tensions within the definition of utopia

     Thomas More created the word utopia with a deliberate contradiction.  The word is a deliberate play between the term eutopos, the good place and outopos, no place.  Tensions over the meaning of the word have only intensified over the succeeding centuries, and one can now find a multiplicity of definitions of the term that are not only mutually exclusive, but are radically disconnected from each other.  It would be futile to try to cover the full extent of the proliferation of meanings that the term has taken, but many of those meanings have taken the form lazy polemics against any effort to create a more socially just word and aren't really worth the engagement.  Instead, I want to look at the way the term has been taken up in very different and distinct ways in relationship to a series of radical projects, notably the anti-utopian turn of thinkers ranging from Michel Foucault to James C. Scott, the embrace of the term by Ernst Bloch, and finally the subsumption of the term into the generic framework of science fiction by radical critics such as Darko Suvin.

Before I get into that conversation, it's remarkable to the degree that these distinct camps, those who reject and embrace the term, don't engage with one another.  In each case, the term not only takes on a different meaning, but is placed in reference to radically different objects and social formations.  The utopian project critiqued by Michel Foucault and James C. Scott is distinctively a state formation, although Foucault is focused on the forms of knowledge that construct that state formation, directed towards creating spaces that are easily comprehended by an outside observer.  For instance, both thinkers discuss the organization of the French state, and in particular, the efforts to transform Paris into a kind of garden city.  The utopian state project transforms the muddle of daily life into something that is easily graspable within a single gaze.  It reduces complexity to create order. Foucault's rather lengthy description in The Order of Things provides a useful description of this particular framework.

Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold; they open up cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical.  Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy 'syntax' in advance, and not only the syntax that we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to 'hold together.' This is why utopias permit fables and discourse: they run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental dimension of the fabula; heterotopia (and those to be found so often in Borges) desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences. (Foucault xviii)

For Foucault,the utopia brings together the ease of the gaze with the flow of the narrative.  It is a place of order untroubled by the complexities and contradictions of ordinary life.  It's a space that is simultaneously impossible but easily imaginable.  It's not hard to see the connection between this vision and the structures of knowledge that Foucault discusses in the initial section of the text itself, the grids of intelligibility created by figures such as Linneus.  We find our space of tables and grids, individualization constructed through forms of gradation and differentiation.  It's also tempting to draw a line from this conception to Foucault's later critique of the prison found in Discipline and Punish.  The panopticon, after all, operates through the internalization of the gaze of the prison guard, which can only occur through the potential universal access of that gaze.  At the same time, Foucault still holds onto the tension as created by More.  After all, utopias 'have no real location' and are 'fanastic.' Within this context, it's not surprising that he creates a tension between the 'fantastic' utopia and the indescribable but very concrete and real heterotopia.  The latter shatters the illusion of the order of the former with its messy complexity of daily life.

It's hard not to see a strong connection between this critique and the critique presented by James C. Scott in his text, Seeing Like a State.  Scott begins his text by looking at German forestry in the 18th century and moves into a discussion of state projects, ranging from the attempt to reorganize the rationalize the city of  Paris in the 19th century to agricultural projects in the United States and the Soviet Union in the 20th century and the construction of the city of Brasilia.  Through that process, Scott critiques a phenomenon that he labels 'high modernism.'  'High modernism is an attempt to create a sort of order and productivity through a process of simplification.  To give a sense of the project, Scott opens by describing efforts on the part of German Foresters to expand lumber production.  These individuals come to the conclusion that the production of lumber is being limited by the scrub and underbrush of the forest.  This junk, the hypothesize, is getting in the way of the trees growing as quickly as they can.  They then went about removing all of the underbrush in order to allow for the most efficient growth of the forest.  The plan went well for the first few years, but then the forests collapsed.  It turns out all of that underbrush was crucial for the working ecology of the forest.  In this sense, Scott also replicates the tension found both in Foucault and in More.  The high modernist project turns out to be a chimerical fantasy that can only be implemented by force and results in only disaster.

Utopia's sympathizers imagine a very different framework for the utopian impulse, focusing on the literary tradition of the word and on a very different reception history, the unintentional and unruly uptake of the tradition by social movements.  Probably the most intense version of this perspective is taken up by the German philosopher Ernst Bloch, who offers a radically different understanding of the word than any other person discussed in this posting.  Bloch against the tendency of later thinkers who borrow from his framework, shows very little interest in the literary tradition of the utopia.  Bloch is not a genre theorist and finds those works a distraction from the phenomenon that he wants to discuss.  For Bloch, one must understand the utopia as a sort of impulse, a trace that marks out the existence of other possibilities, for other ways of life.  Bloch looked for this trace in every conceivable place, from dreams to advertisements to the formation of the Ku Klux Klan.  These traces pointed to other possibilities of life and the desire for transformation in even the vilest of social formations.  It was also an impulse that he linked to insurrectionary social movements, most notably the eschatological formations created by Thomas Muntzer and others during the civil wars of Germany in the 16th century.  Throughout all of these examples, Bloch looks for the expression for the desire for something new, something different.  Bloch frames this impulse through the concept of the Novum, "the unexpectedly new, which pushes humanity out of its present towards the not yet realized" (Moylan para 4).

