Cultural Studies in the Future Tense 9780822393313

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Cultural Studies in the Future Tense

Lawrence Grossberg Cultural Studies in the Future Tense

Duke University Press  Durham and London  2010

© 2010 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Carter + Cone Galliard by Achorn International Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

This book is dedicated to Jim Carey and Stuart Hall, who taught me cultural studies, and what it means to be a political intellectual. They inspired me, and I struggle every day to live up to the example they set. We recently lost Jim, but I hope that his spirit and intelligence are embodied in this book. And this book is dedicated to the two people who keep me going every day, who fill my life with love, and who are the reason I continue to struggle—my wife Barbara and my son Zachariah. Thank you.

A new age does not begin all of a sudden. My grandfather was already living in the new age My grandson will probably still be living in the old one. The new meat is eaten with the old forks. It was not the first cars Nor the tanks It was not the airplanes over our roofs Nor the bombers. From new transmitters came the old stupidities. Wisdom was passed on from mouth to mouth. —Bertolt Brecht, “New Age”

We will walk then the same path of history, but we will not repeat it; we are from before, yes, but we are new. —The Fourth Key, from the March of the Color of the Earth, in Cuautla, Morelos, March 7, 2001

I heard we made progress But still Let’s sing the blues Together Not all over but again. —Unsigned mural, Nassau, The Bahamas, July 2009

If things were simple, word would have gotten around. —Jacques Derrida, “Toward an Ethic of Discussion,” 1988

Contents



Thanks  xi



Introduction: We All Want to Change the World  1

one.

The Heart of Cultural Studies  7

two.

Constructing the Conjuncture: Struggling over Modernity  57

three.

Considering Value: Rescuing Economies from Economists  101

four. Contextualizing Culture: Mediation, Signification, and Significance  169 five.

Complicating Power: The “And” of Politics, and . . .  227

six.

In Search of Modernities  259



Notes  295



Bibliography  329



Index  351

Thanks I am indebted to a small circle of wonderful friends who have been a central part of my intellectual life for decades—John Clarke, Meaghan Morris, James Hay, Chuck Whitney, and Ellen Wartella. I have been extremely fortunate to find an equally wonderful circle of friends and interlocutors in North Carolina—Ken Wissoker (a fantastic editor as well), Cathy Davidson, Della Pollock, John Pickles, and Arturo Escobar. And I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge friends whose work and support mean so much to me, even if I do not get to see them often enough—Henry Giroux, Jan Radway, Paul Gilroy, Angela McRobbie, Doreen Massey, Andrew Ross, and Tony Bennett. I especially want to thank the people who helped make this book better than what I am capable of, by providing feedback on earlier drafts, especially John Clarke, Stuart Hall, and two ex-students, Ted Striphas and Mark Hayward. Chris Lundberg and Anne Allison have been useful and enjoyable interlocutors and resources. Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy not only offered invaluably detailed corrections and suggestions but also, with Sonia López-Baissón, produced the diagram in chapter 6. David Ruccio, Dick Bryan, Mario Blaser, Meaghan Morris, Michael Hardt, and Eduardo Restrepo provided help with specific chapters. Vinnie Mosco suggested the Brecht poem to me. Eric Pineault turned me on to Simmel. Mark Hayward provided the quotation that is the epigraph of the last chapter. I owe much to all my graduate students, past and present, who have always challenged me and continue to do so. I really am grateful for their collaborative and collective labors. I want to thank the students who have helped shape cultural studies at the University of North Carolina, in my seminars on cultural studies, modernity, and economics, and in the various working groups of the University Program in Cultural Studies—the

Cultures of Economies group, the Social Movement working group, the Political Theory reading group, and the Critical Cartography group. I especially want to thank Eduardo Restrepo, Michal Osterweil, Sebastian Cobarrubias, Maribel Casa-Cortes, Juan Aparicio, and Elena Yehia. Students in Communication Studies have been no less important. Carey Hardin and Sindhu Zagoren helped me edit the manuscript, and along with Josh Smicker provided invaluable feedback on earlier drafts. Lisa Calvente and Srinath Jayaram broadened my horizons. Janel Beckham produced the diagram in chapter 5. I am grateful to the junior faculty in my department (Renee Alexander Craft, Sarah Dempsey, Chris Lundberg, Mike Palm, Tony Perucci, and Sarah Sharma); their dedication, commitment, and intelligence have helped restore some of my faith in the possibilities of the academy. I have presented some of the work published here at various institutions. I want to thank the audiences—as well as those who invited me—for their many helpful and insightful criticism and suggestions. They are all part of the conversation. I am deeply grateful to my friend and wonderful translator, Stefan Erdei, whose loving attention has enabled me to correct numerous errors. Finally, I have drawn on, and borrowed from, some of my own previous writings. In the contemporary context, apparently, one must protect oneself from oneself. So I thank myself for being generous enough to give me permission to use my work.

xii  Thanks

introduction We All Want to Change the World I was interviewed recently and asked why I have such a protective and critical relationship to cultural studies, why I have written and lectured for so long about what cultural studies can be, and why I have fought and worked so hard to open up institutional spaces for cultural studies. The answer is that I believe ideas matter, that we are better off approaching the daunting tasks of transforming the world with the best knowledge and understanding possible. And I have believed, for my entire academic career, that cultural studies matters. It matters not because it is the only intellectual practice that can tell us something about what’s going on in the worlds in which we live, but because it is a different way of doing intellectual work, and as a result, it can say and do certain things, it can produce certain kinds of knowledge and understanding, which may not be so readily available through other practices. Cultural studies matters because it is about the future, and about some of the work it will take, in the present, to shape the future. It is about understanding the present in the service of the future. By looking at how the contemporary world has been made to be what it is, it attempts to make visible ways in which it can become something else. This book began over ten years ago. I had agreed to write an introduction to cultural studies. Almost immediately, a slew of introductory texts and collections were released: a few were imaginative and productive, some were passable, and most were rather dismal, having little to do with anything that I could recognize as cultural studies. And then it hit me: given my sense of cultural studies as something that you make up as you go, as a project that reshapes itself in and attempts to respond to new conjunctures as problem-spaces, it was difficult to imagine how one could actually produce an introduction to cultural studies.

In fact, in my opinion, too much of the work that takes place under the sign of cultural studies has simply become too lazy: lazy because it assumes its objects of study and the politics that follow from them, and lazy because it assumes its methods and theories. It too often assumes that everything is the same as it has been, or that everything is new. None of these tendencies should ever be acceptable, but they seem especially irresponsible given the contextual—institutional, intellectual, and political—crises of the contemporary world. So I turned to thinking about how one actually does cultural studies, and the sorts of intellectual work that I thought had to be done in the contemporary world. However, let me make it very clear: this book is not intended as an introduction to cultural studies, although parts of it might be read that way. It is addressed to people who already locate themselves inside the project of cultural studies and share its commitment to political-intellectual work, although I must admit that its addressee shifts, becoming at times invitational and invocational. It is predicated on my belief that cultural studies should not simply be equated with other traditions and practices of cultural critique or analysis; rather, one must begin by embracing the specificity of its project. My understanding of cultural studies, I have to admit at the outset, is different than other, more popular versions, some of which are worth mentioning here if only to warn off those readers who are looking for something other than what I offer. Cultural studies, as discussed here, is not “high” theory, nor is it captured in those intellectual practices that, starting with the concrete, leap into the universal. In my version, cultural studies is not the attempt to find the universal in the concrete, and the concrete is not an occasion for philosophizing, however brilliant and pertinent such philosophizing may be in the final analysis. As I hope will become clear, in my vision of cultural studies, theory is always in the service of the concrete, enabling one to produce the concrete in more productive ways. Nor is cultural studies defined by a concern with any particular politics (e.g., multiculturalism) or any particular domain (e.g., the popular). Cultural studies is most certainly not the celebration and empirical elaboration, in all its detail, of popular culture and everyday life. At the same time, this book does not offer a defense of cultural studies. Instead, it offers a modest proposal for future formations of cultural studies. In part, it can be read as a reflection on how I go about doing my own work

  Introduction

(Grossberg 1992, 2005), but it is even more an attempt to set an agenda for cultural studies work in the present and into the future. I want to construct a vision for cultural studies out of its own intellectual and political history, its most productive formations and articulations, and against its frustratingly euro-centric and euro-modern inheritances and tendencies, as I hope will become clear as one reads the book. It is about the contemporary struggle over thought, imagination, and the possibilities for action as a part of the larger contextual struggles over modernity itself. The book tries to lay out some of the work we need to do—ultimately, collaboratively, and collectively—to produce a cultural studies capable of responding to the contemporary worlds and the struggle constituting them. It attempts to think about what it means to do cultural studies, which is normally understood to be a largely European or North Atlantic modernist project, in a context where modernity is the site and object of struggle. Each chapter of this book offers, I hope, something different to the conversation that this book hopes to be a part of. The book proceeds in the following way. Chapter 1 presents my understanding of the project and practice of cultural studies as a radically contextual and conjuncturalist practice. Chapter 2 offers a preliminary description of the contemporary context as constituted by struggles against (liberal) euro-modernity, and considers some of the dominant efforts (and their limits) to theorize modernity and to describe contemporary possibilities. I conclude this chapter by considering the central place of politics in cultural studies and the question of the political responsibility of the intellectual. The next three chapters challenge the assumption, crucial to euro-modern ways of thinking, that contexts can be treated as a set of fractured and relatively autonomous domains—economics, culture, and politics—even as they try to undo and move beyond this assumption. Each of these domains is taken up serially in chapters 3, 4, and 5, even as each chapter attempts to illustrate some aspect of the practice of cultural studies itself: interdisciplinarity, contextuality, and complexity, respectively. At the same time, taken collectively, these three chapters attempt to offer a coherent vision of some of the work required to realize the possibility of a cultural studies capable of offering better and more useful stories and analyses of the contemporary contexts of living in all their complexity. Chapter 3 considers the interdisciplinary challenges posed by taking up questions and matters of economies within a conjunctural analysis; chapter 4 interrogates the concepts of

We All Want to Change the World  

culture, media, and the popular, arguing that they have to be rethought in response to the historical specificities and changing empirical realities of the context. Chapter 5, in many ways the least satisfying, argues against the contemporary tendency to proliferate apparently unrelated theories, sites, and forms of power, rather than considering the field of power relationally by embracing and even mapping the empirical complexity of the real. Finally, chapter 6 returns to the problem space of modernity in order to theorize other possibilities, other modernities, that can define our collective futures. It moves from the specificity of European or Atlantic modernities, through an ontological discussion of the category itself, to the concrete possibility of multiple ways of being modern. This book is an attempt to intervene into two overlapping and in fact inseparable sets of arguments—about cultural studies and about the contemporary conjuncture—and in that way, to respond to the very serious challenge Hall (1998b, 193, 194) poses to cultural studies in the contemporary conjuncture: Cultural studies has got a lot of analytic work to do . . . in terms of trying to interpret how a society is changing in ways that are not amenable to the immediate political language. . . . Cultural studies requires a huge bootstrap operation to lift itself out of its earlier agenda . . . so that it can come face to face with these much larger, much wider, much broader, more extensive social relations. I am struck by how much potential work there is, and I feel that cultural studies is not aware of its new vocation. It could be called on to act as the leading edge of measuring new ways of both understanding and implementing social and historical change.

This is the challenge: to wake cultural studies out of, to borrow a phrase from Kant, its “dogmatic slumber.” My effort here is simply to lay out some of the sorts of questions we must ask, some of the work we must do, some of the tools we need, to construct a cultural studies for the contemporary. I do not want to offer answers, but to change the questions and perhaps some of the direction of current work in cultural studies. The chapters that follow are meant to contribute to this in small and modest ways. Still, the task remains fundamentally incomplete, marked as much by its absences as by its meager accomplishments. Most of all, as I have said, this book does not undertake the actual empirical and conceptual work that would let me tell the stories of the contemporary conjunctures. Even so, a

  Introduction

number of important issues remain unaddressed or inadequately addressed: the environment (and the materiality of the world); religion; globalizations; various structures of belongings; militarism and violence; and the changing practices of knowledge production (under specific conditions of new technological, institutional, and postcolonial developments). But as I shall argue later, the practice of cultural studies need not seek completeness; it need not attempt to equally encompass all the domains of human life, all of the complexity that is formed at the intersections of everyday and institutional life. “The life and time of man [sic] are not by nature labour but pleasure, restlessness, merry-making, rest, needs, accidents, desires, violent acts, robberies, etc.” (Foucault 1979, 62). Too often, and not simply by chance or necessity, many of the most intimate forms of social relations and practices, forms that often sustain and nurture us, that give us joy and pleasure, that bore and sometimes overwhelm us, fall by the analytic wayside. Other weaknesses are the product of the moment—in the history of cultural studies and in a larger geopolitical history—and of a particular location. I do not apologize for writing a political book addressed to the academy (and largely the highly professionalized, capitalized, and formalized U.S. and European university systems), although I am aware of the price I pay. I know that by focusing on cultural studies in the academy, as a site of knowledge production, I am not talking about a variety of other locations for and ways of doing cultural studies. There are always multiple formations of cultural studies (although not every formation will work in a specific context), defined by complex relations among theoretical, institutional, epistemological, and political engagements. My choice to focus on academic formations is not a matter of any claim to moral or political superiority, but a statement about my own capacities and my own sense of the demands of the contemporary context. Furthermore, I know that the fact that I am trying to tell a story from inside the United States limits me in profound and sometime disabling ways, for I can only follow the lines of transformation and struggle so far. And I know that the conversations I am calling for are already taking place in various regions of the world. I have tried to acknowledge and even enter into conversation with some of them, but I realize it remains too gestural. I hope to do better in future work, and I hope that this book will bring some of those conversations together in productive ways. This book is an expression of my own continuing belief that intellectual work matters, that it is a vital component of the struggle to change the

We All Want to Change the World 

world and to make it more humane and just, and that cultural studies, as a particular project, a particular sort of intellectual practice, has something valuable to contribute. I hope there is something here for those committed to the project of cultural studies, and for those seeking to tell a better story about what’s going on.

  Introduction

one 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 different 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 cultural 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 boundaries, 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 conversation about how we should use our energy and labor as scholars.

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 language 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 transform 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 disempowered by the particular structures and forces that organize their everyday lives in contradictory ways, and how their (everyday) lives are themselves articulated 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 realities 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,

  Chapter One

not as a reality in every instance, but as an assumption necessary for the existence 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 (1992a, 292) 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 matters 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, intellectual, 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, complete, 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 possibility and authority of knowledge. At the same time, its modesty undermines

The Heart of Cultural Studies  

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 something 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 telling two stories: the first, largely autobiographical, retrospectively reads my desire for cultural studies out of my experience at the Centre for Contemporary 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 1968, as a result of a number of fortuitous events and unfortunate political 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 movement, a popular anti-government and anti-capitalist democratic socialism, a revised marxism, anti-colonial liberation movements, feminism, environmentalism, 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 10  Chapter One

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 intellectually 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 [1994, 48]), 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 characterizing 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 simultaneously fled the traces of the Vietnam War in Britain and embraced the countercultural 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 culture (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 The Heart of Cultural Studies  11

of knowledge that Hoggart (1969; 1970) describes at various times as poetic, metaphoric, intuitive, and subjective. It is a privileged knowledge of or access to what Williams (1961) called the “structure of feeling.” Producing such knowledge requires a careful scrutiny of “the words on the page” through “literary-critical analysis,” moving between what Hoggart (1970) called “reading for tone” (in all its psychological, cultural, and aesthetic complexity) and “reading for value,” which was different from making value judgments. “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 literary works, and even excerpts from mass media. While the works were identified 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 necessary 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 Marriage.”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 12  Chapter One

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 (1961, 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 (1969, 18) 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 historical 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 Quonset 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 (1957); 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 1960s. 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 atypical interests and atypical backgrounds (at least for English higher education at the time), but most importantly, most of them were involved The Heart of Cultural Studies  13

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 demands 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 conceptualized 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 asking 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 demanded 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 discomfort 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 assumptions about the “proper” way to carry out intellectual work: the disciplinary organization of knowledge; the dialectical (negative, binary) logic of theo14  Chapter One

retical arguments; the commitment to reductionism and simplification; the claim of universalism and the desire for completion; the demand for an objectivity 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 predicated 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 boundaries between disciplines. It would have to take up the objects that “constituted” 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 human 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 together 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 credentialized 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, The Heart of Cultural Studies  15

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 dangerous alternative that threatens assumed values, standards, desires, etc. This was true whether one was thinking of paradigms (humanism/structuralism, materialism/idealism), politics (domination/subordination, power/resistance, capitalism/socialism), or problems (individual/social, structure/agency, stability/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 Aristotelian 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 understanding 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 believes that there are material (nondiscursive) realities that have real, measurable 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 radical 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 thematize. If the world is complex and changing, then it would seem obvious—although it seemed profoundly new to me—that the practice of knowledgeproduction demanded that one do more than constantly discover what you 16  Chapter One

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 difficulties, 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, institutions, 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 fundamental 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 intellectual 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 attempt 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 contextualist 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 humanities, 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 The Heart of Cultural Studies  17

(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 possibility 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. Cultural 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 knowledge. 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 itself 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, communication, performance, cartography, or rhetoric increasingly claim not only 18  Chapter One

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 concept, 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 encountered 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 counterlogics, 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 intellectual 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 The Heart of Cultural Studies  19

the time. And while I was unaware of it at the time (and would embarrassingly 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 project 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 accurately, to be equivalent to, the apparently more radical claim of contextuality: that the identity, significance, and effects of any practice or event (including 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 relationships 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. 1978), Hall (1998b, 192) 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 20  Chapter One

wouldn’t have seen this articulation up to the politicians, into the institutional 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 (1995, 53–54): “I have never worked on race and ethnicity as a kind of subcategory. I have always worked on the whole social formation which is racialized.” The result is, of course, that any discussion of issues of race and ethnicity cannot be separated from the particular context in which it is located and into which it is directed. Hall (1997a, 157) is rigorously 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 theoretical, is never purely theoretical; it is both defined and limited by its political 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. Articulation 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 contingent 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. The Heart of Cultural Studies  21

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 disarticulation. 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 imagination) 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 (1993a) has called “antianti-essentialism.” Essentialism embodies a logic of guarantees; it assumes that the relations that constitute social and historical existence are necessarily 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 determined 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 contain22  Chapter One

ment, closure, complete and final understanding, total domination, and, on the other hand, absolute freedom and possibility, openness, and indeterminateness. 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 constructionism, 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 meaningful, 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 symbolic, 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 because 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 different 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 The Heart of Cultural Studies  23

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 organization of power is being constructed through the disarticulation and rearticulation 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 entrance 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 everything that is not culture. But where, how, and how much interdisciplinarity is necessary? Again, the answer has to be contextual and practical. Its interdisciplinarity 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 accomplished, in the present. Raymond Williams’s (1961, 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 24  Chapter One

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 contradictory space of multiple contexts and competing ways of life and struggle.14 (As I shall argue, this mode of contextualization is what cultural studies refers 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 invention 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 questions 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 cultural studies, starting with its object, which as I have said, is always a context. 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 discursive 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 The Heart of Cultural Studies  25

and the context in which it is constituted. As Hall, Critcher, et al. (1978, 185) 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 between “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 object 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 determination, 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 symptom of something else.15 Such small moments distill or articulate larger moments, movements, contradictions, and struggles. They are strange attractors. 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 theory. While cultural studies is committed to the necessity of theoretical work,

26  Chapter One

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 possibilities, 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, poststructuralism, 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 (1997a, 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 defines a different practice of theory: “This may be theoretical work of a seemingly 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 theoretical 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.

The Heart of Cultural Studies  27

At the same time, cultural studies does not deny the importance of abstract or general categories, such as commodification, racism, or colonization, 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 understand 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 defines 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 describe particular practices. Instead, cultural practices are places where different things can and do happen, where different possibilities intersect. If cultural studies is politically driven, it also believes that politics is contextual. Assuming that one knows in advance the political stakes, or the politically correct solution, guarantees that one tells the same story by substituting 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-

28  Chapter One

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 1980s, 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 relationships will change (in a similar or comparable way), and if class relationships 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 itself. 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 contradiction). 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

The Heart of Cultural Studies  29

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 necessary to reflect on the category of context itself, and to approach it as contextually 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 thinking 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 assumptions: 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; 2008), for example, and Raffles (1998, 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 location. 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 condition and modify the distribution, function, and effects—the very being and 30  Chapter One

identity—of the events that are themselves actively implicated in the production of the context itself. Contexts are produced even as they “articulate” the “facts” or individualities and relations that make them up. Contexts are always in relations to other contexts, producing complex sets of multidimensional 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 conduct on the “populations” of the context (Deleuze and Guattari 1977). There are at least three ways of constituting contexts, three modalities of contextuality, three logics of contextualization: milieu (or location); territory (or place); and ontological epoch (or diagram). They describe the interconnected dimensions of every context, although the nature of that interconnection (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 (1987) distinction between the milieu and the territory. In the first instance, space is a multiplicity of (overlapping) milieus as heterogeneous blocks of space-time. Milieus are the sum of the material relations within a particular space-time, densely filled material blocks of time-space. They are bounded singularities, marked by empirical 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 repetition 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, coordinates, or communicates across milieus, so that aspects or portions of the The Heart of Cultural Studies  31

different milieus come together at a different level from the milieus themselves. 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 expression (qualities)” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 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 boundaries, an inside (of “impulses” and activities) and an outside (of “circumstances”), and, in the process, it reorganizes functions and regroups forces within the milieus. A territory holds together heterogeneities by the expression of a rhythm among the elements. It is not a bit of space-time, but an articulation 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 interiority 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 1987, 314). A territory cannot be separated from the directional vectors 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, portable 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. Perhaps 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 uncer32  Chapter One

tain and fragile center, to organize a limited space. Many, very diverse, components 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 relations) 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, 187). 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 assemblage 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, 128) description of the method of cultural studies: “ The method thus retains the concrete empirical reference as a privileged and undissolved ‘moment ’ within a theoretical analysis without thereby making it ‘empiricist ’: The Heart of Cultural Studies  33

the concrete analysis of a concrete situation.” It is also Foucault’s description of the connectedness of a transient order (Philo 1992, 150). But Foucault (2007b, 176) himself recognizes that such a description is insufficient by itself: “ 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 interdisciplinary undertaking.” Gilroy’s (1993a) 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 constitutive of Atlantic modernity and as it continues to leaves its marks on contemporary 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 articulations 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, attention 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 (1992a, 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 stability, 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; instead 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 34  Chapter One

“place.” Places are contexts constituted by transits and translations, always defined by their relations to other places. As a result, they introduce (horizontal) 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 (1969) described it as the sense of what it felt like to be alive at a certain time and place, and Raymond Williams (1961; 1977), as the structure of feeling. The third modality of contextualization, the diagram, involves the ontological—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 ontological work is the hermeneutic ontology of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1962), 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 attempting 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 specified, 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 The Heart of Cultural Studies  35

(“enframing”) and the “world-picture” (Heidegger 1982). 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 (1977) notion of reality producing 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 opposition to Kantian transcendental philosophies, which are built upon the assumption 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 (1996, 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 affect and be affected (which they distinguish from the possible, which is not real). On the plane of consistency, reality is the substantial multiplicity—rhizomes—of lines of intensity or becoming. But the plane of consistency is always and already organizing itself—organized—on the same plane; a particular 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 36  Chapter One

plateaus (e.g., inorganic, organic, human, etc.). Unlike other philosophies (e.g., pragmatism), Deleuze and Guattari do not assume that the same machines operate everywhere, on every level, in the same ways. This production of the actual is accomplished by three kinds of machines—stratifying (or abstract machines), coding (inscribing), and territorializing—embodying three forms of relationality or articulation—connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive, respectively.19 Every plateau, or level, of an actual reality is stratified into two assemblages, 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 repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, alternations, amalgamations, penetrations and expansions that affect bodies of all kinds in the relations to one another” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 90), populations given as self-evident. If the former describes the forms of active perception and action (including 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 nonsubjective agency and a nonpassive materiality. It is important to realize that there is nothing inherent or essential about particular events (virtual lines of becoming) 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 matter 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 statistical 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 The Heart of Cultural Studies  37

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 differences 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 difference. 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 machines operating, every machine—every line of becoming in fact—works in both directions: becoming, unbecoming, rebecoming: stratifying, de­ stratifying, restratifying; coding, decoding, recoding; territorializing, deterritorializing, 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 possibilities. 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 construction (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 38  Chapter One

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 (1987, 210) that “the question 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 possibilities 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 understandings 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 multitude, but these are hardly descriptions of the concrete contexts in which people live their lives. In fact, it is precisely the distance from the ontological 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 Deleuzean 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, religion 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 temporarily, and not assume that the lived reality of the territory necessarily corresponds to the material specificity of the location. The ways these various modalities of contextualization are articulated at any moment are always The Heart of Cultural Studies  39

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 radical contextualization, which have, to varying degrees, been taken up to articulate different formations of cultural studies: Marx’s practice of historical 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 predominant way in which context is understood in cultural studies. If context is the real object of study of cultural studies, that context is generally understood 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 concept was reworked within the cultural studies’ project in the empirical and theoretical researches of the Centre, as well as that of others like MartinBarbero, 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 attempt 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 contextuality. But more specifically, it is characterized by an articulation, accumulation, and condensation of contradictions, a fusion of different currents or circumstances. A conjuncture is a description of a social formation as

40  Chapter One

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 product of multiple lines of force, determination, and resistance, with different temporalities and spatialities. Yet a conjuncture has to be constructed, narrated, fabricated. Conjuncturalism is a description of change, articulation, and contradiction; it describes a mobile multiplicity, the unity of which is always temporary 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 temporalities 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 conjunctures 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 particular problematic (or set of problematics)—a term I will explain shortly—that constitutes the conjuncture. Conjunctural analysis focuses on the social formation 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 temporal 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 crisis of sorts. According to Hall (1988, 127), the concept of a conjuncture describes “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 every point of the social formation and when the struggles become visible and self-conscious. At a certain moment, this collocation of contradictions

The Heart of Cultural Studies  41

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 constitute 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 contingency that the concept of conjuncture brings to the analytic table, precisely 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 regimes) 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 impossible form—a doubling tied together by an “unstable hyphen” (Gupta 1998). While some suggest that the current crisis is the undoing or rearticulation 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 articulation 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 articulations, 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 42  Chapter One

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 [1977] terms, the emergent, the dominant, and the residual), between what is similar and what is different, between the organic and the conjunctural (and the accidental). The final task is to interrogate the articulations within and across what I call the dimensions 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 1980b, 336). Hence, the task of cultural studies cannot be assumed beforehand, independently of the context. To put it another way, the very questions 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 (productiontext-consumption), or of hegemony, is mistaken, even though cultural studies 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 contemporary 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. The Heart of Cultural Studies  43

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 analysis. It is not a matter of letting the context speak for itself, but cultural studies 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 disappointment 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 (1990, 12) puts it: For me, cultural studies really begins with the debate about the nature of social and cultural change in postwar Britain. An attempt to address the manifest 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 registered the cultural impact of the long-delayed entry of the United Kingdom into the modern world.

As Hall (1990) has written about it, at least a part of the conjuncture determining the emergence of cultural studies in the 1960s 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

44  Chapter One

“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 operations 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 dominant cultural institutions of the West. It seems to me that Hoggart and Hall and the Centre, as well as Williams, and Carey (1997a) in the United States, who had in 1963 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 challenge was posed, especially in the postwar context, largely by the everexpanding 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 cultural 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 epistemological challenge or problematic was organized around the central cate­ gory of experience, in the attempt to find what Hoggart (1957) described as “what it felt like to live at a particular time and place,” or what Williams (1961) conceptualized as the community of process and the structure of feeling, or what Carey (1989) championed in the notions of ritual and community. The effort to respond to such a problematic need not have centered on questions of experience, however. For example, Foucault’s (2003, 9) work

The Heart of Cultural Studies  45

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 institutionalization 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 epistemological problematic is no longer relevant for cultural studies, that it was somehow associated with elements of the postwar context that have disappeared. In fact, this problematic has continued to be relevant since the 1950s, 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 political stripes, education is “in trouble.” Of course, the content of the diagnosis, 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 attempt 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 science have hitched their wagons to what appear on the surface to be more 46  Chapter One

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 saying 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 matter 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 entails 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 assumption that a single model could describe all realities, an assumption of the monological possibility of knowledge, has also been shattered by recent developments 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 scientists 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. The Heart of Cultural Studies  47

My point is that the epistemological problematic, including the questions of scientism and reductionism, which in part called cultural studies into existence 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 emerging 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 (1958) 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, historicization, 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 constituting 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 between 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 48  Chapter One

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 particularity 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 constructionist 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 characterized 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 [1989b] called formations, as opposed to the common project) by responding to at least six different problematics (and often, the interactions 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 number 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 The Heart of Cultural Studies  49

have pointed to the second, quoting Hall above, on the Centre’s formulations 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 problematic explicitly refuses to assume a simple opposition between domination and subordination, the former having the potential (if not actually success) 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 emphasized 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 ethnography 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 [1971] 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.

50  Chapter One

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. 1978) and The Empire Strikes Back (cccs 1982) and developed most clearly in the analytic work on Thatcherism and its aftermath by scholars such as Hall (1988), Hall and Jacques (1983), Clarke (1991), Gilroy (1987), McRobbie (2009), 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 1970s; the clash between various postwar liberalisms and a range of liberation 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 continuous 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 coercion 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 scholars in the United States, despite its obvious relevance (see Grossberg 1992). Finally, we can identity a problem-space (or problematic) of historical periodization, 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 British cultural studies, such concerns resulted in the less well-known body of work on “New Times” (Hall and Jacques 1989). 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.

The Heart of Cultural Studies  51

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 cultural studies, which does not have a “method,” unless one thinks of articulation—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 dissolution 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 research 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 research, 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 jus52  Chapter One

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 qualitative 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 doing 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 conjuncture, 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 someone 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 another 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 reflect 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 possibilities 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 assumptions 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 The Heart of Cultural Studies  53

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 beginning 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 hallmark 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 going on, that perhaps what worked yesterday over there will not work today over here. Instead, we carry with us so much theoretical and political baggage 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 journalism (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 contextual analysis of the concrete. Cultural studies requires that one brings the 54  Chapter One

conceptual and the empirical (although the separation is never so clear-cut) together, with the possibility that the latter might actually disturb the former even as the former leads to a new description of the latter. It is this possibility that seems to often recede in some versions of contemporary critical work. Finally, cultural studies refuses to go along with the increasingly common 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

The Heart of Cultural Studies  55

two Constructing the Conjuncture: Struggling over Modernity I have suggested that cultural studies aims to provide a “better” understanding of “what’s going on,” embracing two criteria of judgment. First, cultural studies embraces a certain “empirics” that is not defined by concepts of reflection or correspondence; rather, it is part of a broader effort to define a “new empiricism,” in which knowledge is understood as an act within the world rather than a representation of the world. Second, cultural studies entails a certain ethico-political project, insofar as it seeks to (re)constitute “a context of possibilities.” I use this phrase to distinguish the cultural studies project from the effort to think in a utopian register. Instead, in my view, cultural studies has a more modest commitment to producing knowledge that illuminates the conjuncture and explores the possibilities of changing it; thus, it always presupposes a reconstitution of imagination in the context of its own analysis. It aims to give people an understanding of the contingency of the present. If the present context did not have to be this way, if it was not guaranteed in advance, then it could have been otherwise, and it can be something different in the future. It inquires into the possibilities for the future disclosed in the present. Cultural studies tries to understand the present; it tries to make visible other trajectories into other futures, and to formulate strategies to get us from here to there. I will return to the political dimension of the cultural studies project at the end of this chapter, to try to address why it is so deeply embedded within cultural studies itself and why it continues to be a vital aspect of the responsibility of the intellec­ tual in the contemporary world. At the same time, I want to try to specify

in greater detail the particular nature of this commitment, and its ethicopolitical grounding. The starting point for such an endeavor must always be to analyze the conjuncture as a problem-space, and to theorize the problematic. Identifying a conjuncture as a problem-space, specifying its problematic as it were (although there are always other stories that could be told, other problematics that could be identified), is not the same as identifying its “essence.” A problematic is not an essence; it is the way the various crises and contradictions of a conjuncture are articulated and lived as a singular political crisis or struggle. This chapter suggests one possible analysis of the problem-space of the contemporary conjuncture and begins to consider its consequences. I begin by contrasting what has become the most common diagnosis of the conjuncture—through a concept of globalization—with my own conclusions derived from my earlier researches (Grossberg 2005) on the changing place of kids in U.S. society over the past forty years. I then briefly consider some of the reasons why progressive intellectuals continue to tell “bad stories,” and I offer my own conjunctural story of a struggle over the “coming modernities.” I survey some of the ways modernity has been understood and theorized, focusing especially on the concept of hybrid, or alternative, modernities, and on cultural theories of (the failures of) modernity and the limits of such models for opening the conjuncture to the future. Finally, I return to the question of the political commitment of cultural studies and the political responsibility of the intellectual. From Globalization to the Politics of Kids We are living in the multiple milieus, territories, and diagrams of an emergent (and transforming) crisis around the ability of the West to organize consensus, to achieve a balance in the field of forces, and to imagine new forms of political settlement. Such struggles (call them hegemonic if you will) produce the sense of crises as a scarcity of political possibility and imagination, just as easily as capitalism produces financial and commodity scarcities, each as the condition of their own possibility. This crisis is also of imagination insofar as it results partly from the apparent failure of the two most common—temporally defined—forms of political mobilization: either dreaming of future generations of innocent children, or remembering past generations of oppressed (and sometimes rebellious) ancestors.

58  Chapter Two

There is also no consensus about the problematic we are confronting, although many social and cultural critics have assumed, too closely following the lead of the dominant political and economic discourses, that the demand of the contemporary conjuncture is best framed as a problematic of globalization. This has two distinct advantages for cultural studies. First, it poses the challenge of political economy in very real and immediate ways. Second, it forces cultural studies not only to think beyond local and national scenes but also to retheorize these concepts in the light of the complexities of the contemporary relational geographies of power. The turn to globalization has been productive, opening up important debates, challenging sedimented assumptions, and enabling the observation of greater complexity by mapping some of the many determining relations operating across diverse spatialities. It has pushed those of us committed to the project of cultural studies—especially those of us in the insular West and the even more insular English-speaking West, to take seriously the internationalization not only of the conjunctures we inhabit but also of the conversation of cultural studies. And it has made us more self-reflective about the forms of our own provincialism, and the many instances in which, whether we know it or not, we universalize from the specificity of our own singular context. However, I think that the disadvantages and weaknesses of conceptualizing the problematic in terms of globalization heavily outweigh the advantages. Too often, the nature of contemporary economic relations is too quickly assumed, and its complexity too quickly reduced to “the global capitalist economy ” under the sign of “neoliberalism.” Globalization often ends up throwing us back into the very sorts of arguments—“the bottom line is always economic”—that cultural studies has been arguing against for decades. By assuming it is always and all about the economy (stupid!), it renders invisible other developments that are equally important and equally troubling, such as the “globalization” of new forms of conservative politics, of fundamentalist structures of feeling (not only in religion, but in politics, identity, etc.), and of evangelical Christianity, to name but a few. While the reimagination of the spatiality of the contexts with which we have to engage is an important step forward, globalization theory does so, too often, in undertheorized ways, continuing to treat space as a largely empty and passive void, a container of temporal processes. At its best, such work follows Lefebvre’s (1991a) argument that space is both made (emergent) and given (real), but it fails to see, following Massey (1992), that

Constructing the Conjuncture  59

space has a density (substance) of its own, that space is active, dynamic, and agential, and that is has “specific forms of operations and interactions” (Kristin Ross, quoted in Massey 1993, 67). Massey (2005) argues that space is constituted through interaction and is itself the unfolding of interaction. Even more, space is the very possibility of the existence of a simultaneous heterogeneity or multiplicity—a positive multiplicity rather than the negative multiplicity of deconstruction or fragmentation. Part of what is at stake here, in my terms, also involves recognizing the complexity and multiplicity of the contexts of globalization as overlapping and competing geographies of locations, places, and diagrams, with their different logics of boundaries (coding), connectivities (territorializing), and stratifications. Globalization theory often assumes that it knows in advance the answer to the most difficult questions in conjunctural analysis: What is new? What is old? What is rearticulated? Moreover, even a cursory glance at the literature on globalization makes clear that there is a palpable undecidability about exactly where the question is, what sort of data are relevant, and how to interpret them (Grossberg 1997a, 1999). Finally, the discourses of glob­ alization often set up a particular structural logic—an inescapable, binary logic of the global vs. the local, which is applied across every possible dimension. For example: Global

Local

universal

specific

abstract

concrete

homogeneous (same)

heterogeneous (different)

dominance

resistance

power

agency

economics

culture

structure

experience

This logic continually reemerges despite arguments by the likes of Stuart Hall (1991) that capitalism—almost always assumed to be the agency of glob­ alization—always has operated on and produced difference. At the same time, much of the work of globalization theory can be seen as a somewhat failed attempt to get out of its own logic by championing notions of hybridity, or “glocalization.” This has produced an “ethnographical imaginary” at the center of such arguments according to which the reality of globalization and the fact of resistance is always and only established at the level of the ethnographical locale. I say failed because hybridity is not 60  Chapter Two

a solution but the given condition of all human reality, the starting point for theorization rather than the theoretical solution to an unsolved equation.1 Even the practices of globalization are hybrid! At the same time, the complexity of contemporary conjunctures cannot be distributed so neatly either in space or time. Theories of globalization tend to contrast the complexity of the new with the simplicity of the old, assuming a conception of the before times that is at best mythical. A more useful understanding of the present would recognize that if the old was never as simple, or homogeneous, or local, or unified as we imagine, the present is probably not as fractured, or heterogeneous, or global as we assume. And from the other side, we might say that globalization is not new. Not only has the world always been marked by specific global formations, people have always been affected by forces operating over great distances. And at the same time, as George Yúdice (2003, 80) points out, most people continue to live and act “in accordance with background assumptions rooted in national culture, in national formations.” For these and other reasons, I do not think that globalization is a useful definition of the contemporary problematic or a useful starting point for an analysis of the contemporary conjuncture(s). Instead, I want to turn to my previous researches (Grossberg 2005), which attempted to enter the conjuncture in the United States by considering the immense changes, over the past forty years or so, in what have been acceptable and normal ways of treating and representing children (those under eighteen years old). I began to catalog and confront a rarely acknowledged trajectory from a society that some thought had overvalued its children (even while acknowledging that children had and could be problems) to one that increasingly sees its children as little more than a series of problems to be controlled and contained, and as a potential threat and danger to society itself. I concluded that significant forces were redefining childhood, reshaping the lives of children, and restructuring the place of children in society. These changes have been inscribed in rhetorics of children as criminals, aliens, predators, and monsters—rhetorics that ignore the rampant mistreatment of and violence directed at children. They are embodied in the massive restructuring of children’s time away from imaginative play and into regulated activities. They are visible in the changing status of children in the legal and criminal apparatuses, in the changing treatment protocols of the medical and psychiatric industries, and in the changing practices of and diminishing commitments to education. They are being produced by the Constructing the Conjuncture  61

increasing cooperation of these three regulative structures, with the support not only of government agencies but, apparently, of popular consent. They are obvious in the declining economic well-being of children in the United States, which, despite its economic successes, has achieved the highest child poverty rates in the advanced industrial Atlantic world. I could not—and do not—believe that these changes can be explained by any single cause—whether baby boomers, feminism, media, religious fundamentalism, or capitalism. I could not—and do not—believe that the cumulative effects of these changes—what numerous kids described to me as “being young in America sucks” and others have called “a war against kids”—were intended or desired by any significant political, economic, or cultural group. And yet the changes were—and are—real, if still incomprehensible. So I did what I have described as the practice of cultural studies: I built a context around it, to (re)fabricate the conjuncture. I looked to emergent changes, struggles, and rearticulations that characterized the trajectory of U.S. society only over the past forty years, marked in part by the rise of new formations of conservatism and libertarian capitalism. But I also located them in the more extended context of postwar U.S. society, characterized by the “hegemony” of a certain “liberal” settlement that was challenged (in the ’50s and ’60s, from all sides) as soon as it was established. As I began to assemble the elements of a conjunctural puzzle, I identified one line that not only bound some of the contradictions and struggles together but also, more importantly, linked these changes to the changing state of children. I described it—and I think the evidence is all around us—as a dislocation of our experience of and relationship to time, and of the relationships between the three modern ecstasies of time—past, present, and future.2 The struggles of the past decades have, intentionally and unintentionally, narrated the collapse and deconstruction of much of euro-modern and twentieth-century commonsense assumptions about these relations, especially of the relation between the present and the future. People seem to be losing their faith in their ability to shape the future. It is not that they do not care about the future, but that they no longer feel that their caring can shape the future. We take no responsibility for the future, and our actions cannot be guided by any conception of the possible consequences in the future. And when we do envision the future, it comes to us in one of two forms: in apocalyptic terms (e.g., in both religious and environmental rhetorics) as an absolute break with the familiar and normal, which can be experienced as either danger or salvation; and as a resource to be used and used up in the 62  Chapter Two

present, for the benefit of the present (e.g., in various military and economic discourses and practices). As Martin (2007, 136) observes, changes in various military and economic discourses and practices “have brought the time of the future into the present in a manner that may augur [a] dramatic . . . shift for our times.” The most immediate result is that we live within a shrinking horizon of time, that we increasingly see the future in the short term, almost as if it were the present. This broader vision of the conjuncture allowed me to make sense of what was happening to kids. While I think kids are caught at the intersection of a number of different struggles, the most powerful of these is a struggle over “the question of the future”—over our assumptions about the relation between the present and the future. Such assumptions structure the ways we think we can act to shape the future, and our sense of an ethical responsi­bility to the future. The common sense of the North Atlantic societies for much the twentieth century, and especially since the end of the Second World War, assumes a particular, linear, unidirectional, and open-ended relationship; it assumes that the future leans upon the present in particular—determinate but unpredictable—ways. What we do in the present has some determining power over the future, and that link defines the present’s responsibility to (if not for) the future. In the same historical space, the United States identified children with the future and its imagination of that future, and it created a particularly privileged emotional and social place for them. Whether one believed in progress or not, children were seen as the living guarantee that the future would be different from the present. They embodied the obligation that the present must feel for the future, as well as its ability to shape the future. So­ ciety is to be judged by the way it treats its children in the present and prepares them for a future that can never be entirely known. But such deep structures are historically contingent, and they can be—and are being—challenged and changed. My conclusion was, then, that kids are “caught in the crossfire” of a struggle over our relation to the future, over our deepest assumptions about the responsibility of the present to the future and the possibilities in the present of bringing about, or even influencing, the possibilities of the future. Any struggle over the future could not avoid incorporating kids into the spaces of its own struggles. I argued that these changes pointed to and are part of a larger struggle, built on a politics of shifting, temporary alliances, to change the direction and shape of U.S. society (but also, I think, of many other national Constructing the Conjuncture  63

formations, not only in the North Atlantic, but around the globe). This struggle, as fluid, contingent and ill-defined as it may seem at times, has created a sense of division and antagonism within the social fabric and population not seen, quite literally, since the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Certainly, insofar as the story I was telling began in the 1970s (when the situation of children began to markedly change), it was largely the story of the victories, partial and incomplete, of the coalitions of the New Right and of their successes in profoundly shifting the terrain of many of the structures, feelings, and directions of life in the contemporary United States. The fact that the coalitions have, for the moment, collapsed and their power has seriously diminished does not change the fact that they have, over the course of decades, significantly restructured the possibilities of transformation and imagination, as evidenced in the contradictions between the rhetorical and affective successes of a revitalized liberal rhetoric in the 2008 election and the (necessarily) compromised policies that have followed it. But the story I was telling could not begin in the 1970s, for it mapped out developments that took the story back into the postwar decades of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. And the same story—albeit with important differences—continues in the present decade. This is the story of a conjuncture! It is the story of a problem-space that I have characterized as struggles against a particular formation of euro-modernity and a struggle to define the coming modernity. Bad Stories Make Bad Politics! When confronted with the changes and struggles that have defined the conjuncture over the past sixty years, too many political commentators continue to tell the same stories over and over. They explain repeated failure by claiming that people are incapable of discerning the truth or of recognizing lies. It’s an old complaint: if only they knew what we know, they would follow us. The possibility that one’s political message no longer resonates with people’s sense of their own lives, hopes, and fears is rarely considered. The possibility that the stories we tell no longer make sense of the world as it is, is never examined. Instead, political commentators search for narratives of blame. They have to know who the bad guys are, both those explicitly arrayed against them (on the left, since it is all about the economy, it is easy to identify those bad guys) and those who purport to be their allies but are re-

64  Chapter Two

ally complicitous with the enemy. On the left, some blame those who think that cultural issues actually matter. They blame those who think that issues of identity, recognition, and multiculturalism matter, because they have made a simple politics of class identity—assuming the unity and allegiance of the working class in a war of the poor against the wealthy—unworkable and unwinnable. They blame academics who have turned to new theories— theories whose vocabularies are far from the everyday discourses of the left and thus appear to widen the gap between academics and activists—to tell better stories of what’s going on. But often, political academics also continue to tell their own bad stories again and again. On the one hand, some of them think the world has not really changed in any significant way, and so they tell the same old stories. And on the other hand, some think the world has changed so much that no part of the old stories is useful. The idea that the stories we tell might need to be reinvented, not out of the thin air of theoretical fashion or the thick fog of political desire, but may actually take serious empirical and theoretical work on the conjuncture—that it may actually require us to be willing to question our assumptions—is too infrequently contemplated. And too many of those who claim to practice cultural studies seem to have forgotten the project as I have described it here, being more concerned to defend the legitimacy of their particular version or formation. Too many have forgotten that cultural studies is about conjunctures, and that to do it successfully, it has to reinvent itself—its theories, politics, and questions— in response to conjunctural conditions and demands. Too many scholars have forgotten, as Morris (1998, 19) so eloquently put it, that “change itself should be the object of study, rather than an event construed as a text, read as a symptom of a ‘condition’ to be diagnosed by cultural critics.” I am alarmed by how unproductive cultural studies has been, especially in the United States, in the face of the changing relations of power, inequality, and injustice, especially over the past thirty-five years, as well as in the face of changing affective and ideological investments and struggles. I say this not to focus on the work of individuals but on the forms of cultural studies’ institutionalization and normalization, on how easy it has been for so many to accept the comfortable places that have been made for it. (I certainly do not exclude myself from this criticism.) I do not mean to deny that there is lots of good work, but however much there is, it remains too fractured, too partial, too isolated, too sure of its own practice, too

Constructing the Conjuncture  65

removed from any productive, collaborative conversation that can move it beyond the elaboration of small differences into a serious intellectualpolitical project within the current conjuncture. We have become lazy— which cannot be measured in labor time, for if anything we are working harder than ever before. Financial exigencies have changed the daily life of the intellectual in the academy. There are too many demands to be productive, and they are too insistent, too hard to resist (for that is where the rewards are). We have become, like the rest of our society, too risk-averse, and perhaps most importantly, like everyone else, we are increasingly overwhelmed by the context of the many intersecting and determining contexts in which we live and through which we move. Still, I am disheartened by how easy it is to lose the project, to give up not only the focus on change and conjuncture but also the riskiness of cultural studies. It has to be risky, because its questions, theories, and politics, and even the objects that make sense as points of entry, are always changing; therefore, cultural studies needs to dissociate itself from, and to find the moral courage to criticize, what have become the rigidities and common sense of political and intellectual life, including the ease with which we substitute concepts for empirical work, the cynicism with which we approach or reject too many ideas because of their sources, or the automatic privilege we give, intellectually and politically, to the marginalized. I am discouraged by how easy it seems to be for cultural studies to become disconnected from the very real political questions and challenges that the world places before us as intellectuals, or to withdraw from our responsibility of questioning the questions themselves. Too often, we seem to want to make the world answer our questions, illustrate our concepts, take up our politics. These are often the result of our willingness to let our theory or our politics do the work for us as scholars. As John Clarke (personal communication, August 25, 2008) once described it to me, such shortcuts produce an intolerable mixture of political or theoretical certainty and empirical ignorance. That is why it is so important that cultural studies continue to be able to tell us things we don’t know, to surprise us, to tell us that we are wrong. I am not nostalgic for some previous moment of cultural studies; I do not read the history of cultural studies as a narrative of either progress or decline. I want to suggest that there have been moments when, for many different reasons and as a result of many different determinations, political intellectuals were able to more fully realize the project of cultural studies, without necessarily doing it self-consciously; in general, the history of cul66  Chapter Two

tural studies has been a history of mixed results. I presume this is as it must be, and will always be the case. But it seems to me that in the contemporary moment, we might become more self-conscious of the project, and to take it up again. It is not a matter of berating cultural studies or those who claim to practice it, but of challenging us to think beyond the institutional constraints and habits to which we have become accustomed. Foucault (2008, 187–88) offers a similar critique of much of contemporary political thought, assigning to it what he calls “an inflationary critical value.” He makes four specific charges: (1) too often, critical work “encourages the growth, at a constantly accelerating speed, of the interchangeability of analysis,” enabling one to metonymically slip and slide between examples and across domains (e.g., from social security to concentration camps); (2) too often, critical work “allows one to practice what could be called a general disqualification by the worst,” enabling one to move, for example, from harsh prison sentences to the fascist state; (3) too often, critical theory “enables one to avoid paying the price of reality and actuality”; and (4) too often, critical theory “does not carry out a criticism or analysis of itself.” In an important sense, this book arises out of the project that has defined most of my academic career: to provide a history of the present, to tell a better story about what’s going on, and to begin to open new possibilities for imagination and struggle, even for rethinking imagination itself, and in particular for imagining new possibilities for a future that can be reached from the present—one more humane and just than that promised by the trajectories we find ourselves on. How do you redescribe the context, often viewed with some sense of pessimism and even despair, into one of possibilities? This is, I assume, what Williams had in mind when he spoke of “making hope practical, rather than despair convincing” (1983, 240). If bad stories make bad politics, then better stories, while not guaranteeing better politics, open the imagination—of both possibilities and strategies. A Conjunctural Story When you consider the breadth of the sites of struggles in the United States over the past sixty years, as well as how deeply they cut into our habitual ways of living and our most basic commonsense assumptions, there is an almost epochal “feeling” to the contemporary dislocations and struggles. As I tried to understand the changes I was mapping, as I tried to tell a better conjunctural story, I was reminded of Stuart Hall’s (1995, 67) claim that Constructing the Conjuncture  67

we are living in “a highly transitional moment, a very Gramscian conjuncture . . . between the old state that we can neither fully occupy nor fully leave, and some new state toward which we may be going, but of which we are ignorant. What it feels like in that transitional state is to be ‘post,’ living in the moment of the post.” And I was struck by the similarity between this description, written in Britain, and James Carey’s (1997b, 324–26) observation, from the United States, that we are living . . . in a period of enormous disarray in all our institutions and in much of our personal life as well. . . . We are living amidst a cultural meltdown, to be hyperbolic about it, a displacement and transgression of the symbolic, but it is unclear what will replace the terms with which we have navigated our sense of the world and our own nature for at least the last hundred years. . . . Something will be invented to do the cultural work of mapping the social, but that something is at the moment not repressed but merely undiscovered.

Both statements evoke a lovely, somewhat Hegelian, imagery, suggesting that we are in the midst of a rather prolonged and complex organic crisis, which Gramsci (1971, 178) explained as follows: “A crisis occurs, sometimes lasting for decades. This exceptional duration means that incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves (reached maturity) and that, despite this, the political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure them, within certain limits, and to overcome them.” Such a conjunctural crisis challenges cultural studies, because it demands that we produce new concepts and discourses capable of productively describing the changing social realities. Both Hall and Carey suggest that we are living in something of a transitional moment, where the terms of settlement, where the balance in the field of forces, has still yet to be decided, and where, in profound ways, the terms—both intellectual and political, both theoretical and analytical—that we use to understand the structures and struggles of power and everyday life may have to be reinvented, or at least rethought. I am reminded of a heuristic image Carey used in his classes to explain the profound transformation of U.S. society at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Such changes are often glibly described as modernization or the second Industrial Revolution, emptying them of their significance in people’s lives. Carey would say that there was a point in the late nineteenth century that divided the present from the past, 68  Chapter Two

in the sense that if you traveled back to a time prior to that point, you would not, could not, feel at home. You would not recognize the reality of “American life.” But if you went back to a time after that point, however different society might seem, however “primitive” and unrealized, you would recognize it as your own world; it would be within your own sphere of possibility. It would be what Williams (1973) called a “knowable reality.” One might say that Carey’s break point marked the transformation, at an almost epochal level, of “the structure of feeling,” but it does not mark a rupture in the fabric of social life or history, for such changes are always the accumulation over time of the consequences of the complex intersecting and overlapping, cooperative and contradictory, efforts of various agencies, fractions, and institutions. Nevertheless, across the divide of such heuristic breaking points, what we take for granted, such as our assumptions, discourses, and practices of engaging with children—or time—can change. This is the story we need to tell. In the United States, I concluded that I had to locate the specific struggles I had mapped within a broader set of conjunctural struggles that have been taking place for over half a century over and often against the specific configu­ ration of euro-modernity—what I call “liberal modernity ”—that developed and came to dominance within the United States between Reconstruction and the 1950s.3 The establishment of this particular version of modernity, this specific way of being modern, was neither linear nor evolutionary; it was perhaps never completed, and it was certainly never uncontested, but it did largely come to define the United States and much of the North Atlantic world, as well as strongly shaping many other parts of the world in the twentieth century. Despite the powerfully nationalist discourses of this formation, it was crucially implicated in international relations of power, too quickly glossed as the “Cold War” and movements for independence in the colonized world. But this formation has been in crisis since the 1950s. At the very moment when liberal modernity seemed to have been securely established following the Second World War, after almost a century of struggle, it came under multiple and widespread attack and even rejection. At the apparent height of success it was already in trouble, as was made visible in anticolonial and antiracist movements, in emergent youth cultures, in feminist and other social movements, as well as in the rise of various religious movements and new conservatisms. The differences among these attacks suggest that the crisis of liberal modernity cannot be told simply as the result and continuing Constructing the Conjuncture  69

story of the “baby boom generation.” Indeed, the conjuncture provided the context within which the invention of the baby boom generation was possible, sensible, and even desirable. The multiplicity of struggles suggests the crisis of liberal modernity as even more than simply a crisis of liberalism—in both economic (e.g., free labor) and political (e.g., individualism, tolerance) terms. These struggles were often articulated to and built upon a much broader and deeper sense of a crisis: in terms of both material and lived reality, the world was not how it was supposed to be. This sense of crisis, which was often assumed to be historically unique, became discursively and experientially palpable during the 1960s; it was explicitly used to mobilize Republican politics in the ’60s and ’70s, and it has continued to dominate national politics since then, articulated as and into a fluid set of anxieties, fears, and resentments, on all sides of the political and cultural spectra. The struggles against liberal modernity are at least as complicated and uneven as were the struggles to establish it; they have been and continue to be waged from a variety of “centers,” “lefts,” and “rights” against a perceived “liberal” center, and have produced any number of unequal and unstable alliances. (President Barack Obama may be attempting to reclaim that center, but if so, it is a center that has been significantly reconfigured and limited by what has happened during the previous decades. Moreover, Obama is caught in these struggles in ways that leave little room for negotiation, as he tries to overcome the increasing political partisanship while reinvigorating a certain left-liberalism that is already located by that partisanship.) These struggles have involved and continue to be fought out at a wide range of social sites, over a fluid set of cultural, political, and economic issues. A number of different settlements—positions of leadership capable of temporarily organizing the field and defining the trajectories that lead the present into a future—have secured and then lost power. The most obvious of these have been various formations and formulations of what is misleadingly called “neoliberalism” but is probably better described as a series of compromise alliances of new conservatives and libertarian (free-market, anti-regulatory) capitalists. But as profound as the victory of these “right” alliances seems to have been, we have witnessed their fragility. In the end, I do not think any sustainable hegemonic position, any stable balance in the field of forces, has been reached in the United States since the 1950s (perhaps that is why it is still a site of nostalgic investment?), and the struggles have since become integrated into the everyday life of the nation.

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The assemblage of these struggles is best framed as a struggle over what it means to be modern (or in the case specifically of the United States, over what is the appropriate form of “American modernity”). It has been comprised of what we might describe as an ongoing series of hegemonic struggles, of wars of positions, involving many different changes and just as many apparent continuities, all of which have to be articulated together. Different changes and struggles begin at different times, have different speeds, emerge from different projects, encounter different resistances, and operate at different social locations. Yet, taken together, they constitute a struggle—from many political sides, perhaps too many to simply be reduced to the left and the right—over what it means to be modern, mounted against a particular set of assumptions and practices that had themselves been stitched into place through very real struggles through the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. It is in this spirit that I might turn to Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2002, 13): The conditions that brought about the crisis of modernity have not yet become the conditions to overcome the crisis beyond modernity. Hence the complexity of our transitional period portrayed by oppositional postmodern theory: we are facing modern problems for which there are no modern solutions [emphasis added]. The search for a postmodern solution is what I call oppositional postmodernism. What is necessary is to start from the disjunction between the modernity of the problems and the postmodernity of the possible solutions, and to turn such disjunction into the urge to ground theories and practices capable of reinventing social emancipation out of the wrecked emancipatory promises of modernity.

But I do not want to follow Santos into the realms of postmodernity; rather, I prefer to traverse the murkier waters of the possibility of other modernities. That is, I would prefer to say that we are facing modern problems for which the current formations and imaginations of modernity—European or North Atlantic modernity (I will treat these as the same, and refer to this broad formation as euro-modernity4)—offer no solutions. While my own researches grounded these conjunctural struggles and changes in a particular national formation, it has become clear to me that the problematic I was assembling not only depended upon lines that traversed many such national boundaries, but also extended into larger conjunctures (without

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assuming something called “the global”), suggesting that there are multiple and interrelated struggles over modernities in many places, countries, and regions. Moreover, this conjunctural problematic had not only to be located and dispersed in geo-spatial terms, but also in geo-historical terms, for it entailed the articulation of at least three different temporalities (e.g., three different apparent crises): a crisis of euro-modernity, which in a variety of forms has dominated much of the world since the sixteenth century; a crisis of liberal modernity as I have described it above; and most recently, a crisis of the various new conservative models, which from the late 1970s into the present—not only the future but the present is uncertain from many perspectives—has defined the leading efforts to stabilize the two preceding disruptions.5 I propose to describe the contemporary problem-space as a struggle over modernities, to some extent blurring the lines separating these three temporalities, a struggle to constitute an other modernity, an other way of being modern. I do not think we can say what the outcome is going to be; whatever the coming modernity—the emergent reconfigurations of modernity— is going to be, it will not be the simple realization of any one project. Yet the story that needs to be told will have to understand the complex terrain of struggle and the complex play of forces that are shaping what is going on and determining, in different degrees, the lines of possibility leading to different futures. While this complex conjunctural struggle may signal that we are in the midst of something like a larger epochal shift, I think we must avoid thinking of it as a complete change in the nature of social reality, or as a rupture in history, in which everything changes and all the changes somehow line up together, or correspond to each other, so that everything can be described in, or ascribed to, a single logic. We must be careful, because, no doubt, every generation thinks it is living in the great crisis, through a great change, at the true end-time. And yet it may be impossible to completely put such feelings aside in the present conjuncture; still, we have to refuse to take it for granted as we seek a way of telling a story that is not simply a narrative of before and after, of the old and the new, but rather a narrative of change, complexity, and multiplicity. And in order to do that, we must think more rigorously about—theorize—the category of modernity itself, as both a descriptive/analytic and a prescriptive/normative category. That is, we need to tell a story that can tell us, that can link together, where we are and where we want to go.

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The Problem-Space of Modernity My assumption that the contemporary problematic involves struggles over and around modernity enables me to take seriously the common appeals, in the discourses of new conservatives, libertarian capitalists, evangelical religious groups, as well as many counter-Western political movements, to a modernizing project; in fact, there is apparently a very palpable need on the part of those contesting the normalization of twentieth-century liberal modernity to present themselves and their project in either modern or antimodern terms. Further, my analysis has been strengthened by my readings of political intellectuals in the post-colonized worlds of Asia and Latin America (and to a lesser extent, but that is my fault, Africa), where it has been long understood that globalization is but an expression of a more fundamental problematic of modernity (within which different forms of globalization, colonization, and post-colonization have to be located and theorized). For much of the developing world, as well as the non-Western developed world, a major challenge of the postwar years has been to think through the possibilities of refusing euro-modernity, of finding an alternative modernity or an alternative to modernity, while in the North Atlantic, many left and postmodern (they are not the same) intellectuals have been satisfied to simply decenter euro-modernity or reject it, without any suggestion of where that leaves us. Therefore, this story starts from the argument that, even in its multi­ plicity and complexity, the contemporary conjuncture(s) foregrounds a problematic of modernity. But if the problem-space raises the question of the modern, we still must inquire into the form of the problematic. What is the question of the modern? I will suggest below that rather than decentering euro-modernity, we need to think about modernity in a polycentric or even a-centric way. That is, I want to frame the problematic in terms of the possibility of a multiplicity of modernities, not as an answer to the question, but as the question itself. My efforts to think about modernity are conjunctural. I am not trying to offer a universal—context-free—theory, but a contextually specific story of modernity, constituted by and as a response to my understanding of the present as a struggle with, around, and over euro-modernity. This exploration is simultaneously an analytical and an ethico-political project, seeking, as Heidegger (via Bernasconi [1997, 190]) would have it, the “possibility

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of another beginning . . . the opening of future thinking.” Such a possibility is constructed not as a proposal for a coming modernity, but as the rearticulation of the conjuncture and the construction of a sense of possibilities—what Deleuze would call the virtual, what Williams would call the emergent—already present in our lived reality. To avoid this challenge, or to get the question wrong, is likely to mean that we are producing analyses that are likely to be either irrelevant or ineffective. And thus we abandon our responsibilities as political intellectuals. I believe it is only through a simultaneously theoretical and empirical investigation into the articulation—the unbecoming and rebecoming—of modernities, the possibility of other modernities, that we can both understand what’s going on in the contemporary world and reconstitute the context in ways that allow us to move from a grounded pessimism to an earned optimism. The first task, then, is to specify, to theorize, the problematic. We have to understand what is being interrogated and what is at stake in the problemspace. We have to know what the problematic is before we can try to answer it. Let me begin by briefly returning to the postwar era. In that social context, the dominant and most politically influential discourse of the modern in the West was “modernization theory,” popularized by people like Walter Rostow and critiqued by, for example, Escobar (1995). Modernization theory assumed a singular and stable linear-developmental model of modernity provided by the industrialized capitalist democracies of the North Atlantic. It was a Cold War theory, largely propelled by the need to “develop” the “third world” in ways that brought them into the capitalist rather than the communist camp; it assumed the only true and necessary engine of modernization was economic growth, understood as capitalist industrialization in international financial and commodity markets. It assumed that other “features” of modernity, including democracy, individual freedom, secularism, etc., would necessarily follow, or at least be dragged behind, economic growth and development. The essence and origin of modernity was always taken for granted, in advance, predetermined by the theory’s economic reductionism. This commonsense embracing of the universalizing impulse of euro-modernity was legitimated by its assumed social and moral superi­ ority.6 Of course, it should come as no surprise that variations of moderni­ zation (and development) theory continue to exert a powerful influence in contemporary political and economic policies. The political developments of the decades following World War II, starting with the anti-colonial and civil rights movements but expanding around 74  Chapter Two

the world in the various new social movements and the rise of a critical academic intelligentsia, challenged the assumptions of modernization theory and its understanding of modernity. The effort to contest the singularity and universality of euro-modernity took different lines of argument. First, critics began to foreground some of the “internal” complexity of euro-modernity, a complexity that could be measured by the differences across its many actualizations, both across national formations and within the broader universalizing discourse. Second, critics dismantled the claimed unity by pointing out what Dilip Gaonkar (2001) describes as its own internal opposition between bourgeois (“societal”) and romantic (anti-bourgeois) modernities; and there are other internal contradictions, although they are too often and too easily equated or conflated with the first, such as that between moderni­ zation (the primarily economic and technological practices but also social and political forces that produce modernity) and modernism (the cultural expressions of and responses to these changes). Even more importantly perhaps, political realities, translated into cultural work, demanded that critics “write into the history of modernity the ambivalences, contradictions, the uses of force, the tragedies and ironies that attend it” (Chakrabarty 2000, 43). Euro-modernity had to be seen as internally fractured, characterized by progress and catastrophe, order and chaos, civilization and barbarism, emancipation and control (Chakrabarty 2000; Gilroy 2000; Santos 2002; P. Taylor 1999). Euro-modernity was always too willing to ignore and even to erase those sites, both internal and external to the nation, where political society was characterized by violence. Attacks on various subalternized populations, including the colonized, rural peasants, and various subordinated minorities, demanded a critique of the urbanocentrism and presumed cosmopolitanism that often legitimated and underlay the distinctive interpellation of the subaltern—by which they became subjects denied the possibility of their own modernity, and often, in further acts of negation, by violence.7 Yet, ironically, such critical practices too often seemed to continue the very logic of singularity and universalization that they purported to criticize in euro-modernity. If we want to avoid the imaginative limits of the euromodern imagination, we have to pluralize modernity, to see the many different ways in which it has been and can be configured and actualized. We have to realize that what cannot be admitted in modernization theory, in the Western common sense of modernity, that which is always—and must be—left unsaid, is that there are, were, and always will be, at any moment, Constructing the Conjuncture  75

competing visions and even realities of modernity. (After all, were the colonized not also modernized?) Only by acknowledging this can we recognize that the distributive and normative functioning of “modernity” in the West is not an inevitability of modernity itself. To think about such possibilities, we can begin by recognizing that euromodernity was never complete and harmonious, but always on its way, always becoming. It always included any number of counter- and alternative and antimodernities, and therefore, it was always becoming something other as it came to rest at, reorganize, and even produce a variety of contexts. That is, it was played out in different ways; it was becoming different things at different locations, even as it was being resisted, adopted, appropriated, etc., in specific territories by other forces, struggles, and vectors of determination. Consequently, we must avoid thinking of modernity as a singular stable machine the dynamics of which are somehow internal to itself, or definable according to a narrative of intentional agency. This is, in its most basic form, the question of the contemporary problem-space: how to explore the possibilities of modernity. But this implies three entangled but separable questions: What is it we are speaking of when we speak of “the modern”? How do we avoid a singular universalizing concept of modernity? How can one think the possibility of more than one modernity? In fact, the way one answers the first and second questions, defining and delimiting modernity, has an almost determining influence on the way one answers the final question. In many writers on modernity, the questions are too quickly rendered indistinguishable. The rest of this chapter begins to explore these questions. But it is the last of these questions that drives my efforts to theorize the modern. The question of the possibility of other modernities, the possibility of different ways of being modern (a locution suggested to me by Meaghan Morris), can point in two very different directions, each with its own descriptions and effects: theories of alternative or hybrid modernities, and theories of multiple modernities.8 While both might assent to the statement that “the modern is never one!” they embody radically opposed logics of thought and visions of possibility. I want to embrace both of these arguments to varied extents because they each do different work, but it is the latter concept—multiple modernities—that opens up the possibilities of and for imagination. I shall put off the discussion of this concept, and the theoretical work it entails, until the final chapter of this book. In the following sections, I will consider the

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more common and influential ways in which modernity is thought among contemporary critics. Articulating Hybrid Modernities At least in part, the “modern” is an imaginary construct, and therefore, in some sense (although perhaps not for the reasons he argues), Latour (1993) is right that “No one has ever been modern.” While there are many different ways of defining the modern, and many ways of distributing and organizing such definitions as well, I want to begin by considering (or perhaps constructing) one description of the common sense of the West around modernity. On this view, modernity is an articulation of some variety of different elements, a multiplicity of institutional structures, cultural logics, and social experiences. The “modern” is the product of over four centuries of negotiation, struggle, and war, established through a series (both synchronic and diachronic) of compromises, forged on top of the resistance, and the blood, sweat, and lives of those who opposed it in the name of tradition, daily life, freedom, or alternative visions of society and futurity. The commonsense description of modernity can take different forms or emphases. Many of them seem to make one causal feature or descriptive dimension essential, while others recognize a plurality of features and conditions.9 Some authors emphasize particular macro-institutional structures, each assumed to be inherently distinguishable from its corresponding feature in traditional social orders. Each is generally assumed to have a certain “relative autonomy,” or at least its own proper identity.10 Such institutional identifications may be (and most commonly are) economic—capitalism or industrialization—but they are often also political—nation-states, civil society, and ideological politics—or cultural—professional institutions of knowledge production, and the production of mass culture. Other authors see modernity less in institutional terms and more in processual terms or as the realization of one or more social logics: commodification, democratization, individualism (new kinds of subjectivity), difference (as in various border productions, identity productions, or the division of public and private spaces, traditional and modern times), bureaucratization, secularism, cosmopolitanism, urbanization, etc. Still, these logics are generally in the socio-institutional spaces of the nation-state. Here I would include Giddens’s (1991) important work on time-space distanciation, which

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he asserts affects the very nature of institutions (making them more disembedded and self-reflexive) and experience, as well as some interpretations of Foucauldean arguments that modernity is defined by the introduction of new types of rationality/power, such as biopolitics or the camp (Agamben 1998; 2005). There is a common “picture” of modernity at work here. Modernity produces new modalities and machineries of politics, moving from absolute power to democracy, making politics the struggle to produce consensus (agreement) through ideology. In democracy, people function as demos (rather than ethnos), as constitutive and legitimating, producing a different mode of belonging to a general will. The state becomes moral and educative, controlling knowledge and truth and eventually education (in the form of a civic religion). And, finally, politics is identified with the public (as opposed to the private, which is now defined as unregulated economics, religion, and family) aspect of social space. Modernity produces new techniques and loci of sociality; social relations are reorganized around particular versions of family, gender, generation, sexual life, etc. Such relations are incorporated into an equally profound logic, a difference machine, producing particular structures of negativity or negation. Modernity imposes differences on top of multiplicity (fundamentally starting as it were with the distinction between the traditional and the modern or the primitive and the civilized), then extending to cover the entirety of social life (especially constituting new logics of identity and identification). Modernity produces particular modes of individuation and subjectivation “by which . . . human beings are made subjects . . . subject to someone else’s control and dependence and tied to his own identity by a conscience and self-knowledge” (Foucault 1982, 212). These new individuals are assumed to exist prior to collectivities, and therefore they are commonly taken to be the true objects and agents of history (although some positions simply turn the difference on its head, making collectivities prior and the agents of history). But generally, individuals, defined primarily by social identities, are taken as the locus of both sovereignty and agency. Or to put it differently, a system of identities and differences (negations) becomes the means by which agency is constituted in history. In this sense, modernity entails the (re)invention of the individual and of the relationship of the individual as agent to the forces that produce reality. Viewed from a darker, more Weberian and Foucauldean side, modernity involves new technologies for the control of the conduct of individuals and populations through governmentality. 78  Chapter Two

Modernity also exhibits new ways of producing and distributing economic resources, value, and wealth, through the growth of specifically capitalist versions of market and commodity economies and new modes of the appropriation of surplus value through technological, industrial, and eventually consumerist and neoliberal redefinitions of labor as value production. Finally, modernity produces new cultural formations, including the proliferation of cultural literacy, expression, and agency, the differentiation between high and popular, or mass, culture, the fragmentation and compartmentalization of the social totality, the new authority of secular knowledge (reason) over tradition and religion, the new sense of possibility, and the desirability of change and experimentation, combined with a new faith in science, technology, and progress. Bryan Turner (cited in Kahn 2001, 459) offers a nice statement of what I have described and he calls the “HegelMarx-Weber” heritage: the “process of modernization, by which the social world comes under the domination of asceticism, secularization, the universalistic claims of instrumental rationality, the differentiation of the various spheres of the life-world, the bureaucratization of economic, political and military practices, and the growing monetarization of values.” Even more clearly, Stuart Hall (1996, 3),11 in one of the most developed interpretations of modernity within cultural studies, proposes to analyze the passage to modernity in terms of a theoretical model based on the interaction of a number of “deeply structured processes of change taking place over long periods.” . . . It does not collapse these into a single process (e.g., “modernization”), but treats them as different processes, working according to different historical time-scales, whose interaction led to variable and contingent outcomes. As Held observes, “the stress is on processes, factors and causal patterns . . . there is no mono-causal explanation—no single phenomenon or set of phenomena—which fully explains [their] rise . . . It is in a combination of factors that the beginnings of an explanation . . . can be found.”

