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Why I Love Cultural Studies
Simon Critchley
Paul Bowman: How do you position yourself and your work in relation to the cultural studies project? Or, rather, do you see cultural studies as a ‘project’, and is contemporary cultural studies still the ‘same’ project or discipline as it once was? Simon Critchley: I see my work as intimately connected to culture and the study of culture; and by culture I mean the processes by which human beings’ identities, lives and institutions are formed. By ‘culture’ I understand ‘formation’, or what Hegel would call Bildung, which can be translated as ‘culture’. And I tend to see that in terms of my own discipline, or through my own discipline, which is philosophy. For me philosophy is and should be a meditation on the meaning of culture – a meditation on culture. But often it isn’t. So what I see as definitive of philosophy in the Continental tradition is a concern with culture and cultural formation, which means that philosophy on this model becomes a historically sensitive, contextually sensitive discipline, which is concerned with giving a critique of actually existing praxis, actually existing states of affairs. So the way that I understand cultural studies should be taken back to the way I understand philosophy: Philosophy on my model turns around three terms, which are critique, praxis and emancipation – namely that philosophy is a critique of existing cultural praxis, with a view to how one might be emancipated from forms of un-free praxis towards more free praxis. So, philosophy is an activity of critique of social praxis which aspires towards emancipation. The point here in relation to something like cultural studies is that philosophy can be a meditation upon cultural meanings and can reveal the contingency of those cultural meanings and practices, and the nature of the hegemonic constructions which impose those cultural meanings and practices.
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To give you an example of that: How does Hegel do cultural studies? If we think about a classical philosophical example – Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit – Hegel reads Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, and finds in Rameau’s Nephew – or rather, he diagnoses in Rameau’s Nephew – the culture of the Enlightenment. The culture of the Enlightenment for him is defined in terms of a certain splitting or division of the subject: the culture of the Enlightenment is the culture of radical self-alienation, for Hegel, and this is experienced in wit and irony: in a world where there is no God and nothing is certain the only thing we can do is to be witty. Now the point of that example is that Hegel is a philosopher who chooses an exemplary cultural object, a text by Diderot, and a text by Diderot furthermore that is a covert text, which can’t be coded as either high or low culture. In many ways, Rameau’s Nephew is an example of low culture, which is why the text was secret (it wasn’t published until the late nineteenth century), and through reading it he gives us a diagnosis of the culture of the Enlightenment, and also shows how we might move beyond that culture. So it corresponds to this model of philosophy as critique of cultural praxis which is linked to emancipation. You can say similar things about somebody like Nietzsche, in the way Nietzsche will meditate upon the meaning of culture, for him that culture being a culture of nihilism (the source of which is Christianity). So part of philosophy is this study of culture. Another way of thinking about this is that this model of philosophy is and has to be a form of diagnosis of the times – in German Zeitdiagnose. The way Hegel puts this is philosophy is its time comprehended in thought. And what philosophy does as comprehending its time in thought is to pick out what we might call certain ‘cultural pathologies’. This has been the case in philosophy at least since Rousseau, in that a large chunk of philosophy is concerned with diagnosing cultural pathologies. So, for example, Rousseau’s Second Discourse – the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality – is essentially a critique of culture in terms of identifying certain pathologies, namely the pathology of inequality, the pathology that surrounds property ownership, and
Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. P. Bowman.
