Critique of Everything.
Cultural Studies, as the generic name for a range of challenges to thinking that operate through innovative practices of inquiry, analysis and investigation, in a wide range of materials, styles and forms, is under threat in the UK, along with much else. I write and wonder how this extends, and in some ways follows from, forced transformations in other places. As I set down this brief and exploratory meditation, I intentionally choose the format of a provocation so as to underscore what I think and feel is most important. The challenge to thinking that seeks to think differently than we do now. A built-in opposition to complacency. I also write as the Conservative-Liberal Democratic alliance that governs these Islands is introducing an unprecedented raft of cuts, marketization and operationalization of higher education, alongside swingeing cuts in most other sectors of society, and wages war on, now, at least three fronts – Afghanistan and Iraq, of course, and also in Libya. There has not been a more relevant, nor disquieting time, to be a practitioner of critical theory.
We are of a discipline, or are advocates of an inter-disciplinarity, that promised much. How does it fare in interesting times? (‘Everything under heaven is in chaos. The situation is promising’). In all fields of relevance for the practices of cultural studies, the dual context of austerity and war economy demands attention. The No-Fly zone that includes arming recently adopted, and largely unknown, rebels offers a metaphor for the disciplinary regulation of scholarship and the constraints of funding for research. The directives for research funding bodies to adopt themes of interest to government, with an eye to national economic priority, commercial and vocational application, and issues of national security, amount to knowledge twisted to the service of Empire. Disquiet amongst colleagues and protests in the streets, occupations on the campuses, refusals of regulation, threats, strikes, despair, all suggest a volatility that needs to be cut with a knife, or a pen. A double and somehow dialectical impasse that, we should be reassured, the critical and inquisitive, creative spirit of cultural studies is dedicated to undo.
Concurrently, new work on identity and subjectivity suspended within institutional structures and border regimes address bodies and affect with a political sensibility. We write in a war zone, with a siege mentality. The containment of movement in volatile times opens up fissures of feeling and meaning, passionate encounters as well at intractable blockages. One astonishing example of recent work that illustrates a challenging venue for cultural studies is the architectural practice of the group ‘Mes-Architectures’ in France. A body-conforming flight container for deportation, designed for in-hold air cargo, viciously critiques the exclusion, deportation and repatriation regimes of Fortress Europe. The troubling shape of this container, that is so familiar from the catering boxes roughly loaded from the tarmac beneath the plane, recalls the body shape of the Stateless in stasis, prone, trussed, beaten, and soon to be dumped in who knows what no-man’s land from which again and again economic refugees start out endlessly and too often fruitlessly for the apparent richer promise across the border. That every step of the way is subject to costing, charging, extortion and loss is only part of the tragedy. That hostile reception awaits, and that cold-hearted calculation has replaced policies of compassion, are the affective indicators of a moribund culture. Many years ago the discipline of the body was made a theme for Cultural Studies by Michel Foucault. Fruitful work since then has adapted the comportment and affective co-ordinates of contemporary life to be staples of analytic investment. Inquiry troops the colours of social science up the flagpole of anticipation, but then nationalizes the curriculum. Restrictions on visa application, closure of so-called ‘fake’ colleges, privileged export education market for some, declining recruits for others – the UK Border Authority demanding University staff report attendance records for all foreign students. The fall-out here is immense, teaching as surveillance, the border in the classroom. Keeping with the architectural, I have long been inspired by Eyal Weizman’s book Hollow Land (Verso) which is one of several new appraisals of border-politics that embraces theoretical and political engagement. But it also reconfigures – like all good books should – the very possibility of thinking about this topic. We must want destabilizations such as this – Weizman’s book I mean, not the tensions at eh check-point. That the geography of Palestine and the politics of the Israeli military can be rendered three-dimensional shows both the enormity and the stakes of the border as contest. A propositional art work or a pre-propositional theory can cut through the barriers to make space for thinking and to welcome other ways of intervening.
It is the cross-imbrication of interests, politics and practices that invigorates Cultural Studies and offers the possibility of relevance. New media and on-line activisms inspired by philosophical commentary and activist mischief creatively re-tool the cultural industries and challenge marketization. Open source in the political field opens up new vistas for the sociology of struggles and trades union herstories. Multimedia and direct-to-camera journalism, albeit co-ordinated on corporate platforms adopted uncritically (Web 2.0 FB, YouTube) alongside global news outlets seeking untested, and so fresh, talking heads, offers geography reconfigured as a time slot schedule as much as geopolitical mapping. In Jonathan Beller’s book The Cinematic Mode of Production, attention to the gaze an the market of the spectacle advances both film theory and situationist ideas to offer a platform for understanding new media as a terrain of struggle in market, ideology and practice. Just as we willingly go and sit in the dark before the cinema, we also comply with the protocols of the digital. Virtual selves abroad in the world while backache and repetitive strain compensate for touch type immediacy. The world shrunk to a venture start-up as if the assembly of work-station and media-console wasn’t also co-ordinated with wiring configurations, electricity grids and mining industries that make the corralling of workers in all kinds of underpaid labour also part of an integrated geo-circuit.
