Like (2)This article was downloaded by:[bowman, paul] On: 15 April 2008 Access Details: [subscription number 792167067] Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Culture, Theory and Critique
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713696125
Alterdisciplinarity
Paul Bowman Online Publication Date: 01 April 2008 To cite this Article: Bowman, Paul (2008) 'Alterdisciplinarity', Culture, Theory and Critique, 49:1, 93 - 110 To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/14735780802024281 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14735780802024281
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article maybe used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
Culture, Theory & Critique, 2008, 49(1), 93–110
Alterdisciplinarity
Downloaded By: [bowman, paul] At: 15:04 15 April 2008
Paul Bowman
P.Bowman@roehampton.ac.uk Dr 0 100000April 2008 49 PaulBowman Taylor and Francis 2008 &Article Original Theory & Critique 1473-5784 (print)/1473-5776 (online) Culture, Francis 10.1080/14735780802024281 RCTC_A_302596.sgm
Abstract This paper argues that central to the formation and orientation of politicised academic subjects is the notion of intervention. It examines the prevailing conceptions of intervention in the case of cultural studies, and argues that these prevailing notions of how academics and intellectuals can intervene politically rely on broadly Gramscian and post-Marxist theories. However, it argues that the way these theories have been assumed has led to a rather under-theorised faith in the political value of ‘critique’. It proposes that this under-examined faith in the political power of critique is under-theoretical, broadly metaphysical, subject-centred and a regression from poststructuralist-informed theories of the political. By revisiting the implications of post-structuralist theories for academic work vis-à-vis intervention, the paper proposes that what is required is more thoroughgoing attention to the place and character of disciplinarity in the pragmatic mechanics of culture and society’s discourses and hegemonies. It argues that the conditions of possibility for intervention are indissociable from the institutional and disciplinary character of (post)modernity. In other words, it argues, the academic ‘condition’ is one of unavoidably heterogeneous language games in a web of disciplinary differences, and in the face of (the constitutive character of) disciplinarity and disciplinary difference, what has arisen is disciplinary enclaving, mutual unintelligibility and disarticulation. In this situation, it often appears that the only possible form of ethical and political intervention is ‘critique’ – either within one’s own discipline or ‘publicly’, journalistically. However, this paper argues that the interventional effectivity of any ‘critique’ is dubious at best. Instead it proposes a theory and practice of ‘alterdisciplinarity’. Grounded in poststructuralism and deconstructive discourse theory, alterdisciplinary practice is that which seeks to alter other disciplinary discourses and their productions (knowledges) not by critiquing them but by intervening into the disciplinary spaces of their production and legitimation. Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God’s name is the point of cultural studies? (Stuart Hall)
Culture trek, TNG
First the good news. The legacy is safe. Cultural studies remains ‘a politically committed field’ (Hall and Birchall 2006: 2). What is more, just as Stuart
Culture, Theory & Critique ISSN 1473-5784 Print/ISSN 1473-5776 online © 2008 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/14735780802024281
94 Paul Bowman Hall asserted years ago, in the name of this much declared legacy of political commitment, there are still ‘no theoretical limits from which cultural studies can turn back’ (Hall 1992: 282). This is not only because ‘if you are in the game of hegemony you have to be smarter than “them”’ (Hall 1992: 282). It is also because the theoretical ‘interrogation of founding ideas and narratives [can] help us to avoid slipping into […] an “anti-political moralism”’ (Hall and Birchall 2006: 13). So, cultural studies remains politically committed, and a key part of that commitment entails an ineluctable commitment to theory. Instead of rehearsing the debate about what those political commitments are or should be, let us tarry a while with the provocative proposition of the necessity of theory for a politically committed cultural studies. After that, let us still postpone diving headlong into the piping hot waters of the debate about which political commitments to choose, in favour of looking at a neglected (maybe even marginalised, if not foreclosed) matter: the problem of how a ‘politically committed field’ might actually be or become politically consequential. For it seems ironic that so much dispute within cultural studies (and way beyond) takes the form of arguing about what should be argued about, with considerably less explicit consideration being given to the question of how what is being argued about might come to make a difference. Indeed, in lieu of explicit consideration of how this or that politicised critique might make any political difference (however defined), one finds instead a rather vague investment in the presumed political value of ‘critique’ per se. But, at least for those who feel it important to make politicised critiques, it should be at least as important to know whether and in what way these politicised critiques might make any political difference. For just because the political value of critique may be a ‘founding idea’ (Hall and Birchall 2006: 12) of cultural studies, this does not mean it should not be interrogated, on both theoretical and practical grounds. But what does this putative distinction between ‘theoretical’ and ‘nontheoretical’ even mean? According to Gary Hall and Clare Birchall, the two currently familiar alternatives of either being ‘for’ or being ‘against’ something called ‘theory’ are themselves the outcome of the introduction of ‘European thought into the English-speaking academy in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s’ (Hall and Birchall 2006: 2). So, whilst ‘for some the so-called “theory revolution” has now more or less come to an end’, there are ‘a generation whose whole university education has been shaped by theory [and] who have never known a time before theory’. This generation ‘continue to see in it a means of testing and thinking through some of the most important issues and problems in contemporary culture and society – and, indeed, cultural studies’ (Hall and Birchall 2006: 2). So, which response to the question of theory is better for a ‘politically committed’ intellectual? To Gary Hall’s mind, at least, this is a nobrainer. Theory can be claimed to trump something called non-theory because if you compare a well-theorised politically committed work with an un- or under-theorised politically committed work: it is the theoretical analysis […] which is likely to prove the more ‘politically’ effective, at least to the extent that it will be more selfconsciously aware of the politico-institutional factors which affect its
Downloaded By: [bowman, paul] At: 15:04 15 April 2008
Alterdisciplinarity 95 operation and development, and therefore less prone to being blindly shaped and controlled by them. (Hall 2002: 5)
Downloaded By: [bowman, paul] At: 15:04 15 April 2008
Strike one? This is a neat formulation, even if it presumes a very flattering understanding of theory as the approach that is most ‘self-consciously aware of the politico-institutional factors which affect its operation and development’. But even for those who may not follow Hall in this assumption, theory ‘in general’ arguably has lots more to recommend it. For as Hall goes on to explain, even ‘what seems initially to be the most “theoretical” of issues may eventually turn out to have more practical and political effects than the most apparently “political” of political actions and debates’ (Hall 2002: 6). Strike two? Perhaps. But regardless, even if you reverse the values and polarities, you can clinch the case for theory even more tightly by following Hall’s subsequent logic according to which theory is still always preferable to its alternative, because: to move away from theory because it is apparently not political enough is to subordinate everything to political ends. It is to imply that things are only worth doing if it can be established in advance that they will have a practical, political outcome; an outcome which is itself decided in advance. (Hall 2002: 5) Strike three? This actually appears to be a double-whammy: for why should academia (specifically, cultural studies) always have to ‘subordinate everything to political ends’, especially when