The transition to modernity is explained only by the interaction among political, economic, social, and cultural processes. “Modernity, then, was the outcome, not of a single process, but of the condensation of a number of different processes and histories” (7). Nevertheless, each process has its own effects, giving rise to features that, “taken together,” constitute modernity. Modernity emerges from multiple interacting processes that give rise to a specific social formation. There is no one universal logic of development, Constructing the Conjuncture  79

and no one homogeneous outcome. Hence, modern societies can and do look very different, because there is no necessary configuration of the constituents. Thus, Perry Anderson (cited in Hall 1996a, 13) suggests that the “ ‘original association in Western Europe’ . . . [of the] different, interdependent ‘organizational clusters’—the polity, the economy, the social, and the cultural . . . ‘was fortuitous.’ ” However, as I shall argue shortly, Anderson— and such models more generally—gets the argument backward, for the contingent association of the elements presupposes the prior act of separation by which each of these “clusters”—the polity, the economy, etc.—is produced as a separate domain. It is this fragmentation and reification that then calls for their subsequent articulation, and which therefore makes the reality of any totality problematic. This common description of modernity as a constructed social formation usually translates into a notion of hybrid or alternative modernities (and commonly reiterated in arguments for glocalism or lobalism), where different modernities are seen as variations on a theme. If modernity is comprised of many different pieces and formations, the answer to the second question appears somewhat obvious, since it is the result of the constant rearticulation of hybridities. Nevertheless, the result is that, usually, the “meaning” of modernity—within which the possibilities of fragmentation and reconstruction are located—is either underspecified or explicitly identified as European. Modernity is by default identified with its supposed European origins and the particular fragments and themes that define it as an essentially Western phenomenon (see, e.g., Giddens 1991; C. Taylor 2004). The concept of hybrid or alternative modernities gives us a tool to think about the ways the various and changing efforts to create “modernity ” shape the course of history and social change. S. N. Eisenstadt is one of the most visible proponents of an alternative modernities position, although he calls it “multiple modernities.” He argues that “the best way to understand the contemporary world—indeed to explain the history of modernity—is to see it as a story of continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural [and institutional and structural; for Eisenstadt, all are necessary to constitute modernities] programs” (2003, 536). Thus, “ Western patterns are not the only ‘authentic’ modernities, though they enjoy historical precedence and continue to be a basic reference point for others” (536). The “continuous selection, reinterpretation and reformulation of such themes, [gives] rise to a continuous crystallization of new cultural and political programs of modernity, and the development and reconstruction of new insti80  Chapter Two

tutional patterns” (526). This selection and reinterpretation is “shaped by the historical experience of these societies in civilization and by the mode of impingement of modernity on them, and of their incorporation into the modern political economic and ideological international frameworks” (528). Eisenstadt emphasizes the complexity and even the contradictions within any configuration of modernity—between control and autonomy, discipline and freedom, universalism and pluralism. Moreover, that complexity and the changing dynamics of multiple modernities extends to the structures and themes that nevertheless define what Eisenstadt calls a “strong common core.” This core includes, among other things: the conception of human agency and its place in the flow of time; the autonomy of man; “an intensive reflexivity . . . around the basic ontological premises of structures of social and political authority ”; “a distinctive mode of constructing the boundaries of collectivities and collective identities”; and “its potential capacity for continual self-correction” (Eisenstadt 2001, 665; see also Therborn 2003). Stuart Hall (n.d.), in the context of temporality, offers a useful second description of the logic of hybridity: “There is . . . no ‘empty, homogenous (western or global) time.’ There are only ‘the condensations and ellipses, the endless discrepancies and displacements, the syncretisms, mimicries, resistances and translations, which arise when all the different temporalities, while remaining ‘present ’ and ‘real’ in their differential effects, are also over-written—rupturally convened—in relation to, and must mark their differences in terms of, the overdetermining effects of western temporalities, systems of representation and power.” Peter Taylor (1999, 22–25) rejects this understanding of modernity, accusing Hall—and any similar theory of modernity—of ignoring the “danger, at best, of undervaluing the connections, and at worst of missing the overall nature of what it is to be modern. This division into spheres of activity is certainly ‘particular’ to modernity, but such a singularity implies a real possi­ bility that the division is part of the essence of modernity.” It is unclear at first glance why accusing Hall of holding the position he does is a criticism, but this becomes clearer as Taylor makes a distinction between multiple moderns and multiple modernities. The former describes a “sectional plurality” that sees the social formation, and modernity, as the result of “separate and autonomous processes,” while the latter assumes modernity is “a coherent combination of social processes.” The former supposedly characterizes Hall’s hybrid modernity, which, Taylor claims, agrees with Santos’s (2002) assumption “that modernity and capitalism are two different and autonomous Constructing the Conjuncture  81

historical processes,” suggesting literally a “physical separation.” Yet Hall clearly rejects any notion of autonomy, or of modernity apart from the interactions among the processes, and like Taylor, he clearly thinks that modernity describes a formation and not the processes. While there are, I believe, problems with theories of hybridity, some of which I will discuss later, Taylor’s critique of Hall seems to actually deny the very premise of the plurality of modernities. Taylor is criticizing Hall for refusing to identify modernity with capitalism, which constitutes the essence of any modern social totality. And so, once again, we are back to the economic bottom line (via world systems theory, in this case). Yet, perhaps recognizing the weakness of this reduction, Taylor wants also to claim that modernity and capitalism are each embedded within the other, that each is the condition of possibility for the other. He continues to see European history as a developmental, linear process, which allows him to have his essence (“ordinary modernity ”) and eat it too. But Taylor perhaps rightly points to the problem beneath any such notion of modernity as an articulation of relatively autonomous features: Is there a necessary core or essence? And if not, what is it that brings the different alternatives under the common sign of modernity? Is there a way, as Gilroy (2000) might suggest, to think of modernity as a “changing same” without falling back into the privileging of Europe as the necessary origin and model of modernity? Theories of hybrid or alternative modernities dominate much of postcolonial and globalization theories and analyses. In one of the most eloquent statements, Gaonkar (2001, 1) argues that modernity always “continues to arrive and emerge,” always in “opportunistic fragments,” so that, as he suggests, “modernity is inescapable.” And while he asserts that “modernity is not one but many ” (17), he quickly reveals that he has hybridity in mind: “everywhere . . . the struggle with modernity is old and familiar” (22). In the end, what it means to say that modernity is multiple is that it is increasingly the result of “creative adaptation,” which “cannot escape the legacy of Western discourse of modernity ” (14). This proliferation of hybrid modernities, with no governing center, nevertheless seems to have a structure or limit imposed on it. This perspective “foregrounds that narrow but critical band of variations consisting of site-specific creative adaptations on the axis of convergence” (18) and “explores the elusive and fragmentary band of similarities that surfaced unexpectedly on the axis of divergence” (23). It is always and only variations on a—European? Western? capitalist?—theme.

82  Chapter Two

The alternative modernities model has been seriously challenged. While many of the criticisms simply fall back into (new) versions of essentialism and reductionism, like Taylor’s above, others seem to have more to contribute to moving my own project of defining the problematic of modernity forward. Scott (2004), for example, argues that such a model is responding to an outdated—and decidedly euro-modern—political problematic of agency and revolution. The stories such models tell are always aimed at displacing a story of submission with one of resistance. That is to say, rather than telling a story that responds to the problematic of modernity, the alternative modernities model operates within a problematic that aims to show that the oppressed are not merely the passive victims of their own oppression, but are active subjects able to forge their own realities that respond to their unequal relations of power. This would include, for example, those like Kahn (2001, 659) who would assert that “the ethnographer ’s insistence on the pri­ macy of context, by relativizing and pluralizing modernity, leads us to reject any general and singular understanding of modernity.” Such a view makes alternative modernities into a theory of globalization and the agency of contextually specific social subjects, rather than a theory of the modern. The Ghanaian intellectual Gyekye asks whether the fact that European modernity assimilated elements from non-European sources implies that these sources were modern all along or “bore the tinge of modernity ” (1997, 269). Similarly, Yack (1997) argues that the fact that something (say, democracy or capitalism) is modern does not mean that every instance of the modern must exhibit that phenomenon. That is, identity is not necessity, and the articulation of any element does not necessarily imply the articulation of all the elements commonly associated with modernization. Dirlik offers the most direct critique of alternative modernities, arguing that “questions of homogenization and heterogenization, sameness and difference, assimilation and differentiation, are misleading in many ways” (2000, 76). Thus, “the universalization of Eurocentric practices and values . . . implies merely the dislodging of societies from their historical trajectories before Europe onto new trajectories without any implication of uniformity” (76–77). The confrontation between the non-Atlantic world and European modernity does not necessarily change the former so that it now becomes merely a set of variations on Atlantic themes. Instead, it refracts the already defined directions of change of the non-Atlantic societies so that they become something other than what they might have become if the confrontation

Constructing the Conjuncture  83

had never occurred; but that does not mean that what they become after the encounter with European powers is directly and simply determined by the specificities of or its encounter with euro-modernity. This echoes Takeuchi’s emphasis on the encounters that produce what we might describe as changing trajectories of becoming modern. He argues that modernity happens in encounters—in spatial encounters with the heterogeneous, but also in temporal encounters with the past as not present. For Takeuchi, it is possible that China was on its way to becoming modern, not as a result of its encounter with the spatial other of Europe, but with its own history, as a temporal other. On the other hand, the temporality of euro-centric modernity depends upon the resistance of spatial encounters: “The history of resistance is the history of modernization, and there is no modernization that does not pass through resistance” (2005, 57). And this finally brings the argument full circle: Takeuchi argues that Europe discovers itself (as modern) by becoming itself in its encounters with others. That is, the self-recognition of Europe is only possible in its becoming, its movement, its advancement. This in turn resonates with Wang Hui’s (2003) argument that European modernity, as compared with other modernities, is necessarily developmental and teleological. In this sense, it is perhaps not coincidental that Christianity, capitalism, and secularism (or science) are all necessarily self-expanding, proselytizing, universalizing endeavors, that each always defines itself in overcoming the other, even as they define the core as it were of euro-modernity. Theories of alternative modernities are useful insofar as they argue that any social formation has to be understood as the hybrid product of many articulations. Thus, I want to follow the spirit if not the letter of Hall’s position. Modernity is always being produced by the relations and struggles among any number of projects and interests, by the relations and interests among any number of apparatuses of power, operating across different plateaus and organizations. The modern then is the ongoing struggle to remake the material, discursive, and affective lived geography of the real. Thus, any particular force or effect (capitalism, secularization) can only be understood as located within a specific set of contextual apparatuses working (fighting alongside or against each other) on an already organized field. It is defined by the struggles among a multiplicity of overlapping, interacting, augmenting, hijacking, redirecting, competing, completing, limited, and allied apparatuses, formations, and technologies and their specific contextual and conjunctural configurations. Such elements do not necessarily operate only 84  Chapter Two

on one (autonomous) domain or level, nor do they each have a singular guaranteed effectivity. In its broadest terms, we might think of modernity as a contradictory and multidimensional, ongoing production: of social institutions, ways of life, and structures of experience; of maps of intelligibility, affect, and value; of the relations of state (power), economy (well-being), and culture (intelligibility, mattering, and belonging). Moreover, I think it is necessary, following the often implicit argument of theories of alternative modernities, to assume that the production of modernities, including the unbecoming and becoming of new modernities and the transformation of one modernity into another, is often the outcome of struggles over the basic configurations of a society, along the lines of what Gramsci called organic crises. I propose to understand modernity as an ongoing contestation, as something to be won, not merely in a struggle over interpretations, but in material struggles over power and the very becoming of reality. The alternative, for example, Beck’s (cited in P. Taylor 1999, 26) theory of “the modernization of modernity”—in which the “transition from one modernity to another is created by the ‘normal’ workings of the existing modernity whose ultimate fulfillment is a new society,” and where these workings are “surreptitious, unplanned, unintended, unpolitical”—while seeming to affirm the notion that “many modernities are possible,” actually assumes a kind of essential definition of modernity, thus guaranteeing its simple continuity. Changes in modernity are part of the “natural” sociology of flux and change, which Beck separates from the (apparently unnatural) appeals to crises and struggles. His formula (cited in P. Taylor 1999, 26)— “The desired + the familiar = new modernity ”—guarantees that change (and modernity) is always circumscribed within a very narrow set of possibilities, those that can be desired, that is, imagined in the present. But even recognizing that modernity is a site of struggle is not sufficient, obviously, to ensure that one stops thinking of modernity as either singular or stable. Many theories of hybridity continue to treat modernity as if it had a linear if not progressive or regressive trajectory, as if it were evolving through various stages (from early to late and, eventually, post); such notions cannot help but assume that the dynamics of modernity are somehow internal to itself. On the other hand, hybridity theories that avoid such evolutionary logics tend to cast the history of modernity in a narrative of ruptures, and sometimes even complete contingency, embracing, for example, Cho’s (2000, 57) attempt to envision an alternative modernity “which can be made possible through fractals and postmodern ways of thinking.” Her position is Constructing the Conjuncture  85

not unrelated to Appadurai’s (1990) well-known theory of globalization as constituted by a number of -scapes, Beck, Giddens, and Lash’s (1994) notion of reflexive modernization as a second modernity, Beck’s (1992) description of “the risk society,” and Bauman’s (2000) liquid modernity. Yet important questions still remain: In what way does modernity constitute not only the possibilities but also the limits of hybridity? Does modernity in principle constitute or negate the possibility of radical alterity—not only as an alternative to modernity, but more importantly as radically other formations of modernity? Cultural Logics of (the Failure of ) Modernity Coming from a significantly different direction, Kahn’s (2001) and Lee’s (2006, 358) description of “the global spread of modernity and its mutation into multiple modernities” still leaves euro-modernity as an “inclusive” project at the origin of all possible modernities. But now modernity is “as much a state of mind as a set of objective historical processes” (Kahn, 661). While Kahn rejects the possibility of elaborating “a common core of values inherent to any effort to modernize” (664), he goes on to assume that modernity involves a drive to world-mastery, and explains its hybridization by appealing to symbolic differences and the varying “cultural content organized around the meaning of identity” (664). In this, both argue that modernism, defined at the intersection of rationalization and autonomy, constitutes modernity (Kahn, 661): “Modernity should be seen as a product of contradictory or conflicting cultural processes.” And this points us to a second way in which North Atlantic intellectuals have tried to define the modern, one that draws very different conclusions about the future and possibilities of modernity. Here modernity is understood in terms of—usually a single—new, deep cultural logic that organizes and determines the very possibilities of all other forms of social practice and organization. The key to such theories, which distinguishes them from the cultural dimensions of the models discussed above, is that the cultural logics identified in these positions are often never capable of being fully realized; as a result, modernity is always, to varying degrees, a failed project. Some cultural theories follow on the Kantian and Hegelian foundations of the dominant formations of euro-modernism, explaining modernity from the logics that emerged in the nineteenth century to adjudicate the “discovery” of the necessary distance between consciousness and the world, creating a 86  Chapter Two

logic of mediation—whether transcendental or historical—that creates the possibility of hierarchizing the ways human beings construct their own re­ ality. A well-known example is Jürgen Habermas, for whom, as Kahn (2001, 460) describes it, the modern is “more than a grab bag of social and cultural traits. . . . [It is] a process of social differentiation, on the one hand, and cultural autonomization on the other.” Habermas is the leading advocate of identifying modernity with the Enlightenment, and hence with a project of rationality. Kahn is pointing to the very close connection between notions of rationality and the demands for emancipation and autonomy, of freedom and independence, from any source of limitation, power, and determination. The “human” must establish itself, intellectually, morally, and politically.12 On the other hand, some of the most interesting examples of this “cultural” definition of modernity are often shaped by anti-Kantian and antiHegelian sentiments. Heidegger (1982), for example, understood modernity as the very logic of representation itself (the “world-picture” in its twentiethcentury configuration) that Kantian philosophy helped put into place. Bauman (1991, 5) defines modernity as “a time when order—of the world, of the human habitat, of the human self, and of the connection between all three—is reflected upon.” More precisely, however, Bauman argues that the modern constitutes itself as a demand for order, where “the other of order is not another order: chaos is its only alternative” (4). In the face of chaos, modernity is constantly fragmenting the world in the search for order and manageability. It is constantly fragmenting, dividing, separating, producing the (binary) other, and thus always confronting itself with even more chaos. If modernity sees chaos as pure negativity, it creates itself as a logic of “compulsive negation,” which is “the positivity of modern culture” (9). Facing its own terror of the chaos that is the inevitable product of mixing or hybridity, “the central frame of [the modern] is opposition—more precisely, dichotomy” (14), as a negation in which the second member is nothing but the other of the first. Perhaps the most influential advocate of such a view, especially with some of the political and intellectual positions I will consider in the final chapter, is Bruno Latour, who sees the modern as an impossible attempt to reconcile two logics that are constantly producing and negating each other. On the one hand, and primarily, the modern is about a logic of separation or purification, but on the other hand, the modern is about a logic of translation, mediation, or hybridization. But, Latour (1993, 12) suggests, “the more we for­ bid ourselves to conceive of hybrids, the more possible their interbreeding Constructing the Conjuncture  87

becomes—such is the paradox of the moderns.” Modernity is embodied in what Latour refers to as the modern “Constitution,” which “renders the work of mediation that assembles hybrids, invisible, unthinkable, unrepresentable” (34). While the demand for purity and separation attempts to keep everything apart, in reality it proliferates the very thing it claims to prevent. And therefore it calls for an enormous work to hide not only its own culpability but also the growing presence of that which it despises. The constitutional allegiance to practices of purification results in what Latour (1993) calls the “Great Divide” between nature and culture. This is, for Latour, the fundamental assumption of modernity, the basis of many of its most important institutions and commitments. The “great divide” constructs an absolute (negative) difference and divide between culture and nature, the human and the non-human, and distributes entities accordingly: subjectivity, agency, representation, history, etc., to the human; objectivity, passivity, the represented, etc., to nature. Again, while the many realities of hybridity continuously contradict and transgress the divide, it remains the underlying reality of modernity itself. And as Latour himself observes, the (“internal”) divide between culture and nature reproduces itself everywhere, and is responsible for the (“external”) division between the modern and the non-modern: “the Internal Great Divide accounts for the External Great Divide: we [moderns] are the only ones who differentiate absolutely between Nature and Culture whereas in our eyes all the others—whether they are Chinese or Amerindians, Azande or Barouya—cannot really separate what is knowledge from what is society, what is sign from what is thing, what comes from Nature as it is from what their cultures require” (99). I believe that such cultural theories are vital to the project of thinking through the problem-space of multiple modernities, but they are not sufficient, and often, if taken by themselves, they can be disabling. For, in the end, they can only conclude and constantly reinscribe the inevitable failure of the project of modernity, condemning the present to be read as the detritus of the failed project. While Habermas might blame that failure on our own institutional choices, Derrida, Bauman, and Latour might blame it on the very impossibility/inescapability of the constitutive logic. Thus, they seem to leave us unable to imagine a better trajectory into the future. As Bauman (1991, 10) puts it, “Modernity makes itself possible through setting itself an impossible task.” Modernity is the very setting up of an impossible horizon, which both renders the present always inadequate and the future always impossible. 88  Chapter Two

If Derrida (1998) allows us no way out of the logocentric logic of the modern, Latour denies us any possibility of critique. Although modernity is constituted most fundamentally by the binarism of nature/culture, we cannot really contest this metaphysics; we can only “study in detail the work of production of hybrids and the work of elimination of these same hybrids” (Latour 1993, 46), and thus are left with a kind of hyper-empirical ethnography/sociology of criticism itself. Precisely because Latour reduces modernity to the product of a singular machine or technology, the modern constitution, there is no way out of the very logic he detests, for he describes as non-modern “anyone who takes simultaneously into account the moderns’ Constitution and the population of hybrids that the Constitution rejects and allows to proliferate” (47). So the Latourian is the non-modern who, reproducing the separation of the modern and non-modern, can only succeed in producing her own hybridity. Which is to say, ironically, Latour’s theory ends up having to acknowledge—and make a virtue out of the failure—that it cannot escape the very binary logic that it argues is constitutive of modernity. The only way to escape the separation of nature/culture is to document the endless production of the binarism of purification and hybridity. What Latour cannot acknowledge is the possibility of other logics of difference. The only way out of this dilemma is to recognize that the given is not a purity that produces hybridities, but a universe of hybridities which is opposed by specific euro-modern technologies of power that produce negation and separation. In the end, Latour’s theory, like other “cultural theories” of modernity, reduces modernity to a singular epistemological logic, often a single binarism (nature/culture, e.g.) that is claimed to be foundational. It reduces complexity to simple singularity, and reduces the concrete to a conceptual abstraction. The modern as real is produced by the direct actualization of a singular and single vector. All other relations that are constitutive of euromodernity disappear; this seems to suggest that without the modern constitution, we are left with a reality that resembles a kind of Deleuzean flat ontology rather than the complex historical ontology of the actual. Rather than offering an account of the multiplicity of vectors producing the complexity of actual modernities and struggles, it erases the possibility of popular and institutional politics in favor of a purely conceptual critique of a supposedly universal epistemology, which is, of course, always doomed to fail to realize itself universally. Thus, while Latour’s view (as well as other cultural theories) offer some crucial insights to help think the possibility Constructing the Conjuncture  89

that the modern is never one, and therefore to arrive at a workable theory of multiple modernities, I do not believe such a view can arise directly from within such a framework. Rethinking Modernity and the Labor of Cultural Studies As valuable as the work of theories of alternative modernities is, by making every modernity into variations on a theme, such theories transform the historical fact that modernity—or at least the dominant forms of modernity— originated in Europe into a logical necessity; they render the question of whether there can be other origins of modernity, and other forms of modernity, impossible. In fact, they do not problematize the modern, in Foucault’s (1988, 257) sense: “Problematization doesn’t mean representation of a preexisting object, nor the creation by discourse of an object that doesn’t exist. It is the totality of discursive or nondiscursive practices that introduces something into the play of true and false, and constitutes it as an object for thought (whether in the form of moral reflection, scientific knowledge, political analysis, etc.).” Theories of alternative modernities actually take “the modern” for granted, and more importantly, they take this understanding of the modern as the limit on the possibilities of other modernities. One can imagine other modernities, but only within the terms of already existing modernity. And, at the same time, it is usually taken as a corollary that one can never escape these limits because there is no outside of modernity. As a result, these theories preclude at the very beginning any sense of radical normative possibilities that might be opened by the very analysis of the present. And, consequently, any normative position, any ethics, must always be endogenous to the considerations of modernity itself. It is also a circular argument: since modernity is singular, there can be no outside; and since there is no outside, you can only critique modernity from inside; and since you can only critique it from inside, the imaginations of other modes of being in the world are always circumscribed by the very modernity from within which one speaks. If we are to think through the problematic of multiple modernities in relation to both an analytics of the present and the normative possibilities of the future, we need a more complex sense of modernity, built in part on the elaboration of the multiplicity of contexts and the complexity of conjunctures in the previous chapter. These theorizations/tools may help us to prise apart the conjuncture enough to understand the multiplicity of struggles 90  Chapter Two

contributing to, and articulated under, the sign of modernity. Further, recognizing the various understandings of contexts also enables us to see that theories of alternative modernity are built upon, and limited by, their understandings of modernity as either milieus (some set of social and material facts), territories (some set of social and material experiences), or a rather simple singular epistemology (posing as ontologies), without attempting to understand the articulations among them. I believe the task of understanding modernity as a (still unspecified) multiplicity of ways of being modern, must be carried out in two ways: conjuncturally and ontologically. An ontology of the modern points to a diagram that is constituted through articulations of stratifying, coding, and territorializing machines: configuration of time and space, logics of otherness or difference, and distributions of forces or lines of becoming. This diagram can be actualized in multiple ways of being modern. By constituting the modern as a set of fundamental relational possibilities, I want to offer different starting points for stories of the coming modernities. An ontology of modernities poses something of a paradoxical challenge: to think modernity from an outside that is already ontologically present inside modernity. But this is only conceivable if one allows for the possibility of a multiplicity of modernities that are not simply variations of euro-modernity, but actual others. For the moment, most of the work of formulating such an ontology of modernity will remain a question in search of answers, to be taken up in the final chapter. Instead, in the next three chapters, I want to explore one dimension of this ontology through more conjunctural work. I am interested in the specific aspect of that ontology, which I have described as a territorialization, and a crucial element of what is taken for granted about the modern in euro-modernities. As I alluded in the discussion above, in euro-modernity the social totality is fractured into a series of domains. These domains—the economy, culture, politics—each stands on its own, apparently disembedded from the totality of social relations. In more contemporary terms, each domain appears to have and operate with a certain autonomy. That is, euromodernity spatializes itself; it operates through a particular “territorializing” logic by which the complex topography of the transversal lines of determination and contestation that define a specific reality are organized into discrete social domains. Each of these domains exist in changing but still paradoxical places and forms of what I call “embedded disembeddedness.” Specific forms of disembeddedness are constructed through forms of Constructing the Conjuncture  91

embeddedness, and in turn, they construct other forms of embeddedness through which their disembeddedness is sustained and dispersed through the formation. At the same time, the setting apart of the domains or levels is itself articulated to and by other formative distinctions of euro-modernity, including not only gender and racial differences, but also constructions of the public and private, individual and social, elite and popular, etc. Although euro-modernity grants to each domain a certain (relative) autonomy, we cannot assume that the forms or degrees of that autonomy are the same across domains, social formations, or conjunctures. So despite its apparent disembeddedness, a domain continues to be embedded within and relationally constituted by the social formation. It is both embedded and disembedded. More, the form of its embeddedness defines it as disembedded. Moreover, while autonomy is constructed, it is not illusory, since it has real effects. That is, claims of disembeddedness are true and yet not true, since any domain is always relationally implicated in the totality.13 The question is: How can something appear to operate (even actually operate) as disembedded as a result of the forms of its embeddedness? How can it be effectively disembedded by its very embeddedness? In other words, how is something relationally produced as autonomous, without thereby giving up its relationality? How can something be produced as self-producing? How can something be regulated in ways that continuously produce it as self-regulating? The attempt to understand a concrete instance of embedded disembeddedness is going to require the very double analytic movement that I described above: moving from disembedded to embedded realities by drawing the lines of connection and relationality in a kind of rhizomatic move; and moving from embedded to disembedded realities by mapping the machines that produce the actual as what it is. These are the questions at the heart of the next chapter—on economies. In fact, each of the next three chapters will address one of these apparently autonomous domains—economy, culture, and politics, respectively. In the chapter on culture, I want to argue about the changing forms of its insertion into and effectivities within (i.e., its embeddedness in) the social formation, and how this in fact challenges some of the very euro-modern theorizations of culture underlying work in cultural studies. In the chapter on politics, I want to address the ways the current conceptual proliferation of forms and sites of power, while challenging the continuing fetishism of the state, ends up merely fragmenting or deconstructing the political. By itself, this is 92  Chapter Two

insufficient to the task of reconceptualizing the conjuncture and reimagining modernities. In each chapter, I want to ask what it means to try to think contextually (discursively, relationally) and conjuncturally. But, in fact, I will be less interested in these chapters in the actual technologies—for example, the changing territorializing machines or practices—by which these domains have been and continue to be produced as disembedded or rendered “autonomous” within euro-modernity, albeit in changing ways. I am more interested in re-embedding them, not by returning them to the virtual per se; rather, I want to suggest that each of these domains can be understood—deterritorialized—as a possible dimension of every practice.14 Each defines a set of transversal vectors or forces that construct the social formation. Crucially, I want to suggest that this offers us another way of doing conjunctural analysis, a way that does not depend on a “Humpty Dumpty” model of conjunctural analysis as reassembling the pieces that euromodernity has fractured in the first place. We can map, on these vectors, the lines of struggles, contradictions, and transformations, as they are articulated to one another, that constitute the problem-space of the conjuncture, the struggle over modernity, and the problematic of multiple modernities. Such vectors will not be straight lines that neatly transect social reality; they will be plot lines, meandering all over the space-times of the conjuncture. And the map of the conjuncture as a problem-space will look more like a spider web than either a jigsaw puzzle or a chaotic rhizome. Any site of struggle, a point of crystallization, a strange attractor, will be constituted by the web itself, by the complex and not guaranteed intersection of any number of such lines of force. This is, hopefully, a mode of conjunctural analysis for a time when periodization and geo-specification are too undecidable; it may offer a way to rethink the totality of a formation as something other than reconstruction of a ghostly haunting or an imaginary unity waiting to be reconstituted. It suggests a notion of a mapping or cartography of the conjunctural space-times that poses totality as a problem of the creative production of an other—emergent—actuality out of a rigorous and yet experimental project of intellectual work. Conclusion: Politics and Knowledge Before turning to these matters, I want to return to my claim that the heart of cultural studies is defined in part by a necessary—strategic and transformative—relation to power. I began this book by suggesting that cultural Constructing the Conjuncture  93

studies links questions about the possibilities for political transformation to an analysis of what is going on. That is, if politics is, in part, the art of the possible, then one has to understand what is happening in order to figure out how to go about changing it: “It seems to me that the dimension of what is to be done can only appear within a field of real forces. . . . If you want to struggle, here are some key points, here some lines of forces, here are some constrictions and blockages. . . . Of course [you need] to know on what field of real forces we need to get our bearings in order to make a tactically effective analysis” (Foucault 2007, 3). Cultural studies seeks to find ways of rethinking imagination itself, of rethinking what it means to analyze a conjuncture in ways that open up the present to other futures, to other “possible” actualities. It attempts to escape the simple utopian projection of realities that have no basis in the realities—both virtual and actual—of the present, in favor of possibilities that can only be imagined through the understanding of the present. Critical work always has two political poles—a negative critique of the dominant in the present and a positive opening up of the present to other possible futures (Striphas 2004). Gramsci distinguished between pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will; Ricoeur between hermeneutics of suspicion and faith, and Sedgwick between a paranoid and a reparative politics.15 Critical work, at its best, works—analytically, theoretically, and imaginatively—in the gap between the failed present and the impossible future, but there is no guarantee, no dialectical logic, which connects the two. When critical work overemphasizes the negativity of the present, reinscribing its pessimism, it leaves the positive—as the imagination of a different future—free-floating, dissociated from any sense of the ways it can be actualized as the emergent,16 as what we might think of as the pre-emergent. That is to say, critical work has to articulate the negativity of the present to the positivity of the future. The imagination of a possible future has to be constructed out of and enabled by the analysis of the present. It is only because the present did not have to be the way it is that the future can be some way other than where it appears to be heading. Thus, for cultural studies, the beginning of all political struggles must be knowledge about where we are, how we got here, and where we are going. Only then can we begin to ask whether there are other possible futures, where we might want to go, and how we might get there. The question of politics is not where we want to be, but how we get from where we are to where we want to be—hopefully in fundamentally democratic ways, which 94  Chapter Two

prevent us from imposing our moral certainties on others and sliding into what Deleuze and Guattari (1977) describe as the micro-fascisms inside all of us. Yet politics is never entirely pragmatic, nor is it ever completely determined by the exigencies of the present, since it depends, deeply and constitutively, on political desires and ethical commitments that are, I believe, at least partly outside the realm of rational, or perhaps even intellectual, adjudication. Strategic questions lean on more basic, normative questions. We live in an age when it is increasingly difficult to distinguish the ethical and the political (which is not to say that it was ever particularly easy). But still, such normative questions cannot be disconnected from the analysis of the present conjuncture, for they are shaped by what it is possible to imagine in the present and how imagination itself is articulated to contemporary realities and desires. What is the place of political values and ethical commitments in scholarly work, especially in the light of the powerful contemporary mandate, even the demand, in contemporary academic and intellectual spaces, to be political (and “politically correct”) at any and every moment? This demand takes its most benign form in the claims of engaged scholarship and activist research, and its most malignant forms in the saturation of all knowledge with political identifications. It is the product of two independent commitments: first, a necessary rejection, embodied in cultural studies and elsewhere, of the claims of epistemological universalism and objectivity; and second, an unfortunate and rather unreflective polarizing practice of critical analysis, which replaces the complexities of Foucault’s (1980) theory of the inseparability of knowledge and power with the simple assumption of a guaranteed relation between explicit political agendas and identities on the one hand, and the forms and contents of knowledge claims on the other. I want to carefully consider what it means to say that cultural studies is inherently political, that it is defined and driven by its politics. It is inherently political because its very effort to study conjunctures and the effectivities of discourses means that it cannot avoid coming face to face with questions of power—and hence, that its efforts, whether consciously embraced or not, will always be engaged with relations of power and because, to put it simply, it does want to change the world. In fact, one cannot choose not to change the world, for that choice is actually a choice to leave unexamined and unchallenged the existing relations of power—certainly a political choice. The only choices are how self-consciously one approaches this work, and to what end. So, somewhat inevitably, cultural studies does see itself as intervening Constructing the Conjuncture  95

into the real world of political struggle, but its intervention is defined by its effort to produce knowledge that may help change the world. Insofar as cultural studies seeks to tell better stories aimed at enabling people to imagine other—better—possibilities for the future as well as other—better—strategies to advance the struggle for such possibilities, politics would seem to be unavoidably present in the project of cultural studies. Yet it requires us to hold onto the distinction between doing political work and doing intellectual work, however interwoven they may be. It is a premise of this book, and of cultural studies, that knowledge—ideas and analyses—matter, and that “bad” knowledge—bad ideas, bad stories—often results in bad politics. Cultural studies is about the vital role of knowledge in undoing any claim of necessity, and about seeing, opening, and realizing possibilities: Cultural studies’ message is a message for academics and intellectuals but, fortunately, for many other people as well. In that sense I have tried to hold together in my own intellectual life, on the one hand the conviction and passion and the devotion to objective interpretation, to analysis, to rigorous analysis and understanding, to the passion to find out, and to the production of knowledge that we did not know before. But, on the other hand, I am convinced that no intellectual worth his or her salt and no university that wants to hold up its head in the face of the 21st century, can afford to turn dispassionate eyes away from the problem . . . understand what keeps making the lives we live and the societies we live in, profoundly and deeply antihumane. (Hall 1992b, 17–18; emphasis added)

I have already tried to explain what Hall might mean by “objectivity” here, in terms of both theoretical and empirical work and a certain responsibility to the world that is not simply the product of our discursive or political desires. I am suggesting that we hold together the two sides of Stengers’s view of knowledge. As she says, first we must recognize that “the singularity of scientific arguments is that they involve third parties. Whether they be human or nonhuman is not essential. . . . [The important element is] the intervention and production of these reliable witnesses” (1977, 85). This enables a kind of rigor that can “speak of the world without passing through the Kantian tribunal” (54). At the same time, she writes, it is not the function of knowledge to “ratify . . . a state of affairs but [to] subject . . . it to the corrosive dynamics of what could be” (143). For Hall, cultural studies demands a commitment to the messy complexity of the real world and the labor of intellectual theorizing and analysis, against the propensity to allow 96  Chapter Two

theory or politics to guarantee the conclusions and to avoid the real demands of labor. But it also demands that we ask, with Paul Gilroy (2005, 82), “How awful [can we] allow the world to be?” But this still leaves unanswered the question of the place and content of specific political values and commitments in cultural studies. I want to take an unpopular—but also incomplete—position, one that many of my friends and allies in cultural studies may not share: that it is not our job as analysts of the contemporary to offer a normative politics or even morally based political judgments, although it is sometimes unavoidable and perhaps necessary. But it is not my job—as a critical scholar—to tell people what they should be or should desire. There has to be a difference between scholarship (telling a better story)—analyzing particular formations and mechanisms of power and subjecting them to the challenge of contingency and possibility—and the statement of political values and enactment of political action, where the latter refers, rather naively for the moment, to collective action aiming to transform the institutions and operations of power and the political. After all, ideas cannot be directly equated to political action, and academic work operates with a different spatio-temporality than political action. At the very least, if everything is political, not all things are political in the same way. The politics of cultural studies are located in the first and the last instances. In the first instance, it is political in relation to the questions it asks. While conjunctures pose their own questions, what we hear is partly determined by our political positionalities. In the last instance, its politics appears at the end of its story, which fabricates the context anew and, in addressing its problematic, opens new possibilities, both imaginative and strategic, for getting somewhere else. But conjunctural analysis does not have a single, guaranteed ethico-political foundation, nor can the political implications of its analyses be guaranteed in advance. At the very least, one cannot control how the stories one tells will be taken up in the name of political struggles. In the contemporary conjuncture, we need to rethink the grounds and claims of academic authority, responsibility, and credibility. Between the first and last instance, in the analytic work of constructing a better story of what is going on, authority is constructed and increasingly lost, responsibility is taken and increasingly abandoned. Unfortunately, I do not have a simple answer for how this is to be done. I am not suggesting we return to notions of value-free knowledge, or objectivity, or correspondence theories of truth. But the all-too-common unreflective politicization of knowledge, enacted by empowering moral judgments and political desires as conceptual tools Constructing the Conjuncture  97

or analytic conclusions, only substitutes moral self-righteousness for the difficult and risky work of allowing oneself to be surprised. Some people argue that knowledge is directly political because discourse itself is constructive or performative. Are we not then obliged to construct reality—and produce knowledge—according to a set of ethico-political commitments? But such a conclusion oversimplifies the complex relations of multiple discourses and nondiscursive realities, and ignores the many kinds of performances discourses enact as part of the very realities they help to constitute. However, I am not claiming that there is a clear or simple distinction between intellectual and political work (as might, e.g., Stanley Fish). As I have said, the questions from which we begin respond to political demands, even as we seek answers that may open up new political possibilities. Obviously, the work that takes place between these political demands and desires is shaped by this trajectory, but I believe it is necessary to push against the sometimes overwhelming force of such political concerns and to remain committed to telling the best story possible. Politics too often seems to pull analyses in directions it has determined, creating a neurotic sense of in­ adequacy in which we assume that if we could just be political enough, in just the right way, we could guarantee the political register and efficacy of our analysis. Instead, we need to accept there is no right story, no perfect story, and no complete or finished story. We need to be more modest about what we think we know or understand, and about what we are competent to investigate or claim (and political commitment or judgment does not constitute competence). Similarly, practice (or process) does not guarantee either the “truth” of a story or the validity of a political position. The conflation of ontology with conjunctural politics is simply the most recent way politics trumps intellectual labor. An ontology of becoming does not guarantee the elimination of politics. By identifying a set of analytical concepts—contingency, multiplicity, fluidity, intensities, etc.—with political values, such concepts morph from tools to think with, to what look like viable political possibilities. But I doubt that anyone chooses to die for fluidity or multiplicity, although many have been killed for enacting them. The project of cultural studies is not exhausted by the scholarly work of telling a better story. One cannot hope to change the world based only on a better story. It requires as well engagements in the realm of the public intellect, forms of the performance and sharing of knowledge as a political act, and forms of concrete political and institutional work. And while there 98  Chapter Two

are multiple ways of articulating (or not) scholarship in the public arenas of political struggle and citizenship, they depend upon contextually effective performances of authority, the possibility of open intellectual debates, and a certain modesty on the part of academics. The authority of knowledge cannot and should not be presented as directly based on or translatable into moral authority or political privilege. Winning people to specific moral values and political visions is a different task than persuading them about the value of the story I am telling, and it demands that we understand and begin where people are, that we work on and with the popular. And this in turn suggests that we give up the all-too-common privilege that we assign to our own ethical and political positions. If the relationship between knowledge (research) and politics is itself contextual, we need to find or invent modes of knowledge production that will be effective in responding to contemporary problem-spaces and struggles. Obviously, insofar as the questions we ask are shaped by our political values and desires, insofar as we are continuously using not only such values and desires but also our own analyses to offer criticisms of the existing organizations of power, insofar as politics is interwoven into our stories, and insofar as politics is pushing us forward, politics is at the heart of cultural studies. But its soul must be its faith in “knowledge,” ideas, and better stories. I am not denying that intellectuals, as engaged citizens, should speak ethi­ cally and politically, and that they should bring to such efforts the benefits of their scholarly labors. Yet I am trying to suggest that precisely because our work is driven by such judgments, we must not allow them to determine the form or conclusions of our academic labors. Our researches should not be reduced to the reiteration of such judgments. I do not intend to offer a universal theory of the “proper” relation of ethics, politics, and intellectual labor beyond the recognition that they can never be entirely separated nor should they ever be totally identified. The task is itself a conjunctural one— to identify the most effective, conjuncturally specific, articulations. And in the present context, such matters and the articulations we offer, have to be measured in part as a response to a set of crises around the very authority of “knowledge,” crises that themselves are partly the result of the increasing polarization of moral and political positions in the conjuncture. I am aware that I am still deferring the question of concrete political commitments in cultural studies. Of course, since I do not think that cultural studies has any necessary politics—that there can be and in fact is conservatively inflected cultural studies—I do not think there is any necessary answer Constructing the Conjuncture  99

to this question. I refuse to believe that it is possible to define one proper relation to power or one set of political commitments. However, perhaps it will help if I say something about my commitments. I have already suggested that I think the political responsibility of the intellectual is defined, first, by the effort to denaturalize the present and open up the future. In other words, the political intellectual is above all committed to the reality of change itself. I also believe, however, that one’s political desires and sense of obligations cannot be entirely bracketed, even if they have to be held at bay. I do believe that we have an obligation to leave the world a better place, and I believe that requires us to try to enable others—everyone—to be able to fulfill that obligation as well. This second condition provides some content to what constitutes “better,” since it requires us to seek a world in which all people have the material conditions of survival, the political conditions of freedom and justice, and the intellectual conditions of education and expression, as the basis for such a task.17 But I also believe in what I might call the ethical responsibility of the intellectual,18 grounded in a commitment to the intellectual conversation as a necessarily never-ending effort to belong with the other. While my intellectual commitment is to the conversation, my ethical commitment is to the other, to the belonging together with the other (as what both Heidegger and Foucault in very different ways call “care”). That is, my own ethical sense is constituted as an obligation to an other, which cannot be too close (family, nation) or too far (god). Rather, the other is what can only be imagined—as a coming community, as a planetary humanity, or even as “the earth”—in its “absence,” while its presence can only be embraced in its concrete embodiment in every particular instance (in every individual or community). We engage with power for the sake of the other, an other that is always unknown but knowable, always abstract and yet concretized. This is the obligation to imagine an other world, and to an imagination that can only be produced through the concrete effort to bring it about, to embody it in the concrete practice of relationship as belonging together. It is there that ethics and politics, practice and desire, meet. And that, for me at least, is the driving force of cultural studies.

100  Chapter Two

three Considering Value: Rescuing Economies from Economists In this chapter, I want to continue my effort to develop a different conjunctural analysis in the problem space of multiple modernities. But I also want to contribute to an ongoing and collective project aiming to enable those of us working from a variety of critical and cultural perspectives to take on and take up economic questions without falling back into forms of reductionism and essentialism. Accomplishing this is not a matter of either inventing a new economic theory, one that would leave the economy in place as a selfsufficient system, or of reducing economies to systems of signification, representation, or discourse. (I do not think there is such a thing as a singular totalizing economy; rather, the economy is always an articulation of various economies, and economic apparatuses, if you will,1 but that does not deny the effectivity of the discursive construction of something that is thought of as “the economy.”) Nor is it necessarily a matter of claiming a new expertise in matters of economic policy. The point of such work, at least in my argument, is to produce better conjunctural stories: to better understand “economic” events, practices, relations, etc., by contextualizing them, and to better understand the context by inscribing economies into it. Since this effort is, in my opinion, a fundamental and absolutely crucial challenge facing cultural studies, I will consider the various labors that are required to accomplish this task. I will begin by briefly considering the emergent field of “cultural economy,” which has tried to bring the “cultural turn” to bear on economics. Despite its important advances and contributions, I want to suggest that it is characterized by a certain institutionalized “timidity.” Then, I will turn to a consideration of the task of a cultural

studies of economies, acknowledging, and sometimes developing, its links to the work, among others, of David Ruccio (2008a), Bob Jessop (Jessop and Oosterkynck 2008), Roger Lee (2006), J. K. Gibson-Graham (1996), Tim Mitchell (1998; 2005), Doreen Massey (1995), Paul du Gay (du Gay and Pryke 2002), and, more implicitly, that of other colleagues in cultural studies, including John Clarke (2007; 2009), Angela McRobbie (1998), Women’s Studies Group (1978), Randy Martin (2007),2 Arturo Escobar (2005), and many others. I will argue that the project of cultural studies, and my own commitment to unraveling, (re)describing, and reconstituting the contemporary conjuncture, entails a three-pronged investigation or problematization: (1) It requires us to see the complexity and multiplicity of economies, rather than reducing the field to a singular “the economy,” which is in turn often identified with a singular notion of capitalism. We must look at the complexity of economic apparatuses and the relations among them. (2) It demands that we take seriously the discursive production of “the economic” and “the economy.” Recognizing that economies are partly discursive, we will need to consider the ubiquity of economic discourses (building on the important work of David Ruccio [2008b], Evan Watkins [1998], and others), including the heterogeneity of the academic discipline of economics and a brief discussion of the gaps where culture appears in the discourses of economics. It is in the context of such considerations that I want to raise my second fundamental concern in this chapter—namely, to raise questions about the practice of interdisciplinarity in the contemporary academy, for this is not only a fundamental practice of cultural studies, it is one of the places where the current laziness of intellectual work (perhaps an accommodation to the resurgent claims of disciplinarity) has its most profound consequences. (3) The project of a cultural studies of economies entails finding ways of studying the contextual construction and specification of economies and the economic. We have to understand the economies as completely integrated into the social totality even as we recognize their distinctive mode of existence as standing somehow apart from that totality. This entails finding ways to understand that mode of existence as a contextually determined one, so that one studies the contextually constituted effectivities of the economic as a contextually determined set of material-discursive apparatuses. It entails seeing economies as apparatuses (articulations or assemblages of discursive and nondiscursive practices) and as the product of other apparatuses. It en102  Chapter Three

tails analyzing the multiple apparatuses of and in (economic) life, which have changing—overlapping, contradictory, supporting—relations to each other. And there is no guarantee that the basic “building blocks” of “economic” relations—such as value or commodities—remain constant across apparatuses or contexts. I will draw upon the groundbreaking work of people like Polanyi (2001) and Braudel (1977)—and later, Simmel (1991)—who argue, in different ways, that in (euro-)modernity, the economy—capitalism—was disembedded from the social totality. But, too often, scholars using this argument ignore Polanyi’s, Braudel’s, and Simmel’s accounts of the work it took—and takes—to disembed the economy, as it were—that is, the embeddedness of its disembeddedness.3 The point is not to deny the reality and effectiveness of a particular disembedded existence, as if its contingency could be turned against its very reality, to return it to an embeddedness. It is not merely ideological, if one means by that, following some interpreters of Marx, false consciousness or an epiphenomenon. Conjunctural analysis demands that we see the specificity of the disembedding as produced, and that we describe the mechanisms or technologies by which it is produced. Only in the double movement that both re-embeds it and challenges the mechanisms can we see the other possibilities that are always and already there in reality. I have to admit that my efforts to think economics conjuncturally will remain largely speculative, and my discussion will focus on the theoretical labor that seeks the foundations for such analyses, that seeks to (co-)invent a set of theoretical concepts, operations, and logics. Finally, my third concern in this chapter is to begin to think about the specificity of the place and operation of economies in the contemporary conjuncture. There are, again, two possible paths to follow here. The first, the path I shall not follow, continues the modernist ontology of the social formation, which divides the totality into domains, to offer a concrete contextual and discursive analysis of the complexity of the economy(-ies) as a domain. Such an analysis would start by examining the construction of some thing(s)—admittedly a complex and contradictory thing (but then what isn’t?)—from a set of apparatuses comprised of many different sorts of activities, relations, and technologies—called the economy. But it would also have to interrogate the particular forms of its insertion into and its functioning within—both determined and determining, both enabled and enabling—the conjuncture.4 In other words, such researches would attempt to reconstruct (and to a certain extent, deconstruct) the embedded Considering Value  103

disembededness of the economy(-ies) by drawing the lines of relationality that constitute the conjuncture. The second path, the path I choose to follow here, begins by seeking the possibilities for thinking outside the contemporary modernist forms of economic discourses and privilege. I want to approach the question of a conjunctural economics by refusing the euro-modern territorialization of economies, and instead, finding the economic lines of force as they traverse and articulate the conjuncture. By choosing this second path, I do not mean to deny the importance of the first route: I do not mean to suggest that one can simply deny or ignore the reality of the constitution of the economy in euro-modern social formations, or that one should not analyze and intervene into it. I approach this task by offering some considerations on the problem of value.5 Acknowledging the complex nature of economic value in relation to even more complex systems of value, we can recognize that the production of value is not really what is at issue in the contemporary conjuncture, where claims and fears about the reduction of all value to economic value abound. What is at stake in such discourses is the worth of value, the problematic of measuring or comparing value, of the translatability or commensurability of values. It is this question of commensurability, I think, that defines both the force or—to use Le Doeuff ’s concept—the “faire” of the economic, and a line of instability and struggle that partially constitutes the larger conjunctural struggles over modernities. That is, among other dimensions, we are living on a meandering but by no means accidental line defined by the connections among scattered crises of commensuration. I present only some small suggestions seeking to find the question(s) we must ask, to find the direction(s) and trajectories we must follow and traverse, and to identify some of the kinds of work that we must undertake. My own engagement with questions of economics is long-standing, and in many ways reproduces an even longer-standing debate between cultural studies and (certain forms of marxist) political economy. Political economists have argued that cultural studies has basically ignored questions of economics, while cultural studies has argued that it was not rejecting the importance of economic questions per se but simply the way some traditions of political economy answered the questions: on the one hand, by oversimplifying the economy and its modes of construction and operation, and on the other, by assuming that, in the end, the economy necessarily explained everything about society. That is, cultural studies argued against 104  Chapter Three

any and all forms of economic and class reductionism. It simply refused to believe that the economy could define the bottom line of every account of social realities. My own position in these debates was often to reiterate and agree with both sides. On the one hand, I agree with Stuart Hall’s (1996b, 258) statement: “What has resulted from the abandonment of this deterministic economism has been, not alternative ways of thinking questions about the economic relations and their effects, as the ‘conditions of existence’ of other practices, inserting them in a ‘decentered’ or dislocated way into our explanatory models, but instead, a massive gigantic and eloquent disavowal.” That is, cultural studies does need to take questions of economics more seriously, especially because of the specific realities, relations, and forces of the contemporary conjuncture. But on the other hand, cultural studies has to find another way of taking economies seriously, of incorporating economic questions into its analysis, which would not reproduce the reductionism of many forms of political economy. At the same time, I have tried, in my own efforts to diagnose the contemporary conjuncture, to acknowledge and incorporate economic relations, etc., into my work, even as I tried to understand what specifically was important about them and what they were doing in the context. But I think that I have done it . . . poorly, although I do believe that I have often done it not as poorly as many of my colleagues in the human sciences, keeping in mind, as Ruccio (2008b) has argued, that there is more written about matters of economics by those in disciplines other than economics than by those in the discipline. Without significant work, I fear that Nigel Thrift’s (1991, 457) assessment of the efforts of cultural theorists and critics to take account of the economic will continue to be justified: he suggests that they often offer “highly dubious speculations about the changing character of the modern world” and that “the subtlety of disquisition on culture is often in inverse proportion to the crudity of economic and social analysis.” This is the core of the dilemma of interdisciplinarity in the contemporary academy in general, and in the name of cultural studies more specifically. Much of contemporary cultural writing on economics is often rather un-self-reflective, as Ruccio (2008b, 893) explains: “The use of figures of exchange (and circulation, distribution, and so on) as the primary means by which the economy of texts is rendered often ends up supporting the neo-classical ‘subjectivist’ view of economic value.” But we can go further. The truth of the matter is that, quite often, such analyses are based on very Considering Value  105

limited reading in economics. More often than not, cultural and social critics read more accessible, and even more importantly, more agreeable writings on the economy. We read those texts, usually what is au courant, based on our prior theoretical and political commitments. That is, we read those authors, works, and positions on the economy that we already know we are likely to agree with (e.g., David Harvey [1989]; the regulation school [Aglietta (1976), Lipietz (1987)]; Castells [2000]; Hardt and Negri [2000]; Samir Amin [1997]; Amartya Sen [2000]; Lazzarato [1996])! 6 We do not research the alternatives, so we do not know the significance of the choices we are making (out of the whole field of possible positions, explanations, etc.), and we do not consider whether the weight of the world, so to speak, bears witness to the utility or truth of this theory. We simply adopt readymade categories and descriptions, so that, at best, we are caught in ongoing undecidable debates about whether we are living in late capitalism, or postFordism, or neoliberalism, or network capitalism, or the knowledge economy, etc. Of course, such lazy behavior can often result from the best of intentions: “Such formulations [the use of figures of exchange] are also guided by the search for an alternative economic system and an ‘anti-economics,’ the attempt to carve out a space not governed by what is considered to be the strict economic logic of capitalist exchange and of the economic theories that celebrate such a system” (Ruccio 2008b, 893). But intentions cannot rescue the work we produce from the hinterlands of useless knowledge. This laziness is also a manifestation of the increasing tendency to tame interdisciplinarity by incorporating it into and delimiting it within the disciplines. Rather than taking on other disciplines, we grab onto a body of literatures and paradigms that have become transdisciplinary, so that they appear to liberate people from disciplinary canons to some extent. Often, we claim that economics is too technical, just as economists claim that our writings are too technical. We do not seek out the openings. Instead, it is more likely that we isolate subsets of economic practices to talk about—usually those with some immediate relation to culture, which we articulate to broader economic and social changes only when it is convenient and only in the most abstract ways. We talk about discourses of economics as a kind of “ghostly presence” of ideology, and, without thinking about it, much of the time, we conflate discourse and practice, intention and effect (as in much of the writing on neoliberalism), which seems to often assume that freemarket ideology guarantees free markets or even policies unambiguously committed to free markets, whether understood in terms of competition 106  Chapter Three

(viz., Hayek 1994) or regulation (viz., Friedman 1962). Thus, we tend to believe or take at face values “their” stories, and then assume that our task is to show their negative effects, in the end assuming and reenacting the claim that there really is a neoliberal order. The apparent inability or unwillingness to criticize economics as useful knowledge from anything but a radically external position produces an extreme disconnection between sociocultural criticism and the world of economics. Too often, the criticism of academic economics is founded on an imaginary summation, which is really a relative ignorance, of economics; in addition, the point from which such criticisms are offered is often not a theorized analysis of real economic complexities, but an imagined position of radical opposition, in which the only possible politics is defined by the moral project of overthrowing capitalism. Or, alternatively, the assumption seems to be that simply denaturalizing (or sociologizing) particular manifestations of the economy inevitably undermines at least some of the authority of mainstream economic discourses. I doubt that this is true in any significant way, but, more importantly, such work has given up the effort to find better ways to reconstruct economic descriptions and theories, ways that would allow us to talk about the economic and economies in non-reductionist and conjuncturally specific ways. The irony of so much of what is written these days, what is particularly disconcerting about so much of this intellectual production, is how easily and quickly people have slipped back into forms of economic reduction, how easy it is for scholars to just slot in the economy as if it were unproblematically the answer in the last instance, ignoring fifty years devoted to fighting against such strategies. Admittedly, as Gramsci (1971, 336) recognized, there may be contextual reasons for this: “When you don’t have the initiative in the struggle, and the struggle itself becomes identified with a series of defeats, mechanical determinism becomes a tremendous force of moral resistance.” The timidity of cultural studies in the face of academic economics contrasts sharply with the “chutzpah” with which cultural studies and other intellectual formations have taken on other disciplines, including literary studies, communication, anthropology, and sociology. Perhaps one might say: but these disciplines were in “crisis,” the result of various conjunctural developments, some internal to the disciplines, some to the academy and the broader culture, and still others the result of various political, economic, and social developments. Assuming this to be true, any fair assessment of Considering Value  107

economics as a discipline and a field of knowledge production would conclude that it too is in crisis, similarly the result of various heterogeneous developments. Although a more careful study of the discipline would reveal, I am confident, a long history of heterogeneity and crises. I want to recall here something that happened at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies early in its (brief) history: The chairman of the sociology department at the university, having heard some details of what was going on “over there” in that Quonset hut at the edges of campus, wrote a letter (to the student newspaper), stating, for the public record, as it were, that what the Centre was doing had nothing whatsoever to do with sociology, and that those people involved with the Centre had no legitimate claim to speak, use, or teach sociological discourses. Of course, at that early stage, I am not sure that anyone at the Centre understood the challenge well enough to have responded. They (we) were certainly reading widely in sociology and social theory, and debating the strengths and weaknesses of such work. But I know what the answer to that letter would be in retrospect, in part because Stuart Hall (1990, 16) wrote what could have been the response, in a different context, describing the rigorous sense of interdisciplinarity and, in some ways, antidisciplinarity, of the Centre: What we discovered was that serious interdisciplinary work does not mean that one puts up the interdisciplinary flag and then has a kind of coalition of colleagues from different departments, each of whom brings his or her own specialization to a kind of academic smorgasbord from which students can sample each of these riches in turn. Serious interdisciplinary work involves the intellectual risk of saying to professional sociologists that what they say sociology is, is not what it is. We had to teach what we thought a kind of sociology that would be of service to people studying culture would be, something we could not get from self-designated sociologists. It was never a question of which disciplines would contribute to the development of this field, but of how one could decenter or destabilize a series of interdisciplinary fields. We had to respect and engage with the paradigms and traditions of knowledge and of empirical and concrete work in each of these disciplinary areas in order to construct what we called cultural studies.

The question is, then, what does it mean to take, how does one go about taking, economics and economies seriously in the conjunctural analysis of cultural studies? How does cultural studies do economics? Or better, how does cultural studies incorporate economies and economics into its con108  Chapter Three

junctural analysis? I am not suggesting that we can “win” the discipline of economics, anymore than I think cultural studies has conquered sociology or literary studies (or media studies for that matter). This is not a fantasy about hijacking the discipline, or even of creating another singular “true” economic theory or diagnosis. But there is serious work to be done to create, in alliance with others, other possibilities for thinking about economic effectivities and the realities of economic activities, apparatuses, and assemblages. Without such work, I fear that the work that is produced will have limited capacity to help us come up with better understandings of what is going on in the world, to tell better stories, and so, to formulate better strategic politics. Fortunately, this is a collective and collaborative project, which lots of people have been working on for some time, in big and small ways. Such work has to be located within the contemporary context, for, at the very least, we have to agree with Timothy Mitchell’s (1998, 84) insight that “the economy is a concept that seems to resist analysis. It appears to have escaped the kind of critique that now disturbs so many other concepts of modern social theory.” In fact, the discipline of economics is perhaps the only discipline in the human sciences that has not been significantly challenged by, and apparently has not even had to make a space for, the critical and cultural work of the past fifty years. Economics as a discipline is rather unique, and it might be worth considering just how odd its position is. This task is made somewhat more difficult by the simple fact that the sign of “the economic” refers both to the discipline and its object (like “history ”). What other discipline is of such immediate concern to so many people and yet so totally obscure, even dismissive of popular curiosity? What other discipline has become so publicly successful, at least in its visibility and status (e.g., Greenspan as a national icon, or the success of such popular treatises as Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics [2005]), even as it completely ignores the ways everyone else talks about economics? What other discipline is so successful and yet finds it so necessary to police its boundaries, both internally, in terms of competing models and paradigms, and externally, confronting the intellectual world with the kind of paranoia embodied in titles like Economics and Its Enemies (Coleman 2002)?7 What other discipline claims the right to directly shape real policies, while building analytic tools that enable it to operate by abstracting models that are only weakly if at all connected to reality? What other discipline could Considering Value  109

claim to be the only true science in the human sciences, while still clinging to its founding texts (whether Adam Smith or Karl Marx) as if they were sacred, as if quoting Smith on the invisible hand of the market were somehow sufficient.8 What other discipline can claim to be authoritative, even a “science,” and yet have such a bad record? Not only is there so much contradictory evidence and information in the world of economics, but its claims and predictions turn out, so often, to be wrong. It is once again obvious that economic theory simply does not conform to reality. Not even the economic crisis of 2007–? seems to have affected academic economics as much as one might have expected, and discourses of deregulation, free markets, etc., continue to find a relatively secure place (although other discourses, which had little visibility or credibility, have also gained the right to be heard once again) in the public arena. Instead, it is corporate leaders rather than even policy wonks who have taken the biggest hits. (Compare this with the rather sudden and profound marginalization if not exclusion of socialist and neo-Keynesian economics from the public arena following the economic upheavals of the late 1970s.)9 Economists (with the cooperation of journalists and politicians) demonstrate an inordinate ability to forget what they said yesterday (about the deficit, or the implications of the new economy for business cycles, or stagflation, or taxation, etc.).10 And in wonderfully clarifying moments of honesty, they occasionally admit, as Greenspan did numerous times (Grossberg 2005), that they just do not understand what is going on, and yet, they continue to operate as if their theories guaranteed the truth of their policies. What other discipline can claim, on the one hand, that its object, the economy, is, for all practical purposes, autonomous, that it follows its own quasi-natural laws, that it is not determined by anything outside itself (or when it is, it is a kind of perversion), and, on the other hand, that its object explains and determines just about everything else? In the end, I cannot help but believe that the privileged status of the discourses of economics (both as an object and a discipline) is insepara­ble from its apparently dominant place in the conjuncture, not only in the sense of explanation and determination, but also in the sense of being the space within which people make sense of their lives, as I will discuss later. As Bigelow (2005) says: Economics, as channeled by its popular avatars in media and politics, is the cosmology and the theodicy of our contemporary culture. More than reli110  Chapter Three

gion itself, more than literature, more than cable television, it is economics that offers the dominant creation narrative of our society, depicting the relation of each of us to the universe we inhabit, the relation of human beings to God. And the story it tells is a marvelous one. In it an enormous multitude of strangers, all individuals, all striving alone, are nevertheless all bound together in a beautiful and natural pattern of existence: the market.

Cultural Economy There has been, in recent years, something of an explosion of work on the cultural dimensions of the economy, often brought together under the sign of the emerging field of “cultural economy.”11 Du Gay and Pryke (2002, 1) lay out the parameters and the conditions for the opening of “cultural economy”: The set of processes and relations we have come to know as “the economy ” appear no longer as taken for granted as perhaps once they were. Many of the old certainties—both practical and academic—concerning what makes firms hold together or markets work seem less clear-cut and our knowledge of them feels less secure. Yet among these proliferating uncertainties has emerged—or better, re-emerged—a belief that something called “culture” is both somehow critical to understanding what is happening to, as well as to practically intervening in, contemporary economic and organizational life. This “cultural turn” takes many different forms depending on context and preferred projects.

Or again, from a later piece on the cultural economy of finance (Pryke and du Gay 2007, 346): Cultural economy differs from mainstream finance because it does not, for example, assume the rationality at the heart of modern finance as given but deconstructs it to show its making. . . . It differs from political economy that seeks to generalize the effects of finance. Cultural economy displays a more cautious analytic approach.