121 so forth. So why I mention this is that I think you can see how the project of continental philosophy is unified around these terms – critique, praxis, and emancipation. Which means that philosophy has to be a meditation on culture. If you think of philosophy in those terms you can unify it with the ambitions behind cultural studies in its various guises – from people like Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, through to its French variants, through to its more recent varieties. So I see the philosophical project as linked to the project of cultural study. And that has to be linked to a notion of emancipation. But in terms of my own work, that means that what I try to do some of the time is try to pick out specific cultural pathologies in certain exemplary objects. For me in many ways a key question is how one discriminates, how one discriminates cultural objects, how one reads a culture in terms of those objects; and I try to do that in different ways: through popular music, and more recently I’ve been trying to do that in work in film, on the Coen Brothers, and most recently on Terrence Malik. So in many ways I’d like to be able to imagine a more philosophical form of cultural studies, which would show that philosophy and cultural studies were part of the same family, if not identical twins. Coming back to what I have just said about this sense of exemplary objects and discrimination: I don’t think my position commits me to a form of cultural populism, as is so often claimed about the move towards cultural studies. What interests me is an engaged experience of judgement in relationship to particular objects of study. And, in my rather naïve way, the way I see cultural studies would be in terms of judgement in relationship to particulars. Those particulars could be modernist poems, they could be films, they could be chunks of death metal – it doesn’t really matter what. For it is a matter of encouraging the exercise of judgement. I have no interest in the high culture/low culture distinction. I simply choose to ignore it. I’d like to encourage discrimination in both registers, between registers, and the kind of work I’d like to see would be work that is informed by choices from all sorts of cultural registers.
Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. P. Bowman.
122 PB: It sounds to me like your model of cultural studies would be a subset of philosophy – it sounds like we’re going back to Plato here in seeing it as a little part of an overall philosophical project, and for you it’s continental philosophy that cultural studies is aligned with. But, you’ve used certain words – you’ve spoken of philosophy as a ‘meditation’ on culture, philosophy as ‘critique’. But I think that perhaps the difference between cultural studies and the kind of philosophy that you engage in is that cultural studies tries to be more than critique or meditation – for cultural studies it’s all about ‘intervention’. Do you see that as a difference between what you do and what cultural studies claims or aims to do, tries to do, or fantasizes about? SC: I don’t see a contradiction between what I do and the notion of intervention. I’d like to think of what I do as more of an intervention that would be as activist as the most active cultural studies. I’m just coming to that with a different toolbox, a different set of assumptions, and I try to set those to work in relation to… well, all sorts of objects: I’m happy to talk about anything in that sense if it’s interesting or if someone can make it interesting. So meditation is probably something of a misnomer. The vision of philosophy that I have is philosophy as an intervention into culture that would be critical of cultural meanings and productive of new cultural meanings – very much more like the sort of Deleuzean model of philosophy, as the production of new concepts under which we might see things in a different way.
PB: Cultural studies is said to be a political project – it calls itself a political project. It sounds like you think of the kind of philosophy that you do as being very much related to that. But I think that one accusation against cultural studies is that it doesn’t really know anything about politics, that it doesn’t really have a politics. What, to your mind, are the politics of cultural studies? Does it have ‘one’, more than one, or is it, rather, political in a different sense of ‘political’? And, secondly, for a cultural studies academic, perhaps as distinct from a
Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. P. Bowman.
123 philosopher, the question of the ‘proper destination’ of one’s work is strongly felt. That is, a philosopher, perhaps, would be quite happy to be talking to other philosophers, whereas a cultural studies academic wouldn’t want just to be talking to other cultural studies academics – in a very literal and direct sense. I think you’re talking in a more extended sense… SC: Yes. I’m in a philosophy department, I talk to other philosophers. If all I did was to talk to other philosophers I think I’d slit my wrists and slip into a Roman bath and do away with myself. I mean I’d like to say that philosophy is my institutional home, but I want to address as many people as possible. Pure narcissism I think! So that means, happily, coming from philosophy, you have a sort of grid that you can apply to all sorts of areas. But my work isn’t really important in professional philosophy. It’s not dismissed, but it’s hardly mainstream. My stuff has been picked up much more in political theory, critical and legal theory, international relations, art theory, literary theory – areas like that. So in many ways, my audience is really outside my discipline.
PB: I think that your work is really important to cultural studies, especially when it comes to thinking the politics, the ethics, the philosophical underpinnings of exactly what one is thinking or what one is trying to say or trying to do. So do you think that cultural studies has a politics that you can specify? SC: As I understand the question – and this is largely based on my experience of a variety of cultural studies conferences I’ve been to – then there seems to be a lot of hand-wringing about cultural studies as a political project. My historical understanding, which is pretty shaky, is that cultural studies was a political project in the Birmingham group, in the work of Raymond Williams, in the work of Stuart Hall. That’s fairly clear. I think it’s equally a political project in the work of Foucault, if we include Foucault in the sphere of cultural studies, and Michel de Certeau (maybe even more so in de Certeau). Whether it was political in the same sense, particularly in the way in which French
Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. P. Bowman.