doing so presumes in advance that we know with certainty what a political outcome looks like? But none of this is certain, and none of it is intellectually or perhaps even politically reliable. Which is perhaps all good news for those inheritors of the legacy of politically committed cultural studies who are also into theorising. So, despite the recent rounds of jubilant announcements of the death of theory or the irrelevance of theory for cultural and political debate, it appears that – theoretically, at least – theory wins. No matter what ‘anti-theorists’ or ‘non-theorists’ may claim, theory can be shown to be necessary, constitutively, both intellectually and politically. As Judith Butler spells it out, it is demonstrably the case ‘that any effort at empirical description takes place within a theoretically delimited sphere, and that empirical analysis in general cannot offer a persuasive explanation of its own constitution as a field of enquiry’ (Butler 2000: 274). Besides, because we are scholars – remember – we need to be theorising, thinking and studying anyway. Unless, that is, we presume that we all already know everything about this ‘politics’ we are committed to, and that the world is not constantly a world in process. Unless we presume this, there will always be a need, in changing times, in a changing world, to re-examine and to be prepared to retheorise politics, in order to try to avoid becoming dogmatic stalwarts. As Timothy Bahti once put it: ‘knowledge without an accompanying rationale for its constitution and existence is counterintellectual, and ultimately counterrational’ (Bahti 1992: 73). And the performative contradiction of anti-intellectual intellectuals or anti-academic academics is surely too much for anyone to bear. (It is certainly what prompted Jacques Derrida to appeal to ‘classical protocols’ and to ideals of ‘rigour’ whenever
96 Paul Bowman critics accused deconstruction of taking things too far – a matter to which we will return.) But still, is it necessarily checkmate to theory, even theoretically-speaking? And would this theoretical victory have practical consequences? On the one hand, the fact that Hall and Birchall have deemed it necessary to put forward the case for the uses of theory suggests that its theoretical necessity may not be enough to save it in practice from other forms of practice. Which brings us to the other hand. Theory may be necessary, but it is (even theoretically) certainly not sufficient. For, theory is not politics. It is at best only a supplement. A condition of possibility, perhaps. But as cultural theory of several stripes has long suggested, by the same token it may also be or become a condition of impossibility, in any number of ways (becoming-obstacle, deferral, drift, division, alibi, etc.). So, is this then stalemate, with ‘theorists’ either distinguishing themselves from or being distinguished from ‘non-theorists’, and with each claiming that they are more political or more to the left than their polemical others? There is certainly a lot of this about. But are there really, actually, two discrete millenarian camps, the theorists versus the non-theorists? Surely this is not a very nuanced theoretical or empirical description of any disciplinary terrain. Such a two-dimensional image lacks depth.
Downloaded By: [bowman, paul] At: 15:04 15 April 2008
Disciplinary commitment
Derrida once observed that a disciplinary space or terrain is inevitably ‘a field of battle’. This is because ‘there is no metalanguage, no locus of truth outside the field’, and this ‘makes the field necessarily subject to multiplicity and heterogeneity. As a result, those who are inscribed in this field are necessarily inscribed in a polemos, even if they have no special taste for war’ (Derrida 2003: 12). Hence, what is involved ‘is not an opposition between the legitimate and the illegitimate, but rather a very complicated distribution of the demands of legitimacy’ (Derrida 2003: 18). As such, there will be more to any disagreement than one issue. In a consideration of Jacques Rancière’s conceptualisation of ‘disagreement’ as the basic aspect of politics, Benjamin Arditi clarifies this complexity when he observes that: a disagreement is less a confrontation between two established positions – as in the case of a debating society – than an engagement between ‘parties’ that do not antedate their confrontation. A disagreement constructs the object of argumentation and the field of argumentation itself. (Arditi 2007: 115) This clarifies the point that the very object of argumentation is already a particular kind of institutional construct. In this case, theory (and theoretical versus not theoretical approaches to political commitment) is already what John Mowitt has proposed we term a ‘disciplinary object’ (Mowitt 1992). For in any ‘versus’, there is a lot more to consider than the two putatively opposed terms – here political versus not political, or theoretical versus not theoretical. Rather, there is the issue of the silent, structuring, yet easily overlooked ‘third’ or ‘middle’ term that is at work in constructing the objects and the very terms of the debate: namely, the institution, paradigm, institutional
Alterdisciplinarity 97 paradigm, or disciplinary object (Mowitt 1992; 2007; Bowman 2007). This awareness of institutionality points up the often unregarded matter of the place and the manner of the construction of ‘the object of argumentation and the field of argumentation itself’ (Arditi 2007: 115). The significance of this can be clarified by a consideration of disciplinary ‘commitment’ per se. According to René Girard (after Lacan, after Durkheim), a discipline (an institution) is what it is thanks to its disciples, who are what they are by virtue of being embroiled in a passionate disagreement about what they are all differently attached to: namely, their shared declared commitment to some ‘sacred’ object (Girard 1977; Mowitt 1992: 37). Viewed in this way, an institution or a discipline is something which is constituted fundamentally as a rivalrous hegemonic structure congregated around or in the name of a particular object. But here’s the rub. This institution may well not have any simple, direct or necessary relation to or connection with its putative raison d’être. For instance, an institution such as a religion’s sacred object may be ‘God’. If God is supposed to exist as an ontological property of the universe, then even though an earthly institutional dispute about God may well change the institution, it would not actually change God. The same may be said of more earthly institutions, such as football supporters’ clubs, for instance, or fan clubs, or, indeed, even academic disciplines. Their connection with their object need neither be necessary nor even real. At the very least, any ‘connection’ will depend upon a work of invention or of forging the articulation. So, even though ‘politics’ is rarely theorised as residing in a divine realm beyond human intervention or in a professional realm entirely divorced from ‘us’, surely an institutional or disciplinary commitment to politics operates according to the same logic, wherein the question remains that of the way that a politically committed field might possibly impact on its object. But what if it doesn’t at all? This would be the bad news. It would be bad news not only for cultural studies but for any who shared the premise that academic production on the subject of politics might be able to make any political difference, however conceived. It would be bad news if being politically committed, in this sense, amounted to nothing more than being committed to fighting for the hegemony of a particular paradigm within a narcissistic disciplinary space whose fundamental activity boiled down to misrecognition and projection. Therefore, assuming politics to be an ontological property of the world,1 what needs to be established (or at least theorised) is the relation of the ‘political commitment’ of cultural studies to, with or within the world. Another way to frame this would be to ask what the most verifiable or reliable theory of politics that we could start from would be, in order to establish, re-establish, theorise or retheorise the political place or role of ‘politically committed’ academic or intellectual work. In other words, how might our politically committed efforts
Chantal Mouffe voices something of this prevailing theoretical tendency when she proposes that ‘we could, borrowing the vocabulary of Heidegger, say that politics refers to the “ontic” level while “the political” has to do with the “ontological” one. This means that the ontic has to do with the manifold practices of conventional politics, while the ontological concerns the very way in which society is instituted’ (Mouffe 2005: 8–9).
