cultural studies & deconstruction

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Cultural Studies & Deconstruction

by Mr. Gary Hall

Submitted to: Submitted by:

Shanthi Mathai Mam PrashastKishore



Wh

at is Culture? � Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning "to

cultivate") is a term that has various meanings. For example, in 1952,

Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of

"culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions.

However, the word "culture" is most commonly used in three basic senses:� Excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, also known as high

culture

� An integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that

depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning

� The set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes aninstitution, organization or group.



Wh

at is Deconstruction? � Deconstruction is on the one hand, a movement of overturning or reversal

of the asymmetrical binary hierarchies of metaphysical thought (one/many,

same/other center/peripher), in such a way as to register the constitutive

dependence of the major on the minor term; on the other, a movement

beyond the framework delimited by these terms to an always provisionalsuspension of their force.



Ch

aracteristics of Deconstruction� Deconstruction fails to provide a positive alternative politics and is

therefore conservative.

� Deconstruction is concerned too much with theory and texts, and not

enough with practical political issues.

� Deconstruction is just a mode of negative literary or philosophical critique



Cultural Studies after Gramsci, Hegemony

T h

eory and t h

e Birmingh

am Sch

ool� Cultural studies has a lot of analytic work to do in terms of trying to

interpret how a society is changing in ways that are not amenable to the

immediate political language.

� Close to two million people can protest on the streets of London against

attacking Iraq, but Tony Blair is still prepared to 'ignore the public will' andtake his country to war on the grounds that he and George W. Bush

consider the use of such force and power the right thing to do - and what's

more he doesn't need to hide it. Hegemony is thus 'inadequate', according

to Grossberg, 'to either analyse or respond to the complexly changing

balance in the field of forces or, more conventionally, to the vectors and

restructurings that are potentially changing the very fabric of power and

experienceµ.



Cultural Studies & Hardt & Negri� There is a growing disparity between the apparent vectors and effects of

"culture" and the leading edge of political transformation and historical

change this leading edge is seen as having been analysed most powerfully

in recent years.

� Hardt¶s and Negri¶s thesis is this: a new era is emerging, what they callEmpire, for which the current methods of analysis are no longer adequate.

They are inadequate because µthey remain fixated on attacking an old form

of power and propose a strategy of liberation that could be effective only

on that old terrain.What is missing here is a recognition of the novelty of

the structures and logics of power that order the contemporary world.



CommunityW

it h

out Community� R easoning here is based on two methodological approaches that are

intended to be non-dialectical and absolutely immanent: the first is critical

and deconstructive, aiming to subvert the hegemonic languages and social

structures and thereby reveal an alternative ontological basis that resides in

the creative and productive practices of the multitude; the second isconstructive and ethico-political , seeking to lead the process of the

production of subjectivity toward the constitution of an effective social,

political alternative, a new constituent of power.



Concepts of t h

e ¶Dialectic·� µThe conventional one, of totalization, reconciliation and reappropriation

through the work of the negative etc.', evident most obviously in Hardt and

Negri's presentation of Empire as the emergence of a new, non-dialectical

era (albeit, paradoxically, in old, dialectical terms) and desire to move

towards some messianic or teleological political end-goal;� A 'non-conventional figure' which presents Empire as both old and new,

dialectical and non-dialectical, and which holds both the old (commonality,

'totalization, reconciliation and reappropriation') and the new (singularity,

difference, dissensus) together at the same time in 'a concept of dialectic

that is no longer the conventional one of synthesis, conciliation,

reconciliation, totalization, identification with itself; now, on the contrary,

we have a negative or an infinite dialectic that is the movement of

synthesizing without synthesis'.



Concepts of t h

e ¶Infinite Dialectic',� This is indeed an irreducibly violent stabilisation of something 'essentially

unstable'.

� This stabilisation can never be fully or finally achieved. There is always

something that escapes, something different, heterogeneous, other, an

excess, 'a supplement that does not let itself be dialecticized'.� This is not just the case with regard to Empire and the multitude, but to

politics in general. Hence the way in which even the 'old' 'horizontal'

struggles weren't 'organised' or welded together for Hardt and Negri, but

constituted merely a 'potential or virtual unity of the international

proletariat' that 'was never fully actualised'



Inventing a New Cultural Studies� The point is to acknowledge that the inherent instability and irreducible

violence of this relation cannot be resolved, eliminated or escaped; instead,

it constitutes the potential for collectivity and community at the same time

as providing its essential limits. In this way, far from being merely an

intellectual exercise, as many of its critics have claimed, deconstruction canprovide a means of exploring forms of social and political organisation

which avoid fusional and totalising (and totalitarian) fantasies of arriving at

the One, at total unity and unification, while nevertheless being compatible

with some form of gathering together of a multiplicity of singularities.



In the Words of Gary Hall

� That's what deconstruction means to me: that's what I understand Derrida

to be saying: we have no other language in which philosophy has been

conducted, and it no longer works; but we're not yet in some other

language, and we may never be« That is exactly what the notion post

means for me. So, postcolonial is not the end of colonialism. It is after acertain kind of colonialism, after a certain moment of high imperialism and

colonial occupation - in the wake of it, in the shadow of it, inflected by it -

it is what it is because something else has happened before, but it is also

something new.



With Four Points Concerning the R elation Between

Cultural Studies & Deconstruction.

1. cultural studies' attempts at closing down the question of what it is to be

political by deciding on the answer to this question in advance (e.g. that

today, in the wake of 9/11 and the attack on Iraq, and now 7/7, it involves

shifting away from theory and deconstruction towards politics and the

'real') is precisely not political . Interestingly, this can be concluded fromreading one of the very texts it is suggested cultural studies turn to in order

to be more political: Empire. (This is not to say a responsible decision

cannot be taken to the effect that political economy, or whatever, is the

political thing to do in a particular situation; just that a decision has to be

taken on each singular occasion for it to be responsible, and not made in

advance.)



2. Far from failing to help with pragmatic political decisions, deconstruction

provides one of the most rigorous and responsible means of doing so -

precisely because deconstruction does not simply decide what constitutes

politics and the political in advance of the moment of decision. In this way,

by means of a calculation that is open to the complexities of a social or cultural situation, to the incalculable, to what cannot be predicted or

foreseen, deconstruction can help cultural studies take just and responsible

political decisions; decisions which are sensitive to the specific demands -

including 'real', practical, empirical, experiential, concrete demands - of

each singular conjunction of the 'here' and 'now'.



3. The necessity of keeping the question of the political open, and of not

deciding in advance what is political (that it obviously is to be concerned

with left politics, the economic, hegemonic struggle, but obviously not so

much with theory, deconstruction, the extreme, the animal, the secret and

so forth), has a direct relation to the difficulty of Derrida's works, andespecially the difficulty of identifying in them an obvious politics, at least

of the kind many people in cultural studies would recognise.



4. The questioning of the political space is also one of the most cultural studies

thing to do of all. (I'm returning here once more to Derrida's strategy of

reading based on the notion of non-oppositional difference.) Hence the way

it's previously been possible for me to produce careful readings of certain

privileged texts in the cultural studies tradition which, by following their logic as closely and rigorously as possible, reveal these texts to challenge

and disrupt that tradition - including its ideas of politics and what it is to be

political - as much as they uphold and maintain it. Such inventive

interventions in the cultural studies tradition - which are more than cultural

studies while still being cultural studies - are readable:



Video Clip Links

� http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YkXDTQ7iFs

� http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgwOjjoYtco&playnext=1

&list=PLFD8A8F5BB33144A8

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