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 18th
and 19th 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 18th century to the middle part of the 20th
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.
[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.