124 theory was being translated into the English speaking world, is another question, but certainly I think for them it was a political project, and I think cultural studies still is a political project for the people I read who are working in that area, like Paul Gilroy, for example. I see his work as being continuous with the ambition of cultural studies as a political project. The question then would be what sort of political project should cultural studies be? And the answer is simple: it should be an emancipatory project, and that links back to what I was saying in answer to the first question about the issues of emancipation and the way in which my model of philosophy turns around these three terms of critique, praxis and emancipation. So emancipation for me has become increasingly important. Emancipation has changed. The paradox is that in a world that’s more globalised and unified, the meanings of ‘emancipation’ have become more pluralised. In a sense, it makes more sense to talk about emancipations, in the plural. And that’s doubtless true: we can’t subsume emancipation under some unified goal, as in the classical Marxist picture. But that doesn’t mean we should give up the notion of emancipation. Not at all. As Derrida has said, nothing is more out-dated than the classical emancipatory ideal, and for me why you write, why you do stuff, is in order to reduce unfreedom. It has to be as naïve as that, I think. Unless your work is animated by that then I don’t see why you’re doing it other than for forms of professional legitimation, which I think are of no interest at all. In relation to politics as I conceive of it, the first thing I’d say is that obviously in the history of cultural studies in the 70s and 80s the category of hegemony from Gramsci was very important to the work of Stuart Hall and others, and I think it’s still important. I understand hegemony as a non-negative category. Hegemony is a description of how political identities are formed. The key term in the theory of hegemony, in Gramsci, but more clearly in the work of Ernesto Laclau, is the notion of hegemonic articulation: that identities, cultural meanings, practices, are what they are through processes of articulation which are hegemonic and therefore ultimately political. In a sense, everything becomes political with the category of hegemony, and
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125 hegemony is the logic of the political, it’s what is at the heart of the political, because that is the way power is organised. Now, two things can follow from that. I want to relate politics to the category of hegemony, and the category of hegemony can be taken in two ways. On the one hand you can see hegemony as a sort of value-free, neutral analytics of power, in the way that some people would interpret Foucault (I wouldn’t interpret Foucault that way, but you can interpret Foucault that way). So Foucault is giving us an analytics of the way in which power is organised, through disciplinary practices, or whatever. And when people read Laclau and Mouffe, they tend to see the notion of hegemony in those terms. But – and this would be the second option – I think that at the basis of hegemony is a normative claim, or an ethical claim, that, for example if we think about a book like Hegemony and Socialist Strategy,1 on the one hand we are given a genealogy of the history of Marxism, which is a descriptive analytics of the power structures which produced a certain version of Marxism and how that can be taken apart. But what that leads to in Laclau and Mouffe is a conception of the democratic revolution and radical democracy. And I see that as an implicitly ethical concept. So, to come back to the question, cultural studies is a political project. The political project turns around the use of the category of hegemony; and hegemony at its core has a normative ‘push’, a normative force. So for me the key question theoretically is linking or thinking about ethics in relation to politics through this notion of hegemony. For me at the basis of all normative notions is an experience of what I call an ethical demand. And the ethical demand is that by virtue of which we become subjects, and it’s on the basis of a certain experience of the ethical subject that we can begin to conceive of a transformative politics. Now, when I was at Bath Spa University College last year for a big cultural studies conference, one of the things that interested me at the conference was the session on Lévinas and cultural studies. There seems to be a great deal of interest in Lévinas in cultural studies, which I think is interesting, and I’m all
Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. P. Bowman.