While I eventually want to challenge this very caution, I must also clarify that the term actually refers to the various ways that different (disciplinary) representatives of the cultural turn have taken up matters of economics, rather than to an actual cultural turn in either economics or political economy. Considering Value  111

Let me begin by outlining the wide range of work gathered together under the sign of cultural economy, along a trajectory that might loosely be described as moving from weak to strong challenges to current economics. First, cultural economy includes work on the economies of culture or the cultural industries, raising questions about culture markets, labor, classes, ownership, production, commodification, consumption, etc. I describe this as the weakest work, not merely because it often takes “culture” as an economic sector for granted and treats it as isolated or autonomous, but because much of the work is built upon fairly traditional economic and political economic concepts, methods, and assumptions. There is, in fact, nothing inherent in the questions asked that necessarily questions taken-for-granted practices of economic analysis. The fact that cultural products produce all sorts of effects—signification, for example—not usually considered by economics, functions as a supplement rather than the basis of a rearticulation. And there is nothing in this line of work that requires the recognition that economic practices are themselves always discursively saturated and contextually constituted, although the best work certainly does take this into account. Second, there is a growing and rich body of work that focuses on what might be called the operation of culture inside economies, on often ignored dimensions and elements of the “ordinary ” economy, including studies of consumer cultures, the practice of cultural intermediaries, organizational culture, management theory, learning and innovation, as well as the place of cultural identities and differences within various structures and relations of the economy. Third, work on the rhetoric of economics (as a science) has explored the ways in which its authority and “truth” are discursively constructed, especially through the naturalization of the economy and its laws, and the “inevitabilization” of the “laws” and relations that economics purports to discover.12 In the case of contemporary economics specifically, at least part of the rhetorical construction of scientificity and authority has been built around the practices of modeling, formalization, and mathematics. Such practices emulate the scientific study of what is commonly thought of as reality, even as they have taken economists further and further away from anything that might be thought of as reality. But there is obviously more that can be said about the discursive practices of economics, including considerations of the various ideological practices of economic—both direct and indirect—agents. Meaghan Morris (1992b, 57) provides a nuanced un112  Chapter Three

derstanding of economic fundamentalism by suggesting that it seeks “no longer to impose as universal a particular mode of logic but rather to displace the argumentative procedures of reasoning with a furious rhetoric of Reason.” One might further observe, for example, the peculiar logic of a subset of economic arguments that focus on cross-paradigm (policy) practices in which my (obviously correct) theory is compared favorably with your real (failed) practice: so my capitalist theory is obviously superior to the reality of your socialist planning and, just as obviously, my socialist planning theory compares favorably to the reality of your capitalist system. Fourth, perhaps the largest part of the field applies a variety of sociological approaches—including ethnography, discourse, and institutional analysis—to specific economic events, positions, relations, and institutions. Much of this work, while often denaturalizing the apparent objectivity and opacity of various economic realities, is also resolutely empiricist and even positivist, insofar as it takes for granted the existence of its objects of study as facts per se, and as specifically economic facts. But the most interesting so­ ciological work involves “constructionist” analyses, often drawing on Latour’s (2005) actor network theory (ant), and specifically, on the ways ant has been used in science and technology studies. Pryke and du Gay (2007, 341) suggest that such work emphasizes the “systematic forms of knowledge deployed in markets or with their technological infrastructure . . . the social, cultural and technical conditions that make them possible.” But from this broad and potentially radically contextual question, they quickly put forth a narrower sense of cultural economy as “the contingent assemblage of the ‘economic’  ” (du Gay and Pryke 2002, 5). And again, “Cultural economy refers to a variety of approaches to the analysis of economic and organizational life which exhibit a shared focus on the heterogeneous ways in which objects and persons (firm, markets, consumers) are ‘made up’ or ‘assembled’ by the discourses and dispositifs of which they are supposedly the cause . . . [by] a shared focus upon the (material) practices, ordering and discourses which produce economically relevant activity ” (Pryke and du Gay 2007, 340). Thus, the most radical body of work in cultural economy focuses on the “assembling ” of specific economic phenomena: “the ways in which the ‘making up’ or ‘construction’ of economic realities is undertaken and achieved; how those activities, objects and persons we categorize as ‘economic’ are built up or assembled from a number of parts, many of them supplied by the discipline of economics but many drawn from other sources, including, of course, forms of ostensibly non-economic cultural practice” (du Gay and Considering Value  113

Pryke 2002, 5). But the radicalness of such work is clearly limited, since it tends to focus on the microeconomic (markets, firms, etc.) and, in the end, takes what constitutes the proper realm of the economy (“economically related activity ”) for granted even as it deconstructs the apparent naturalness of each such phenomenon. Moreover, the artificiality it demonstrates is, in practice, a much more limited sense of contextualism or conjuncturalism than what might be possible under the sign of constructionism.13 Fifth, the work that generates the most excitement attempts to diagnose the specific epochal nature of contemporary capitalism. Usually, such work assumes that capitalism has reinvented itself, becoming something new. What has capitalism become after monopoly or “late” capitalism? Not surprisingly, under the sign of “cultural economy,” the new capitalism is usually defined by a culturalization of the economy. The leading diagnoses include theories of neoliberalism (which emphasizes the role of a universalizing ideology of the market or new forms of governmentality), of the financialization of the economy and sometimes of all of life, of the emergence of a knowledge economy, of the growing dominance of “immaterial labor,” of “the new information economy ” (pointing to new productivity gains based on innovations in technologies), and of the centrality of “the cultural circuit of capital” (Thrift 2005). Many of these theories have little empirical foundation, and they often generalize from one aspect of contemporary capitalism, which may be new only in that it has grown more visible or more powerful. Even when they point to something emergent, they often fail to locate it within the broader relations and contradictions constitutive of both capitalism and the conjuncture. Thus, we see an increasingly rapid proliferation of such interpretations of capitalism, with little or no guidance as to how we are supposed to decide among them. Furthermore, such work, important as it is, often continues in the traditions of political economy, without much radical rethinking of the categories of economics itself. Finally, there is an important body of work devoted to studying what are called “alternative economies.”14 These may be small local-market economies, or alternative forms of appropriating surplus value or cooperatives, or alternative currencies, etc. They may also focus on a variety of “creative” concerns and activities. Similarly, there is significant anthropological work exploring local economies, especially as they are challenged by increasingly powerful forces of transnational corporations and capitalist globalization.15 The work of cultural economy is important, and has made real contributions, not the least of which is that it has demonstrated, decisively, the in114  Chapter Three

separability of culture and economies. In fact, cultural economy at its strongest argues, following du Gay and Pryke (2002, 9), that such an analytic distinction can only “be formulated and assessed in the context of definite normative and technological regimes.” That is, the distinction emerges as a contingent feature of particular contexts. And yet, as I have already suggested, the distinction is both more powerful and more enduring than this suggests, for it is constituted by and is constitutive of euro-modernity. Yet, at the same time, there are serious weaknesses in cultural economy’s broad range of researches. Too often, the work is empiricist, and takes the facticity or givenness of the economic for granted. It assumes the identification of certain activities or practices as economic, and then looks at how they are constructed, or how they function. It does not adequately explore the struggles to constitute the category of the economic, the struggles over which practices are marked as economic and which are not. It assumes it knows at the beginning what it is trying to describe—a certain fact that may be culturally constructed but that is almost always treated as if it existed outside of any contextual entanglements or determinations. In fact, context is virtually absent in much of this work. As a result, such work often takes the terms of operating capitalism for granted in constituting its object of study—whether financialization or securitization or branding. Du Gay and Pryke (2002, 2) hint at this when they describe economic discourses as “a form of representational and technological practice that constitutes the spaces within which economic action is formatted and framed.” Even so, they seem always and already to have prior knowledge about which discourses are economic, just as much of cultural economy assumes it is obvious which events are economic without exploring the construction of the space of being economic. Instead, should we not ask about every appearance of the economic, precisely how it is constructed and how it is constructed as economic?16 As Ray Hudson (2004) has challenged, what is at issue “is precisely what is defined as and taken to be the economy.”17 But this is only possible if one takes on the broader challenge of locating economies, and specific economic events, within the larger social context or conjuncture. Otherwise, it is not surprising that much of the contemporary work on economies slides back into a variety of economisms and technologi­ cal determinisms so that, once again, economics is slotted in as the bottom line or the last instance—“It ’s all about the economy, stupid!” Such work abandons what I take to be the constitutive commitments of cultural studies to complexity, relationality (overdetermination), and context. Without Considering Value  115

such a radical contextualization of both the economies and the economic, the project of cultural economy lacks both a guiding analytical vision and a politics. So it is rather devastating, it seems to me, when Pryke and du Gay (2007, 248–49) admit, “Maybe though there is scope for a cultural economy that is (more) aware of the politics of money and finance. . . . Others too have called for a ‘more politically-engaged cultural economy that does not simply reproduce the agnosticism of the cultural turn.’ ” Cultural economy fails to offer a sufficient basis for political critique, and it fails to address the key analytic questions of the constitution of the economy itself and its contextual articulations and determinations. It seems at best odd to suggest that there might be a place within cultural economy for such concerns. I would prefer to suggest that cultural economy might find a place within or alongside another, more radical project, what I would call a cultural studies that seeks to take economies and economics into account in both serious and consistent ways. The timidity of cultural economy becomes most apparent in its relationship, or, actually, its lack of relations, to the disciplines of economics, which means, for all practical purposes, that it leaves economics rather unproblematically in place, despite the recognition of the very real social power (however little we have analyzed it) of the discipline. In fact, cultural economy for the most part not only refuses to engage (and become familiar) with the discipline, it also seriously reduces the field of economic discourses. Thus, du Gay and Pryke (2002, 6) argue, “One cannot do economics in a way that follows on from one’s convictions concerning its cultural constitution . . . because doing economics and doing . . . ‘cultural economy’ are two rather different sorts of practices.” They suggest (6) that confusing these two distinct practices runs the risk of a “loss of focus and purpose.” It is even more surprising that two leading figures in economic and cultural geography, Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, also take such a timid approach. Despite the temptation to do so—because economics is the linchpin of the social sciences, its clear policy influence, its apparent (but nevertheless apocryphal) rigor, and its apparent reference to something so common and commonly known—Amin and Thrift (2008, 8) argue that people working outside of the discipline of economics should not seek a rapprochement with mainstream economics because there is “a lack of fit,” especially around questions of theory and methods. The strengths of those in cultural economy, for example, are their ability to deal with open systems, contexts, and qualitative techniques. As they put it in the end, “We think we would 116  Chapter Three

be fooling ourselves if we believe that we can lie down with the lion and become anything more than prey.” Returning Cultural Studies to Economics Ironically, the project I am proposing here is announced by Ruccio (2008a, 897), a political economist: “What I am looking for are ways in which existing conceptions of both the disciplines of economics and ‘real’ economic relations and institutions can be denaturalized, made different from themselves and new ones can be produced . . . creating a new discursive space to accomplish that goal.” An example of this task, he suggests, would be “to rethink the spheres (e.g., production and labor), to locate and overcome the forms of reduction and essentialism to which they have been subject, and to make them different from themselves.” This is a radical project with none of the caution and timidity of so much of cultural economy. This is the project of reinventing economics—not just deconstructing or denaturalizing it, but rearticulating it. Doing so requires recognizing not only that economic realities are constructed and that they are in part discursive, but also that the economic is itself embedded in complex relations with the non-economic, that economics can never survive as a discipline on its own, completely cut off from other dimensions of the specific contexts within which it takes the shapes and effects it appears to have.18 This project does not seek to create a new, singular, completely unified and totalized discipline, but to recognize the radical contextuality of the economic—what it means to be an economic event, that something is or is not an economic event, and even the difference as it were between the economic and the non-economic—that these are all constantly being defined within specific contexts and struggles.19 And, at the same time, the line between the economic and the non-economic, however successfully produced and policed, is never as distinct as it is imagined to be; it is always porous, temporary, broken, and multiplied. I am not propounding a fantasy of hijacking the discipline, or even of putting alternative “economic” theories or diagnoses on offer. Rather, I am suggesting, following Gramsci, that we must prise open the contradictions of economic common sense and find a more viable position from which to enter into debates around economic policies and practices. But the real aim is to find a different way to do economics and, significantly, to find a way to re-place “economic” apparatuses, technologies, and effectivities into Considering Value  117

the conjuncture without giving them, necessarily, either the first or the last word. This task assumes that there may well be any number of articulations of the discipline of economics, depending not only on the context but also on the nature of its deployment. I am seeking to understand what economics might look like if it is put in the service of cultural studies, which means always staying partly focused on the problem-space of the contemporary conjuncture. Too much contemporary work assumes a diagnosis without the selfreflective and self-constructive work implied in the conjuncturalist project of cultural studies (or Foucault’s genealogical project, for that matter). It often confuses the organic crisis (a struggle over modernities) for the attempt to establish a new settlement, a new balance in the field of forces, which may either be simply a variation on an older settlement (e.g., Obama’s reintroduction of Keynesian policy into neoclassically based systems) or an attempt to forge a radically new settlement on the grounds that the crisis has rendered older possibilities irrelevant (e.g., perhaps, the policies of Evo Morales in Bolivia). As I have suggested, I think parts of the world have been in this struggle, a transitional moment of sorts, for the past fifty to sixty years (while others have entered via different trajectories more recently), although the effort has become increasingly visible in the past thirty years; there have been some brief moments of apparently stable but always temporary settlements or compromise formations. This problem-space, embodied in a series of competing struggles to rearticulate and reconstitute the possibilities of being modern, requires us to constantly reflect upon our own assumptions about modernity and the ways they limits our ability to analyze what’s going on. Doing so may help us avoid falling into the trap that Thrift (2005, 2) decries, of “many social theorists who too often let their historical imaginations atrophy in order that they can make large claims about ‘modernity ’ which are meant to set the seal on history, to wrap everything up.” And as we know, nothing “ wraps everything up” so nicely and easily as “the economy,” and nothing in economic thinking works so well as assuming that what is going on is either the same old thing (so we don’t really need to do any work) or something entirely new (so we don’t have to worry about everything that has been done), that we can ignore the crucial work of conjunctural analysis: describing the balance between the old and the new, the organic and the conjunctural. Certainly, the project I am offering here is closely connected to the work of a number of others, including, for example, Massey’s argument (1995, 118  Chapter Three

309) “that it is impossible simply to separate-off ‘the economic’ from the political, cultural and ideological aspects of society.” She calls for political economists to pay greater attention to “what is being represented, how it is being represented, and from whose point of view, and the political effects of such representations” (1991, 44). And further, critiquing the concept of space-time compression (1994, 179), she argues that how one lives such socioeconomic changes depends on one’s position in various “powergeometries”: “Different social groups, and different individuals, are placed in very distinct ways in relations to these flows and interconnections. This point concerns not merely the issue of who moves and who doesn’t, although that is an important element of it; it is also about power in relation to the flows and the movement.” Similarly, Bob Jessop (Jessop and Oosterlynck 2008, 1157) has elaborated what he calls “cultural political economy ” (cpe), which attempts to bring cultural studies and political economy together: “cpe distinguishes the ‘actually existing economy ’ as the chaotic sum of all economic activities (broadly defined as concerned with the social appropriation and transformation of nature for the purposes of substantial provisioning) from the ‘economy ’ (or better ‘economies’ in the plural) as an imaginatively narrated, more or less coherent subset of these activities occurring within specific spatio-temporal frameworks.” The question cpe poses, much like my own project, is then: “Why [is it that] only some economic imaginaries among the many that circulate actually come to be selected and institutionalized and thereby come to constitute economic subjectivities, interests, activities, organizations, institutions, structural ensembles, emergent economic orders and their social embedding, and the dynamics of economic performance” (1155)? Moreover, Jessop and Oosterlynck recognize that “each ‘imagined economy’ is only ever partially constituted. There are always interstitial, residual, marginal, irrelevant, recalcitrant and plain contradictory elements that escape any attempt to identify, govern and stabilize a given ‘economic arrangement ’ or broader ‘economic order’ ” (1158). My hesitations in signing up with Jessop are twofold. First, not surprisingly, given its roots in political economy, the project is entirely macroeconomic, although it should not be impossible to apply the argument to microeconomic relations as well. Second, despite Jessop and Oosterlynck’s (1157) recognition that “technical and economic objects are always socially constructed, historically specific, more or less socially embedded in—or disembedded from—broader networks of social relations and institutional Considering Value  119

ensembles, more or less embodied and ‘embrained’ in individual actors, and require continuing social ‘repair’ work for their reproduction,” the category of the economic itself still remains inviolable, presupposed, and perhaps even transcendent. Moreover, they still seem to assume the possibility of distinguishing (perhaps only analytically?) between a chaotic materiality and a symbolic narrative order, rather than embracing their inseparability and coexistence within discursive apparatuses. My project is also related to Roger Lee’s efforts to theorize the “ordinary economy.” Lee (2006, 414) seems to assume, like me, that “the distinction ‘economic/non-economic’ is not only far from self-evident, it is not selfevident at all.” He argues (413) against “the arbitrary notion that the economic is somehow separate and autonomous, rather than constituted through multiple social relations and conceptions of value.” While I think Lee grounds this separation largely in the fact of disciplinary thinking rather than in the conjunctural articulations of power, it is nevertheless an important insight. But it is one that he steps back from, I think, by claiming that “the materially inescapable feature of economic activity [is] that of the consumption, production and circulation of value” (417). He repeatedly refers to the economic as “the consumption, exchange and circulation of value without which . . . societies are materially unable to reproduce themselves” (414). I believe there is an important distinction to be made here between the particular articulations of the economic that one finds in any context, and the particular articulations of what counts as economic, of what the effectivity of the economic is taken to be, in that context. The latter defines, to speak neologistically, the economic-ality of any specific activity; it determines the space-time of the economy. Thus, it strikes me that there is a certain circularity in Lee’s argument. On the one hand, he claims that “if economic geographies are necessarily relational, then the diversity of multiple, intersecting material and social relations of value is also intrinsic to them: economic geographies are inherently diverse” (422). This suggests that “not only is value practiced in highly diverse ways” (422), but that “different notions and practices of value are simultaneously present” (415). But the potential chaos of that diversity is quickly and inevitably tamed, not only by circumscribing value within circuits already understood in economic terms, but also by arguing that: “To be ‘successful,’ then, economic geographies must be capable of producing at least as much value as is necessary to enable those involved in them to stay alive and to be fit enough to continue to produce value. And for this to happen, a surplus of value is always necessary to cope with 120  Chapter Three

environmental vicissitudes and other potential interruptions to circuits of value” (415). Amazing that all this conceptual labor has led us back to Marx on necessary and surplus value! Finally, it would be disingenuous on my part not to acknowledge the influence of others’ work, such as Gibson-Graham’s wonderful The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It) (1996), which presents one of the first and most important efforts to rethink economics and economies, and the important efforts of John Clarke—along with his colleagues and collaborators, like Janet Newman and others (see Clarke 2004, 2007, 2009; Clarke and Newman 1997; Newman and Clarke 2009; Clarke et al. 2007)—to bring economics to cultural studies, and culture to economics. Doing a different—conjunctural—kind of economics involves recognizing that the economy is not only overdetermined, but also multiple, relational, and discursive (Grossberg 2006). If we are to demystify both economies and economics, we need to both deconstruct and find alternatives to at least four distinct, commonsense, and, often, academic assumptions: 1. Economism is the assumption that the economy (whether understood as a mode of production, class conflicts, entrepreneurialism, technology, finance, or markets) is the motor force of history, the proverbial bottom line. It is increasingly played out in contemporary writing in more sophisticated ways by allowing the supposed expansion of economic logics to justify identifying the entirety of the social formation as or with the economic (i.e., capitalism). Such simple logics have to be criticized with some concept of overdetermination and then rethought within logics of effectivity and “conditions of possibility.” 2. Capitalocentrism is the assumption that capitalism is a singular, homogeneous, and singularly ubiquitous formation; moreover, capitalism is usually represented in terms of some core, invariant logics and trajectories, which leaves no space for politics. Or it may be theorized in structural terms, which leaves no space for struggles in everyday life. Such assumptions have to be challenged by acknowledging that capitalism is always heterogeneous, hybridized, and multiple, and that it works on and through difference;20 they have to be replaced with a recognition of the multiplicity, not only of capitalisms but also of non-capitalist practices and formations that help to constitute and define various formations of capitalism, as well as other sorts of economic and social formations. It seems that Stuart Hall was making similar arguments some time ago: Considering Value  121

We used to think . . . that if one could simply identify the logic of capital, that it would gradually engross everything in the world. It would translate everything in the world into a kind of replica of itself, everywhere. . . . But the more we understand about the development of capital, the more we understand that that is only part of the story. That alongside the drive to commodify everything, which is certainly one part of its logic, is another critical part of its logic which works in and through specificity. . . . So that notion of the overarching, ongoing, totally rationalizing [logic of capital] has been a very deceptive way of persuading ourselves of the totally integrative and allabsorbent capacities of capital itself. . . . As a consequence, we have lost sight of one of the most profound insights in Marx’s Capital, which is that capitalism only advances, as it were, on contradictory terrain. It is the contradictions which it has to overcome that produce its forms of expansion. And that until one can see the nature of that contradictory terrain and precisely how particularity is engaged and how it is woven in, and how it presents its resistances, and how it is partly overcome, and how those overcomings then appear again, we will not understand it. (Hall 1991, 29) 3. Axiological normativity assumes either that there is a single fundamental kind, or a universal hierarchy, of value (e.g., market fundamentalism), or that there is some single, fundamental, and essential source of all value (e.g., laborism, productivism). It has to be replaced by a recognition of the multiplicity, dispersion, and contingency of values. 4. Finally, economic essentialism is the assumption that there is a stable and universal distinction between economic and non-economic practices or relations. It has to be replaced by a recognition, not merely that economic relations are themselves partly discursive, but also that the economic is always a relationally and contextually produced category. What makes some productive apparatuses economic rather than something else? What other kinds of productive apparatuses might there be? How do some events come to be marked as economic, and what happens as a result of being so marked? Are such markings always contingent and conjunctural?

We can deconstruct economic events and show how they are themselves assembled from both discursive and nondiscursive elements. But such deconstruction has to be carried forward, in part to see how such constructions are themselves constituted according to specific (conjunctural) determina122  Chapter Three

tions, and how they are constituted to operate as they do, to have the effects they do. That is, we have to ask how they function not only as productive apparatuses but also as particular sorts—in fact, economic—of productive apparatuses. But this demands not only reconstructing economic apparatuses but also reinserting them into the social context (which is not a simple, homogeneous, closed totality) based on a reconsideration of the concept of determination. We might begin by recognizing some of the dominant definitions of the existence of the economic. First, the economic is “a material substructure of forces, relations and interests” (Clarke 2007). Such a notion need not assume some “pure” materiality and may well incorporate political and ideological forms into the economic; the most common example, I suppose, would be analyses of the forms of capital accumulation, or modes of production. Second, increasingly, the economic refers to “those practices, relationships and forms of organization that are discursively constituted as economic through governmental work” (Clarke 2007); if the former has traditionally (but not necessarily) dominated political economy, the latter dominates cultural economy. There is a third interpretation of the category of the economic, which is of little interest to me, which sees the economic, and more commonly, specific economic categories, as simply ideological or linguistic constructs, with little or no material reality as such. But I fear that trying to negotiate competing definitions merely throws us back into the circularities and dilemmas of logics of identities. Instead, we have to rethink the question itself. We cannot avoid the question of the specificity of the economic, and the nature of economic effectivity: What is it that makes a particular practice, relation, technology, or apparatus “economic” rather than, say, cultural? What are we saying when we nominate such an event as economic? What is, again, the “faire” of the economic? But the question is always contextual: what is constituted as economic in any conjuncture is itself articulated by and within the conjuncture itself; and what it means, in that conjuncture, to be nominated as economic is similarly conjuncturally articulated. Thus, it is possible to think about the constitutive effectivity of the economic only from within the conjuncture. So, instead of definitions, perhaps we can begin with some common perceptions about the changing nature of “the economy.” There are a number of common observations—diagnoses—about the contemporary forms of capitalism that often predetermine one’s ability to understand the contemporary conjuncture and the place of economies within it. Consider these Considering Value  123

three examples: First, there is a sense that the very nature of economic activity is changing, in a process of the culturalization, informatization, or digitalization of the economy. As a result, the economy involves a different kind of apparatus, one that is both self-reflective and self-productive (Thrift 2005). Second, many observers claim that capitalism is expanding and incorporating the social—in fact, everything—into the economic. Everything can be and is being made into a market, where markets are defined by unregulated exchange rather than competition. Third, it is commonly feared that capitalist values (money?) are replacing other forms, or at least demanding that they be translated into exchange or market value. Finally, the assumption that the economy is about the satisfaction of material needs seems no longer accurate, because we have all become aware not only of the cultural production of needs, but also of the increasingly heartless emphasis upon wealth and luxury (e.g., the acceptance of the growing disparity of incomes). Consequently, the relation of values and needs has itself been fractured by an increasingly abstract concept—and measure—of value. I do not agree with these diagnoses. I believe that the truth of contemporary capitalism is more fractured, contradictory, and marked by multiple socialities, temporalities, and spatialities. And I believe that temporal differences are never so clear-cut—the past was never so . . . simple as we think, the present is not as . . . different (complex) as we imagine. I do not take them to be “truths,” but discursive facts or statement, and the question then is why they are so commonly enunciated and embraced. What are the conditions of the economic that make such statements proliferate, and even popular? And given that it is always a double dynamic, what are the conditions of the conjuncture that enable such economic statements to proliferate and become popular? So how can we approach the task of conjuncturalizing economics in a way that both stands against and yet accounts for these assumptions? Again, I do not want to offer a general theory of the economy, but to think about the tools we need to better understand how the economy is constituted and how it is operating in the conjuncture. The following challenges can and should be presented, perhaps, independently of one’s politic. They are meant to point to the theoretical and analytic tools that will enable us to understand the specificity of the existence and operation of economies (the economic) in the conjuncture. These questions or tasks are, in a sense, the preconditions for the sort of cultural studies work I am aiming for. The chal124  Chapter Three

lenges are: the multiplicity of the economic; the complex discursivity of the economic; the contextuality of the economic; and the multiplicity of values. These four conjuncturally specific questions help us define what it means to rethink economics and economies in the contemporary problem-space, defined both by struggles over the hegemony of euro-modernities, and for the possibilities of a multiplicity of ways of being modern. They seek ways to reconceive the logics with which we approach economics, the algorithms with which we constitute “economies,” and the frames within which we reinsert both economic apparatuses and discourses into larger contexts and map their effectivities. The Multiplicity of the Economic One of the most important contributions of the groundbreaking work of Gibson-Graham (1996)—a collaboration of Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson—is that it compels us to embrace the complexity of economies—of economic practices, relations, institutions, formations, etc. Let me summarize their arguments and note the weaknesses of those arguments—because they are as important and positive as are their strengths. Their arguments can be expressed in a number of propositions. First, the social world is economically complex and differentiated; there are a multiplicity of economic processes and relations, including non-capitalist, non-commodity, and even non-market ones. Gibson-Graham emphasize the plurality and heterogeneity of the economic, invoking “the image of noncapitalist forms of production and exchange, of noncapitalist modes of surplus labor appropriation and distribution [i.e., class], all those unfleshed out feudalisms, slaveries, household economic practices and intrafirm relations” (250). Moreover, they argue that the relations among these things are only ever partially fixed. Second, there is no such thing as Capitalism, singular and with a capital “C.” Not only is capitalism also plural and heterogeneous, there are only specific capitalisms, the forms of which are always overdetermined. That is, capitalism itself has no identity, no essence, and no inside that defines it, once and for all, as being exactly what it is. Instead, it is radically empty, determined, or, more accurately, overdetermined by its outside, nothing but an effect of the articulation of a variety of economic processes, practices, and relations. Each form of capitalism is therefore historically specific and singular. Any capitalist formation is only temporary and at best only partially Considering Value  125

stable. Hence, capitalism has to be understood as a practice, a process, and a project. This becomes clearer in Gibson-Graham’s analysis of class. Understood as an identity, class is a way of distributing individuals into categories and dividing society into groups. But for Gibson-Graham, class is the social process of producing, appropriating, and distributing surplus labor. More accurately, it is a multiplicity, and hence a process without an essence. It is the multiple flows of surplus labor. Class can take on many different forms, each overdetermined by its context, each a form of exploitation involving the appropriation of surplus labor. But there are non-capitalist modes of producing, appropriating, and distributing surplus labor, and thus, one assumes, of distributing people across the social field. There is an apparent paradox in this argument, for it assumes and continues to reinscribe the difference between the capitalist and the non-capitalist, which seems to suggest that capitalism cannot be merely its conditions of existence, its exteriority. The fact that the particular nature and shape of any specific capitalist formation is overdetermined does not guarantee that one is outside the discourse of essences. In fact, if capitalism has no essence, would it not be problematic to talk about multiple possibilities of capitalism? In what sense would they all be possibilities of capitalism? In fact, GibsonGraham do offer a very good definition of capitalism: the presence of capitalist economic processes is denoted by the presence of wage labor and the appropriation of surplus labor in value form. That is to say, in a rather circular argument, capitalism is identified as the process of capitalist class exploitation.21 Third, and most importantly, Gibson-Graham argue that “capitalist hegemony” is a discursive artifact. That is, it is in discourses that capitalism’s almost absolute and complete control of the world is constructed. This hegemony depends upon assigning three features to capitalism: a structural and systemic unity, singularity, and totality. But there are significant uncertainties here. It is unclear who constructs this hegemony and how: at times, it seems to be the result of various anti-capitalist discourses rather than a part of the dominant practices of capitalist hegemony and its construction of common sense; and it is unclear if these discursive attributions have a real effectivity of their own, or whether they are simply misrepresentations (enabling them to claim that capitalism should be seen as an uncentered aggregate of practices). Insofar as they seem to adopt the latter position, Gibson-Graham not only deny the adequacy of most critical analyses of the contemporary forms 126  Chapter Three

of capitalist hegemony, they also deny that there is a real capitalist hegemony in need of a more constructionist and heterogeneous analysis. Pluralizing capitalism and allowing for the existence of non-capitalisms, embracing overdetermination and historical specificity, need not negate the reality, however temporary, complex, and articulated, of the dominance of capitalism. In fact, Gibson-Graham (1996, 237) explicitly oppose the project of “delineating a hegemonic formation where things line up and fall together,” and thereby seem to eliminate any project of a counterhegemonic struggle. Indeed, rather than a politics of resistance, opposition, and transformation, they embrace a local politics of alternative economies. They offer this project as a “weak theory” of the economy that allows for the creative expression and realization of the new, the unthought, the unexpected—but unfortunately, they do not acknowledge that, for the most part, such innovations are framed within an individualistic and voluntaristic understanding of social struggle and change and exist within a sphere of capitalist tolerance. However, I cannot avoid the feeling that Gibson-Graham, as important as their contribution might be, continue to operate with a notion of a relatively autonomous (disembedded) economy and, even more surprisingly, with a kind of economic determinism. The latter seems to result from their underemphasizing the notions of overdetermination (from Althusser, from whom they draw heavily) and conjuncture, leading them to assume that the “liberal subject,” for example, is either an economic subject or an epistemological (Cartesian) subject, rather than a multiple, contradictory, and overdetermined one. This is partly because their conjuncturalism is a purely linguistic one rather than a radically contextual and materialist one. Their newest work, however, does recognize that “capitalism is not just an economic signifier that can be displaced through deconstruction and the proliferation of signs” (Gibson-Graham 2006, xxxv). They present capitalism as a mode of subjectivation (offering a sense of self) and a mode of being-in-the-world (offering forms of sociability, happiness, and capacities for action), even for those who oppose capitalism. Recognizing that capitalist practices and relations function as sites of libidinal investment, they recognize that the project of creating alternative economic projects has to find ways of getting people to disinvest from what they continue to deny is a hegemonic capitalism. Capitalism remains “a set of economic practices scattered over a landscape rather than a systematic concentration of power” (2). (There is a way of operating between these two, seeing the dispersion of Considering Value  127

capitalism as always being articulated through a variety of hegemonic projects.) As a result, the greatest part of their effort ignores this challenge, both analytically and politically, and instead, but still invaluably, seeks to find new languages of economy and new ways of enacting them, without tying this latter effort back to the former. Gibson-Graham multiply: the possibilities of markets, alternative markets, and even non-markets; the kinds of transac­ tions and ways of negotiating commensurability (i.e., the exchange of equiva­ lent value); the kinds of labor and forms of compensation; the forms of enterprise; and ways of producing, appropriating, and distributing surplus. One might add that it is possible to consider the multiplicity of symbolic relations of investment and risk, of resources and social values, etc. But while acknowledging the articulations among diverse economies, Gibson-Graham continue to underplay the ways these are articulated to capitalisms and the power of particular dominant economies to locate and constrain any alternatives. Moreover, their analysis rarely approaches the conjunctural questions of what is old and what is new, what is organic and what is conjunctural. After all, much of what they describe harkens back to older countercultural discourses and practices, especially those of the global countercultures of the 1960s. But they ignore the question of why these earlier countercultural—alternative—economies failed; the answer surely has something to do with the failure to analyze and come to terms with the existing hegemonic institutions of (“economic”) power, and to recognize their ability to rearticulate themselves when challenged, and even in response to crises, in ways that partly resuture the existing relations of power and partly enable the emergence of new counter-progressive formations and alliances (as well as, perhaps, new progressive countercultural possibilities). To summarize, Gibson-Graham reject the assumption that capitalism is a singular, homogeneous, and ubiquitous formation, a monster that is undefeatable, seeing it instead as multiple and multiply fragmented, a contradictory sets of formations. Similarly, they refuse to see capitalism as the totality of economic activities, relations, and forms. Instead, they picture the economic as an iceberg, with the enormous and greatest part embodying the diversity and multiplicity of economies remaining hidden under the surface (submerged as it were by the discourses of economics). But they take this argument further, in order to reject any reduction, denial, or simplification of the relations within and between economic formations; so that rather than disarming this multiplicity by subsuming everything under the largesse of capitalism, we have to recognize the contestations, competitions, 128  Chapter Three

and independence that make the space of the economic so complex. One final implication of their argument might be that we have to give up what seems to have become the obsessive search to discover and diagnose whatever is apparently radically new about “the economy”—whether we think we are describing new kinds of economic practices or apparatuses (postFordism, securitization, neoliberalism), new forms of self-reflexivity and self-production (culturalization, informatization, or epistemologization of the economy), new technological revolutions (digitalization, computerization), or new spatialities. All of these are partial and inadequate at best and misguided and reductionist at worst. The Discursivity of the Economic Gibson-Graham (1996) point us to the second challenge: to recognize that “the economic” is partly a discursive configuration and to think through the implications of this for integrating economies into conjunctural analyses. “The economic” is always, in part, discursive and discursively constructed; we have to avoid naturalist and materialist reductions, even while we simultaneously refuse any culturalist or linguistic reduction (as if the economic were nothing but the ways it is represented, even in all its complexity). To investigate the discursive construction of the economic, and not merely of specific economic-related activities, we must begin first, by recognizing the ubiquity and diversity of discourses of economies and economics, and second, by actually engaging with the discourses of academic and institutional economics. We must examine the full range of “cultural forms in which economic understandings of society have been disseminated” (Morris 1992b, 8). Ruccio has already begun this work in his “economic representations project.” He uses Gibson-Graham’s diagram of economic activities and discourses as an iceberg with only a small bit exposed above the surface to provide an iconic representation of their effort to challenge any and all claims that academic economics is able to offer a comprehensive body of knowledge of economic realities. He proposes seeing “the terrain of economic representations as expansive (occurring across and outside the academy), fragmented (because the knowledges produced in one arena are often incommensurable, in both form and content, with those produced in other arenas), and contested (precisely because some representations, implicitly or explicitly, differ in their most basic elements from others, within and across arenas)” (Ruccio 1998a, 905). Considering Value  129

Ruccio identifies four such arenas: academic economists (to which I shall return); academic non-economists; economic activists; and popular culture, which, as he suggests, “is replete with references to and representations of economic themes and issues” (Ruccio 1998a, 895). Of these, certainly the one that cuts closest to home for many of us is the second: “Almost every discipline, especially in the humanities and social sciences, includes a larger number of scholars who engage in economic analysis—by referring to and producing economic concepts, analyzing the relationships between the economic and non-economic aspects of society, deploying economic metaphors in social and cultural analysis, or using economic theories and concepts to analyze texts, artworks and other cultural artifacts” (895). Of course, such discourses should not be privileged, and one can and probably should ask why they are appearing in the current conjuncture, in the forms they have. One can investigate, that is, the very conditions of the production of such discourses. And moreover, they can—and should be—criticized. I would make three emendations to Ruccio’s four categories. First, I think it is necessary to add a fifth category, which would be something like the opposite of what Ruccio means by economic activists, which we might call the discourses of the institutions of policy, law, and business. Mitchell (2005, 298), for example, begins to locate such discourses “in the design and marketing of goods, in the calculation and forecasting of reserve banks and investment houses, in the case studies of business schools and law-schools, in the programs of political think tanks and in the policies of international development organizations.” Obviously, the list can be expanded to encompass all of the actual policy and business sites where economic theories, logics, and calculations are invoked or created in ways that, to a large extent, we do not yet understand. But even the conception of such self-reflective economic agents—defined by their economic tasks—has to be supplemented with the recognition of all sorts of economic activities performed by people (and institutions) that do not think of themselves primarily as economic agents. Second, it is necessary to expand upon Ruccio’s category of popular culture by taking up a notion of economic common sense, in order to take cognizance of the proliferating and even sprawling series of sites through which the economic might legitimately be spoken. The fact is that most people, in the course of their everyday lives, discuss the economy and specific aspects of it; they make calculations about their own relations to and 130  Chapter Three

actions within the economic realm; they have their own theories, logics, and modes of calculation for their economic choices and judgments. In capitalist common sense, Watkins (1998) has argued, capitalism appears as the origin of its own (economic) resources. For example, when talking about markets, he states that “a market appears less as an economic resource than as the field within which something can be identified as a resource that has a certain economic value” (5). And he continues: “It ’s only because the very existence of the market is always and everywhere up for grabs at any given moment that the possible conditions, for its emergence or failure to emerge, can appear absolutely anywhere in the totality of the social field. Thus the primary condition of possibility for the market is not the ‘commodification of social life,’ which assumes an existent market where commodification takes place, but the work of consumers who construct the market” (17). But is it, or is it only, the work of consumers? And what is already assumed in the assumed existence of consumers? It is best to treat this discursive arena on the model of Gramsci’s (1971) notion of common sense as “traces without an inventory,” as made up of often contradictory fragments the sources of which we have long forgotten. Such common sense is not an individual matter but a site of social construction and struggle. It is made largely on the terrain of the popular—including various representational media (films, television), affective media (music), participatory media (videogames, game shows)—but also on the rearticulation of various institutional discourses (e.g., “trickle-down economics,” “toxic assets”) and figures (e.g., Greenspan, Sachs, Krugman) into the popular. It is often intentionally and directly addressed—for example, through the popularization of various books and other media products that either embody various get-rich schemes or offer some version of “economic imperialism,” that is, that offer economics logics and practices as the best explanation of and solution to all human activities and problems (e.g., Becker 1978). Even the staid Times Higher Education Supplement (Reisz 2008) had to acknowledge that “today the ‘dismal science’ of economics is sexy.” But it is also very self-consciously shaped through a variety of forms and outlets for news coverage and journalism on a range of economic events, issues, and, often, crises.22 Alongside their engagement with both interactive and noninteractive media, younger generations are no doubt being largely and powerfully shaped by educational practices and materials; but there has been surprisingly little discussion of the various K–12 curricula and resources that are produced and distributed, often with corporate support, by organizations Considering Value  131

such as the National Council on Economic Education and the National Economics Association. Third, we need to investigate the relationships among these various discourses. And we cannot assume that there is any necessary relation among them—among the more theoretical and instructive discourses, the justificatory or explanatory discourses of particular institutions, and the discursive practicalities of concrete actions and everyday life. This is the weakness of so much of the discourse of neoliberalism, which tends to assume that these discourses are all equivalent and identical! We might, for example, think about the relationship between the discourses and practices of economics as an academic discipline and the varied and variegated discourses and practices of economic policymaking. I might describe this as the relationship between the discourses of economic theory and science, on the one hand, and the discourses deployed at the many different sites of applied economics in both institutional and everyday life. Too often, in our effort to criticize the discipline of economics, at least its neoclassical forms, we assume that it either describes or determines contemporary policies, without looking at the enormous contradictions within contemporary economic practice and policy, or at the way policy is determined at the intersection of a wide range of economic discourses, political ideologies and practicalities, and common sense. And while books propounding various managerial theories have become bestsellers, we assume at our own peril that these theories are actually driving business. Business people, in fact, all economic agents, operate on complex and often contradictory beliefs and assumptions, including various forms of spiritualism and religion (Salamon 2001; Rubin 2007). Put differently, economies are never as rational as economists or others assume (e.g., recall Keynes’s “animal spirits,” or Shiller’s “irrational exuberance”). Ruccio’s project quite literally explodes the category of economic discourses and knowledge as well as pointing us to the proliferating series of sites at which economic discourses, often very banal, can legitimately and plausibly be spoken. It reminds us—academic non-economists—that we are still positioned within the academy, and, as such, we are producing institutionalized languages of the economy. At the same time, we have to see those outside the academy as both producers and consumers of economic knowledge. But even more importantly, Ruccio argues that we must now see economics as a contested field constituted by multiple discourses: “From this perspective, economic theories and approaches can be seen as being created, learned, utilized and contested in many different social sites . . . and 132  Chapter Three

to be embedded in many different social practices, again both inside and outside the academy ” (2008a, 896). This expansion of the discursive universe of economics does not exactly change our task—of critically engaging with the full range of such discourses—but it most certainly changes the scope of the task. In fact, the most obvious possible engagement, that between academic economists and non-economists, is perhaps the least realized: Academic economists rarely acknowledge, let alone read and engage with the economic analyses carried out by academic noneconomists. By the same token, scholars in disciplines other than economics often refer to economics as a singular method or set of conclusions—“ This is what economists say.” “ This is how economics works” which drive me crazy—thereby overlooking or ignoring the variety of theoretical approaches that together make up the discipline of economics. And for the most part, neither group within the academy has taken seriously the languages and discourses of economy that are produced and disseminated by economic activists and others outside the economy. (Ruccio 2008a, 895)

Ruccio proposes analyzing the full range of economic discourses to uncover their “rules of formation and discursive regularities” (896). A critical engagement with these discourses would enable us to decenter economic knowledge by asking what counts as economic representations and investigating the various ways these different representations matter, at different social sites and to different populations. It is in fact depressing to realize just how few engagements there are between the non-economists and economists within the academy. And when such encounters do take place, I have to admit that they are usually depressing in their own right: economists tend to speak a disciplinary-bound discourse of the “real,” while cultural studies scholars simply dismiss such claims as universally naive, and each side tends to think that its field is somehow determining in the last (and sometimes in the first) instance. We have to find a way to hold a conversation that does not begin by dismissing the other discipline out of hand or that blames a particular discipline for the weaknesses of its interdisciplinarity.23 Such a conversation would require us to engage with economic paradigms more widely; we often justify not doing the work because so much of economics is too technical (a charge economists can legitimately make about cultural studies as well), but we do not look for the openings where conversation is possible. The demand Considering Value  133

for some interdisciplinary exploration, it should be said, works in the other direction as well. As economists increasingly turn to other disciplines—especially psychology and sociology—they are often just as irresponsible and disrespectful, choosing paradigms because they appear to be the most consistent with their needs or because they appear to be the most scientific. And when economists try to talk about culture, either in anthropological or discursive terms, the results are no less embarrassing than cultural scholars trying to take on trade negotiations, tariffs, etc. The conflation of the hegemonic position of neoclassical economics with the even more hegemonic quantitative and modeling techniques, and then the assumption that these define the totality of the discipline, are serious mistakes that impede our ability to find the best ways to talk about contemporary economic realities. Despite whatever problems we might identify—the substantive assumption of equilibrium, or the abstractness of models, or the quantification of social relations, or the positivistic claim to be the only proper epistemology—we ignore such work at our own peril. Moreover, most of the time, cultural scholars’ understandings of neoclassical economics (often conflating it with some largely undefined political and economic notion of neoliberalism) are seriously inadequate and oversimplified. Too often, commentators assume that the neoclassical paradigm was formulated earlier in the twentieth century against Keynesian theories about the causes of depression and the role of the state. In fact, the basic frameworks and assumptions of neoclasssism (marginalism, etc.) were created in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, connected, on the one hand, with debates against planned economies, and, on the other, according to Livingston (1997, 61), with the rise of “the corporate alternative to unrestricted competition” as a practical solution to the “problems of cost allocation and long-term investment planning.” According to Livingston (61–62), the marginalists and neoclassical economists won “because they designed a model that posited—that presupposed and promoted—those changes through which capitalist solidarity and managerial discretion would become the conditions of renewed economic growth and social development.” Neoclassicism was reshaped after the Second World War, and again after the global crisis of the 1970s and the appearance of stagflation in the advanced industrial world. In fact, there are currently many different versions of neoclassical theory, which has to be seen as an array of assumptions and theories, many of which have been challenged and revised over the past decades. Moreover, these assumptions and theorems are combined and ar134  Chapter Three

ticulated in a variety of ways into a diverse set of positions within neoclassical economics. The major premises include: marginal utility theory; rational choice models of human behavior (as the maximization of utility, subject to constraint, although this been revised recently), although such models are being increasingly challenged by psycho-economics; and free-market theory, where free markets (whether this means competitive or deregulated is open to debate) embody the rationality of the price-mechanism. While this once might have involved a corollary of perfect (transparent) information, this too has been challenged. Additionally, neoclassical economics generally subsumes macroeconomics into microeconomic theories and adopts equilibrium and aggregate theory. More differentially, particular versions embrace the central role of the entrepreneur (a key premise of the Austrian school); monetarism; inflation as the primary enemy; the desirability of the maximization of (short-term) profitability; and the primacy of growth as a measure of economic success. But perhaps what most accurately characterizes the effect of the hegemony of contemporary neoclassical theories is its adoption of highly quantitative (partly as a result of the explosion of available data in the twentieth century) and highly formalized (modeling) methodologies, although such methods are neither limited to nor necessary for neoclassical scholarship. It is important to further acknowledge the diversity of the discipline of economics and not assume that the hegemony of neoclassical economics is translated into either complete domination or total occupation. The assumption that the discipline of economics is (and hence that all economists are) neoclassical ignores the complexity of academic economic discourses. In an effort to take this complexity seriously, I want to highlight two disciplinary developments, two interrelated groups or movements within academic economics. The first is usually referred to as “heterodox economics.” With a very real institutional presence within the academy, it describes a coalition of many of the paradigms, positions, and research traditions that have been marginalized or even excluded by the often extreme tactics by which the neoclassical hegemony was established and is maintained. The list will often include post-Keynesian, neo-Ricardian, and marxist; social economics, feminist economics, institutionalism, and political economy; comparative economics, experimental economics, evolutionary economics, and historical economics; behavioral economics, environmental economics, neuro-economics, and complexity theory. We might think of expanding the list even further by opening it up to links with other disciplines—economic Considering Value  135

sociology, economic anthropology, economic history, and economic geography, for example—but this would itself require new forms of engagement. While it may, at first glance, seem that the only thing that unites the various traditions represented on the list is their common opposition to the hegemony and the rather totalitarian tactics of neoclassical hegemony, among at least some of these groups, there is more, for they see themselves engaged in a critique of modern economic grounds and a search for a new common ground.24 The second group, “post-autistic economics,” also has a material institutional presence. On June 21, 2000, the prestigious French newspaper Le Monde published a story that headlined: “Economics students denounce the lack of pluralism in the teaching offered” (see Fullbrook 2003). The students were studying at the most prestigious university for the subject, the Ecole Normale Superiore. Their complaint was, in the simplest terms, that the complete emphasis on modeling and methodologies had created a situation in which the study of economics was cut off from economic realities. That same month, economics graduate students at Cambridge issued a similar formal protest. And again, in August of 2001, an international meeting of heterodox economic students issued what has come to be known as the Kansas City proposal (39–41), which called for fundamental reforms of the study of economics, including: a broader conception of human behavior; the recognition of culture; considerations of history; a new theory of knowledge, which rejects the separation of fact and value; a commitment to empirical grounding; expanded research methods; and interdisciplinary dialogues.25 These two movements offer various critiques of the neoclassical hegemony, as should be obvious from the Kansas City proposal. The most common has to do with the very form of contemporary neoclassical theory. Both post-autistic economics (pae) and heterodox economists argue that neoclassical economics’s formalism results, inevitably, in a state in which the study of economics is detached from substantial and practical issues. The result is, ironically, that economics lacks realism. Tony Lawson (2003, 11), a leading heterodox theorist, writes: “There is widespread agreement that the modern discipline is not in too healthy a condition, and that whatever explains the fact that the formalistic mainstream project has risen to such dominance, it has little to do with this project’s record so far in explaining the social world.” Here is at least the first hint of the crisis within economics that provides an opening for cultural studies. 136  Chapter Three

This formalist abandonment of reality is connected to neoclassical theory ’s deductivist logic, which leads it to constantly search for “event regu­ larities” and which forces it to assume that the world operates as a closed system. Lawson argues that if economics is to be a science, then it must have an ontology that sees both human beings and society as complex, evolving, and open. Such an ontology would be practically conditional, historical, and fallible: When we focus upon varying productivity performances here, conditions of work there, rising or falling unemployment rates, and so on, we do not suppose that these features we choose to emphasize exist in isolation, even as a temporary heuristic measure. To do so is to assume a totally different world from the one in which we live, and one that has no bearing upon it . . . In short, there is literally a world of difference between leaving something (temporarily) out of focus and treating it as though it does not exist. The achieving of an abstraction and treating something as though it existed in isolation are not the same thing at all. (Lawson 2003, 23)

Ruccio (2005), while agreeing with the call, criticizes Lawson’s turn to critical realism as a new ontological foundation for economic analysis. Similarly, Davis (2006, 23) suggests that heterodox economics sees social reality as “intrinsically dynamic or processual, interconnected and organic, structured. . . . [It] exhibits emergence and includes value and meaning . . . and is polyvalent.” One might add that, for many of these economists, such a theory would have to recognize the salience of political dimensions as well. Heterodox theorists often talk about a dialectic between a socially embedded individual and social structures, and actively seek to be engaged with other disciplines. Many of them are self-reflectively concerned with how particular approaches become hegemonic while others become heterodox. And there is a serious debate about the place of mathematical and statistical techniques in economic research. I have to add that the concerns and arguments of heterodox/post-autistic economics are not limited to a small group of marginalized “loonies.” There have been numerous articles recently about the many debates and challenges within the discipline, most of which are not presented as linked to the financial crisis going on at the time.26 Many leading economists have signed on to statements such as the Kansas City proposal, and even more have begun to accept its criticisms of the mainstream. Respected mainstream figures like Mary Morgan and Robert Solow have decried the fact that the drive to Considering Value  137

create models that account for the data, collected in increasing amounts and at increasing rates since the early twentieth century, has made economics into a technical discipline based on practices of oversimplification. Solow (1997, 54) has even written that “the part of economics that is independent of history and social context is not only small but dull.” In fact, one finds among these academic economists many explorations of the relations among the various (and various kinds of) assumptions constituting the neoclassical hegemony, including: methodological assumptions about the necessity of mathematization and the value of models; ontological assumptions of atomism (individualism and subsequent aggregation), perfect (competitive) markets, and optimization (or rational choice); and theoretical assumptions of marginalism and equilibrium. There are also many serious discussions that for the moment are placed under the sign of cultural economics in mainstream and heterodox economics. Despite the fact that we tend to ignore it, there is a large body of literature, even in “mainstream” traditions but also in heterodox economics, on culture, which take a wide range of perspectives on diverse questions. Throsby (2001) includes chapters on theories of value, cultural capital and sustainability, and culture in economic development, as well as the more obvious concerns with the economics of culture (including economic aspects of cultural heritage and the economics of creativity, cultural industries, and cultural policy). The most immediately relevant issue is no doubt the question of the influence of culture on “rational” behavior. Admittedly, one might not know quite how to respond to the machinations through which economists have to go to take culture into account. For example, a recent essay (Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales 2006, 23), published in a special symposium on cultural economics, argues, “Without testable hypotheses . . . there is no role for culture in economics except perhaps as a selection mechanism among multiple equilibria.” The authors propose a three-step procedure that would be necessary to demonstrate that culture affects economic outcomes: (1) to show a direct impact of culture on expectations and preferences; (2) to show that those beliefs and preferences have an impact on economic outcomes; and (3) “All work on culture and economics faces the problem that causality is likely to work both ways—from culture to economics and from economics to culture. . . . [Economists should] focus only on those dimensions of culture that are inherited by an individual from previous generations, rather than voluntarily accumulated. This choice allows us to isolate the cultural 138  Chapter Three

components of beliefs and preferences by using as instrumental variables the cultural determinants of these beliefs” (24). One is almost tempted to say, little ado about much! Eric Jones suggests (2006, ix), on a different track, that, “While culture makes only a ghostly transit through history and has far less independent effect than many non-economists propose, it does in some measure color behavior, sway choice, and influence technologies.” Yet only a few pages later, he asserts (6), “A more reasonable position might be that, since economics is the analysis of an abstract category of behavior—choice—its techniques are culturally neutral and universal by definition. If some economists neglect to allow for the legal, religious and social impediments to full-blown market behavior outside Western society, that is a weakness on their part, not on the part of the science.” Eventually, Jones advocates maneuvering one’s way through the two extremes of cultural fixity, which by asserting that culture is primary ends up in relativism, and cultural nullity, which assumes either that culture does not matter or does not exist. (The choice of names is interesting and revealing.) On the other side, and somewhat ironically, the importance of culture has more often been championed by those on the right rather than those on the left. For example, Harrison has written: The influence of cultural values, beliefs and attitudes on the way that societies evolve has been shunned by scholars, politicians, and development experts, notwithstanding the views of Tocqueville, Max Weber and more recently, Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, David Landes, Robert Putnam, and Lucian Pye, among others. It is much more comfortable for the experts to cite geographical constraints, insufficient resources, bad policies and weak institutions. That way they avoid the invidious comparisons, political sensitivities, and bruised feelings often engendered by cultural explanations of success and failure. (Harrison 2006, 1)

Harrison offers a typology of “progress-prone” and “progress-resistant” cultures, by identifying twenty-five variables organized into four categories: worldview, values and virtues, economic behavior, and social behavior. One reviewer on Amazon.com rejected the utility of the book for economists because of its lack of quantitative analysis, and implicitly, of quantifi­ ability, but allowed that it might be of some use to political scientists and sociologists.27 Recently, the economic historian Gregory Clark has similarly propounded the importance of culture. He is firmly convinced that institutional actions Considering Value  139

cannot bring about the changes necessary for initiating a new formation in which sustained economic growth is possible. Instead, he argues that the rapid surge of economic growth in Europe that marked the beginning of the Industrial Revolution was made possible by cultural changes: changes in behavior, many of which have been identified by other authors with both Protestantism and the emerging middle class, which enabled Europe to break the (Malthusian) cycle of poverty and produce a new economic form of productivity and cycle of growth. These changes apparently induced genetic changes (echoing Lamarck) and literally produced a new—modern, capitalist, European—human being. According to Clark, this new cultural and subsequent economic transformation was populated, not by a rising (and exploited) peasantry/working class, but by a declining elite nobility. And it was precisely their downward social trajectory that forced them to change their culture and invent new repertoires of behaviors as responses to their growing needs and premodern conditions. While providing a significant role for culture, Clark’s theory also poses significant if obvious challenges—for example, about the origin and role of the working classes. Obviously, cultural studies has a good deal to learn by joining these many conversations, and there is a good deal at stake in them as well. One has to wonder why more people in the “cultural” disciplines have not tried to engage them. I think the answer is that, in reality, such an engagement—beyond simple political condemnation and epistemological criticism—implies a different project: a conjunctural project of reinventing economics. The Contextuality of the Economic If economies are partly discursively constructed, we have to acknowledge that they are also materially constructed. Or more directly, the economic— practices, relations, institutions—is also contextually constructed. We must analyze the ways economies are constituted by, and located, exist, and function within, complex contextual relations, both in the particular and as instances of “the economic.” In other words, what something is, how it can operate and exist as economic is contextually determined. The economic can never be understood apart from contextual analysis. Markets, for example, are not natural things; they have to be made, and there is no single universal model. Similarly, we have to ask, how do we talk about capitalism? There are many ways of defining capitalism: as the class contradiction, or the contradiction of the mode of production, or the commodification of 140  Chapter Three

labor, or the mode of appropriation of surplus value (exploitation), or the existence of the general equivalence (i.e., money as the representation of capital). Capitalism is an abstract category that does not describe any particular economy, but a set of possibilities for the organization of “the economic” within certain kinds of social formations. One has to look not only at the articulations, but the forms of articulation among the various discourses and practices—negotiation, distanciation, compromise, marginalization, etc. One has to look at economic relations and practices, concretely, located along particular trajectories, and at particular geographical and institutional sites. This is usually taken to mean that one has to look at the relations among the various actors, institutions, practices, and discourses at the intersection of political, economic, and cultural life. That is, one has to study the social formation as a concrete articulation of its various formations, domains, or levels, into a conjunctural totality.28 It is necessary to come back to the specific conjuncture, to return to the task of describing what is going on in the particular problem space of modernities. This work is often tossed aside in favor of rather glib descriptions under the sign of neoliberalism. As Clarke (2007) has argued, the concept of neoliberalism carries so many different meanings, which it then magically stitches together into an apparently dominant and harmonious formation. Neoliberalism is defined as new forms of capital accumulation, as the expansion of the reach of corporate capitalism, and as “the indirect economization of areas of social and political life” (Clarke 2009). Sometimes neoliberalism is an economic project; at other times, it appears to be an ideological project, and at still others, a form of governmentality. It is, at times, about fiscal policy, or monetarism, or global imperialism, or labor markets, or corporate governance and profits, etc. What are we to make of Dagnino’s (cited in Clarke 2009) observation of “the ‘perverse confluence’ between key organizing ideas and principles of social movements and neoliberal politics, especially those of ‘participation’ and ‘citizenship’  ”? Whatever it is, the question is how is it dis- and re-articulated to existing practices, projects, and discourses, or into specific—old and new—configurations? And if it is being articulated, and even doing some of the work of articulation, how does this affect its own identity? But the discourses of neoliberalism seem to make the work of conjunctural diagnosis even more difficult, because neoliberalism has become an adjective that can be placed in front of almost anything. It is a term—certainly not a concept—that “lets us off the hook”—and we would Considering Value  141

be better off without it unless its meaning is always specified and contextually located.29 This line of work (which must be followed) sees conjunctural analysis as a reassembling of the fragments that have resulted from the euro-modern breakup of the social totality into distinct and (relatively) autonomous domains or spheres, which are continuously subsequently reified in a wide range of discourses and practices (even as they are intersected by and articulated to all sorts of other ways in which other differences and divisions have been produced and are productive within the social formation). Yet this very practice can end up reproducing the contours and configurations of euromodernity itself. Even when recognizing that the economy is constructed— socially, politically, and culturally, we can continue “isolating” the economy, and sometimes, almost involuntarily it seems, privileging it. Alternatively, or perhaps alongside this effort, we need to explore the ways, the work by which, the economy is apparently “disembedded” from other forms of social practices in order to construct not only “economically relevant practices” but also “the economy.” This disentanglement has actually been the primary labor of the discipline of economics for some time now. Moreover, the historical fact that such a domain is produced as apparently relatively autonomous does not mean that “the economy” does not continue to be embedded within and articulated by its relations in the totality. Nor does it guarantee for us the best way to understand its functioning within that totality. Analyzing and perhaps challenging the work by which “the economy ” is disembedded is not merely a matter of internally differentiating the economy, or recognizing that it encompasses different and even contradictory formations and developments. It is not sufficient to recognize the “assembling” or constructing of the economy and economically relevant activities, or simply to abandon the assumption that the dynamics of the economy are completely internal. As I have said, we have to see that the category of the economic, the distribution of practices into or out of the category, as well as the possible effects of including or excluding practices from the category are not pre-given, not guaranteed, apart from the complex relations that constitute the conjuncture. Of course, a great deal depends here on how one constitutes the conjuncture. There are really at least two distinct questions for a cultural studies of economies condensed here. First, we must explain the apparently privileged place of the economic constituted in euro-modernities. How are specific apparatuses and assemblages inserted into and located within the social for142  Chapter Three

mation in ways that assign them particular sorts of identities, privilege, and power, enabling them to produce particular kinds of effects and determinations? This question raises, in a different way, the problem of determination and autonomy and points us, I hope, to a way of avoiding some of the limits of a concept of relative autonomy. Second, what is the nature of what we might describe as a certain “conjunctural dominance” that the economic has had, that is sometimes what is referenced by the term “neoliberalism”?30 Mitchell (1998, 91) poses the question, “If the economy is just a discursive construction . . . the question arises why it has become so powerful,” although one need not agree that anything is just a discursive construction. Presumably, it is this latter conjunctural question that Bauman (2000, 4) is pointing to: “ The melting of solids led to the progressive untying of economy from its traditional political, ethical and cultural entanglements,” although one could be forgiven for asking whether this untying of entanglements did not happen long before. Another way of distinguishing these questions would be to contrast, as a hypothesis, three “states” of the economy (figured here for convenience’s sake as the market): (1) the market as embedded in social relations (this does not mean that there is no “economic” category but that, at the very least, the boundaries are blurred and changing); (2) the market as a disembedded system of social relations, the euro-modern economy; and (3) the market as something other than social relations, as doubly disembedded, in the contemporary conjuncture (one might think here of the way the finance market has operated—e.g., derivatives—or at least, has imagined itself to operate).31 Similarly, I assume that it is some variant of this second question— although not the same timeline exactly—that Mitchell (1998, 84) is addressing in his somewhat controversial claim that the sense of “economy” commonly taken for granted dates back only to the 1930s. He argues that this modern sense of economy is the result of the application of early twentieth-century theories of mechanics/physics, which enabled economists to “imagine growth . . . as an internal intensification of the totality of relations defining the economy as an object,” which in turn made the economy into “a field of operations for new powers of planning, regulations, statistical enumeration and representation” (91).32 One could argue that he is conflating the two moments of euro-modernity when he describes the taken-for-granted meaning as “the structure or totality of relations of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services within a given country or regime” (82); or as a “self-evident totality” (88), a general structure of economic relations. Considering Value  143

I have no doubt that Mitchell is correct that the early twentieth century saw a significant transformation of “the economy ” and that it was subjected to new forms of governmentality based partly on the new demands for and technologies of data collection. But within the longer historical set of articulations, this is only one—and not the most current—rearticulation of the euro-modern construction of the economy as an isolatable totality and an object of governmental power. On this reading, Mitchell is both right and wrong—wrong that the economy was first constructed as an autonomous totality in the 1930s, but right that the nature of its totalization and its autonomization was significantly reconfigured in the 1930s. My argument is that the reconfiguration of the forms of disembeddedness of the economic, in the first half of the twentieth century, was the continuing expression of the struggle to establish what I call liberal modernity, while we have witnessed, in later decades, more significant changes in the context of struggles against liberal modernity. But Mitchell is certainly correct that it is important to ask what can be excluded as standing outside the sphere of the economy. Among the most obvious answers in the past have been, ironically, the household, the state, and the culture! Mitchell’s argument (1998, 93) then is an attack on economic essentialism: “ The conception and arrangement of the economy as a self-contained sphere requires from the beginning and at every point, in every interaction and exchange, the maintaining of a difference between the monetary and non-monetary, the economic and the personal, the public and the private.”33 In this way, Mitchell also locates the question of the economy within the larger problematic of modernity. Perhaps then it might make sense to look at earlier historical work on the “construction” of modern economies in modern Europe. I want to draw upon the work of Polanyi (2001) and Braudel (1977), without trying to adjudicate the differences between them and without intending to accept their histories completely. Both Polanyi and Braudel start by recognizing that, prior to the advent of modernity and capitalism—and even, in a sense, continuing on into them (especially for Braudel), the economy rests upon (and initially is dispersed into) material or daily life (as habitual and routinized, for Braudel), and into systems of social relationships (for Polanyi). Both Polanyi and Braudel map out a history of the emergence (or production) of markets, market economies, and, eventually, capitalism; it is crucial to their work that one holds on to the differences and distances among these formations, as well as among the various formations of markets, including 144  Chapter Three

local, municipal, regional, national, and international. Neither figure thinks it is appropriate to think of markets at their most local as located within something that we could call an economy. Such markets exhibited limited competition, and were created and controlled by state regulation. Polanyi in fact agues that regulation and markets grew together, the former serving to protect labor and land from becoming objects of commerce. As the commodity chains grew and lengthened, national and long-distance public markets were institutionalized as sites for competitive and transparent exchange (in which economic agents function as “price-takers”). While Braudel argues that such markets freed themselves from systems of regulation, Polanyi emphasizes the ways in which “free trade” required an increase in central interventions and regulations. But such market economies are not yet capitalism, which only begins to emerge as a result of international trade and depends on the creation of a network of “external,” private, “counter-,” or anti-markets, which avoid transparency and regulation in establishing a different regime of competition. In these markets, economic agents in the form of firms use techniques of planning to manipulate supply and demand in order to make rather than take prices. But even such unregulated markets, marking “the birth of capitalism,” are “unthinkable without society ’s active complicity” (Braudel 1977, 62).34 Braudel argues that until the eighteenth century, only a small mi­ nority of European populations were affected by even a precapitalist market economy. Both agree that early modern economists often conflated market economies and capitalism, studying the former as if they were sufficient descriptions of the latter (although they differ over how to describe this assumed equivalence and the difference). Finally, both identify the emergence of modern capitalism, which Braudel (1977, 46) claims, “in its broadest sense . . . dates from the beginning of the 20th century,” but which Polanyi locates much earlier, with the existence of a self-regulating system of markets, directed only by market prices without any outside interference or help. Yet both recognize that such an independent economy was in fact dependent on society. In Polanyi’s view, society had to be reshaped to allow the economic system to function according to its own laws.35 And in Braudel’s terms, the “economy can only be understood in terms of the other ensembles” (64). Capitalism is, he suggests, “essentially conjunctural . . . it flourishes according to the dictates of changes” in the social situation (61). Ironically, while Polanyi assumes capitalism was enabled by the institutional separation of the economic and Considering Value  145

political spheres, so that the state could no longer prevent land, labor, and money from becoming (“fictitious”) commodities, Braudel argues (64) just as convincingly that “capitalism only triumphs when it becomes identified with the state,” when it literally becomes the state.36 At the same time, the limit of their work is that they continue to believe capitalism’s story of itself—that it consists of a self-regulating system of markets. It is the story itself that needs to be deconstructed and retold. One of the ambiguities in both Polanyi and Braudel revolves around the question of whether, despite historicizing the “economy,” they take the economic for granted; they do seem to know in advance the distinction between “the economic” and the non-economic, which is often too easily identified as the social (conflating one domain or field of the social formation with the totality). Yet for both of them, the economic per se is itself constituted only within the social history they recount, so that it is only within capitalism that we can understand the economy as a system of production and distribution. In other words, the production of capitalism, as well as the production of a specific category of the economic, can only be understood conjuncturally at the intersection of forms of knowledge, forms of control (including governmental), and forms of technology. Yet at the same time, one cannot help feeling that Polanyi and Braudel do, in some sense, take the category of the economic for granted, that they trace its continuing existence—as an institution in process—through the long duree of European history. Thus, while this history of capitalism (and the economy) is usually told as a story of the disembedding of the economy from its intimate imbrications within the social totality, I believe that what we see here, and what I want to take away, is a story about a complex and changing set of relations of embeddedness and disembeddedness, a story of embedded disembeddedness. For as much as the economy is disembedded from the social formation, it never entirely escapes, and, eventually, it even turns around and claims to reincorporate it.37 Polanyi offers an account of how this is set into motion, for the result of capitalism is, in part, the production of pauperism and poverty, the immiseration of the great mass of producers, which is not apparently deducible from the laws of the market.38 It is this very failure that demands that the economy be put under the authority of nature, while, simultaneously, calling for the construction of the social through the need to manage or govern poverty. This also partly explains the need to postulate scarcity as a secondary constitutive principle for the construction of economic value in euro-modernity, so that the economy must always produce the very scarcity 146  Chapter Three

the demands of which it fulfills. But we do have here a sense of how modern capitalism and euro-modernity are haunted by society and the social insofar as they require all sorts of interventions designed to govern the reproduction and functioning of the working class—and other classes—in rational ways. The question to be posed to economics—as both discourse and practice— in a context in which the modern itself has become the political problematic thus seems to require us to begin by asking how the mode of the existence of the economic in the modern is changing or being changed. Using Braudel and Polanyi, the answer involves the changing but still paradoxical forms of an embedded disembeddedness. To put it simply, there is no autonomous economy, and even the more limited claim of relative autonomy gives away too much of the farm. In other words, there is a kind of double articulation: specific forms of disembeddedness are constructed through forms of embeddedness and, in turn, they construct other forms of embeddedness through which its disembeddedness is sustained and dispersed through the formation. The privileged place of economics in euro-modernities is constituted by the particular form of its embedded disembeddedness, a form that is both similar to and different from the forms of existence of the other euromodern supposedly autonomous domains—culture and politics (the state). We cannot assume that the forms or degrees of that autonomy are the same across domains (e.g., the economy is privileged as having an almost absolute autonomy), or even that they remain the same for any one domain (e.g., culture has increasingly moved from a transcendental autonomy to a form of quotidienization). Thus, the assumption of the economy as disembedded goes beyond the observation of the fragmentation and reification of the various social domains or levels in euro-modernity, for even within this structure, there is something unique about “the economy.” This has been described in many ways, but perhaps the most obvious sign of this uniqueness is the range of stories, or genealogies, that are told, without any apparent need for or possibility of adjudication. For example, Dumont (1977) argues that the economy is made to appear as a consistent whole of interrelated parts, but it is also externalized as a natural phenomenon. Similarly, Mitchell’s (1988) genealogy of the economy, while recognizing that the economy as an object “does not always exist,” that it is “formed as a new object in the context of broader developments” (141), nevertheless rightly singles out the economy insofar as it becomes “disembedded from other Considering Value  147

spheres and functions in the modern period” (88). And again, Charles Taylor (2004, 76) talks about the economy as “an interlocking set of activities of production, exchange and consumption, which form a system with its own laws and dynamics,” and claims that “conceiving of the economy as a system is an achievement of eighteenth century theory . . . but coming to see the most important purpose and agenda of society as economic collaboration and exchange is a drift in our social imaginary that begins in that period and continues to this day.” The starting point of any effort to take up economics within cultural studies has to be the fact that economies or, better, certain practices and relations, are constituted as “economic” per se (and even as particular sorts of economic forms) contextually; the line between the economic and noneconomic is constructed, however porous and fluid that line may be, and hence the assumption of economic essentialism—that there is some stable, natural, and universal distinction to be drawn between economic practices and non-economic ones—is untenable. Consider the various ways in which the economic has been defined in the context of modern capitalist economies: as a certain structure of relations (e.g., the circuit of production and consumption as an interlocking set of activities governed by its own dynamics and its own laws); as the production of value; or as a particular form of relationship. There are of course many possibilities for such constitutive relations, including reciprocity (a symmetrical relation), redistribution (as in tribute economies or socialism), householding, communal sharing, and gift relations. I assume that most people would assert that the specificity of the modern economy is defined by the specificity of the form of exchange. But it cannot be exchange per se, for there are many forms of exchange relations that are not allowed to be “economic,” including communication, love, sexuality, domesticity, etc. What we mean by exchange then is really market relationality, understood as the inevitable harmonization of interests implicit in Adam Smith’s invisi­ble hand of the market—a notion of a social harmonization of self-interests by an invisible mechanism—which leads him to conclude that the economy has a normative character of its own and is beneficent if left to itself. That is, exchange—and hence the economic—presupposes that such relations are beneficial to both parties, however unintended.39 Dumont (1977, 35), for example, suggests, “ To think of exchange as advantageous to both parties represented a basic change and signaled the advent of economics.” This rests, he concludes, on the postulation of an inner consistency oriented 148  Chapter Three

to the good of men. Charles Taylor suggests that the eighteenth century saw a new “appreciation of the way human life is designed to produce mutual benefits”—what he calls “invisible hand” factors: “ The crucial thing in the new conception is that our purposes mesh, however divergent they may be in the conscious awareness of each of us. They involve us in an exchange of advantage” (2004, 70). But, importantly, Taylor slides from the idea of an “exchange of advantage,” which takes place behind any particular relationships, to a notion that “humans are engaged in an exchange of services” (71), which is, to say the least, a very different matter. So a basic assumption, then, seems to be that the economy as a modern object is constituted on the basis of an assumed social benefit of the individual actualization of value in a specific social relationship. But such a definition is not only circular, it is also self-contradictory, since by definition it cannot deal with the possibility, in fact the inevitability, of market failure (and the inevitable production of scarcity, poverty, and inequality). Let me return to the question of embedded disembeddedness. As I have said repeatedly, while that “autonomy ” is constructed, it is not illusory, since it has real effects. Despite the economy ’s apparent disembeddness, it continues to be embedded within and relationally constituted by the social formation. It is not only both embedded and disembedded, its embeddedness defines its disembeddedness. This poses a real dilemma. As I asked at the end of the last chapter: How can something be effectively disembedded by its very embeddedness? How can something be produced as self-producing? Asking the question in this way allows us to avoid an easy—and mistaken— solution: namely, the claim that once it is produced as self-producing, its dependence upon the larger context ceases—that once it comes to be disembedded, it is no longer embedded. But the paradox of the economic is precisely that it is continuously produced as self-producing, or if one prefers, the nature of its relational existence is such that it is made to operate— in some way—independently of that relationality. I say in some way because clearly it is not independent of its place within and its relations to the complexity of the social formation. That is, claims of its disembeddedness are true and yet not true, since it is always relationally implicated in the totality. Finally, recognizing the contextuality of the economic means that we must rethink the ways we think about the effect of the economic on the social totality, and on various other formations within it. It means, at the very least, rejecting any form of economism—the assertion that the economic, Considering Value  149

no matter how or even how complexly it is understood, is always the motor force of history and social change—precisely because it oversimplifies the complex relations between economic formations and other productive and expressive aspects, agencies, or formations active in the conjuncture. Economics as a discipline confronts us with the danger of underestimating the sociality or relationality of the economic, focusing entirely on its disembeddedness. Anthropology often confronts us with the danger of overestimating the sociality or relationality of the economic, by focusing almost entirely on its embeddedness. The challenge is to consider the different and changing forms of both the embeddedness and the disembeddedness of the economic, as well as the forms of the articulations between the two “modes of being” which actually constitute the economic. The matter is not so simple as denying that the economy is autonomous, since the very imperialism of disciplinary economics (especially, e.g., in its neoclassical form), which claims to be able to describe and intervene into the entirety of the social formation, seems to both depend on and negate that autonomy. It is in fact a kind of imperialism that constitutes the neoclassical hegemony in the form of the “rational expectations revolution.” Thus, Dumont (1977, 294) writes, “A standard neoclassical micro level tool was applied to the macro context to explain a phenomenon [stagflation] and a policy failure at the aggregate level.” Similarly, Becker’s (1978) view of economics as a method of analysis that can be applied to all human behavior involving choice, on the basis of an assumption that individuals maximize welfare as they conceive it, suggests a move back to embeddedness, albeit of a radically different kind. Continuing the task, the question is how the form of economic embedded disembeddedness has become a site of struggle, how it is changing in ways that privilege and empower the discourses of economics (if not the practices) to behave in particularly imperialistic and expansionist ways. In trying to incorporate economies into a better story of the contemporary conjuncture, we might begin by hypothesizing that in the contemporary conjuncture, the paradoxical mode of existence of the economic has itself become visible and self-conscious, so that the economic is experienced both as something outside of, greater than, and even in control of the social and, at the same time, as the very medium of our lived reality. The economy ’s effectivity is not in its disembeddedness, but rather it is precisely the result of its new forms of embeddedness, as the place where history is being made and the locus of our sense of ourselves and change. 150  Chapter Three

In euro-modernity, and especially in liberal modernity, culture, both specifically as aesthetic or expressive texts and more generally as language or communication, was privileged as the domain in which people understood themselves, experienced and gave meaning to the historical and political changes and challenges of their lives. Moreover, in liberal modernity, culture came to be seen as the crucial domain in which history itself was being made and experienced, and resistance was being, at least possibly, organized. In Althusser’s (1970) terms, the question is what domain is becoming “dominant”40—of where the leading edge of political transformation, historical change, and lived reality is to be located. But I am suggesting that in the contemporary conjuncture, culture’s position is being weakened in favor of the economic. The economic is becoming the domain in which history is made and experienced and resistance defined. Even more, I am hypothesizing that the significant locus of the constitution and experience of change is in the economic and economies41—but I do not think this is simply equivalent to the (mistaken) claim of an economization of social life. I will suggest in the next chapter that there is an emergent “structure of feeling” that is being constituted within and is constitutive of the domain of economics “directly,” increasingly foregrounding matters of what we have to call economic culture. And this partly grounds, I think, the saliency of cultural economy as a set of concerns. But at the same time, if we are to make sense of such changes, we must give up a vision of the social formation as comprised of separate levels or domains and seek a new practice of conjunctural thinking. Value and Commensuration In this final section I want to offer a possible conjuncturalist reconsideration of the economic, and of its place in the contemporary conjuncture (see Grossberg 2010). I will begin by providing a brief summary of the labor theory of economic value, concluding that we have to contextualize this theory of value. I will then consider value more generally, which will lead me to distinguish between two dimensions of the question of value—production and commensuration—and I will propose that “commensuration” defines the economic, as an aspect of every practice, as the force of a line that traverses the conjuncture. I will conclude by arguing that at least a part of the contemporary conjunctural crisis is laid out as a dispersed set of crises on the line of commensuration. Considering Value  151