Despite his aversion to the generic formation of the utopia, Bloch's insights were most quickly embraced by a school of science fiction critics who were interested in embracing the utopia as the forerunner of the genre of science fiction.  This branch of thought is largely started through the work of Darko Suvin and his work on the genre, notably his text, The Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, but the work has been taken up by a variety of other critics such as Philip Wegner and Fredric Jameson.  Suvin emphasizes a number of things about the genre that distinguish his take from the above thinkers.  Most significantly, Suvin conceives of the utopia within the shifts in the understanding of history that were going on at the time of the construction of utopian narratives.  Suvin notes that there is a radical shift in the nature of More's narrative.  Rather than imagining a sort of golden age, More imagines a community that has a sort of history, a beginning and just as significantly, an open and unfolding process of becoming.  The nation has come across a set of rules that work for it, but it also continues to interact and transform its neighbors.  (Interestingly, Benedict Anderson makes a similar observation about the construction of utopian narrative forms and the rise of the empty homogeneous time that undergirds the logic of the nation-state, which is synthesized in Wegner's Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity.)

Suvin takes up the concept of the Novum as developed by Bloch and uses it as a key term for the understanding of science fiction.  The Novum still remains a novelty that points to something new, but that newness loses the eschatological framework that dominates Bloch's thinking.  The Novum continues to be some sort of novelty, whether in the form of some sort of invention or some sort of sociological or political transformation, but instead offering a moment of redemption, the Novum creates the conditions for the kind of totalizing cognitive estrangement, which presents a radically different society.  Contrary to many of his critics, Suvin is far less concerned about the technoscientific veracity of such a Novum, and is far more concerned about its engagement with its engagement with the class struggles that define its present.  Within this context, the work of H.G. Wells is more significant than the work of Jules Verne, despite Verne's greater concern with technoscientific veracity.  In effect, the Novum becomes a way of using the shifts in the concept of time that were introduced with capitalist accumulation in order to imagine radically different ways of life.  Suvin looks to the Novum to provide the means to imagine new ways of life, but ways of life that still remain historical in nature, even if the future societies are different.

In the end, these particular takes on the word are irreconcilable.  Constructing an antagonism between the camps would itself assume too much ground.  Instead, the two perspectives constitute a kind of non-relationship, perhaps close to what Jean Francois Lyotard refers to as the Differend, "a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both arguments.  One side's legitimacy does not imply the other's lack of legitimacy (Lyotard xi).  My own work has tended to work on one side of this bifurcation or another.  For instance, my readings of China Mieville like many other critics has framed that work in relationship to hybridity and heterotopia, while my work on writers such as Ursula Le Guin has engaged with the utopian tradition, again, not unique.  Just as significantly, I've found myself continually returning to the work of Suvin, who draws on the tradition to frame the history of the development of science fiction. Utopia within that context is a continual haunting, a gesture towards other possibilities and a refusal to naturalize the present. At the same time, Foucault and Scott's critique of high modernism has an equally significant influence over how I think of social and political projects, ranging from long term prospects for transformation to the processes of daily life. I suspect that this disjunction will not be changing any time soon.

The Discovery of Daily Life

     There is a project that has been on the back of mind for the past decade or so, something that I've never really put on paper or even really seriously discussed in any situation.  It's a point that influences my dissertation, a study of feminist science fiction over the last century, but it's hardly a central point to that study.  That is the discovery of daily life as a site of political struggle and as a site of academic study.  It's a journey that draws together a wide swath of often quite disparate academic disciplines and political movements, ranging from cultural studies, John Burger's studies on paintings, the study of history from below, to a network of dissident small groups such as the Forrest-Johnson tendency, Socialisme ou Barbarie, and the workerist networks in Italy that arose in the post war period.  At the same time, feminist networks transformed the formerly ostensibly private space of the household into a space of political inquiry, both through political intervention and the construction of an academic discipline.  It's a process that both culminates and dies with the brief rise of cultural studies as a celebrated interdisciplinary process in the 1980's and 1990's.  With a multiplicity of theoretical lens and objects of study, these disparate groups began to see the rich complexity of daily life as a something to study, and perhaps more significantly, as a terrain of struggles that define the process of both reproducing dominant social structures, both in the form of institutions and disciplinary practices, as well as challenging those institutional and disciplinary practices.

     While there are precedents to this examination, often taken up by governmental agencies to understand social strife in the 19th century or by radical activists to create that strife, the study of daily life really takes life after the second world war.  The first major academic study is taken up by Henri Lefebvre in 1947 with his first volume of the The Critique of Daily Life, which was to be continued with two other volumes published in 1961 and 1981 respectively.  Only a decade later, literary critic Richard Hoggart published The Uses of Literacy and in collaboration with Raymond Williams and others launches the cultural studies project in the UK.  Interwoven with that narrative is the rise of the study of the history of resistances and domination in the workplace taken up by EP Thompson and other, which inadvertently launches a study of the history from below, which takes on a myriad of forms such as the practices of the Subaltern Studies collective in the 1970's.  At the same time, the Forrest-Johnson tendency is involved in the creation of a series of political pamphlets discussing the revolutionary possibilities of working class organizing in the United States. 

