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Hi everyone,
Since I'm not sure I'll be able to make it tomorrow, I wanted to send along my
thoughts, as well. This piece by Therborn demands a level of scrutiny I'm not
sure it deserves, and while it might be valuable as a survey of intellectual
trends over the past thirty-odd years, the idea that it might productively
illuminate relationships between socioeconomic formations, historical dynamics,
and theoretical engagements is sheer pretense. For example: To speak of the
political defeat (that is, the defeat at the level of the State) of
Marxism/socialism in the same breath as one castigates Slavoj Zizek as a man
without a political program, as a theologian, and as a Leninist suggests some
sloppy thinking. This is, after all, the same Zizek (although he would
probably debate the extent to which any of us remain ever the 'same' unto
ourselves) who was nearly elected president of Slovenia in 1990, and who was
one of the most significant mouthpieces of the liberal-democratic leftist
opposition to Slovenia's status as a Soviet satellite state. The
Marxist-Lacanian tradition that he represents emerged out of the context of the
movement for democratic reform and sovereignty in Slovenia; Zizek's present
distrust of both democracy and liberal notions of sovereignty are, in their
way, responses to the failure of that movement to attain its goals, to the
failure of (as he might put it) "actually existing democracy."
A similar point could be raised regarding Therborn's dismissive regard of
cultural studies. If I had to locate one point of origin for what I think of
as cultural studies, I would point to the British worker's education movement
in the post-war period, and the turn to popular culture as a way of exploring
and explicating larger social and political concerns. In its earliest
articulation, the analysis of popular culture was meant as a way to prompt
people to begin to make radicalizing connections between the conditions of
their labor and the conditions of their daily lives--connections obscured by
the very nature of Keynesian capitalism. As it was institutionalized after the
founding of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Cultural
Studies took as its task the analysis of the turn to the right amongst the
English working-class and the rise of Thatcherism, particularly in relation to
the demise of the British empire and the rise of ex-colonial immigration to the
metropole. Cultural Studies, in other words, grew out of a struggle over
political power and social meaning within Britain; a struggle as much over the
maintenance of a British socialist tradition as for the heart of the Labor
Party and its cultural and intellectual relevance. To be fair, Cultural
Studies has undergone numerous, not necessarily flattering, mutations since it
was exported to the United States. Nonetheless, to suggest that Cultural
Studies is nothing more than the contemplation of televisual images, the
secondhand consumption of non-intellectual drivel, is to have surrendered that
which remains in potential within the discipline--that potential, in other
words, over which struggle is waged. Cultural Studies emerged out of a social
movement, even if it is not one that Therborn is inclined to locate within his
schema of political theory and power relations. (The fact that, as I can
recall, he mentions no British Marxists makes me suspect a continental bias...)
As for his take on postmodernism.... I'm not even going there. Suffice it to
say, it's sloppy. It lacks any meaningful historical or political economic
perspective (i.e., historically, on theoretical and political
"post-structuralism" as a response to the failure of the French Communist Party
to support the Algerian National Front, on the highly defensive attitudes of
different national Communist parties to the events of May 1968, on the late-60s
student left and its critique of the Marxist left; or, economically, on North
African and Arab nationalisms after after 1967, the rise of OPEC and
international attempts at regulating the production and price of oil, on the
dissolution of the gold standard in 1971, or the economic crisis of 73-76). It
collapses many different strands of thought together, and makes them look like
the same beast. It is, in my opinion, a bit of irresponsible criticism.
After writing all this, I truly hope to make it.... With any luck, I'll write
five pages this evening, and I won't feel pressured to stay home working
tomorrow....
Best,
Adam.
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