Critique for What? by Joel Pfister

Author:Joel Pfister [Pfister, Joel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317261803
Google: uAdZCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-01-08T06:00:58+00:00

Why (Is) Cultural Studies?

The Left often tends to characterize—sometimes glamorize—itself as oppositional, adversarial, radical, dissident. While identifying oneself as radical certainly can give one a resistant subjective potency and a transgressive air of political defiance, it is also a way of announcing that one or one’s group stands apart from the hegemonic crowd and, unlike them, has not been bamboozled. Paradoxically, the Left often makes a virtue out of its marginalized in-the-minority identity, even as it strategizes to hegemonize and become the majority. As the founders of early Cold War cultural studies well knew, Left bids for majority support did not always take this tack. Not long before cultural studies was established, the organized Left styled itself as the obvious majority choice. As the Labour Party’s prime minister of Britain from 1945–51, Clement Attlee ushered in some fundamental structural reforms, including the National Health Service and the nationalization of key industries. One commentator described his cultural “style”: “It suited him to be thought a dull little man, and to sound rather like a suburban bank manager. Such people can make revolutions and no one will be frightened.” Attlee conveyed reassuring respectability, not if-you-were-as-clever-as-I-am-you’d-be-radical hipness.76 The encoding of certain political beliefs as cool and others as uncool can of course alienate groups—branded uncool—whose support the Left would like to win. Nevertheless, Attlee’s own appeal was by no means timeless. He exemplified the postwar Left program and style that Hall argued was in need of New Left revision in the 1950s and long outmoded by the 1980s. Hall and his colleagues were right—the Left had to acknowledge new constituencies, issues, forms of economic power, contradictions, and understandings of what constitute “politics.”

Likewise, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, founder of the Rainbow Coalition in the mid-1980s, had to negotiate American New Times. It is fascinating to wonder whether Hall noticed any similarities—not just the many obvious differences—between Attlee’s older reassuring Leftism and Jackson’s approach when he interviewed him in 1986 to discuss strategies for popularizing the Rainbow Coalition. In one revealing exchange between Jackson-the-political leader and Hall-the-political intellectual, Jackson rejected Hall’s description of his foreign policy proposals as “radical.” Jackson preferred a different vocabulary—his foreign policy proposals, he insisted, were “moral,” not radical, and fundamentally in America’s best “interests.” (Nowadays the accent on the critical often supplants the stress on the moral, while many in the New Left era were at home with the idea of a critical morality, a socialist morality.) Whatever strength and confidence American progressive forces might gain by billing themselves as “radical,” Jackson, by implication, seemed to view this tactic as self-limiting and impolitic if the goal is to win majority support.77 The Reverend Jackson instead attempted to reappropriate discourses of righteousness—rooted in the Civil Rights movement—that the New Right had used to attract an electoral majority.

How might one label progressive forces if one’s aim is to popularize them in the new millennium? Which label and which history that goes with the label work best in which conditions: common sense, moral,

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