126 in favour of that. What that seems to be speaking to is the question that cultural studies is not just a political project, or if it is a political project, at the core of that project has to be some sort of normative claim, some sort of ethical demand, an ethical vision. And it seems that one strand of that within cultural studies is the Lévinasian strand – the Lévinasian-Derridean strand – which is one ethical vision. Another strand would be a sort of Deleuzean strand, which I suppose now would be linked to people like Hardt and Negri – which is also a deeply normative vision of transformative politics, but on the basis of a different ontology. For me the key category that I’m trying to think about in my own work at the moment is the idea of commitment. And I’m trying to breathe life back into the category of commitment. There was, and I suppose there still is a lot of talk about ‘engaged cultural studies’. And in many ways that interests me, that idea of engagement and commitment. For me it’s the notion of commitment that can link ethics to politics, and that’s work that’s underway, it’s what I’m teaching at the moment. And teaching is always a laboratory for me.
PB: Which is very interesting, especially insofar as it seems like you see cultural studies as organised predominantly around the concept of hegemony, which I agree with. But then that would imply that, say, the work of Baudrillard or Žižek – or the recent work of Žižek – wouldn’t really fall into cultural studies at all (Žižek would probably be quite happy about that!), as I don’t think that Žižek agrees with the concept of hegemony in that way…. SC: I think Žižek is a cultural critic in the highest possible sense of that word. He is someone who is engaged in diagnosis of the times, Zeitdiagnose, in the old Frankfurt School sense. And I think when you put Žižek in front of an exemplary cultural object, like David Lynch or, as I remember listening to him talking about Titanic, it’s extraordinary. What he is unable to think, in my view, is politics. That’s because he’s thinking politics on the basis of the wrong categories, namely psychoanalytic categories. I remain doubtful as to whether
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127 Lacanian psychoanalytic categories are going to be able to bring you any understanding of politics, certainly in the way Žižek uses them. I see Žižek as a cultural critic whose theoretical grid is psychoanalytic and philosophical, but not as a political thinker. And I think the weakest aspect of his work is in his political pronouncements, particularly those of the last couple of years, which I think take you to a complete ultra-leftist cul-de-sac.
PB: That too raises very interesting questions, because I once heard Žižek talking on Radio Four, and he was unintelligible to everyone else on the programme: no one understood what on earth he was talking about. In a sense, he might as well not have been talking at all. So, for cultural studies and for Žižek, or indeed for anyone within the academy to such an extent, on the level that they talk about politics and they try to do political work in this way, the question is, does that have any significance outside of the university at all? SC: Well it does have a significance outside the university, empirically, insofar as a lot of people read Žižek and buy his books. I think that Žižek often picks the soft target of universities to attack: so when he’s attacking cultural studies, or when he’s attacking multiculturalism, or political correctness, or whatever it is, he’s doing it in terms of a university model. I think it’s very witty – it’s incredibly witty what he does. But I don’t think that’s the be-all and end-all of politics. So if I’m thinking about politics I want to think about politics in political categories, and I think that there are people that give us those. The person I’ve worked most closely with and learned most from in that regard is Ernesto Laclau, who has the Marxist tradition under his skin and just understands how politics works. There are problems with Ernesto’s work, which we’ve debated, but what he understands is the logic of politics. So, if there is a Žižekian cultural studies, the object of its attack would be these institutions, and in that sense, it’s missing the target: it’s too easy to attack university academics.
Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. P. Bowman.
128 PB: So for cultural studies more generally then, outside of the university, does it have any articulation with political movements, does it have any political ‘consequences’…? SC: Yes, I hope so. There are various political groups that I’ve spoken to over the years – I did a talk last year to the Signs of the Times group, when they organised a series of seminars, in London: very well attended, very political, and very sort of cultural studies events, but linked to a political project. So I think you can do that, and I think people are hungry for serious cultural analysis. They’re not hungry for a sort of flip, ironical, knowing use of theory, which ends up in some sort of relativistic soup. They’re not hungry for that, that’s demeaning. I think there has to be cultural density for intellectual work. Intellectual work has to put its roots down into what’s taking place in a culture in order for that work to have any meaning. The paradox is that to have the luxury to do that work it helps if you have a university position, and so in a sense we need institutions, we need frameworks of learning, we need frameworks for study, of the most traditional and rigorous kind. But the echo of that work has to be heard outside of the university, and more importantly it has to listen to what’s going on outside. I think that is crucial. In my work, the last two books – the book on continental philosophy and the book on humour that’s coming out – I attempted to reach a wider public, which of course is going to be a mixed thing. But there you go. Again, as I said before, professionalization is the great Satan for me. There does need to be a profession, professions need to be organised, there need to be ways of legitimating intellectual work, but that can’t be exhausted by the institutions, otherwise we end up doing cultural studies in an intellectual vacuum, sealed from any contact with the outside world (This is always my worry about a lot of work that goes on in the United States, as it seems much more divorced from actual cultural movements).