It is not my intention to provide a detailed overview of the history of the theory of (economic) value, but to provide just enough historical background so that one can understand something about the terms of agreement and disagreement that have so strongly shaped its development into the present. Even within the economic domain, value points to any number of issues: value in use (in Adam Smith’s terms), or use value, which points to questions of utility or usefulness and has sometimes been explicated in terms of what one is willing to give up in order to have particular (use) value; value in exchange (again, in Smith’s terms), or exchange value, which is generally thought of in terms of what one has to trade in order to acquire something—what quantity of other commodities it will exchange for. Sometimes, exchange value is assumed to be equated with, or at least measured by, some notion of price, such as Smith’s “natural price,” Marx’s “price of production,” and what others have called the “cost-determined price.” The question of how exchange value is linked to price raises all sorts of questions in its own right, often referred to as the “transformation problem.” Prior to Adam Smith, the dominant theories of value were those of the physiocrats, who argued that all value was anchored in the land, that land was the only source of value, and the mercantilists, who equated value with capital or bullion. The result of both of these theories, but even more for the mercantilists, was that the sum total of global value was taken to be finite and unchangeable. So growth in one economy entailed loss somewhere else. Adam Smith (1723–1790), whose work is subject to many interpretations, began by rejecting not only these capital theories of value but also existing utility theories of value. To a certain extent, classical liberal economic theory begins by recognizing that use value and exchange value are, for all practical purposes, independent of one another, and that this results in a paradox of value, what Smith (2003) referred to as the paradox of diamonds and water. After all, Smith argued, diamonds have a very high exchange value but little or no use value (he did not know of their industrial use, but, in any case, that does not account for their exchange value), while water, which has a very high use value (it is after all necessary for survival) has—at least until recently—very low exchange value. In Ronald Meek’s (1956) highly influential reading of the history of the theory of value and marxism, Smith took a great step forward by postulating that the exchange of commodities is an exchange of activities, that value is produced as a result of relations among men as producers, making value itself into a social relationship. As a result, Smith proposed a labor theory of 152  Chapter Three

value, which suggested that the labor used to produce a commodity is the source of its value (without necessarily constituting the substance or quantity) of its value. That is to say, a commodity acquires value because of, but not necessarily to the extent that it is a product of social labor. But the real measure of the value of a commodity, according to Smith, is the condition of its exchange such that the quantity of value of the commodity is defined by what Smith called its “commandable labor,” that is, by the quantity of wage-labor which its sale on the market will enable one to purchase or command in the market. Hence, Smith offered what can be called a qualitative but not a quantitative labor theory of value. However, according to Meek, Smith also argued that, in more advanced market economies, the market price is no longer even proportionate to the labor costs, since the value of goods will now have to include compensation for the owners of the means of production. This raises a fundamental question for Smith: given that he denies that labor costs regulate market value, and given the distance between embodied labor and commanded labor, how is profit itself possible or calculable? David Ricardo (1772–1823) in part responds to this dilemma, arguing that Smith confused value and wages, and hence value and price. Ricardo affirms that the necessary starting point for any theory of value must be the determination of value by labor time. The value of a good, its exchange value, is proportional to the amount of labor that is required to produce it, as long as the quantity of labor is not identified with wages. This absolute value is therefore invariable. But the “natural price,” the monetary expression of its relative value, Ricardo argued, is determined by the cost of production, which includes a measure of profit at some determined average rate. Karl Marx enters into this discourse, offering a critique of both Smith’s and Ricardo’s presumption that the economy (including value and price on the one hand, and Homo economicus on the other hand) is naturally given, even as he continued to operate within some of its discursive and calculative logics. Again, following Meek’s influential text, Marx argued that the relations of exchange—the apparent locus of exchange value—are determined by relations of production; or, in other terms, the mode of value of commodity exchange depends upon the mode of exchange of the productive forces (labor). In some ways, this repeats Smith’s and Ricardo’s labor theory of value. At least a part of Marx’s contribution to this argument, however, was to develop a quantitative analysis of the law of value, in order to understand the “qualitative and quantitative connections between productive Considering Value  153

relations and exchange relations under commodity production in general and capitalist commodity production in particular” (Meek 1956, xiv).42 Marx defined value (or the value-form) as the shared characteristic of the exchange values of all commodities; it is a representation of the labor embodied in the commodity in the course of production, both the living labor that went into its production and the dead labor embodied in the means of production used by that living labor. More accurately, it is the representation of the (average) socially necessary labor time. Marx also reproduces the distinction between use value and exchange value, where the former is the representation/embodiment of “concrete” labor power (or labor-time) while the latter, exchange value, as the appearance or expression of value in trade, is defined by abstract labor power (or time). The former, which is determined in some sense as a response to needs and wants, is the site of true material wealth, according to Marx. These two forms of value are held together, measured against each other as it were, in the commodity. For Marx, capitalism is made possible by (and defined by) the commodification of labor power, so that labor power itself has its own value, measured by the value of all the goods and services required for laborers to be able to continue selling their labor power. Such commodification enables the existence of “surplus labor” and the production of “surplus value” because the “use value” of labor exceeds its exchange value even though labor power is bought at its value. In other words, its use adds surplus value, value over and above its own value. Meek suggests that one must read Marx’s theory in Das Capital in a slightly more complicated way, since, he argues, Marx describes three distinct logical—not exactly historical—stages of his analysis. The first two are to be found in the first volume of Capital. The first describes a society based on simple commodity production, when people engage in specific commodity production and exchange. Under these conditions, the equilibrium prices will tend to be proportional to the quantities of labor normally used to produce them. The second stage involves the introduction of capitalism, when capital subordinates labor on the basis of the technical conditions in which capital finds labor—that is, what is commonly referred to as primitive accumulation—but we might recognize, contrary to Meek’s apparent assumption, that capital actually produces these technical conditions through acts of violence (such as the enclosures in England). As a result, capital creates a new form of class income—surplus value—where the profits are pro-

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portional to the quantities of labor employed rather than to the quantities of capital employed. But, Meek argues, there is a third stage, only minimally outlined in the third volume of Capital, and in this stage Marx seems to agree with Smith that a new type of explanation is necessary for prices in developed capitalism. Surplus value has been transformed into profit, and profit is proportional to the quantity of capital employed, and the price is defined not in relation to value but to the “price of production.” In this stage of “capitalistically” modified commodity relations, the question of value is redirected to consider how the labor-capital relations of production determine the distribution of the national income between wages and profits. Marx still assumes a fundamental relationship between labor value and equilibrium prices, albeit a different one: “Since the total profits is by definition equal to the total surplus value, it naturally follows that . . . the sum of the values is equal to the sum of the prices of production, or, to put the same thing in another way, that the deviations of prices from values . . . cancel one another out ” (Meek 1956, 191). Finally, Meek appeals to “Marx’s rather complex analysis of the ‘elementary,’ ‘expanded’ and ‘money’ forms of value. . . . Essentially, what he is trying to do here is to reveal the contradictions which results from the reciprocal interaction . . . and to demonstrate the nature of the solutions of these contradictions which logic—and history—demand and provide” (1956, 173– 74). This seems to point to a more contextualized theory of values,43 a call that has been eloquently argued by Massey (1995). Ruccio and Amariglio (2003, 184) have suggested that “there is no general form—hence no general laws or principles—of market economy. . . . Each market . . . each manner in which market value is determined must be understood contextually.” It is one of the ironic failures of both cultural studies and too much marxist theory, since both share a commitment to radical contextuality, or, in the latter’s terms, historical specificity, that they have failed to treat political economy itself—and in particular the labor theory of value—as a contingent and contextually grounded theory. After all, Marx himself did project that, “As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour-time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence, exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value” (1973, 705). He even located such a transformation in the very nature of value more concretely:

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But to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose “powerful effectiveness” is itself . . . out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology. . . . Real wealth manifests itself, rather . . . in the monstrous disproportion between the labour time applied and its product, as well as in the qualitative imbalance between labour, reduced to a pure abstraction, and the power of the production process it superintends.” (704–5)

The most original and important effort to date to present a radically contextualist reading of Marx’s theory of value is offered by Moishe Postone (1993). Although I have no reason to think Postone would affiliate himself with cultural studies, this is exactly what I want to do, to suggest that cultural studies must embrace a radically contextual theory of value and, hence, a radically contextual reading of Marx’s labor theory of value. Stuart Hall (2003a, 116) has already suggested that cultural studies must follow this route, by arguing that the very notion of abstract labor, on which Marx ’s labor theory of value depends, must itself be taken as a historically specific category: “There is no ‘production-in-general’: only distinct forms of production, specific to time and conditions. One of these distinct forms is, rather confusingly, ‘general production’: production based on a type of labour, which is not specific to a particular branch of production, but which has been ‘generalized’: abstract labour.” He thus poses the question, key to Marx, of “ ‘the form under which value becomes exchange value’ . . . which are peculiar to specific historical conditions (the forms and conditions of commodity-production).” Postone argues that understanding Marx’s theory of value requires separating wealth from its specific form based on a particular determinate form of social relation (i.e., of mediation)—namely, value based on the expenditure of abstract labor time. Consequently, we must understand value, as Marx used it, to be “a historically specific and transitory category of social wealth intrinsically related to a historically specific mode of production” (1993, 25). Postone argues that there is a widespread misreading of Marx, which sees capitalism as a transformation of the mode of distribution—the exchange of labor power for wages—while assuming a given mode of production—industrial production—based on value as the source of wealth.44 156  Chapter Three

Consequently, the marxist critique has generally been assumed to be a critique of social relations from the standpoint of labor. But, he queries (43), what if Marx’s theory is “a historically specific critical theory of modern capitalist society—one that rests upon a critique of labor, of the form of mediation and of the mode of producing in that society?” In that case, Marx’s critique of capitalism is a critique of a particular form of mediation, of the social character of labor as a historically determinate social relationship. Thus, for Postone, the critical issue is not the distribution of wealth but the form of wealth itself. Marx’s analysis and privilege of the commodity in his theory is based on its double structure: it is “simultaneously a use value for the other and a means of exchange for the producer” (Postone 1993, 148). Labor itself is similarly doubled, as concrete and abstract labor, which can then be seen, according to Postone, to be historically specific categories of a “determinate form of social interdependence” (149). It is in the commodity that the two forms of labor are embodied and bound together. As a result, “labor itself constitutes a social mediation in lieu of overt social relations” (151), or in other worlds, labor appears to mediate itself, to provide its own grounding, and, as a result, value—as understood in Marx—can be seen to be a general and socially total form of mediation. Since labor as this total and selfgrounded mediation necessarily objectifies itself in commodities, the social relations that are the essential character of capitalist society can only exist in objectified form. Further, this duality (of labor, of the commodity) is externalized once more in the relationship between the commodity and money, a doubling through which the commodity, a thing to be used (up) is socially mediated by money, which appears (again) as a universal mediation in and of itself, a total and self-grounded mediation in the form of a social relationship. Value is a self-distributing form of wealth that appears not to be mediated by other forms of social relations (such as forms of material wealth). Thus, Postone concludes (167), “ value is an objectification not of labor per se but of a historically specific function of labor. Labor does not play such a role in other social formations, or does so only marginally.” To put it in the simplest terms for a moment, Postone argues that Marx’s labor theory of value is specific to a particular mode of production—industrial capitalism—and that Marx himself foresaw the coming of another configuration of capitalism in which the specific organization of value, the specific deployment of labor, and the specific form of wealth that preoccupied the first volume of Capital would no longer serve as a viable analysis. Considering Value  157

As a result, Postone argues, even more controversially, that Marx’s critique of capitalism was not a critique of commodified social relations from the perspective of labor (since the duality of labor is intimately connected to the form of the commodity as well as of wealth itself).45 I do not mean to suggest that labor as the source of value, and the commodity as its doubled embodiment, is now irrelevant to questions of economic value, or that industrial capitalism no longer exists.46 I need only to suggest that it is not the only regime of economic value production.47 After all, at the very least, however one conceptualizes economies within a conjuncture, they are more complex and multiple than many descriptions assume. One cannot assume, in advance of the empirical work of conjunctural analysis, that labor has been or is being completely displaced by other logics and sources of value; but it seems obvious that it is being challenged in a variety of ways and places. I am not sure what an analysis of the conjuncture will conclude about such struggles, logics, and sources. Contemporary theorizations of immaterial labor (see, e.g., Lazzarato 1996), while perhaps contributing to a more contextual understanding of the nature and production of value in the current conjuncture, seem at best partial (often sounding as if mental labor has not been crucial in previous configurations of capitalism) and strikingly more theoretical than empirical. My point lies elsewhere: it is simply that the uncertainly of the role of labor in the production of value—expressed and made visible in at least some of the discourses and practices of the neoclassical and financial redirections of the global capitalist economy—is contributing to a sense of uncertainty and crisis, as well as a series of struggles around conceptions and practices of value. Let me now pose the question of value in broader terms by asserting that “value” appears across the entire spectrum of human life. Consider the various appearances of the category of value. First, value is a matter of representation, whether in semiotics, where it refers to meaningful differences, or in mathematics, where is refers to the specification of a variable. Second, obviously, it appears in economics, where value is, to quote Graeber (2001, 1), “the degree to which objects are desired, particularly as measured by how much others are willing to give up to get them”—which might be generalized to the question of how little one would wish to give up the things one desires. For Graeber (9), what economists call value is “the promise of pleasure.” But, in treating value in such terms, not only do economists reduce social relations to objects, they treat economic values as always instrumental. 158  Chapter Three

Third, there are a number of realms, such as ethics or aesthetics, where value purportedly marks the presence of or measures the degree of some quality. Such qualities are often taken to be immanent within the object, even while it is assumed to be transcendent of any particular instance. Graeber (2001, 34) describes this as a measure of a degree of singularity, which at least in some realms translates into the “capacity to accumulate a history.” Fourth, value functions in what we might call the personal/ social/cultural realms in terms of the question of what is good or desirable. Kluckholm (cited in Graeber 2001, 3) describes this as the conceptions that influence the choices people make between different possible courses of action: culture as value refers to the principles, standards, or qualities that guide human action. This is similar to what Stuart Hall (1981) identifies as “the popular,” the logics of calculation by which people decide how to live their lives. Unfortunately, such descriptions, like theories of ideologies, often leave unanswered important questions about the degree of importance or investment in such “values.” However, Graeber’s subsumption of such issues into the need for a “theory of motivation” mistakenly leads us into psychologies rather than into broader ontologies of affect, but that is a question for the next chapter. These broader discourses of value seem to move us from the question of labor as the production of use/exchange value to a recognition that the enormous multiplicity of human practices, always embodying and embedded in social relations, are always creative. As Graeber puts it (2001, 45), every practice is a “statement ” that makes visible a relative distribution/investment of time, energy, concern, and intelligence. Such investments are always embodied in value forms, which define the ways people represent the meanings and importance of their actions in tangible forms as “objects” of desire and value. But most important, every action makes visible a possibility of a (transformative) difference that already exists as a potential (47). A general theory of value suggests that all human activity produces value: value constitutes the effectivity of the social; it is the very being of the social, the effectivity of all social practices. I want to suggest here—without getting too far afield into an ontology of value—one way of making sense of this claim. Value is the presencing of the actual as opening onto the virtual. It organizes the tension between the virtual and the actual by always showing that the virtual exceeds the actual. Value can be thought of as the actualization of potentiality as potentiality, or the presencing of the virtual as virtual. That is, value is the making present of the actual as an opening onto the Considering Value  159

virtual, as always actualizing more than the actual. Value is the production of a surplus (i.e., that is not the actual), so that value is the production of the real as always greater than, in excess of, the actual.48 Surplus here defines a logic of coding that produces another logic of difference, of otherness, which does not necessarily reproduce the logic of negativity of euro-modernity. In such a theory, the specificity of value depends upon the modality of its production, the forms of its articulation of the actual and the virtual—that is, the ways particular virtualities are actualized (to include the virtual as excess) in different contexts. Additionally, I want to connect this idea—that value is always about creative and expanding possibilities—to Hardt and Negri’s (2009) claim that value must be seen as an expression of life, of the power of creation and cooperation, which enables me to at least leave open the (ontological) question of whether it is only human practices that produce value: cannot the world itself produce value? Graeber (2001, 88) is correct, I believe, when he argues that “the ultimate stake of politics . . . is not even the struggle to appropriate value; it is the struggle to establish what value is.” Or, to put it differently, the primary struggle is always how value is produced and how it works in human lives. But one must always locate these questions in a specific conjuncture. In the contemporary conjuncture, too often, the diagnosis is commonly made, almost in advance of any empirical work, that all value is being reduced to exchange value and, even worse, to money itself. This is not a sufficient characterization, if only because such a vision of the present has been put forward for well over a hundred years by many social critics. Thus, Simmel (1991, 23), writing in 1896, suggested that “the continuously required estimation according to monetary value eventually causes this to seem the only valid one; more and more people speed past the specific value of things, which cannot be expressed in terms of money.” And again, “Indeed objects themselves are devalued of their higher significance through their equivalence with this means of exchange” (24). But Simmel (1991, 24) also gave us a direction for thinking further, by distinguishing between “the question of what something is worth . . . [and] . . . the question of how much it is worth.” He recognized that these issues— the production or fact of worthiness, and the comparative measure, translation, or commensuration of that worthiness—are commonly conflated, but argued against this: “Where things are conceived of in their direct relationships to one another—thus not reduced to the common denominator of money—then much more rounding off and comparison of one unit 160  Chapter Three

to another occurs” (28). But I am not sure that such direct relationships are often possible. Consider Simmel’s (25) description of money as what I want to call an apparatus of commensuration: money “has its entire meaning only as a transition. . . . It is only the bridge to definitive values, and one cannot live on a bridge.” We can then distinguish the question of the production and nature of value from its commensuration, where the latter describes a possible dimension of every practice or event. I want to postulate the existence (or lack thereof) of multiple, different commensurating apparatuses, with different “powers.” This idea is perhaps similar to Strathern’s (1999, 166) notion of compensation: “Compensation travels by its own means of evaluation. A transaction which transforms human energies into other values.” As Kirsch (2001, 157) describes it: “Strathern . . . suggests that compensation is like a ‘universal translator’ which, under certain circumstances, can convert anything into wealth.” Let me try to flesh out this notion of commensuration.49 Within euromodernities it is almost universally assumed that commensuration is only possible either (1) by comparing the two terms to be commensurated to a third—stable—term that serves as a standard,50 suggested by Marx’s universal equivalent, or (2) by appealing to the translation, reduction, or homoge­ nization of both terms into another, third, set of terms—what Espeland and Stevens (1998, 314) call a “common metric.” Most theories of value assume that the only way to measure and compare different concrete values (and even more, different forms of concrete value) is to have a third term, a standard to serve as a measure through which equivalence can be defined and established. In economic terms, it is generally assumed that systems (especially as they expand to include multiple commodities or forms of capital) require a universal standard. However, as Marx (1992, 161) warned, “ The commodity that figures as universal equivalent is . . . excluded from the . . . universal relative form of value. If the . . . commodity serving as universal equivalent, were, at the same time, to share in the relative form of value, it would have to serve as its own equivalent.” Spivak (1987, 156) reiterates, “ The commodity which becomes the universal equivalent must be excluded from the commodity function.” It cannot itself become an object to be traded for variable prices in a market; otherwise it would “operate on two registers at once, both measuring and carrying value” (157). Such a theory need not demand a universal and natural standard of measure; it can easily acknowledge that every standard or unit of measure is Considering Value  161

socially produced, and perhaps even arbitrary, but that we must then distinguish between those which are constructed as invariant (there is no market or arbitration to determine how long a meter is) and those which, despite the desire or claim, are not (e.g., money and labor). In these cases, “the unit of measure is itself a product of what it is measuring ” (Dick Bryan, personal correspondence, March 2009). Once we recognize, with Hall and Postone, that labor as a measure of value is itself a historical production, we open the possibility, perhaps even the inevitability, that the universal equivalent will in fact become a commodity with its own relative value. Or, in other words, it seems that the universal standard is an impossibility.51 Povinelli (2001, 320) gets at this dialectical or reductionist notion of commensuration, although I do not agree with her equation of commensuration with (linguistic) translation: “The concept of incommensurability is closely related to linguistic indeterminacy. . . . If indeterminacy refers to the possibility of describing a phenomenon in two or more equally true ways, then incommensurability refers to a state in which two phenomena (or worlds) cannot be compared by a third without producing serious distortion.” Both views see commensuration as a practice of standardization, although Espeland and Stevens (1998, 315) do recognize that commensuration is “a fundamental feature of social life.” Moreover, they celebrate the fact that “commensuration is fundamentally relative”: “It creates relations between attributes or dimensions where value is revealed in the comparison. . . . Commensuration is radically inclusive. . . . The capacity to create relationships between virtually anything is extraordinary ” (317). I would make three modifications here. First, commensuration is the articulation of a particular kind of relationality, always on top of already existing relations, an articulation of an articulation. Second, commensuration is not the production of value but the adequation of values; it is the condition of possibility of appropriation. And third, commensuration is not (necessarily) a matter of meaning, understanding, or translation, although euro-modernity has often defined it as a hermeneutic problem. It is more material—a matter of weighing, of measuring, without necessarily being enumerated or quantified. In fact, I am tempted to say that commensurability is always of the untranslatable, which is what calls commensuration into existence. Commensuration, moreover, can take many forms; there are many logics/apparatuses of commensuration. It can offer forms of equalization, standardization, reduction, relativism, or it can refuse both relativism and all forms of absolutism. It is not a matter of coordination, but the possi162  Chapter Three

bility that enables coordination. Commensuration is not a particular kind of equivalence or mediation, but specific apparatuses construct specific notions of equivalence or mediation, including the possibility of mediation without negation or dialectics. I suggest that the actual utility of value, as a calculation of comparative worthiness, entails that any specific value enter into relations of comparative exchange, that there are powerful apparatuses or logics of commensuration, but that not all such exchanges are economic (markets, money). Only through such mediations can value itself become actualized and recognized. That is, exchange (or commensuration) is not a value-producing, but a value-translating apparatus, and these are not the same sorts of apparatuses. Moreover, different exchange-formations may have different powers, ranging from the ability to serve as a universal equivalent, measuring and commensurating any and all values, to more limited and particular possibilities of translation. Such commensurating apparatuses can be seen, I suggest, as a particular embodiment of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) apparatuses of capture. Such apparatuses put into relation (1) a measure of value, establishing a ground of equivalence that allows for comparison; and (2) a medium of value, establishing a ground of difference that allows for evaluation (“exchange”); in order to (3) actualize a surplus.52 In comparison, differences are equalized in order to be compared. In appropriation, differences are weighed and measured. But the comparison, which creates a general space, always presupposes the appropriation, which creates a mobile center, even as the appropriation can only follow the comparison. The apparatus of capture, precisely through the appropriation across an equivalence, produces (captures) a difference or excess—such as surplus labor, profit, rent, etc. In this way it produces the consistency of an assemblage that is never merely a homogenization. Thus, “surplus labor is not that which exceeds labor; on the contrary, labor is that which is subtracted from surplus labor and presupposes it. It is only in this context that one may speak of labor value” (1987, 442). This is the semiological operation par excellence.53 Actually, I am tempted to suggest that such an apparatus of capture is a particular sort—a capitalist sort—of commensurating apparatus, given the limits Deleuze and Guattari seem to impose on the two convergent operations: comparisons are always direct and appropriation is always monopolistic.54 It may help to illuminate the concept of commensuration by looking for a moment at the relation between economics and calculation, through a Considering Value  163

reconsideration (and maybe rescuing) of at least a part of the argument of the Austrian theorists (of course, they thought of themselves as liberals). I think we have allowed Milton Friedman (and his political allies) too much power to define the argument between Keynes and the Austrian economists;55 in general, and especially in the context of the financial crisis of 2007–?, the argument is often glossed as a dispute between fiscal and monetary policy as the two mutually exclusive poles of economic policy and imagination. But there is another, in fact more important dimension to their difference, which goes back to the “socialist calculation debates” over the role of the price mechanism and the possibility of planning. The simple version of the Keynes/neoclassical dispute is that the latter believed that all uncertainty could be reduced to measurable risk, while the former did not, but this seems to me to oversimplify the Austrian liberals, Hayek and von Mises, not only by oversimplifying their position but also by glossing over its messiness. Von Mises (1966), for example, did believe that society is impossible without the (individual psychological) process that he called calculation. But what is often missed is that, for von Mises, calculation precedes measurement! In fact, calculation is the prerequisite of any rational action. And in fact, he concludes, one must address the problem of calculation before any theory of market economy is possible, precisely because calculation is what constructs the difference and relationship between means and ends. (The neoclassicist fetishism of mathematical modeling suggests that they might have overlooked this point.) Just as importantly, von Mises (1966, 212) argues, “The main task of economic calculation is not to deal with the problems of unchanging or only slightly changing market situations and prices, but to deal with change.” And he later (392) explains: “A price . . . does not indicate a relationship to something unchanging, but merely the instantaneous position in a kaleidoscopically changing assemblage. In this collection of things considered valuable by the value judgments of acting men each particle’s place is interrelated with those of all other particles. What is called a price is always a relationship within an integrated system, which is the composite effect of human relations.”56 This suggests that the problem constitutive of economic relations involves comparison and calculation or what I have called commensuration. Again, I propose seeing “the economic” as a process that defines a possible dimension of every practice: as von Mises would have it, the economic is precisely constituted as a logic or calculus of value, a practice of commen164  Chapter Three

suration. That is to say, any practice can be located within relations of commensuration and pass through various logics of commensuration. Moreover, every society must have commensurating apparatuses or logics—in fact, a complex ecology of them.57 Conclusion: Commensuration and the Conjuncture Let me conclude by bringing this argument into the contemporary conjuncture, to suggest that the conjuncture, as a struggle over modernity, is constituted in part by a widely dispersed and somewhat disaggregated series of “crises of commensuration,” with different temporalities, across virtually every vector and plateau. That is, one of the most powerful lines of struggle and change in the contemporary conjuncture is defined by a series of crises of values that point to the collapse at worst, the uncertainty at best, of many if not most of our commensurating apparatuses. We seem to be living in the midst of, or at least facing the threat of, the impossibility of valuation and commensuration; across all dimensions of human activity, from religion and politics to knowledge and economics, there is at least the appearance of a growing inability to find any logic upon which one can constitute, measure, compare, and possibly adjudicate (or compromise) differences. These multiple crises are calling the very possibility of commensuration into question. Sometimes they mark the failure or collapse of, or the struggle against, some existing commensuration apparatuses (such as the withdrawal of the universal equivalent, or the critique of euro-centric value systems or hierarchies of privilege), or they mark our confrontations with equally valued but competing apparatuses. Sometimes, a crisis of commensuration appears where we are publicly called upon to meet demands of commensuration for which we have not even an imagined apparatus, such as when we confront the challenge of ontological pluralism and radical alterity. Mario Blaser (2009) gives a wonderful example of such ontological commensuration when he tells of an event that took place in British Columbia: Greenpeace finds a whale stranded in a small inlet and wants to “save” it by leading it back out to the ocean. The local indigenous people see the spirit of their beloved tribal leader and chief, who has returned to watch over them. They are sure that if their chief is taken from them again (e.g., in Greenpeace’s misplaced effort to save what they misperceive to be a whale), they will surely suffer. How does one adjudicate such a difference? How does one commensurate these systems of value/realities? Notice that this is Considering Value  165

not a problem of translation—which I will locate soon in the realm of the cultural—for the two sides are certainly able to understand one another. The problem lies in weighing the claims. We can see crises of commensuration in politics and in culture. In “politics,” it is expressed in the extraordinary celebration and power of partisanship and extremism, and the disappearance of moderation and compromise. It is visible in the increasingly common equation of moral and political calculation, which means that one can never accept defeat (even in electoral terms, there must always be a conspiracy or something external to blame). In “culture” (as euro-modernity constructs it), I can point to the widespread inability to escape the relativism that seems to have emerged form the critique of various foundationalisms,58 which in a circuitous way, and from a variety of positions, has helped to fuel the rejection of the value of education and knowledge. These are not crises of translation, for it is not a question of understanding, but of comparison. The multiple crises of commensuration are not the expressions of a single, real crisis, which has yet to be located and is fundamentally economic (in the territorialized euro-modern sense, thus returning us to economic reductionism). At the same time, I do not think that the multiple appearances of crises of commensuration are simply random. They are not all “the same,” as it were (e.g., all “epistemological”). Instead, one has to look at how they are produced and articulated contextually. For such crises are always local, and so, across the conjuncture, the crisis (crises)—in this case of commensuration—is never complete, or total. And yet they are linked, by a line that maps out an almost but not quite chaotic web of connections. In euro-modernity there are at least two broad dominant kinds of commensurating logics, each with a variety of local concretizations and apparatuses, each located within one of the two most disembedded domains—economics and culture—as competing loci of both value and commensuration; that is why these two realms have presented themselves, so often, in direct opposition to one another. They embody and express two fundamentally different sets of logics of commensuration, constituting themselves as competing modes of living and being modern. For example, to oversimplify an already oversimplified example, consider the value produced in the affective practices of domestic life. These values have been commensurated through different apparatuses, including socioeconomic apparatuses (in which such value is “exchanged” for security, livelihood, etc.) and religious-cultural apparatuses. In the contemporary conjuncture, the calculations of such com166  Chapter Three

mensurations have been called into question, increasingly, by developments such as the growing visibility and condemnation of domestic violence, the increasing need for women to enter the workforce, the rise of domestic labor, etc. The crises of commensuration constitute at least part of the context within which the economic crises that began in 2007 have to be understood. Rather than beginning with the assumption that all values have been reduced to exchange or monetary value, or that this is another example of the failure of deregulated (free-market) capitalism, or that markets have simply collapsed, thereby destroying value, I want to propose another view of the crisis. It is not the only possible view, but it may be a useful view in our attempt to get a better understanding of the conjuncture. I suggest that this crisis is, at its heart, defined by the existence of an enormous set of financial (“toxic”) assets that cannot be commensurated—that is to say, their value cannot be calculated! How has this come about? Let us assume that capitalism’s power lies in its ability to articulate the relations among values without necessarily privileging its own, so that, for example, the notion of wealth (as the accumulation of value) is always changing and always somewhat ambiguous. I suggest that, over the past decades, the status and operation of these capitalist commensurating logics has changed. First, increasingly they were reconstructed as universal logics, claiming that all values could be commensurated through these singular capi­ talist apparatuses. Second, they sometimes seemed to claim to be either the only viable commensuration apparatuses or to be hierarchically able to subsume all other. And finally, especially at the intersection of conservative/freemarket economic theory and policy on the one hand, and financial theory and finance capitalism on the other, they began to operate in problematic ways: by denying their own mediating position (precisely as commensuration), they claim to or act as if they do produce value itself. As the dominant commensurating apparatuses have come under attack, as they have collapsed, disappeared, or become dysfunctional, there seems to be a tendency for them to increasingly become what Deleuze and Guattari (1977) describe as “paranoiac machines.” Again, denying their position as mediating devices, such commensurating apparatuses act as if they were the only possible source of value. I think the name for such value practice is fundamentalism—whether religious, political, economic, intellectual, or financial. The rise of fundamentalism is the other side of this dismantling of the possibility of commensuration; it is what I might call a negative Considering Value  167

economy of value, as the production and appropriation of value without the possibility of commensuration. In fundamentalism, some particular set of relations/values appears not only absolute but also as the absolute negation of any other. This goes beyond the negativity of difference in euro-modernity, because fundamentalism refuses to allow its negativity to be coded into a system of hierarchy. Fundamentalism is nonhierarchical, refusing the reality or possibility of the other and thus demanding the extermination of the other. But the rise of fundamentalism, as a particular affective form of the refusal of calculation, as a particular absolute partisan investment, cannot be laid at the door of any single cause, group, or political position. One of the great “mysteries” of the contemporary world is the extraordinary rise of everyday violence, even of the most horrific kinds. Even “genocide” itself seems to have become more ordinary, a reconstitution of relations among neighbors according to principles and intensities of fundamentalism. The challenge then is to find or invent commensurating logics that are not only capable of adjudicating otherness via (and not in spite of) their difference, but that also refuse to universalize themselves. But it is also to find or invent spaces in which practices need not be articulated by or into relations of commensuration. It is to imagine other ways of being modern, ways that not only allow the possibility of other logics of commensurating value but their right to co-exist alongside others as well. I do not mean to deny the continuing importance of questions of value, but it strikes me that the real questions of the conjuncture—for example, whether growth can/should be embraced at every site, along every line, of the social formation59—are not questions of value, but of commensuration. And I do not think that matters of economics—the economics of value, questions of commensuration or comparative worth—should be left to the discipline of economics. After all, economies are too important to be left to economists.

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four Contextualizing Culture: Mediation, Signification, and Significance It is rather obvious that the category of culture is central to both cultural studies and euro-modernity. In fact, cultural studies—at least in the Englishspeaking world—is often traced back to reflections on the historical emergence and ambivalences of the concept. But, too often, people have mistakenly assumed that cultural studies is about culture, while its real concern is always contexts and conjunctures. And since it can only reconstruct a conjuncture by studying relations, then the study of culture has to go through those relations and investigate everything that is not culture, even if, ultimately, in relation to culture. Just as importantly, and just as mistakenly, the category of culture has not been sufficiently subjected to the demands of contextual or historical specificity that are constitutive of cultural studies. Yet, as Eduardo Restrepo (personal communication, May 2005) argues: “Culture is the deepest and most solid rock of our common sense.” Instead, too often, the concept of culture—and other related categories—is assumed, appropriated, generalized, and even universalized. Of course, to raise questions of the contextuality of culture is to return, once again, to questions of the “construction” of culture, and of the specific forms of embedded disembeddedness characteristic of “culture” in various euro-modern conjunctures. This chapter approaches these questions by doing some of the work of contextualization, remembering that the forms of embeddedness and disembeddedness are not only articulatory—constituted through networks of relations and affiliations—but also machinic—produced through the agencies and apparatuses of world-creation. It seems to me that avoiding such questions has resulted in a series of analytic and political failures—for

example, failing to understand the culture wars as a crucial part of a conflict between forms of being modern! We are in the midst of a conjunctural shift (or an organic crisis) in which culture itself is rearticulated and relocated, in which the “center” of culture itself—its work as it were—has moved (a moment not unlike earlier moments in which historical changes rearticulated the category of culture itself ). I begin by offering a brief, possible account of why culture took the form (as disembedded) and substance it did both in euro-modernity generally and at the moment, after the Second World War, of the emergence of cultural studies. But in the current conjunctural crisis, culture appears to be in trouble; after describing at least some dimensions of those troubles, I suggest that its central place and functioning in the context of euro-modernity may be changing. I then turn to the question of the work of culture, first by exploring what the concept was called upon to do in euro-modern theory, and then by generalizing the cultural as discursive expression and affective mediation. I further explore the cultural as apparatuses of mapping that depend upon the construction of others. I attempt to show where “culture” in its euro-modern sense was carved out of the broader field of cultural mediation. Finally, I look at two concepts that have been used to organize the cultural field—the popular and the media. The all-too-common inability to recognize the changes in the operation of culture and the popular is due, in part, to the decontextualized ways in which the concepts of the popular and the media have been used, often in the name of a “media cultural studies.” By denying media studies the too easy claim to cultural studies, I reconsider the possibilities for analyzing “the cultural” in cultural studies, through notions of affective logics and discursive formations. I suggest thinking of the cultural not as distinct and separable from some notion of a social or material reality but as an organization and distribution of affects (intensities) within and across the social formation. Accounting for Culture How and why were the category and domain of culture constructed as a central part of euro-modernity? What does culture do at particular moments of the history of euro-modernity? Don Mitchell’s (1995, 102) assertion that “there’s no such [ontological] thing as culture” is correct, even while his conclusion (103) that “there is only a very powerful idea of culture, an idea that

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has developed under specific historical conditions,” is not. Culture, albeit constructed, functions materially as category and a domain, with real consequences for the ways in which people live their modernity. But that does not yet define the forms or content of its reality, nor what it is doing in and for euro-modernity. It does not tell us why a domain of culture was disembedded in particular ways as crucially constitutive of euro-modernity. Nor does it tell us, finally, why, in the decades following the Second World War, the cate­ gory of culture gained a new urgency and was taken up—problematized— as the basis for a new field of investigation. If Kuper (1999, 23)—paraphrasing Elias—is right that culture becomes a matter “of general concern only at certain historical moments”—and only in certain ways—we might well need to explore how the category of culture, for example, has shifted “from something to be described, interpreted, even perhaps explained . . . [to something] treated as a source of explanation in itself ” (247). I want to problematize the articulation of “culture” at two overlapping moments. To address the first moment, the moment of the construction of culture as a domain, I want to recount a Foucauldian, anti-enlightenment story of the place and operation of culture in the emergence of euro-modernity to locate culture in a broader story about power and the changing ways in which power is exercised. Most performances of this story explain euro-modernity as a transition from juridico-discursive to governmental power. This is not the story euro-modernity commonly tells about itself, as a move from force to ideology (representation), but rather, a story of a move from representation to discipline and control, in which culture is “attempting to order, control and define ‘others’ in the name of power or profit ” (D. Mitchell 1995, 104). Unlike the taken-for-granted concept of culture inside euromodernity, which Tony Bennett (1998) characterizes as a conception in which culture serves power by constructing consent and legitimacy, through ideologies that in some way stage or represent power, this story sees culture as a set of resources used by various institutions in programs aimed at the transformation of conduct. According to this story, premodern or juridico-discursive power was centralized and singular; it sought obedience. And it accomplished this by creating a spectacle of power that enabled the population to see and know power as such. Modern or governmental power is dispersed and multiple. It pursues a variety of ends through a variety of means. It does not make a spectacle of itself, but rather hides itself in its very practices and procedures. Rather than making power the object

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of the people’s knowledge, it seeks to make populations the object of its own knowledge, and to change the behavior of the population in specific ways through specific and multiple “technologies.” Bauman (1987) tells a similar story: modern power involves an attempt to generalize an elite practice of self-fashioning in order to change the everyday life of its subjects; what appears often to have been a beneficial cultural crusade was actually a form of the political organization and control of conduct. The expansion of education, democratic institutions, etc., were all efforts to modify the conduct of people’s lives, to refashion human beings through systems of social and cultural practices. Culture was a technology of power, a crucial component in the project of managing society and everyday life through practices of surveillance, discipline, and the production of what Toby Miller (1993) calls “ well-tempered citizens.” It was social control through self-control and self-production. Culture is then the embodiment of “a theory and pragmatics of state power” (Bauman 1987, 55). Its political power extended from the professionalization of cultural elites to its endless production of norms. At the same time, Bauman argues, the more restricted realm of culture as art and mediation is privileged as the provenance of the emerging intellectual fraction of the rising middle class. The political effects of culture are the result of the ways specific fields of cultural practices have been “governmentally deployed.” Consequently, according to this story, culture is a set of resources, techniques, tools, specific knowledges, programs, technologies, aimed at managing populations, aimed at changing the habits of conduct, feeling, expression, and thought of a population. In short, culture is a means of acting on or managing the social, accomplished by using cultural practices to shape and direct people’s conduct in order to refashion individuals’ behavior and to produce new forms of individuality. Oddly enough, however, this story fails to define the specificity of culture, allowing it to collapse into the political (rather than being re-embedded in the social); it does not offer an account of why or how it was disembedded at a particular spatio-temporal moment. Reducing everything to power, the apparent importance of ideology and civil society in euro-modernities becomes an illusion (hence the facile assumption that the Foucauldean story throws out ideology, when, ironically, it actually seems to fall back into a story of ideological mystification about the existence of ideology). I want to propose a solution to this apparent paradox: culture was constructed in specific ways (as a complex and ambiguous formation that I will elaborate 172  Chapter Four

below), which enabled it to function precisely as a domain that was, necessarily, free of any political entanglements. In other words, euro-modern power—including governmentality—operating through the “ideology of ideology,” enables the very appearance of ideology—as culture—to appear as something other than simply ideology. In a sense, culture becomes euromodernity ’s alibi, which suggests a possible rereading of Latour’s (1993) argument about the centrality of the nature/culture divide. It is not only that power needed to hide itself in its own cultural procedures, but also that culture needed to hide from itself. Thus, the displacement of culture as material practice into culture as meaning, aesthetics, and textuality produced the ideology of ideology (and, consequently, the very critique of ideology and culture can reproduce the very logic it seeks to escape). The second question, which brings us to the postwar years and the emergence of cultural studies, may offer some further hints about the specificity of the ways culture has been constructed and taken up. For, in fact, cultural studies emerges at a moment when culture becomes both visibly central and explicitly ambiguous. Consider the ways these ambiguities play out in the following paragraph from a classic of British cultural studies (S. Hall, Clarke, et al. 1976, 10): The culture of a group or class is the peculiar or distinctive “ way of life” of the group or class, the meanings, values, and ideas embodied in institutions, in social relations, in systems of belief, in mores and customs, in the uses of objects and material life. Culture is the distinctive shape in which this material and social organization of life expresses itself. . . . Culture is the way the social relations of a group are structured and shaped; but it is also the way those shapes are experienced, understood and interpreted.

In this statement the concept of culture operates on a number of distinct dimensions, all of which involve the relations among experience, expression, and as we shall see, unavoidably, judgment: (1) a distinctive way of life and the organization or structure of that social life; (2) the meanings, values, and ideas embodied in that way of life, or, to put it somewhat metaphorically, how the way of life expresses itself; (3) the distinctive shape of the meanings, values, and ideas described in 2; (4) the ways 1, 2, and perhaps 3 are experienced, or understood; and, implicitly, (5) the forms of expression and representation that articulate those meanings, values, and ideas. But how and why did cultural studies take up the concept in this way? For example, Williams’s description of culture as a descriptive and normative Contextualizing Culture  173

concept depends upon his rereading of the history of English criticism and his “discovery ” of a critical tradition, which he called “the culture and society tradition.” He argued that within this tradition the concept of culture was invented as the recognition of “the practical separation of certain moral and intellectual activities from the driven impetus of a new kind of society ” (1958, xvi). And yet, crucially, by refusing to take the separation of culture and society for granted, Williams refused to locate himself within that tradition. The project of cultural studies was to reinsert culture into the practical everyday life of people, into the whole way of life, into the totality of the social formation. Moreover, unlike the “culture and society tradition,” as well as many other theories of the emergence of the modern, (Williams’s vision of ) cultural studies was driven less by a vision of a total qualitative transformation of society (e.g., from the traditional to the modern, or from community to mass society)—cultural studies was not about the destruction of community—than by a concern for the consequences of new forms and degrees of change and mobility. Cultural studies was about change and the (re-)articulations of contexts. The fact that Williams was never able to actually escape the separation of culture and society—both in his privileging of certain forms of culture (literature and, later, language) and in his continuing desire to equate culture with some sort of ethical standard—does not define the end of the story. This still leaves open the question of why culture was taken up as a conceptually ambiguous concept, precisely in its ambiguity, as an intellectually and critically productive foundation at the particular moment. Why was it so hard for cultural studies to escape the modernist separation of culture and society? Why did cultural studies inevitably foreground the narrow sense of symbolic culture rather than the broader notion of the creativity of ordinary life? And finally, if only implicitly, is there another vision that might help to point cultural studies in a different direction, one that might enable it to get beyond some of the impasses these questions suggest? Let me offer, only in the briefest terms, a possible account of why this particular concept of culture presented itself as a useful strategy for confronting the particular context of postwar social change and struggle in particular locations. I suggest that the privileging of culture and the emergence of cultural studies were built upon an—I think correct—assumption about the conjuncture. As Denning (2004, 3) put it, at mid-century “the concept of culture undergoes a sea change” as “culture moved to the foreground.” He

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sees this (4) as overdetermined by two vectors: first, “the uneven development of a global culture out of the cultural and ideological struggles” of the Cold War (the “first,” “second,” and “third” worlds); and second, an emergent “aspect of social reality—the culture industries, the mass media, mass communication—which seemed to have its own autonomy, its own logic, its own power.” Referring to the struggles of “subaltern classes,” Denning argues that the appearance of this “new and relatively autonomous region of social life” (3) reshaped people’s everyday lives. While I think he underestimates the diversity of struggles that both address culture as a medium of oppression and see making culture (authentic, alternative, oppositional) as a viable form of political activity, he is right to note that culture, both specifically as aesthetic or expressive texts and more generally as language or communication, emerged historically as a crucial domain in which history was being made and experienced, and resistance was being organized. Textual or expressive culture was where the lived experience of historical change was constituted. It was where people lived and gave meaning to the historical and political changes and challenges of their lives; culture was the constitutive and constituted locus of the emergent structures of feeling. Whether or not it was “determining in the last instance”—and that may depend upon how one understands the Cold War—culture had become dominant, the most important domain shaping people’s lives and their understandings of the worlds in which they lived. The growing importance of culture is evidenced in the growing concern in the academy with language and cultural forms of “control (or effectivity) at a distance,” and in the growing governmental and public concern for questions of propaganda, subliminal messages, the mobilization of ideas, the dispersion of education, “hidden persuasion,” cybernetics and feedback, etc.1 It is not coincidental that the postwar decades saw the extraordinary growth and reconception of education, of the “media,” and of the public investment in culture across the board. This was the moment when communication and culture (as human processes and sites of contestation) moved to the center of both intellectual and public life, the moment of the so-called linguistic turn. It was a time characterized by the growing concern for the politics of mass culture and mid-cult (as the testing ground for democracy vs. totalitarianism), for the Cold War politics of ideology (unlike Nazism, communism was immediately constructed as an ideology), and for a series of flirtations with, panics around, and investigations of subcultures and

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youth culture, often looking for the new agent of change (assumed to be found in culture). As Simpson (1994, 5) writes, “The idea of communication became something like a Rorschach test through which favored academics spoke about the world as they believed it to be, and thereby helped institutionalize that vision at the expense of its rivals.”2 Of course, to say that culture was dominant is not to say that it was determinant, and the new visibility and role of culture were no doubt the result, in complex ways, of the particularities of the postwar settlement— nationally and globally—in political and economic terms (e.g., the corporate compromise of “liberalism”), as well as developments in the material forms of economic and political power, along with changing social relations. But even the contestations—whether talking about civil rights and anti-colonial struggles, the new conservatism, the counterculture, or identity politics— were largely played out in decisively cultural spaces (including McCarthyism, popular anti-communism, or youth/popular culture). That is to say, politics itself came to center on culture as an object, a site, and a practice. In making culture both central and omnipresent, and by identifying it as the primary locus of the experience of historical change and struggle, if not entirely its cause, this foregrounding of culture and its consequences (across a wide range of discourses) has had profound and positive impacts on our understandings of power and politics. It emphasized the mediated nature and the representational aspects of power. It “discovered” the cultural construction of all of human reality, including the other domains of politics and economics. Unfortunately, while never denying the importance of these material and discursive condensations, this enabled some people, even in cultural studies, to bracket them, too quickly and for too long, only to have them return when they were not looking. Such work, by decentering the state, pluralized the sites of power (so that power, like culture, was everywhere), even if it also, too often, treated power as disembodied and disconnected from the material relations of inequality and domination that are its anchor in everyday life. It pluralized the dimensions and domains of politics, opening it up (with many allies here) to new differences and new practices. It made visible the politicization and politics of culture (e.g., ideology, the culture wars) as a necessary complexity and contingency within the effort to understand the complex relations among the politics of politics and the politics of everyday life, even as both are framed and intersected by both cultural and economic forces and trajectories.

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Culture and the Struggles over Modernity Recently, it seems like the category of culture is in trouble, assailed from all sides for different reasons. Even as culture itself seems to be undergoing nothing less than a transmogrification, the concept of culture has come under attack, both historical and intellectual. Some dispute the need for the category, others the place, the location, and the ubiquity of the category. Some think culture is becoming irrelevant; some think it is more important than ever; and some dispute the common assumptions about the operation or productivity of culture. For some, the problems are endemic to the category, while for others, they are historically specific. Everyone seems to agree that serious changes are afoot in the world of culture. But despite the disagreements, all of this concern for the category—a concern that extends into the “culture wars”—must signal something. The most interesting arguments concern the changing place, nature, and operation of culture in the structures of experience and politics. Some suggest that the current context is characterized by the omnipresence of culture, what critics like McRobbie (1994), Yúdice (2003), and Jameson (1991) have described as the culturalization of society, politics, and economics. Culture seems to have become ubiquitous: across the whole range of public and even private discourses, culture has moved to center stage; it has become inescapable, for example, in economics, whether we are talking about cultural economy, the growing importance of culture in and to economies (e.g., new managerialism, organizational culture), the changing culture of economics, or the role of culture in constructing images, experiences, and expectations of the economy. It is no less important in politics: for example, the role of culture (and entertainment) in elections, or the increasing importance of culture as a political problem. The success of Huntington’s thesis that the future of politics is located in civilizational struggles, where civilizations are defined by culture and sharply distinguished from ideology, provides a small example of how this is playing itself out. As Yúdice (2003, 9) puts it: “The role of culture has expanded in an unprecedented way into the political and economic.” Culture has been dispersed across the entirety of social, political, and even economic space. Directly opposed, critics argue that culture no longer matters, or at least, that the long-standing modern forms of cultural power are weakening. Denning (2004) claims that the age of culture has ended. Yúdice (2003, 9)

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observes, “Conventional notions of culture largely have been emptied out.” Baudrillard (1983) insists that the difference between culture and reality no longer makes a difference. Readings (1996), certainly the most articulate proponent of such views, argues that as global culture replaces distinctive national cultures, the institutions and values of the modern conception of culture give way to new—neoliberal—constructions of culture. National cultures are becoming less important as a result, in part, of globalization and diasporic movements, although this has not necessarily reduced the power of national identities. Even the value of cultural capital is declining, whether as something to be possessed and exhibited by the wealthy, as something valued in itself, or as a democratized means of mobility. Read­ ings (17) suggests: “ ‘Culture’ no longer has a specific content. Everything, given a chance, can be or become culture.” And yet, just a few lines later, he (17) claims that “culture becomes merely one object among others.” He (103) asserts that “culture no longer names a metadiscursive project . . . from which we might be excluded,” going on to suggest that the new global system of power, located so clearly in the global system of capitalism rather than in the state, is no longer concerned with modern citizen-subjects and no longer requires cultural content through which to interpellate and manage subjects. He concludes that culture no longer matters to the powers that be in the advanced capitalist world. Power seems less invested in and less reliant upon culture; ideology and consensus have been replaced by the re-emergence of structures of subordination based on explicit—administrative rather than cultural—strategies of economic and political subordination. The sorts of surveillance and control that Foucault described as disciplinarity seem to be giving way, in the name of religion and “law and order,” to a juridico-discursive system based in violent and spectacular forms of punishment, incarceration, and military power. The visible ideologies of contemporary life are greeted with an everyday cynicism, as if they were already banal. Instead of the classical marxist formulation of ideology—“They don’t know what they are doing, but they are doing it anyway ”—the exposure of ideology is greeted within an entirely different, and in-different, logic: “They know very well what they are doing, yet they are doing it” (Žižek 1999, 62). Culture becomes merely expedient, more of a resource and tool, aimed at other, more valued goals. To quote Yúdice (2003, 23) again, “The content of culture recedes in importance as the usefulness of the claim to difference as a warrant gains legitimacy. The result is that politics trumps the content of culture.” Culture has been re178  Chapter Four

shaped in the service of a certain new economic liberalism, by which culture is the means through which people construct themselves as responsible (economic) individuals. The paradox is that both of these descriptions are true: culture does appear to be, in fact is, both more and less important. In the place of the modern conception (and power) of culture, a new formation of culture seems to be emerging, which can be captured succinctly in both neoliberal appropriations and in the increasing tendency to blame national and institutional problems, even failures, on “the culture.” This is to offer culture up as a malleable—almost willed—set of behaviors and conduct that can be consciously reshaped primarily by social elites. Rupert Murdoch, when asked how to rescue the Australian economy, answered: change the culture (Frow and Morris 1993, vii). Such elites assume they can change people’s conduct by reconstructing, among other things, the modalities of identity and unity to which individuals and groups can lay claim; the financial crisis of the early twenty-first century underlined the importance of culture—of people’s values, beliefs, and behavior—in relation to questions of credit, savings, and fairness on the one hand, and in relation to irrational exuberance and panic on the other. This new existence (manipulation) of culture is visible in the new managerial practices, which are seen as technical strategies or means for refashioning the behavior as well as the thinking of employees in accordance with the goals of the organization, and in new political philosophies of the state. In fact, practices and logics of culture are crucial to current struggles and debates about citizenship and rights, migration, and multiculturalism.3 Not surprisingly, both in the postwar years and in the present conjuncture, education was a major cultural issue. In the 1950s, education was both celebrated and expanded. At the same time, the increasing power of the sciences and corporations created something of a crisis, especially for the humanities. In the present struggles, education—especially public education, but also the broader authority of the educational apparatuses—has come under serious attack, and its mission and values questioned. Higher education especially is challenged, not only by professionalization, capitalization, privatization, commodification, and corporatization, but also by the very politicization that began in the postwar years. It is no longer the humanities that are in crisis—but knowledge itself, and the claim of education to offer something other than ideology or faith. I suggest that it is not so clear—and it certainly cannot be assumed— that culture is the “same” thing, or that our existing theories of culture are Contextualizing Culture  179

adequate to the changing ways culture operates in the contemporary conjuncture, or that culture continues to be dominant in the current struggles over or experiences of the shape and direction of modern societies. More specifically, whether one thinks of textual/expressive culture as aesthetic or popular culture, it does not appear to be playing the same central role as it did in the postwar years. It is no longer the site or form in which people live their experience of historical transformation. It is not where change is primarily being organized and experienced, and it is certainly not where resistance is being made possible. There is a growing disparity between the apparent vectors and effects of “culture” and the leading edge of political transformation and historical change. This does not mean that culture— whether understood aesthetically or symbolically—is not still crucial, but it does mean that we cannot assume culture’s priority and privilege anymore than we can assume its effectivity. Culture, as it has been understood, matters less; it has become less important—at least in terms of previous problematics and iterations of euro-modern conceptions of culture. It seems reasonable to hypothesize that films, television, and music, the dominant forms of “culture” in the postwar years, do not matter as much. More accurately, let us say that such cultural forms do not mean the same sorts of things; they do not do the same sorts of things for most people. Culture matters in different ways that we have not yet understood, and, elsewhere, that we have not yet mapped. As I have suggested in the previous chapter, the significant locus of the constitution and experience of change may be relocating into economics as the new dominant; people are experiencing economies as the primary field of change, and as the locus of their primary experience of change itself, although often mediated through technology and commodities. Yet I do not mean to relegate culture to a secondary role, and I do not believe that culture and economics are as separable as euro-modern knowledges might suggest. This is not to say that everything is culture; it is to say that everything is articulated to culture as much as to economics, and politics, and that it is the relations, the articulations, that are the material processes and practices of historical transformation. Nor am I simply claiming that people think of the world or themselves (e.g., as consumers) in economic terms, but that the complexity of their lived realities and their experiences of those realities goes through the economic in the first instance, however inseparable they may be from the cultural.

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In the conjunctural struggles over modernities, culture itself is being re­ articulated and relocated, and the “center” of culture itself—its work, as it were—has moved (again). If culture and its dominance in the postwar era seemed to continue, perhaps even reinforce, its euro-modern specificity—as a domain it was both embedded within and separated from (transcending) the social formation, constitutive of the social formation even as it appeared to remain independent of any of its constitutive relations of power—it has become increasingly obvious that culture is inseparable from the social totality and from power, and that it is, even more importantly, displaced into or subsumed by other domains and vectors. Culture seems to constitute itself as the space of an articulation that always ends up elsewhere. I am not lamenting the co-optation of culture into capitalism,4 or of the collapse of any critical-political distance, but pointing to a relocation that undoes culture’s identity as a disembedded apparatus and transforms its effectivity. Culture is integrated, in new ways, into everyday life to such an extent that it becomes ordinary, banal, insignificant. The result is that culture seems to lose some of its specificity, some of whatever distance it had from other forms of social practices and apparatuses. Culture’s disembeddedness is recast as its reembeddedness into social reality. Yet precisely by receding from the position of dominance, culture is increasingly taking up a diffuse position of determination, reconstituting what we might call its intensity, or its “coefficient of articulation.” Thus, culture is increasingly working at multiple points and instances, across multiple vectors and planes, in small, subtle ways, rather than in the structural ways suggested by notions of ideology and representation. It is as if it announces the multiplicity of if own effects (what I will shortly describe as mediations) across all of the sensuous strata of life. Nor does the dominance of the economic mean that cultural politics has become unimportant, but that its form has changed, since the trajectory of its effectivity and power has changed. In fact, what constitutes “culture” and “cultural politics,” and their place in the conjuncture, is itself conjuncturally determined. If, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to be human was to be cultural (as in post-Kantian philosophy), or, in a different tradition, political—and in the postwar era, to be human was to be communicative—in the contemporary conjuncture, to be human is to be economic. This is not the Homo economicus of liberalism, for this latter never defined the humanity of the population and it was never the primary locus or plane of experience. I do not say this judgmentally, as if

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culture were a site of authenticity that has been displaced by the nasty inauthenticity of the economies. I am not describing the reduction of all values to the economic, but the fact that it is increasingly in the economic that all values can be realized and commensurated. Of course, this only makes sense if we understand the changing conjunctural nature of culture as a crystallization, a node or billboard (Grossberg 1992, 109–10) of a larger struggle over modernity, not a rupture in which everything lines up neatly, everything corresponding to everything else, but a complex grid, a war of positions in which different struggles, different changes, have to be articulated together. Different changes and struggles begin at different times, have different speeds, emerge from different projects, encounter different resistances, operate at different locations, and are connected by different, wandering lines. Yet, together they constitute a struggle over the very formation of modernity itself. The Work of Culture in Euro-modernity It is part of “common wisdom” that the concept of culture was an invention of euro-modernity itself, but its actual working, its faire, is rarely problematized.5 Culture is a complex ontological, epistemological, and anthropological concept resting on a normative and ethical ground, providing sustenance to a historically and geographically specific political project. The concept operates at the intersection of the processes (modernization), experiences (modernity), and discourses (modernism) that marked its very emergence. The privilege with which euro-modernity constructs itself as the most advanced, the most human, of all possible societies begins, rather obsessively, with the need to differentiate the human (culture) from the non-human (nature), and modern society from that other society (projected into a past and an elsewhere) which it constructed as “traditional society.” Such traditional societies could not think of themselves as traditional, nor could they think of themselves as societies, for it is only “modern” society that can selfconsciously understand itself as an object and a project: “Making society into a project—not the polis, or a kingdom or the state, but society—is where Euro-Americanism began. Now in so far as this enterprise was thought to bring a new threshold of awareness . . . traditional becomes the epithet applied to those in a state of existence before such awareness” (Strathern 1996, 41)—an awareness that might be expressed in economies and politics but that was crucially embodied in culture. That is, the construction of society as 182  Chapter Four

an object was concomitant with the construction of culture as an isolatable sphere of human activity. The modern is, thus, constituted by the separation, the disembedding, of culture from the other domains of the social formation (that are then often bundled together under the sign of “society ”) as much as from nature. It is precisely the absence of such recognizable differences (the separation of culture, society, economics, and politics, and of the human from nature) that define traditional societies as primitive and thus construct them as appropriate objects of colonialism! Even as the concept of culture defined a perspective for critics of modernization, it was also called upon to support the particular forms of social and political life—structures and agents—that were emerging as a result of the processes of modernization. Part of the history of euro-modernity involves the entrance of “the people”—first the bourgeoisie and then the middle classes and finally “the masses”—into the political and cultural spheres as potential actors and agents, which went hand in hand with the emergence of new forms of power: on the one hand, the power of a new class of pro­ fessional, middle-class, intellectuals whose power was defined by their guardianship of the domain of culture, meaning, and interpretation; and on the other hand, a power appropriate to and responsible for the emergence of the space of civil society: the rule by consensus. Culture is the emergence and even domination of ideological power. It provides modernity with a new kind of power that is simultaneously a new kind of legitimacy, since it is opposed to traditional forms of control based on violence and spectacular state power (as in public hangings and torture). It is not that these more brutal forms of power ever disappeared in euro-modernity—and, in fact, they seem to be making a comeback all over the world—but that their place had to be secured through the space of ideology. Power now had to organize the active participation and support of the population by incorporating more and more of the population into its everexpanding ideological sphere. Thus, on the one hand, power became a psychological matter of belief and interpretation. The consent to the rule of the dominant fractions was now to be secured by changing the ways that subordinate populations thought about their lives and the world, by making them think and even (desire to) act, within the limits of their resources, more like the ruling bloc. Suddenly, culture has not only entered the scene, it has come to define it as well. And, on the other hand, the “people” or “the popular” as a category come under the same differentiating scrutiny, subject to a troubling ambivalence, both inclusive and exclusive, both descriptive Contextualizing Culture  183

and normative (since the attribution of the popular is often a statement that people are living the wrong way, the wrong values, the wrong tastes, etc.). Thus, the emergence of the modern concept of culture was closely linked to the very forms of modern power it sought to criticize. The modern concept of culture, a concept that is “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language” (Williams 1983b, 87), is the rearticulation in the seventheenth century of an agricultural category— the tending of natural growth, a practice of domestication—into the heart of the puzzle that is euro-modernity. Perhaps that is why, in the parsing out of knowledge in the modern university, no single discipline was given responsibility for culture (in the way sociology became the study of society, or political science the study of the state). Instead, the provenance of culture was dispersed not only among the humanities, but also the social sciences, especially anthropology, each taking a particular aspect or definition of culture for granted. A part of the complexity of the category of culture is located within the very descriptive functioning of the category. Descriptively, “culture” is simultaneously transcendental and particularizing (and this latter functions both categorically and socially). Transcendentally, it describes a universal condition of human existence: the necessity of mediation, of something—generally called meaning—that stands “between” consciousness and reality. This is the premise at the root of euro-modernity, which is given its most precise expression in Kantian philosophy: that human beings are constitutionally different from the animals because they lack the instinctual apparatus that would allow them to interact directly with the world, without mediation. To cope with this lack, the mind takes on what we might today call a semiotic or symbolic function—or rather, that semiotic or symbolic practice is the mind!6 Rather than a “natural” organization, reality takes on a symbolic organization. The meaningfulness of the world—the constitution of experience (or the phenomenon, in Kantian terms) in the place of reality (the noumenon, in Kantian terms)—is the third space, within which human beings exist in a world of their own creation. In this space, meaning as signification is articulated to, and often equated with, both experience and subjectivity. Culture is the house or vessel of subjectivity. Human reality, then, is a creation—the result of a uniquely creative act of meaning—or world-making. Understood transcendentally, culture is an aspect or dimension of all human activity, for insofar as an action is human, it entails thinking and imagination, the creation of meaning itself. It is the paradoxical realm through 184  Chapter Four

which, as Carey (1989) puts it, we first represent the world and then take up residence in our representations.7 Without culture, reality would be unavailable except as a “booming, buzzing confusion.” Within culture, reality is always and already sensible. It is the space within which almost all “modernist ” philosophy operates. Culture is stitched onto the real as the space within which the subject comes into being, thereby constituting the ground for a philosophy of distance, alienation, and negativity. This is the fundamental and apparently universal function of culture. It defines the human, and in doing so, it produces the same and the other: in producing meaning, it produces the world; in producing the human (subjectivity), it produces the non-human; and in producing itself as modern, it produces the primitive (traditional). Culture is the medium and agency by which the chaos of reality is transformed into an ordered—manageable—sense of human reality. As such, it is not just descriptive, but is embedded within a (prescriptive) project for (future) actions. Second, culture is particularizing insofar as it describes a particular subset of activities that are privileged in euro-modernity because of an assumed unique relationship to the construction of meaning in general, and to creativity more specifically. This is, of course, where the sparks begin to fly. The question is just how narrow and how privileged is the particular set of practices and objects that belong to culture. This matters because culture is still a transcendental; hence, these practices and objects are the concrete existence of the universal. And since culture is about and embodies the highest possibilities of humankind, there can only be one culture. Every artist speaks from the particularity of his or her own time and place, and even her or his own language, but transcends such particularity and individuality (or maybe it is that he or she realizes it fully) by speaking of the universal possibilities, in both a geographical and historical sense, of human existence. This particularizing function, where culture becomes a differential category, inscribes the limitation of culture to “art,” to the aesthetic, to “the best that has been thought and said” (Arnold 1961). While this understanding of culture embodies the transcendental, it also potentially contradicts it. At the very least, the first meaning of culture requires that, judgments of quality aside, all of the self-consciously creative symbolic activities of human beings are specific instances of the transcendental mediation of meaning. So culture as a set of objects and activities would have to include all of those symbolic activities that characterize popular culture, and even the commercial culture that is increasingly called into existence in part by the new modes of production Contextualizing Culture  185

and media of distribution. All such activities are the concrete embodiment or particularization of the transcendental practice of mediation. Here culture is equated with the symbolic, with specifically sign-using behavior and often, commonsensically, with language and all activities that involve the creative possibilities of language, and hence, of communication. But this notion of culture as a set of uniquely symbolic activities still contradicts the apparent universality of cultural mediation in human life acknowledged in the first transcendental definition. For, according to that first meaning, all human activities are world-making (mediating and mediated) activities. The productivity of culture extends to the entirety of social life itself, or what is often described as the whole way of life of a people. This points to yet another—more societal—particularization of the category in euro-modernity, which links culture to matters of national identity. As Readings (1996, 3) argues, drawing especially upon Germanic traditions, culture is “linked to the destiny of the nation-state by virtue of its role as producer, protector and inculcator of an idea of national culture.” Culture produces, defines, and is entrusted with national identity. It is a regulative idea that links the people (ethnos) or community (popular will) with the nation and even the state. The state, in fact, often builds its own identity and power by forging and strengthening the link between culture and the nation. Thus, culture not only gives us unique insight into who we are—universally—as human beings (sharing something across time and space), but also into our particularity—the history and traditions that have shaped our different identities. It is the national culture that defines a people and, ultimately, a nation, if not a nation-state. Of course, this articulation merely reproduces the ambiguity that I have described above, since national culture may be defined by the customs and habits (the whole way of life) of a people, by the “national” language (which often requires the violence of establishing a national language and the repression of various ethnic alternatives), or by the national canon. In fact, it is usually all of these that operate in modern nation-states, although a certain privileged position is traditionally given over to the arts as constitutive of the highest possibilities and achievements of the people. This particular euro-modern logic of mediation makes culture both different from and that which mediates the real. It thus creates the unavoidable problem of “the last instance that never comes,” insofar as the actual determining power of reality itself is always deferred. The logic of mediation reproduces a metaphysical gap in the very heart of epistemology. This 186  Chapter Four

logic reduces mediation to a single function (the necessary compensation for a lack), a single form (a filter or screen, however productive), a single mechanism (signification and subjectification in the face of a necessary lack, a logocentric chain of signification that is itself constituted by its own lack), and a singular directionality (negativity). The result finds its most profound statement in the Hegelian dialectic. If, as I shall argue shortly, the effects of a practice often take a circuitous route, this specific logic of mediation is precisely the negation of the reality of such trajectories in favor of a simple and predefined pathway: the human, all too human (i.e., the meaningful or cultural). The productivity of the real disappears into the productivity of culture itself. This logic of mediation collapses all discourse—art, ideology, common sense, the popular, fantasy, imagination, and science—into the single effectivity of meaning, and collapses all significance (or meaning in the broadest sense) into the logic of cognitive or semantic meaning. In its most powerful and acceptable contemporary forms, this notion of culture as mediation is captured and rearticulated by the discourses of social constructionism, or theories of the social construction of reality. While the equation of culture with a specific logic of mediation cannot simply be equated with social construction, such theories are the most common form in which the euro-modern logic of mediation is articulated. Obviously, this theoretical signifier covers a wide range of positions, which are often conflated, often strategically, especially in recent “conservative” attacks on the broader notion of constructionism (which may recognize a variety of regimes of mediation). I think it is important in the present climate to carefully distinguish different versions of constructionism, which disagree significantly about the ontology and effectivity of the real and the precise nature of the signifying mechanism of mediation. However, I also think one can describe a certain set of common assumptions characterizing social constructionism. All experience of the world (and hence, any possible access or relation to reality) is: 1. mediated (determined by a third term), which is constituted by 2. “human” (social or subjective) structures that are 3. spatially and temporally specific, and which are 4. expressive (semiotic or meaningful) in the narrow sense of 5. signifying and subjectifying: involving ideology (signification, representation), semantic referentiality, and/or cognitive, semiotic, or narrative structures of meaning. Contextualizing Culture  187

Different versions of social constructionism will assent to and interpret these assumptions in various ways and combinations. These assumptions not only make culture the “essence” of human existence, they end up equating culture with communication. At the very minimum, such theories bracket or erase the real (without necessarily denying it) and predefine every possibility of production (or articulation) as a particular kind of—semantic— construction.8 Culture as a dialectic reproduces the dialectical role of culture; mediation itself is always the mediating term. This enables “culture” to reconcile through its very becoming the key contradictions of modernity (individual/ social, reason/history, mind/nature, etc.). And it also means that there is no escaping the dialectic of culture. In this sense, logocentrism (Derrida 1998) can be seen as the euro-modern regime of culture, an ontological diagram. Culture serves as a regulatory ideal (whether as language, art, imagination, etc.) that unites communication and community by producing the form of the specificity of human existence (signification/subjectification) and the particularity of its actualization at any place-time. This logic partly defines the modern regime of culture as an organization of power. There is another dimension of the polysemy or ambiguity of the culture concept, for even while the discussion so far has focused on the apparently “descriptive functions” of the concept, we have been unable to totally avoid normative questions, whether involving judgments about the superiority of culture over nature, of art (high culture, the aesthetic) over the popular, and, at least implicitly, of the modern over the traditional (or primitive). In fact, as Williams (1958) argued, the concept of culture was taken up in modern discourses precisely as a category of judgment. That is, culture, whether as the truly human, the highest achievements of humanity, or a way of life that successfully manifests its humanity (e.g., “community ”), was meant to offer a position from which people—artists, critics, journalists, scholars, and intellectuals—could talk about and judge the historical changes in the way of life, the organizations or structures of that social life, the forms of expression, and the meanings, values, and ideas embodied in any or all of these, brought about by the processes of modernization. This normative notion of culture involves a double articulation: on the one hand, the projection of a position, constituted by a temporal displacement (from some other—e.g., the aesthetic, the transcendental, tradition, working life), from which change can be comprehended; and on the other hand, the equation of that position with a standard of judgment from which 188  Chapter Four

one can offer a “total qualitative assessment” of such changes. “The idea of culture is a general reaction to a general and major change in the conditions of our common life” (Williams 1958, 295). That is, the very emergence of euro-modernity necessarily involved the construction of a place which allows one to both describe and judge the changes in everyday life; it requires at the very least a “court of human appeal,” some locatable “higher” standard, to be set over the processes of practical social change: it requires “culture.” Culture is, simultaneously, the standard and the position from which and against which one can judge those changes. The variety of standards that were offered or assumed is inseparable from the polysemy—the multiplicity of meanings—of culture. In judging the changes that were being produced by the forces of modernization, what was at stake was the very nature of human’s social life, of the forms of association and communication, of the way the various specific activities of life were integrated together into a coherent and meaningful totality. Mediation, Affect, and the Cultural If we are to find the descriptive tools necessary to understand the context of struggles we are living through, and if we are to help empower the imagination of other modernities, we need to find a way to think about culture “outside” or perhaps better, alongside, the euro-modern logic of mediation. Against this tradition we need to multiply the modalities, practices, and agencies of mediation. That is, while the concept of mediation functions in euro-modernity in a very specific and narrow way, I do not think mediation can be so simply reduced to a singular logic. Calling the euro-modern logic of mediation into question reaffirms the reality, positivity, and multiplicity of mediation itself. The trajectories of effectivity (the way reality constructs and expresses itself) are always mediated by other trajectories and practices, their paths interrupted, inflected, and redirected. Paradoxically, in order to open up our understanding of the vectors of the cultural, we need to begin by assigning mediation back to reality itself rather than seeing it as belonging only to culture. At least this is how I propose approaching the task of understanding the cultural as mediation. We might say that modernity, in its most abstract, discovered or invented, a mediated society, a society mediated always in particular ways, according to particular logics, by particular apparatuses. Returning to mediation as the central problematic, we have to avoid the dualisms that structure Contextualizing Culture  189

so many theories of culture: “Mediation is in the object itself, not something between the object and that to which it is brought ” (Adorno, cited in Williams 1977, 98). Taking up my earlier discussion, I want to pose the question of an ontology of mediation, to return to another tradition of modern thought, a post-anthropological, post-Kantian theory, which says that reality is nothing but mediation, that what is between precedes the constitution of that which it stands between, that the relationship precedes the relata. Such an ontology assumes that reality is always and only relational, and that it can be mapped only as an unpredictable, non-linear, and multiple series of relations—determinations, articulations, mediations, or effectivities. Here mediation is not limited to those planes of practices that euro-modernity has identified as culture. Such a theory, call it Spinozist or Nietzschean, is not the social construction of reality but a theory of reality constructing itself. I have already discussed Deleuze and Guattari’s version of such an ontology in chapter 1, that reality produces itself through machinic processes of coding, territorialization, and, most importantly, stratification, through which events are distributed and made to exist (in a non-necessary relation) as expression or content. This is not simply a reinscription of the distinction between the subject and object, but rather a production of a relation between particular possibilities of acting or agency and particular possibilities of being acted upon, remembering that (1) there is no necessary distribution, and (2) that discourse and reality, expression and content, always operate on the same plane: The independence of the form of expression and the form of content is not the basis for a parallelism between them or a representation of one by the other, but on the contrary a parceling of the two, a manner in which expressions are inserted into contents, in which we ceaselessly jump from one register to another, in which signs are at work in things themselves just as things extend into or are deployed through signs. An assemblage of enunciation does not speak “of ” things; it speaks on the same level as states of things and states of content. So that the same x, the same particle, may function either as a body that acts and undergoes actions or as a sign constituting an act or order-word, depending on which form it is taken up by. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 87)

