Shanthi Mathai Mam PrashastKishore What is Culture? • Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning "to cultivate") is a term that has various meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. However, the word "culture" is most commonly used in three basic senses: • Excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, also known as high culture • An integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning • The set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group. What is Deconstruction? • Deconstruction is on the one hand, a movement of overturning or reversal of the asymmetrical binary hierarchies of metaphysical thought (one/many, same/other center/peripher), in such a way as to register the constitutive dependence of the major on the minor term; on the other, a movement beyond the framework delimited by these terms to an always provisional suspension of their force. Characteristics of Deconstruction • Deconstruction fails to provide a positive alternative politics and is therefore conservative. • Deconstruction is concerned too much with theory and texts, and not enough with practical political issues. • Deconstruction is just a mode of negative literary or philosophical critique Cultural Studies after Gramsci, Hegemony Theory and the Birmingham School • Cultural studies has a lot of analytic work to do in terms of trying to interpret how a society is changing in ways that are not amenable to the immediate political language. • Close to two million people can protest on the streets of London against attacking Iraq, but Tony Blair is still prepared to 'ignore the public will' and take his country to war on the grounds that he and George W. Bush consider the use of such force and power the right thing to do - and what's more he doesn't need to hide it. Hegemony is thus 'inadequate', according to Grossberg, 'to either analyse or respond to the complexly changing balance in the field of forces or, more conventionally, to the vectors and restructurings that are potentially changing the very fabric of power and experience‘. Cultural Studies & Hardt & Negri • There is a growing disparity between the apparent vectors and effects of "culture" and the leading edge of political transformation and historical change this leading edge is seen as having been analysed most powerfully in recent years. • Hardt’s and Negri’s thesis is this: a new era is emerging, what they call Empire, for which the current methods of analysis are no longer adequate. They are inadequate because ‘they remain fixated on attacking an old form of power and propose a strategy of liberation that could be effective only on that old terrain.What is missing here is a recognition of the novelty of the structures and logics of power that order the contemporary world.
Community Without Community • Reasoning here is based on two methodological approaches that are intended to be non-dialectical and absolutely immanent: the first is critical and deconstructive, aiming to subvert the hegemonic languages and social structures and thereby reveal an alternative ontological basis that resides in the creative and productive practices of the multitude; the second is constructive and ethico-political, seeking to lead the process of the production of subjectivity toward the constitution of an effective social, political alternative, a new constituent of power. Concepts of the ‘Dialectic’ • ‘The conventional one, of totalization, reconciliation and reappropriation through the work of the negative etc.', evident most obviously in Hardt and Negri's presentation of Empire as the emergence of a new, non-dialectical era (albeit, paradoxically, in old, dialectical terms) and desire to move towards some messianic or teleological political end-goal; • A 'non-conventional figure' which presents Empire as both old and new, dialectical and non-dialectical, and which holds both the old (commonality, 'totalization, reconciliation and reappropriation') and the new (singularity, difference, dissensus) together at the same time in 'a concept of dialectic that is no longer the conventional one of synthesis, conciliation, reconciliation, totalization, identification with itself; now, on the contrary, we have a negative or an infinite dialectic that is the movement of synthesizing without synthesis'. Concepts of the ‘Infinite Dialectic', • This is indeed an irreducibly violent stabilisation of something 'essentially unstable'. • This stabilisation can never be fully or finally achieved. There is always something that escapes, something different, heterogeneous, other, an excess, 'a supplement that does not let itself be dialecticized'. • This is not just the case with regard to Empire and the multitude, but to politics in general. Hence the way in which even the 'old' 'horizontal' struggles weren't 'organised' or welded together for Hardt and Negri, but constituted merely a 'potential or virtual unity of the international proletariat' that 'was never fully actualised'
Inventing a New Cultural Studies • The point is to acknowledge that the inherent instability and irreducible violence of this relation cannot be resolved, eliminated or escaped; instead, it constitutes the potential for collectivity and community at the same time as providing its essential limits. In this way, far from being merely an intellectual exercise, as many of its critics have claimed, deconstruction can provide a means of exploring forms of social and political organisation which avoid fusional and totalising (and totalitarian) fantasies of arriving at the One, at total unity and unification, while nevertheless being compatible with some form of gathering together of a multiplicity of singularities. In the Words of Gary Hall • That's what deconstruction means to me: that's what I understand Derrida to be saying: we have no other language in which philosophy has been conducted, and it no longer works; but we're not yet in some other language, and we may never be… That is exactly what the notion post means for me. So, postcolonial is not the end of colonialism. It is after a certain kind of colonialism, after a certain moment of high imperialism and colonial occupation - in the wake of it, in the shadow of it, inflected by it - it is what it is because something else has happened before, but it is also something new. With Four Points Concerning the Relation Between Cultural Studies & Deconstruction. 1. cultural studies' attempts at closing down the question of what it is to be political by deciding on the answer to this question in advance (e.g. that today, in the wake of 9/11 and the attack on Iraq, and now 7/7, it involves shifting away from theory and deconstruction towards politics and the 'real') is precisely not political. Interestingly, this can be concluded from reading one of the very texts it is suggested cultural studies turn to in order to be more political: Empire. (This is not to say a responsible decision cannot be taken to the effect that political economy, or whatever, is the political thing to do in a particular situation; just that a decision has to be taken on each singular occasion for it to be responsible, and not made in advance.) 2. Far from failing to help with pragmatic political decisions, deconstruction provides one of the most rigorous and responsible means of doing so - precisely because deconstruction does not simply decide what constitutes politics and the political in advance of the moment of decision. In this way, by means of a calculation that is open to the complexities of a social or cultural situation, to the incalculable, to what cannot be predicted or foreseen, deconstruction can help cultural studies take just and responsible political decisions; decisions which are sensitive to the specific demands - including 'real', practical, empirical, experiential, concrete demands - of each singular conjunction of the 'here' and 'now'. 3. The necessity of keeping the question of the political open, and of not deciding in advance what is political (that it obviously is to be concerned with left politics, the economic, hegemonic struggle, but obviously not so much with theory, deconstruction, the extreme, the animal, the secret and so forth), has a direct relation to the difficulty of Derrida's works, and especially the difficulty of identifying in them an obvious politics, at least of the kind many people in cultural studies would recognise. 4. The questioning of the political space is also one of the most cultural studies thing to do of all. (I'm returning here once more to Derrida's strategy of reading based on the notion of non-oppositional difference.) Hence the way it's previously been possible for me to produce careful readings of certain privileged texts in the cultural studies tradition which, by following their logic as closely and rigorously as possible, reveal these texts to challenge and disrupt that tradition - including its ideas of politics and what it is to be political - as much as they uphold and maintain it. Such inventive interventions in the cultural studies tradition - which are more than cultural studies while still being cultural studies - are readable: Video Clip Links • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YkXDTQ7iFs • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgwOjjoYtco&playnext=1 &list=PLFD8A8F5BB33144A8