Libya this week, Bahrain last week, Cairo and Tunisia the week before. We have seen amazing scenes unfold on the global news channels that beam images from elsewhere into our palms, laps, desk-tops and living rooms. The whole world is televised, sometimes from our own street view, as distraction and investment. This scene-setting is often then filtered into a streaming and screamingly traumatic tension, for example the Japanese quake, tsunami and nuclear crisis, as well as the hypocritical grotesque – the farcical rerun of tragedy in David Cameron’s citation of George Bush seniors’ ‘line in the sand’ comment to justify the full-frontal launch into yet another military imbroglio (Bush Snr in February 1991 re Kuwait, Cameron March 2011 referring to Libya). It may seem that each world leader now needs to access their own brand development option of a legacy war, but of course analysis also shows that arms sales, commercial imperatives, political positioning, and playing to camera for domestic concern are also shaping factors. Even in London the so-called anarchist so-called rioters who broke one or two windows and threw a few missiles during otherwise ‘peaceful’ demonstrations are playing out largely media-tested tropes. That these events are unconnected both near and far is a position held by perhaps only by the fabled nobody of narrative myth. The distraction machine as a weapon of war is our topic.
Television and screens in the context of the short circuit of attention and the long circuit of sociality are pertinent and deserving of close inspection. Our often too quick assumptions that alienation and disaffection are the consequence of corporate media capture of youth can be challenged and debated. A range of possible, creative, apparent misuses of media become interesting. The social in media sounds out a sonic probe for the long-distant and non-locative, non-proximate conviviality of electronic company. We can be together over space, indeed we always have been, even as we value the immediate in a knowing staginess. The pastoral nostalgia for the community is challenged by the specificities and distribution of cosmopolitan competence in so many places. Empathy across airwaves can be as constitutive as close physical contact – and as violent, destructive or mundane. As half a million people marched in London against the cuts on March 26th (this was the Government’s own estimate so we might expand the number) the attempt to distract focus from a large working class refusal of Government policy is set to backfire where the demonization of rioters and rebels is carefully examined. In my experience, the street mobilizations have brought with them an increased analytical engagement – an attention to politics and to meaning that had perhaps been dormant, or buried in a kind of lethargy. The irruption of struggles into the public is itself an opportunity for Cultural Studies, though only in a reworked, re-imagined way. We are all in this together, as the slogan goes.
We can call this being together ‘culture’, but that word is looking decidedly worn – The Expediency of Culture is a very fine work by George Yúdice, critical of the way sponsored and strategic cultural deployments have had commercial and calculating imperatives. The work has released a number of subsequent studies that take on the bureaucratic deployment of culture for gain. In London this means the hype and boosterism of the Olympics, with local initiatives promising much but delivering little – early targets for social improvement quietly abandoned. There is a peculiar and hollow aspect in the sound of State endorsed cultural capital – the tragic and useless life of a salesman already at death’s door, peddling old wares without enthusiasm, not even able to pass for crack whore at the annual accounting meeting. As I write, perhaps unknown beyond the shores of this overworked Island, the current conservative Minister for Universities is featured in the press as having said that he thinks one of the problems for social mobility for men is a consequence of women working. It must be noted that he did say this on April Fool’s day, but perhaps I can be forgiven for not getting the joke. The conservative defence of the family takes on an absurd form, picking a sure to be incendiary fight with the gains of feminism and ignoring the Conservative destruction of the manufacturing sector in the first place. A resurgent feminism – for example the popular text of Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman, from Zero Books, offers a healthy riposte to such tomfoolery.