PB: I’m just thinking of the terms ‘reactive’ and ‘proactive’ – you suggest a lot about listening and paying attention and speaking with the most appropriate potential audience, or trying to construct an audience
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129 or a readership. So, do you see cultural studies or your own work as more reactive or proactive, or are these categories simply wrong? SC: It’s both. You try to do work which is for an audience and producing an audience. That’s the fantasy. The hope is that you will do work that will create a constituency. The most successful academics, the most successful intellectuals, like Žižek, say, do that, and there’s a constituency for his work. And those of us who are less successful are full of envy for his success!
PB: So, speaking from your position as both inside and outside, with one foot inside and one foot outside of cultural studies, as you are at this particular moment, where do you think cultural studies is going? This question is obviously tied to that of ‘where has it been?’, which is an interesting and important question itself; but where you think it should go, or what you think it should now do or try to do: in short, what has cultural studies ‘achieved’, what has it ‘failed’ to achieve, and to what extent are these ‘failures’ inevitable, structural, or is it just that their realization is only a matter of time or strategy? SC: In some of the cultural studies literature I’m familiar with, there’s talk of the cultural turn, and there is certainly a cultural turn in the universities and outside of universities, particularly in relationship to subjects like literature, say, which are increasingly difficult to separate from the cultural studies project, simply because of recruitment – universities have to offer media studies, TV, film studies, and so forth. The problem with the cultural turn is that it can risk conspiring with an increasingly globalised and an increasingly homogenized notion of cultural production. I think one of the interesting features about cultural production now is its standardization, so that not only is Big Brother a massive phenomenon in the UK, it’s based on a Dutch model and every country in Europe has its own Big Brother. It’s the same thing with Pop Idol, same thing with the Weakest Link, the same thing with all of these
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130 shows.1 The specificity of cultural production is broken down through increasing globalisation. And I find that enormously depressing. I think popular culture for the most part is rubbish. My partner has a poster on her wall which was produced by an art collective in east London, which reads something like ‘don’t deceive us with popular culture, what we want is art’. And I am interested in art. I’m interested in things, events, with meaning, power, sublimity. I’m interested in cultural events that can transform one’s sense of self. So I’m interested in the things that can have that effect; and that can be anything. It can be a piece of popular music, it can be anything you choose. So the high/low culture distinction doesn’t interest me because what interests me is events that can have that power, and insofar as they have that power they are doing what art should do. What I hate is irony. I hate postmodern knowing irony. In fact, I hate postmodernism, and I think postmodernism was a massive diversion of energy away from what we should have been thinking about. And I particularly hate the way in which theory can be used to conspire with irony in a generalised cultural knowingness, so that people have a knowledge of a few things – having read a few books or done a course at university, and will know, as Oscar Wilde said, the price of everything but the value of nothing. I think if cultural studies as an institution could be said to conspire with that, then that’s lamentable.
PB: That’s strange though, because you speak very highly of Richard Rorty. Is his a different sense of irony? Is there something specific to the way Rorty articulates irony with a political project? SC: Rorty is a complex case. I do think highly of Rorty, and I think that he is one of the cleverest philosophers of the last 50 years – probably, culturally, the most important American philosopher of the last generation. Yet I think
1
Big Brother is a TV show in which contestants share a house (entirely monitored by TV cameras) for a protracted period of time, having no contact with the outside world. Viewers vote out contestants week by week. Pop Idol operates in a similar ‘audience interactive’ way, whereby viewers vote out aspiring pop stars until only one remains, and is hailed the successful ‘pop idol’. The Weakest Link is a (basically sado-masochistic) ‘teamwork’ quiz, in which competitors work together to accrue points, and after each round vote out the weakest competitor. [PB]
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131 his separation of the public and the private domains is implausible, and the way he wants to separate the public from the private is that the public sphere is the liberal sphere, the private sphere is the sphere of irony. So irony becomes a private matter, and it’s what people of a certain cultivation do. They can sit at home and read Proust, and listen to Mozart operas, and know that their private tastes do not determine the public meanings of the liberal world. I think that’s implausible. If you separate the public from the private in the way Rorty wants to, then you end up in political cynicism, and the paradox is that that’s not what Rorty wants. Rorty is a man of the left, in the American sense of the American liberal left, and what he wants is a politics of civic hope, which is actually a leftist project. The theoretical resources he produces – some of them, at least – actually undermine that project. I think it’s the right project, but you can get there with other means.