1
Downloaded By: [bowman, paul] At: 15:04 15 April 2008
98 Paul Bowman constitute themselves as political interventions in terms of our own theory of political practice? To answer this, it will be necessary to engage in (or, rather, with) some more theorising in order to try to work out what else (other than a ‘new generation of cultural studies’ disciples) might also emerge ‘from the long shadow cast by the Birmingham School’ (Hall and Birchall 2006: 2). For if this is ‘Cultural Studies, The Next Generation’, then what is the new ‘mission’? Is it the same as that of the still-influential earlier generation? What, in other words, was, is and could or should be the main cultural studies’ theory of (its own) political intervention?
Downloaded By: [bowman, paul] At: 15:04 15 April 2008
The critique of critique
Richard Johnson proposes that ‘we have to fight against the disconnection that occurs when cultural studies is inhabited for merely academic purposes or when enthusiasm for (say) popular cultural forms is divorced from the analysis of power and of social responsibility’ (Johnson 1996: 79). Tony Bennett adds that ‘The ambition of cultural studies is to develop ways of theorizing relations of culture and power that will prove capable of being utilized by relevant social agents to bring about changes within the operation of those relations’ (Bennett 1997: 52). These tidy little rationales are fairly representative of a consensus about what it is that would make cultural studies political. There are problems with both, however, and these hinge on the crucial matter of ‘connection’. This is perhaps most clear in the case of Bennett. As the likes of Paul A. Bové have noted, there is a problem with this sort of broadly Gramscian assumption that political activists (whatever they might look like) will or do or should come running to cultural studies for political advice (Bové 1992). There is both an elitism and a narcissism at play here. In other words, perhaps this aspect of Gramscian thinking should not be the paradigmatic organising assumption or orientation of cultural studies work, even if there nevertheless remains something invaluable in Gramscian theory. This certain something, according to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, is ‘the expansion and determination of the social logic implicit in the concept of “hegemony” [albeit] in a direction that goes far beyond Gramsci’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 3). The propositions of Johnson and Bennett, like those of Stuart Hall (1992), convey the bare bones of what a politically committed cultural studies has been held to be. Bennett, Johnson, Hall, and many more, have always construed the injunction to seek to intervene in terms of a notion of connection or, rather, articulation, a concept that has always found its best theoretical formulation and elaboration in the works of Laclau – even though, according to Jennifer Daryl Slack, ‘in spite of the importance of Laclau’s formulations, he has been excluded – as has Mouffe – from most of the popular histories of cultural studies’ (Daryl Slack 1996: 120–21). The important point for us is that this discursive formation arguably exemplifies the dominant cultural studies theory of politics. It also, therefore, provides the coordinates of the ‘place’ that cultural studies can locate itself within in the political terrain. However, it does not yet provide a convincing answer to the question as to what the precise nature of a possible cultural studies articulation would be if, as post-Gramscian discourse theory has it,
Alterdisciplinarity 99 culture and politics are a matter of articulation (see Laclau and Mouffe 1985; McRobbie 1992; Daryl Slack 1996; Bowman 2007) Or to put it another way, precisely how can cultural studies intervene in the political? Historically, the overwhelming answer to this question has been: academics can intervene culturally and politically by making critiques. This is because, as culture and society are regarded as contingent, changeable and hence political formations, the character of which is irreducibly institutional or contingently instituted, there must be immanent political implications to everything that is instituted (Derrida 1992; Hall 1992). In such an interpretation, an inestimably important political significance cannot but be attached to the matter of knowledge: how knowledge is established, what passes for knowledge and why, and into what relations with what effects. This is why the idea of critiquing such important practices and institutions as policymaking, knowledge-production, journalistic and media texts and so on, easily comes to appear to be the valid strategy of ethical and political intervention. But this is precisely where the unanswered, often elided or occluded question remains: how? How do critiques make a difference to the objects, practices or realms critiqued? As Martin McQuillan reminds us, to call for change is not to make a change (McQuillan 2001: 120). There may be no necessary connection and no necessary consequence. Calls can fall on deaf ears, be drowned out, unheard, misunderstood, ridiculed or ignored. So, the simultaneously theoretical and practical question remains how to make the change proposed or suggested by any critique. Yet, across the board, and apparently without irony, the answer keeps returning: critique. But if critique is in question, how can critique be the answer? More productively, the question can be posed as one of how, when, where and why might critique come to be politically consequential. This is a vital theoretical and practical question for anyone concerned with the political problem of intervention. Yet it has been largely avoided or foreclosed by a kind of ‘happy Gramscian’ stance, wherein we seem content to operate as if it goes without saying that our intellectual critiques have knock-on effects and/or that we teach political activists to ‘go forth and articulate’. Other than this narcissistically assumed relation, the precise mechanisms of how critique may constitute an intervention remain an article of faith. I would suggest that this is so much the case that it has caused something of a hiatus or blind spot to arise in politicised theory and that this has occurred right on the core question of politics: intervention itself. This is similar to what both Geoffrey Bennington and Gary Hall have suggested about political discussions that do not interrogate the notion of politics that they are relying on. Hall and Bennington have suggested that there is a real problem in works organised under the sign of political analysis when the notion of politics that implicitly organises those works is not also interrogated. It means that the organising category is transcendentalised (set as the yardstick of evaluation) and (thereby) excluded from consideration (Bennington 1998: 106; Hall 2002: 66). When it comes to the question of political intervention, it seems that the same often goes for ‘critique’. Yet if we think that critique names the way we can intervene, then we need to clarify precisely how, where and why this is so. This is something that has been under-considered and under-theorised, even by theorists who consider theory to be potentially politically vital.