      A similar analysis is taken up by militants in France in the form of Socialisme ou Barbarie and by Italian militants connected to Mario Tronti under the framework of 'workerism.'  These militants were interested in the questions that were taken up by all the other thinkers within this framework.  How had the radical transformations that occurred after the second world war transformed the working class and what possibilities for radical transformation still existed?  This work challenged a consensus that assumed that Keynsian economic interventions had stabilized capitalist accumulation and created what might be called a capitalism with a human face.  Their studies found that such resistance and self-organization still existed but that the forms of militancy took on very different forms than they previously had taken and in the views of these groups called for very different kinds of organization to fulfill their potential.  In that sense, despite their very real antagonisms, feminist thought and practice is very similar to these intellectual formations, seeing the household as a space of domination and resistance in which a very new political project could be launched. (This topic deserves far more attention than is given here, and is by no means a unified project itself.)

      These collectivities are intertwined with the stalled world revolution of 1968, but are only a part of the story, and in many ways, a less significant part of the story than the long history of decolonization that might be argued to be the central narrative of the 20th century.  But there's something really interesting in that story, which follows the creation of the great economic boom of the second half of the 20th century, a boom that does not only benefit the bourgeoisie but creates a level of comfort, albeit unevenly, for working class groups that had never been seen before.  In doing so, it transformed formerly oppositional institutions into part of the hegemony of the new system, but that process didn't lead to the labor peace that was expected.  Instead, following the lead of the rest of the world, we see new forms of militancy and new forms of life.  In this sense, following the framework of Michel Foucault, the newly minted disciplinary structures of capitalist accumulation that, for lack of a better word, colonized daily life, created new modes of resistance that couldn't easily map onto the formerly dominant forms of resistance.  Those who wanted to contribute to those practices then had to take up that study of daily life, to discover that world and to intervene in it.

Thoughts after receiving a Ph.D.

       It's close to the end of 2013, and I thought I would try to put up at least one more blog posting before the end of the year.  I've been busy with contract negotiations and finishing my dissertation project, which was accepted at the beginning of December.  So I now have my Ph.D., which technically makes me a doctor.  I'm now beginning the process of looking for academic work, which is an incredibly dreary and depressing activity, if only because of the lack of work on the job market.  I'm going to give it a couple years, but I will probably be moving on if that doesn't work.  But anyways, the blog.  I'm going to hold onto this project through March, which is when I will be done with my stint at the union.  I'll probably have some more thoughts on that as we go into the triennial election.  I'd like to see the person replacing me to remain committed to the reform project, but right now, that doesn't seem like it's guaranteed.  The last two elections have been controlled by the old leadership faction of Coral and Moshe, who certainly have put in a lot of work on the ground.  If their platform moved anywhere beyond stating that they're from the sciences and the mention of Google parties, I'd be a little more impressed.  (I also have some issues with their campaign claim that they oppose caucuses, which would hold weight if they weren't obviously a part of a caucus.)  I have more to say on the subject, but it will have to wait until the next year, hopefully after a couple posts on other subjects.

       Rather than simply abandoning blogging, my thought was that I should start a new blog that had a greater sense of focus, perhaps on science fictional matters, and other cultural engagement.  The truth is that Work Resumed on the Tower was never a terribly successful blog in terms of readership.  It got a few posts that were read broadly, but often my posts received under 40 views.  I'm not terribly upset about this.  The blog was primarily meant to be a place to push myself to write more, and to express thoughts about a variety of topics.  It also became a place to discuss issues within the student movement and my engagement with the union.  Those two issues are coming to an end with my completion of my degree, which seems to also point to a need for another project.  I've always been interested in the idea of putting together a more focused blog, which while not being commercial, might have an audience in mind, something that this project never had.  On the other hand, I'm not terribly thrilled at the prospect of coming up with another name.  I still like the name of the current blog, but I also don't want it to disappear as a historical record of my work over the period of time that it ran.  I'm tempted towards something Futurian related, but am currently feeling a bit lazy as to doing the research.  Maybe, I'll take a day to go to the Eaton archive in Riverside soon, to take a look at their fanzine collection.

      Beyond that, I've been contemplating a number of directions I might want to go in once I'm finished with turning the present dissertation into something larger.  I know it's a bit off in the future, but I like to have more than one thing going on.  I'm interested in trying to put together a project on Brecht's work in the early 1930's, particularly his Learning Pieces, and their relevance to activism and organizing.  I'd like to look at the emphasis that Brecht puts on experimentation and the necessity for error in the process of creating new political forms.  You can see some early thoughts here.  It also ties into my interest in aleatory aesthetics, as discussed here.  I don't see this is primarily existing as an academic project.  Instead, I could see it looking similar to the sorts of projects that zero books has put out.  Additionally, I'd like to look at the work of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke in relationship to the post war period.  This idea is a lot less developed, but I feel that there is something interesting to be said about the pair in relationship to the cold war, decolonization, a particular modernization project of the time.  Also, I've really enjoyed both the novels by Clarke that I have read, and liked the Foundation novels, as well.  Finally, I'd like to make a more theoretical intervention into the return of the concept of patriarchy.  Using Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, I'd like to argue that patriarchy is an increasingly tertiary matrix of domination within contemporary.  Instead, it's been supplanted by other forms of domination, that are no less serious.  I would probably start with a critique of the Federici's reading of Foucault, and move from there.  We'll see what happens in the next couple of years.