PB: I would like to pursue some other aspects of some of the things that you have been alluding to and mentioning (and using). The first one is that when you talk about emancipation you don’t like to specify what that should mean, and you say we should pluralize emancipation. But to refer to Derrida briefly, Derrida argues that pluralisation solves nothing: pluralizing merely defers the problem of exactly what it is you are talking about, which ties in I think – well, it does and it doesn’t tie in – with the question of policy, or ‘what is to be done’. You’ve answered that directly with reference to the question of commitment and trying to be audible and clear and so on. But with audibility, Derrida argues that audibility is strictly structural, not phenomenal: so audibility and intelligibility have nothing to do with the fact that there is a person speaking; rather it is entirely to do with institutions and language, a kind of politics of language. So if you’re working towards a certain kind of audibility, isn’t that always already political, and is that the kind of policy, is that the kind of pragmatic activity that you envisage for cultural studies and your own work?
Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. P. Bowman.
132 SC: The question of emancipation. Let me try to specify the argument in Derridean terms. I see Derrida’s work as fundamentally poised around the question of how one thinks together two contradictory imperatives. On the one hand there is – and it’s always ‘on the one hand… on the other hand’ for Derrida – On the one hand there is an unconditional demand that can’t be compromised, that Derrida calls justice (among other things), which I think of as an ethical demand. Then there is the question of how that can be made effective with reference to a specific context – if you like, the pragmatic question. So for Derrida, it’s always a question of how one thinks together an unconditional demand with the conditions of a particular context. And what that means is that hegemony, which is the actual taking of a decision on the basis of an unconditional demand in a specific context, is going to be different in different cases. So that’s what I mean by pluralisation. Pluralisation simply means that what emancipation is going to mean in a specific context is different from what it’s going to mean in another context. So it’s contextdependent, but not exhausted by context. There is this trans-contextual demand, which Derrida calls justice, which remains formal, but still operative in any decision. So emancipation has to be pluralised but not compromised, if you like. In relationship to the politics of audibility – it’s a difficult question. And the linking of that to policy and things like that… I am a philosopher by training and by institutional location. The fear that philosophers have is of being unintelligible. Therefore I want to be as intelligible as possible. I suppose what I’ve learned from analytic philosophy as a student and then subsequently is that philosophy, although engaged in often bizarre theoretical constructions, does speak the language of – or has to speak a language that is at least recognisable by – ordinary people. So, often you’ll find that rather sophisticated analytic philosophy will proceed in a very prosaic and matter of fact way. That can become banal, but I kind of like that. It keeps a sense of cultural gravity in one’s intellectual activity. The problem with continental philosophy in the English speaking world is that it often lacks that gravity, so that it often ends up speaking past people’s
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133 ordinary concerns by adopting this often barely understood jargon. And there are lots of examples of that – friends of mine are guilty of that. So I want to make these intellectual insights speak a plain language that’s understood. Again that’s a fantasy, because it’s a very difficult thing to do. You can always refuse to be understood. Plus there is a risk of clarity. I’m often obsessed by an ideal of absolute clarity, with the idea that my work could be intelligible to anybody who could read. And the book on humour I hope is the closest I’ve got to such a thing – of course that’s another fantasy that isn’t necessarily going to be successful. The problem is that you end up being compromised by the language that you’re forced to use. I mean, you talked about Žižek on Radio Four being unintelligible. When I went on Radio Four I tried to be intelligible. The risk is that you end up becoming banal or that you end up losing any critical distance and your political project fades. That’s a risk. And in many ways I haven’t sorted that out yet. There are people who’ve taken different routes, people I respect, who’ve come out of the same sort of background as me – someone like Keith Ansell-Pearson, who’s an old friend of mine, takes quite a different approach to these questions. What was the policy question, in particular?