Reality is constantly producing itself (humans are, of course, part of reality) as the articulation and separation of expression and content. Such an ontology does not distinguish the productivity of discourse (as a human 190  Chapter Four

practice) from that of reality itself as expression. Reality is itself expressive, but expression no longer assumes the existence of subjects or subjectivity. It is neither distinctly human nor mediating in the euro-modern sense (of a screen separating, of signification, representation, etc.). The world itself does not exist outside of its expressions; it is only in expressing itself that reality produces itself. Thus, rather than a new theory of “immediacy,” this theory proposes a different theory of mediation; more accurately, it denies the contradiction between the immediate and the mediate that the euro-modern logic of mediation constructs. It wants to deny mediation in the sense of a filter or screen or even a third space, always put in place by and constructed as processes of signification, representation, and subjectification. In its place, it understands mediation to describe the (not necessarily anthropocentric) trajectory of effectivity or becoming. That is, the path of causality is always mediated, which is to say, it is interrupted, intersected, magnified or diminished, transformed, bent, blocked, inflected, redirected, etc., by other practices and events. Mediation, in this sense, describes a non-linear causality; it maps the flows, interruptions, and breaks that describe the becoming or self-production of reality or, better, reality-always-configured. Mediation is the movement of events or bodies from one set of relations to another as they are constantly becoming something other than what they are. It is the space between the virtual and the actual, of becoming actual. I can begin now to work my way back to the question of culture and mediation, although we must proceed slowly, starting with the broader question of expression, which at the level of the human—as discourse—produces “incorporeal transformations” (of bodies), producing real effects, moving bodies from one set of relations—both actual and potential—to another. While discourse does not mediate any more or less than any other practice, it does have, especially in modernities, a significant part to play. That part, its own mediating powers, cannot be reduced to signification and representation, which are at best merely two modes—and not universally the most important—of discursive mediation. Discourse does not signify, represent, or even mediate a reality that exists on a separate plane of reality. (After all, one needs to acquire the habit of comparing reality to the image or of thinking that images are supposed to be images of reality, including, for example, that ads are supposed to be images of oneself.) In fact, discourse can produce many different kinds of mediations or effects, and these effects can then be articulated to many different uses, for example, nation-building, identity, Contextualizing Culture  191

education, and civilizing. Discourse is a milieu of possibilities or, better, a virtual space of possibility and imagination if you will. This notion of expressive mediation calls for a vocabulary that will enable us to describe the agencies and sites of the production, mobilization, deployment, organization, management, and transformation of mediation as becoming. The leading contender for such a theoretical vocabulary is the increasingly visible notion of affect. As a concept, it seems to have many different references and has given rise to a wide range of theoretical accounts; consequently, it results, all too often, in slippages that merely obfuscate both the workings of the popular and the specificity of the conjuncture. Too often, affect is either treated as a singular event or plane, or rendered the universal ontological substance of the real. In the latter case, there is a flight to ontology and theory, as if that could substitute for the analytic work of theorized conjunctural analysis. In too many discussions, affect seems to propel as well a flight to science and biology, as if affect were simply a material relation among bodies. Both of these flights are forms of reductionism. Too often, in fact, affect is identified directly with the body (as if thought were somehow not embodied), while its relations to the state or other agencies of power are left unexplored.9 Thrift, in a helpful overview, suggests two interrelated meanings of affect: on the one hand (quoting Massumi), affect refers to “ vitality, one’s sense of aliveness, of changeability,” “capturable life potential” (Thrift 2004, 63, 66), making affect both autonomous and always escaping. On the other hand, affect points to a micro-biopolitics that involves us in a kind of “corporeal thinking” (67). (Thrift uses emotion as an example.) This social but pre-individual affect, according to Thrift (68), has become the focus of “corporate and state institutions producing ‘systematic and mobile bodies of knowledge of complex affective states of becoming,’ ‘regimes of feeling.’ ” And while he does not think these new forms of power can be guaranteed, “the fact is that this is no longer a random process either ” (68). But I want to argue that the production of affective states and regimes of feeling was never random, and that they are probably not so successful as the objects of power today. Thrift (2004) also usefully distinguishes a number of different approaches to affect. First, there is pragmatism, with its emphasis on habit and embodied practice. Second are the theories of the psychic apparatus, including Tompkins’s theory of affect systems, as well as Freud’s theory of instincts and drives. (We would do well to remember that, despite the fact 192  Chapter Four

that his theory of affect is often reduced to a theory of libidinal desire, Freud had three principles of affect—Eros, Thanatos, and Ananke. Contrary to Thrift, I think psychoanalytic theory argues that the affect of investment in any object must always fail.)10 The third category is evolutionary theory; and the fourth, where Thrift seems to locate his own views, involves the sorts of Deleuzean-Spinozist naturalist ontology I have described. What unites these different approaches to affect is an overlapping set of assumptions about affect: first, it is non-representational, non-cognitive, and a-signifying; second, it is non-conscious and non-intentional, and therefore a-subjective and pre-individual,11 although it may well be subjectifying; and third, it exists as intensity, or in intensive qualities. It is the quantitative and material reality of any event, line of becoming, or mode of being. While not every theory accepts all of these assumptions, they do define a theoretical space in which the concept functions. In much of the contemporary work, affect is assumed to be more natural than constructed, and often, additionally, to be necessarily unorganized (as opposed to, e.g., language). It often apparently functions as excess, which sometimes pushes it back into a politics of resistance or liberation. Most commonly, affect is treated as a single apparatus, or a single type of effect, such as emotion or desire or attention, rather than recognizing the multiplicity of its qualitative organizations and effectivities. In response, I can offer only the beginnings of a theory of affect. Affect names a complex set of mediations/effects that are, as Thrift suggests, a-signifying (although they can produce signification), non-individualized (although they do produce individualities), non-representational (although they can produce representational forms), and non-conscious (although they produce various forms of consciousness). Affect refers to the “energy ” of mediation, a matter of (quantifiable) intensity. Affect operates on multiple planes, through multiple apparatuses, with varied effects. In order to explain this, I want to distinguish three dimensions (or plateaus) of the existence of affect. First, affect defines the ontology of immanence or virtuality. In this sense, affect is universal, the fundamental being of reality, the singularities or lines of becoming that, ontologically speaking, are the real, each constituting a pure capacity or potentiality to affect and be affected. If the first sense is the reality of the virtual, the second sense of affect defines the reality of the actual as affective: affect describes bodies in motion (affectio), the materiality of mediation. Here affect describes the effectivities of bodies on one another, including importantly the modalities of Contextualizing Culture  193

incorporeal effects or causality at a distance (e.g., forms of discursive effects). It may appear—and many writers certainly seem to assume—that such affect is instinctual and unmediated, but it is crucial to recognize that it is not. For example, consider the following occurrence: a pregnant woman falls, and, almost instinctually, people reach out to catch her.12 Yet is it instinctive? What if the “instincts” of the men surrounding her had been shaped by religious teachings that prohibit them from touching a woman? The third sense of affect, often mistakenly set in opposition to forms of signification, highlights certain modalities of incorporeal effects, especially the multiplicity of expressive—discursive, cultural—mediations. In other words, for both of the last two senses—where affect describes something about the realm of the actual (the plane of organization), affect is always organized by discursive or cultural apparatuses, which are in turn sites/agents of the production of and the struggle over the real, in the form of habits and the habitual. If the first two dimensions describe the virtual and the expressive strata, respectively, the third dimension of affect refers to the multiplicity of regimes, logics, or organizations of intensities or passions (affectus) which de­fine the affective tonalities and modalities of existence, behavior, and experience. This is a second articulation of expression. This third dimension, then, refers to those expressive regimes which mobilize and organize affect as the habitual, the lived, and the imagined. But they are effective only within larger articulations, in what we can call the discursive formations or apparatuses of the cultural.13 Such formations are themselves comprised not only of the discursive and affective elements of expression, but of the nondiscursive elements of content as well. These formations define the meaningfulness of the world, in the sense of significance—importance—rather than of signifying. These affective apparatuses construct the feeling of existence, the timbre or density of lived reality.14 Here the affective is the register in which values (including differences) are animated and engaged, individualities constructed, and investments in specific realities defined. It defines the way any relation is lived, the way any value is “attached” to the real. It is the multiplicity of ways in which people are anchored into their lives, the ways they belong at certain places and along certain trajectories. It is the production of the fact of identification. It operates through multiple regimes and formations, producing many different modalities and organizations, including, for example, emotion, mood, desire, belonging, structures of feeling, mattering maps, maps of meaning (signification), and systems of representation (or ideology, as the affective 194  Chapter Four

investment in particular significations that grants them the claim to represent the world). Affect in this sense is the agency and locus of the investment within reality itself. It produces relations through the cathexis of specific relations. It is, I think, such affective formations that determine in some way the languages and logics of calculation that people use to live their lives (i.e., Hall’s description of the popular in the context of hegemonic struggle). That is to say, the affectivity of discursive formations constitutes the ground of the popular. (The popular in euro-modernity is what is left when certain discursive formations, which constitute “culture,” are subtracted; in that way, the popular comes to be identified as affective, as if culture itself were not.) We can also see how religion can operate as culture (as I explain it below) and still function affectively. To use a personal example, my grandparents did not worry about the deeper meanings of all the messages of their Judaism: it told them how to live their lives and it made the world an enchanted place for them. Perhaps this is the difference, within Christianity, between Gnosticism and evangelicalism on the one hand, and the more mainstream churches on the other, between embracing the mystery, the passion, or the teachings of Christ. It may also help to describe, in some measure, part of the distinctiveness of what are now generically referred to as fundamentalisms. A number of significant cultural theorists have linked affect, on the one hand, with new developments in science, including “information and communication [theory?], genomics and microbiology, quantum physics and complexity theory . . . a rethinking of science, technology and causality, shifting focus from epistemology of human consciousness to a ‘quantum ontology’ of matter and time-space” (Clough 2009, 48), and, on the other, with a notion of an “ontological politics” that reinscribes a ruptural concept of historical change. Such theorizations usually depend on the conflation of the three different dimensions of affect I have identified: some conflate affect as bodily capacity with particular formations of expressive mediations, often treating both in terms of the first, ontological sense; others identify the ontological sense of capacity with the actualized bodily capacities, the latter being a more “naturalized” organization of affective power, which is then, somehow, equated with formations of expressive mediation. Often, this results in treating the relations of affect in rather unmediated, almost stimulus-response terms (couched as “quasi-causality”). For example: “A figure can be determined when needed and when it is so determined, Contextualizing Culture  195

it brings forth ‘competing bureaucratic bodies of control procedure and political command centers’ ” (Clough, 2007, 20). Or again, speaking about preemption as a new form of power: “Preemption . . . is the unceasing inviting of probabilities but not to predict the future. Indeed, they cannot predict the future in that they are drawn immediately into the ongoing modulation of affect, giving populations over to being a probe or sensor of the improbable future” (Clough 2009, 53). Such theories assume the emergence of a radically new form/organization of power, commonly affiliated with Deleuze’s (1992) “society of control.” Additionally, while Foucault’s notion of discipline necessarily pointed to the decentering of the state, much of this work seems to subsume such ontological power into the operation of state-capitalist power itself, with not enough sense of the mediating work that has to be done and the complexities of the relations of power. For example: “The target of control is not the production of subjects whose behaviors express internalized social norms; rather, control aims at a never-ending modulation of moods, capacities, affects and potentialities, assembled in genetic codes, identification numbers, ratings profiles, and preference listings, that is to say, in bodies of data and information (including the human body as information and data). Control . . . is a biopolitics that works at the molecular level of bodies, at the informational substrate of matter” (Clough 2007, 19). Moreover, Clough concludes (2007, 21) with a vision of the almost guaranteed success of such power, a vision of a radical neoliberalism as the “real subsumption of life itself,” making a directly economic mode of power the motor force of the process as a whole: the “ontogenetic” productivity of becoming. The logic of this argument ends up by assuming that the politics of a practice are inscribed within it and defined by homology: “Rather than merely representing populations, probabilistic measure of sociological method modulates populations’ capacities to affect and be affected, thereby also modulating the affective background or surround of a way of life. As such, sociological methodology becomes the affective modulation of populations that is central to the logic of preemption shared by economy and governance” (Clough 2007, 54). Although I am not fond of the ways probabilistic methods are often used in the social sciences, I do not think they are so effective, or so entirely complicit. And yet, I do agree that the changing relations between past, present, and future define a key moment in contemporary configurations of power, and in the struggles over modernity. And I

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do agree that affect—both bodily and expressive—is playing a more direct and powerful role in the conjuncture. Brian Massumi (2002), a leading theorist of affect, similarly conflates the three dimensions of affect.15 For example, his theory of “affective modulation” as “signals without signification . . . a variation in intensity of feeling over time” (2005, 32), moves seamlessly between the second and third dimensions, talking about discursive practices as “less a communication than an assisted germination of potentials for action” (33). Such modulations, dispersed through television, for example, entail the “spontaneous mass coordination of affect, . . . in real time, at socially critical turning points. . . . To capture spontaneity is to convert it into something it is not: a habitual function . . . this taming of television’s affective role” (33). Despite claims that such effects are not guaranteed, he nevertheless argues that the “government gained signal access to the nervous systems and somatic expressions of the populace in a way that allowed it to bypass the discursive mediation on which it traditionally depended and to regularly produce effects with a directness never before seen” (34). This sounds precariously close to an evacuation of (the complexity of) the lived (although Massumi does recognize the contingency introduced by complexity) and an erasure of affect precisely as mediation, since affect is treated here as the necessary production of a set of direct empirical effects, almost as if he were denying that the body is a constructed assemblage of discursive and nondiscursive mediations. By conflating the three dimensions, and treating empirical power here as an ontological category, Massumi constructs a direct and immediate relationship of causality: “Threat strikes the nervous systems with a directness forbidding any separation between the responsiveness of the body and its environment. . . . If an action triggers, the activation follows” (2005, 37). Further, this affective modulation, as a “refocusing of government signaction . . . is a tactic of incalculable power” that operates “at the limit between the individual and the collective” (46). And yet, at the same time, Massumi knows that he has to allow for what he calls the autonomy of affect, or what I would call a lack of guarantees. After describing a number of modes in which fear (as the self-reproduction of threat) can be experienced both individually and collectively, Massumi suggests: “Which of these modes, or which combination of them, will be in operation at any point will depend on the regime of external signs in play, the nature of the contexts through which they multiply, the acquired skills of suppression impressed

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on the bodies populating those contexts, and the techniques of attention in operation (for example, as associated with the media . . . )” (44). I do not mean to reject this ontological project tout court, or to disagree entirely with its sense of the changing configurations of everyday life, the popular, and power. I want, instead, to simply distinguish such a largely philosophical project from my own sense of cultural studies.16 In fact, Massumi’s last statement, perhaps despite his own theorizations, points to the sense I want to start with, of the complexity of affective apparatuses and mediations. The challenge is to identify and understand the specificity, in both theoretical and empirical terms, of the various affective modalities, each with its own configuration, each both organized and organizing, and each with its own kind of structuring effects, as an organization of investment. I might begin to try to delineate the variety of such apparatuses by distinguishing, for example, between subject-ifying and socio-fying assemblages. In the former, I would include, recognizing that I can only use rather commonsensical and ill-defined names—emotion, mood, feeling (e.g., sen­ timentality), orientation, attention,17 will, etc. In the second category, I would include formations of affiliation, belonging, caring, mattering maps, structures of feeling, structured mobilizations. I would also include apparatuses of representation and ideology, by which the actual comes to be rendered meaningful. And in a third category, located between these two larger groups, I might locate desire and its neurotic formations. But I do not mean to suggest that the former, subjectifying, is not both socially determined (through discursive apparatuses) and socially effective. I mean only to suggest that such popular formations construct our sense of self as an affective reality. On the other hand, I am not suggesting that the apparatuses of the second category are not lived and felt at the level of individual lives. Moreover, we have to consider the implication of the existence of such a multiplicity and variety of affective mediations. We have to ask ourselves how we recognize them, how we determine when we are examining a particular discursive formation, what sort of apparatus it is, what kind of effectivity it is producing, and what sort of organization it imposes on the world and people’s experience of and relation to the world. In addition, in one of those annoying circular challenges that discourse is always presenting to us, we have to ask how to approach, how to “read” or, better—since I think we must avoid falling back into textualist paradigms, as if affect could be read off of the discourses themselves—how to analyze particular apparatuses. Different kinds of formations will pose their own problems, and these 198  Chapter Four

will be magnified and multiplied by the simple fact that rarely do such apparatuses operate by themselves, in isolation from other discursive and nondiscursive assemblages.18 We also have to remind ourselves not to see these three dimensions in a hierarchical relation, despite the strong inclination to do so. They all exist on the same plane, as it were, intersecting one another in complicated ways, and operate to enable and articulate one another. I can now turn, however speculatively, to the question, What is it that constitutes discourse or expression (which permeates all of reality) as the cultural? What kinds of lines of effectivity were being territorialized by euromodernity into a domain of culture? That is, if we do not think of culture as a domain, but as a possible aspect of every practice, articulated through discursivity or expression, what constitutes the cultural? Or in other words, if discourse as enunciative practice refers to the capability of producing effects at a distance, to the possibility of immaterial causality, what is the work of those discursive apparatuses that operate as cultural? Let me start by suggesting that cultural apparatuses are responsible for articulating the relation between the second and third dimensions described above. In other words, the cultural is the relation between the production of the habitual and the specific affective modalities or organizations (and significance, importance, interest) of a lived reality. They work, first, by operating as apparatuses of mapping, producing maps or grids that actualize specific configurations of belonging. And, as a result, cultural apparatuses are the affective articulations that actualize value, enabling it to be effective in the lived world. They are coding machines, and the very multiplicity of such apparatuses (and maps) calls into existence a second, second-order kind of cultural apparatus—apparatuses of translations that can trace one map onto another. The challenge of the cultural is that of translation or, better, of translatability. This is not the same as the problem of commensurability, which is always a matter of comparison and measurement. Rather, it is a question of the superimposition of grids, the adjudication of maps. Second, cultural apparatuses produce maps through the production of other-ness; they are apparatuses of other-ing. The production of otherness takes two different forms: the production of difference and the production of distance (borders). The first is the production of a systematic, interlinked grid, or network, of affective investments as relations of the same and the different, or better, of the identity and difference between them. The second is the effect of the production of a grid, or map, of divisions. Borders divide spaces, creating distances, distinguishing between the here and the there, the Contextualizing Culture  199

inside and the outside, us and them. However, crucially, these categories of otherness—difference and borders—do not describe singular possibilities; there are many maps of differences and distances. They can unite just as well as they can divide; in fact, it may be that they do both, in different ways and to differing degrees, in any and every instance. The challenge is to think of such relationality (mediation, otherness) as a necessary foundation without assuming any particular regime of relationality. Of course, one can imagine (I suppose) modes of being in the world that assume complete unity (e.g., as in some readings of Spinoza), or that assume complete disunity (e.g., as in some readings of Leibniz). In both of these, there is no other qua otherness. But the realm of the cultural is what constitutes lived reality as the space between. Third, this suggests that the cultural participates in a particular articulation of and relation to matters of value. Not only do such maps actualize value, making it livable, but insofar as these maps of belonging produce otherness, the cultural appears both as a map of value and as uniquely productive of value. If value is the presencing of the virtual as virtual (always a surplus), the other produced by the maps of cultural apparatuses is also a form of surplus and therefore of value. The otherness of the cultural always remains partly virtual: a term (an actuality of belonging) that projects its other (as not yet, or not necessarily, actual). The form of this cultural value is the condition of possibility of both homogeneity and heterogeneity, of inclusion and exclusion, of the same and the different. Moreover, such apparatuses are always themselves articulated to other affective apparatuses. It is a matter of marking the distributions of otherness, the distances across which value can travel, according to a variety of logics of the specific modalities of otherness. It is an exercise in constructing the possibilities of convergences and divergences, of moving between the same and the different. Having given an account of the cultural, let me return to the question of the construction of a domain of culture in euro-modernity by suggesting that it is constructed through a series of equivalences and reductions: (1) an identification of all discourse with culture; (2) the privileging of a particular modality of mapping—signification—over the broad range of forms of significance; (3) the assumption that in this map otherness is always coded by a machine/logic of negativity;19 and (4) the privileging and universalization of this logic as normative and epistemological. None of these moves are necessary and they have all been, in some contexts, the sites of struggle 200  Chapter Four

and disparity that then play themselves out in the fundamental “cultural” battlegrounds of reason, imagination, and feelings, of rationalism and Romanticism, of art and popular culture, etc., and continue to be articulated to all sorts of other social and political differences. And this particular articulation of the cultural also constitutes, I believe, a certain somewhat limited understanding of imagination (within euro-modernity) at the center of the euro-modern. Let me comment further on the second and third of these, assuming that the first (and the fourth) are easily understandable. Culture as signification operates on a certain affective plane to produce a specific kind of map— maps of meaning—that are constituted by what is commonly referred to as interpretive, cognitive, or semantic meaning. Such maps have a particular geometry: on the one hand, they are constituted by the seemingly endless production of meanings (signs, signifiers, etc., depending on one’s theory). But the endlessness of their productivity of meaning is not infinite, but circular, so that the map (and its infinitude) is always both self-enclosed and self-referential. Therefore, the “signs” of signification are themselves quasivirtual, always referring to their own existence with other signs as excess (and therefore, uniquely, as a kind of value). Finally, signifying apparatuses demand a specific kind of investment or belonging, an interpellation that produces a subject as a position within a system of nominative interpella­ tions.20 This subject position, which locates an individual as not only the master of language but of meaning as well, makes it very easy for such signifying apparatuses to be articulated to another kind of apparatus—of representation or ideology—through which the subject appears to connect specific maps of meaning to a lived reality. In the euro-modern category of culture, this signifying apparatus, the euro-modern concept of signification, is also articulated to a particular logic, built first of all on a binary or dualistic form of otherness (of distanciation and differentiation), and second, on the negation of the other. It assumes that negativity (dialectics, contradiction, absence) is the only logic of otherness, resulting in rigidity and impenetrability characterizing all of its maps of meaning (belonging, otherness). It is finally this fetishization of a particular logic that enables euro-modernity to disembed meaning and create a domain of culture. The logic of negativity is a theory of sets in which a set cannot be a member of itself. The result of this act of exclusion is the construction of a boundary that marks the necessary existence of a constitutive negation, although different versions of this logic may understand constitution Contextualizing Culture  201

differently (as simple negation, dialectical negation, productive negation, etc.). The result is always the space of a set which is unable to define itself. There are at least three expressions of this logic of negativity: identity/difference, interiority/exteriority, and essentialism/anti-essentialism. Although I do not assume that they are in any other way equivalent such that they could be directly traced onto one another, they are all the consequence of a boundary which is in the first instance an act of negation of the outside rather than a mode of opening up to it. This logic of negativity is the foundation of the Hegelian dialectic of recognition (the master-slave), propelling a universalizing claim of normative identity. Many contemporary political projects seek to contest this logic of negativity, to “empty out ” the interiority (essence, identity), to make it the effect of an exteriority or the other. We can acknowledge poststructuralist efforts to deconstruct or fragment, and defer, any stable realization of the difference. Such a view sees itself inevitability trapped within this negative logic of euro-modernity (logocentrism). But Stuart Hall argues (2000a) that the logics of deconstruction, différance, dissemination, etc., “must always be read in the context of colonization, slavery and racialization; they must not be read as an alternative to, but as part of their internal logic.” Similarly, notions that are too often assumed to challenge the stable binarism of dominant structures of power—including notions of hybridity, syncretism, third space, etc.—do not escape from or define solutions to the binary organizations of asymmetrical power, but are in fact products of “ ‘the disjunctive logic’ [in my terms, negativity] that colonization and Western modernity introduced” (1999, 6). Such poststructuralist efforts to escape the binarism, to exist in between as it were, are always implicated in the very diagrams they try to escape. The real question for Hall is not how to escape or deny the binarism, for that would entail ignoring the context. Rather, “you have to keep asking why the binaries reappear” (1995, 61). As Hall (personal communication, 2006) explained it to me: “Deconstruction is a vital move— showing that the binaries are really examples of différance.” Deconstruction, at least as it is practiced in cultural studies, moves essential binaries to the level of historical differences. So Hall refuses to think that a theoretical critique of binarisms is sufficient; specific configurations of the political always continue to maintain the binaries as historically specific realities. But is there no other possibility? In fact, I want to suggest that we have only begun to imagine other ways in which a diagram of relationality (coding) can be actualized, primarily through anti-Kantian and anti-euro-modern 202  Chapter Four

theories of the other as positivity and the different as multiplicity. As Deleuze and Guattari (1977) put it, the rule is to subtract any claim to unity or identity. This involves imagining/constructing/inhabiting a world in which the cultural is not organized by stable binary and negative oppositions, where hybridity is the starting point rather than the solution, and where the positivity of the other is acknowledged. We can begin to imagine—and reach for—other modernities that start with the ongoing process of the belongingtogether or the gathering-together of the others as singularities.21 Not surprisingly, the struggles against this particular affective configuration of the cultural, often manifested in what might be seen as dispersed crises of translation, define a line of force moving across and constituting the larger conjunctural struggles over modernity. That line is also a line of flight, in search of other ways of constituting and living otherness, of living with difference, of inhabiting (moving across, settling within) at, on, or across the borders.22 Organizing Culture I want to turn, now, to the question of how cultural studies can organize and approach the concrete study of the cultural. To pose the question differently, how does cultural studies construct its object as that which provides its entrance into the conjuncture? In particular, I want to consider two ways in which the domain of culture has been organized, two concepts that have crucially shaped the study of “modern” culture in euro-modernity, especially but not only since the Second World War: the popular and media. The concept of the popular (or popular culture) has a long and complicated history that need not be repeated here. Suffice it to say that the popular commonly links together the sociopolitical and the cultural realms. In both instances, it signals matters of identity and difference and, insofar as it is always politicized, of inclusion and exclusion. Thus, “the people” is both an inclusive category (through which, e.g., “the people” is identified with the state) and an exclusive one, in which the people are separated from some notion of an elite. In cultural terms, the popular is commonly defined in opposition to an other set of cultural practices, usually presented as “high art ” or folk culture; and these mutually constitutive relations are crucial to the very constitution of euro-modernity. Such views operated well into the postwar years, continuing to define the dominant cultural judgments, although there were certainly pressures, largely as a result of the Cold War and Contextualizing Culture  203

the continuing threats of fascism, to seek more positive—“liberal”—understandings of the possibilities of the popular. At the same time, the notion of popular culture was largely subsumed under a broader category of mass media. Williams (1983b, 203) has in fact observed that the concept of the media as we use it is an invention of the twentieth century, and really becomes part of common sense only in the second half of the century. Obviously, the proliferation and visibility of media are closely connected to what I have described as the conjunctural dominance of culture in certain social formations after the Second World War. The category of the media here is more difficult to elucidate, in large part because it is almost inseparable from an institutional history of the formation of an academic discipline (or a series of disciplines and subdisciplines) focused on the mass media. The dominant formation to claim the media as its object was an interdisciplinary one, formed largely by the coalescence of propaganda research from the two world wars and a long, somewhat fractured history of research concerned with the impact of new media (e.g., comics, movies, radio, etc.) on society (largely focused on children). It articulated a more “scientific” project, locating the media under the conceptual sign of mass communication: that is, the media (and popular culture) were identified with a universal process defining the real object of investigation; and the media themselves largely remained variables in the attempt to answer questions about effects and functions, understood within specific psychological and sociological parameters, and broadly liberal political problematics (in the war against the various forms of perceived totalitarianism). Concurrently, other groups at the margins of various disciplines had for some time, and continued to, offer different models, constituting the media themselves as their object of study. It was partly through notions of culture, whether explicit or implicit, that an alternative formation of media studies was created, influenced by pragmatist social theory (Dewey and Blumer), alternative traditions in the history of technology (Mumford), Canadian “medium theory ” (Innis and McLuhan), and British cultural studies. By the 1970s, media as a category was taken up more vociferously and visibly, drawing in people from many departments (and sometimes in alliance with other apparently interdisciplinary formations such as film studies, semiotics, popular culture studies, American studies, etc.), constituting itself in significant ways in relation to cultural studies, against both mass communications’ scientific reductionism of effects and the more textual and literary reduction-

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ism, often built on alternative psychological traditions, of literary and film studies. At a certain moment, to a large extent, the histories of British cultural studies and the broader formations of media studies, were intertwined, and, not surprisingly, there are some parallels between their histories. Unfortunately, the two formations—media studies and cultural studies—are too commonly equated, as if cultural studies were the study of media (and popular) culture, and media studies necessarily embodied the project of cultural studies. But I want to begin to disentangle them; it is crucial that these two discourses are not equated or identified. This is, it seems to me, necessary, if we are to hold onto the project of cultural studies in the contemporary conjuncture. If nothing else, cultural studies must always be suspicious of the constitution of any disciplinary object, precisely because this mitigates against the very possibility of radically contextual investigations and threatens to overshadow the real questions about the broader context. Thus, Williams (1989b, 151, 158) emphasized that the relation between a project and formation is always decisive. . . . On the other hand, there remains the problems of forgetting the real project. As you separate these disciplines out, and say “Well, it ’s a vague and baggy monster, Cultural Studies, but we can define it more closely—as media studies, community sociology, popular fiction or popular music,” so you create defensible disciplines, and there are people in other departments who can see that these are defensible disciplines, that here is properly referenced and presented work. But the question of what is then happening to the project remains. And in a sense the crisis of these last years should remind us of the continuing relation between the project and the formation: the assumption that we were witnessing the unfolding of some structure which was, so to say, inherent—a continuation of some simple line, as in those accounts of the history of Cultural Studies which had shown people gradually, although always with difficulty, overcoming their residual errors and moving on a bit—has been brutally interrupted by the very conscious counter-revolution of these last years.

The efforts of media studies to borrow from cultural studies, to take up cultural studies as if it were media studies, were often, I think, fundamentally flawed; it did not simply borrow from cultural studies, it misread cultural studies as a theory of media because it failed to recognize the radically

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contextual nature of the project. Here I can only point to Stuart Hall’s (1971) disclaimer: “The notion that the Centre, in directing its attention to the critical study of ‘contemporary culture’ was, essentially to be a center for the study of television, the mass media and popular arts . . . though never meeting our sense of the situation . . . nevertheless came, by default, to define us and our project ” (emphasis added). For those at the Centre, the articulation was accepted provisionally, partially (it was never all the Centre did), and contextually; at a certain moment, in the attempt to analyze a particular conjuncture, and particular contradictions of that conjuncture, a specific concept of media, and a specific kind of media studies, needed to be invented. There is a second reason to disentangle the two formations: I want to argue that the formation of media studies is too often limited by the fact that it constituted a particular object; it defined itself not by the general problematic of mediation, but by a problematic of the unity and specificity of diverse media of communication (but almost always meaning mass media)—that is, it operated in the same space as mass communication, largely ignoring pre-electronic and non–mass distributed forms of communication. Media studies too often assumes that “media” is a stable concept (the content of which changes), that it is still a useful tool for gathering together and organizing practices and relations in the domain of culture, and that it can still be deployed in the same ways it has been over the past sixty years. The question is, at least for cultural studies: In what way is the concept of media a useful concept around which to organize research on the conjuncture? If we assume that concepts are ways of interrogating and managing complexity, we might ask how well the concept serves. Do we know how the concept works? Can we define it in some consistent way as both the object of study and as an agency in the context? Can we identify the modalities of its agency? Can we describe how it is constituted by the relations surrounding and interpenetrating it, even as the media constitute those relations? Can we understand the complex discursivities of the production and effectivity of the media? In fact, for the most part, the category of media does not rise to the level of a concept; it is ill-defined, inconsistent, overwhelmed by its own ambivalence and multiplicity.23 It remains, in too much of the research, undefined. To glimpse the complexity of the category, we can begin with Williams’s (1983b, 203–4) description of the three senses that are combined into the category of media. First, there is the notion of an intervening or intermediate

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agency. This refers to an older philosophical sense that, he thinks, has been deconstructed, so that the notion of a medium (e.g., language, whether as speech or writing) has been replaced by the concept of practice. Second, there is the technical sense, referring to something with its own specific and determining properties. But two issues make this concept problematic: first, it hinges on the even more obscure and controversial claim of determination; and second, if true, then all technologies would seem, in the light of the rejection of the first sense, to be media. The third sense is a capitalist one—both in the sense of commodities and as what Williams (204) describes as “the social sense of media”—as an agency for something else, something other than its apparent “primary purpose.” Williams seems to conclude that the category of media is not as useful as we assume: “It is then controversial whether print and broadcasting, as in the technical sense, are media or, more strictly, material forms and sign systems” (203). (Hence, the subtitle of his book [1974] on television: “Technology and Cultural Form.”) In a more empirical sense, the notion of a medium is often treated as a matter of one or more of the following: a technology or a specific configuration of technologies; a commodity or a cultural industry; a format, protocol, or logic of coding (Sterne forthcoming; Galloway 2006); a thematics of content; a sensorium or sensory economy (most commonly, oral, print, and electronic, or, more recently, the distribution into visual culture and sound culture); or, less frequently, as an infrastructure (e.g., commoditized, wired, broadcast, cabled, and wireless).24 Rarely are the possible or actual articulations among these different understandings of a medium interrogated, and even more rarely is that interrogation contextualized. And yet the objects of study do proliferate as critics decide to study, not the media qua media, but whatever can be brought under the sign of media—particular instances, episodes, icons, events, programs, genres, sites, forms, codes, etc. More often than not, the objects of study are taken either from industry or popular categorizations, and so remain analytically and conceptually ungrounded. Such categories often too quickly simplify the enormous complexities, articulations, and convergences. Such constructions of the media isolate the objects of study from their context, a world that is never simply communicative or discursive and whose materiality cannot be simply reduced to either the technological or the economic. And they continue to privilege media, often in predictable ways that depend on pre-given theoretical or political paradigms so that, basically, the same old questions are constantly re-posed.

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Let me contrast this with the ways cultural studies conceptualized the popular as an object of study. Key figures in British cultural studies25 rejected the notion that the popular could be contained by a list of all the things that “the people” do or possess, which reduces it, in the end, to a simple market category. More importantly, they deconstructed any approach that located popular culture within simple normative categories, whether they damned or praised the popular. In the case of the former, the popular (as commercial, banal, appealing to the lowest common denominator, or “cultural dopes,” co-opted, etc.) was commonly contrasted with both art (as intellectually sophisticated, critical, creative, authentic, appealing to elite and autonomous individuals, etc.) and folk culture (authentic, emerging from and addressing “the people,” usually members of a marginalized or oppressed group). In the latter case, the “marginality ” of popular culture could be seen as an act of resistance and/or pleasure (as poaching, bodily, carnivalesque) and held up against legitimate culture—art (as reified, hierarchical, intellectual, etc.); or, in more formal terms, the popular (as stylized, artificial, disruptive) could be opposed to the mainstream (as naturalized, commonsensical, incorporated, etc.). Such categories distribute cultural formations into aesthetic norms: good and bad, complex and simple—and political possibilities: domination, complicity and opposition. As a result, they argued, the meaning of a cultural event or practice and its place or position in the cultural field is not inscribed in its form, nor is its position fixed once and for all. There is no fixed and guaranteed content to the popular. What counts as popular varies from one context to another; and things can move in and out. Events that start out in one register—for example, high art—can move into the popular, only to return later to their original status. And similarly, there is no fixed subject inevitably attached to it. What is at stake in struggles over the popular is precisely “the capacity to constitute classes and individuals as a popular force” (S. Hall 1981). They also refused to reduce the popular, even popular culture, to matters of texts; they embraced all sorts of hobbies and leisure activities, even political or juridical events, such as public hangings. The popular, then, is never simply equivalent with or limited to the realms of textuality. The popular included not just popular culture but also the languages and logics that people used to make sense of, to locate themselves, and to calculate their choices, in their everyday lives and the social world. The popular points not only to the everyday, but also to a realm of common sense (in a Gramscian sense) as a ter­ rain of struggle. 208  Chapter Four

This vision of the popular had profound implications for its political possibilities: a simple battle between good and evil, progressive and oppressive, was now replaced by what Hall (1981, 233, 228) described as a “dialectic of cultural struggle” or “the double movement of containment and resistance.” This double movement or dialectic has both a temporal sense—what was resistant can be contained, perhaps later to escape and become resistant again—and a spatial sense—what resists over here, is contained over there. But the dialectic goes even further, for it points to the articulation, the relationship between the two movements, containment and resistance. What matters is the constantly changing state of play, the emerging balance in the field of forces on the plane of culture: the “continuous and necessarily uneven and unequal struggle” (233) between the people and the power bloc, between the cultures of the popular classes and the dominant culture. Here the popular serves not as a set of texts but as a terrain, the ground on which struggle and transformation are waged. Bennett (1986, 19) summarizes this very nicely: [The popular] consists of those cultural forms and practices—varying in content from one historical period to another—which constitute the terrain on which the dominant, subordinate and oppositional cultural values and ideologies meet and intermingle, in different mixes and permutations, vying with one another in their attempts to secure the spaces within which they can become influential in framing and organizing popular experience and consciousness. It consists not of two separated compartments—a pure and spontaneously oppositional culture “of the people”—and a totally administrated culture “for the people”—but is located in the points of conflict between these opposing tendencies whose contradictory orientations shaped the very organization of the cultural forms in which they meet and interpenetrate one another.

It is important then to see that this work was not attempting to construct a new disciplinary object or offer a theory or methodology for some subset of cultural texts and practices. It was not attempting to create “popular culture” studies. As Hall (1981, 239) writes: Popular culture is one of the sites where [the] struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured. It is not a sphere where socialism, Contextualizing Culture  209

a socialist culture—already fully formed—might be simply “expressed.” But it is one of the places where socialism might be constituted. That is why “popular culture” matters. Otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don’t give a damn about it.

Moreover, if “the popular ” was not the object of cultural studies, we also have to avoid taking this work as a general theory of the (politics of the) popular. It is a theory of the popular in a specific conjuncture—a conjuncture that Hall and others described in terms of a hegemonic struggle and the rise of Thatcherism. That is, I think, crucially, one needs to reread this body of work, and Hall’s influential essay in particular, as an intervention into and a response to a particular context. It was an important piece of the puzzle they were constructing, an important element in the story they were telling. It makes a significant contribution to the collective effort to offer a better description of that context. It was a necessary detour through theory to consider the place of the popular in a hegemonic struggle, as Hall and others understood the context of late 1970s and 1980s British culture and politics. In this context, they emphasized that the struggles in and over the popular were, in essence, ideological struggles over common sense, and to reconstitute “the people” and rearticulate their political positions. It was, in other words, a particular contextual intervention into a specific conjunctural struggle. Therefore, we cannot assume that the particular theory it offers addresses in productive ways the contemporary conjuncture, although there is much we can learn from it and that we should take from it. After all, the context has changed dramatically, not only in terms of the changing fields of both the popular and politics, but also in terms of the dialectics of cultural struggle. At the very least, the language of the popular and even the concrete empirical experiences of it have changed significantly; perhaps they have even been largely evacuated.26 And certainly the configurations and technologies of power have changed as well; it is no longer clear that the conjuncture that I have described as constituted by struggles over modernity, or the specific moment of that conjuncture (a particular balance in the field of forces) in which we find ourselves, can usefully be described as a hegemonic struggle, at least in the sense that Hall and others used it. After all, it had a very specific meaning, describing not the universal nature of democratic politics (as it does for many other theorists who use the term) but, rather, a rare political event. Finally, it seems reasonable at least to start by assuming that the relations between the popular and the political, the 210  Chapter Four

ways in which they intersect and articulate, have changed.27 Have the possibilities of articulating resistance and struggle on the terrain of the popular been transformed, weakened, or even disappeared? The question is, how do we continue to develop contextual tools appropriate to our conjuncture? In order to map the articulations of the political and the popular, to map the production of new scenes, seams, frontiers, technologies, and formations of the popular, we need to develop a different theory of the popular; we need to theorize its conjunctural possibilities, as it were. Such work might begin by considering how the popular is implicated in euro-modernity. What sort of work does it do in euro-modernity? Is there a way of rethinking the popular outside of its difference from some other kind of cultural formation? How can the popular be a historical event? If there are other modernities, do they construct different notions and configurations of the popular? How do we analyze the conjunctural specificity of the popular and its organizations and effects? Hall (1981, 229) himself seems to have realized such questions as he observed the “profound transformation in the culture of the popular classes which occurs between the 1880s and the 1920s”: “The more we look at it, the more convinced we become that somewhere in this period lies the matrix of factors and problems from which our history—and our peculiar dilemmas—arise.” Hall, Denning, and others have also observed a very severe fracture, a deep rupture, in popular culture in the postwar period. And of course, postmodernists argued that the line between art and popular culture has collapsed, thereby undermining our very ability to meaningfully constitute the category of the popular.28 I would add that the fracture of the postwar years has deepened and expanded, no doubt propelled in part by both technological developments and other conjunctural changes, to such an extent that the popular, however we might conjuncturally reconstitute it, does appear to be qualitatively different. This argument—that when cultural studies has taken up questions of the popular, or of media cultures, it was not attempting to establish either a new object or a general theory for disciplinary researches; that rather, it offered contextual theorizations and strategies addressed to particular problems within a broader conjunctural investigation—has to frame the other contributions that various media studies paradigms have appropriated from cultural studies. For example, the encoding/decoding model (Hall 1980a; Morley and Brunsdon 1999) has to be understood as a particular strategic tool to respond to a set of contextually posed questions and determinations, Contextualizing Culture  211

and as part of an explicitly political research project.29 Also, the various models of the so-called circuit of production, from Hall (2003a) to Richard Johnson (1986/87) to du Gay et al. (1997), have been similarly offered in particular contexts as tools in response to particular questions. But too often, such strategies and arguments have been taken up as universal definitions, methods, and assumptions of a field of study with the media as its disciplinary object. Too often, work in media studies continues to distribute texts, audiences, and reading practices into the very systems of normative categories that cultural studies rejected, identifying and valorizing specific forms as either resistant or creative, and relegating all others to a cultural mainstream in which they are contained by the existing structures of power. Too often, media researchers take the questions that have to be posed for granted, to assume that the study of media can be defined by a largely decontextualized set of concerns.30 And when some researchers do try to contextualize a notion of media and the questions posed to it, the context is usually reduced to a singular referent, such as the relations of technology and industry, or post-9/11 media, war, and securitization. Media researchers often take for granted the obviousness of the organizations of media and popular formations, as well as how they are inserted into and operate within larger formations and contexts, enabling them to assume the nature of the object. The result is that they operate as if the object—media—has both not changed and has changed completely, enabling them to focus on the perpetually new—participatory culture, embodiment, virtual reality—even while the questions remain the same. But these are all, to a large extent, rearticulations of what has already existed for some time. The media (both as category and object) are assumed to still operate in pretty much the same way, and the questions addressed to the media, which have been asked for decades, are assumed to be still relevant (although they may be dressed up in the latest theoretical garments). Media researchers frequently assume the media continue to be located within a set of predictable logics: first, a logic of production and consumption, or encoding and decoding, methodologically understood in terms of a relation between textuality and sociality, or economics and textuality; second, a particular problematic understanding of temporality and change, in which either the old simply reproduces itself, or the new simply replaces the old; third, an equally problematic understanding of unity and difference, ending up in the impossible proliferation of the concrete singularities of texts, practices, and uses; fourth, the assumption, in both theoretical and empirical terms, of a 212  Chapter Four

particular sensorium, usually defined by the dominance of the visual; fifth, a politics that assumes the equivalence of two distinct relations—mainstream and margin—with domination and resistance; and sixth, a set of assumptions about the ways the media matter in people’s lives, about intentions and effects, and about the media’s relations to power and to particular social configurations of power (usually emphasizing a search for meanings, representations, and ideologies), for homologies between texts and power, or modalities of identification and subjectification. The net result is often that researchers do not reflect on the questions they ask, or the forms of knowledge that their methods produce: What do you know when you know . . . how an audience responds to certain questions about programs, or how a professional critics reads certain texts, etc.? As the limits of these logics have become increasingly visible, the most common response has been to deconstruct the conceptual coherence of certain key categories. The isolation and privilege normally assigned to media, media audiences, and the practices of consumption can be seen as efforts to both constantly reinvent, locate, and measure, and to dislocate and escape the inescapable questions of cause and effects. Thus, whether talking about media or audiences, the illusion of unity is negated in favor of dispersing the medium or the audience into the fluid and dispersed complexities of everyday life. Such a theory poses the enormously difficult task of reconstituting the media object within “the endlessly shifting, ever-evolving kaleidoscope of daily life” and then of studying “the way in which the media are integrated and implicated within it ” (Radway 1988, 366). Or, turning to consumption, as Ang and Hermes (1996, 340) put it, “Media consumption should be conceptualized as an ever proliferating set of heterogeneous and dispersed, intersecting and contradictory practices, involving an indefinite number of multiply positioned subjects.” Or again, as Radway puts it, audiences “are never assembled fixedly on a site or even in an easily identifiable space” (1988, 361). Instead, she continues, one must take seriously the “fluid, destabilized, ever-shifting nature of subjectivity produced through the articulation of discourses and their fragments” (368). We must “theorize the dispersed, anonymous, unpredictable nature of the use of mass-produced, mass-mediated cultural forms” (361). As interesting and important as such work is, I think it is fair to say that the notion of deconstructing an object of study has not been very successful or very radical in its ability to call a disciplinary object into question, whether it is literature or media. Part of what is so interesting about such Contextualizing Culture  213

invocations of deconstruction, for example, is how consistently even the best scholars of media cannot sustain such a practice without seeming to give back to the media some sort of independent and privileged position. They are always called back, in part, by the fear that the complexities of the everyday threaten not only to delegitimate research that foregrounds the media, but also to write the media, as a focus of research, out of existence. Moreover, such strategies of deconstruction, dissemination, or deterritorialization cannot delineate the possible set of relations nor can they constitute the relevant context. The problem of constituting an object of study that can define a discipline or (subdiscipline) can be clearly seen in the contortions that have to be enacted around the study of video games—“gaming studies.” I will leave open the question of what sort of object video games might be—a medium? a genre? a technology?—or exactly where it belongs in relation to Internet studies, digital studies, mobile media studies, convergence studies, or new media studies, all of which have been used in the literature. How does one even make sense of this nested or overlapping or competing system of subdisciplines? How does one decide what the object of each is, or where any object belongs? In fact, I do not think that “gaming” even constitutes a coherent, singular object or formation of study. If one treats it as such, presumably one has to define the criteria of inclusion. Is online poker part of games studies? What about digital Monopoly? Or Snood? Or solitaire? Is the specificity of the object of game studies located in the imaginary identifications of the avatar, or in its imagined embodiment? But aren’t all human discourses and practices embodied, albeit perhaps in different ways? And don’t many forms of play (think of a child playing dress up) entail imaginary identifications and avatars? Is it to be found in the virtuality of the environment? But again, how can one distinguish this from larger structures of play, imagination, and fantasy? Is it in the interactive or participatory nature of the play, which is often contrasted with the assumed passivity of an assumed mass culture? But again, there are all sorts of interactive and participatory forms of leisure and play. Is the isolated individual going online that different from “bowling alone”? Is the social interaction of Web-based games all that different from the playground, or sports, or chess via the post, or pen pals? Of course, the answer is, in part, yes, but it is more difficult to define that difference than one would gather from the literature. Instead of considering these questions, the field is often constituted by an endless search for difference: online vs. console; narrative vs. non-narrative vs. simulation; 214  Chapter Four

various kinds of activities—shooters, strategy, or simulation; various ideologies—America’s Armies vs. Left Behind; various relations to history—games often rewrite or predict history, or present a hyper-real vision of history. While there is some work on the history of games, which of course have existed in many forms, for a very long time, such considerations rarely enter into the effort to describe the balance between what is old and what is new. If we begin, as cultural studies must, by recognizing that the media are themselves constituted by and within changing contexts, then it seems to me that our starting point can only be constructed at the intersection of the changing configurations of the conjuncture and the changing practices, locations, organizations, and effects that might have traditionally been gathered together under the sign of media and popular culture. The salience of the category of media as a central tool for making sense of what is happening cannot be taken for granted. The dominant theories and analyses no longer even attempt to speak about or enter into the complexities of the lived world. Every concept that has animated media studies seems to be called into question by contemporary practices. I think it is obvious that the configurations of media and media culture have changed significantly over the past thirty years, becoming rather strange, at least from the perspective of the preceding decades. They are significantly different, which does not mean that they are radically new, but it does mean that many of the leading media theories, which were shaped in response to the earlier configurations, may no longer pose the questions that need to be raised, and may no longer give us the insights we seek into the larger conjunctural struggles. Yet even the strangest practices—for example, people outsourcing their playtime, etc.—are quickly recuperated into existing paradigms of explanation. If some of the most interesting efforts to understand the media’s impact in the postwar context have depended on treating some media event as an emblem, a metonym, a symptom of the context itself (“to see the world in a grain of sand”)—for example, mtv certainly became emblematic of an emergent cultural formation—the ability to treat cultural events emblematically seems to have disappeared as well. The very forms of what we might naively (given my arguments) call media access and provision are changing (Morley 2007, 203); we are no longer living under conditions of media scarcity or, even, widespread availability. Instead, we are confronted with an overabundance, a seemingly non-stoppable proliferation, fragmentation, interaction, and multiplication (too often oversimplified as convergence) of cultural events. As the density and speed of changes Contextualizing Culture  215

in both provision and access explodes, we are faced with an increasing uncertainty of choice, taste, and identification. While it is probably the case that the media were never so simple and so easily identified as many media theories assumed, it is nevertheless true that the terrain of “media” has changed both quantitatively and qualitatively in ways that have yet to be—and may not lend themselves to being—mapped and measured. For example, the continued use of a category like “television” makes some of the problems clear. As both Hay (2001) and Anna McCarthy (Couldry and McCarthy 2001) argue, tv is multiple. Perhaps it has always been, to some extent. It has different specificities, different effects, different ways of existing and functioning at different sites, and it has different geographies. This complexity cannot be erased by appealing to some as yet undiscovered essence of the televisual: television is “an arbitrary term referring to the assemblage and interdependence of various technologies and practices” (Hay 2001, 205), not all of which are “media” technologies (since “media” is equally arbitrary). It is not enough to see it as a space of distribution, deployment, and articulation. It is not enough to simply accept the proliferation of the singular sites we can study (e.g., what does it mean to study YouTube, given instant access to extraordinary numbers and types of videos and given the multiple sites of reception), or to acknowledge the multiplication of uses (from social networking to procrastination to pornography to music downloading to research). The fact is that if we used to think we were able to manage the complexity of such phenomena by putting them all under the sign of television or video, the complexity of the contemporary field overwhelms any and all efforts to control the chaos. This near chaos is not only defined by the different delivery systems—including broadcast, cable, satellite, the Web, dvds, and the new postal and Web-based systems of distribution, as well as digital downloading and recording devices. The effects of this are exponentially multiplied by the proliferation of apparatuses of reception, including television sets of various sizes, from wrists to home theaters, public screens, stadium screens, computers, mp3 players, mobile phones, and other devices which access programming wirelessly and directly, all of which means that one can “watch” “television”—almost anything—anywhere and anytime. I won’t go into the new systems of production (suffice it to say the business models of the culture industries are failing, even by something other than Wall Street ’s standards), but I do need to point to the even greater explosion of content—network and cable programs and series (in all their diversities), Web programming, 216  Chapter Four

podcasts, paid commercials, movies, “amateur works,” etc.31 The complexity of programming on broadcast television, which led Williams (1974) to theorize (interrupted) flows rather than texts, now seems simple and naive, given picture-in-picture, the interaction—interruptions, enhancements, even influences—between traditional “television” programming and Web pages, etc. What does it mean to see a “text ” like a film, not as a narrative whole but as a collection of clips in no particular order on YouTube? How does one respond to a particular program when one has already seen so many variations and co-productions? When you have the sorts of intertextuality and intermediality32 that characterize the current cultural terrain, where programs are not only available across media but are also seamlessly interwoven into multiple media—programs embedded within other programs, series intermittently presented in breaks, etc.—the very concept of a singular text or event (“a program” or “a series”) seems anachronistic. My point is that if some singular homogeneous and identifiable object called “television” ever did exist, it doesn’t exist anymore. When you’re watch­ ing csi inside Second Life on your iPhone, when satire becomes a major source of knowledge even as serious news is replaced with comedy on the one hand and hyper-local coverage on the other, when “watching tv” slides across technological apparatuses and appears ubiquitously in everyday life, and when you can be arrested for stealing virtual furniture, it is probably time for us to reconsider our understanding of “the media.” Putting it as simply as I can, our descriptive concepts no longer capture the empirical reality of the terrain. But the spaces of what we have usually described as media are changing in other ways as well. First, without intending to return to simple models of incorporation and co-optation, it seems obvious that the relationships between the terrain of media and the economic worlds of corporate capitalism are changing. It is not simply a matter of the degree of integration, but also of the forms of that integration, so the results of this changing relationship may not be as obvious as many have assumed. Similarly, the media seem to be so thoroughly integrated into everyday life, so ordinary, even residual and insignificant (Lefebvre 1984), that they are reconfiguring everyday life itself.33 Second, and simultaneously, people’s relations to “media” and the ways they matter are changing. Like “culture,” they are, paradoxically, both more and less important: on the one hand, a growing investment of time and money in “media” (including technologies), and on the other, a growing Contextualizing Culture  217

disinvestment, visible in a growing eclecticism of taste, the deconstruction and dispersion of notions of “cool” as constituted by media tastes, and the absence of any demand for “resistance” or “authenticity.” 34 As people become media experts, more sophisticated in their consumption (and increasingly, production) practices than the industry can keep up with, the investments people make in “media” and the ways their relations to it are organized are changing, visible in the changing forms in which the “media” are articulated into structures of intimacy and publicness, of locality, identity, and subjectivity. The “media,” most especially the “traditional media,” are no longer unique and uniquely important sites of subjectification and identification, even as the investment in cultural identity is changing. And consumers seem to choose to knowingly act like cultural dopes, knowing that what they are doing (or consuming) violates their own norms, accepting that the “media” lie and nevertheless acting as if the “media” did not lie. They act in a mode of cynical or skeptical distance, passive dissent—or what Jeremy Gilbert has called “disaffected consent.”35 As John Clarke (personal communication, February 2009) has observed, this might suggest that what we have always thought of as sites of domination may be more contingently occupied by their subject than we have assumed, or perhaps we have overestimated the past levels of investment and attachment to such sites. And at the same time, the proliferation of fundamentalisms and their growing “media” presence evince new and stronger investments. Third, the contemporary media environment makes it clear that we are living in ever-changing sensory economies, although I’m not sure that the social world was ever as dominated by the visual—a society of the spectacle— as much of media theory assumes. Such claims ignore the embodied— multisensory and multimodal—nature of any and every media event, and as a result, have ignored an entire history of, for example, sound and the sonic landscape, to say nothing of the enormous power of sound in euro-modern lives. Or touch and the haptic! But there is no doubt that the contemporary environment is overwhelmingly multisensory to a degree perhaps never true before. The contemporary environment also foregrounds a different understanding of the mobility of media and the media as mobility, which may no longer be accountable in terms either of community or of isolated individuals, or in terms of global routes and local places. We might take note of the growing importance of mobile media, and of media outside of domestic and personal use (such as outdoor and in-store), and of “smart-ad” services, making it simultaneously more difficult to “audit” audience behavior and 218  Chapter Four

more necessary to micro-target messages. As a result, increasingly, in fact, the use of the traditional names of media, such as “television,” are increasingly metaphorical.36 Finally, we should take note of the changing nature of the relations between “media” (as both entertainment and information) and politics. Like culture more generally, as a site and stake of political struggle, it seems to matter both more and less. Consequently, the gap between entertainment and both information and politics is being redefined. But, again, we must not think of this as co-optation, but as a rearticulation of its mattering forces and effectivities. I am not saying that the “media” are being integrated into a military–industrial–entertainment complex—this may or may not be true. I am suggesting that approaching the politics of the “media” in terms of traditional notions of ideology and resistance seems less and less appropriate; while such effects are still present, they seem to have become more a matter of the internal management of alliances and of the external polarization of the enemy in struggles like the culture wars. Yet, this does not mean that the “media” are not important forces in the organization of the political terrain; it is just that we should be less confident that we know.37 I do not think we are justified to assume that we already understand how the “media” are acting, or that they act according to predictable registers of effectivities, although again, I am not suggesting that any registers have disappeared. I think that, too often, the questions we ask, the effects we assume and then search for, are defined more by our theoretical certainties and our political desires than by the conjunctural problem-space. Given these changes, and others, I do not think we can assume what it means to say that something is a medium in the contemporary context, or how the relations between “the media” and the conjuncture are organized, or even that this is a particularly useful way to organize the cultural terrain. If our theories, and the questions, logics, and assumptions they present, are themselves overdetermined responses to a particular conjuncture, or particular moments and struggles within it, they may actually prevent us from understanding what ’s happening in the world, from telling better stories. In the contemporary context, we need to ask instead: How do we interrogate the field of “media”? How do we constitute the objects? What are the questions to be addressed to or asked of them? What are the terms of the interrogation? These questions have to be framed by our sense, however tentative it may be, of the problematic—the problem-space—within which we work and to which we respond. Contextualizing Culture  219

At this point, we can take some lessons from media studies, for there are other traditions within media studies that do approach “the media” and the contemporary context in ways that embrace the cultural studies project, despite the impressions I may have created. I would include here a longstanding tradition of “medium studies,” which sees “the media” as located within and shaping with a broader cultural context, an environment within which life itself is organized. “Media” set the shape, pace, rhythms, and topography of social life; they define space and time. But “the media” are neither treated as technology nor as content on purely formal terms. They are modalities of articulation creating environs or organizations that define the allowable logics of discourse and mediation.38 Additionally, some of the best work done in media/cultural studies can be found in “television studies,” much of it historical, precisely because it is not, in the end, about television but rather starts with it.39 I would also point to some of the work in a newly emergent Foucauldean approach that focuses on issues of governmentality and security.40 Much of this work decenters “media” by contextualizing its objects, so that the task of media studies is reconstituted partly by the effort to understand how the context itself constructs the object. Rajagopal (2008, 24), for example, argues that “a critical theory of media cannot have the media at its center,” although he perhaps too quickly returns to a productionconsumption model. Morley (2007), more radically, calls for a non–mediacentric form of media studies, which would look at the ways in which media processes and everyday life—one might add institutional contexts and the full range of technologies of power—are interwoven and intereffective. Or, as Morris (1992a, 467) once put it, “I am less interested in music or tv than in how these cut across and organize the various times/spaces in which the labor as well as the pleasure of everyday living is carried out.” Similarly, Hay argues, “If everyday life is composed of various procedures for negotiating places and producing paths and spaces, then ‘audience’ becomes a way of considering how, when and where certain technologies and techniques are deployed to produce contexts, relations among sites and networks” (1996, 369). He continues: “The project of considering as spatial practices the technological engagements of practices in the everyday life of social subjects [‘a common subject of audience study ’] thus involves examining how individuals or social groups have access to, come to occupy, become invested in, transform, move among and are traversed by and connected to other sites through various flows” (372, [371]). 220  Chapter Four

Such work suggests a different project and a different starting point, embracing three assumptions: first, what we commonly refer to as “media” practices appear, empirically, as dispersed elements or events in everyday life, so that there is no clear boundary between “media” and everyday life; second, what we commonly refer to as “media” exist and function within discursive formations or apparatuses with no clear boundary between the discursive and the nondiscursive; and third, such formations exist within larger configurations of power operating across the conjuncture. The point is, we cannot isolate or privilege “the media,” and we cannot abstract them from their concrete relationships and articulations. A radically contextual approach will inevitably raise different questions. In fact, we need to begin to ask how the “media” themselves are produced, in the contemporary conjuncture. What are the mechanisms that produce “the media” as having a particular kind of embedded disembeddedness, and as particular kinds of mediating, affective apparatuses? How is the distribution of formations—such that one would never think of elevators or air conditioners as “media”—accomplished, and accomplished in such a way that it appears so commonsensical?41 Why are certain obvious media—for example, what Mark Hayward (personal communication, April 2009) calls “economic media” (e.g., atms, stock tickers)—so easily ignored? How is the specificity of a medium constituted? Is its distinctiveness technological, or as a system of representation, or as a system of consumption, or as a structure of experience? And just as importantly, why and how are what we commonsensically call “media” constructed as obviously mediating, and as if they were the only mediating formations? The present conjuncture is rearticulating, both undoing and reconstructing, the identities and effectivities of “the media.” I think we will have to stop thinking about the media or about media worlds, and to interrogate worlds that are mediated in ways that we have yet to conceptualize. Guattari (2000) may be correct to assert that we live in a post-media age! I want to propose that we bring “the media” back to the cultural, and ultimately to the question of mediation itself. I have already asserted that the “cultural” works, not as texts or technologies or commodities, but always as organized, expressive apparatuses or formations operating in specific contexts. If we want to investigate the operation of discourse in its conjunctural specificity, we have to start by recognizing both the multiplicity and complexity of discursive apparatuses: any apparatus is itself a complex articulation of any number of different affective logics or discursive effectivities.42 Such logContextualizing Culture  221

ics include not only meaning (signification) and representation (ideology), but also the carnivalesque, fantasy, play, emotion, caring, mattering, etc.— the entire range of affective logics. Not only are such formations conjunctural, but the relations within and among them are as well. Thus, in one apparatus operating in a specific context, fantasy may be controlled by or subordinated to ideology, while at other moments fantasy can trump ideol­ogy. In fact, the relation of fantasy and play to representation, in the contemporary world, seems at best unstable. Expression or discourse is an articulation into specific conjuncturally determined formations of multiple affective-discursive regimes: not fantasy vs. signification, but fantasy articulated to signification. There are a multiplicity of discursive regimes (or logics) of discursive mediation. Such regimes constitute the enunciative elements that combine to form specific expressive formations, which are always hybrid apparatuses of mediation. A theory of the cultural starts with the assumption of the multiplicity and complexity of the forms and formations of discursive mediation, a multiplicity of forms of articulation. Mediation happens not just through meaning or consciousness or commodities; there are all sorts of ways of beckoning meaning without producing it. Cultural practices operate only in such apparatuses, and in a sense, a practice is cultural only insofar as it enters into them, so that what looks like the same practice may exist in different regimes and apparatuses. Such apparatuses may accomplish many dif­ferent kinds of effects, produce many kinds of relationalities, operate as different modalities of mediation and articulation to produce different lines and forms of affinity and affiliation, different configurations of reality. The cultural is then comprised of the multiple assemblages or formations, each with its own regimes and configurations, operating as discursive mediations producing the real as a conjuncture. Similarly, perhaps, Morris (1998, 56), using de Certeau, talks about stories as “means of transportation in the shuttling that ‘constantly transforms places into spaces and spaces into places,’ ” defining modes of change and practices of persistence, and what certain media/cultural studies researchers describe as the temporal and spatial configuration of the lived environment. I am proposing a different way of organizing and mapping the cultural in the contemporary conjuncture as an unstable and changing set of discursive formations and configurations of affective regimes—as agencies of mediation or articulation, centrally implicated in contemporary struggles over the coming modernity, of the possible ways of being modern. They are played 222  Chapter Four

out in the changing ways in which discourses, technologies, sensoria, etc., are articulated into, and themselves articulate, configurations of intimacy, privacy, publicness, locality, identity, embodiment, etc. These assemblages are also involved in biopolitical articulations, not only of the body (and of forms of individuation), but also of the social body (and the forms of collectivity), not only of the human, but also of the non-human (e.g., the natural world).43 The starting point for cultural studies, then, is never a singular event, whether as a text, genre, or media. The starting point is always an assemblage, a formation, which has to be constructed in its own right.44 The analyst has to both discover and build the formation, as the first moment of the work of contextualization. Cultural studies enters into and maps the conjuncture not with a single event, but by configuring one or more such assemblages and using them as a way to open up into the context. There are many ways of constituting such formations and assemblages—organized around different kinds of vectors and effects. Given my own interest in the popular as a plane of affective articulation, not surprisingly I am most concerned with specifically affective-cultural assemblages. For example, rather than talking about genres of horror, or violent video games, we might try to understand something that I might call “the fantasyviolence formation.” Or consider the fact that there has been an explosion of work on “reality tv.” Yet the category does not describe a genre, since its formal structures are so variable; and it does not describe a specific discursive formation, precisely because its affective possibilities are too multiple and dispersed. It is a commonsensical and commercial category naming a variety of relations among public discourses, institutional realities, and labor practices, and as such, it is hardly new. But much of “reality tv” (including parts of specific programs), along with other cultural events and affective regimes, as well as certain social and political regimes, participate in a discursive formation that I might call a “humiliation machine.”45 I believe this is in fact an important emerging, if not already dominant, structure of feeling in the contemporary United States. Let me, finally, return to my earlier suggestion that people no longer see themselves “reflected” in the domain of culture but, rather, in the discourses of economics. I can now offer another, more theorized, description of what is going on, by suggesting that as the nature of our investment in “culture” in the euro-modern sense (signification, ideology, reason, etc.) is changing and even diminishing, the nature of our investment in and of the economic Contextualizing Culture  223

as a set of discursive apparatuses is moving from embodied logics of need and moral logics of worth to other affective popular logics. And in that way, the economic itself moves toward becoming the ground of our lived experience of the world. That is, some economic apparatuses are functioning according to affective logics that enable them to be increasingly articulated to the popular, so that then the economic expands its ability to realize or articulate the virtual into the actual. Conclusion: Crises of Culture, Cultural Crises The struggles over modernity, and the possibility of other modernities, have created a set of dispersed crises along the lines of cultural and popular discourses. These crises can be difficult to sort out, even if they are easy to identify, because they usually articulate two distinct sets of lines (of crises): more narrowly (as “culture”), they are defined by the uncertainties of otherness, as both difference and distance, establishing crises of translation; more broadly (as “the popular ”), they are defined by struggles over the forms of people’s investment in the world, including values and moments of otherness. The first is a failure of imagination and understanding, when habit fully occupies the distance within which cultural value is effective; the second a failure of will and mattering maps, when habit overrules all possibilities of imagination and experimentation.46 The first demands that we describe the ways in which differences and borders can limit imagination, can organize people’s ability to identify, trans­ late, and invest in others, other meanings, other values. It is here that we might try to begin to understand the changing dynamics and configurations of identity and identification in the conjuncture, and the deep and continuing investments in difference and distance as negation. It demands that we find ways to listen to the challenges posed to euro-modernity by the demands of those who have been colonized and even exterminated. In one sense, it is precisely the claim of other modernities—but even more, of other realities, of the postcolonial seeking an other future, of the indigenous seeking to live in the reality that euro-modernity tried to take from them. This is the challenge of ontological imagination and translation and investment. For example, returning to Blaser’s example of the confrontation between Greenpeace and an indigenous population (in the previous chapter), my claim that this is a crisis of commensuration assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that the various worlds facing each other were capable of understanding 224  Chapter Four

each other, even if they each invested differently (with different affective logics) in their own beliefs and those of the others. If not, then we have a crisis of imagination and translation, in which the other is condemned to the netherworlds of the impossible and the incomprehensible. But just as importantly, if we can imagine such realities, if we can translate them (so that they become at least comprehensible) even if we dismiss them as primitive, we still confront crises of the second sort: can we find ways of investing in them in ways that do not end up negating them, rendering them somehow unlivable and locating them outside of the affective territories of our popular imagination? Similarly, the problem of epistemological relativism can be a crisis of translation (or investment) as well as a crisis of commensuration; this is clear in the common argument that different knowledge paradigms are incommensurable, in the sense that they are mutually incomprehensible and untranslatable. Crises of investment (of the popular) similarly are the result of active struggles, defined not by the commodification of affect but by its quotidienization in ways that seem to “flatten” affect, to circumscribe it and apparently create a border of everyday habit that separates imagination and experimentation. The result is, in part, a search for affective intensities, whether in religion or popular culture (e.g., the different practices of reality tv produce both positive—instant success—and negative—humiliation—intensities within different popular formations). Such crises have contributed to a sense that culture no longer matters, pushing many critics back into strategies that “read” the popular solely in terms of capital markets and (magical) commodities, or in terms of propaganda, domination, and escape. Yet, apparently, there are other cultural and popular apparatuses operating which seem to make the cultural and the popular even more important. Again, this might enable us to better understand why religion—in its many and varied forms, from fundamentalism to spirituality to “the enchantment of the world”—has become so powerful, and why certain forms of popular investment have come to dominate the territorializations of value. As the realm of the popular has expanded to cover all of everyday life, as “culture” has become more affective, it seems to have become increasingly difficult to map the relations of the popular as affective to the political. In the present conjuncture, many commentators continue to assume that the popular is a particularly powerful site where domination and opposition are constructed. I am less confident about such articulations. There is no doubt that it still remains a site where specific forms and technologies of power are Contextualizing Culture  225

constructed and enacted, but I am less certain that it is where power is won (as in the analysis of Thatcherism as a hegemonic struggle). And I am less certain that it is where significant resistance can be organized, even if it still remains a site of struggle, not only within the register of affectivity itself, but also, at the very least, as the condition of possibility for the organization of resistance to power, both affective and political. However, at the same time, I am convinced that change cannot be organized without going through the popular, for it is only in the popular that people can be solicited to invest in whatever actions or possibilities are on offer, where imagination can be called upon to leap over habit and embrace that which is not yet—that is, to experiment. It is only through the popular that the “people” are called into existence as more than an imaginary political event, and it is only through the popular that they can be mobilized to care about any issue and to act on its behalf. I fear that the absence of a viable conjunctural analysis of the popular defines a very serious limit to many of the most interesting and existing forms of political struggles, especially antisystemic movements that stress alternative and autonomous realities. For example, arguments for a new commons frequently forget that any commitment to a democratic imaginary would seem to demand the work of creating new collectivities and winning them into the structures of political imagination and the organizations of political action that might produce such a different configuration of borders in the real. And that leads me to the next chapter and the political.