Downloaded By: [bowman, paul] At: 15:04 15 April 2008
100 Paul Bowman
The alterdisciplinary theory of theory
This does not mean that we must conclude that, therefore, critique does not do anything. It is just to suggest that we ought to enquire into its presumed cultural and political relations and effects. So let us have a quick look at how cultural studies has tried to fulfil its much declared strong ‘will to connect’ (Hall 1996: 263). For Stuart Hall, this ‘will to connect’ has always meant that by definition cultural studies ‘tries to make a difference in the institutional world in which it is located’ (Hall 1996: 271–72). The precision of the expression ‘the institutional world in which it is located’ is key here, as it reiterates the (post-)Gramscian character of Hall’s understanding of culture and politics as institutionally reticulated. Indeed, in Hall’s account, cultural studies was formed in ‘a discursive formation, in Foucault’s sense’ (Hall 1996: 263), emerging within the ‘milieu’ of the New Left in the UK (Rojek 2003: 23). It was a university institution that was explicitly ethicopolitically motivated: open to alterity, intent on pushing exclusionary limits, borders, conventions, boundaries, orientations, hierarchies and so on. In short, as Hall makes clear, cultural studies was always intent on intervening, on altering. It was never ‘merely academic’, either in the literal or the pejorative sense of this term. Rather, to employ one of Derrida’s definitions of deconstruction, although located within the university institution, cultural studies was always ‘an institutional practice for which […] the institution remains a problem’ (Derrida 2002: 53, emphasis in original). Indeed, the concept of ‘institution’ has clearly been a central and defining problematic for both cultural studies and deconstruction alike. For even though many in cultural studies have been hostile to (Derridean) deconstruction, cultural studies is arguably a prime example of what Mowitt has called the ongoing practical deconstruction of the humanities (Mowitt 2007). Thus, the basic orientation of cultural studies (and deconstruction) should be regarded as alterdisciplinary. This is to be understood as something quite different from work that is simply interdisciplinary. For the aim was never to inter – or, that is, to bury – cultural studies ever deeper into the structure of a disciplinary status quo. Rather, the aim was to alter the ‘business as usual’ production of knowledge – in Derrida’s words, ‘to politicize and democratize the university scene’, in order, ultimately, to ‘modify’ dominant discourses (Derrida 1995: 409–10; see also Mowitt 1992: 27). With this rationale in mind, the original alterdisciplinary strategy of cultural studies was indeed to intervene by unmasking partiality. And this was largely done through critiques. As Mieke Bal depicts it: [along with] women’s studies, cultural studies [was] responsible for the absolutely indispensable opening up of the disciplinary structure of the humanities. By challenging methodological dogma, and elitist prejudice and value judgement, it has been uniquely instrumental in at least making the academic community aware of the conservative nature of its endeavours, if not everywhere forcing it to change. It has, if nothing else, forced the academy to realise its collusion with an elitist white-male politics of exclusion and its subsequent intellectual closure. (Bal 2003: 30)
Downloaded By: [bowman, paul] At: 15:04 15 April 2008
Alterdisciplinarity 101 Thus, alterdisciplinary critique (rather than mere interdisciplinary work), often in the form of polemic, was the primary form of cultural studies’ early interventions. The desired aim of its ethically and politically inflected critiques was the alteration of other disciplines. And although this may appear to be a ‘merely academic’ focus, it was always regarded in cultural studies as (immanently) political because it was based on the post-Gramscian theory that to change what is produced and legitimated as knowledge will be discursively consequential. The method or pragmatics of this intervention took the form of revealing what Derrida called the bias and even the ‘violence’ of the ‘nonconceptual orders’ upon which different conceptual orders (discourses, ‘knowledges’) are articulated (Derrida 1982: 329). In spite of this ideological continuity, however, this method has always taken different forms, of course. In cultural studies this process of practical deconstruction largely took the form of directly pointing out political biases such as Eurocentrism, heteronormativity and so on. The Derridean strategy, on the other hand, took the form of evoking what Derrida (teleiopoetically) called ‘classical protocols’2 – namely, ‘levering’ at established interpretations and invoking above all else rigorous, rational, reasonable, incisive questioning and ‘reading’3 in order to demonstrate the limitations and biases underpinning this or that accepted ‘truth’. Now, if what it sought to alter (for discursive and hegemonic reasons) was disciplinarity, then the most important question to ask is: did it work? If so, to what extent and how and why did it work? With what consequences? Thereupon, the question becomes: does it still work? Can we still intervene consequentially in the same way? If not, why not? And what theoretical and practical strategies of intellectual intervention might remain viable and politically effective today?
Downloaded By: [bowman, paul] At: 15:04 15 April 2008
The vanishing intervener
There are many possible evaluations of the cultural studies intervention. The fact that there are so many of these and that they so often veer off into febrile condemnations of cultural studies actually helps to strengthen the claim that, whatever else may be said about it, there is a widespread implicit agreement that cultural studies did intervene ‘alter-disciplinarily’ and that it had significant effects on other disciplines and other cultural discourses (Young 1999: 5; Hall 2002). This is perhaps nowhere better demonstrated than in the bitter denials of the significance of cultural studies’ interventions by some critics.
In Derrida, ‘classical protocols’ functions as a teleiopoetic term that he regularly conjures up in order to engender what it would seem to evoke or promise – namely, more analytical ‘rigour’ through more ‘sensitivity’ in reading; more ‘listening’ for the voices that have been drowned out, more questioning of the political implications of interpretive decisions, and so on (see, for instance, Derrida 1992: 11). This is why John Protevi proposes that ‘deconstruction is democratic justice, responding to the calls from all others’ (Protevi 2001: 70). (And this is also why many things other than what Derrida and friends did can be called ‘deconstructive’.) 3 ‘[T]he best liberation from violence is a certain putting into question, which makes the search for an archia tremble’ (Derrida 1978: 141).