(On reflection, the comment on Moshe and Coral was a little one sided and unfair.  I'll make a slightly lengthier comment on their role in the union in the future, but its worth noting that despite the fact that the two did extensively draw upon the three issues I discussed above for campaigning, they have also occasionally contributed to the union.  More on this in the future.)

A long selection on cultural studies

           In order to deal with this set of questions, it’s necessary to look at the formation of cultural studies historically, or to put it in other words, why does a formation called ‘cultural studies’ come into existence at the time it does?  To begin, it’s worth delimiting this field; we are primarily discussing the center of the capitalist world system, primarily Europe and the United States, although the effects of decolonization cannot be ignored on these locations.  This means sketching out some of the challenges that the transformations of the capitalist world system pose for radical social movements after the second war.  It then means looking at the critical engagement that is posed by the group of thinkers that are organized under the category of ‘cultural studies’, and the set of tools that they develop in order to understand the new forms of social institutions and relations that exist under Fordist and Post-Fordist modes of production, relations that are not easily reduced to the economic, but rather permeate all aspects of daily life.  At that point, it’s possible to engage with the question of the questions posed by the prompt, although not necessarily within the same terms posed by them.

           The end of World War II was marked by several shifts in the capitalist world system.  Perhaps the most obvious of these transformations is the shift from a world system that was dominated by the British Empire to one that was dominated by the United States.  This shift also marks a distinctly different relationship between the center and the periphery, from a relationship of direct colonialism to a more diffuse set of indirect and diffuse relations of domination defined by the developmental state and later, neo-liberalism.  At the same time, the process of decolonization is also defined by resistances to these new forms of domination.[1]

            Shifting to the social structures of the core countries, there is a shift in the economic conditions of the working classes, as well as its political position in these countries.  This shift is defined by the consolidation of the Keynesian economics in the post war society, integrating the working classes through increased wages, a social safety net, and union representation, at the cost of some of the more radical aspects of the political movements of the time.  This economic model was reproduced throughout Europe through the economic aid given in the Marshall Plan.  This shift simultaneously brought a left a level of comfort to workers that was never previously available, but simultaneously compromised the formerly autonomous structures produced by the worker’s movement, producing a serious crisis in both Marxist political practice and theory.[2]

            Simultaneously, this project, most frequently identified with Fordism, also produced a remarkable transformation in working class households, although unevenly, and in a manner that reproduced the structural racism of the period.  This transformation was marked by a shift of working class families from the city to the suburbs, and into single family dwellings.  Those families were placed in a position to live comfortably for the most part on one salary, and the living conditions of unionized workers and their middle-class managers were at times, indistinguishable.  This also created a large body of working class women who stayed at home to raise children and focus on the responsibilities of reproductive labor, although in isolation.[3]

            The construction of this household could be the most important technology to bring the working class family into a regime of sexuality.  According to Foucault, this regime initially starts with the self conceptualization of the bourgeoisie as a class, and, “by and for the privileged classes, spread through the entire social body.”[4] The urban proletariat enters into this regime at a very particular moment, first with them implementation of set of census practices of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and then at a more intensive level, with the beginning of “the epoch of Spatkapitalismus in which the exploitation does not demand the same violent and physical constraints as in the nineteenth century, and where the politics of the body does not require the elision of sex….”[5]

         Although, Foucault never makes the connection himself, there is a distinct connection between the construction of a gendered division of reproductive labor in the household and the intensification of a regime of sexuality of the working classes.  It would be too complex to deal with adequately, this construction of the household comes at a moment where the construction of this social class becomes an additional wage to the working classes, a wage that takes the form of the use of women’s labor as a social commons for the benefit of men across class lines, a social contract that is noted in the work of Gayle Rubin amongst others, although theorized in a trans-historical manner.[6] The collective labor then became marked as the grounds that would guarantee the reproduction of the society, a class configuration radically naturalized and depoliticized.[7]

            With this in mind, one can understand the activities of a number of small, radical political groups, such as the Forrest-Johnson tendency[8] in the United States, the Socialism or Barbarism group[9] in France, and the Potere Operia group[10] in Italy, which can be defined by the attempt to understand the recomposition of the working classes in response to the immense social transformation of the capitalist world system after the war.  Each of these group’s investigations were both extremely provincial, in the sense that they put a great deal of emphasis on linking Marxism with a strong, concrete sociological interest in investigating the lived experiences of contemporary factory workers, at the same time these groups saw their projects take a global dimension in their emphasis on the linkages the groups made with each other, along with their exchanges of ideas.  These projects, along with a number of feminist projects, become the first steps on the long march to a new revolutionary project, one that draws from them but takes form in a way that they could not predict.

            To turn to the more formally academic sphere, this radical shift in the social relations of the system are most immediately taken up by three thinkers, within different social context and with different critical tools, Richard Hoggart borrowing from and transforming a literary and cultural analysis borrowed from F.R. Leavis within an English context, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s engagement with a German critical tradition from the perspective of exile, and Henri Lefebvre’s attempt to construct a Marxist sociology in France in the immediate aftermath of the liberation of that country.  Despite their considerable differences, all are beginning to try to use the resources they have available to them to start to produce conceptual tools to produce a critique of dominant social relations, emphasizing its forms of alienation and exploitation.  None paint a particularly positive portrait of their present days, although Lefebvre’s analysis is less phobic then the ones offered by Hoggart and Horkheimer and Adorno.