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five Complicating Power: The “And” of Politics, and . . . Cultural studies is part of a larger reconfiguration of critical analysis at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences, which is the product of the interaction of two lines of transformation: the first involves the empirical foregrounding and theoretical reinvigoration of a set of concepts (often under the sign of the “turn”: the cultural turn, the rhetorical turn, the performative turn, the spatial turn, etc.). Critics have sometimes attacked cultural studies and other sympathetic formations for “mobiliz[ing] ‘culture’ as a principle against the prevailing generality of ‘politics’ in the disputed plane of social authority ” (Mulhern 2002, 86). For Mulhern, the ubiquity of culture means the “end of politics” (100) as the “the struggle to determine the totality of social relations in a given space . . . a general, qualitative labor on social relations” (101). Yet this charge seems odd, since the second line that has defined the reconfiguration of intellectual work is precisely the discovery of the ubiquity of power and the multiplicity of political forms; it is precisely this explosion and expansion of the category of the political that has driven cultural studies (and many related intellectual-political formations) forward. We may wonder where the problem lies: is it, as Vattimo observes, a matter of the ontology of our age: “In the epoch of democracy, the inaugural event of being might no longer be the work of art but, in some sense, the political agora” (2006)? Or is it, as Mulhern would have it, a spatial matter: “Culture is everywhere, politics can be anywhere, and that is not the same thing” (200, 102)? Or does it lie elsewhere? I want to think about the place of politics within conjunctural analysis. In particular, I want to contest a widespread tendency within critical analysis

to presume the conjuncture has a singular political character, or, more modestly, that such a singular diagnosis is ever sufficient. Such reductionism—the denial of the complexity of the conjuncture, the simplification of a complex totality to a single register (e.g., biopolitics, or identity), or to a single factor or element within a register (e.g., governmentality, or sexism)—not only contradicts the very project of cultural studies but also undoes the advances of the past sixty years. Most modern political theory through the middle of the twentieth century defined politics in terms of either or both the (embedded) disembedded field of the state/government, or political economy, the latter usually equated with class conflict (nationally and internationally). In the past sixty years, the political has been decentered (from the state) and proliferated (from class). The interrogation of the state as a limited domain has been transformed into a mapping of the ubiquity of power across the entire social formation. The assumption that the social structuration of power can be defined in class terms has been both fragmented and pluralized, opening the study of politics up to new differences and new practices. As analysts have recognized the extraordinary complexity (and contingency) of the relations between the politics of politics and the politics of everyday life, the concepts of power and politics have increasingly escaped the discipline of political science. (Unfortunately, this has too often meant that analysts ignore both the state as a crucial site and agency of power, and the discipline of political science.) Consider just some of the proliferation, if not the chaos, of descriptive and theoretical terms used to locate and/or characterize the register of the political: domination, resistance, opposition, struggle, social movements, consent, consensus, hegemony, civil society, public sphere, citizenship, state, sovereignty, democracy, communitarianism, identity, difference, populism, state of exception, anarchy, autonomy, rights, liberalism, included excluded, conflict, violence, nationalism, globalism, antagonism, populism, coloniality, governmentality, biopolitics, necropolitics, society of control, real subsumption of labor, public/private, regulation, discipline, empire, alliance, risk,1 everyday life, body, politics of place, affective politics, neoliberalism, ideology, migration, diaspora, exploitation, racism, sexism, ageism, heteronormativity, autonomy, multitude, commodification, market fundamentalism, alterity, etc. While the acknowledgment of this multiplication of sites and categories of power and politics is important, one has to be able to make some sense of the distances, from the minuscule to the enormous, and relations among 228  Chapter Five

them. But the ubiquity of power has been translated into a battle among a proliferating set of theories and locations of the political itself, each claiming its own more or less foundational status. We confront a chaotic scene of political analyses with no ability to map it, and with no obvious way to judge the various claims about power, its affiliations and oppositions. On the one hand, despite an increasingly common fetishism of the local, analysts often leap, without much looking, into their favorite theories, claiming if not to describe the totality, at least to offer the key, the essence, the crucial piece, of the contemporary puzzle. But there is no key! On the other hand, chaos is not complexity, and complexity is not accomplished by adding everything together, nor by seeking some magical essence that binds everything together into a simple harmony. Conjunctural analysis describes the production of the totality as the articulation of a complex (“teeth-gritting”) reality. The best work in cultural studies embraces and analyzes the real and irreducible complexity of power and politics. Within the register of the political, it is often theory that lets researchers off the hook and enables them to avoid complexity—rather than political commitments, as is often the case in discussions of the economic. Too often, too, analyses of the contemporary political spaces are driven by theory; political theories have become today’s statistical hammers: if you go looking for something—the state of exception, governmentality, discipline, biopolitics, neoliberal subjectivity—you will find it everywhere. If you theorize it, it will be there! Quite often, such analyses fail to give adequate consideration to the gap between intentions and effects. Despite common acknowledgments that power intended does not guarantee political effectivity, such theories are commonly deployed in ways that erase the inevitable complexities—failures, contradictions, multiplicities—of the effectiveness of power. Rather than mapping the historical complexities and measuring the balance of the old and the new, such theories too often gesture to and then ignore the continuities (e.g., of governmentality, sovereignty, etc.)2 in favor of an almost obsessive quest for the new, following a postmodernist’s binary “menu” approach (like that of globalization theory): two columns, with items corresponding both within and across the lists, so that each list is seamlessly bound together by some implicit principle of homogeneity. Consider a special section of the journal Theory, Culture & Society (vol. 24, no. 3 [2007]) devoted to “cultural studies and its futures,” but really devoted to an argument that a new organization of power has replaced hegemonic politics. Venn, for example, talks about the “emergence of a society of control Complicating Power  229

and new capitalist regimes for which class based analysis and the privileges of the economic appear inadequate because these new regimes . . . now operate on fluidity, open identities and indeterminacy ” (2007, 50).3 He continues: “In image-based capitalist cultures, there is a movement away from ‘signification and meaning’ toward ‘communication and affect’ ” (51), while emphasizing the “new media techniques they deploy in constituting attitudes and producing the responses required by biopower” (52). Terranova talks about a “new dispositif of power that is biopolitical and noopolitical” (2007, 126), which operates through techniques, Venn claims, that “work directly at the somatic and affective level” (52). I must admit that when I hear such “descriptions” of the world—which often boil down to the claim that cultural power never worked as well as it works today—I can only think back to the fifty years of arguments that have taken place in cultural theory, communication studies, and cultural studies against the assumption that communication always works directly, without the mediation of meaning and many other factors. It was called the bullet theory, or the hypodermic needle model, and I thought we had laid it to rest. But now it returns in a new chic garb. In the same issue of Theory, Culture & Society, Lash suggests that we should dispense with notions of hegemony in favor of looking at developments in bio-, info-, and tele-technologies that are transforming both culture and economy. Lash’s list describing the break between hegemonic and post-hegemonic, or neo-vitalist, politics is as follows: extensivity vs. intensivity; epistemological (symbolic) vs. ontological; mechanistic vs. vitalist forms of power; hegemonic norms vs. intensive facts; power as domination (constituted) vs. power as inventive and internal (constitutive). This is little more than a rereading of postmodernist grand narratives through Deleuzean lenses. I do not contest that new technologies have significant effects, but I doubt that historical specificity (and change) can be understood on such models of before and after, as if society were a commercial for some transformative beauty-care product. Such narratives of rupture are commonly embraced without much critical or empirical research (think of the overwhelming and, for the most part, celebratory reception of Hardt and Negri’s Empire [2000], e.g.). Such arguments have the same generic form, providing new versions of old grand narratives: class and economics used to be important, but now they are not; meaning has been replaced by communication; we used to be in a disciplinary society, but now we are in a society of control; identities used to be 230  Chapter Five

stable, but now they are fluid and open. Arguments structured around “the post” abandon any notion of the complexity of historical change. But if the first terms never operated as simply or completely as such stories assume, they probably have not disappeared or changed as completely as they assume. If identities were not so unified and stable, if capitalism was never so simply determining, etc., then the present is not so absolutely fluid, posthegemonic, etc. If the world was not so simple in the past, the contemporary world is probably not so uniquely complex. There is, simply put, too little sense of specificity about how these claims might have to be concretized within and across contexts, too little recognition that they may be, in specific ways, true over centuries and across continents, and too little consideration of what it means to assume that they are completely and radically new. Or to put it differently, we would do better to see the relationships among the dominant, the residual, and the emergent, to use Williams’s (1977) terms, as a complex system of relationships and processes rather than a structure of breaks and ruptures. Such intellectual practices are not unique to the political register or the contemporary context. As I argued in my discussions of the economic, categories such as “commodity ” and “reification” have often similarly functioned as transcendentals that escape any sense of specificity. But I also think it has become increasingly common in political analyses to conflate the ontological and the empirical, and to leap directly from the theoretical to the concrete (e.g., as if the most abstract theories of sovereignty offer useful descriptions of actual contexts). This is partly why so many stories seem to recreate a nightmarish scenario that we are now confronting the perfect enemy, some pure and unstoppable power (e.g., the real subsumption not only of labor but of life itself ).4 As I said earlier, many generations have seen themselves living at the end-time, living through the ultimate crisis; this is probably not the best affective starting point for conjunctural analysis. I am not going to try to talk about the full range of contemporary theories and/or descriptions of the contemporary relations of power and politics, or even to talk about specific theories in detail, such as theories of: global governance; multinational institutions; empire; coloniality and postcoloni­ ality; governmentality and biopolitics; sovereignty and governance; international relations; civil society, citizenship, and public spheres; ideology and subjectification; difference and identification; diaspora; new social movements; hegemony and the popular; affective politics; political economy; neoliberalism, etc. Complicating Power  231

Nor will I attempt to trace the specific possibilities, closures, and openings operating in the disciplinary literatures of political science, although, embarrassingly, cultural studies scholars (and other cultural analysts) are often only slightly better read in political theory/science than in economics. Since my previous discussions of interdisciplinarity and historical specificity are also relevant to the analysis of the register of power and politics, and to the effort to articulate the political contextually and discursively, cultural studies has to take the discipline more seriously. There is a great deal of important and useful work, both empirical and theoretical, in the discipline, perhaps even in the dominant paradigms (e.g., around questions of state institutions and governance). There are also “heterodox” positions in political science, often but not entirely placed under the sign of “political theory.”5 Of this heterodox work, it is almost always only the more theoretical work that is known outside the discipline, and almost always in very limited and selective ways. Let me offer a few observations about the discipline, especially in relation to the category of “culture.” Like economics, the study of politics poses challenges in terms of both engaging with the full range of intellectual and academic discourses and of acknowledging the full range of (academic and non-academic) discourses that construct the political. As a discipline, political science has largely isolated itself—in the name of science—from many theoretical and political challenges. As one political scientist (Almond 2000, 9) puts it: “As is often the case in the history of science, progress is stimulated more by the development of new technical and empirical capabilities than by substantive theories and hypotheses. . . . The invention of survey research technology may be compared to the invention of the microscope.” The discipline is dominated by rational choice theories and statistically based modeling methodologies, although the hegemony of such paradigms is neither as powerful nor as successful as most academics assume. Mainstream political science has occasionally acknowledged the presence of culture: “Yet against the increasingly rigorous epistemological standards of contemporary social science, the linkages between . . . beliefs, values and practical commitments and various political behaviors and consequences have come under increasing scrutiny” (Crothers and Lockhart 2000, 2); yet, even then, it diminishes the centrality of culture, so that “political culture theory has lost ground since the early 1970s to alternative [more scientific] forms of political analysis ” (2). For example, Elkins and Simeon (2000, 33) make what they no doubt think is a generous nod to culture: “Political cul232  Chapter Five

ture is a ‘second’ order explanation, appropriately applied only after institutional and structural explanations have been ruled out or in conjunction with such explanations.” This is a common enough move: culture is added on in the hope that it can “explain” whatever residue remains unexplained by all the structural variables, etc., in their scientific models. M. H. Ross (2000, 40) is perhaps more honest than most: “Most basically, culture is not a concept with which most political scientists are comfortable.” Yet, ironically, the category of culture is everywhere within the political: in the discourses of political science itself (which helps to shape the very politics it studies); in the discourses of the state (and of the various state apparatuses); in the spaces of culture within the state, as well as the spaces of civil society and/or the public sphere; in the cultures of government and the government of cultures; and in all the discourses by which people make sense of and invest in / disinvest from the world of power and control. And this is, of course, only the beginning. In this chapter, I do not intend to argue for or against different theories and analyses, or to offer an analysis of the politics of the contemporary conjuncture. Instead, I want to think about how one might begin to think about the relations among the proliferating theories of power and politics. I will start by considering some of the complexity of the political field and begin to construct a map or diagram to organize that complexity, which might let us put the pieces of the puzzle together in ways that speak to both the ontological possibilities and the historical specificities of the contemporary moment. I also want to challenge the euro-modern reduction of the political to a disembedded domain of politics, and, as I did with both economics and culture, to find a way to describe the political as a dimension or articulation of every practice. I shall then offer an analysis of the relationship between power and politics, and propose that the specificity of the political depends upon the modality or forms of its production—by apparatuses of capture producing geographies of inclusion and exclusion, or, better, of consistency and surplus. Finally, I shall briefly consider the relation of cultural studies to “autonomous” or ontological politics and political theory. The Complexity of the Political Field The task of elaborating the notion of the political field as unavoidably complex is not simply a matter of describing the specific conjunctural complexity that I have written about elsewhere (Grossberg 1992). Any political Complicating Power  233

moment, struggle, or event can only be understood by looking at its articulation within, first, the field of the political, and second, the conjuncture in which the register of the political is itself constructed. Hence, I need to provide the terms of reference for a diagram of the terrain of the political, a map of an active space of possibilities, enabling us to model complexity, contradiction, and system failure. It is a map, not as a description of an already existing reality, but an experimentation within, an intervention into, the spaces of that reality. The empirical existence of the political is the result of the operation of various processes or technologies that actualize and organize power into specific formations or apparatuses. Such technologies (and apparatuses) produce the real by assembling, organizing, and distributing singularities into populations, collectivities, assemblages, and technologies, and defining the possibilities and “proper” forms of their conduct. The challenge is not to focus on a single form of power (governmentality, society of control, etc.), but to think about the complex ecology of technologies and apparatuses of power. At the same time, this production of the real always fails, in that no apparatus of power is ever able to fully actualize reality according to its own operation or diagram. Such apparatuses are constantly changing—and according to some calculations, improving, because they fail. Such a theory of necessary failure (like forests that require fires to grow) is not the same as a politics of resistance, for at best it offers a way of thinking of how reality (power) resists its own becoming. On this model, at least one dimension of resistance has to be rethought along the lines of electrical resistance (as a relation to conductivity that makes possible both the flow of electricity and its resistance). I offer here a map defined by three primary sites, or vertices (all existing on the same plane)—states, bodies, and everyday lives—which might be seen as “strange attractors” around which the field of the political is organized. The relations among these sites are immanent: none constitutes a transcendent event of power per se; none determines the political in and of itself. Moreover, the space constituted by these three sites, the space inbetween so to speak, is the transversal space in which the realities of conjunctural politics are articulated. It is the space within which the social as the production of value, the economic as the commensuration of value, the cultural as the actualization of value (and of surplus, as the other), traverse, cut into and through, and thus determine the political. That is to say, the political is always articulated to and constituted by other apparatuses and 234  Chapter Five

state

1

9 11

4

5

el

3

8 12

10

7

body

2

6

legend for diagram Vertices 1. State 2. Body 3. Everyday life Vectors (Solid light lines) 4. Bodies–States 5. States–Everyday lives 6. Bodies–Everyday lives Transversals (Broken lines) 7. Bodies—States–Everyday lives (2–5) 8. Everyday lives—Bodies–States (3–4) 9. States—Bodies–Everyday lives (1–6) Transversals (Solid dark lines) 10. Bodies–States—Bodies–Everyday lives (4–6) 11. Bodies–States—States–Everyday lives (4–5) 12. States–Everyday lives—Bodies–Everyday lives (5–6)

logics, by its others. It should be clear that this is a long way from claiming, as some accuse cultural studies, that all politics happens in culture, or that all politics is cultural. In the diagram I present, one cannot read down from any domain, but, rather, one reads across the lines of power to understand what’s happening to power in the passage through the economic or the cultural. This diagram simply says that the conjunctural specificity of the political is constituted in the mediation—discursive and nondiscursive—of the complex sites and transversal lines of the register of the political. But of course, culture here is critical, for it is culture that enables different lines of power—of control or organization and flight—produced within specific apparatuses of power to articulate with each other. The diagram, then, points not only to the multiplicity of sites and relations of the political, but to the complexity of any point on the diagram, for every point, every line, every relation within the political field is always hybrid, always constructed, always mediated by its passage through the multi­ dimensional space of the conjuncture and by its articulations—mapped in the diagram—among the lines emanating from the apparatuses at the three vertices. There is no primordial or simple political event, no founding moment, and no singular manifestations of either power or resistance. Even the vertices cannot be understood as pristine events, because while from one angle they appear as the anchor points of the diagram, from another angle they are the product of the intersection of the lines “circumscribing” the diagram. By displaying a distribution of political moments, the diagram maps the complexity of political issues, events, and relations, so that what is often taken to be a reflection of different interpretations of the same thing, or of different theories about a common struggle, may now be seen to involve different locations and articulations. However, it is important to add that I intend the diagram to be, at best, heuristic. It is not the content or substance that is crucially on offer, but the very possibility of diagramming the political relationalities in a conjunctural way. The last phase is essential, for any such diagram must be understood to be conjuncturally specific. Let me speak briefly about the three vertices of this diagram of the political. Without offering either a general theory or a concrete analysis, I want simply to locate them and then map out some of the lines of articulation that constitute the complex field of the political. The first, the state, is usually taken as the disembedded essence of politics in euro-modernity. Obviously, this diagram is part of my effort to re-embed it; moreover, the state is usually 236  Chapter Five

approached as a matter (both as substance and problematization) of institutions and institutional power.6 However, it is probably better understood as an assemblage of any number of interwoven, heterogeneous, and somewhat independent institutions or processes. In fact, institutional existence is in no way unique to the state as a point in our diagram. What is perhaps unique, following Deleuze and Guattari (1987), is the way in which the assemblage itself is constructed: by overcoding everything that enters into its territory. The state is a territorializing machine that uses coding machines to produce or appropriate and inscribe a grid of self-identification across a territory and a population over which it claims power. Overcoding refers to the process whereby a discursive code appropriate to a particular milieu or apparatus is extended into other regimes so as to bring them all together under a common signifying regime. “The State is not a point taking all the others upon itself, but a resonance chamber for them all” (224). Such overcoding usually operates with codes organized around a center, a master signifier that puts everything it touches under a common sign. This signifier is the first and, as it were, the most basic actuality of sovereignty, in the form of a person or person-role, such as the king, but it could also be a principle (the law) or an abstraction (the people). This sovereignty is always paradoxical, since it is cannot establish its own claim to power. This is what Schmitt (2005) referred to as the state of exception (emergency). The power of the sovereign, whatever form it may take, has to create itself, as it were, ex nihilo. If it cannot ground itself by anything other than its own act, it is also the case that it can act against whatever limit its own sovereignty sets. The state as sovereign can act outside its own codes: the sovereign power not only establishes the law, but also declares the power to act outside the law. But this state of exception as the definition of sovereignty is a part of the diagram of euro-modernity (and we must leave open the question of its place in other formations of modernity, or even non-modernity). For the state of exception is only possible on the condition that sovereignty is itself constituted by and responsible to the law, even as it escapes it. Insofar as other forms of sovereignty, such as the absolute monarchy (established by divine right) of other state-formations, do not depend on law, they do not function via the logic of the state of exception. Of course, this construction of the state as sovereign has to be supplemented with an understanding of the state as a stratifying machine as well, whereby its reality is distributed into the “content” of the state as a population constituting the subjects of the state, and the “expressive” technologies Complicating Power  237

of the state understood as the modes and formations of governance. Moreover, at the same time as the state overcodes its territory and population, it provides the conditions of possibility for what, in some ways, can be seen as its own reverse processing. This can take two forms. On the one hand, it is the possibility for a radical decoding, such as that perpetrated by the existence of capital (as the production of surplus labor and value) and the possibility of accumulation. The state as an overcoding apparatus has a complex relation to capitalism—both antagonistic and enabling. On the other hand, it raises questions about the relations of state sovereignty to the people who are the subjects of such sovereignty. After all, state sovereignty is not the same as, and does not presuppose, national sovereignty. In fact, the former may pre-exist the latter, and their articulation together (producing specific forms of both the state and the nation) raises the very question of democracy at the heart of sovereignty. Taken together, the relation of state sovereignty and its subjects (democracy) constitutes the terrain of the modern state as one anchoring point of the diagram. The second vertex of the political strata involves bodies, but not as a simple empirical collections of biological individualities. Rather, it refers to the constitution and organization of life itself, along the lines of what Foucault (2003; 2007a) called biopolitics. Foucault uses the term to refer to specific euro-modern technologies (e.g., discipline, biopower, governmentality) that control the conduct of human life per se. I want to expand the category to refer to any technology that engages in the establishment and distribution of life (living bodies)—both human and non-human—as sites of power. Life itself is not only a condition but also a consequence of power. In its most general form, biopolitics produces (conjuncturally, or perhaps epochally) a specific distribution of the living and the non-living, and perhaps, in some formations, the human and the non-human, with the latter as the content (the given) and the former as expression (agency) of a stratifying machine. Again, such distributions are never merely questions of biology or physics, but define sites of apparatuses of power, and the struggles organized around and against them.7 Foucault suggests that biopolitics involves two distinct technologies in euro-modernity: discipline and biopower. I want to broaden his reading of these technologies to talk about machines of individualization and machines of aggregation. The former produce the individual as a living being, but always as the articulation of structures of embodiments, processes of sub­ jectfication and subjectivization, regimes of agency, and discursive formations; 238  Chapter Five

technologies of individualization produce individuals as an articulation and distribution of any number of elements and effects. In euro-modernity, individuality is established in very specific ways: the establishment of the individual body as the incarnation of the singular species being of the human is set up not only as somehow escaping nature, but as transcending it. But that individuality is never merely biological and embodied; it embodies a subjectivity that is itself constituted by the articulation together of the subject as both a location—the center of its own phenomenological space—and a position—the owner/producer of its own experience and intentions, with the individual as agent (initiator of action), agency (able to intervene into historical processes), and identity. The second form of biopolitics involves the construction, mobilization, and management of “populations” in the name of life itself. The stratification of bodies is duplicated on the scale of sociality, so that we can talk about the construction of sociality, of the various ways in which the multiplicity of individualities—again both human and non-human—are organized and mobilized. Populations can vary significantly, not only in terms of their internal consistency (from homogeneity to heterogeneity, however these are defined) and their external relationalities. Foucault (2003), for example, uses this concept not only to account for new forms of governmental power (which manage the health and welfare of the population), but also to describe the emergence of racism—of a distribution of populations marked by otherness—with the space of society itself. Euro-modernity operates with a distinct double stratification, first between the human and the non-human, and then between what Agamben (1998) describes as zoe, or bare life, and bios, or ways of living. The former refers to human life in its biological existence not as a scientific but a political construction. It is important to avoid essentializing bare life, and to remember, as Ghassan Hage (personal communication, July 2008) has pointed out, that the simple fact of merely living can be an act of, and even a public statement of, resistance. Euro-modern biopolitical technologies do not only separate the living and the non-living, the human and the natural (other diagrams have done or can do that that as well, albeit differently), they subsume the human into culture so that always zoe is constructed as an object of bios (as a sociality, a way of life). That is, we might say, the biopolitics of euro-modernity elides not only the naturalness of the human but also the human-ness of nature. It does this in two steps, through a very particular modality of stratification. First, Complicating Power  239

the human is equated with culture: the logic of culture (a logic of coding, otherness, and differentiation) is imposed upon a distribution; the relation between two constructed and distributed assemblages is automatically coded into a relation between the same and its other. Thus, the relations of biopolitics are rearticulated as relations of othering, the living and its other, the human and its other. This is the locus of the first political articulation of the other (or difference), an articulation that is always given the sign of negativity in euro-modernity. The other is reconstituted in a negative logic of difference, and hence, the world exists outside and independent of the human. In the negativity of the relation between the human and nature, where the former is subjectified and universalized while the latter is objectified and particularized, the world stands as a resource to be used and used up by humans, for their own needs.8 But we should note that such relations are always conjuncturally concretized, and we must leave room to distinguish a variety of ways in which the distribution can be articulated to otherness: as the dominant form a comparative negativity (the other is not the same, and is therefore denied the privilege of the same); as pure negativity (the other cannot even be compared, and can therefore pose a radical and absolute challenge); and as the positivity of a radical alterity. This takes us back to a second use of the concept of the state of exception (Agamben 1998) as the included exclusion. While some people assume that the two referents of this concept—to sovereignty and biopolitics—are the same, they operate at different sites in the diagram, although they may well be articulated, connected by a specific line that defines them both as distinct actualizations of a common logic—the logic of negativity—of euromodernity: “The rule suspending itself, gives rise to the exception and maintaining itself in relation to the exception first constitutes itself as a rule . . . the extreme form of a relation by which something is included solely through its exclusion” (18). The state of exception stands opposed to another logic—a positivity— that Agamben (1993) calls the “example.” The example qua example is itself an example of singularity as a mode of existence that is neither universal (in the sense of being conceptual) nor particular (i.e., individual), for the example exists both inside and outside of the class it exemplifies. The example exists “by the indifference of the common and the proper, of the genus and the species, of the essential and the accidental. [It] is the thing with all its properties, none of which, however, constitutes difference. In-difference with respect to properties is what individuates and disseminates singulari240  Chapter Five

ties” (19). Moreover, the status of the example is not accomplished once and for all; it is a line of becoming, “a shuttling between the common and the singular” (20). In other words, the example is defined not by an appeal to a common universal property—an identity—that empowers a boundary of inclusion/exclusion, but by its appropriation of belonging (to the class, in this instance) itself. The example belongs to the set that exists alongside of it, and hence it is defined by its substitutability, since it always and already belongs in the place of the other. This is “an unconditioned substitutability, without either representation or possible description” (24–25), an absolutely unrepresentable community. This community, on which the example borders, is an empty and indeterminate totality, an external space of possibilities. Thus, a singularity can be defined as “a being whose community is mediated not by any condition of belonging . . . nor by the simple absence of conditions . . . but by belonging itself ” (85). In other words, the example functions as an example not by virtue of some common property which it shares with all the other possible members of the set, or which it lacks, either of which would be capable of constituting the possibility of exclusion, but rather by virtue of its material relationship to the set itself. Any term can become an example of the set because what is at stake is the very claim of belonging to the set. Agamben turns this example toward the imagination of a new politics. He calls it “the coming community,” but it is perhaps more helpful to think of it in Deleuzean terms, as the “becoming community ”: “Because if instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper and senseless form of individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such, in making of the proper being—thus not an identity and an individual property but a singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity . . . then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects” (Agamben 1963, 65). In such a community, there is no common identity, no property that defines and unites the members apart from the fact that they are there, together, in that place. It is the fact of belonging that constitutes their belonging together. This is a community that, like an improvisational jazz performance, exists only in the emergence. Such a singularity follows a metonymical logic of involvement, a logic of the next rather than a synecdochal logic in which one term becomes the “proper” image of the whole. It is the product of the different processes and modes of individuation and even subjectification, outside of any economy of identity and difference. Such a community defines a positivity based on exteriority, on the singularity of Complicating Power  241

belonging. And yet, precisely by virtue of its positivity, it can, whether intentionally or not, come to define and embody a community of opposition, not only in the particular but in the universal as well. There are other dimensions, other questions, of biopolitics. For example, political ecology explores the processes by which nature itself is constructed, and which thus define the possible relations among various populations to and within “nature” (or the world), especially the relation of the human and nature. Thus, biopolitics raises fundamental questions not only about the politics of the environment and of our relation to the earth, but also of the relations among the different forms of the “non-human.”9 Finally, it is at this vertex that we might begin to locate and think about some of the enormously difficult questions of violence, for ultimately violence is a matter of—often literally—life (and death), a matter of attacks on the body— whether of individuals, populations, societies, or nature itself.10 Violence challenges cultural studies because it appears to be, in some not so obvious ways, a negation of the necessary discursive mediation of the political; the result is that, more often than not, cultural scholars write more about the representations of violence.11 On the other hand, especially in the context of euro-modernity, violence seems to confront us with the contradictions between its increasing spectacularization and quotidienization, or normali­ zation, which has the paradoxical effect of rendering it unrepresentable. The claim that it is impossible to represent violence, at least in some of its forms, presents violence as an ontological event that negates any possibility of meaning.12 Instead, by locating violence at the vertex of bodies, we are faced not with the seemingly impossible task of confronting a materiality outside culture, but rather that of mapping its articulations within the diagrammatic space of the political. I now turn to the third vertex of the field of the political—the production of everyday life—which, like the state, is primarily a set of territorializing apparatuses. As I will argue in the final chapter, taken together, these two vertices figure into another diagram, a diagram describing the production of the space-times of modernity as a multiplicity. Everyday life describes an organization of spaces of mobility and placement, or what I have called (Grossberg 1992; 1997b) a structured mobility. It defines or maps the possibilities of where and how people can move, how they can stop and place themselves, and how they can occupy such spaces and places. Such places are temporary points of belonging and identification, of orientation and installation. They are states of intensity, creating temporary addresses or homes, 242  Chapter Five

which do not pre-exist the lines of mobility. They define forms of empowerment or agency, ways of going on and going out. Places are not figures of containment, for it is precisely around such places that various cultural maps of meaning, desire, pleasure, attention, etc., and various relations of identity and difference can be articulated. Everyday life maps how much room people have to move, and where and how they can move. It produces specific vectors, lines of intensities, and densities that differentially enable and enact specific forms of mobility and stability, specific lines of investment (or anchoring) and flight. It maps the ways in which people live the alwayslimited freedom to stop in and move through a field of force. It maps the possibilities of how spaces become places and places become spaces; it maps the ways mobility and stability are both enabled by and limited within a field of forces. Everyday life is a map of the circulation of practices and bodies, resources and utilities, values and affect, power and politics, through space and time, and of the effects and constraints of this circulation. It measures not only places and spaces but also distances and accesses, intensities and densities. The lines of this structured mobility offer both an organization of space and a model of mobility. They constantly enact and enable specific forms of movement and stability, becoming and being, and empower specific forms of action and agency. It is neither a rigid system of places nor a predefined itinerary of imagined mobility. It is a constantly changing but always constrained deployment of possibilities of changing directions and speeds. Not all roads are equally available to, or equally comfortable for, every body or practice traveling within the spaces of everyday life. Not all roads intersect, and some roads have very limited access from specific points. Access may even be granted only in one direction. Not all roads are equally easy to travel, because the lines of mobility themselves have different forms and shapes (comparable to the wide range of roads).13 The politics of everyday life, even when involving specific populations, does not automatically fall into the common notions of identity and difference, which are largely the result of cultural articulations of relations around the vertex of the body (as struggles over the organization and distribution of particular bodies). Instead, everyday life involves questions of the technologies and modalities of belonging, affiliation, and identification that define the places people and practices can belong to, and the places people can find their way to. Within a structured mobility, for example, the subaltern is not a social category, an identity, or a simple spatial location, but a distributive Complicating Power  243

vector defining access, mobility, and the possibilities of investment and agency. Consequently, there is a different notion of agency in everyday life than that which manifests at the other two vertices. Here agency points to the existence of particular formations of practices and bodies as places on territorial maps, and to the concrete overdetermined articulation of fractions of the population to particular possibilities of places and spaces. Diagramming the Political My question concerns the production of the political as a complex and changing field against the claims of any form of reductionism, including theories that reduce the complexity of change itself. I hope this diagram begins to move us beyond the simple dichotomies that often structure discussions of the political: structure vs. process; centered vs. decentered; macro vs. micro. Before explaining the diagram, I want to make two points. First, in this diagram of the political, not only must one assume failure to be as constitutive as success, but also that resistance is similarly ubiquitous across the diagram. However, resistance cannot be explained by an abstract metaphysical (or anthropological) principle, or by an appeal to the return of the repressed, or by the fact of contradictory interpellations and subject-positions. It cannot be explained as any one thing, for the forms of resistance are as much determined by their location on the diagram, and the technologies they oppose, as by any common essence that can, anyway, only be defined by some vacuous negation of power. Second, I want to emphasize that the diagram has to be understood as both dynamic and inevitably incomplete, since the actuality of the political is always shaped by the intersections and interminglings of the political with the equally complex machinic apparatuses—stratifying, coding, and territorializing—and operations of the various technologies—of value production, commensuration, and actualization—that render sensible the geometries and densities of the social formation.14 The three vertices allow us to begin to map something of the complex transversal space of the political. The diagram is a (hopefully) useful albeit oversimplified representation of that complexity, a possible tool for thinking politics conjuncturally. This may look like a rather arcane exercise. I can only say—especially because I will not take up the challenge in enough detail to allay such fears— that my aim is to convey only some of the multiplicity of sites and lines of determination that constitute the political field, a sense that the specificity of 244  Chapter Five

political event or practice depends on its place within the political field, and the complexity of formations of power (like coloniality or “multiculturalism”) that are too easily reduced to a single dimension or location. Thus, if we consider something like diaspora, we might begin by asking how it is constructed, in its conjuncturally specific forms, by the apparatuses operating at the three vertices of the diagram. And that would only be the beginning, to which I shall return shortly. Similarly, we cannot ignore the way the state forms are involved in constructing the politics of pleasure and desire. Or, if we see that liberalism (individualism) and communitarianism are located along different lines, in different spaces, we might be able to rethink their relationship (beyond the typical assumption of a contradiction). And the dispersion (and articulation) of the political that the diagram accomplishes may enable us to understand the extraordinarily complex and multiple relations between the political and the economic on the one hand, and the political and the cultural on the other, to see the various sites and ways these registers intersect and correspond.15 I could go on, but my point is that, too often, we reduce the distributive complexity of the political register to a small number of issues and struggles, generally treating each as relatively independent. Moreover, too often, we also reduce the complexity of each point of political struggle, overlooking the conjunctural complexity of its production and effectivity. There is a fractal logic at work here: the complexity of the political—or of any problematic within the field—has to be described both internally to the field and externally to the conjunctural totality. After all, what counts as political and how the political field is organized and articulated is itself constituted in relation to that totality. This diagram aims to be a simple and constant reminder against the reductions of the political. Finally, I want to offer only a few brief, highly abstract, and speculative observations about the lines of the diagram (and the spaces they map), to offer some hints and examples of the complexities, focusing for the most part on the “vectors.” These are not stable and fixed boundaries or markers of the political field; rather, they are the active lines that call the field of the political into existence, the porous boundaries that keep the chaos at bay, as it were. But, as such, they also define the possible forms of disembeddedness constituting politics within the various actualizations of modernity. The first of these lines (“4”) connects bodies and biopolitics and the state. Here we might locate many forms of the political through which life itself is captured and politicized, including literal struggles over bodies, health, Complicating Power  245

sexuality, immigration, and death. It would include at least some of the formations of governmentality, securitization, etc., that Foucault (2007a) identifies as working on the body of the population itself, seeking in the name of improving the health of the people, to organize and control its behavior. And crucially, it is along this line that I would locate the violence of the state against both its own population (racism) and its enemies (war). It points us to the absolute centrality of racism and coloniality to euro-modern power: “Once the state functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the state” (2003, 256). It is along this line that a peculiar, biopolitical logic arises, which can then be articulated into a variety of cultural formations: we are surrounded by barbarians who make us—good people—do bad things.16 The second vector (“5”) connects the state to everyday life. Here I would locate civil society and liberal citizenship, and popular (affective) struggles, where one might talk about what is usually identified as the public realm and forms of stranger-sociality. It includes many of the regimes or practices of governance,17 recognizing that there are different theories and certainly many practices of governing, and that many of them cannot be isolated within or limited to the state per se. Clarke and Newman (1997), in the context of describing the emergence of managerialism as a distinctive practice or regime of governance, highlight the complexity of such questions: on the one hand, they have foregrounded the articulations of the political and the cultural; and on the other hand, they have consistently argued that power is always faced with challenges and inevitable failures, whether through simply the continuing power of the residual or through active forms of resistance, etc.18 Alvarez (2008) recently summarized much of this work by contrasting various “technologies of rule.” She describes four practices: governability (which seeks stability by delivering solutions to problems, where civil society has only a minimal role); governance (which is concerned with the quality of government, working closely with civil society / citizenship); co-governance (built on more participatory notions of civil society / citizenship); and governmentality (in which discipline is administered in the third sector through technologies of performance, and civil society / citizenship is rela­tively depoliticized). We might initially locate questions of citizenship (and its correlative terms, including “civil society,” “public sphere,” and at least one notion of “rights”—other domains and concepts of rights might be located on the previous vector) as separable from matters of subjectivity and identity.19 The 246  Chapter Five

third vector (“6”), connecting the body with everyday life, articulates the political as what is commonly called the personal or the private—I realize the two are not the same, that they are in fact produced through different technologies and located at different points on the diagram, but they are intimately connected in euro-modern societies—as forms of sociality, including relations of both intimacy and domesticity on the one hand, and collectivity and community (including cultural identities) on the other. It especially involves questions of individuality, subjectivity, and community; and through its articulation to matters of culture, it is where I would locate much of so-called identity politics. As a vector of the diagram, I think the private is both a foundational term with no essential content, a crucial self-representation of euro-modernity, and an organizing principle of both power and value. The remaining lines are transversal, insofar as they cut across multiple vectors; they constitute and occupy particulate sites in and configurations of a three-dimensional political space marked by varying densities and interdimensional relations. They constitute actual political formations, technologies, and struggles as complex heterogeneous formations. They articulate and assemble elements and relations captured at the vertices and distributed along the vectors to produce the complex realities of political life. For example, I would suggest that somewhere along transversal line “12” we might begin to make sense of Agamben’s (1998; 2005) bios, Wittgenstein’s (1968) form of life, and Williams’s (1961) whole way of life as political actualities. Any further elaboration, any effort to fill in or flesh out the diagram, will be even more speculative than what I have already offered. How the complex dimension of the political is actualized is always a matter of the specificity of the conjuncture. How and where a particular concept, struggle, or event is located on the diagram of the political can only be answered in the complex realization of the conjuncture. In fact, what we assume to be a single political problem, struggle, or concept may be multiply located and/or complexly articulated. What we think is a better theory of a particular political problematic, a specific location on the diagram, may actually be almost inseparably articulated to other sites and other struggles. For example, rather than thinking of disagreements over the nature and efficacy of identity politics, we might unpack the very notion: essentialist struggles over access and representation might be located somewhere nearer the state pole; constructions of otherness and difference might be somewhere closer to the body pole; and questions of belonging seem nearer to the everyday Complicating Power  247

life pole. We might also think about the shifting location of so-called identity politics in relation to the changing conjuncture, so that while various essentialist and anti-essentialist versions of identity politics may have been necessary and appropriate as a response to the postwar context (before the explicit emergence of a problematic of multiple modernities), they need to be reshaped in the contemporary conjuncture.20 Or take the question of diaspora, which we might have to think about in more complicated terms.21 While one might begin thinking about the politics of diaspora along transversal “10,” we can also map out its complexity. First, it obviously raises questions of mobilities, at least temporarily, without stabilities; or rather, bodies in motion have to find a way to bring their everyday life with them. In a way, they are always threatened with confronting the state as bodies and thus finding themselves reduced to, either, in the most extreme case, bare life, or, in the more typical case, people without a home. That is to say, diasporic politics operates somewhere on a line that connects and articulates all three poles. This is no doubt true of most of the dense problematics that are at the center of contemporary political theory. Not surprisingly, this complexity also inheres in the politics of coloniality, and its complexity, density, and centrality in the map of the euro-modern political lends evidence to the claims of the Modernity/Coloniality group that coloniality is a necessary defining aspect of euro-modernity (Mignolo and Escobar 2007). Taken together, these issues seem to raise a number of absolutely crucial questions: How did matters of identity (understood through various cultural technologies of difference) become a—if not the— master concept of political struggle in the euro-modern world? How did identity become a kind of strange attractor (master signifier?) around which so much of the field of the political has been articulated? How has the functioning of identity as a key strange attractor / master signifier of euro-modern politics been reconfigured in the context of the postwar conjuncture? How has this reconfiguration of identity contributed to and been shaped by the transformation of other political struggles in the world and in the United States (e.g., including the liberation struggles in the colonized world, the civil rights movement, countercultural politics, feminist and other so-called identity movements, etc.)? Or by other, intersecting—economic and cultural—struggles? How might we begin to articulate the political, beyond the diagram of a constructed and distributed field of complexity, to a dimension of every practice? It is this endeavor, presented as well in the previous two chapters, that opens the possibility of imagining a description of modernity 248  Chapter Five

that does not begin with a set of reified and fractured domains shadowed by their impossible unity. From Power to the Political I have tried to begin to diagram some of that complexity. I want to turn now to the question of an ontology of the political. Let me begin by distinguishing three terms: politics, the political (or the politics of . . . ), and power. Politics, as it is commonly used within euro-modern theories (and, to some extent, within everyday languages) refers to the narrow institutional site of power—the state and all that is directly or indirectly attached to it—that operates as disembedded, although I doubt that it was ever or was ever assumed to be as autonomous as the economy. Still, we can apply Gibson-Graham’s (2006) iceberg metaphor to the political: the state, given its embedded disembeddedness, stands out as what is visible from a broader, less acknowledged, and less visible field of the political, which I have diagrammed above. However, unlike the field of economics, the argument for recognizing the dispersed and embedded nature of politics has been embraced by many activists, critics, and theorists, although the effort to rethink the state by re-embedding it has generally not gone as far as it must.22 The political as such, which is often presented as “the politics of . . . ,” is almost always presented as attached to other elements, always articulated in relations. But the relationality is almost always confined rather than extended into the complexity of relations that would constitute the political as a dimension of the conjuncture. And that dimension, like both the economic and the cultural, has to do with the relations between the virtual and the actual, relations of value. I want, then, finally, to re-embed not just the state as politics but the diagram of the political into an ontology of power, in order to arrive at a better conjuncturalist approach to the political and the conjuncture. To do that, I have to start with the category of power itself, which can encompass more than the actual formations and processes of either politics or the political. Actually, we can distinguish three interrelated and overlapping concepts of power—constitutive power; capillary, or micro-politics; and constituted, or macro-power—although I do not think the distinction between the latter two is as ontologically significant as some have suggested. The notion of constitutive power23—sometimes mistakenly equated with micro-political, or capillary, power—is an ontological category (as opposed Complicating Power  249

to the empirical reality of micro-politics). It defines the virtual power of existence (or life, depending on your reading of various philosophers) itself, or perhaps more accurately, it defines existence itself, the virtual, as power—the capacity to affect and be affected. It is the lines of energy or force that constitute reality at its most fundamental level. It is the reality or power of becoming, or reality of becoming as power itself. Constitutive power is the ontological precondition of any actual reality as well as of any actual political field, but it is not the same as the political, which as an empirical register (an actualized real) is always the organization of capacities and, therefore, always their circumscription, delimitation, etc. As Deleuze (1994, 212) puts it, the “actual terms never resemble the singularities they incarnate,” and “in this sense, actualization or differentiation is always a genuine creation.” It is this creation that is the realization, the birth, of the political. Obviously, constitutive power “precedes” both value and significance, and in this sense, power precedes the economic and the cultural, since the latter are, at least as I have theorized them, relationships between the virtual and the actual. Constitutive power is not an empirical form of power or an alternative principle of the political. Power as capacity is not and cannot be, in itself, an actualization or even a negation of some actual political configuration, although it always guarantees the failure of any such configuration, in terms of both its actualization and its effectivity. Yet some theorists present constitutive power as a completely open and undetermined space of empirical possibility. If this ontological category is given normative reality, the result is a political ethics that assumes that anything that structures the flux of intensities and possibilities, anything that arrests and organizes the flows of becoming, any structure that appropriates and stabilizes the completely open and creative space of virtuality, is necessarily “bad power.” But if every structure is despotic, even micro-fascist, then there seems to be no way to distinguish among various political structures, and the only possibility left is (a rather strange notion of) anarchy. The empirical field of the political is often divided, following Foucault (1980; 1988), into the micro- and the macro-political, with the former sometimes mistakenly identified with the molecular (virtuality, becoming), and the latter with the molar, as if micro-politics were the same as constitutive power.24 Micro-politics refers to the capillary nature of specific configurations of the political—“the political everything,” in Jodi Dean’s (2000) felicitous phrase. It is meant to push our understanding of the field of 250  Chapter Five

the political beyond the reified (disembedded) institutional structures and practices of the state. Micro-politics is power operating not through vertical systems of domination (whether coercive or ideological) but through horizontal mechanisms of the control of behavior (the conduct of conduct), not through prohibition and constitution but through articulation, not necessarily through individuals (whether individuated or social) but through the fragments constituted in relationalities of power itself.25 It operates not only within and between macro-structures (of institutions, populations, and individualities) but also upon and within the micro-structures and microprocesses that both provide their infrastructure and define distinct technologies of power. And yet, micro-politics and macro-politics are inseparable. Hence there is no reality without power, or better, without the political, not because power is the virtual or because power produces its object, but because the political describes the production of an actual reality by selecting and configuring the virtual (capacities). Micro- or capillary power is itself organized, constituting specific regimes of power and constituted by specific technologies of power! It is not the same as constitutive power, nor is it simply the infrastructure or building blocks of the macro-political. For the moment, I will assume that the notion of macro-politics as the third concept of power does not need elaboration. It refers to the institutional sites and organizations of power, the explicit vertices and sites of the diagram, those which are generally (but not always, and not to the same degrees) thought of as disembedded within the discourses of euro-modernity—including state politics, civil and human rights, identity-structures, social movements, etc. While contemporary theories, and the struggles within the contemporary conjuncture, have multiplied the dimensions, sites, and categories of the political, the contextual questions of where and how the political is itself constructed involves the historical ontology—the modern specificity—of the political. How do we think of the political not as a disembedded domain but as an aspect of the existence of any practice? This is not simply another transcendental question like those that drive much of contemporary political theory—for example, what is the essence of politics, what is its primary subject/object: Schmitt’s (1996) constitutive exclusion (enemy);26 Laclau’s and Mouffe’s (1985) antagonism; Hardt’s and Negri’s (2000) multitude; Rancière’s (1995; 2001) struggle;27 Balibar’s (2003) masses and their movements; Connolly’s (2005; 2008) constitution of the relation of identity and difference; or Agamben’s (1998) zoe? Other questions driving political theory include whether the political is determinate or indeterminate; the Complicating Power  251

transcendental role of poetic or tropic discourse;28 and the constitutive role of democracy, the state of exception, consensus, rationality, and identification. Instead, I want to suggest a different question: How is the political produced within specific conjunctures? How do we define the political in a conjunctural or historical ontology? I have suggested that the social is defined by the fact that every practice is engaged in the production of values as the actualization of potentiality as potentiality (surplus); the economic, by the participation of any practice in technologies/apparatuses that adequate or compare values (or, in more common economic terms, that adequate the dynamic tension between resources and utilities); and the cultural, by the participation of any practice in technologies / discursive apparatuses (where discourse is defined by the capacity for incorporeal transformations) that actualizes both value (and its surplus) as an other. Now, finally, I suggest that the political involves the production of the actual, simultaneously micro-political and macro-political, as an architecture of collectivities. The political defines the participation of any practice or relation in technologies and apparatuses producing collectivities constituted in the tension between power as capacity and power as control, between the virtual and the actual. It produces a set of organized environments of configured multiplicities that operate almost parallel to—but always intersecting—the cultural (explaining the occasional sense of “competition” between them over the claim to be the defining register of modernity) and the economic. If economics has its commensurating machines, and culture its affective mediating machines, the production of the political operates through what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call “apparatuses of capture.”29 Such apparatuses produce assemblages the elements of which resonate together, embodying “forms of consistency.” “Capture” makes clear that in the political “the issue is not at all anarchy versus organization, nor even centralism versus decentralization” (471). Apparatuses of capture constitute assemblages that are always escaping themselves, defined not by homogenization or even totalization but by resonances and principles of consistency. They create “thresholds of consistency,” by which the singularities or events assembled are made to resonate together: “the taking on of consistency, or the consolidation of the diverse as such” (435). Yet it is not quite so simple as the claim that apparatuses of capture produce assemblages, for they also capture something that already exists; what is captured is simultaneously presupposed and produced by the act of capture. Or as Deleuze and Guattari (441) 252  Chapter Five

put it, “The mechanism of capture contributes from the outset to the constitution of the aggregate upon which the capture is effectuated.” And yet, by capturing the assemblage, the apparatus of capture not only orients the assemblage in its interiority, so to speak, it also sets in place or determines an outside, “engendering . . . the outside as outside of the apparatus” (Toscano 2005, 40). Apparatuses of capture always fail to capture everything, thus producing their own outside, which is not a negation but which can, not coincidentally, be articulated as surplus and other through cultural apparatuses. They thus define the political as the constant production of modes of inclusion and exclusion, not necessarily only as questions of identity and community, but as distributive and constitutive collectivities.30 Remembering that every machinic process works in both directions— stratification and destratification, coding and decoding, territorialization and deterritorialization—so apparatuses of capture operate always between capture and the nomadic (escape), not in terms of organization and fluidity, but, rather, of the numerable and the innumerable as that which cannot be counted and therefore cannot be captured. As nomadic, the apparatuses produce the innumerability of power as its own condition of possibility and its own modulation of failure. That is, power always escapes the apparatuses that seek to capture it, even as that escape is the very condition of possibility of the apparatuses themselves. But it is always power—the virtual—that escapes as innumerable, not its negation (or the absence of power). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) identify at least two forms of capture, two forms of consistency: the intraconsistency of the expropriation and appropriation of an outside by an instance of control, and the transconsistency of a network. The former, which suggests the operation of a coding machine, is the basis for their description of the state as an overcoded assemblage. The state literally captures everything that enters into its orbit and incorporates them by saturating them with its codes (thus creating even more possibilities of lines that escape its codes). It is also within such apparatuses of capture that Deleuze and Guattari (1977) locate processes of subjectivation (of which they identify at least two forms: social subjection and machinic enslavement). Apparatuses of transconsistency describe processes of convergence and distribution, the construction of an assemblage between heterogeneous series, marked by circulations among the elements and the emergence of territories. In other words, they are territorializing apparatuses of capture, such as those that produce everyday life. But it strikes me that there is another Complicating Power  253

form of consistency implicit in their theory: interconsistency.31 It suggests a stratifying apparatus of capture that works through a particular double articulation, the conjunction of two operations—in this case, comparison and appropriation. As Patton (2005, 41) summarizes, “In all cases, we find the same two key elements: the constitution of a general space of [‘direct’] comparison and the establishment of a centre of [‘monopolistic’] appropriation.”32 This is the mode of capture by which life itself, and the human as a species being, are captured, and by which the politics of biopolitics is set in motion. Obviously, I have suggested that the three vertices of my diagram—state, body, and everyday life—are actually describing specific apparatuses of capture. That is, they are actually not “sites” of power on the field per se but rather apparatuses that constitute the field, that define the boundaries of the field and the varying fields of consistency that mark the variable densities of the political. They are actually not, despite the appearances, the moments of potential disembeddedness of politics, since they operate precisely by the lines of effectivity they produce. Moreover, each vertex is itself constantly fluctuating between capture and nomadism, thus ensuring within the very ontology of the political that power is always incomplete, is always resisted, always fails. I have also suggested that each of the apparatuses that constitute the vertices is constituted by the articulation of capture to particular forms of machinic processes—stratification, coding, and territorialization. The concept of capture seems to operate across and through all of the machinic processes. But I do not want to carry this too far, because I think that while they are always articulated, always deployed in particular ways and in particular relations, these articulations are never guaranteed outside the particular conjuncture. Thinking about the political as apparatuses of capture may enable us to think beyond the all-too-common disputes in the field of the political—for example, between process and structure, between agency and institution. It also seems to present us with something of a paradox, for it seems that my conception of the political as the production of capture of collectivities is closer to common understandings of the social as a system of relationships, from the interpersonal to the institutional. This is precisely what Schmitt (2003) was afraid of: that contemporary politics (both as practice and theory) increasingly not only conflated the social and the political but substituted the former for the latter. Yet, that is precisely what I hope to have accomplished, to move away from the euro-modern fetishism of politics 254  Chapter Five

and to open the field to its complexity and multiplicity. I do think that what euro-modernity has isolated as the social is precisely the field constituted by the operations of power as capture. More importantly, I hope to provide a vocabulary and a set of conceptual tools that may enable us to see not only the ubiquity but the permeation of the entirety of the conjuncture, and even of modernity as a multiplicity, by the economic, the cultural, and finally, the political. Conclusion: Imagining the Struggle over Modernities I want to end this chapter by considering one structuring dispute of the intellectual and cultural left in the contemporary conjuncture33—not the only one, but a crucial one, since the argument can be understood to be defined in large measure by the question of struggles against (liberal) euromodernity. Moreover, it is a dispute that can be seen to involve questions about the relations between an ontological and conjunctural politics. This rift is sometimes described as an argument between those concerned with state power and those who think that any involvement with such structures inevitably traps one within the very operations of power one opposes. The former position can include many possibilities, although it is usually identified with various marxisms, including much of cultural studies. The latter position is often identified with two distinct but overlapping discourses: on the one hand, autonomous theory, which starts with the assumption that power as capacity—located in the working classes or the multitude—precedes and determines in its very oppositional capability the structures of power it then opposes; and on the other hand, an explicitly Deleuzean theory of a “politics of becoming.” Both of these contribute, in different ways and to different degrees, to an anti-systemic politics, committed to changing the world without taking power,34 which is often linked to the new anarchists (the black brigade), the squatters, the anti-globalization (or global justice) and social forum movements, the Zapatistas, etc., although there are significant differences among the various manifestations of this position. Such autonomous political struggles often see themselves defending ontological against sociological (structural) power, becoming against being, fluidity against stability, complexity and multiplicity against singularity and universality, locality against nationalism, decentralization and democracy against organization and structure. They celebrate experimentation as the practice of political struggle. Complicating Power  255

Still, it is important to distinguish the different implications and impacts of the two discourses I have identified as operating within this position. First, as I have suggested, it can be seen as building a normative politics on the basis of an ontology of becoming; this would seem to give over the question of political agency and strategy to ontology, so that the emphasis on process trumps the exigencies of the contextual problematic. In seeking not only freedom from state power but also freedom from having to engage with such politics, it often offers rather universal and totalizing descriptions of how such politics operate. Alternatively, figuring a politics in which power as productive force (constitutive) is freed from all social relations of politics, emphasizing the immanent, autopoetical, fluid, complex, emergent, and horizontal nature of power/reality, its struggles are insistently local. The real question is not whether but how one can derive a politics for the actual from the nature of the virtual. Ironically, an ontological politics can relieve one of the responsibility to analyze the specificity of actual configurations of power. Too often such positions offer relatively simplistic analysis (e.g., of capitalism, albeit dressed up in fancy garb), or they assume a postmodern logic of before and after that reproduces the absolute binary structures they claim to oppose. As Holloway (2002, 15) insists, “The struggle is lost . . . once the logic of power becomes the logic of the revolutionary process. . . . We want a society in which power relations are dissolved . . . a society of non-power relations.” From a cultural studies perspective, it is difficult to know what to make of such a position. Yet I do not believe conversation is impossible. One of the most intelligent defenders of such a politics is William Connolly (2005), who juxtaposes a politics of becoming—“that paradoxical politics by which new and unforeseen things surge into being” (121)—from a politics of being, which “refers to crystallizations that persist, even as subterranean forces may accumulate within them” (121). It is perhaps not so far to cultural studies, which, at least as I have presented it, asserts a politics of contingency, complexity, and possibility. One of the strengths of Connolly’s position is that, unlike other autonomous authors, he does not directly derive his normative politics of pluralism—one I find particularly attractive—from the politics of becoming. Connolly also avoids a common tendency within anti-systemic politics to separate social movements as agents of change from more general questions of “the people,” however contested this construct may be. Social movements tend to be thought of as outside of the politics they oppose, and therefore as outside the very change they seek to produce—perhaps as a result of the 256  Chapter Five

centrality of models taken from relatively isolatable populations: for example, the indigenous struggles of the Zapatistas. One of the results is a peculiar sort of temporality that in fact undermines the possibility of serious intellectual work: we want the world and we want it now. A second, related understanding of these autonomous social movements foregrounds the ways they embody an alternative to existing ways of living. Their opposition is primarily expressed in their own internalities, their existence as an alternative way of life or a laboratory for experimentation. The social movements enact what is commonly referred to as a “prefigurative politics,” emphasizing principles of autonomy, nonhierarchy, and selforganization: the movements become their own object of desire. The practices of any social movement aim to produce the social movement itself, as a movement that actualizes an ontology of becoming. And yet, the very possibility of creating such a movement, even if it defines its own becoming as the task, cannot dissociate itself from the instrumental task of opposition or from the conjuncture within which it operates. In the present conjuncture, the argument between the two kinds or poles of politics—state/structure/popular vs. everyday/anarchist/lifestyle—can be followed back to a seriously disabling split in the left in the 1960s.35 But the argument has a longer history, one that Williams (1977) conceptualized as the differences between oppositional, alternative, and independent politics. Oppositional politics depends upon the presence of the other as enemy and presents itself as a direct challenge or threat to the dominant politics by confronting it with its own power and its promise (but not necessarily a concrete vision) of a better configuration of power. In alternative politics, the very existence of the alternative offers itself as an implicit challenge to the hegemonic organization of politics. In independent politics, the other is effective only by its absence; it is a politics defined by escaping from the control of the dominant politics. My point is that such ontological and autonomous theories and politics, which often do not see themselves operating under the sign of cultural studies, are an important interlocutor within the debates of contemporary cultural studies. Rather than seeing an unbridgeable distance between them and cultural studies, we should see the productive possibilities of that distance in the contemporary conjuncture. For these arguments over the appropriate forms of politics and struggle can be read as arguments about modernity—although in the discourses of both sides modernity is usually identified with euro-modernity or its reconfigurations; moreover, the Complicating Power  257

modernity of euro-modernity is rarely defined, so that either everything is assumed to fit together into a neat “modern” package or modernity is equated to a singular essence which is expressed in everything else. Consequently, I want to return to the task I began in chapter 2, to think about modernity as a problematic, and the possibility of other modernities.

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six In Search of Modernities There is no establishment of truth without an essential position of alterity; the truth is never the same; there can be no true except in the form of the other world and a different life. —Michel Foucault

I want, in this final chapter, to return to the question of other or multiple modernities. In chapter 2, I argued that the present conjuncture can be seen as a problem-space constituted by multiple struggles against euromodernity, and in particular, against that version of it—liberal modernity— that was established in much of the North Atlantic world by the midtwentieth century (with its own variations in other parts of the world). Additionally, I have asserted my own belief that formulating the best political responses to the context, the best strategies aimed at making the world “better,” depends upon producing the best knowledge we can about the context, and that depends on both empirical and theoretical work. How one theorizes the problem-space will shape one’s ability not only to understand the present, but also to imagine other possible futures. Finally, I have argued that the dominant ways in which modernity has been theorized assume that all possible modernities are simply variations on the universal model of euromodernity. Such theories of “alternative modernities” constrain the ways we can imagine other realities, and hence, the ways we can analyze the present. So the question is, is there another way to theorize modernity, which might then give us another purchase on understanding the conjunctural struggles against it, and on imagining that other worlds are possible? The unavoidable question is how a particular configuration can be asserted to be modern. How do we define modernity as a changing same or, adopting a phrase from Colectivo Precarias a la Deriva (2004, 42), a

“singularity in common”? One must distinguish not only between the modern and the non-modern, but also between variations within a common modernity (i.e., alternative euro-modernities) and distinctly other modernities. As Lefebvre (2005, 188) argues, “We insist upon the need for a general concept of modernity which would be valid for all countries, social and political regimes, and cultures.” But Lefebvre makes it clear that such a concept, while claiming worldwide utility, cannot claim universality. Such an inquiry cannot be entirely conceptual or definitional. Takeuchi (2005, 53) admonishes us to “keep the ambiguity of the word ‘modernity  ’ so as to avoid a method that begins through conceptual determination.” So how do we conceptualize modernity, recognizing that it too often functions as an abstraction in need of specificity even while that specificity has been universalized as a configuration of spatio-temporal power? The question is neither empirical nor conceptual, but conjunctural and discursive. To theorize the problematic of the modern requires us to investigate the production of the discourses of the modern—what are its conditions of possibility, its effectivities, and its dispersions. Or to put it differently, it involves questions of what might be called conjunctural and epochal ontologies. What are we saying about a context when we call it modern, or when we deny it such a description? What was it that was brought into existence under the sign of euro-modernity that is what we refer to as “the modern”? What sort of answer would not simply condemn the modern to forever becoming euro-modern? I offer a somewhat speculative analysis of fractions of a spatially and historically dispersed conversation on modernity. What can possibly be signaled by the complexity of the contexts and claims made about and for modernity? The analysis does not seek to define either an essence or a simple unity; rather, it points to the virtuality of modern, to a reality that has effects but is never fully actualized, because it can be actualized in multiple ways. It is often unclear to what the term “modern” is being ascribed. Yack (1997) makes an obvious but telling distinction between a temporal sense of modernity as a periodization, and a substantive sense that refers to the distinctive quality of being modern. He points out that we rarely attribute some quality—say “antiqueness”—to other periods, say, Antiquity. Moreover, he argues that commentators often conflate the temporal and substantive senses of the terms, so that everything in the modern period must be distinctly modern. But does the fact that something is modern in the substantive sense (say, democracy) mean that it must be present in every 260  Chapter Six

instance of modernity in the temporal sense? Recognizing this distinction enables us to see the complexity of people’s relations to the changes that both characterize and propel modernity: we are often not so much a part of the forces of modernization, or even riding them as it were into the future; we are just as commonly standing alongside them, judging, resisting, or trying to avoid them at all costs. Moreover, modernity sometimes refers to specific, actually existing social formations; at other times, it refers to larger structural conditions that transcend any particular social formation and constitute what might be thought of as “constituents” of modernity, so that we might think of capitalist-democratic-secular modernity. Finally, it can describe more fundamental—ontological—modes of being in the world, or “ways of being modern.” What constitutes a mode of being as modern, and how do we construct its diagram? I assume that the modern describes and circumscribes, even as it constructs, a certain variability in the ways people can belong in the world, or in what I have called the ways of being modern, understood as simultaneously material, discursive, ideological, and affective. In this way, I do not define modernity as a particular kind of subject, experience, logic, or institution; I do not identify it with a particular (set of) social or structural norm(s). Instead, I follow Talad Asad (2003, 14)—“Modernity is not primarily a matter of cognizing the real but of living in the world”—and Gilroy (2000, 55), for whom the modern is “a distinctive ecology of belonging.” I have tried to rethink the very concept of modernity by taking a necessary detour through theory, by moving into the realm of a Deleuzean on­tology to identify the “machines” that produce any modernity, but also the specific realizations of such machines, the diagrams, that actualize modernity as euro-modernity. Theories of alternative modernities take these diagrams for granted, failing to recognize that they constitute only one possible modernity. Theories of alternative reality assume that the specific ways in which the machines operate to produce euro-modernity are necessary and universal, that they are constitutive of any modernity. Consequently, they cannot confront the constraints that such diagrams impose upon the possibilities of ways of being modern. I have tried in the previous three chapters to suggest some paths that may enable us to think about and map conjunctures in ways that do not always reinscribe the assumptions of euro-modernity about the nature of the social totality. I have presented three machines, or diagrams of the modern and euro-modernity. In these chapters, I have questioned, in admittedly small In Search of Modernities  261

ways, a territorializing machine of euro-modernity, which divides and distributes the lines of force shaping any context into a specific configuration of domains (economy, culture, politics). I have, at various moments, especially in chapter 4, described and challenged, again in small ways, a coding machine of the modern as the construction of the other, and the specific forms it takes in euro-modernity, which place every difference, every distance, every boundary, every other, under a sign of negativity. I have, in chapter 5, offered the outlines of a diagram of power as it shapes the terrain of euro-modernity. In addition, I have described some of the apparatuses (of commensuration, mapping and translation, capture) that operate within any modernity. But at the same time, I think that my efforts up to this point to offer an ontology of the ways of being modern remain insufficient. Even recognizing that it will always be incomplete, I want in this final chapter to further elaborate the ontology of modernity as a multiplicity, by considering the operation of one more machine, the constitution of another diagram, of modernity: a stratifying machine. In my earlier discussions, I considered two ways of defining modernity—conjunctural and cultural—and the limits of the possibilities they could imagine, whether as theories of alternative modernities or of modernity  ’s necessary failure. I have tried to both agree and disagree with both of these approaches: with conjunctural theories, I have embraced the complex composition of modernity while refusing to understand that composition in sociological/institutional terms; and with cultural theories, I have embraced the argument that modernity can be better analyzed in terms of logics (or apparatuses) while refusing to assume that there is a single such apparatus that constitutes the possibilities of being modern. In order to deepen my ontology, I want to return to the problematic of modernity as a multiplicity. After elaborating it, I will turn my attention to a third way of defining modernity—in terms of time (and space). I will then offer another diagram of modernity as the articulation of lived temporal geographies or possible relations within and between time and space. Finally, I will bring this book to a close by considering the path that lies before us as intellectuals. The Problematic of Multiple Modernities I want to consider the arguments of Takeuchi and Gyekye, that in both China (as opposed to Japan) and Africa, respectively, modernity was internally generated. Gyekye (1997) describes African modernity as a self-created 262  Chapter Six

modernity; similarly, Takeuchi (2005) argues that China’s modernity was created as renewal, within the encounter with the otherness of its own past. In the early twentieth century, the Kyoto School of history sought to establish an Asian origin of modernity, located as early as tenth century China. And new interpretations of the Qing dynasty have suggested that it was an expansive, multicultural—modern—empire.1 Perhaps we should not be surprised by such claims; after all, neither Nkrumah of Ghana nor Nehru in India (key figures of the Bandung Conference of unaligned nations) were willing to assume that modernity was a singular process that committed the “third world” to westernization, nor were they willing to settle for hybridi­ zations of the West. My point here is not to agree with the specific socio-historical readings of national modernities offered here, but to illustrate a different logic, and different discourses, of modernity. I do not want to debate the historical merits of these arguments, but to display them as other discursive logics of the modern and discursive statements of other modernities. It may be that Kahn (2001, 658) is right: “But did the key elements of modernity really appear first in the West, only then to be transported and indigenized elsewhere? Evidence can certainly be produced to demonstrate that the modernization of the West and at least part of the non-West—Russia, Japan, China, the centers of the Islamic worlds . . .—were contemporary processes rather than being merely cases of early ‘Westernization,’ raising the possibility of more genuinely parallel, multiple, or plural modernities.” The difficulty and promise of the effort to think modernity outside or beyond euro-modernity is made clear in the very important “research program” of the “Modernity/Coloniality group,” comprised mostly of Latin American intellectuals.2 To be fair, the group is what Escobar (2007, 190) calls “a community of argumentation,” sharing a project, a common political and epistemological desire, and a common set of assumptions and conceptual tools. That desire is articulated out of a particular “reading,” one that echoes the opening of this book, of the contemporary context (181): “the present is a moment of transition: between a world defined in terms of modernity . . . and a new (global) reality which is still difficult to ascertain but which, at opposite ends, can be seen either as a deepening of modernity the world over or, on the contrary, as a deeply negotiated reality that encompasses many heterogeneous cultural formations. . . . This sense of a transition is well captured by the question: Is globalization that last stage of capitalist modernity, or the beginning of something new?” In Search of Modernities  263

The m/c project, focused on the possibility of radical alterity, seeks to find “an other way of thinking . . . [and] talking about ‘worlds and knowledges otherwise’  ” (Escobar 2007, 179). They too agree that what I have called the alternative modernities model, “in the last instance . . . end[s] up being a reflection of a euro-centered social order, under the assumption that modernity is now everywhere” (183). There is, however, fundamental conceptual disagreement that separates our projects without, I hope, closing off the conversation. They assume that there is no modernity without coloniality. Or, in slightly different terms, “colonialism and the making of the capitalist world system [is] constitutive of modernity  ” (183). That is, they equate modernity with euro-modernity, and this guarantees that they see their project not as looking for other modernities, but, rather, for alternatives to modernity. As I have said previously, I do not disagree that some of the struggles over modernity in the world today are actually struggles against any modernity, propelled by a desire to find alternatives to modernity, and that such struggles have to be supported on their own terms, but I do not think these are the only two choices. Additionally, I do agree that the possibility of other modernities, or for that matter, of alternatives to modernity, will require a decolonization of knowledge itself. However, there are ambivalences within the project. First, the m/c group is attempting to decenter modernity from its apparent European origins, proposing instead to adopt “a world perspective in the explanation of modernity, in lieu of a view of modernity as an intra-European phenomenon” (Escobar 2007, 184). Yet they continue to identify modernity with Europe, even as they double it: the first modernity begins in 1492 with the Spanish colonization of the Americas, followed by a second (more commonly recognized) modernity of northern Europe, which did not replace the former but “overlaps” with it.3 They limit modernity to Europe, but suggest it is the product of global relations; yet it is unclear why all modernity is euromodernity, and therefore inescapably involved in coloniality. Could one imagine a modernity without coloniality? If such imagination is not possible, then how is it possible to imagine other elements that are similarly intimately connected to modernity but without the contamination of euromodernity? For example, if it is necessary to give up any notion of modernity, why are we not compelled to give up notions of democracy? Why can democracy be reconceived but modernity cannot? The second ambivalence involves the space within which the challenge to euro-modernity is located: “it is impossible to think about transcending 264  Chapter Six

or overcoming modernity without approaching it from the perspective of the colonial difference” (Escobar 2007, 186). The group advocates a “border thinking ” that stands opposed to (or at least is cognizant of the limits of   ) the “various eurocentric critiques of euro-centrism,” “the modern critiques of modernity,” including deconstruction, postmodern theory, and much of postcolonial theory. Their particular framing of “border thinking ” advocates thinking about and from an alterity that is always an exteriority. This is the colonial difference as “a privileged epistemological and political space” that “take[s] place at the exterior borders of the modern/colonial system” (185). This is crucial work, although I am not sure if the group has yet adequately specified the forms of coloniality and othering: in what ways, for example, is their analysis specific to Latin America, and why? But this is certainly an ongoing project. This key notion of the colonial difference is described in different ways, although it is centrally articulated as the exteriority of the other. This is, for the various authors, the necessary conclusion of the fact that their critique of modernity is undertaken “from the perspective of coloniality  ” (Escobar 2007, 188), “from its underside, from the perspective of the excluded other” (187). Nevertheless, the notion of the colonial difference is elaborated in a number of different ways. Maldonado-Torres’s (1997) notion of the “coloniality of power” seems to suggest that the difference is an ontological “excess.” Dussel’s (1996; 2000) notion of “transmodernity  ” suggests a different kind of modernity itself. But the dominant position seems to be what can be described as an “interior exteriority,” a kind of hybridity, which stands both within and outside of modernity.4 One can imagine Maldonado-Torres agreeing with Escobar that “In no way should this exteriority be thought of as a pure outside, untouched by the modern” (2007, 186). But he might be less confident with a move that seems to me to involve reading that exteriority back into a decidedly poststructuralist, or even Hegelian, logic of negativity: “The notion of exteriority does not entail an ontological outside; it refers to an outside that is precisely constituted as difference by a hegemonic discourse” (186). And it is not clear how this can be reconciled with the further claim that “By appealing from the exteriority in which s/he is located, the Other becomes the original source of an ethical discourse vis a vis a hegemonic totality. This interpellation of the Other comes from outside or beyond the system’s institutional and normative frame” (186). This exteriority is, it seems to me, further compromised by the assumption that the other is constituted as a subject. Thus, the argument moves In Search of Modernities  265

from coloniality as a complex political relation to the colonial difference as a matter of subjectivity.5 The colonial difference slides between a space of productive possibility, a notion of a prior indigenous way of living / subject, and a wounded yet celebrated identity / subject position occupied by specific people who have been the “victims” of colonization. On the one hand, that position offers a vision of a hybridized colonial subject, which is, in its very extremity, the very inescapability of its violent subordination, and therefore offers a clearer experience—and critique—of modernity from its extremity. And on the other hand, the position also offers the possibility of alternatives to modernity. Presumably, the assumption is that the colonial subject is more than just the colonized subject, that their very hybridity points to another space-time of their existence (in another place, another time) that opens the possibilities not of going back but of imagining new futures. But the excluded, subalternized other is never outside of modernity, since it is a necessary aspect of modernity itself, since modernity cannot be separated from coloniality. There must be something more, for the critique of modernity is also “from the exterior of the modern/colonial world.” There seems to be no reason why that exteriority which, as quoted above, interpellates the Other, must always and only be located within modernity/coloniality or as subjectivity. While it is important to recognize that there are vibrant alternatives to modernity, might such alternatives not also come from other spaces of social possibility and political imagination? Might they not also open up the possibility of other modernities? Might not the possibility that the m/c group seeks a “positive affirmation of the alternative ordering of the world” (Escobar 2007, 188) open up the multiplicity of modernities as well as alternatives to modernity? After all, modernity has always been spatially multiple; it differed in different places, even in Europe (and certainly across colonial empires). Western common sense for the most part identifies modernity with the Reformation and Protestantism, giving rise to the scientific revolution. But what about Catholic France, where modernity was primarily articulated in political terms, and articulated by a Jansenist antipathy to Rome and the Jesuits? And why not a Catholic Iberian modernity, which maintained a positive attitude toward its own multicultural and medieval traditions and refused the absolute distinction between religion and science, leaving only a narrow space for euro-modern notions of empirical demonstration? (Domingues