2
102 Paul Bowman
Z [] o a c r n
ˇˇ Z i[ z ek’s polemical tirades against cultural studies as a discourse that is at the forefront of politically correct postmodernist deconstructionist liberal ideology typify many of the reactions to cultural studies and, of course, demonstrate that cultural studies did have ‘wider effects’, however simultaneously ˇˇ denounced and denied they may be.4 Indeed, the ensemble of Z i[ z ek’s diverse sweeping statements reveals a kind of ‘kettle logic’ at play in reactions to cultural studies: a simultaneous admission and denial (plus an accusation) about its achievements (Bowman 2001: 50–65). Put differently: there is a sense in which the alterdisciplinary intervention was so successful that, retrospectively, it no longer looks like it ever intervened into anything at all. Indeed, it could well be that cultural studies’ interventions are the victim of their own success, having worked so well and effected such fundamental change that the current state of affairs now completely assimilated into everyday life is taken for granted to such an extent that it seems always to have been in place. In this argument, cultural studies is something of a ‘vanishing mediator’, an agency that blazed a trail; a trail which has now become a standard thoroughfare, a required route.5 In other words, what cultural studies once did (almost) alone, everyone does now. So, the problematics first thoroughly instituted, disseminated and (shall we say) ‘popularised’ by cultural studies are now the stock in trade of the vast majority of arts and humanities academic-intellectual production.6 Or, as Mowitt suggests: ‘just as it has established itself as something like a new paradigm, it has begun to vanish into the very effects this paradigm is generating in cognate fields within the humanities and social sciences’ (Mowitt 2003: 184). To the extent that it was a trail blazer, cultural studies may come to have been a vanishing mediator in the sublation of the humanities by the new paradigm or, in Robert J. C. Young’s words, the new ‘architectonic of knowledge’ that it exemplifies: namely, ‘the contemporary assertion of political truth as the most comprehensive metalanguage’ (Young 1992: 111–12). Thus, the logic of its intervention means, in effect, that ‘cultural studies can only succeed by failing’ (Mowitt 2003: 184). The greater its success in disseminating, circulating
z] c a o r n Z [] o a c r n z] c a o r n
Downloaded By: [bowman, paul] At: 15:04 15 April 2008
ˇˇ I have discussed Z i[z ek’s problematic relation to cultural studies more fully in Bowman (2006). 5 The term is Fredric Jameson’s and refers to ‘an element essential to a historical and/or intellectual transition that disappears when its work is done’ (Walsh 2002: 396). 6 However, this trail-blazing was obviously far from a smooth transition or sublation. Inevitably, the generalisation or ‘popularisation’ of cultural studies type problematics moved hand in hand with its simultaneous unpopularity. Lola Young once accounted for the twin forces of attraction and repulsion attached to cultural studies by noting the way that cultural studies is ‘vilified along with media studies, amongst others, as being a “Mickey Mouse” subject’; yet, as she notes, ‘it is somewhat ironic […] that there have been repeated attacks on the subject in the media’ because ‘ideas and analyses which are now firmly embedded in media discourses have increasingly come to resemble closely the kind of cultural textual analysis that has been nurtured through cultural studies’. At the same time, ‘critical and theoretical paradigms derived from, and influenced by cultural studies, have seeped into the study of a wide range of disciplines: History, English Literature, Geography, Sociology and so on’. Thus, cultural studies was ‘a key element in the movement of disciplinary boundaries, and […] of wider shifts in political and intellectual sensibilities’ (Young 1999: 5).
4
Z [r o a c n ] z o a c r n ]
Alterdisciplinarity 103 and instituting its problematics, the more its work, as intervention, is done. Of course, the discipline or field of cultural studies will remain as long as there are enough students applying to do it to protect departments from the axe. But, if so many other fields and disciplines now appear to do what was once the preserve of cultural studies, then surely its work is done. So, is this the end of the cultural studies intervention?
Downloaded By: [bowman, paul] At: 15:04 15 April 2008
The end of the intervention
In one sense, I think, yes. This is the end of that intervention. It ‘worked’ because the questions posed by cultural studies precipitated crises in the established disciplines that were its contiguous ‘cognate fields’. But that was then. This is now. And surely one must historicise – at least often, if not always. In this case, one need only historicise a little bit to grasp that inevitably the interruptive and disruptive power of a particular strategy of intervention will dissipate. Politicised critiques will cease to shock. They will cease to interrupt, cease to disrupt, cease to alter anything. This – and indeed what might be called the cunning of disciplinary reason – can be seen in the way that the end of the initial cultural studies intervention took the form of a generalised ‘theoretical fluency’ which Hall suggests has ‘formalized out of existence the critical questions of power, history, and politics’ that we all now seem both eminently able and contractually obliged ‘extensively and without end, to theorize’ (Hall 1992: 287). Or, as McQuillan puts it, even though today cultural theoretical analyses abound, nevertheless ‘one cannot “do” cultural studies simply by borrowing its thematics’ (McQuillan 2003: 50). For one may well be studying, theorising, or diagnosing ‘the political’ in this or that aspect of culture, but one is not necessarily intervening in any consequential sense. Thus, argues McQuillan, at this moment in disciplinary time, ‘the endless articles on Foucault and football are not “doing” cultural studies anymore’: no matter how ‘political’ their vocabulary and their organising thematics, such works are nevertheless something of a ‘conservative force’ nowadays (McQuillan 2003: 49), as this has become straightforwardly disciplinary work, rather than alterdisciplinary intervention. Such work is then not a disruption, interruption, or irruption of anything but, rather, the reiterative consolidation of a new disciplinary order in which making politicised critiques is the order of the day. In short, this may signal the end of that intervention. So, is politicised critique to be rejected because it is now just what Stuart Hall calls a kind of ‘ventriloquism’, a compulsion to repeat, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing: a merely disciplinary gesture? To borrow an ˇˇ image from Slavoj Z i[ z ek, perhaps the search for an effective, interventional, ‘transformative critique’ in this context is a bit like the proverbial man searching for a lost key in the pool of light cast by a lamppost: he sees no sense in looking outside the pool of light because he won’t be able to find his key in ˇˇ the surrounding darkness ([Z i[ z ek 2001: 208). Thus, although it may seem untenable to look for our own lost political effectiveness anywhere other than in ‘critique’ – because that is what we believe intellectual work ‘is’ – we may perhaps be flogging a dead horse in looking there. Perhaps ‘critique’ is a political relic. Yet, on the other hand, rejecting ‘critique’ tout court would seem to be tantamount to throwing the baby out with the bathwater – a regression
Z [] o a c r n z] c a o r n Z o a c r n ] z] c a o r n
104 Paul Bowman from the post-Gramscian insights of the institutional and fundamentally contingent (articulated, reticulated and discursive) basis of culture and society and the crucial role that ‘knowledge’ surely plays within it. Yet some have argued that the problem is that the terrain within which (and the way in which) the arts, humanities and social sciences can intervene is in a very real sense now ‘irrelevant’. For Bill Readings, culture becomes contestable precisely when power has moved on (Readings 1996). For Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, ‘power itself’ today chants along with all supposed radicals ‘Long live difference! Down with essentialist binaries!’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 139). They argue that ‘Power has evacuated the bastion [that most “radicals”] are attacking and has circled round to their rear to join them in the assault in the name of difference’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 138). Or, as Jean-François Lyotard crushingly puts it: ‘radical’ politicised critique ‘is not thrust aside today because it is dangerous or upsetting, but simply because it is a waste of time. It is “good for nothing”, it is not good for gaining time. For success is gaining time’ (Lyotard 1988: xv). With this, Lyotard brilliantly makes the argument that today ‘we’ are simply not where the ‘action’ is. What matters, what determines, what dominates is what Lyotard calls ‘techno-science’, what Martin Heidegger called the ‘modern technicalization and industrialization of every continent’ (Heidegger 1971: 3), or what Deleuze called ‘the 3 Ms’ which rule ‘the New International order’: ‘Money, Media and Military’ (Peters 2001: 107). In such representations of the contemporary world, then, it would not seem to matter what ‘we’ say, precisely because our voices are not the voices that matter. The voices that do matter are those that produce, legitimate and institute techno-scientific knowledge, knowledge that is performative and articulated with, as or at centres of power: state, governmental, military, media, corporate, educational, policymaking and so on.
