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Cultural Studies & Deconstruction

by Mr. Gary Hall

Submitted to: Submitted by:


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

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