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2001). Or what about the various modernities that were created in the colonized regions of the globe? Are these all simply hybrids of the West? Modernity has also been temporally multiple. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, euro-modernity was characterized by an absolutist state linked to colonialism (primarily for financial reasons), which provided the conditions for the emergence of capitalism (which then reappropriated colonialism for other purposes). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, modernity linked capitalism to the emergence of the democratic nation-state and the rise of the liberal subject, which was also nationalized, racialized, and economized, as it were. Could there not have been other significant variations? Could there not also be more temporal variations? After all, if western scholars cannot even agree about in which century modernity emerged in Europe,6 why should we not agree with the Brazilian philosopher Vaz (cited in Domingues 2001), who distinguishes Greek modernity, the theoreticalrational modernity of the late Middle Ages (connected perhaps to the commercial revolution of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Europe), and European capitalist modernity? What if we then were to read the history of European modernity less as a break and more as a series of negations? This began not with the discovery and negation of the to-be-colonized world and its inhabitants, but with the first negation of the Levantine formation of the Middle Ages, a globalizing society that was both religious and scientific, and pluralistic (encompassing Arabs, North Africans, and Europeans, Muslims, Jews, and Catholics). That negation, quite literal in 1492 with the expulsion of the “Moors,” that is, the Jews and Muslims, was followed by the re-presentation of this formation as the presence of “barbarians” on European soil, thus making it necessary to erase Levantine society, and with it southern Europe, from the history of modern Europe. These momentous events were perhaps enabled by the articulation of the expansionist logics of Christianity and capitalism, and were simultaneously linked to a kind of dialectical negation (Hegel’s master-slave) of colonialism. And in fact, even in the mid-twentieth century, in many popular discourses, Europe ended (and “Africa” began) at the Pyrenees, thus excluding not only Iberia but also Turkey and Greece.7 The question is not when or where modernity belongs, but what it is to belong to modernity. I am not concerned with the contradictions within modernity, but with the possibilities of contradictions among modernities. What would it mean to see modernity as multiple, to think that there are

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always radically other modernities? It would mean refusing to assume a single narrative of modernity, or even a fractured linear narrative through which modernity moves, whether smoothly or rupturally, in a series of states. It is not a matter of variations, however great, around a set of themes, nor a continuing process of the hybridization of some originary formation. We must “unlearn to think of history as a developmental process in which that which is possible becomes actual . . . to learn to think the present—the now that we inhabit as we speak—as irreducibly not one” (Chakrabarty 2000, 249). We must ask, with Gilroy (2000, 56–57), “in what sense does modernity belong to a closed entity, a ‘geo-body  ’ named Europe?” We must wonder whether C. L. R. James (1989) was right to think that modernity was invented in the “periphery  ” of the world system, in the Caribbean. This is to think “modernity elsewhere” (Gilroy 2000, 76) and, I might add, “else when”; it is to offer “an altogether different, a-centered understanding of European history ” (80). Perhaps this is what Chakrabarty (2000) meant by “provincializing Europe,” which seeks to find, for those outside of Europe, ways of articulating something other than “subaltern subject positions.” For Chakrabarty (43), this requires us to understand how the multiplicity of modernities has been apparently defeated: “If a language . . . is but a dialect backed up by an army, the same could be said of the narratives of ‘modernity  ’ that, almost universally today, point to a certain ‘Europe’ as the primary habitus of the modern.” This entails more than critiquing Enlightenment rationality; it demands questioning the assumption that the equation of a “certain version of Europe with modernity  ” is “the work of Europeans alone” (43). Gyekye (1997, 274) is surely correct that “the link between modernization and westernization can only be empirical, not conceptual.” How would one begin to challenge the discursive tactics by which euromodernity is always remaking itself from a singular universal to the universal singular? How would one think of the category of modernity as something other than a universal singular? How would one multiply modernities as something other than hybrid variations within that singularity? How might one imagine a multiplicity of singular universals, each a complex relationally constituted statement or embodiment of modernity? How might one think the possibility of a more ethically desirable modernity, whether Gilroy  ’s (2000) planetary humanism, or Dussel’s (2000) transmodernity, or Agamben’s (1993) coming community?8

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It is the desire to imagine other ways of being modern that has fueled my interest in Levantine society, a society that Menocal (2002, 46) describes as “the first full flower of modernity.” It was a society that embodied “a will to establish a wholly new society  ” (61) without teleology or universality, a society of tolerance, of translators rather than proselytizers. It was a society not of negations and hybrids, but of the constant articulation among differences, actualized in an extraordinary celebration of translation. It was a society that embraced contradictions, built upon (at least Menocal [11] claims) an ethic of “yes and no.” My point is not to romanticize this formation, nor to hold it up as a model of what we might become, but to see in it the possibility of an other—to use Harootunian’s (2000, 55) phrase, possibly “coeval”—modernity. If the concept of a multiplicity of modernities defines a problem-space, rather than answering its question, then perhaps we can now specify the question: How do we constitute a concept of modernity as a multiplicity? Scott suggests that we are all “conscripts of modernity.” That is to say, too often, the very demands we make against euro-modernity are articulated by and inside that modernity (e.g., Toussaint ’s demand in the Haitian Revolution, “I want my freedom”). But if we begin with a model of a multiplicity, then there is always an outside, always a line of flight, always the possibility of an other (including alternatives to modernity). And there is always another demand: I want to live otherwise. An Ontology of Space and Time One of the most common ways modernity has been understood is as the production of new organizations and/or experiences of time (and to a lesser extent, space). Most frequently, the chronotope of modernity is assumed to be History: modernity is the invention of History, and the acceptance, even the celebration and institutionalization of change; it stands against stasis (as tradition). This modern time is linear, a movement from a past through a fleeting present into a future. The future passes into the past through an ever-disappearing present. Or in a slight but important variation, the present is the articulation of different temporalities—past futures and futures past—embodying “the contingencies of the past [and the future] in the present ” (Scott 2004, 220). Koselleck divides the experience of time into the “space of experience”—the past made present, embodying the particularity

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of a past remembered—and the “horizon of expectations”—the future made present, embodying the diffuse possibilities of a future anticipated. While the latter defines and surpasses the former, Koselleck argues that the modern age constitutes a break in which the gap between these two dimensions or planes of the experience of time has considerably expanded.9 One of the most famous (in the English-speaking world at least) statements of this chronotope is Marshall Berman’s marxist-influenced vision of modernity as a particular attitude toward and experience of the increasingly rapid and dense actualizations of change: “a mode of vital experience—experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life’s possibilities and perils. . . . To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. . . . To be modern is to be part of a universe in which . . . ‘all that is solid melts into air’  ” (1982, 15). To be modern is to make oneself at home in the maelstrom, to embrace and even desire change. Modernity is the experience of History. But there is no guarantee how this linear temporality is lived out. For some it is about the future as defined by a teleological sense of progress rather than apocalypse. For David Bromfield, writing about Perth, Australia, “The ‘modern’ was only marginally understood . . . as implying the future. . . . The modern is much more commonly a known history  ” (quoted in Morris 1998, 16). Gyekye (1997, 280) similarly conceives modernity as a commitment to innovation and change: the “cultivation of the innovative spirit or out­ look . . . can be said to define modernity.” Modernity is the incessant claim to produce the new.10 And yet, Gyekye also contests any account that ignores the complexity not only of modernity but also of notions of innovation and change. After all, he points out, traditional societies also change and often seek change, while on the other side, modern societies always embody and embrace traditions. Similarly, Gaonkar (2001) warns against those who emphasize the place of change in modernity, ignoring on the one hand the growing importance of routine, and on the other, that change itself is a new modality of power; as Cesaire (2001), Chakrabarty (2000), and others have argued, this construction of history as a linear temporality is powerfully articulated to a variety of forms of violence and brutality, exhibited most clearly in slavery, colonialism, and global wars. The temporality of history is always spaced as well; in general, it is articulated to the bounded space of the nation-state. History takes place largely 270  Chapter Six

within the space of the nation-state, so that the universalizing of euromodernity is built upon the normalizing and universalizing of the nationstate as the proper spatialization of socio-political existence, with the result that history itself, still always plural in relation to particular nation-states, is itself singularized and universalized as the History of euro-modernity itself (Chakrabarty 2000). But the reality is more complicated. After all, euromodernity was constructed through moves away from large-scale religiousbased empires to smaller sovereign national states where the borders define the space of decision-making powers (and social identifications), but it then adopted new forms of spatial expansionism through capitalist markets and colonialism. In fact, the spatial logics of euro-modernity are located in the “contradictions” between boundaries and expansion, since many of euromodernity  ’s determining vectors (Christianity and science, capitalism and democracy) are proselytizing forces that demand constant expansion. Recent work has tried to deconstruct the universalizing tendencies of euro-modern thought by re-spatializing History as histories, locating History in specific spatial locations and configurations. The result is the somewhat unsuccessful effort to construct “geo-histories.” Timothy Mitchell (2000) and others have attempted to re-spatialize even the origins of euromodernity itself, displacing it from Europe onto a more global scale, arguing that it was the product of complicated worldwide relations: “If modernity had its origin in reticulations of exchange and production encircling the world, then it was a creation not of the West but of an interaction between West and non-West ” (2). (Mitchell also recognizes that the use of West and non-West here is at best anachronistic.) As important as such moves are, they cannot get us to a notion of multiplicity, for there is surely a difference between the claim that euro-modernity was invented globally—that Europe did not invent modernity by itself—and the stronger and more radical claim that modernity was also invented elsewhere—that it has been invented, in fact, at many different times and in many different places. There is a second temporal definition or chronotope of euro-modernity. If the first chronotope is more conjunctural, operating at the level of social structure, social change, and national identity, and emphasizing the break between the old and the new, the second is more phenomenological and affective, operating at the level of structures of identification, investment, and experience. It can be traced back to two significant theorists of the modern: Benjamin’s (1968, 262–63) “other history  ”—what he calls messianic time as “a cessation of happening . . . an enormous abridgement ”; and In Search of Modernities  271

Baudelaire’s emphasis on the present and presence, on the now, as the key to modernity.11 In this second chronotope the modern is constituted as the construction of the now, the present as a discrete moment of temporality. The present is the ontological locus of the lived, and the temporal locus of the subject of experience. It is the present-ing of the individual as subject of his or her own experience. The now is the moment of experience as a way of being in time. Stuart Hall (n.d.) says that being modern bestows upon one “the privilege of living to the full the potentialities of the present ‘from the inside.’  ” For Foucault (2003, 227–28): “The present becomes the fullest moment, the moment of the greatest intensity, the solemn moment when the universal makes its entry into the real. . . . The present is no longer the moment of forgetfulness . . . it is the moment when the truth comes out.” Or as Toni Morrison (2004, 210) says: “all of it is now it is always now.” Each now, each present, is unique unto itself. This notion of the present seems to have abandoned any notion of history and historical specificity, as well as of change itself. In the present, history, “both as a form of knowledge and as a primary state of being of empirical phenomena . . . is itself a historical phenomena . . . even if its problematic of temporality spills over into many others” (Young 1990, 74). Following Bloch (1977), the now is the “nonsynchronous accumulation,” the repetitions of all times, of multiple temporalities, in the moment. As Gaonkar (2001, 7) suggests, in modernity, “everything turns to the present, and that present, having broken out of the continuum of history, is an unceasing process of internal ruptures and fragmentation.”12 Interestingly, although Gaonkar seems to define modernity through its temporality, you will recall that his vision of alternative modernities rests elsewhere, so that the essence of modernity, its temporality, remains constant across all of the (surface) variability of the alternatives. While I share Gaonkar’s desire to say what lies at the core of the modern and that it is, at least in part, about time (and space), I shall try to avoid defining it in euro-modern terms. I propose that modernity is, before all else, the product of a stratifying machine that produces a new set—a diagram—of ways of belonging to and in time and space, defined in large measure by what Stuart Hall (1996b, 251) has called “doubled time”—“What distinguishes modernity is the overdetermined sutured and supplementary character of its temporalities”—and, I would add, spatialities. The two chronotopes of euro-modernity are simply one actualization, one diagram, of this machinic stratification which produces the ways in which the modern is constituted as a lived space-time.13 272  Chapter Six

Thus, history can be seen as one expression of the more ontologically defined time of Chronos, or the spatio-temporality of change itself. In euromodernity, Chronos is actualized as the differentiation of past, present, and future in a linear relation. It is paradoxical, in part, because it is the dimension of change which, nevertheless, under the determination of the second chronotope, functions as a state of being rather than becoming. Although it is about change, it makes change subordinate to structure. As Osborne (1995) says, modernity is “a distinct but paradoxical form of historical temporality  ” (5), which he identifies as “the ceaseless process of temporal differentiation” (6). Chatterjee (1993, 131) seems to recognize and then retreat from the recognition that there are other ways of belonging in time when he opposes the universalization of euro-modern time-space relations, warning that “people can only imagine themselves in empty homogeneous time; they do not live in it.” They live in “heterogeneous time”—time that is “unevenly dense.” Homogeneous time is the “utopian time” of capital and the euro-modern state. Yet, by his very description, his own claim that “homoge­ neous time is not located anywhere in real space” seems to elide his very characterization of euro-modernity. My point is that there are other ways of becoming, of existing in and as change; there are other ways in which the temporality of Chronos can be actualized. The second chronotope, the happening, or event of the now, is that of experiential space-time or the space-time of the event itself.14 But the event of the present, the present as event, is not merely the fleeting and disappearing portal through which the future becomes past; it has a being-structure of its own. It is the ontological reality, the discontinuity and contingency, the “event-being ” of the present or the now as a singularity constituting the locus of experience and subjectivity, which defines this second chronotope. My use of event here is not unrelated to the ways the event is used by such writers as Žižek (2002) and Badiou (2005), for whom the event represents the unrepresentable, the unprecedented, the absolutely singular. But for them, the event is always a kind of interruption of change, of history, so that the temporality of the event embodies the fantasy of an absolute rupture with the past, and even time itself. This makes the event into the negation of both the ordinary and the particular.15 Instead, I use the notion of the now as event to point to what Takeuchi (2005, 58) calls “the permanence of the instant.”16 It is, in Heideggerian terms, the event as happening, as the being of the performative.17 This is the present as an ontological condition of the possibility In Search of Modernities  273

of transition, of becoming, as the ontological between.18 As Benjamin (1968, 264) says, “A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop.”19 In other words, the present is an event of belonging and, simulta­ neously, as Heidegger (1962) demonstrated, a project(ion) outside itself. For example, the present opens onto an always-open future, even as the openness of the future has to be struggled for in the present. It is, therefore, the condition of possibility of change, although it itself does not change and is not the locus of change. It has at the same time a more dialectical relation to itself, so that it includes the eternal within the event of the present. As Foucault (1997, 311) put it in his rereading of Baudelaire: “The value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is.” Thus, the permanent critique, the experimentalism of the modern, “at one and the same time, marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task” (309). Similarly, Derrida (1994, xix) talks about the “noncontemporaneity with itself of the living present.” There is, then, within the very event of the present a kind of double presencing, not merely a presencing of discontinuity, contingency, and fleetingness, but also the expression of, as Foucault (1997) describes it, the eternal, the heroic, in the present, the transcendent in the immanent. It is the event of the now that constitutes the condition of possibility of self-consciousness even as it is the site of subjectivity, by taking the subject out of the very flow of temporal (time) consciousness.20 The present in which one can “separate out from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do or think” (Foucault 1997, 315), embodies a paradoxical structure that results from the negation of change, similar to the logic that Takeuchi (2005, 71) identifies in the poet Lu Xu’s story of the slave, a logic that contravenes Hegel’s parable of the master and slave: The “most painful thing in life . . . occurs when the slave rejects his status as a slave while at the same time rejecting the fantasy of liberation, so that he becomes a slave who realizes he is a slave. This is the state in which one must follow a path even though there is no path to follow; or rather, one must follow a path precisely because there is no path to follow.” We might see this as the present always being greater than itself, for in its reality it includes not only the actuality of the now, but the virtuality of the becoming. Speaking figuratively, the now

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of the present includes its own way out, its own possibility of movement and self-critique, precisely as the singular, emergent, contingent event. It is more difficult to distinguish the ontological present or event from its actualization in euro-modernity. Yet Harootunian (2000, 4) suggests that the present is a “historical” event, “a framework of temporal immanence . . . a minimal unit of temporary experience” which emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I might suggest that if the temporality of the event is always the site of subjectivation, in the euro-modern actualization of the present, subjectivation takes on a very specific form—of subjectification. The site of the event is the space of (phenomenological) experience, and hence of the construction of the individual as the phenomenological subject of experience. This subjectivity is lived as both an interiorization of one’s essence or individuality, as a self, that is—in metaphysical terms— “spiritualized,” and as the privileged author/possessor of its own experience. It is, we might say, the rationalization of the soul. This inner self is a selfaware subjectivity that stands in specific relations to both the social order and the world. But as always, these relations are never completely fixed and guaranteed. As Morris (1998, xxii) suggests, “When [the category of experience] is used as a way of posing skeptical questions of history, rather than as a way of imposing a claim to personal authority, ‘experience’ has also been part of the struggle to name a different temporality.” But the stratifying diagram has another axis, for temporality is always articulated to spatiality. Before turning to this axis, I need to briefly consider the ontology of space itself, if we are to avoid not only the euromodern bifurcation of space and time and the privileging of time over space, both rooted in Kantian philosophy, but also the assumption of a necessary equivalence between them (or between specific configurations). Above all, we must avoid seeing space as the passive partner serving merely as the occasion in which time can be active.21 There can be no universal description of space, and space is never simply equal to the codes and structures of the spatial practices that organize the transversality or “vectoral” nature of space itself (i.e., space is both directional and dimensional). We might begin, however, with the difference between four-dimensional Minkowskian space (in the specific theory of relativity) and the Riemannian space of the general theory of relativity. In the former, events are located and localized at particular points, and it is the nature of such events that they are independent of where they are. The

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points have no power of their own. In the latter, events spatialize; they are “world-lines,” the vectors of the becoming of place. And the nature of such lines varies with their—language fails us—locus. In Riemannian space, space is not independent of what happens, and what happens is not independent of the space where it happens: a line can bend space.22 This is to see space as the active being of distanciation, of the movement of becoming itself, and to see objects or places in space as active, as having power in themselves. Every event is an effect of and constitutes space. The very becoming of the event is the becoming of space itself. Massey (personal communication, March 30, 1998) once used the image of the plant blossoming to capture this sense of the simultaneity or co-becoming of event and space. It is important to remember, as I have already argued in chapter 1, that space in this sense is still organized, first, as a multiplicity of (overlapping) milieus, or heteroge­ neous blocks of space-time. Or better, space is the becoming of milieus. Massey (2005, 56) has argued: “For there to be . . . multiplicity there must be space.” And second, space is organized as territories, constituted through the repetition of particular components or elements, creating a resonance or rhythm between milieus, so that aspects or portions of different milieucontexts come together to construct an expressive assemblage. Since space is always a space of becoming, space and time are mutually constitutive; they are called into existence—actualized—together. I have discussed one axis of the stratifying diagram of the ways of being modern in terms of two modes of temporality, two ways of being or belonging in time. I want now to describe a second axis comprised of two ways of being or belonging in space: institutional space and the space of everyday life. While discussions of euro-modernity often assume a necessary correspondence across the two axes, linking history with institutional space and the present with everyday life, such articulations are contingent, further defining specific actualizations of the topographical possibilities of being-modern. The contrast between the two modalities of space can be rather simply, if somewhat schematically described: institutional spaces are characterized by permanence, simple territorializations, and complex codings. That is, they are structured by rather well-defined boundaries, often but not always producing varying degrees of confined territories. But within the bound­ aries, they are marked by complex technologies of power—systems of rules, norms, and standards, all “designed” to control behavior and regulate interaction; and they are marked by elaborate cultural regimes of significance and signification producing shared worlds of meaning, importance, and 276  Chapter Six

desire. In euro-modernity, such institutional space encompasses state and governmental institutions, the institutions of civic, public, and even private life, corporations and formal markets, etc. They manifest both individually and collectively an apparently insatiable expansionary tendency, as if they were seeking to define all of the spatiality of modern living. The second modality of modern space is the spatiality of everyday life, which Baudelaire (cited in Gaonkar 2001, 4) described as “transient . . . fleeting . . . contingent,” although I will suggest that this is only partially true. Its very impermanence and instability seem to make it into a kind of spatial singularity, so it is not surprising that many critics have associated it with the time of the event. Baudelaire (1995, 5) locates the same “marvelous” element of the present, or what Gaonkar (2001, 5, 23) calls, citing Baudelaire, “the intimation of ‘the eternal’ in ‘the ruins of our tradition,’ ” in the spatiality of everyday life. Similarly, Harootunian (2000, 4) argues that the “minimal unity of the present, however precarious . . . [is] the actual and unavoidable experience of everydayness . . . identified as distinctly modern.” While Benjamin (cited in Harootunian 2000, 3) similarly suggested that the present was “the actuality of the everyday  ” (and vice versa?), I believe we have to see the relation not as an equivalence, but as an articulation of the now and the here.23 As Gaonkar (2001, 4) puts it, modernity is located at the crossing where the “fugitive materiality  ” of everyday life impinges on a sharpened consciousness of the present. Just as importantly, everyday life is characterized by simple codings and complex territorialities. It is not organized by systems of rules and meanings, but by distributions of habits and structured mobilizations. Everyday life is not the same as the phenomenologist’s life-world, nor the pragmatist’s cultural context, which are more commonly articulated with institutional spaces.24 As Lefebvre (1984; 1991b) makes clear, what I am calling everyday life is not merely a phenomenological “lived,” but its condition of possibility; it cannot be approached through the immediacy of appearances, since, unlike the phenomenological “phenomenon,” it is precisely what eludes any and every attempt at thematization. Although I am drawing on Lefebvre, I deviate from his vocabulary, in which “the everyday  ” is the form that what he calls “daily life” (and that I am calling “everyday life”) takes in twentieth-century euro-modernity (defined by a particular capitalist reorganization of power), where it is both commodified and reified. As a result, it becomes both self-conscious (a concept in its own right) and an object of power and control. The everyday negates In Search of Modernities  277

whatever sense of unity, totality, and “style” existed previously in “daily life.” I distance myself from Lefebvre in two ways: first, to argue that everyday life need not be reified or commodified, and that it is a virtual spatiality that can be actualized in multiple ways (including its form in late capitalism as Lefebvre describes it). Second, I do not want to suggest that somehow, in the past, everyday life has some sort of meaningfulness that was subsequently lost, thereby producing a modernist narrative of a fall from authenticity.25 Everyday life, in my use, refers to the uncatalogued, habitual, and often routinized nature of day-to-day living, what we don’t think about while we are living it; it encompasses all those activities whose temporality goes unnoticed (i.e., we simply don’t even notice the time they take). It has a certain messiness, an unsystematic and unpredictable quality, to it. It is not recoverable, reclaimable, or redeemable, because it is banal. And despite the fact that it functions as the common ground of all human thoughts and activities, it has as well a certain mysteriousness, since it always remains outside of science and social theory. In fact, it is opposed to abstract thought, which is incapable of ever understanding the dense particularity of daily life. While it is always permeated by meanings, values, and myths, yet they cannot organize it. Everyday life is a residue, what remains when you subtract all the institutional structures, all the meaningful and significant (we must remember that the non-meaningful does not suggest the necessary disruption of meaning) practices, “all [the] distinct, superior, specialized structured activities [that] have been singled out by analysis. . . . Considered in their specialization and their technicality, superior activities leave a ‘technical vacuum’ between one another which is filled up by  ” everyday life (Lefebvre 1991, 97). 26 Everyday life is a space of routinization, of repetition, of the ordinary (and hence, possibly, of boredom). In this sense, there is a certain luxury to the very existence of an everyday life. Again, such routinization need not signal an “intolerable tediousness,” as if its monotony were constantly foregrounded and imposed. It is the site of the habitual, where habit is understood, following the pragmatists, as a productive and repetitive singularity (rather than as a simple routine); it enables new kinds of reflexivity and self-consciousness or, better still, new kinds of self-imaginations. At the same time, this event of the lived introduces contingency—the unpredictable, risk, error, and the accident—into human life. Thus, Lefebvre (2005, 185) goes so far as to suggest, “Would not the essential characteristic of modernity be the aleatory,” which is not simply absolute contingency. 278  Chapter Six

Finally, there is another dimension to the mystery of everyday life, for it always exceeds or escapes itself—as what Lefebvre calls everydayness, as what Morris (1992, 465), following Blanchot, describes as “pure process in excess.” In fact it is the taken-for-granted ordinariness of life itself that is the excess that escapes, “the excess of living” as it were. But this excess of banality is not some sort of vital essence of life itself. It is the result of lived practices, that possibility that the end point of the ordinary is the arrival at or construction of a common place. Everyday life is closely related to the realm of the popular, where this excess can embody a creativity that always exceeds and resists configurations of the political; for Lefebvre, it embodies a particular strength and resilience as the basis for the possibility of resistance. As Osborne (1995, 196) observes, following Lefebvre, everyday life is “the place where ‘the riddle of recurrence intercepts the theory of becoming.’  ” In this way, it “can reorganize the place from which discourse is produced” (de Certeau, cited in Morris 1990, 27). A Stratifying Diagram of Modernity I want to describe a diagram of ways of being modern as a configuration—a doubled difference—of four distinct but articulated apparatuses of spatial and temporal belonging.27 The actuality of any possible modernity will be defined by particular articulations of each of the terms of lived tempo­rality— change and the event—and of lived spatiality—institutional space and everyday life—as well as the relations among them. In euro-modernity, for example, these appear as history and the phenomenological present, as the state and a commodified everyday life. But there are other ways of actualizing change, and the present—of realizing institutional and everyday space. They are virtualites that can be differently actualized to create a multiplicity of ways of being modern. In other words, being modern involves neither the event nor change in the abstract but concrete actualizations of both in relation—neither everyday life nor institutional space in the abstract but concrete actualizations of both in relation. Insofar as each of these varied logics of belonging in space and time is never simply singular and universal, as if there were only one possibility, then “being modern” itself is a real and positive multiplicity. This diagram maps the virtuality of being modern by enabling us to imagine the actualizations and articulations of and across the two axes of differentiation of belonging in time and space that I have elaborated. My In Search of Modernities  279

space

Everyday Life Now/Event

articulation mediation of individuation

Institutional Space

time

Change/Chronos

presentation of the diagram is intended to suggest not a simple table but the articulations among two intersecting axes or dimensions, neither of which can exist independently of the other. While the diagram inevitably remains flat and static, I hope it will be taken as an image of a self-producing, constantly changing, multidimensional machine.28 Let me reiterate briefly my account of this diagram. It is defined by the belonging together, the articulation, of two dimensions, each of which is defined by a relation of the belonging together of two modalities of belonging in the real. The first dimension comprises the necessary belonging together of Chronos (historicality) and the event (the now) as modes of belonging in time. As Chakrabarty (2000, 8) put it, modernity is located in the space where “the urgency of the ‘now ’ [is] in tension with historicism’s not yet.” Insofar as the chronotope of the event focuses entirely on now, as it were, it gives up not only any notion of change, but of any possibility of theorizing 280

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the “historical” specificity of the event itself. And insofar as the chronotope of Chronos focuses entirely on change, it gives up the possibility of understanding the immediacy—and hence, the subjectivation—of the lived. In the contingent relation between the two modes of being-in-time, each of which is itself contextually actualized, in the life lived in both chronological and eventalized time, human life is opened to the mediation of material, affective, and semiotic regimes. As I have suggested, in euro-modernity, presence is lived as phenomenological experience,29 and change is lived as History/histories. The second axis—of lived spatiality—comprises the necessary belonging together of the space of institutions and the space of everyday life as modes of belonging in space. In the contingent relation between the two modes of being-in-space, each of which is contextually actualized—in the life lived in both institutional and everyday spaces—human life is opened to the very real possibility and even necessity of multiplicity itself. Again, in euromodernity, the former is actualized as the space of the nation-state (and, within that, the space of civil society, corporations, etc.), while the latter is actualized as a commodified and biopoliticized space. But the diagram is defined not just by these two axes, but also by articulations across them as well. “The experience of modernity is constructed as a relationship between time and space. It is a particular way of expressing one in terms of the other” (Mitchell 2000, 13). There are always relations constructed—and then assumed—across the axes, between spatiality and temporality. How they are articulated is again a matter of specific and multiple actualizations, so that, for example, in the diagram of euro-modernity, history is closely linked to institutional space (of the nation-state) while the present is for all practical purposes equated with everyday life. It is this double articulation—a doubling both within and across the two axes—that results in the apparent mirror structure of the diagram. It is the articulations within and across these axes that make sociopolitical change structurally necessary and “normal” within the multiplicity of modernities. The changing relations between everyday life and institutional spaces, between Chronos and the event, and across the two dimensions, allows for the rapid multiplication of sources and loci of resistance, struggle, and the effort to seek out and produce the new.30 I might very tentatively hypothesize that in non-modern societies, the differentiations made explicit in this diagram do not exist or are not lived as distinct and significant within the modes of being-in-the-world. This is not to say that such spaces In Search of Modernities

281

and times do not exist or, more accurately, that they cannot be identified; it is a matter of their lived effectivity.31 How are such articulations within the diagram itself accomplished? How are the different modes of belonging that constitute the actuality of beingmodern mediated? I might hypothesize that the agency, or vector, of articulation is constituted by the construction of modalities of individuation. It is the articulation of the simultaneous and multiple ways each modality of belonging constructs a subject—and possible agency—of time and space. Individuality does not have to be equated with embodied singularity; subjecthood does not have to be equated with the locus of phenomenological intentionality and experience; agency does not have to be equated with self-reflective and self-conscious intention. None of these have to be located within codes of negativity, and none need to be defined outside of complex webs of relations. Yet, this is precisely how individuality, as the fundamentally euro-modern way of being in the world, is constituted: individuality, identity, subjectivity, and agency are articulated into an assumed chain of equivalence, which is simultaneously distributed (territorialized) into the various realms of the social formation (economic individuality, political individuality, etc.) and coded into a logic of negative differentiation.32 I want to take a moment to suggest a few ways such a diagram might help us diagnose the conjuncture, especially because I think the implications of the other diagrams I have discussed are somewhat more obvious, remembering that the diagram of how we belong in time-space plays a crucial role in defining the very possibilities of living and acting in the present. First, and most obviously, as this complex set of relations and demands changes, so must the diagram of power change, and vice versa. That is, new ways of belonging in space-time require new forms and organizations of power, across both the doubled spatiality and the doubled temporality of modernity. Such power involves not only the management of bodies in space but also the management of temporality—of the present and of the future. Perhaps Lefebvre (2005, 187) was correct to assume that “modernity is best charac­ terized . . . as a fruitless attempt to achieve structure and coherence.” Let me, however artificially, separate the two axes for the moment. There are in the contemporary conjuncture multiple crises of spatiality, multiple lines of struggle around spatiality. Consider the growing complexity and uncertainty—disinvestments, reinvestments, and changing investments—of people’s ways of belonging to a variety of different spaces and spatializations. Perhaps even more importantly, it seems that the unique articulation 282  Chapter Six

of these spaces in contemporary forms of euro-modernity, especially the relation of institutional and everyday spaces, is not simply the overdetermination but the permeation of each by the other, so that institutional spaces are increasingly characterized by triviality and boredom, while everyday life is increasingly organized by the technologies and codes of institutional spaces. Everyday life feels more and more institutional, even as institutional spaces increasingly try to take on the feeling of informality and habituation of everyday life. This does not mean either that there was at some point an absolute difference between the two figures of spatiality, or that the difference between them is disappearing, but rather that the actualization of the diagram, the configuration of lived space is changing, or perhaps more accurately, being changed, through a broad range of struggles. But it is the crises and struggles along the axis of time that are particularly striking and profound. This takes me back to my reference in chapter 2 to my researches (Grossberg 2005) on the changing status and place of children: one of my conclusions was that a key site of conjunctural contestation involves changing configurations of time, especially our relationship to history and change.33 Across a wide range of discursive and nondiscursive practices, including economic relations, family life, governmental regimes, the construction of and investment in time, especially in the future, are changing. A key anchor of the diagram of euro-modernity, and even more strongly, of its liberal modern variation, involves the ways we belong to history and the place we occupy on the trajectory from the present to the future. The common sense of liberal modernity assumes a particular linear, unidirectional, and open-ended relationship; it assumes that the future leans upon the present in particular—determinate but unpredictable—ways. What we do in the present has some determining power over the present, and that link defines the present’s responsibility to (if not for) the future.34 Whether intentionally or not, increasingly, the future is being defined as either indistinguishable from the present (and therefore as the servant of the present rather than vice versa), or apocalyptically (as radically other than the present, without any continuity). It is a struggle to collapse, deconstruct, or reshape our sense, not of where we are heading but of what it means to head into the future, not of the content of the future but of the sorts of temporalities and causalities operating in the space between the present and the future. It is a struggle over our relation to the future, over our deepest assumptions about the responsibility of the present to the future, and the possibilities in the present of bringing about or even influencing the possibilities of the future. In Search of Modernities  283

I am suggesting that people’s faith in their ability to shape the future has become fragile at best. This is not the same as saying they don’t care; it is rather that they don’t think their caring can shape the future. As Fukuyama (1992, 48) put it, “We arrive . . . exhausted, as it were, from the pursuit of alternatives we felt had to be better than liberal democracy.” The most immediate result is that we live within a shrinking horizon of time, that we increasingly see the future in the short term, almost as if it were the present. The signs of this transfiguration of lived time are commonplace. Nowhere is it more visible than in explicit efforts to treat the future as if it were re­ sponsible to the present. The future is treated as a resource to be used and used up in the present, for the benefit of the present. If the stock market represented the commodification of particular pieces of the future, the current explosion of securitization is its wholesale submission to the demands of the present: the future (as condition and possibility) reduced to futures. The most frightening sign of our changing relation to the future is the growing popularity and power of apocalyptic narratives, whether they come from the religious right or the environmental or anti-global left, whether visions of the end-time or simply images of history as a discontinuous series of ruptures, disasters, and miracles. Both replace notions of the continuities of social effort with images of unpredictable outcomes. These are not only operating at the level of grand narratives, but also of individual lives, so that images of miraculous (chance) successes (e.g., lotteries) begin to replace the faith that hard work eventually has its rewards (e.g., the image of working one’s way up the ladder of success, seen even in some aspects of the civil rights movement). In Postrel’s (1999) frightening libertarian treatise, there are only two ways of relating to the future. Stasists—the liberal-left way (often represented by the Unabomber35) want to limit what can be done in the present in order to shape the future. They are anti-change, anti-modern! Dynamists know that the future is “unknown and unknowable” and therefore that it cannot be controlled in the present; let a thousand possibilities bloom in the present, whatever the consequences! This apparent negation of the futurity of the future is inseparable from changing relations to the past. It is in this context that the current prominence of the question of memory as a key cultural and political site becomes a question rather than a solution to an as yet unasked problem. We can take note of the increasing need and speed of memorialization, to remember, in the face of the disappearance of the future. Huyssen (2003) has similarly noted that the “culture of memory  ” has emerged since the 1970s.36 If 284  Chapter Six

liberal modernity emphasized the present-future relation, is there evidence of a shift to a new emphasis on present-past? Are we somehow caught in a conflict between a politics of the present-future, or even of the pastfuture (Walter Benjamin), to one of the past-present relation? And at the same time, the present itself become uncertain. Bauman (1991, 11), for example, has talked about struggles to escape the present, but my favorite sign of the changing investment in the present is an ad for the International Advertising Association World Congress (The Economist, 2008) on the theme “What’s coming next?” which describes the conference as “where ‘now ’ is a thing of the past.” Taken together—and I have only scratched the proverbial surface of this diagram, these crises/struggles may partly explain the common feeling, articulated in many different ways, that the changes we are living through are momentous and epochal. While this diagram describes an axiomatic geometry of multiple modernities, it is not sufficient, either as a theory of modernity or as a description of any specific configuration. I have tried to make clear that this stratifying diagram of belonging in time-space is always and already articulated by other diagrams, including those of coding (i.e., relationality or mediation, otherness), territoriality (e.g., dimensions vs. domains), and power; by regimes of value, expression, and power; and by apparatuses of commensuration, mapping, and capture (the subjects of chapters 4, 5, and 6, respectively). Still, we have to inquire into the forces that actualize the various diagrams of modernity as a concrete social formation (even if we assume with Althusser [1970] that it is always a “teeth-gritting harmony  ”). I nevertheless think that this stratifying diagram can suggest a different view of a social totality as a distribution of practices, apparatuses, and lines of crisis and struggle articulated across the diagram of space-time, rather than as a fractured unity always enclosed within its own proper space. Perhaps we can think of it as an always incomplete movement toward totality—articulated into the specificity of conjunctural problem-spaces. How are these diagrams articulated to regimes of discourse and power? Additionally, I am well aware that an ontology of ways of being modern cannot answer all the questions.37 On the contrary, many questions remain. To find “answers,” we have to go on to map the very different ways people live out these diagrams as modes of being-in-the-world, given the social and material complexities that concretize a way of living. But that would already assume a different way of theorizing the multiplicity of social formations as interconnected, fragile, mobile, porous, rearticulated and rearticulating “totalities.” In the In Search of Modernities  285

end, we cannot avoid following this risky path from diagrams to actualities, from abstractions to conjunctures. Before ending this discussion of multiple modernities, I want to address one final challenge. One might, confronted with the claim of other modernities, ask why I call them modern instead of something else, perhaps even alternatives to modernity. This question deserves a serious answer, although I want to reiterate that I do not think that other modernities are the only possibilities that are being struggled over. There are certainly alternatives to modernity even in the broad sense that I am using it, but there are also some possibilities better thought of as modernities. I have no doubt that at least one reason for this conclusion lies in the “origins” of this investigation, in my effort to find a better way of understanding the contemporary conjuncture of the United States. This led me to a story about struggles over the “coming American modernity.” As happens too often, having “discovered” modernity as the definition of a problem-space, I discovered that many others have been addressing the question of (and demand for) modernity in other—both geographically and historically—conjunctures. A second reason is that I want to avoid paradoxically reproducing the negative logic of euro-modernity. The question, are these other possibilities not outside of, or other to, modernity itself?, can too quickly become a euromodern negative difference. Perhaps, by thinking about multiple modernities, we can move our interrogation onto other topologies; the effort to find other ways of thinking relationality is itself a part of the effort to think beyond euro-modernity, but without the analytic work, it can easily remain an imaginary logic. But the most important reason is what Gaonkar (2001, 21) describes as the “rage for modernity  ” and what Lisa Rofel (1999, xi) captures, describing her fieldwork conversations: “  ‘Modernity  ’ was something that many people from all walks of life felt passionately moved to talk about and debate.” Rofel (cited in Deeb 2006, 189) continues: “In the end, despite its messiness, the attempt to redefine the terms of discourse around being modern was really an attempt to posit a way of being that is neither West nor East, and that is both ‘modern’ and ‘authentic.’  ”38 Of course, I could have chosen to invent another term for other modernities, given the power of euromodernity over our imagination of modernity itself, but I want to resist such a temptation to give in to the power of euro-modernity. We cannot start by denying people’s desire to be modern, nor should we underestimate their ability to imagine the possibility of being modern without following 286  Chapter Six

in the path of the North Atlantic nation-states. Nor can we take for granted that we understand what it is they are reaching for in this desire. Gyekye (1997, 263) asserts that modernity “has in fact assumed or rather gained a normative status, in that all societies in the world without exception aspire to become modern, to exhibit in their social, cultural and political lives features said to characterize modernity—whatever this notion means or those features are.” He is clearly not suggesting that the whole world is trying to become Europe; in fact, he similarly describes a number of writers in the Middle Ages (269): “In characterizing themselves and their times as modern, both Arabic and Latin scholars were expressing their sense of cultural difference from the ancients. . . . But not only that: they must surely have considered their own times as advanced (or more advanced) in most, if not all, spheres of human endeavor.” On what grounds do we deny such claims or judgments of modernity? Even Lefebvre (1995, 185) acknowledges that the “ ‘modern’ is a prestigious word, a talisman, an open sesame, and it comes with a lifelong guarantee.” Admittedly, the relations to discourses of the modern are often extraordinarily complex and contradictory. Deeb’s research with Shi’ites leads her to conclude: “The concept of modern-ness is used as a value-laden comparison in relation to people’s ideas about themselves, others” (2006, 229), and “Incompatible desires came together here— the desire to undermine dominant western discourses about being modern and the desire to be modern (or to be seen as modern)” (233). I want to suggest that at least a part of the complexity of these discourses is precisely the thinness of our vocabulary—and understanding—of modernity. Thus, the answer to why I want to think through and with the concept of a multiplicity of modernities is because the contest over modernity is already being waged, because it has real consequences, and because we need to seek a new ground, of possibility and hope, and of a new imagination for future ways of being modern. Cultural studies has always taught that any successful struggle for political transformation has to start where people are; the choice of where to begin the discourses of change cannot be defined simply by the desires, or even the politics, of intellectuals. Of course, there is another perspective on such matters that we also have to take account of: Blaser (2009), for example, has suggested that I am taking people’s desire to be modern too literally, and failing to consider that their use of the term may be an adaptation to or the equivocation of a demand. That is, might not the demand for modernity also be the product of the political positioning of such populations?39 I have no doubt that such questions need to be raised in In Search of Modernities  287

specific conjunctural struggles, and for specific actors. I have no doubt that there are, as Deeb (2006, 189) declares, “other stories to be told.” Conclusion: Becoming Cultural Studies It is time to look forward, to ask where we go from here, although I am painfully aware that I have not come very far. I am trying to participate in a conversation, speaking from the particularity of my own context (into which, ultimately, I want to speak) but also speaking with other specificities and with the recognition that a certain globality is unavoidably a part of the problematic of modernity. Such conversations are beginning to take the cate­ gory of modernity out of the hands of the west; as Harootunian (2000, 41) says: “Any critique must now be positioned not inside or outside ‘the West,’ since the West can no longer be thought of as a dominant geographical concept structuring the non-West. Rather, it must be located, immanently within the temporality of a modernity embracing new cultural forms that have been and are still developing in what used to be the non-West and that now offer an occasion for dialectical encounter.” At the same time, the problematic of modernity does not define the “essence” of the contemporary conjuncture; conjunctures have no essences, and problem-spaces are always themselves contested and contestable. Modernity is not the only reading of the problem-space, even of the United States; it is not the only way of seeing the contours of the conjuncture. Nevertheless, an understanding of the modern as a set of possible ways of being provides, I hope, a theoretical foundation that may enable us to move beyond a critical understanding of the hegemonic power of euro-modernity not only over people’s lives but also over the very imagination of possible ways of being modern, to the recognition of other possibilities—of other modernities as well as alternatives to modernity. Questions about what’s going on and our possible futures remain paramount. To repeat myself, I want to both accept and reread Santos’s (2002, 13) perceptive statement that we face “modern problems for which there are no modern solutions.”40 I would prefer to say that we face modern problems that challenge us to think outside the possibilities of our own ways of being modern. Thinking about multiple modernities might enable us to admit that we no longer know what questions to pose—for example, about culture in general, and media and popular culture more specifically—for it is not merely that the practices have changed (although we have too often 288  Chapter Six

failed to carefully identify what is new, and what is a rearticulation), but that the contexts of struggle—and the diagrams of modernity—are changing. What effect does the hypothesis of a multiplicity of modernities have on the generation of imaginaries of economy, nature, and development, for instance, or on social movement strategies, or on strategies of place-making and temporalization? How do we create questions, vocabularies, and concepts that sufficiently capture the complexity of forces, technologies, and struggles operating in the midst of numerous struggles over, and transitions among, different visions and formations of possible modernities and alternatives to modernity? How do we imagine questions and languages that sufficiently capture multipolar, multitemporal, and multiscalar webs of connectivity, relationality, and difference, which are driving the creation of contemporary geo-economic, political, and cultural formations and spaces, and new subjectivities and collectivities within and across them? I have tried in this book to do some of the ground-clearing work necessary to find analytic positions that can open up political futures and embrace a different kind of universality: not the universal singular but the singular universal. If the former defines a hierarchical abstraction out of the particular against which all future particulars have to be measured, the latter sees universality as movements or relations across nonhierarchically arranged particulars. This is a universality that is neither teleological (developmental) nor expansive (totalizing). It opens “the capacity to hear that which one does not already understand” (Chakrabarty 2002, 37), which depends on the recognition that “other temporalities, other forms of worlding, coexist and are possible” (Chakrabarty 2000, 95). The imagination of other ways of being modern requires us to begin reimagining imagination itself: the virtual, unlike “the possible” is after all real. Williams (1979) seems to have understood this, giving it substance in his concept of the structure of feeling. While the concept described affective homologies in his early work, in his later work it points to the necessary gap between the known and the knowable, experience and the discursive, the lived and articulation, the gap that is the site of emergence and creativity. It is the event of the virtual that may enable us to find new ways of (re-)constituting and reimagining our ways of being in the world. This may reveal new ways to connect to the multiplicity not only of disabling and pessimistic realities but also of hopes, dreams, and desires, and to seek a new collective project of reinventing the “possibilities” of imagination and the ways of being modern. For in the end, I am inclined to agree with Peter Amato In Search of Modernities  289

(1997, 88): “It is thus only in the prospect of African [or at least an other] modernity that the hopes of European modernity may have any chance of success . . . a conscious movement from one particularity toward an inclusive plurality of particularities seeking convergence.” So where does this leave us? I hope it is obvious that, for me, the way forward for cultural studies cannot be separated from questions about the way forward for the world. The futures of both (the latter being eminently more important, of course) are intertwined and, as yet, not guaranteed. But the future of both will be shaped in part by what we say and do, and, in part—because I do believe that ideas matter—by what we say and do as intellectuals—by the stories we tell, because bad stories make bad politics. Even if we cannot know in advance what cultural studies will look like, I do know that “making it up” and, eventually, telling better stories of the conjuncture, will take serious time and even more serious labor. It will take more than simply intoning the mantra (which I have certainly done too often) of contextuality, complexity, contradiction, and contestation. It will require us to reinvent ourselves as intellectuals and scholars, to change our intellectual practices and to produce new kinds of collective and collaborative scholar-subjects. The project of thinking beyond euro-modernity will require a conversation of many voices and contexts, many discourses and knowledges. Cultural studies has to become a conversation, or even multiple conversations, for that is where such work becomes cultural studies rather than a collection of isolated works. Such conversations must be both geographically diverse and interdisciplinary; they should make us think about whom we want to think and speak with, and the forms and practices of heteroglossia that can animate such conversations. We must accept at the outset that they will be ongoing, incomplete, uneven, and inconsistent. They have to go beyond the recognition that answers are determined by the “location” of the researcher, to embrace the more fundamental challenge that questions are similarly determined. Thus if we want to converse across the particularities of contexts, we have to find new ways of asking questions. And yet, we must be careful not to confuse the conversation practice of knowledge production with the assumption that knowledge production must be “democratic.” Conversations are more difficult than we like to admit, and the kinds of conversations I am talking about will challenge many of our practices as academics and intellectuals; they will demand even more of the critical ground-clearing that I have been trying to do in this book. We have to give 290  Chapter Six

up the model of the singular heroic intellectual and stop thinking that our success, our intellectual accomplishments, can only be built on the devastation and ruins of other people’s work. Our contributions should be measured by our participation in the collaborative conversation, not by claims of originality and difference, which can only be established by demonstrating the utter failure of everyone else (except of course for a privileged few, usually including one’s mentors and friends). We need to respect each other as allies and recognize that different theories, methods, and even politics are not necessarily in opposition, that they each make some things visible and others invisible, give voice to some things and silence others. Therefore, sectarianism—whether political or theoretical—and accusations of “complicity with the enemy  ” have no place in the conversations of cultural studies, even while argument and even passionate disagreement are necessary modalities of this conversation. We can learn from and with the many efforts, past and present, to establish intellectual work as conversation, taking the measure of their successes and failures. We can notice how easy it is for habits and institutional norms to undermine the efforts at conversation, which become: too sporadic; too sharply divided between theory and empirics, the general and the specific, the global and the local; too comparative—constrained by assuming the questions and the normativity of the allegedly universal knowledge practices and epistemologies of euro-modernity and its institutions; and too beholden to the disciplines as the sole guardians of knowledge and judgment. This conversation depends on our willingness and ability to speak and listen across many of the taken-for-granted boundaries of intellectual work, to work with knowledge producers who are: outside the academy, from think tanks and ngos to social movements (a trans-institutional conversation);41 producing other kinds of knowledges (a trans-epistemic conversation); located elsewhere to us, across sedimented but shifting geopolitical boundaries and locations (a trans-national and trans-regional conversation); living in different relations to the world, respecting that the world as such is not simply answerable to our theory and desires (a trans-ontological conversation); and finally, in other disciplines or in the spaces between disciplines (a trans-disciplinary conversation). This conversation will demand new practices of translation and commensuration that will enable it to reflect on its own geopolitical, epistemological, and disciplinary positions—its questions, modes of inquiry, and pedagogies—even as it seeks to fabricate better stories of what’s going on. In Search of Modernities  291

Let me speak for a moment, once again, about the need for and the challenge of interdisciplinarity. The signs of the growing need for interdisci­ plinarity are ubiquitous. While everyone agrees that the contemporary world requires people who can think “outside the box,” they fail to see that you do not learn to think outside the box by learning to think inside a number of boxes. You have to learn to put multiple boxes into conversation, to live and think in the spaces between the boxes. Furthermore, the evidence suggests that the organization of intellectual communities among researchers is no longer defined by the bureaucratic—disciplinary—systems of intellectual reproduction. Nevertheless, interdisciplinarity still has to fight for its place in the academy. Interdisciplinarity requires collaboration. My own weaknesses and failures in this book demonstrate that quite clearly. As hard as one might try, one cannot be interdisciplinary by oneself, and the collaboration cannot simply reproduce a disciplinary division of labor (e.g., I bring culture, you bring economics . . . ). Interdisciplinarity challenges the ways disciplines have divided up the world and constructed their objects by isolating them from the contextual complexity of the social formation and, usually, from the discursive determinations of culture. Yet just as importantly, as I have argued, we need to take the work that is done in the disciplines seriously. At the very least, we must understand the choices we are making, and their significance, out of the field of possible theories and accounts and across the debates of what constitutes important questions and relevant evidence. While I do not think we can eliminate the disciplines, we need to rethink their place and contributions. Unfortunately, there is already a backlash in many disciplines and at many institutions against interdisciplinarity, often implicitly justified by conditions of financial retrenchment and carried on under the banner of being “interdisciplinary inside one’s own discipline.” This paradoxical claim enables scholars to appear to embody the virtues of interdisciplinarity without actually having to do the work. We should not confuse the laudable movement of many critical scholars onto the edges or margins of their disciplines, or the existence of transdisciplinary bodies of theory, with the labor and risk of stepping beyond the disciplines. Simultaneously, more disciplines describe themselves as interdisciplinary even as they reinscribe the normative constraints of their disciplinary traditions. The results are, I am sorry to report, usually very thin, and while often imaginative, they do not significantly move the interdisciplinary and collaborative project of cultural stud292  Chapter Six

ies forward. Against such tendencies, we need to reanimate and rethink the possibilities of collaborative interdisciplinary research, and the organization and meaning of expertise. It strikes me that making knowledge production into a conversation will require that “long march through the institutions.” We will have to join those movements around the world that are trying to change the university as a center of research and teaching, and the even larger struggles to challenge the trajectories that locate and shape matters of culture, knowledge, and education within contested social realities. After all, the kind of changes I have been describing are not things that we as individuals or even as a collective faculty can change by our own choices; they are the result of larger social and cultural struggles, of lines of force “that shape the becoming intellectual” and that “tend to produce individuals, calculations of success, survival strategies and modes of imagination and embodiment” that limit (not without tensions and contradictions) the habits and structures of intellectual production (John Clarke, personal conversation, March 2009). Despite my rhetoric, we have to avoid the voluntarism that so easily produces accusatory configurations of guilt and victimage even as we struggle against the “deep habits” that shape our practices and our imaginations. I am not proposing that we offer a new universal model for the university, knowledge production, and dissemination. We need to abandon monological strategies and think about the possibilities of pluralization. We need to imagine multiple configurations, multiple organizations of both intellectual work and education and of the relations between them. We might consider creating multiple pathways through undergraduate and graduate education, not all of which require departmentally defined majors. We might consider other ways of imagining research communities and academic belongings, including ways that allow flexibility and change. Perhaps we should not talk about interdisciplinarity, but about different possible relations to, among, and between the disciplines. After all, cultural studies is not about teaching interdisciplinarity, but, rather, relational and contextual thinking. It is about learning how to ask questions (that are not defined by disciplinary matrices, but in response to the world) and how to use—appropriate and articulate—theories, methodologies, and knowledges from various discursive formations, including the disciplines, to forge the best possible answers one can, to tell better stories. I know that administrators will say this is impossible, a potential bureaucratic nightmare. I do not believe that, although I do think it will change the In Search of Modernities  293

nature of their labor. But in the end, the university is not about the bureaucrats and administrators, nor fund-raisers, nor the politicians who used to be its benefactors, nor the business people who are increasingly called upon to be its benefactors. But we seem to have forgotten that, and we seem to have lost the moral courage to stand up to such misrepresentations and the practical policies that have resulted from them. I know that many of my colleagues will also say it is impossible. It might help to remember that many of the features of the university that we take for granted (and sacralize) were inventions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The “research university  ” that was created at that moment has already been further reinvented at least twice in the past century: in the 1950s and 1960s, increased government funding and support for research was complemented by an expanding student population and the emerging struggles of the “new social movements”; and in the 1980s and 1990s, decreased government funding and support and a growing public-political scrutiny pushed the university into more corporate, managerial, and entrepreneurial organizational models. In fact, many of us have lived through these changes. If the university could be reinvented before, it can be done again. This is, after all, the very project of cultural studies: to offer a description—in this case, of the academy—that, recognizing its contingency and contextuality, allows us to imagine other—better—possibilities and how we might get to them. Finally, I have to admit that I do not know what this conversation will look like, and I do not know what the outcome will be. I do not know what a new university should be. I do not know what other modernities—as well as alternatives to modernity—are possible, but I do know that we have to begin imagining such possibilities. We have to imagine a world in which many worlds can exist together. And we have to figure out what is going on, and how it has, for so long, prevented us from moving toward more humane realities. I have always thought of cultural studies as an invitation into such conversations, into the experimentation of collaboration, into a selfreflective practice of translation and transformation, and into an uncertain effort to build new institutional spaces. As such, it is difficult and enlivening, depressing and full of hope, modest and arrogant. It is for me a promising way of being a political intellectual!

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Notes Chapter One: The Heart of Cultural Studies 1 I do not see much evidence that much of what claims to be cultural studies, especially but not only in the United States, has gone through this moment of self-reflection. Instead, all too frequently, critical work has forged another kind of insularity by making self-reflection into a form of self-involvement, becoming too inward-looking and personal. As Doreen Massey has observed (personal communication, April 18, 2005), it has become too easy for critical intellectuals to focus on questions of personal (internal) identity and memory, on the West and the cities in which the authors live. 2 Although I am primarily drawing upon the work and words of Stuart Hall, I believe this commitment is visible in general in the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, as well as in other British cultural studies figures, such as Raymond Williams. Let me be clear here. I am not claiming that Williams or all the people involved at the Centre were self-consciously radical contextualists. I do think that this is what the practice was pointing toward, although the vocabulary to describe it may not have been there. And of course, the commitment may have been more or less strong (and more or less conscious) in different practices and practitioners. But as Stuart Hall once told me (personal communication, April 10, 2005), “Never trust the teller, trust the tale.” 3 I do not mean to continue “mythologizing” the sixties. On the contrary, I believe that the developments that began in the ’50s and ’60s have continued to shape much of Western societies, if not even more globally. However, after the 1960s, the relations among these different developments and movements have become more fragmented and less cohesive, and they are no longer centered at a small number of geographical and institutional sites, such as the university. 4 Too often these tensions have been oversimplified, as if they could be reduced,

for example, to the certainly real, intellectual, stylistic, and political differences between Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall. 5 I remember the first seminar, when Richard Hoggart handed out copies of the first stanzas of William Blake’s “The Tyger” and left us to our own devices. After a few hours of conversation and analysis, we were ready to present our collective reading to Hoggart. Despite our confidence that we had done a reasonable job of providing a close reading of the words on the page, Hoggart quickly undercut our confidence and provided just a hint of what such a close reading might have to say about the text. 6 The collective project, “The Cure for Marriage,” was as much about trying to figure out how to do collaborative work. Unfortunately, the final report, which Stuart Hall drafted, has been lost, although I am hoping to reconstruct it from his notes. Interestingly, this early project focused not only on questions of women’s media, but also on questions that were only just being defined as feminist concerns. 7 This might suggest that Hoggart and Williams were precursors of contemporary concerns with questions of embodiment and affect, and everyday life. 8 Charlotte Brunsdon (1996) points out how few cccs students actually completed the program. 9 So when Williams (1979) is asked about the limits of the changes in university culture in the 1960s, he replies that the faculty was never able or willing to give up the power to ask the questions. Perhaps this perspective is rooted in the nontraditional pedagogical venues with which many key figures in cultural studies began their careers. 10 Deconstruction addresses this logic, although it does not so much undermine it as constantly reiterate it, even as it demonstrates that it can never accomplish the very negation that sets it in motion. 11 Cultural studies does not offer a version of perspective or standpoint theory; such theories cannot escape the implicit assumption that there is some—one— thing on which one has a perspective or that the perspective one has is defined by one’s own system of identities and identifications. Instead, cultural studies’ view suggests a kind of “situated knowledge” (Haraway 1998), in which knowledge is a map produced by the trajectory one follows, a map that “fabricates” the real. Thus while cultural studies demands a rigorous self-reflexivity about the ways one “walks” through the worlds in which one is always already involved, this is not understood as an acknowledgment of predeterminations, identities, or limitations, since the only limitations really worth talking about are the ones you are not aware of. 12 I want to acknowledge another line of radically contextual thinking in contemporary analysis—namely, that of Foucault’s genealogy. Foucault (1977)

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offers one of many descriptions of genealogy as a contextual practice: (1) as understanding events as the articulation of singularities within relationships of force; (2) as a theory of contingency; (3) as seeking out events “in the most unpromising places”; and (4) as counter-memory, to transform the temporality of history itself. My thanks to Josh Smicker for his help on these and other matters. 13 It is related to, but not exactly the same as, the Deleuzean concept of assemblage (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987). 14 This is a controversial subject: exactly to what extent did Williams write about the whole way of life as if it were almost always a harmonious—communicative—unity? (see Hall 1993 and Gilroy 1987). 15 Thus, I agree with the spirit but not the letter of Rustin’s reading of Hall’s practice. 16 One question that might be raised is whether, in general, a contextual analysis can be built around a single point, or whether it is necessary to have a number of different sites, so that one can use their cross-articulation to constitute the context. My own position would likely favor the latter. 17 For an excellent and wide-ranging discussion of the theoretical challenges and resources for a “new” cultural studies, see G. Hall and Birchall (2006). 18 I am not privileging phenomenological theories of experience. In fact, such experience can simply be one sort of event that can and even should be included in the field of lived reality, without any special privilege. How one lives the territory depends on many things, including where one lives in it, and how one is positioned in relation to others, although I would not go so far as some poststructuralist theories that simply reduce the relation to locations and territories to a question of subject-positions. 19 I am aware that identifying the forms of machines with the forms of lines is at best an oversimplification, but I nevertheless think it is a useful one. De Landa (2006) has done some of the most important work linking Deleuze and Guattari to the concerns of social and cultural analysts. It may be helpful for me, given what I will later do with their work, to differentiate my argument from De Landa’s assumption that such a theory is opposed to theories of totalities. The latter are characterized by “relations of interiority: the component parts are constituted by the very relations they have to other parts in the whole” (8). In opposition, a realist social ontology (his term) is built on a theory of emergence in which the elements exist outside the assemblage. De Landa assumes that all theories of totality are Hegelian, postulating wholes in which “the parts are fused together into a seamless web” (10). I want to argue for a contextualist ontology in which—except at the level of the virtual—the components do not exist outside of assemblages, outside of totalities, but that

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these components themselves are assemblages always changing through the very machinic processes that are always mutating and changing reality, so that the latest rearticulation, the latest process of assemblage, reconstitutes the part. In this way I want to continue to assert that the identity of the parts is constituted inside the assemblages, without falling back into Hegelian models of relationship and interiority. De Landa’s theory depends upon a new dualism he creates between the properties defining a component or entity and its capacities, where the exercise of capacities is always defined by relations of exteriority. This distinction oddly resembles that of the British empiricists between primary and secondary properties. But what if one assumes that the properties are only the contextual actualization of capacities. If assemblages are heterogeneous and contingent (i.e., non-Hegelian), then it is still possible for relations of exteriority to be defined within the assemblage and by their functioning within the plateaus. De Landa cannot follow this move, because he equates strata with assemblages rather than seeing the strata as the result of specific kinds of stratifying apparatus, rather than seeing multiple assemblages on the plateaus. (In this way, he allows no space of milieu, and thus no theory of territory.) The result is that De Landa locates assemblages inside of populations rather than as the production of reality by the production and organization of populations. The final difference is that, as a result, De Landa argues that to describe such a theory as postulating a flat ontology affirms that reality “contains nothing but different scaled individual singularities” (28). Without denying that any assemblage is a singularity, I want to define flat ontology as the claim that all singularities, all assemblages, exist on the same plane (but not the same plateaus), and hence that there can be no transcendental power of position that stands outside of the assemblages and plateaus. Further, De Landa collapses the production of strata through stratifying machines, which distribute the components, producing two populations—the material (content) and the expressive—with the “synthetic processes” of territorialization (and deterritorialization). And he equates these in turn with the effects of stabilization and destabilization. He then introduces, in a kind of secondary role, another synthetic process—coding and decoding—as operating only on the plane of expression and in very narrow terms: the “production and maintenance of identity by specialized expressive entities,” including genes and words (14). For yet another take on Deleuze and cultural studies, see Slack (2003) and Seigworth (2006). 20 Deleuze and Guattari describe this somewhat deconstructive process as thinking “n—1.” That is, one subtracts any claim to unity or organization, in order to reveal the virtual as pure “becoming.” I should also note that (1) rhizomes exist in the actual as well as the virtual and (2) rhizomes are not intrinsically good—they can be despotic as well. 298  Notes

21 They are also sometimes described as machinic processes, technologies, or apparatuses. 22 This gap was made visible in cultural studies, for example, in the “encodingdecoding ” model, where it was argued that neither discursive nor sociological realities determine or guarantee the lived realities of what people make of and do with particular media texts. 23 See, e.g., Althusser (1970), Gramsci (1971), Laclau and Mouffe (1985), and Balibar (2003). 24 One needs to carefully distinguish between a conjuncture, which, as I will argue, can be described in terms of a problem-space, from the hegemonic formations struggling to claim the leading position and to offer a new settlement, a new temporary balance. Thus, we were not living or do not live in a neoliberal or new conservative conjuncture, although such positions may claim the hegemonic position for a time. 25 The Uses of Literacy (1957) was less commonly understood as an attempt to theorize cultural transmission than as an epistemological opening into a theory of social change, a theory Richard Hoggart synecdotally collapsed into the recurring image of “modification-with-adaptation” (or what would later come to be called “articulation”). Hoggart’s project, at least his vision of cultural studies, was to bring the epistemology of cultural interpretation to bear upon the question of social transformation (as lived, social relations). He attempted to bring an epistemology of the humanities to bear upon the questions of social theory (as posed by Marx, Weber, Toennies, Durkheim), in order to offer an epistemology of changing, lived, social relations. At the same time, The Uses of Literacy was in part trying to validate working-class culture as embodying legitimate forms of knowledge practices as well, insofar as it demonstrated the complexity of attitudes, intelligences, feelings, and moralities within workingclass cultures. It is worth noting that this problematic of epistemology and science reappeared throughout the early work of the Centre, especially in Hall (1978). 26 This despite Hall’s (1980) efforts to define the relation as a circuit modeled on Marx’s circuit of production. Carey always refused the encoding-decoding paradigm of cultural studies, on the grounds that it reinscribed a transmission model of communication. 27 For example, ethnographic practice, which is increasingly all that defines anthropology as a discipline, even as more and more disciplines appropriate ethnography, constitutes its object as a “field.” The category of the “field” tends to be simply deployed as a fetishization of the specific (in a straightforward empiricism) and is rarely the object of critical scrutiny. The “field” is further, and even more problematically, always assumed to be the site of the constitution of difference. Some might argue that this is the inescapable inheritance of Notes  299

anthropology’s historical roots in colonialism so that, as I shall explain later, that difference is always understood as the negation of the other rather than as the production of multiplicities (see Harootunian 2000, and Ribeiro and Escobar 2006). 28 I am grateful to Eduardo Restrepo for pointing this out to me. Chapter Two: Constructing the Conjuncture 1 A more interesting approach to globalization might be found through the lens of the postcolonial (Hall 1996b, 247): “  ‘Global’ here does not mean universal, but it is not nation- or society-specific either. It is about how the lateral and transverse cross relations of what Gilroy (1993b) calls the ‘diasporic’ supplement and simultaneously dis-place the centre-periphery.” 2 I cannot resist giving, first, the strangest and then my favorite example: an ad for the 41st International Advertising Association World Congress. The “headline” of the ad was “What’s coming next?” The conference was titled, or perhaps simply described as, “Where ‘now’ is a thing of the past” (www .whatscomingnext.org; accessed Jan. 2008). Second, what I have called “the rock formation” was about time—about rejecting the apparently prescribed future and living that rejection in the present. In this way, it refused the temporal structure of the avant-garde, which continued the temporality of liberal modernity, as a rejection of the present from the position of the future (see Grossberg 1997b). 3 I realize that some people may think this understanding of a conjuncture is larger, longer than the way it is typically discussed. And yet Gramsci seems to have believed that the conjunctural forces that set the French Revolution in motion did not end until the 1870s, and in that sense, one might assume, the conjuncture did not end until then as well. 4 I realize that North Atlantic is perhaps more descriptive, but given the economics of publishing, which counts words, one word is better than three. Additionally, I have found that some intellectuals from outside the North Atlantic world recognize “euro-modernity” more easily than “North Atlantic modernity.” 5 This last crisis, sometimes framed as a crisis of neoliberalism, has been partly fueled by the rise of China, India, Brazil, etc., and the possibility that we do not yet have the tools for understanding these emergent national formations. 6 As John Clarke has pointed out to me (personal communication, February 2009), the Cold War formation of euro-modernity rested on “splitting” Europe itself, and “Europe” is still struggling with defining the content and boundaries of Europe.