Downloaded By: [bowman, paul] At: 15:04 15 April 2008
Altering alterdisciplinarity
However, because academic contexts that ‘matter’ in a macro-political sense include the disciplines that inform, supplement, confirm and legitimate various forms of policy, I am not going to reiterate the old proposal that ‘therefore’ cultural studies should become ‘cultural policy studies’ (Bennett 1996: 307–21). For such a step remains ensnared in what I propose we think of as the prior alterdisciplinary strategy, which was characterised by critique from afar. Rather than critique from a distance (‘we here’ critiquing ‘them there’), perhaps it would be better to move in, close the gap and join with the other. For, to use one of Rorty’s favourite terms, in the face of critics, anyone can reply: ‘who cares what such “know nothings” think about us! What do they know about what we do?’ The point here is that, whether carried out in the pages of cultural studies journals or in broadsheets or on high-brow talk shows, critique does not change the status of those involved from simply being dismissible as busy-bodies, from elsewhere, busy-bodies that do not matter. Instead of this, my suggestion is that what ‘we’ now need to overcome is precisely the compulsion to repeat the gesture of critiquing the other (as other) – and that we need to do this with the aim of inventing a kind of critique that might (again) work as effective intervention.
Alterdisciplinarity 105 In the quest to establish the alchemy of intervention, the philosopher’s stone to be discovered is the answer to the question of how. The answer I would proffer is inseparable from the sustained consideration of contingency, articulation and disciplinarity. A first proposition is that, in a terrain characterised by contingency, there is no necessary reason why the cognate fields of cultural studies should remain those of the arts and humanities. (Anyway, these are now quite tied up in the processes of altering in light of having their ‘collusion with an elitist white-male politics of exclusion’ – among other things – firmly impressed upon them [Bal 2003: 30].) Indeed, why not embrace other, more ‘otherwise-influential’ disciplines? One might wish to consider such influential fields as economics, econometrics, management, IT, informatics, international relations, education, law, government policy … (this list is not exhaustive). Such disciplinary constellations have academic centres that are firmly articulated (indeed intimately reticulated, imbricated) with determinant centres of power. As disciplinary spaces, they are surely not immune to alterdisciplinary intervention. So the issue is ultimately one of establishing the conditions of possibility for intervention into them. As for how to do this, the answer is in the question: intervention must be into them, and not just about them.7 But I would like to go further and to suggest that such intervention will be all the better the further it is from appearing to be polemical denunciation, and the less it is apparently launched either ‘from here’ (from ‘our own’ disciplinary academic contexts) or aired in the so-called ‘public realm’ (whatever or wherever such a mystical sphere is supposed to be), or media. The aim, rather, is to intervene directly, ‘there’ – namely, within the very academic contexts wherein ‘that’ knowledge is produced and legitimated. In short, the objective remains alterdisciplinary, but the targets and languages must be transformed. For today, the problematic object of attention is no longer simply, solely, or necessarily the exclusionary effects of the hegemony of white male patriarchy or its canons in culture. Hence, the subjects, languages and contexts of critique are no longer necessarily those of the arts and humanities disciplines. Therefore, if one’s object of concern is with, say, the deleterious ethical or cultural consequences of, say, managerialism or economic or educational policy, then one’s preliminary task would be to ascertain the disciplinary and institutional sites of the production and legitimation of the knowledge and rationales to which reference and appeal is made in the organisation of micro- or macro-policy implementation. Certainly this will never be easy. This is because the contemporary academic condition is defined by heterogeneous language games in a disciplined/dislocated web of disciplinary differences and intensified disciplinary enclaving. The unavoidable proliferation of disciplinarily-specific technical languages (Lyotardian ‘paralogies’) leads to mutual unintelligibility and the disarticulation of different subjects and disciplinary realms. This is precisely
Downloaded By: [bowman, paul] At: 15:04 15 April 2008
7 I made a similar argument to what follows in Bowman (2004). Indeed, this present paper is a development upon Bowman (2004) and of some of the points made in the conclusion of Bowman (2007).
106 Paul Bowman why ‘critique’ from ‘our perspective’ will either be unintelligible to the other or unacceptable/ignorable/dismissible according to the other(’s) criteria. This linguistic and conceptual abyss can be bridged only through mastery of the other(’s) criteria, the other(’s) language, the other(’s) logic, in the other(’s) ‘context’. Thus, the point is precisely to intervene into and to alter other disciplinary discourses and their productions (knowledges) not by critiquing them but by intervening into the disciplinary spaces of their production and legitimation – that is: getting inside knowledge, undoing methodologies and arguing in the other’s language for other conclusions.