            The earliest of the engagements is by Adorno and Horkheimer through their engagement with the concept of enlightenment in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, particularly through their engagement with the culture industry.  This industry is seen to replace older forms of the myth of the society, one that introduces a new and more pernicious form of deception.  As the two note, “The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry.”[11]  The role of this industry as a social mediator operates a sort of analogy to exchange value in the everyday life relations.  Just as the structure of exchange value allowed for the masking of the domination that occurred at the workplace, creating an abstract machine of equivalence that could create surplus value, the cultural industry as a whole has molded men as a type unfailingly reproduced in every product.  All the agents of this process, from the producer to the women’s clubs, take good care that the simple reproduction of this mental state is not nuanced or extended in any way.”[12]  The culture industry then becomes the face of nature of social domination and alienation that marks the entire history of the Enlightenment, through its engagement with instrumental reason.  It marks the intensification of this social domination along with its impoverishment.  At the same time, this system is also marked by the inability to imagine a positive alternative to it, leaving the negativity of the dialectic as the only way to engage with the system.

           Lefebvre’s engagement is the second one to occur historically, the first of the texts being produced just after the liberation of France in 1947.  His text poses the need for a new approach to the critique of everyday life that he sees previously fulfilled by a French literary avant-garde, moving from Baudelaire and Rimbaud to the Surrealists.  He argues that this critique operated from the outside of everyday life, and was limited by its refusal to engage in an immanent critique of the phenomenon.  Instead, Lefebvre proposed a new sociological approach to the question, which would offer an immanent approach to the problems of everyday life, an approach that would focus on the concept of alienation, and the ways that alienation both had to take on its own terms as a form of reality, and at the same time, had to recognized for its modes of deception.

            Similar to the approach offered by Horkheimer and Adorno, Lefebvre argued that this was only possible through an engagement with the dialectic, although in a far more conventional manner.  For Lefebvre, this meant producing an engagement with the concept aufgehoben, which he notes is not easily translated into French.  The critique of everyday life needs to be able to both ‘abolish something (as it was) and to raise it to a higher level.[13]  This double movement, which contains an element of conservation through its fulfillment of the alienate possibilities of the earlier social formation, while abolishing it for a new social formation, presumably defined by less social alienation.  This is tied to a process of trying to find the ‘total man’, the unalienated man.  It’s not sure whether this could actually come into existence within Lefebvre’s analysis, but it is a necessary concept to allow for the critique of everyday life to be linked to radical political project.

           Hoggart’s analysis is the last of the three initial engagements with the questions of culture and the everyday, and, in many ways, is the strangest of the grouping.  Written in 1957, it draws from a traditional approach to literary criticism, however it also includes elements of ethnography and autobiography in its analysis.  This strange and eclectic mixture of genres and disciplines tries to map a shift in the culture of working class England by first establishing an earlier formation of this culture, and then map out the shifts that are currently occurring in that culture.  He does this by defining the social milieu of everyday life, the household, the neighborhood, religion and popular texts.  Within that, he shifts between an analysis of culture as a lived experience, and culture as a system of signs.  His analysis is not an optimistic one as can be seen early in the text.

            This cultural pessimism links up Hoggart’s analysis to a conservative anti-capitalist tradition[14] that runs from the 18^th century to the middle part of the 20^th century, although in a slightly more cautious form then found in those writers.  Hoggart refuses the concept of the golden age that defines that tradition, [15]however he still emphasizes the loss that occurs from the shift to the city from the countryside.  This new development only completes the process that had already started some time ago.  For Hoggart, the most valuable resources of working class culture are those which are preserved from the agrarian traditions that were brought into the city. The earlier formation of the working class can engage with the novelties of capitalism in a manner that is selective.  It could take in those innovations that were useful to it; however these innovations are now deluging this culture and can no longer be engaged with in the same manner.

“My argument is not that there was, in England one generation ago, an urban culture still very much ‘of the people’ and that now there is only a mass urban culture.  It is rather that the appeals made by the mass publicists are for a great number of reasons made more insistently, effectively and in a more comprehensive and centralized form today than they were earlier; that we are moving towards the creation of a mass culture; that the remnants of what was at least in parts an urban culture ‘of the people’ are being destroyed; and that the new mass culture is in some important ways less healthy than the often crude culture it is replacing.”[16]

            The effect of this deluge is marked by a profound loss.  Although the old forms of society are not defined by the authenticity that so many generations of conservatives found in their childhood, they are still marked by a health that is missing from the new order that is coming in to being.  The cheap flood of commodities that dominate this new set of social relations have some immediate benefits, as that they are cheap, readily available and often durable.  But beyond this shallow benefit, it produced a coarsening of the social relations, as well as the destruction of a long lasting social symbolic.  Within this analysis, he focuses on many of the aspects of youth culture that would later be taken up in later formations of cultural studies, although the reading those formations is marked by conservative pessimism that do not mark later cultural studies engagements.

            Before we move on to the shift in the critical approach in methodology that occurs as cultural studies occurs as a practice, we should take some time to note some important dimensions that will mark most of the texts discussed under the rubric of cultural studies.  First, all of the texts were produced in response to a perceived crisis on the part of the authors.  These crises were not crises of the social order, but rather of the ability to understand and represent the experiences of the current form of capitalism. Second, in order to deal with that change in social relations, the authors take what might be called a multi-disciplinary approach.  The epistemological crisis puts the writer in a position where his or her original discipline is no longer sufficient to produce concepts or methods to deal with the new formation of the society that they are dealing with.  Within this crisis, the writers much seek out a new method, new concepts in order to deal with the transformation of social relations.