The point is to take all this together – the cuts, the war, the economy, the struggles. And to then use this resurgent multi-disciplinary enthusiasm for critical work that breaks with the mould of convention. I am reading Amitava Kumar’s new book A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, examines the new literatures that have emerged in the wake of the war on terror post September 11, 2001. By new literatures Kumar means ‘War Lit’ reporting, and ‘Terror Lit’ to which, consistent with his ever-creative drive, he adds to a genre that might be called ‘detainee lit’ – seeing out and interviewing a number of those unjustly or disproportionately incarcerated or persecuted in America and elsewhere by the legal and covert war administration. Among the heart-wrenching cases he reports is a range of photographic interventions curated in galleries that document the lives of detainees, and, in one striking example that deserves more attention, the deployment of photography as a research tool. Photography here is implicated in multiple ways in the production of terror, but some of these documentary practices turn that around. For example, Trever Paglin’s book Torture Taxi seeks out and exposes, thorough a range of media and the investigative techniques of nerdy Plane-spotters and private eye investigators, the ‘dark sites; of special rendition and the kidnapping of citizens of sovereign countries for transport to off-shore torture and disappearance. To turn to photography as a tool challenges it too-easy earlier ascription as fact. The mug shot, the exposé, the front page scoop – photography as evidence has been though the truth test of exploding indexicality. The picture must lie, the editing, cropping and perspectival conditions of partial view are almost so commonplace now they are again obscured. Documentary evidence turns out to be a question of ratings, as Endomol’s Big Brother franchise so successfully had shown, imaging celebrity and everyone in the same blank canvas persona. The most natural performance before the camera is now staged as self-knowing – and didn’t the paparazzi at Abu Ghraib know that, as did the military who hung the hapless Lynndie England out to dry but left the detention system intact.
To have mentioned the torture photos of Abu Ghraib does raise the question of specific responsibility on the part of Cultural Studies. Responsibility to the situation and the circumstances which we can work to know and redress. There remains a felt, but only sometimes explicitly articulated, need to attend to the counter stories of the war on terror without making them a publishing curiosity. I am not keen on conspiracy tales, but I am interested in the efforts of those who would caution and err on the side of proportion by insisting that the excesses of the war are a political strategy on the part of a paranoid capitalism. No need to overplay this drama, the numbers of the dead in the equation have their own tragic eloquence. We do have to look at the photographs and count the dead. There is possibly nothing more important that the injunction to have a look for yourself that is the heart of the investigative impulse behind all study of culture. Interpretation and analysis require working with those who practice, and although of course research can be practice, and indeed no one without the other, the imperative to look to the local meanings and articulate the detailed significance of always complicated predicaments is the beginning of informed and collective participation. I have in mind the careful work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the patient effort to rearrange desire and inculcate a lexicon-consulting responsibility in those who would choose, as if any other choice was viable, to fight and write against injustice – her essay ‘Righting Wrongs’ is most salutary in this regard (in her book Other Asias). The narrative the attends to the displacements of desire is a wake-up call. If we are to take seriously the way Cultural Studies sometimes proffers proposals for a renewed democratic culture it means something more than a once every four years celebrity-popularity context that abdicates responsibility for governance to a bunch of barely accountable apparatchiks. The participatory democracy on the cards now, the only one that would challenge the war machine, the bureaucracy machine, the celebrity machine and the television screen, must be a truly militant and informed cultural studies for all. Everything must be studied, occupied, and debated. From all perspectives, and unrelenting. For this we need a critical questioning of everything, a ruthless criticism of all that exists, as Old Beardo once said (Marx’s letter to Ruge). Without a rampant intellectual embrace, Governance is ordering, disorder is control, thought is a box and life is dead. The bombs that are falling and the cuts that are cutting are no way to live, and the collective project of exploring how else to organise things is the only, multiple, extravagant, voracious and viable option.
I imagine these writers, artists, authors and theorists trudging the world as a new shock troop against complacency, never marching in formation but driving thinking and theory with a force towards the responsible and the rampant. Creative outrageous, extravagant and thorough – the stories told here are the ones we must live by. This is a performative Cultural Studies in many ways – a critical theory that has to use the stage to draw all into the possibility of engagement. I imagine a diaspora of the discipline, all secretly ready to adopt the orange jump suit as curatorial uniform, reminding us that detaining possible jihadists (many falsely accused) and depriving them of legal redress (let alone dignity) does not make anyone safer, though it does outrage and help politicise millions. To say this is not a reporting on the militant people’s of the world as some sort of fit-for-purpose surveillance, but it recognizes the hybrid here and there co-constitution of subject and consumption that produces and travels to draw metaphor and meta-theory together as practice. For the dialectic of a critical Cultural Studies, that would look back on the way forward and make the world different to now. Cultural Studies on the march, singing. Zindabad!
John Hutnyk
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I offer you this documentation of last night’s dinner. I do this in solidarity with Hasan Elahi who, as I read in Amitava Kumar’s excellent new book (mentioned below in the Ruthless post), was detained for questioning after visiting an Artist’s Residency program in Senegal and subsequently became subject of a 6 month FBI investigation after being falsely accused of having fled the country leaving explosives behind in a locker… ‘In order to prove to his interrogators, over the course of dozens of interviews, what he had been doing on that particular day as well as the days that followed, Elahi showed them all the information he had on his PDA … And when the investigation was over, Elahi began working on documenting publicly his every move … His aim is to overwhelm those who have him under surveillance … [he says] “If 300 million people were to offer up the details of their private lives, you would need to hire another 300 million people just to keep up”‘ (Kumar -2010, p28-29 A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb).