Downloaded By: [bowman, paul] At: 15:04 15 April 2008
Z [] o a c r n
Altering conclusions ˇˇ Z i[ z ek suggests that to intervene, to act, one must change the ‘co-ordinates’ of ˇˇ a situation ([Z i[ z ek 2000a: 122). As Oliver Marchart has pointed out, this ultiˇˇ mately refers to a kind of suicide (Marchart 2007: 109). In Z i[ z ek’s argument, ˇˇ an act requires ‘striking at one’s self’ ([Z i[ z ek 2000a: 122–23). Translated into alterdisciplinary practice, this means, first and foremost, acknowledging what Derrida called the ‘monolingualism of the other’ (Derrida 1998). Thus, it means necessarily using the other’s language, in the other’s context. It does not mean shouting about how terrible capitalism or managerialism or bureaucracy or militarism or nanotechnology or genetics or legislation or government policy is solely in our own disciplinary sites and scenes, books, journals ˇˇ and conferences (again, perhaps, à la Z i[ z ek). It means, rather, engaging with the other in their journals. For, frankly, which scientists or policy makers have even heard of never mind read cultural studies or arts and humanities journals or, even if so, given the slightest bit of a shit about what is said about genetics or ‘geopolitics’ therein? My point here is not to disparage disciplinary work.8 It is simply to suggest that talking about something ‘here’ is not to make any difference to it ‘there’. To publish within one’s own well-institutionalised field is not to have intervened into anything other than that field. Of course, if that’s what you want to alter or contribute to, then fine (as here). But all fauxradical pseudo-political tub-thumping and soap-box pontificating should be recognised for what it is. Rather than this, what is required is to move with the other’s moves, to analyse, read, ‘connect’ with and deconstruct their connections in their language in order to make critiques that ‘make sense’ there, where making new sense might reorient that. In a very practical sense, this would be to strike at oneself – to relinquish one’s comfortable disciplinary identity, to stop ‘being disciplined’. Rather than disciplined repetition, alterdisciplinary intervention requires yielding to the other discourse, the other protocols, the other language, the other scene, through a renewed emphasis on listening to, engaging with, connecting with the other, on other terms, in order to ‘deconstruct’ it where that deconstruction could count. (I am not suggesting ‘doing a Sokal’ [Sokal and Bricmont 1998] by sneaking Trojan Horses into other disciplines in order to discredit them [although you could]. Rather, I am proposing taking
z] c a o r n Z o a c r n ] z] c a o r n Z [] o a c r n z] c a o r n Z o a c r n ] z] c a o r n Z [] o a c r n z] c a o r n
8 Nor is it to forget the value of the deconstructive ‘perhaps’. Rather, my point is that blind faith in ‘the perhaps’ is itself perhaps a particular kind of refusal to think, a particular kind of irresponsibility.
Alterdisciplinarity 107 the notion of interdisciplinary dialogue seriously, rather than relying either on the enclave comfort of ‘our spaces’ or the easy alternative of holding onto some rather nebulous faith in the ‘general’ power of critique and journalistic ‘public debate’.) For the point is to change it and without changing the coordinates by striking at oneself in this way and fully accepting the other’s ˇˇ ˇˇ terms (in what Zi[zek calls a strategy of ‘overidentification’ [[Zi[zek 2000b: 220]), we remain in the face-off characterised by Lugwig Wittgenstein in which: ‘Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic’ (Wittgenstein 1979 [1975]: 611–12). This too can be read as part of the problem of altering disciplinarity. Different discursive language games produce different institutions. And ‘institution’, says Derrida, does not refer to ‘a few walls or some outer structures surrounding, protecting, guaranteeing or restricting the freedom of our work; it is also and already the structure of our interpretation’ (Derrida 1992: 22–23). So, alterdisciplinarity specifies the logic and opens up, as a topic of reflection and analysis, a certain possible practice, one organised by the aim of intervening into the other. Its ‘next generation’ incarnation – indeed, its regeneration – requires a renewed theoretical and practical attention to and awareness of the rivalrous structure of disciplinarity as well as the disciplinary structure of the micro and macro hegemonies that constitute the political terrain, just as much as it obliges an attentiveness to the potentially consequential link between institutions and interpretations and between interpretations and institutions (Weber 1987). In this elaboration, alterdisciplinarity names the aim of opening up to analysis a crucial yet underdeveloped aspect of the notion that cultural and political intervention consists of acts of articulation. That is, alterdisciplinarity not only concurs with but deepens and intensifies the dominant theory underpinning cultural studies, that culture and politics are constituted through contingent articulation within an institutional discursive terrain. It thereby enables us to conceptualise a key way that ‘articulation’ (and indeed ‘discourse’) need not simply mean ‘speech’ or ‘conversation’. Rather, these terms refer us to relationality, institutional reticulation, connection, hinging. In this light, the problem of intervention, of how to intervene, can be recast as a problem of disarticulation – the disarticulation of the realms of ‘public debate’ and ‘academic critique’ from, so to speak, the forces and the contexts that could be said to count. For the contexts that are thought of as ‘counting’ – macropolitical sites and scenes associated with the state, corporations, media and so on – are not simply involved in any causal relationship with academic cultural critiques or even with journalistic public debate. However, they are articulated or reticulated with the institutional production of the knowledges that underpin and that legitimate the practices and policies of macropolitical scenes. Hence, even when we remain ‘politically committed’ to ‘external’ (social, cultural, political) issues ‘outside the university’, the primary site of academic or intellectual intervention needs to be into the academic and intellectual scenes that are most closely connected to the relevant power. As such, perhaps the best way to proceed – according to what Derrida once proposed as an ethics of the lesser violence (Derrida 1977) – is not to critique the other from afar, from/in our own disciplinary sites and
Z [] o a c r n z o a c r n ] Z o a c r n ] z o a c r n ]
Downloaded By: [bowman, paul] At: 15:04 15 April 2008
108 Paul Bowman scenes, but to engage with the other ‘there’, from/in their disciplinary sites and scenes. Moreover, because no one will ever be able to agree on what rationality, logic or rigour should look like, it would seem rational, logical and rigorous to aspire to make an intervention which, in Derrida’s words, would not seem ‘eccentric or strange, incomprehensible or exotic (which would allow [others] to dispose of it easily)’, but to produce work that those others should, according to their own declared standards, values and protocols, find ‘competent, rigorously argued, and carrying conviction’, such that it may oblige a ‘re-examination of the fundamental norms and premises of […] dominant discourses [and] the principles underlying many of their evaluations’. Derrida concludes: ‘What this kind of questioning [seeks to do] is to modify the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and democratize the university scene’ (Derrida 1995: 409–10). I would add that engagement in the other field must necessarily take place in its language, according to its protocols and proprieties, otherwise our efforts will look like those of ‘a fool and a heretic’. And fools and heretics are laughed at, or burned.