           In addition, all accounts link the transformation of capitalism is marked by the intensification of the role of the commodity in mediating all social relations.  The readings of this intensification differ   between the authors.  For Horkheimer, Adorno, and Hoggart this intensification is read phobically, linking to the loss of the ability to create authentic social relations.  This loss is far more radical within the work of Adorno, who unlike Hoggart, even rejects the possibility of the nostalgia that can be found throughout The Uses of Literacy. This places contemporary late capitalism within what Adorno calls ‘damaged life.’  Whereas, the engagement of this question by Lefebvre, still claims the ability to distinguish between “everyday life as it is—as it has been made by the bourgeoisie—and the life which a human being actually demands, begs for….”[17] Marking the ability to map out what might be called an authentic life, a life outside of the logic of capital, or at least not dominated by its structures.

           We can also see an attempt on the part of some of these thinkers to critically reread the tradition of historical materialism, particularly though their critical engagement with the Marxist concept of base and superstructure.  As we have already noted, this engagement already marks the work of Lefebvre and Adorno, through their separate engagement with a particular European theoretical tradition, as well as a set of critical approaches to Marxism.  For Adorno, this draws from the recognition that the commodity form’s ability to reshape all forms of social life, and for Lefebvre, it comes through the reading of Capital as a critical form of sociology, as well as an analysis of economics. This critical engagement with these questions become a focus for Raymond Williams, someone who provides an interesting transition from the conservative approach of Richard Hoggart to the engagement made by the Birmingham Center for Cultural Studies.

            Williams returns to the question of the base and superstructure throughout his career, first appearing in his 1958 book Culture and Society: 1780-1950 and then returning in Marxism and Literature, along with several other separate essays.  This analysis emphasizes a number of important elements.  The first analysis in Culture and Society begins by noting that Marx’s analysis of culture takes an incomplete form.  He notes that Marx’s occasional comments on literature, while thoughtful, don’t necessarily link up to any particular literary theory.[18] His analysis of further efforts on the part of Marxists to produce a complete theory of culture from a Marxist perspective sees these efforts primarily as failures.  He links this up with the continual linkage of culture to the superstructure.  This limits the analysis of culture to something primarily acts as an effect or acts as a mode of representation of other structures.  It doesn’t allow for a theory of culture that fully maps out a theory of culture.  This will only be found later on in his career with his reading of Gramsci, and the development of his concept of a structure of feeling in relationship to Gramsci’s concept of culture.[19]

    

        This engagement brings us away from Williams himself, and to a collective project that Williams is indirectly, the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies.  The Birmingham School then becomes a place in which a group of critical approaches and methods are congealed into a practice called cultural studies.  It is a shift that begins with Stuart Hall’s replacement of Richard Hoggart as the head of the school, along with the rise of the politics of the new left.  This shift moves from the study of the experience of everyday life to the sign systems that construct its ideological framework.  It also a shift from the pessimism and cultural conservativism that often marked the earlier models, looking instead for the possibilities for radical change that could be found in these various formations of everyday life and popular cultural formations, keeping the same emphasis on a multi-disciplinary approach to its object.  This engagement is marked by a search for critical tools and approaches to reading the ideological formations of everyday life, drawing from the interwar concepts developed by Voloshinov, Bakhtin, and Gramsci.  It also drew from contemporary French theorists Barthes, Althusser, and Foucault.  When one looks at the collected papers of the school, they are marked by this exploration of method, often acting primarily as explanations of various methods, and as translations of those methods into the set of questions that the school was posing, turning into the school papers into a method of reading.[20]

            The most significant of those engagements was the engagement with Antonio Gramsci’s work, which had only become available in the 1960’s through the compilation of his prison notebooks, which were translated in 1971.  The most important concept that is drawn from his work is the concept of hegemony.  This concept, which was already circulating within the discourse of the Third Communist International[21], became a central concept and concern for Gramsci in trying to understand the rise of fascism in his country.  The concept of hegemony emphasizes that a ruling class must depend on the consent of the governed as well as the use of force.  This consent must be created by this class through its presentation of its concerns as universal concerns, that is to say by articulating a particular social formation.  This emphasis on articulation emphasizes both the possible fragility of the ruling coalition as well as the means to create another social order, the coagulation of the subaltern classes into a new hegemony, a new state.

            At the same time, the modern, hegemonic state ends the possibility of conceiving of the subaltern classes as existing outside the relations of consent, as unaffected by the legitimating intellectual discourses of the state.  Their modes of antagonisms are incorporated into the state, through a variety of social organizations.  As Gramsci notes, “The modern state abolishes many autonomies of the subaltern classes—it abolishes the state as a federation of classes—but certain forms of the internal life of the subaltern classes are reborn as parties, trade unions, cultural associations.”[22] Within the modern liberal state, these organizations allow for the continuation of a subaltern class life can occur through their rebirth as these social organizations.  This rebirth then links up to a different mode of class struggle, a struggle defined by the war of position, rather than the war of maneuver.

