfully to constitute corporate capital as our audience, to do research that is commercially attractive… I’ve always thought that it’s important that full time intellectuals, especially in Universities, have some kind of contact with the grassroots, some sort of counter balance to all the tendencies to retreat, to Ivory Tower yourself, to get caught up in the internal debates.
Excellent - Said was a great loss and I really like the way you’ve related his point to the dysfunctions of postmodern academe and its claims to rad coolness. This is the point that Martha Nussbaum made about Judith Butler and her po/mo feminist disciples - their ideology blinds them to the real oppression of women happening under their noses and they’ve lost any sense that it’s necessary to engage with social movements outside the academy and communicate to a broad audience. It’s a defensive and elitist reaction - and one often driven by pique that intellectuals don’t get to run the show *unless you’re a Straussian neo-con*!
Tariq Ali - I think you linked to this earlier - made the point well - history has returned with a vengeance post s11 and politics has returned with the Bushies’ neo-conservative dreams and practices of empire - and if self-identified lefties don’t take note, well that’s really quite sad in my book.
I always admired Voltaire et al for inventing an intelligent, concerned lay audience. It gave people someone to speak to. Now, two hundred years older and wiser, we discover that it isn’t there.
mark, it seems you are invoking a retrograde myth of the political and a strawperson ‘cultural studies’ that actually ignores what Said is arguing, but correct me if I am wrong.
“In much recent theory the problem of representation is deemed to be central, yet rarely is it put in its full political context, a context that is primarily imperial. Instead we have on one hand an isolated cultural sphere, believed to be freely and unconditionally available to weightless theoretical speculation and investigation, and on the other, a debased political sphere, where the real struggle between interests is supposed to occur.”
“The irony, of course, is that many (though by no means all) of the left-wing postmodernists in their cultural studies redoubts have reinscribed in their texts the disdain for getting down and dirty with politics and material as opposed to symbolic struggles which such movements developed to contest. Left culturalism needs to get real.”
I find accounts of culture rather silly if they do not signal at least an awareness of the material conditions through which various cultural formations, sites and histories emerge. I say ’signal’ because sometimes people work or publish according to very wide arcs which may not always appear as if they are writing from a critical position.
Said does not use the word ’symbolic’ in the above and I certainly do not even mention the concept in what I have written of my thesis. He focuses on representation and is quite rightly critical of an exchangist view of language and images (ie representation). Is something like the concept of the ’spectacle’ (image-commodity) apolitical?
It is equally silly to separate the material/politcal and the cultural/symbolic — as you attempt to do above — if the political is to always going to be thought of as necessarily associated with the ‘material’. Speaking truth to power requires an understanding of the relations of power operating within particular cultural formations, sites, and histories. It seems as if you are saying cultural studies (or ‘postmodernism’ as the code word for ‘bad’ cultural studies) is ok when it supposedly rediscovers the ‘cultural’ within the ‘material’ because that is where you understand the ‘political’ to reside.
I agree with Said if he is arguing that there is no cultural sphere separate from the political, but not if you insert the caveat that this means the cultural is collapsed in the ‘material’ as if this is where assume to find what is ‘really’ political and where ‘real’ politics occurs.
No, Glen, I think politics and political struggles have both material and symbolic dimensions, and that is also the point I take Said to be making.
yeah, that is what I thought. just had to clarify.