Downloaded By: [bowman, paul] At: 15:04 15 April 2008
References
Arditi, B. 2007. Politics on the Edges of Liberalism: Difference, Populism, Revolution, Agitation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bahti, T. 1992. ‘The Injured University’. In Richard Rand (ed), Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 57–76. Bal, M. 2003. ‘From Cultural Studies to Cultural Analysis: “A Controlled Reflection on the Formation of Method”’. In Paul Bowman (ed), Interrogating Cultural Studies: Theory, Politics and Practice. London: Pluto, 30–40. Bennett, T. 1996. ‘Putting Policy into Cultural Studies’. In J. Storey (ed), What is Cultural Studies?: A Reader. London: J. Arnold, 307–21. Bennett, T. 1997. ‘Toward a Pragmatics for Cultural Studies’. In Jim McGuigan (ed), Cultural Methodologies. London: Sage, 42–62. Bennington, G. 1998. ‘Inter’. In M. McQuillan, G. Macdonald, R. Purves and S. Thompson (eds), Post-Theory: New Directions in Criticism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 103–22. Bové, P. A. 1992. In the Wake of Theory. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. Bowman, P. 2001. ‘Proper Impropriety: The Proper-Ties of Cultural Studies’. Parallax 7:2, 50–65. Bowman, P. 2004. ‘The Task of the Transgressor’. Culture Machine 6. Available online: http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j006/Articles/bowman.htm (13 March 2008). ˇˇ Bowman, P. 2006. ‘Cultural Studies and Slavoj Z i[z ek’. In Gary Hall and Clare Birchall (eds), New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 162–77. Bowman, P. 2007. Post-Marxism versus Cultural Studies: Theory, Politics and Intervention. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Butler, J. 2000. ‘Dynamic Conclusions’. In Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj ˇˇ Z i[z ek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso, 263–280. Daryl Slack, J. 1996. ‘The Theory and Method of Articulation in Cultural Studies’. In David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 112–30.
Z [] o a c r n z o a c r n ] Z [] o a c r n z o a c r n ]
Alterdisciplinarity 109
Derrida, J. 1977. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, J. 1978. ‘Violence and Metaphysics: Essay on the Thought of Emanuel Lévinas’. In Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 79–153. Derrida, J. 1982. ‘Signature Event Context’. In Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 307–30. Derrida, J. 1992. ‘Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties’. In Richard Rand (ed), Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1–34. Derrida, J. 1995. Points …: Interviews, 1974–1994. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, J. 1998. Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, J. 2002. Who’s Afraid of Philosophy?: Right to Philosophy 1. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, J. 2003. ‘I Have a Taste for the Secret’. In Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1–18. Girard, R. 1977. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hall, G. 2002. Culture in Bits: The Monstrous Future of Theory. London: Continuum. Hall, G. and Birchall, C. 2006. New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hall, S. 1992. ‘Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies’. In Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies. New York and London: Routledge, 277–94. Hall, S. 1996. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. London: Routledge. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. Heidegger, M. 1971. On The Way To Language. New York: Harper Collins. Johnson, R. 1996. ‘What is Cultural Studies Anyway?’ In J. Storey (ed), What is Cultural Studies? A Reader. London: Arnold, 75–114. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Lyotard, J.-F. 1988. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ˇˇ Marchart, O. 2007. ‘Acting and the Act: On Slavoj Z i[z ek’s Political Ontology’. In ˇˇ Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (eds), The Truth of Z i[z ek. London: Continuum, 99–116. McQuillan, M. 2001. ‘Spectres of Poujade: Naomi Klein and the New International’. Parallax 20, 114–30. McQuillan, M. 2003. ‘The Projection of Cultural Studies’. In Paul Bowman (ed), Interrogating Cultural Studies: Theory, Practice and Politics. London: Pluto, 41–58. McRobbie, A. 1992. ‘Post-Marxism and Cultural Studies’. In Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies. New York and London: Routledge, 719–30. Mouffe, C. 2005. On the Political. London: Routledge. Mowitt, J. 1992. Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object. Durham and London: Duke. Mowitt, J. 2003. ‘Cultural Studies, in Theory’. In Paul Bowman (ed), Interrogating Cultural Studies: Theory, Practice and Politics. London: Pluto, 175–88. Mowitt, J. 2007. Re-Takes: Postcoloniality and Foreign Film Languages. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Z [] o a c r n z o a c r n ] Z n o [ r ] a c n o r a ] c z
Downloaded By: [bowman, paul] At: 15:04 15 April 2008
110 Paul Bowman
Peters, M. A. 2001. Poststructuralism, Marxism and Neoliberalism: Between Theory and Politics. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Protevi, J. 2001. Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida and the Body Politic. London: Athlone Press. Readings, B. 1996. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. Rojek, C. 2003. Stuart Hall. London: Polity Press. Sokal, A. and Bricmont, J. 1998. Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science. London: Profile Books. ˇˇ Walsh, M. 2002. ‘Slavoj Z i[z ek’. In Julian Wolfreys (ed), The Edinburgh Encyclopaedia of Modern Criticism and Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 390–98. Weber, S. 1987. Institution and Interpretation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wittgenstein, L. 1979 [1975]. On Certainty. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Young, L. 1999. ‘Why Cultural Studies?’ Parallax 11, 3–16. Young, R. J. C. 1992. ‘The Idea of a Chrestomathic University’. In Richard Rand (ed), Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 97–126. ˇˇ Z i[z ek, S. 2000a. ‘Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, please!’ In Judith Butler, ˇˇ Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zi[zek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso, 90–135. ˇˇ Z i[z ek, S. 2000b. ‘Da Capo Senza Fine’. In Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj ˇˇ Zi[zek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso, 213–262. ˇˇ Z i[z ek, S. 2001. Did Someone Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions into the (Mis)Use of a Notion. London: Verso.
Z [] o a c r n z o a c r n ] z o a c r n ] Z [] o a c r n z o a c r n ] z o a c r n ] Z [] o a c r n z o a c r n ] z o a c r n ]
Downloaded By: [bowman, paul] At: 15:04 15 April 2008
Z [] o a c r n
Z [] o a c r n
Z [] o a c r n
Readers
Add Comment