           While conceptualizing the possibilities of this new war of position, Gramsci spends a considerable amount of time analyzing how the capitalist system produces consent through what would later be called para-literature, that is, through pamphlets, magazines, missionary stories, etc.  He focuses on this material, in part, because it is the only material that is available in the prison library, but Gramsci also argues that this material, material that is consumed, rather than critically engaged with, can be particularly influential.  Engaging with it can allow for an exploration of the ideological structures that legitimate the social order of his time.  He examines how this literature through cliché, through the pleasure of the narrative, through constructing and meeting social expectations, that is to say, how it produces structures of consent through forms of common sense, that is, “a conception of the world mechanically imposed by the external environment.”[23]

           For the conversations at Birmingham, this approach became a more fluid and dynamic conceptualization of ideological formations, responding to the limitations that they saw in the analysis of ideology provided by Louis Althusser.  On one hand, Althusser allows for a conceptualization of totality that recognizes the complex structure of totality, identified by Althusser as overdetermined, rather than expressive.  It recognizes the need for an analysis of society as a complex set of articulations, rather than as reducible to any form of economic determinism.  However, Hall finds limitations in Althusser’s emphasis on the concept of structural determination in his work in Reading Capital.[24]  By emphasizing the totality of the social formation, this concept loses the ability to deal with the always incomplete nature of a social formation, a reality that is more fully recognized by Gramsci’s concept of Hegemony.

            This concept of hegemony was supplemented by the concept of language provided by the Bakhtin circle, notably in Voloshinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.  The work can be seen as a double critique, both of the structuralist model that finds its initial formation in the lectures of Saussure, and at the same time, a critique of a reductionist Marxist model that would dismiss language as a mere form of reflection and representation.  This second dimension links its project up with the critiques of the base and superstructure model that Gramsci engages in.  This critique is accomplished by emphasizing language and sign production as another form of material practice, one that is central to the social structures of a society.  The sign becomes the space for social contestation, and relations of power.  As Voloshinov notes,

            “Existence reflected in sign is not merely reflected, but refracted.  How is this refraction of existence in the ideological sign determined?  By an intersecting of differently oriented social interests within one and the same sign community, i.e., by the class struggle.

            Class does not coincide with the sign community, i.e., with the community which is the totality of users of the same set of signs for ideological communication.  Thus various different classes will use one and the same language.  As a result, differently oriented accents intersect in every ideological sign.  Sign becomes an arena of the class struggle.”[25]

            The sign then becomes the critical terrain of the class struggle.  Its engagement in that struggle is defined by the contestation of meaning that occurs through its various refractions.  This emphasis on refraction points to the creative dimension of language, its ability to not only reflect social reality, but also to engage in that reality and pose alternative forms of sociality, alternative futures.  The possibilities contained in this concept then link up with the possibilities contained in the incomplete and contestatory nature of hegemony.  The possibility of social transformation occurs within the system of language, within a set of social structures, and not outside of it.  One is both a part of a sign community and involved in struggle at the same time.

           This interest in the sign in forms of social struggle has obvious linkages with the modes of semiotic engagement that can be found at the time, particularly the work of Roland Barthes and the Tel Quel School of analysis.  For the practice of cultural studies, the earlier work of Barthes, particularly around Mythologies became the most important work, primarily because of its focus on the banal discourses of everyday life, particular those around magazines, advertisements and popular kitsch.  The arguments point to the utopian qualities of these texts, while at the same time, marking the ways that this utopian possibility is caught up in a structure of myth, a deformed structure of signification, which places its own history and contingency under erasure.  It links their construction to the continued production of a naturalized and timeless capitalism, and at the same time, pointing to a libidinal economy that operates within that sign system.

            This set of engagements became a way of the Birmingham school to critically engage in the changing practices of the working classes of the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s.  They could begin to produce a critical analysis of how youth practices indicated a shift in the class composition of the English working class after the Second World War, arguing against a conventional Marxist narrative that insisted on a static image of the working class and at the same time, against a popular notion that youth culture provided a transcendence from the old class divisions that defined the society before the war.  Instead, the negotiation of class began to take shape within the increased consumption that increased wages had provided the working classes, and through a set of relations produced within the logic of the commodity and the pleasure of consumption and style.[26]

            Within that context, Gramsci’s concept of the war of position allows for an analysis of how working class resistance occurs within the hegemonic structures of the welfare state, focusing on tactical engagements, social formations that are not necessarily immediately political, etc.  It marks a shift in the engagement of a whole series of social forms that formerly acted as dominant forms of counter-systemic politics, such as trade unions and communist and social democratic political parties.[27] It tries to map the politics that are increased marked by a disengagement with those traditional forms of politics, a moment that would eventually shift into a time and place where, “one is a socialist because one used to be one, no longer going to demonstrations, attending meetings”, etc.[28]  We can find a radical political formation, pluralist and contradictory, resisting the forms of social reproduction and sketching out possible alternatives between that moment of depoliticization and the quiet of the immediate post war.

            Cultural Studies offered a set of critical tools that allowed for an examination of the transformations of the class struggle, marking out the terrain of the system, its continuation and intensification of forms of exploitation, alienation, and domination.  It also marked the forms of collectivity and resistance that could be found within that system.  As those forms developed, it tried to contribute to their growth.  In short, it becomes a project very similar to the radical and feminist groups discussed earlier in the essay, and similar to them, the project became one that offered those tools in service of those movements, although never fully as either a vanguard or as a set of organic intellectual.  One could say that the engagement of these scholars is as much of a social experiment in reimagining the relationship between intellectuals and social movements, as the movements were experiments in creating alternative modes of social reproduction.