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7 See Chatterjee (1993). I am grateful to Srinath Jayaram for his help on these questions. 8 One must be careful. These terms are used in very different ways by different authors. 9 Two commonly cited conditions of possibility of modernity are technological. On the one hand, scholars have often pointed to the importance of the printing press (and later, communicative technologies), which led to the growing dispersion and secularization of culture, and hence to the possibility of the explosion of knowledge (see Eisenstein 1980). On the other hand, developments in military technologies, starting with the invention (or importation) of gunpowder, had profound consequences for the organizations of states and power (see Hall, Held, et al. 1996). I am grateful to Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy for reminding me of the obvious importance of such technologies in the most common narratives of modernity. 10 If we are to rethink euro-modernity from outside, as it were, we need to rethink the nature of the social totality: (1) the relation of overdetermination and the assumption that the formation is a structure of different levels; and hence (2) the separation and assumed relative autonomy of the levels. 11 This is actually not the product solely of Hall’s efforts and ideas, but of an Open University course team. So it is somewhat problematic to attribute the position to Hall by himself. Still, I think it is not far off. 12 Here one might also point to the work of Jameson (2002), who, building on the notion that modernity is the birth of history and historical consciousness, argues that modernity is a fundamental discursive trope of social self- referentiality, through its constant effort at self-definition through the constitution of its own temporality. 13 This dilemma is often papered over by appeals to more “scientific” notions derived from systems and complexity theories, as if this somehow rendered the paradoxes more acceptable and less problematic. 14 In the following chapters, I will propose that the social comprises the plane, or vectors, of value production, the economic that of the commensuration of values, that the cultural is mapping and translation, and that the political is capture and the production of collectivities. 15 I could also add others, including Marx, Hall, Fanon, Gilroy, Cesaire, Chatterjee, C. L. R. James, etc. 16 In one sense, this is the Deleuzean distinction between the virtual and the possible, but I also want to suggest that some Deleuzeans fail to make an adequate distinction between the pre-emergent and the emergent. There are always a multiplicity of “possible” emergents in the virtual, which must

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be distinguished from the actualization of any emergent and its possible rearticulation. 17 This still leaves open, intentionally, two questions. First, how does one go about changing the world? Does one first change oneself or the social structure? This is a long-standing argument that divided the counterculture in the 1960s and continues to trouble various cultural and political movements for change. Second, what is the geography of concern and action? How circumscribed is the relevant sphere of action? Answers range from family and community to the nation and the world. These are long-standing arguments that have divided “the left ” for a long time, including during the counterculture of the 1960s, and continue to trouble various “left ” cultural and political movements for change. I realize that there are some who think that we have outgrown the utility of “left ” and “right,” but I find it useful to continue to think of “the left ” in terms of critique of dominant structures and practices of power from a perspective of social justice, equality, freedom, and a common right to a “dignified” life. 18 For a discussion of ethics and cultural studies, see Zylinska (2005). Chapter Three: Considering Value I cannot thank John Clarke, David Ruccio, and Dick Bryan enough for their time, their patience, and their brilliance. One cannot ask for better mentors and interlocutors. 1 I use the notion of “apparatus” as the equivalent of a discursive formation, or what Deleuze and Guattari (1977) call a collective assemblage of enunciation. 2 Randy Martin’s important efforts to think the contemporary as a relation between economics and sociocultural experiences is an important effort, but flawed in two significant ways: first, it collapses all of economics into a single development, and second, it makes the correspondence too immediate and simple. In the end, Martin does not really take on the economy. Instead, he assumes the reality of the domain of economics, as well as the truth of finance capital’s discourse about itself. He then makes the latter into a synecdoche not only for the former, but for all of the contemporary conjuncture. 3 I leave unaddressed the question of whether it makes any difference if one understands the disembeddedness of the economy as its existence as an autonomous domain or as a self-regulating or self-organizing system. Polanyi argues that economies are always submerged in and equated with particular social relationships. In addition to exchange, which is the basis of capitalism, he acknowledges reciprocity (symmetrical relations, e.g., of kinship), redistribution (centralized relations of tribute), and householding—but we might 302  Notes

want to expand the list to include, perhaps, communality (sharing) and giftgiving (ceremonial). Marx’ s theory of primitive accumulation can be seen as an attempt to describe the transformation of these articulations into modern capitalism. 4 A conjuncture is not simply a spatio-temporal field, but a shifting field of multiple and multiply articulated contradictory forces and formations. It is constituted by the inability of old solutions to provide even the most temporary settlement or stability to the field. While it is usually understood in national terms, I think the conditions of the contemporary world demand that we see the conjuncture as itself an unstable articulation between national, regional, and global forces and formations. My own concerns move between what might be called the North Atlantic region of euro-modernity, and the national site of the United States. I thank John Clarke for the push. 5 Again, I am immensely grateful to Dick Bryan for his willingness to share his thoughts about value with me. 6 And at the time I am writing this, for example, Klein (2007). 7 Philosophy may also be paranoid about policing its boundaries, although one might be less likely to describe the effort as successful. 8 Interestingly, the status is apparently not granted to Smith’s other great work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which in my opinion needs to be read alongside The Wealth of Nations but rarely is. Further, whether a particular founding text, such as Keynes’s General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, is granted such status seems to depend upon whether one agrees with it or not. 9 The arguments of this section were first written before the financial crisis of 2007 and the recession that followed. Of course, these events have created something of a crisis in economics as a discipline, and in the public perception of economics. Nothing can make this more obvious than an “editorial” in The Economist (July 18, 2009, 11–12) titled “What Went Wrong with Economics.” It acknowledges that the discipline’s reputation “has taken a beating,” and cites Barry Eichengreen’s assertion that “the crisis ‘has cast into doubt much of  what we thought we know about economics.’ ” But, alas, the editors—while granting that “economic theory,” especially macroeconomics and finance economics, helped cause the crisis, failed to see it coming, and have no idea how to fix it—nevertheless come to the defense of the discipline, and, amazingly enough (although we should not be surprised), of the “free-market paradigm.” While economists might have to give up their claim to explain “ever more forms of human behaviour,” they remain the keepers of “a broad canon, stretching from theories to explain how prices are determined to how economies grow.” While the editorial acknowledges that there is a “clear case for reinvention,” its imagination of the terms of that reinvention are dismally thin. It starts with

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a glimmer of hope—“Economists need to reach out from their specialized silos. . . . For in the end, economists are social scientists, trying to understand the real world.” But it quickly retreats: “Macro-economists must understand finance, and finance professors need to think harder about the context within which markets work.” And apparently, all that is required is that economists talk to other economists, across specialties and perhaps across paradigms (but there seem to be only two—Keynesian and neoclassical). A dismal end for the dismal science. 10 Securitization was supposed to prevent just the sort of global impact that has occurred during the credit crisis that began in 2007. 11 The field has its own journals, even one with its own name as the title (I should add that I am proud to be a member of the editorial team). 12 See, e.g., the very different work of McCloskey (1998), Franks (2001), and Smith (1997). 13 See, e.g., Callon (1998) and MacKenzie, Muniesa, and Siu (2007). In my opinion, Actor Network Theory (ant) (Latour 2005) treats everything as a network while denying contexts. While ant might be taken as a kind of hyperempiricist and generally depoliticized formation of cultural studies, I see it as an investigation of a set of assemblages, which has yet to locate itself conjuncturally. 14 See, e.g., Gibson-Graham (2006). 15 See, e.g., Gudeman (2001) and Gudeman and Rivera (1990). 16 Thus, with Meaghan Morris (1992b, 75), when thinking about a category like “neoliberalism,” we might want to ask “why an otherwise disparate bundle of economic theories, administrative practices and political policies should have fused so powerfully . . . as a visible and nameable ‘doctrine’ for public debate.” 17 See also Miller and O’Leary (1990) and Miller and Rose (1990). 18 I am reminded here of Bourdieu’s (2005, 77) claim that “it is not prices that de­termine everything but everything that determines prices.” But we need, in ad­dition, to ask how the category of price is itself constructed and made effective. 19 Thus, if economics always involves relations of exchange, I still want to know how, in any particular context, only certain relations of exchange are considered economic. After all, communication, sexuality, domesticity, etc., all also could be characterized as relations of exchange. 20 This is the central argument of Gibson-Graham (1996). A good example of capitalocentrist thinking is Hardt and Negri (2000). Another example can be found in the Comaroffs’ notion of “millennial capitalism,” which assumes the nature of the link between capitalism at the millennium and capitalism as a “gospel of salvation”: the “ontological condition of being under millennial

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capitalism begins . . . as it did for the ‘fathers’ of modernist social theory—with epochal shifts in the constitutive relationship of production to consumption, and hence of labor to capital” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001, 3). What is both seductive and disturbing about the Comaroffs’ theory is how neatly everything all fits in place together. 21 This may explain why Gibson-Graham are so reluctant to accept the notion of accumulation, and hence the possibility that the two contradictions of capitalism—between the forces and relations of production, and between capital and labor—may be different, although both are constitutive of the different articulations of capitalism. Of course, there are other possible ways out of this apparent dilemma—for example, following a logic of anti-anti-essentialism, or the changing same, and constructing the “diagram” of capitalism as I have defined it here. 22 John Clarke, for example, has noted the increasing frequency of descriptions of the markets as “nervous” systems—edgy, panicky, contagious, fearful, etc.— during the economic crisis that began in 2007 (personal communication, February 2009). 23 For any knowledge claim, even the most disciplined and reductionist, one needs to inquire: Of what use or pertinence is it? What do we know? What does it allow us to do? My assumption is not that interdisciplinarity is the only valuable form of knowledge, but, against positivism, that cultural studies is a valuable form of knowledge insofar as one seeks to imagine transforming the social world. 24 See Harvey and Garnett (2008) on heterodox economics. 25 On post-autistic economics, see Fullbrook (2003; 2007; 2008). 26 See, e.g., Patricia Cohen, “In Economics Departments, a Growing Will to Debate Fundamental Assumptions” (New York Times, July 11, 2007). 27 Posted by William G. Rhoads, July 7, 2006. 28 In economics, some of this work is already in process, in some marxist schools, including the regulation school and the Rethinking Marxism group, or in various institutional and social economics (including followers of Veblen, Polanyi, and Braudel), and among some feminist economists. Within cultural studies and affiliated disciplines (anthropology, geography, etc.), there are also many people who have already begun to do some of this work. There are also interesting developments in business schools (e.g., work on the history of accounting as discursive formations). 29 Such analyses also ignore the complexity of the articulations between various political formations and economic discourses and practices. For example, consider the following conservative critique of neoclassical economics: “Our scientific ignorance of human society is profound. That is what makes the

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expensive trial-and-error processes of economic markets and political freedom—to coin a phrase, the open society—necessary. The central irony of Freedomnomics is that Lott wrote the book to define the role of markets; but if human behavior were as easy to analyze as he assumes, we would have very little need for markets” (Manzi 2007, 51). It should also be remembered that, at least in the United States, economic policy is always sold in non-economic terms, or more accurately, it is dragged behind (and often remains relatively absent in electoral discourse) social and nationalistic issues. In that sense, the success of so-called neoliberal ideology in the United States is almost never the result of a public choice but always follows behind issues of national security and morality. 30 We shall have to wait to see if this dominance is significantly diminished as a result of the economic crises that began in 2007. 31 The difference between states 2 and 3 might be—and I owe this insight to Carey Hardin—the difference between two kinds of machines, the former being the result of a territorializing machine (that first divides nature and society and then the various domains of the social), while the latter is the product of a stratifying machine in which the economic becomes the expression articulated to the social as content. 32 Mitchell places too much emphasis on the claim that no one in the nineteenth century referred to an object called the “economy.” This is too fragile a foundation on which to build an argument about the discursive realities of social life. 33 Mitchell’s argument is perceptive and crucial, although I do think some of the details—in particular, the assumed equivalence among the various binaries, as well as the particular binarisms that might be implicated with the economic at any moment—are disputable. John Clarke (personal communication, February 2009) has pointed out that Mitchell also misses the richly shifting relations between the economy and other formations. For example, households were relatively late in being removed from the sphere of the economy (see Catherine Hall’s important 2002 work, and C. Hall and Davidoff 1991). Indeed, Foucault (2007a) oddly naturalizes governing via the household as the foundational site of economic conduct. He also misses something odd about consumption, which articulates the economy and other spheres, since consumption takes place separately from the act of exchange within the circuit of the economy itself. 34 See also Thompson (1966). 35 For a different perspective, see Foucault (2008). 36 It is worth pointing out that Polanyi distinguishes between economic liberalism, which opposes any forms of social protectionism for the sake of higher

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profits, and laissez faire, which he argues was always limited and always involved active interventions on the part of the state. 37 Of course, in other conjunctures and in different ways, this is also true of both culture and politics, both of which have, at various times, operated according to other logics of embedded disembeddedness. 38 It may be too much of an oversimplification to claim that capitalism produces poverty per se, but the point remains that capitalism could not in fact separate itself entirely from its effects on and the effects of the social. Again, Foucault (2008, 32) makes a similar argument. In Europe, from the middle ages through the seventeenth century, the market was a site of jurisdiction and justice. In the mid-eighteenth century, the market appears as something natural, a spontaneous mechanism. The theory of the price-value relationship is merely the articulation of the assumption that the “market must be that which reveals something like a truth,” and thus constitutes a site of veridiction for governmental practice. 39 At the same time, the realm of social relationships is commonly shrunk to that of circuits (as in the circuit of production—or, more broadly, circuits of production, distribution, exchange, and consumptions) and networks, or market exchange (with its implication of choice). The market may be either competitive (as in Hayek, as price-takers) or free (as in Friedman). Or the market may be understood, as it is in international trade, as value chains in which the primary actors are firms, a notion whose importance in economics can be traced back to Schumpeter, who argued against the privileging of markets and price competition. According to Schumpeter (1962, 84), the real site of competition was not over prices but over “the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization.” Braudel (1977) argued that markets in which firms dominate are actually anti-markets, not price- takers but price-makers, who replace price with commands and coordination. Such anti-markets are hierarchical, involving the manipulation of supply and demand, and call into existence a new practice of planning. 40 As opposed to being “determining in the last instance.” 41 And perhaps technology—but I think this is a specifically a generational difference. 42 Meek points out that there are a number of different interpretations of the place of value theory in Marx. Some would argue that Marx’s theory of value is not actually a part of his economic theory at all, but is rather an essential part of his critique of capitalism (alienation, commodity fetishism, exploitation). Others propose that Marx was offering a theory of the dynamics of price formation, or a labor theory of price based on the law of value (such that the magnitude of price is proportionate to the quantity of labor). Finally, Rubin

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(1973), another influential commentator of Marx’s theory of value, suggests that it be read as a theory of the distribution of labor/value to the different sectors of the economy. 43 There have been many criticisms of Marx’s labor theory of value—from both marxists and anti-marxists, as well as from friendly co-travelers and “outsiders”—which do not lead to such contextualizations. I will reference only two here. In the contemporary era, Baudrillard (1975) argues that the separation of use value and exchange value is impossible. The former is in fact produced by the latter as its alibi. (This resembles a more common marxist argument that Marx’s theory of use value does not and cannot explain—or judge—the difference between needs and wants.) Baudrillard argues that ultimately the distinction between concrete and abstract labor is unsustainable, since by definition concrete labor is always incommensurable. The only way in which it can be abstracted into a system of equivalence would require marxism to take into account the relation/rupture between work and symbolic exchange. Similarly, Spivak (1987, 162) argues that “the [claim]—value is the representation of objectified labor—begs the question of use-value. . . . Use value . . . is both outside and inside the system of value determination. It is outside because it cannot be measured by the labor theory of value. . . . Exchange value . . . is . . . a superfluity or parasite on use value. . . . Capital consumes the use value of labor-power.” Neoclassical economics, with its focus on individuals (usually as­sumed to be rational), poses a different set of challenges. Neoclassical economics assumes that the tastes, wants, and preferences (which determine demand), as well as productive abilities (partly determining supply), are exoge­ nous variables. They are taken as given, and it is assumed that they cannot be acted upon within the terms of the economy itself except in terms of the question of the satisfaction of (or failure to satisfy) demands. Neoclassical economics privileges exchange over production. Markets are the sites of value pro­ duction, and value is equated to, as well as measured by, price (ideally, the equilibrium price), defined completely at the intersection of the supply and de­ mand curves. As a result, value is determined (in part or whole) by utility. For the Austrian school (e.g., von Mises 1966), this makes value a matter of subjective judgment, while for other neoclassical economists, value is more ob­ jectively determined (e.g., utilitarianism), where utility is the worth derived by the consumer from the act of consumption. The neoclassical solution to Smith’s paradox of value depends in part on its adaption of marginalism: value is determined by the utility of the last bought good in satisfying a specific need. 44 Industrial capitalism can be understood perhaps more accurately as that mode of production in which not only the appropriation of surplus value (or the surplus labor) is a function of capital but so is the creation of the surplus a

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function of capital. It is usually distinguished from commercial capitalism, and finance capitalism. 45 There is a similarity between Postone’s (1993) and Lukács’s (1971) readings of Marx. In Lukács’s analysis of the consequences and conditions of the capitalist economization of society, he argued that the commodification of labor power so central to bourgeois capitalism (and indeed all forms of capitalism) was enabled by and produced a particular splitting of the individual—into commodified labor power, on the one hand, and the free (liberal, bourgeois, humanistic) subject on the other. In Lukács’s argument, capitalism (and modernism) disarticulated agency from labor power, the body, and the proletariat by identifying it with a subjective excess, that which comes to be understood as (bourgeois) subjectivity. This is the first and founding capitalist compromise. By ceding the realm of subjectivity and “the private,” capitalism oversaw the production of the bourgeois civil society as the realm of freedom. The subjective excess, constituted as bourgeois subjectivity, has for centuries legitimated the protection of certain spheres of human life—but only for certain sectors of the population (for colonialism was equally central to this compromise of modernity)—from certain kinds of operations of power, including, most importantly, the operations of economic apparatuses. We might see a political side to this. Capitalism granted to labor a minimal value only by virtue of displacing that value onto an abstract set of rights partially crystallized in the notion of the subject as citizen. We might also think here of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1977) notion of the transition from the worker as slave to the worker as subject, from the public individual internally implicated in the codes of the machine and thus enslaved by it, to the worker as a private abstraction subjugated to the machine while remaining external to it. “ The person has become ‘private’ in reality, insofar as he derives from abstract quantities. It is these abstract quantities [‘convertible abstract rights’] that are marked, no longer the person themselves” (272). If modernity produced a subject out of the fragments of an individual’s abstract existence—as worker, consumer, citizen—in the new contemporary conjuncture, the individual can no longer claim possession of abstract rights. For it is only as specific sites of the investment and production of (finance) capital that such rights—now rearticulated as property rights—can be asserted. The individual is no longer that mysterious abstract (or universal) singularity of North Atlantic modernity. What we are facing here, then, is a new mode of interpellation, a new mode by which subjects are made by subjecting people to specific apparatuses of control and dependence. 46 But this does not mean that we have to go as far as Ulrich Beck, who claims that “work [is] being threatened with extinction” by the idea of “capital without jobs” (cited in McRobbie 1998, 139).

Notes  309

47 I am not sure that the various forms of post-Fordist theory have even begun to question the nature of value in such formations. How does one theorize value in capitalist formations that increasingly foreground processes of innovation? Without wanting to agree entirely with Schumpeter, it is clear that some contemporary practices of value production (and profit, recognizing that these are not the same) depend on innovation not only in the production process but also in marketing and, even more problematically, in the corporate form, and on the increasing importance of corporate moves into financial markets, and on financial and stock manipulations. Dismissing them as either temporary or mere speculation simply rewrites the same old stories we always tell. I realize that one could read Postone’s argument—and my use of it—as historicist, and I am willing to accept that up to a point. I would argue that the sort of radical contextualism I am advocating does not entail a commitment to either developmentalism (Hegel) or relativism (as in much of contemporary poststructuralist and anthropological theorizing). Instead, while contextualism does argue that theory and politics develop out of and in response to particular contexts, it does not deny the utility of certain generalizations, nor does it hold to a form of objectivist referentiality. Again, theories are measured by their ability to respond to the present and the possibilities of the future, with the world as witness. 48 If we wanted to put this into economic (capitalist) terms, we might understand the virtual as resources, whereas use value is the actualization of resources as utilities, while also producing the existence of resources as that which always escapes and makes possible utilities. 49 See Chang (1987). 50 My argument here can and should be connected to a reading of the Frankfurt school’s argument (Horkheimer and Adorno 1976) that the crisis of modernity was the reduction of everything to a common standard of the commodity, and to Adorno’s efforts to think beyond the crisis. One might also think here about Lyotard’s (1984) arguments about postmodernity and language games. 51 I argue elsewhere (Grossberg 2010) that this lack of a universal equivalent— embodied in Nixon’s decision to allow the dollar to float, thereby breaking the Bretton Woods monetary accords—was one of the conditions contributing to the financial meltdown of 2007. 52 It is this capture of the surplus that returns a political apparatus (capture) to the production of the economic. See chapter 6. 53 This can be connected to Deleuze and Guattari’s own version of marginalism: “There is neither exchange value nor use value but rather an evaluation of the last by both parties (a calculation of the risk involved in crossing the

310  Notes

limit ” (1987, 439). Thus, the evaluation of the last is the collective assemblage of enunciation to which the entire series of objects corresponds. Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between the limit and the threshold. If the limit is that point where the series begins again, the threshold is the point of the transformation of the assemblage. If the limit is always the locus of the marginal, the next, the threshold is that point at which the series itself is captured as what Deleuze and Guattari call the “stock,” or the assemblage, as that which can be appropriated and compared. 54 It may help to understand this to think of it in relation to Ricardo’s (1981) objections to the labor theory of value as regards land and rent. On the one hand, the natural price of an agricultural product should depend primarily on the rent. On the other hand, crops grown on fertile land will cost more, although the fact that such crops demanded less labor would mean that they have less value. Ricardo’s answer is that the cost of rent offsets the differences in labor costs, so the value of agricultural products is the same regardless of the fertility of the land, because rent is itself based on differential productivity. Consider two fields, A and B, with the same labor and the same inputs. While the output of A is 1,100 labor-days, the output of B is 1,000 labor-days. But the difference in rent would be equivalent to 100 more labor-days. So how do you calculate the value? Ricardo tells us to imagine a third, infertile, field, which defines the marginal position of land. Suppose this field can produce 800 labor-days’ worth of output, which covers the cost of cultivation with nothing left for rent, so the rent is zero. Field A produces 300 more labor-days of value, and so its rent is defined as 300 labor-days. Field B produces 200 more labor-days of value, and so its rent is 200 labor-days (http://faculty.lebow.drexel.edu/ mccainr/top/prin/txt/marx/marx2.html). 55 I also think it is worth rereading Hayek, since his argument for radically open, competitive markets can be seen to operate against the conservative argument for deregulation. Hayek understood that it required work, government work, to create markets and to sustain them as competitive. 56 I must acknowledge my debt to Salerno. One can see on this model of economic calculation why the logic of calculus, as the study of change in relations among functions in which integration and differentiation are inverse logics, makes sense. There is another important element of Austrian theory, and of the debate with Keynes, that I want to mention. Von Mises (1966) argues that calculation is always about the future: one is calculating future prices and, in such calculations, knowledge of the past or even the present (prices) is not necessary. For Keynes, similarly, economic calculation is about the future, but, precisely because it involves imagining the future under conditions of uncertainty, it is only possible on the basis of the assumption that the future will

Notes  311

look like the past (and the present), and therefore past and present prices correctly sum up future prospects. 57 I realize that this could easily be read as offering a new universalizing conception of the economic (comparable to theories of scarcity or rational choice), but I do not think it is in the end: first, it does not create a domain of essentially economic practices, nor a logic that defines the economic; second, I am not suggesting that every practice is always articulated into relations of commensuration. Every practice is articulated by some contextually specific and contextually specified set of vectors, of which commensuration is only one. 58 Obviously, here I am referring to the full range of theories that challenged epistemological foundationalism in all its forms (including logical positivism and empiricism) and positivist forms of ontological realism, including the emergence of science studies, the so-called linguistic turn, the various forms of social constructionism, possible worlds theory, etc. 59 Growth has become, apparently, the sole measure of economic success. Giving that up will also entail, I think, reining in the assumption that economies flourish through the celebration of consumerism. Of course, in the end, the choice may not belong to the peoples of the North Atlantic modern worlds, given the changing balance of national, political, and economic forces defined by the geopolitical shift toward the emerging global claims of China, India, Brazil, etc. Chapter Four: Contextualizing Culture 1 I am grateful to Charles Acland for this insight. 2 For Simpson, communication is the category that articulated the government ’s security interests with the ambitions and practices of both the culture industries and “an enterprising stratum of university administrators and professors” (1994, 4). 3 See Brown (2008) and Hage (2003). 4 It is not culture but the cultural industries that are thoroughly integrated into corporate capitalism. 5 This sections draws on Grossberg (1998). 6 Think of the pragmatists, or Wittgenstein, most obviously. 7 For Carey, this paradox suggests that culture is a form of psychosis, of schizophrenia. 8 By identifying mediation with communication, all cultural practices are seen to involve the production of meanings and representations, of subjectivities and identities (making culture into little more than the form of ideology or the substance of common sense). This notion of culture as a plane of cognitive

312  Notes

meanings makes every practice an instance of the communicational relationship between text and audience correlatively; and all critical analysis is thereby transformed into a question of individuated and psychological interpretations and tastes, although such individuation is often defined through social identities. 9 In addition to the work I discuss here, significant contributors to the contemporary discussions of affect include Sarah Ahmed’s (2004) political phenome­ nology of emotion, Ghassan Hage’s (2003) political sociology of affective political states of possibility, Lauren Berlant’s (1997) textual readings of sentimentality, and various psychoanalytical treatises. See also Woodward (2009), Harding and Pribram (2009), and Gregg and Seigworth (forthcoming). 10 In Berlant’s (2006, 35) terms, all affect is “cruel optimism,” which she describes as the “centrality of optimistic fantasy to reproducing and surviving in zones of compromised ordinariness.” Berlant’s textual reading of sentimentality seems to be caught between, on the one hand, a voluntaristic notion of affective investment, moving from libidinal position to affective promises, and, on the other hand, something like false consciousness, which presented with the apparent reality of no way out has to find a crack in the normal (as minor) but never arrives as politics. 11 Agamben defines the domain of affectivity as pure life without mediation. Thus, he describes the relation between life and immanence as itself one of pure immanence, “a kind of crossing with neither distance nor identification, something like a passage without spatial movement ” (1999, 223). Similarly, Simondon suggest, “Affectivity indicates and comprises this relation between the individualized being and pre-individual reality: it is thus to a certain extent heterogeneous in relation to individual reality, and appears to bring it something from the exterior, indicating to the individualized being that it is not a complete and closed set of reality” (cited in Hansen 2003, 207). See also Seigworth (2007). 12 Thanks to Deb Royals. 13 Deleuze (1988) refers to these as “collective assemblages of enunciation.” When such an assemblage is articulated affectively—in this third dimension or strata—Deleuze sometimes calls it a “subjective disposition.” 14 One might think here of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) on the refrain: “It acts upon that which surrounds it . . . extracting it from various vibrations, or decompositions, or projections, or transformations. The refrain also has a catalytic function: not only to increase the speed of the exchanges and reactions in that which surrounds it, but also to insure indirect interaction between elements devoid of so-called natural affinity, and thereby to form organized masses” (348). And, again, the refrain is like a song that orients: “The song is

Notes  313

like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. . . . Now we are at home. But home does not preexist: it was always necessary to draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile center, to organize a limited space. Many, very diverse, components have a part in this, landmarks and marks of all kinds. . . . 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 refrain might suggest an ethicoaesthetic project, which brings together the song as a temporal sublime and the map as a spatial sublime. The question of its articulation to the political remains. Thanks to Chris Wells. 15 Massumi has written extensively on affect; see Massumi (2002). I use one of his more widely read essays as an example. In a way, Massumi offers a different “Deleuze and Guattari” than the one I am using. His is a philosophy of singularities, although I do think he comes close to conflating events or haccaeities with bodies. As a result, he often sounds like he is proposing a new causal (stimulus-response) model, with every event functioning as a “message,” despite his denials. My “Deleuze and Guattari” concerns the machinic production of the actual, with a concern for multiple kinds of assemblages and productions. In my view, affect is only autonomous at the level of the virtual; in the actual, it is anything but autonomous, since it is always organized machinically. 16 It is important to recall that Foucault’s “discovery” of disciplinary power was grounded in sustained empirical, historical, and contextual work. While many of the new ontologists claim to be practicing a new empiricism—as would I, by the way—I am somewhat skeptical; the work seems to be largely theory driven! Moreover, they ignore Foucault’s warning that such matters (discipline, the humanist subject) can only be discovered as they disappear. 17 I am reminded here of Crary’s (1999) discussion of “attentive capacities.” 18 Remember that no apparatus is ever entirely discursive or nondiscursive; the former includes nondiscursive elements, while the latter includes discursive elements. 19 This machine/logic of negativity describes a broader coding machine that operates across the entire social formation of euro-modernity. 20 See Althusser (1971) and Benveniste (1973); see also note 42. 21 See my discussion in chapter 5 of Agamben on the example. 22 That is why identity politics—in its myriad forms—is thought of as a cultural politics by cultural studies, despite its refusal of identity as a singular logic of negation. 23 Consequently, “media studies” as a discipline is an odd formation. While some may argue that this is true of the objects around which many disciplines are built, in such cases, I believe the problem is more a matter of disagreements 314  Notes

across theoretical paradigms than conceptual weakness. After all, there is something interesting about a category that so easily and unproblematically can be taken up across so many disciplines; there is something odd about a cate­ gory that can so quickly, and with so few consequences, transform the Society for Cinema Studies into the Society for Cinema and Media Studies; or a literature department into one that now teaches film, television, and even popular music—as simply matters of addition or incorporation—without posing any conceptual challenge to the disciplinary apparatus itself. Moreover, we can talk about its historical connotations, connecting it, for example, to spiritual and ghostly matters, but that is not the same as understanding the genealogy of the term. 24 I want to thank Sindhu Zagoren for this insight. 25 Including Stuart Hall and Whannel (1964), Stuart Hall (1981), Bennett (1986), Chambers (1986), Stallybrass and White (1986), and Hebdige (1979). 26 As I have argued elsewhere (Grossberg 1992; 2007b), in the present context the popular seems to be increasingly affective, and politics increasingly articulated into structures of entertainment, fantasy, and polymorphous pleasure, rather than ideological. As Sennett (1977) argues, to offer one small anecdote, the popular form of the political question seems to have moved from “What do you think?” to “How do you feel?” And while I do not want to make this into a classic tale about the fall from reason to emotion, I do think it raises important questions that problematize the concept of the popular and its relationship to the political. Most clearly, it puts the matter of affect at the center of our agenda. 27 Such articulations may involve: the state, civil society, and citizenship, on the one hand, and the economy, on the other: biopolitics and the relations of individuality, collectivity, and populations; communitarianism and identity; democracy and fascism; the forms of political subjectivation and subjection; the logics and spaces of exception and sovereignty; violence and militarization; neocolonialism and globalization; the relations of public and private, intimacy and domesticity; the forms of inclusion and exclusion (including Agamben’s excluded inclusion); the places and spaces of everyday life; realizations of resistance and autonomous politics—is there something that escapes or precedes the political? 28 Actually, this is most obvious in literature. Is there any longer a “high” literature? Or is it the case that the new elite literature is defined by global and ethnic minorities so that the new art is culture of the global other? 29 I am grateful to Ann Gray for this point. 30 While researching this chapter, I went online to check out syllabi from the Introduction of Media Studies classes and the Introduction to New Media classes at a variety of universities, as offered by a variety of professors. I have Notes  315

to report that not only was there a surprising amount of consistency across universities and over time, but that the basic outline of topics has not changed all that much over a significant period of time. Of course, new topics—privacy, decolonization, globalization—have been added, but they have not challenged the basic assumptions about the nature of the object or its privilege, or the organization of the class. 31 The situation is just as confused and confusing if one looks at the distribution and reception of music: beyond am and fm radio, broadcast and cable television, tapes and cds, the various ways the Web operates here, various Web- sharing programs, iTunes, concerts, clubs, and satellite radio, we would also have to consider YouTube, ringtones, Facebook and MySpace, cd Baby, Second Life, etc. 32 Notions like “cross-platform” programming seem like thin and desperate efforts to conceptualize something that has long ago surpassed our ability to theorize it. 33 And at the same time, everyday life has become increasingly overwhelming, not merely in terms of time and labor, but also as a matter of media, pleasure, and information. As Berlant so eloquently puts it: “ The labor of reproducing life in the contemporary world is also the activity of being worn out by it” (2006, 23). Indeed, “the ordinariness of suffering, the violence of normativity, and the ‘technologies of patience’ or lag that keep these processes in place” (23), increasingly seem to make the most mundane and ordinary activities and requirements into demanding and frustrating expenditures of time, emotion, and energy. 34 Some of my critics seem not to understand that the fact that authenticity is constructed by and within a particular formation does not make it any less real or effective within the territories of that formation. On the other hand, it does prevent one from universalizing the judgment, either descriptively or normatively. 35 Gilbert ’s contribution to an event in London, on February 4, 2009, on “Culture (and Cultural Studies) after the Crunch.” “Passive dissent ” appeared in the last chapter of John Clarke’s Changing Welfare, Changing States (2004). 36 Thanks to Joe Turow for this insight. 37 For example, as much as I am sympathetic to concerns about privacy or the ownership of cultural rights, I do not think such analyses or politics have yet been articulated to the larger conjunctural struggles, over the construction of private and public, as a crucial piece of the struggle over modernities. 38 Such work is often rooted in the work of the Canadian theorists Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, and in the cultural approach of James Carey. 39 See, e.g., McCarthy (2001); Parks (2005); Sterne (2003); V. Johnson (2008); Acland (2003); and Striphas (2009). Berland (2009) and Morley (2007) come 316  Notes

closest to my own vision of media studies that is not, in the last analysis, about media. 40 I have a mixed response to much of this work, because I think its practitioners’ reading of Foucault is rather thin, and that they have an even thinner reading of the context. Moreover, by assuming their theory in advance, they guarantee that they will find what they are looking for. Still, the best of this work— Andrejevic (2003), Ouellette and Hay (2008), Packer (2008)—makes significant contributions. 41 Yet, McLuhan recognized that lightbulbs were a medium. 42 Deleuze and Guattari (1987) refer to such logics as semiotic regimes. A regime of signs is a “function of existence” of language; they are discursive logics or productive mechanisms organizing expression. As such, any regime might be characterized as operating (1) on a particular plane (e.g., interpretive vs. passional), (2) along a particular vector or architectonic principle (circularity vs. the point from which issues a line of flight), and (3) according to a specific diagram of power. Deleuze and Guattari identify a number of regimes, defined by their configuration and mode of operation: signifying regimes, which are characterized as the endless production of (cognitive or semantic) meaning; post-signifying or passional regimes, which are characterized as the production of subjects through affective investments; pre-signifying regimes, which are characterized by a pluralism of forms of expression (think of bricolage); and counter-signifying regimes, characterized by mobile and plural distributions. Guattari (1996) offers a different matrix of “coding regimes,” distinguishing a-semiotic encodings, signifying semiologies, and a-signifying semiotics. He describes the first as “so-called natural encoding which functions independently of the constitution of a semiotic substance,” and warns us not to “succumb to the semiotic illusion of projecting an ecriture onto the natural field” (149). The second category is divided into two forms: symbolic semiologies, which put several types of substance into play to produce decentered semiotic circles that are “never completely translatable into a system of universal signification; and semiologies of signification, in which a single signifying substance establishes a dictatorship of the signifier” (150). The third category, also called post-signifying, uses signifying semiotics as a tool of semiotic deterritorialization, to establish new connections that function independently whether they signify something for someone or not. 43 For example, despite constant claims to the contrary, much of Internet (etc.) research still acts as if the individual, even though understood as embodied, in non-humanistic terms, confronts the facticity of a text or machine, etc. I would propose that a more fruitful ways of approaching it—and I am sure there are some people doing this—is to think of overlapping and changing assemblages that come together and engage one another in many different ways. Notes  317

44 I do not mean to deny the possibility of starting with a single event, like a text, but I do want to emphasize how very hard it is to move from that singular event to the formation and, ultimately, the broader context. There are very few people who can pull it off. For one example, see Morris (1992a). 45 I think of humiliation—reducing to a lower position—as a state of being or a structure of feeling, rather than as a psychologized emotion such as shame or guilt. It does not imply the same kind of moral judgment that these emotions do, but it does require an other as a witness (as does shame, but not guilt). It is a kind of unbecoming what we are, if not unbecoming human. 46 Perhaps the best example of the sort of work I am suggesting is the corpus of Meaghan Morris. See, for example, Morris (1998). Chapter Five: Complicating Power 1 While risk may actually be declining in the advanced industrial world, we do seem to be more risk-averse, going to extreme lengths to avoid risks. 2 Assuming that such empirical phenomena as “responsibilization” were somehow new (ignoring its connection to, e.g., the notion of inner-directed selves in the 1950s). 3 The concept of a society of control, introduced only briefly by Deleuze (1992), seems to overlap somewhat with Foucault ’s notion of biopolitics and securitization. It describes a system of permanent training—rapidly shifting and continuously variable, modulating, infinitely flexible. It presents an image of the complete (and successful dispersion of power) that dismantles older forms of agency and subjectivity, envisioning a new form of “machinic enslavement.” As one can see, it does seem to correlate, perhaps much too easily, with descriptions of post-modernism, post-Fordism, etc. 4 In Marxist theory, the formal subsumption of labor describes the condition in which labor remains essentially outside of the productive processes, and therefore it has to be abstracted, recuperated, disciplined, and managed by the productive processes, primarily through primitive accumulation and the production of a labor market. In real subsumption, labor becomes a product of the circuit of production itself. 5 See Connolly (2002), Brown (1995), Dean (2000), and Shapiro (2001), but also Balibar (2003), Rancière (1995), and Mouffe (1993). 6 I do not assume that “the state” is specific to euro-modernity, or even that it is unique to modernity, although that may turn out to be the case. I do think modernity makes the state into the site of the struggle over power. I think here of Dewey ’s (1946, 223) question: “whether there is any alternative between a theory . . . which, placing sovereignty in a part of society, makes the govern-

318  Notes

ment an entity per se, whose operations are all commands, and a theory which finds the residence of sovereignty in the whole complex of social activities, thus making government an organ—an organ the more efficient we may add, just in proportion as it is not an entity per se, but is flexible and responsive to the social whole, or true sovereign.” 7 It is possible to imagine a biopolitics in which almost everything is alive, for example. 8 See Heidegger (1982) and Latour (1993). 9 See the important work of people such as Muecke (2009), Escobar (2008), Berland (2009), Pezzullo (2007), Slack (2008), Ross (1994), and Blaser (2009), to name only a few in cultural studies. 10 But I would also locate war along the line connecting the body to the state, especially insofar as some have argued that there is an almost indissoluble connection between war and politics. Foucault (2003; 2007a), like Schmitt (1996), argues, for example, that politics is the continuation of war by other means. 11 See Feldman (1991). 12 Compare Taussig (1997) and Mbembe (2003) with Fanon (1967). 13 For example, in my previous work (Grossberg 1992), I described the effort to produce a disciplined mobilization as a specific (conjunctural) structuring of everyday life in which deterritorialization itself becomes the logic of its territorialization. The places and spaces that constrain mobility disappear in favor of a boundary that produces a mobility always circling back on itself. A disciplined mobilization transforms the labor of place-making into the labor of mobility. The boundary, of a seemingly unconstrained (within everyday life) mobility, is itself transformed, from a coding machine that differentiates the other into a territorializing machine that, in refusing to capture the other, excises its presence. The other is disappeared. More accurately, a disciplined mobilization is a machine that performs a double erasure: it erases both those living outside of everyday life, and the existence of the rest of the political field (i.e., that which exists apart from but in relation to everyday life). There is, quite literally, no outside, so that the only political question becomes that of everyday life itself. 14 Thus certain relations and regimes of power such as coloniality and other apparatuses built on the construction of otherness can only be mapped at the intersection of this conjunctural diagram of power with the constitutive machinery of modernity, especially coding-decoding, as described elsewhere. 15 For example, one colleague suggested that the two correspond precisely at the space defined by the triangle 10–11–12. 16 Thus, in the contemporary world, we are faced with the increasing reality of monocultural societies demanding their place as the new norm, as opposed

Notes  319

to their being a state of exception (as in the original “modern” founding of Israel). I am grateful to Ghassan Hage for this point. 17 Governance is not equivalent to the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, which is both more and less inclusive. I must admit that I often have serious problems with much of this post-Foucauldian work on governmentality, not only because it tends to find it everywhere it looks, but even more because it constructs a seamless web between capitalism (finance, post-Fordism, etc.), politics, and subjectivity. It ignores the historical specificity of such practices, thus including an extraordinary range of activities under the common signifier of neoliberalism, without ever explaining the term or what is being identified as new. Further, it fails to distinguish between hegemonic constructions and distributions of the population and biopolitical management of the population. It equates dreams of power and regulation with the realities of power, intention with effect. 18 It is also along this line that I would locate not only the so-called Washington consensus but also current discussions about the “rule of law ” as the necessary institutional condition of possibility for governance. 19 Here one might want to take account, for example, of Ong’s (1999) arguments for a transnationalization of citizenship, and her description of the flexible citizenship of active ethnic subjects (constructed as discursive objects); or Berlant’s (1997) efforts to think of citizenship in historically variable terms, manifesting itself in the contemporary conjuncture as anti-political politics and the privatization of citizenship; or Rosaldo’s (1997) and Miller’s (2007) efforts to construct a cultural citizenship. 20 See Grossberg (2007); Hall (1998a); Gilroy (2005). 21 See, e.g., Hall (1997b; 1999; 2000a) and Gilroy (1993a; 1993b). 22 See, e.g., Aronowitz and Bratsis (2002); Jessop (2002); Steinmetz (1999); Hansen and Stepputat (2001); and McLennan, Held, and Hall (1984). 23 Spinoza’s potentia, as opposed to potestas. 24 I want to acknowledge that the relations of the two distinctions are somewhat ambivalent in Foucault. Additionally, it is important to remember that Foucault (1988b) distinguishes technologies of production, technologies of self, technologies of power, and regimes of signification, despite the easy way so many contemporary scholars act as if all of them were simply apparatuses of power! 25 It is important to note that Foucault (1978) rejects both of these possibilities, and his theory of productivity, following Deleuze, has to be distinguished from the notion that power or discourse constitutes its object. 26 Schmitt ’s (1996) enemy must be perceived as posing an existential threat that has to be contained. In these terms, the “left” faces the challenge of making capitalism appear to be an existential threat. Let me also acknowledge here 320  Notes

that there is a dimension missing from my diagram involving relations across and between state (and non-state) spaces—e.g., international relations. 27 For Rancière, according to Panagia, “politics is an event initiated by individuals or groups who insist that the ordered configuration of a political arrangement . . . is wrong. Such proclamations, however, do not sound like anything because they are unrecognizable as speech” (Panagia 2001). 28 For example, for Laclau (1990) the discursivity of politics is what guarantees its indeterminateness, while for Rancière (1995), it is the political activity par excellence, because the language of politics is always spoken by the excluded and therefore is always incomprehensible. 29 The notion of “capture” makes a number of different appearances in Deleuze and Guattari’s work: with regard to the state; to the “holy trinity ” in Marx’s theory of capital accumulation—land (rent), labor, and money (taxation); and to the formation of assemblages and territories (in what Delueuze and Guattari call a “double capture”). This presents us with the possibility of rethinking political economy, since for Deleuze and Guattari it is surplus labor that produces labor as value, and it is taxes that produce state money. 30 This has some similarity to Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) notion of a constitutive outside, but it is clearly different from their definition of the political as antagonism, and from Mouffe’s (1993) reading of this in terms of the enemy as different. 31 Actually, I think here is another kind of apparatus of capture, built on what we can call extra-consistency, which enables what I have referred to, throughout this book, as problematization. 32 This is most commonly identified with Marx’s concept of the primitive accumulation of capital. This clearly connects, although does not identify, apparatuses of capture with the commensuration machines of the economic. I disagree with Patton’s (2005, 41) assumption that such apparatuses “define the abstract machine which is expressed in the different forms of State, but also in non-state mechanisms of capture such as the capture of corporeal representation by faciality, or the capture of political reason by public opinion.” Moreover, in fact, at one point Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987, 445) description of the state as an apparatus of capture seems to move from intra- to interconsistency: “The state constitutes a form of expression that subjugates the phylum: the phylum or matter is no longer anything more than an equalized, homogenized, compared content, while expression becomes a form of resonance or appropriation.” 33 I owe a great deal here to the Social Movements Working Group at the University of North Carolina—especially to Michal Osterweil, Sebastian Cobarrubias, Maribel Casas-Cortes, Juan Ricardo Aparicio, and Elena Yehia, as well as my dear friend, Arturo Escobar (see the special section on “Meaning-Making Notes  321

in Social Movements” in Anthropological Quarterly 81, no. 1 [2008]). For an excellent discussion of the fraught relation between autonomous theory and politics, see Gilbert (2008). 34 On autonomous politics, see Holloway (2002); Lotringer (1980); Negri (1990); Sen et al. (2004); and Shukaitis and Graeber (2007). 35 Too many histories create an absolute split between two poles—partly by collapsing alternative and independent movements and practices—when the reality was that many people were involved in both oppositional and alternative politics, and were even, sometimes, independent as well. In fact, much of what the so called anti-systemic movements claim to be new seems to me to reproduce much of what was said and done in the sixties. Unfortunately, they have not bothered to ask why that counterculture failed in many ways. Chapter Six: In Search of Modernities Epigraph from Michel Foucault, Le Gouvernment de soi et des autres: Cours au Collège de France (1982–1983). Paris: Seuil, 2008. Translated by Mark Hayward. 1 This discussion is drawn from Gail Herschatter’s (2007) presentation of the work of the eminent Chinese intellectual historian Wang Hui. I am grateful to her for sharing her work with me. 2 For an introduction to this group’s work, see the special issue of Cultural Studies (vol. 21, no. 2/3 [March/May 2007]), “Globalization and the De-Colonial Option,” ed. Walter D. Mignolo and Arturo Escobar. I do not claim to be presenting a complete overview of this complex, interesting body of work, or of the arguments within the group. 3 As Isabel Gill (personal communication, 2008) has pointed out to me, the Portuguese were a colonizing state before the Spanish. 4 And despite his denial, which I do believe must be taken seriously, it does sound at times as though Mignolo is assigning a kind of essentialized “authen­ ticity  ” to the indigenous colonized subaltern. 5 See Scott  ’s (2004) critique of the Haitian Revolution. See also Trouillot (2002). 6 According to Coyle (2007), the economist Angus Maddison argued that Europe’s living standards rose as early as the fifteenth century, suggesting that its economic success must have depended on earlier conditions than those realized through imperialism/colonialism or other factors traditionally associated with modernity. 7 This contrast between an Iberian and Northern European modernity, the latter built on the secularization of Christianity, and the assumption that this might explain the different postcolonial histories of Latin America and the other regions colonized by Northern European modernity, is not completely 322  Notes

original (see Dainotto 2006; Chambers 2008). There is also a long tradition of writing in the Hispanic world on this topic (see Racionero 1996; Morse 1982; Rodó 1967). Europe is significantly reimagined and reconfigured only after the trauma of fascism and its defeat, and this did not happen in Southern Europe until the 1970s. 8 See Grossberg (2000c). 9 I want to thank David Terry for his insight here. Let me also point out the universalizing tendencies in Koselleck’s theory. 10 This creates an interesting contradiction for conservative modernizers. 11 This discourse differs from the more common appeal to Baudelaire’s concept of the flaneur as the figure or emblem of modernity, which ties Baudelaire back to the chronotope of change, albeit a radically contingent, almost random change. See also Derrida’s (1997, 306) “time of the promise.” 12 Although he retreats somewhat, in my opinion, by describing this as “a leap in the open air of the present as history  ” (7). 13 See Grossberg (2000b) on belonging in time. 14 There is actually a third possible chronotope, which points to a plurality of temporalities/spatialities. See Foucault  ’s notion of heterotopias (1967) and Bloch (1977) on the synchronicity of the non-synchronous. 15 I think it also stands the event against the temporalizing logic of the Judaic, which is so central to Benjamin. One should, I believe, be skeptical about the simple incorporation of Judaism into some (imaginary) Judeo-Christian tradition of euro-modernity. 16 My sense of the event is closer to, but not exactly aligned with Deleuze’s (1990, 63) view: the event is neither a significant happening, nor a singular instance that interrupts everyday life. Events are fragments of reality that are caught in the tension between the virtual and the actual. While it has presence, “in its impassibility and impenetrability . . . [it] has no present. It rather retreats and advances in two directions at once, being the perpetual object of a double question: What is going to happen? What has just happened?” This view is not surprising for a philosopher for whom change—becoming—is everything. I would argue that the event in the modern is precisely the construction of a present for presence, out of the ontological or virtual becoming. I am grateful to Ted Striphas for pointing this out to me. 17 In these terms, euro-modernity might be seen as the demand to “perform or else,” where performance has the ontological meaning not only of cultural performance but also of technological and organizational performance as well. I am grateful to David Terry for this understanding of euro-modernity. See also Yúdice (2003). 18 Foucault (1997) distinguishes three ways philosophical thought reflects on its own present: the present represented as belonging to a certain era; the present Notes  323

interrogated for signs of a forthcoming event; and the present as a period of transition into a new world. 19 Thus, I disagree with Mitchell (2000, 14), who writes, “The modern occurs as that form of temporality [contemporaneity or presence] that Walter Benjamin calls homogeneous empty time . . . [of] simultaneity.” 20 Thus we can see that Foucault here is arguing against the phenomenological location of subjectivity in time-consciousness, which then demands the assertion of a transcendental subjectivity to enable the thematization of consciousness itself. 21 See Grossberg (2000a) on space. See Pickles (2004) for a discussion of the relations of practices of mapping and theories of space. 22 Physicist John Wheeler observed, “Matter tells space how to curve, and space tells matter how to move” (“Universe 101: Big Bang Theory,” National Aeronautics and Space Administration, http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/bb_theory .html). 23 Thus, I do not entirely agree with Osborne’s (1995, 195) statement that “everydayness is a temporal mode of existence,” since I think it is also spatial, but I do agree that “its mode of temporalization [is] a distinctive combination of presentness and repetition.” 24 While Gaonkar (2001) sees Baudelaire calling for a poetics of civil society (not surprising for a rhetorical scholar), I think of him as offering a description of the poetics of everyday life. I also think Gaonkar mistakenly equates everyday life with the life-world, even though this everyday life is not entirely fleeting; in fact, it is itself crucially constituted as routinized and habituated. 25 Lefebvre’s theory has three distinct but articulated “attributes”: everyday life (la vie quotidienne), the everyday (le quotidian), and everydayness (quotidienneté  ). Everyday life is not a fixed and eternal dimension of social life but the rearticulation, in euro-modernity, of daily life to everydayness and the everyday. 26 This need not be “the recurrent sludge” that Lefebvre sees as the “everyday” of capitalist modernity, nor need we follow Lefebvre’s identification of the everyday with the feminine, nor de Certeau’s (1984) equation of the everyday with a complete negativity or lack of power. 27 I want to briefly consider the affinities of my project with the arguments of Timothy Mitchell, who also sees the limits of an alternative modernities model: “Nor should we allow a more global view of the modern to encourage us to talk simply of alternative modernities, in which a (fundamentally singular) modernity is modified by local circumstances into a variety of cultural forms” (2000, 24). Instead, Mitchell’s more “global view  ” argues that “developments and forces external to any possible definition of the essence of capitalist modernity continually redirect, divert, mutate and multiply the

324  Notes

modernity they help constitute, depriving it of any essential principle, unique dynamic, or singular history  ” (12). Yet Mitchell does identify a fundamental structure for modernity, which is not unlike my own second diagram: “the experience of modernity is constructed as a relationship between time and space. It is a particular way of expressing one in terms of the other” (13). Although the terms are not exactly the same as mine, he recognizes the doubling of modern time: it is both historical time, and “contemporaneity or presence. The modern occurs as that form of temporality that Walter Benjamin calls homogeneous empty time . . . simultaneity  ” (14). As Mitchell summarizes it, “Modernity . . . seems to form a distinctive time-space, appearing in the homogeneous shape of the West and characterized by an immediacy of presence that we recognize as the ‘now’ of history  ” (23). And in a move that interestingly seems to reverse his argument, he suggests that it is the “effect of simultaneity  ” that “makes it possible to construct the idea of historical time” (15). He further elaborates the complex relationship between modern time and space. On the one hand, “historical time, the time of the West, is what gives modern geography its order, an order centered upon Europe” (7). And on the other hand, “the ‘now’ of modernity . . . depends upon the representation of an homogenous space” (15). These similarities are significant; yet there are also significant differences that open up the space of a possible conversation. First, in what may be a minor issue, Mitchell seems to conflate the phenomenological and the ontological questions of time and space. Second, he takes the presence, or “now,” of modernity to be the same as the fleeting presence of historical time, rather than its doubling. In other words, he seems to assume that history can be derived from contemporaneity. So, despite appearances, there is a singular structure of temporality rather than a doubling. Third, Mitchell argues that the time and space of modernity are themselves “the products of an endlessly replicating system of representation” (23). Thus, in the end, modernity is not constituted by and as time and space, but as representation, or better, by “the distinctly modern techniques of representation” (25). Thus “the most powerful aspect of the production of the euro-modern, and what at the same time exposes it to spectres of difference and displacement that deny it the originality and coherence it claims: the way in which the modern is staged as representation” (16). Or again: “The modern is produced as the difference between space and its representation. It is not a particular representation of space that characterizes the production of the modern but the organization of reality as a space of representation” (27). In this distinct economy of representation, the world is “set up” (echoing Heidegger’s world-picture) in terms of an absolute difference between subject

Notes  325

and object, between the real and its representation: “Colonial European modernity stages the endless set-up that pictures and promises us this complete, unmediated, self-present, immediate reality” (18). Mitchell identifies this “presence” of the real with the contemporaneity of the present of historical time. “What is distinctive is that such contemporaneity or presence is an effect that can be rendered up to experience only through the structure of a replication” (22), through what he later calls “the staging of difference” (26). In this, Mitchell’s position seems to privilege what I called a coding diagram, agreeing with both cultural theories of modernity as well as the Modernity/Coloniality group. The result is that Mitchell has no way to conceptualize a multiplicity of configurations of the temporalities of change and presence, and of the spaces of institutions and everyday life. He is left with a desire to imagine other possibilities, without the ability to theorize other modernities: “It is not that there are many different modernities, any more than there are many different capitalisms. Modernity, like capitalism, is defined by its claim to universality, to a uniqueness, unity and universality that present the end (in every sense) of history” (24). However productive his analysis may be, Mitchell is left to find some way out of the space of history and representation, and so his pessimism is mitigated only by the appeal to an exteriority, an outside, as he continues: “Yet this always remains an impossible unity, an incomplete universal” (24). 28 As I said in the acknowledgments, I am grateful to Chantal Cornut-Gentille D’Arcy and Sonia López-Baissón for providing this diagram. My own first efforts were merely a two-by-two chart with individuality located at the center. As the designers explained to me, “Rather than being ‘boxed’ into (what looks like) set/closed/stable categories, space and time are represented as interrelated dimensions—the strength, influence, power of attraction of the different forces emanating from these dimensions being totally irregular (none of these forces fully occupies any set space or time-span). At the same time, the (deliberately) uneven, darkened, center-area shows up how multiple (coexisting) experiences of modernity result from—in the manner of a recipe— differing densities/intensities of interaction and interconnection among these orbiting forces” (D’Arcy and López-Baissón, personal communication, August 30, 2009). 29 One might find non-phenomenological understandings of experience articulated by pragmatists such as John Dewey (1938) and William James (2008), as well as A. N. Whitehead (1979). 30 This is related to the change Foucault sees as the development of discipline as distinct from sovereignty, but he fails to see the tension as productive—in fact, as the space of the invention of the popular as a political space. 31 I am extremely grateful to Mario Blaser (personal communication, April 2009) for helping me to avoid making a total fool of myself. In an earlier version, I 326  Notes

suggested that non-modern societies only had institutional spaces. This obviously imagines non-modern societies as closed, so that change can only come from the outside. Besides, it would be equally plausible to suggest that they only have everyday spaces. And it is certainly plausible to argue that non- modern societies have other forms of institutional spaces and everyday life spaces. Hence, the position offered here is my latest effort, in conversation, to think through my own position. 32 This is the euro-modern subject, the split subject of Lukács’s (1971) analysis (the social body of labor and the self-reflective phenomenological subject of consciousness and rights) of the bourgeois modernity (see Grossberg 1999). 33 One might take note here of the complex temporalities of the postwar youth cultures, often centered around music, embodied partly in the always varied (doubled) tempos and unique sense of historicality embodied in the notion of “oldies.” 34 It often involves a notion of progress as self-completion, the self-realization of the individual and of the nation as well as of history itself. 35 Theodore Kaczynski, a mathematician and survivalist, was a “terrorist” who sent at least sixteen mail bombs between 1978 and 1995, to airlines, universities, corporations, and individuals. He was opposed to technology and consumer culture. In 1995, both the New York Times and the Washington Post, in the face of the threat of continued bombing, published his manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future.” He was arrested in 1996 in remote Montana, tried, and eventually sentenced to life in prison. 36 It is not, I think, coincidental that much of this work often fails to address the role of the state in producing not only the homogeneous empty time of historicism but also the remembered time of lived memory. 37 Mario Blaser (personal communication, April 2009) has raised a serious objection to my analysis: are the terms so under-specified as to no longer distinguish the modern from the non-modern? I think this is precisely where and why we need the sort of conversation I call for at the end of this chapter. 38 I want to thank Elena Yehia for her insight on these matters. 39 Yet I think his use of Latour, and the consequent reduction of modernity to the politics of negativity of European culture, closes off any possibility of other modernities. 40 Santos here echoes Aimé Césaire’s (2001) earlier observation that Europe was incapable of solving the problems it had created. 41 There is a lot of interesting and sophisticated analysis taking place outside the academy, around the Social Forum movement, the Global Justice movement, the precariat movement, etc.

Notes  327

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Index Acland, Charles, 312, 316 Adorno, Theodor W., 190, 310 Agamben, Giorgio, 78, 239–41, 247, 251, 268 Aglietta, Michel, 106 Ahmed, Sarah, 313 Almond, Gabriel A., 232 Althuseer, Louis, 40, 50, 127, 151, 285, 299 Alvarez, Sonia E., 246 Amariglio, Jack, 155 Amato, Peter, 289 Amin, Ash, 116 Amin, Samir, 106 Anderson, Perry, 80 Andrejevic, Mark, 317 Ang, Ien, 213 Aparicio, Juan Ricardo, 321 Appadurai, Arjun, 86 Arnold, Mathew, 185 Aronowitz, Stanley, 320 Asad, Talal, 261 Auden, W. H., 13 Badiou, Alain, 273 Balibar, Etienne, 251, 299, 318 Baudeliare, Charles, 272, 274, 277, 323–24 Baudrillard, Jean, 178, 308

Bauman, Zygmunt, 86–88, 143, 172, 285 Beck, Ulrich, 85–86, 309 Becker, Gary, 131, 150 Benjamin, Walter, 271, 274, 277, 285, 325 Bennett, Tony, 171, 209, 315 Benveniste, Émile, 314 Berland, Jody, 319 Berlant, Lauren, 313 Berman, Marshall, 270 Bernasconi, Robert, 73 Bigelow, Gordon, 110 Birchall, Claire, 297 Blake, William, 45 Blaser, Mario, 165, 224, 287, 319, 326–27 Bloch, Ernst, 284, 323 Blumer, Herbert, 204 Bourdieu, Pierre, 304 Bratsis, Peter, 320 Braudel, Fernand, 103, 144–47, 305, 307 Bromfield, David, 270 Brown, Wendy, 318 Brunsdon, Charlotte, 211, 296 Bryan, Dick, 162, 302–3 Bush, George W., 47 Callon, Michel, 304 Canclini, Nestor Garcia, 40 Carey, James W., 18, 19, 45, 68–69, 185 Casas-Cortes, Maribel, 321

Castells, Manuel, 106 cccs (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies), 10–18, 20, 40, 44–45, 48, 50–51, 108, 206, 299 Cesaire, Aime, 270, 301, 327 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 75, 268, 270–71, 280, 289 Chambers, Iain, 315, 323 Chang, Ruth, 310 Chatterjee, Partha, 273, 301 Cho, Hae-joang, 85 Clark, Gregory, 139 Clarke, John, 13, 42, 51, 66, 102, 121, 123, 140–41, 218, 246, 293, 300, 302–6, 316 Clough, Patricia, 195–96 Cobarrubias, Sebastian, 321 Cohen, Patricia, 305 Colectivo Precarias a la Deriva, 259 Coleman, William Oliver, 109 Comaroff, Jean and John L., 304–5 Connolly, William, 251, 256, 318 Couldry, Nick, 216 Coyle, Diane, 322 Crary, Jonathan, 314 Critcher, Chas, 20, 51 Crothers, Lane, 232 Dagnino, Evalina, 141 Dainotto, Roberto M., 323 D’Arcy, Chantal Cornut-Gentille, 301, 326 Davidoff, Leonore, 306 Davis, John B., 206 De Certeau, Michel, 222, 279, 324 De Landa, Manuel, 297–98 Dean, Jodi, 250, 318 Deeb, Laura, 286–88 Deleuze, Gilles, 39, 74, 89, 193, 196, 230, 241, 250, 255, 261, 297, 298, 301, 313, 318, 320, 323 352  Index

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, 31– 32, 36–38, 40, 95, 163, 167, 190, 203, 237, 252–53, 297–98, 302, 309–14, 317, 321 Denning, Michael, 174–75, 177, 211 Derrida, Jacques, 50, 88–89, 274, 323 Dewey, John, 204, 318, 326 Dirlik, Arif, 83 Du Gay, Paul, 102, 111, 113, 115, 116, 212 Dubner, Stephen J., 109 Dumont, Louis, 147–48, 150 Durkheim, Émile, 299 Dussel, Enrique, 265, 268 Eichengreen, Barry, 303 Eisenstadt, S. N., 80–81 Elkins, David J., 232 Escobar, Arturo, 30, 74, 102, 248, 263–66, 300, 319, 321–22 Espeland, Wendy Nelson, 161–62 Fanon, Frantz, 301, 319 Feldman, Allen, 319 Fish, Stanley, 98 Foucault, Michel, 5, 34, 40, 45, 49, 67, 78, 90, 94–95, 100, 118, 171–72, 178, 196, 220, 238–39, 246, 250, 259, 272, 274, 296, 306, 314, 317–18, 320, 322–24, 326 Franks, Thomas, 304 Freud, Sigmund, 192–93 Friedman, Milton, 107, 164, 307 Frow, John, 179 Fukuyama, Francis, 139, 284 Fullbrook, Edward, 136, 305 Galloway, Alexander R., 207 Gaonkar, Dilip P., 75, 82, 270, 272, 277, 286, 324 Garnett, Robert F., 305

Gibson-Graham, J. K., 102, 121, 125–29, 249, 304–5 Giddens, Anthony, 77, 80, 86 Gilbert, Jeremy, 218, 316, 322 Gill, Isabel, 322 Gilroy, Paul, 22, 34, 51, 75, 82, 97, 261, 268, 297, 300–301, 320 Graeber, David, 158–60, 322 Gramsci, Antonio, 40, 42, 51, 68, 85, 94, 107, 117, 131, 208, 299–300 Gray, Anne, 315 Greenspan, Alan, 109–10, 131 Gregg, Melissa, 313 Guattari, Felix, 36, 221, 317 Gudeman, Stephen, 304 Guha, Rananit, 40 Guiso, Luigi, 138 Gupta, Akhil, 42 Gyekye, Kwame, 83, 262, 268, 270, 287

Harvey, John T., 305 Hay, James, 216, 220, 317 Hayek, F. A., 107, 164, 307, 311 Hayward, Mark, 221, 322 Hebdige, Dick, 315 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 26, 68, 79, 86–87, 187, 202, 265, 267, 274, 297–98, 310 Heidegger, Martin, 35, 36, 73, 87, 100, 273–74, 319, 325 Held, David, 79, 173, 301, 320 Hermes, Joke, 213 Herschatter, Gail, 322 Hoggart, Richard, 10–13, 35, 45, 296, 299 Holloway, John, 256, 322 Horkheimer, Max, 310 Hudson, Ray, 115 Huntington, Samuel, 139, 177 Huyssen, Andreas, 284

Habermas, Jürgen, 87–88 Hage, Ghassan, 239, 312–13, 320 Hall, Catherine, 306 Hall, Gary, 297 Hall, Stuart, 4, 9–10, 12–13, 19–21, 25, 27, 33, 40–45, 50–51, 60, 67–68, 79–84, 96, 105, 108, 121–22, 156, 159, 162, 173, 195, 202, 206–11, 272, 295–301, 315, 320 Hansen, Mark, 313 Hansen, Thomas Blom, 320 Haraway, Donna, 296 Hardin, Carey, 306 Harding, Jennifer, 313 Hardt, Michael, 37, 106, 160, 230, 251, 304 Harootunian, Harry D., 269, 275, 277–88, 300 Harrison, Lawrence E., 139 Harvey, David, 106

Innis, Harold, 204, 316 Jacques, Martin, 51 James, C. L. R., 268, 301 James, William, 326 Jameson, Fred, 177, 301 Jayaram, Srinath, 301 Jessop, Bob, 102, 119, 320 Johnson, Richard, 212 Johnson, Victoria, 316 Jones, Eric, 139 Jones, John Paul III, 39 Kaczynski, Theodore (Unabomber), 284, 327 Kahn, Joel S., 79, 83, 86–87, 263 Kant, Immanuel, 4, 36, 86–87, 96, 181, 184, 190, 202, 275 Keynes, John Maynard, 110, 118, 132, 134, 135, 164, 303–4, 311 Index  353

Kirsch, Stuart, 161 Klein, Naomi, 303 Kluckhom, Clyde, 159 Kosseleck, Reinhart, 269–70, 323 Krugman, Paul, 131 Kuper, Adam, 171 Lacan, Jacques, 50 Laclau, Ernesto, 251, 299, 321 Lash, Scott, 86, 230 Latour, Bruno, 77, 87–89, 113, 173, 314, 319, 327 Lawson, Tony, 136–37 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 106, 158 Le Doeuff, Michele, 104 Lee, Raymond, 86 Lee, Roger, 102, 120 Lefebvre, Henri, 59, 217, 260, 277–79, 282, 287 Leibniz, Gottfried, 200 Levitt, Steven D., 109 Lipietz, Alain, 106 Livingston, James, 134 Lockhart, Charles, 232 Lopez-Baisson, Sonia, 326 Lotringer, Sylvere, 322 Lu Xu, 274 Lukács, Georg, 309, 327 Lyotard, Jean-François, 310 MacKenzie, David, 304 Maddison, Angus, 322 Maldonado-Torres, Nelson, 265 Manzi, Jim, 306 Marston, Sallie A., 39 Martin, Randy, 63, 102, 302 Martin-Barbero, Jesus, 40 Marx, Karl, 25, 40, 79, 103, 110, 121–22, 152–58, 161, 299, 301, 303, 307–9, 321

354  Index

Massey, Doreen, 30, 33–34, 49, 59–60, 102, 118, 155, 276, 295 Massumi, Brian, 192, 197–98, 314 Mbembe, Achille, 319 McCarthy, Anna, 216, 316 McCloskey, Deidre, 304 McLennan, Gregor, 320 McLuhan, Marshall, 204, 317 McRobbie, Angela, 11, 51, 102, 177, 309 Meek, Ronald L., 152–55, 307 Menocal, Maria Rosa, 269 Mignolo, Walter D., 248, 322 Miller, Peter, 304 Miller, Toby, 172 Minkowski, Hermann, 275 Mitchell, Don, 170–71 Mitchell, Timothy, 102, 109, 130, 143– 44, 147, 271, 281, 306, 324–26 Morales, Evo, 118 Morgan, Mary, 137 Morley, David, 211, 215, 220, 316 Morris, Meaghan, 34, 65, 76, 112, 129, 179, 220, 222, 275, 279, 318 Morrison, Toni, 272 Morse, Richard, 323 Mouffe, Chantal, 251, 299, 318, 321 Muecke, Stephen, 319 Mulhern, Frances, 48, 227 Mumford, Lewis, 204 Muniesa, Fabian, 304 Murdoch, Rupert, 179 Negri, Antonio, 37, 106, 160, 230, 251, 304, 322 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 263 Newman, Janet, 121, 246 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 190 Nixon, Richard, 310 Nkrumah, Kwame, 263

O’Leary, Ted, 304 Obama, Barack, 70, 118 Ong, Aiwha, 320 Oosterlynck, Stijn, 102, 119 Osborne, Peter, 273, 279, 324 Osterweil, Michal, 321 Ouellette, Laurie, 317

Rostow, Walter, 74 Royals, Deborah, 313 Rubin, Harriet, 132 Rubin, Isaak Illich, 307 Ruccio, David, 102, 105–6, 117, 129–30, 132–33, 137, 155, 302 Rustin, Michael, 297

Packer, Jeremy, 317 Panagia, Davide, 321 Parks, Lisa, 316 Patton, Paul, 254, 321 Pezzullo, Phaedra, 319 Philo, C., 34 Pickles, John, 324 Polanyi, Karl, 103, 144–47, 305 Postone, Moishe, 156–58, 162, 309 Postrel, Virginia, 284 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 162 Pribram, E. Deidre, 313 Pryke, Michael, 102, 113–16

Sachs, Jeffrey, 131 Salerno, Joseph T., 311 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, 71, 75, 81, 288, 327 Sapienza, Paola, 138 Schmitt, Carl, 237, 254 Schumpeter, Joseph, 307, 310 Scott, David, 48, 50, 83, 269 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 94 Seigworth, Gregory J., 298, 313 Sen, Amartya, 106 Sen, Jai, 322 Sennett, Richard, 315 Shapiro, Michael J., 318 Shiller, Robert J., 132 Shukaitis, Stevphen, 322 Simeon, Richard E. B., 232 Simmel, Georg, 103, 160–61 Simondon, Gilbert, 313 Simpson, Christopher, 176, 312 Siu, Lucia, 304 Slack, Jennifer Darryl, 298, 319 Smicker, Josh, 297 Smith, Adam, 110, 148, 152–53, 155, 303, 308 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 304 Solow, Robert M., 137–38 Spinoza, Baruch, 190, 193, 200, 320 Spivak, Gayatri Chakrabarty, 161, 308 Stallybrass, Peter, 315 Steinmetz, George, 320 Stengers, Isabelle, 96

Racionero, Luis, 323 Radway, Janice, 213 Raffles, Hugh, 30 Rajagopal, Arvind, 220 Rancière, Jacques, 251, 318 Readings, Bill, 178, 186 Restrepo, Eduardo, 169, 300 Rhoads, William G., 305 Ricardo, David, 163, 311 Ricoeur, Paul, 94 Rivera, Alberto, 304 Rodó, José Enrique, 323 Rofel, Lisa, 286 Rosaldo, Renato, 320 Rose, Nikolas, 304 Ross, Andrew, 319 Ross, Kristin, 60 Ross, Marc Howard, 233

Index  355

Stepputat, Finn, 320 Sterne, Jonathan, 207, 316 Stevens, Mitchell L., 174 Strathern, Marilyn, 161, 182 Striphas, Ted, 106, 316 Takeuchi, Yoshimi, 84, 260, 262–63, 273–74 Taussig, Michael T., 319 Taylor, Charles, 80, 148–49 Taylor, Peter, 75, 81–83, 85 Terranova, Tiziana, 230 Terry, David, 323 Therborn, Goran, 81 Thompson, Edward P., 306 Thrift, Nigel, 105, 114, 116, 118, 124, 192–93 Throsby, David, 138 Toennies, Ferdinand, 299 Tompkins, Sylvan, 192 Toscano, Alberto, 253 Toussaint L’Ouverture, FrançoisDominique, 269 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 322 Turner, Bryan, 79 Turow, Joseph, 316 Vattimo, Gianni, 227 Vaz, Henrique C. de Lima, 267 Veblen, Thorsten, 305

356  Index

Venn, Couze, 229–30 Von Mises, Ludwig, 164, 311 Wang, Hui, 84, 322 Watkins, Evan, 102, 131 Weber, Max, 78–79, 139 Wells, Chris, 314 Whannel, Paddy, 315 Wheeler, John, 324 White, Allon, 315 Whitehead, Alfred North, 324 Williams, Raymond, 12–13, 24–25, 35, 43, 45, 48–49, 67, 69, 74, 173–74, 184, 188, 189, 204–7, 217, 231, 247, 257, 289, 295–97 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 247 Women’s Studies Group, 49 Woodward, Kathleen, 313 Woodward, Keith, 39 Yack, Bernard, 83, 260 Yehia, Elena, 321, 327 Young, Robert, 272 Yúdice, George, 177 Zagoren, Sindhu, 315 Zapatistas, 255, 257 Zingales, Luigi, 138 Žižek, Slavoj, 273 Zylinska, Joanna, 302

lawrence grossberg is the Morris Davis Distinguished Professor of  Communication Studies and Cultural Studies, and Adjunct Distinguished Professor of American Studies, Anthropology, and Geography at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is a leading figure both in the United States and internationally in cultural studies; he has co-edited the pre-eminent journal Cultural Studies for twenty years, and serves on the advisory/editorial boards of over twentyfive journals around the world. He has published approximately two dozen books and 200 essays in English and at least a dozen other languages. He has won numerous awards from the National Communication Association and the International Communication Association, as well as the University of North Carolina’s Distinguished Teaching Award (For Post-Baccalaureate Teaching). His books include Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics and America’s Future (2005), MediaMaking: Mass Media in a Popular Culture (with Ellen Wartella, D. Charles Whitney, and MacGregor Wise, 2005), Bringing it all Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies and Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture (1997), and We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (1992). His coedited books include About Raymond Williams (with Monica Seidl and Roman Horak) (2009), New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (with Tony Bennett and Meaghan Morris) (2005), Without Guarantees: Essays in Honor of Stuart Hall (with Paul Gilroy and Angela McRobbie) (2000), Cultural Studies (with Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler) (1992), and Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (with Cary Nelson) (1988). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grossberg, Lawrence. Cultural studies in the future tense / Lawrence Grossberg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-4844-3 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-4830-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Culture—Study and teaching.  I. Title. hm623.g76 2010 306—dc22  2010017149