PB: Well, the policy question in particular basically comes down to my favourite Bill Hicks question: ‘Yeah? And? So? What?’ That’s the question that cultural studies feels like it is (or, if I’m in any way representative of cultural studies, that’s the question that I feel like I’m) accused by: I feel like I stand accused in the face of that question – ‘Yeah? So that’s so clever, but so what?’ So I feel challenged by that question. And yet I do not think that cultural studies should be policy making or policy-making studies… SC: I think the ‘Yeah and so what?’ question is the right question. It’s a troubling question if you don’t understand the nature of what it is that you’re doing. I think that philosophy is a humanistic discipline, cultural studies is a humanistic discipline, and humanistic disciplines make remarks that are valid only if they’re accepted. So in a sense everything you say about a cultural
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134 object has to be banal, because it has to be intelligible to the person to whom it’s addressed. It’s not science. Science can produce a theory on the basis of empirical evidence that has predictive power. That theory could be completely unintelligible to the average man or woman in the street – that doesn’t matter. It’s a different activity. The humanities are engaged in the production of remarks that in a sense have to be measured against something like a sensus communis – something like a community, a community of language speakers, or whatever. What one is trying to do intellectually is to force moments of dissensus into that sensus communis. But that means that you have to speak everyday language. So the ‘Yeah and so what?’ question is right: we’re not in the business of producing a theory that’s going to explain the nature of culture. It just ain’t like that. What we’re doing is producing remarks which can be accepted or rejected or put alongside other remarks, and then it becomes a question of rhetoric and persuasion as to which remarks have the greatest force. Now that’s a crucially important question, and too little energy is spent thinking about rhetoric and persuasion. What you want to do with language is to move people – like the idea that at certain moments in the House of Commons people would actually cross the floor on the basis of a speech. That’s the sense of what you want to do: you want someone to be moved by what you say and to cross the floor. And that depends upon rhetorical power, and that rhetorical power depends upon knowing the conditions of your culture. Here’s a very old fashioned reactionary thought: when I was a student I remember being in somebody’s bedroom in the first year and having an intense conversation with this person (who became a friend): he wanted to be a literary critic. This seemed to be a legitimate ambition – to be a literary critic. And he could be a literary critic because in a sense literature, a certain understanding of the cannon of literature, in particular modernist literature, had meaning. It’s the way people like me made sense of their lives. And I think that this is very much the world that Hoggart and Raymond Williams and the first generation of cultural studies came out of and tried and challenge and deepen. But that’s gone. That’s simply, more or less, evaporated. What we
Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. P. Bowman.
135 have now is a situation in which our common currency is a theoretical language, which in a sense is international. The difficulty is making that theoretical language speak to people’s everyday concerns. I mean why should it? Why should Foucault, or Lacan, or Judith Butler, or whoever, speak to someone’s everyday concerns? So in a sense, one aspect of globalisation is the globalisation of theory, which is interesting. You know there’s a globalisation of the theoretical language which people have in common. You can go to a conference in Macedonia or Poland or South America, and people will have a common theoretical language. It could also be linked to the interest in visual art. Visual art has in that sense become an aspect of global culture. Why? Because it’s translatable. I don’t know where it leads.
PB: Richard Rorty comes to mind straight away, again, when he challenged Laclau, saying, more or less, ‘It is you who needs to tell the world why you’re so interested in this high theory, and why you think it’s so important’. Because all of us who are infected with theoretical interests, we all ‘know’ why Foucault, for instance, is important. So it does seem like the desire is to be some kind of philosopher-king, preaching the word of Foucault, say, or Hegel, or whoever. But, we can’t possibly be, so do you think that we should try to be the ‘parasite’, to use the Derridean term? SC: Oh yeah, the gadfly, the parasite, the irritant: that’s what the intellectual is and can be. Society is not and should not be run by philosophers. PB: There’s a sense in which the intellectual function has gone or that ‘intellectual function’ is a misnomer now, because it’s now the ‘capitalist-corporate-advertising-PR-etc.-function’, which used to be the intellectual function. Would you agree with that? SC: No, I don’t.
Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. P. Bowman.
136 PB: I mean, that sense might be highly parochial, because it just occurred to me that whenever I listen to one of the French radio stations that you can receive in this country, they always seem to be talking about political issues, it seems. And these are major international radio station. But then you turn on British radio and it’s just… trivia. SC: No, it’s a good point, but I think that when you’re working in a university in a country like Britain then it’s very easy to devalue the role of intellectual life because it seems that we are… PB: … Because it seems that we are interpellated and subjected as irrelevant? SC: Yes, we’re low-level; we’re not even civil servants. We’re employees – salaried employees who are there to entertain students. But, what I hang onto, this notion of cultural density or cultural gravity, is that there is a massive hunger amongst people to make meaning of their lives and to criticise the way things are, to imagine other ways things could be. And intellectuals can help us to do that, I think, and can help to give ways to do that. I believe that in many ways this is more pressing than it’s ever been. The role of the intellectual is absolutely crucial. The high theory remark is interesting, though, because in relation to, say, Ernesto Laclau’s work, it’s the case that Ernesto in English sounds like hightheory. But Ernesto’s theory is highly dependent upon the dynamics of populism in a South American context, obviously in Argentina – of which he has a perfect intuitive understanding. It’s just a question of context: it makes sense in Argentina, it doesn’t make sense in Virginia in the same way, so that’s different horses for different courses. What Rorty does is to banalize everything into the language of the pragmatist. And that’s a risk, and it’s also a risk in what people like me are up to. You can banalize things too far. A critical discourse has to be recognisable, but it’s also got to be slightly strange as well. It’s got to be a discourse that produces new concepts, in that Deleuzean sense,
Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. P. Bowman.
137 and those concepts have to be ones that you both recognise or see and at the same time that change the aspect under which you see phenomena. So it’s a delicate business. But one last thing I want to say about the future of cultural studies, or where cultural studies is going, would be that the world is a dark place and the world has become a darker place since September 11th. As I see it, the real danger of the situation we’re in now is the following: September 11th is the moment when globalisation and neo-liberalism part company. What I mean by this is that the vision that sustains a book like Hardt and Negri’s Empire,2 let’s say, is that the sheer creative energy of the multitude is somehow in tune with, or can be in tune with, the forces of production in a way that will produce emancipation and the overthrow of empire. Hardt and Negri’s is probably the best version of Marxism that one can have, I think, because it’s resolutely modern. Technology’s a good thing, capitalism’s a good thing, the destruction of pre-modern ways of life is a good thing. The question is how can the good thing that we call capitalism be prevented from producing the massive inequalities of wealth which it produces? It seems to me that post-September 11th that question is becoming even more acute because neo-liberal globalisation has been replaced by what I call authoritarian globalisation, or a repressive globalisation, where things have become really reterritorialised on the level of the state. So let me put it this way: if the Hardt and Negri version is one of a sort of a deterritorialising power within capitalism that can then be said to produce its own inversion through emancipation, then that prospect is increasingly remote. What we’ve seen since September 11th is the attempt to reterritorialise power along state lines, obviously in the United States but also in Russia and elsewhere. The effects of that, I think, are disastrous. So what does one need in the face of that? I think what one needs in the face of that is seriousness. We need intellectual work of utter clarity, that’s able to read, pathologise, criticise, and imagine the transformation of the present. And nothing else will do. That’s why the category of commitment interests me more and more. But this might change in a few years. In many ways I hope it does. But at this point
Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. P. Bowman.
138 there’s a need for intellectuals in cultural studies and in my own discipline to become utterly serious about what they’re doing, about the objects that they choose and why they’re choosing them, because it’s… later than you think.
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). 2 M. Hardt, and A. Negri, Empire (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2001).
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Interrogating Cultural Studies, ed. P. Bowman.
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