            Now that we recognize the role a critical set of tools put under the rubric of theory, we can now return to some of the questions posed by the prompt.  First, theory can never be understood as a method of ‘liberating’ everyday life.  Instead, theory offers a set of critical analytical tools that allow for an analysis of everyday life, allowing for critical engagement with both the social structures of a particular moment in the development of capitalism, along with the forms of resistance immanent to it.  The construction of new forms of life that would ‘daily life’ must be produced by sustained forms of collective action that may be informed by theory, but cannot be supplanted by theory.  To enter into what the new forms of those actions might be put us outside the framework of this essay, and to be frank, I am not sure what those forms might possibly be.

            Within this context, the limitations of the American approach the genre can be linked to a pair of problems, which while related, are distinct as well.  The first problem is that the U.S. engagement with cultural studies (at least the dominant moment) occurred precisely at the moment that the critical practices of the new left were either being destroyed or neutralized by being reincorporated in the service of capital.  This fact does not immediately negate the value of investigating these cultural formations, but the methods of inquiry did not recognize the ‘re-colonization’ of those formerly ambivalently liberated practices and institutions. To put it in Deleuzian terms, it posed an endless series of lines of flight, precisely at the moment when those lines of flight were being captured.

  

          The second problem could be lined to the concept of agency, a concept that is only prominent within the U.S. context.   It can be found in the structure of part of the question itself, when it poses the question, “Does Consumer Culture, for example, necessarily preclude agency?”  The most immediate answer to that question if we take the engagement of the work of most of the authors seriously would be no.  But the notion of agency retains a linkage with a liberal humanist project, doesn’t fully engage with the forms of collectivity that define the attempt to resignify a series of commodities, whether through formations of subculture, race, class or gender.  These can only be understood through an set of concepts that explore structures of inter-subjectivity, rather than looking for an agent, whether individual or collective.

            However, these two problems don’t inherently explain the difficulties of theorizing daily life, although they point to some inherent difficulties, viz. the continual transformation capitalism through the incorporation of its own crises and contradictions.  This practice of incorporation refuses the ability to find any form of stable resistance, given the ability for those modes of resistance to be incorporated.  Althusser offers a critical approach to thinking through this process with his distinction between science and ideology.  Ideologies are marked by their critical engagement with particular, and historic forms of capitalism, with its structures of domination, and its forms of resistance.  Science on the other hand is the attempt to produce a method of critically engaging with the new structures of power, resistance, etc. as they make the old ideological structure obsolete.  This engagement, as we have seen, is neither a simple or easy process.

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[1] For more on this please look at Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review, 2001)

[2] On this topic, see Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985), amongst others

[3] See Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (London: Falling Wall Press, 1975)

[4] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 122.

[5] Ibid., 114.

[6] Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy” of Sex” in Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination, Ed. Karen V. Hansen and Ilene J. Philipson (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).  Also look at the readings by Jacques Lacan on the concept as well as the various feminist takes on his work.

[7] It goes without saying that this project never becomes fully successful, although it’s worth noting that the erasure of the contingency of this project was more successful.

[8] C L R James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Paul Buhle, State Capitalism and World Revolution (New York: Charles H. Kerr, 1986) is probably the most definitive statement of the group, although there are a lot of essays by James floating around that also cover the topic.

[9] The best examples of the intellectual engagement of the group can be found in Cornelius Castriadis’ Political and Social Writings, which cover the period from 1956 through the 1960’s

[10]Steven Wright, Storming Heaven (London: Pluto Press, 2002)  Although minimizing some of the debates around feminism, Wright offers a good history of the activist and intellectual practices that lead up to the formation of the various Autonomy groups, moving from the 1950’s to the 1970’s.

[11] Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, trans. John Cumming, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1999)

[12] Ibid., 126.

[13] Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 1 (London: Verso, 2008), 177.

[14] For more on this, please look at Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983)

[15] Raymond Williams, The City and the Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973)

[16] Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London: Transaction Publishers), 9-10.

[17] Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 1, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 1991), 140.

[18] Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 265.

[19] Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977)

[20] Culture, Media, Language, Ed. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (London: Hutchinton University Library, 1987)

[21] See Perry Anderson, “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci” and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985) for this history.   Also, Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity”

[22] Antonio Gramsci, Gramsci, Antonio and Joseph Buttigieg. Prison Notebooks. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992, 61.

[23] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffery Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 323.

[24] Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and the Centre: some problematic and problems” in Culture, Media, Language, Ed. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (London: Hutchinson University Library. 1987)

[25] V.N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik (Cambridge, Massachussetts: Harvard University Press, 1986), 23.

[26] Resistance through Rituals, Ed. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (London: Routledge, 1993)  and Dick Hedige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979)

[27] Read Immanuel Wallerstein, “1968, Revolution in the World System: Theses and Queries”  Wallerstein argues that the revolt of 1968 was both against U.S. hegemony, as well as against a set of older counter-systemic movements that succeeded in taking state power, without producing the transformation in social relations that were promised by these movements.

[28] Michel de Certeau,  The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 177.