CRITIQUE OF EVERYTHING + JOHN HUTNYK + There is a problem with narrow conceptions of cultural studies that would require us to endorse any one proposed solution or adopt any one critical tradition. I would like to see them all thrive and compete. I have suggested below a number of areas in which a renewal of cultural studies has been underway. I take the work of antecedents of contemporary cultural studies seriously Birmingham, yet also the Frankfurt School, poststructuralism, critical Marxisms, Feminism, Subaltern, etc. I also want to drag us, kicking and screaming perhaps, into some of the fields in which that work has offered promise—architecture, media, activism, culture industries, postcolonialism—and offered relevance beyond safe parameters of scholarship. Critical still of those who speak of things they do not know well, I would not yet like to give up on the poststructuralists, or the Maoist anti-war activists, or.. the many and varied influences of cultural studies in all its diversity, from which I learn. I have not exhausted that variety here. I don’t think we can. We are not defeated, though the chreats are severe. Ido feel we have to recognise some difficult truths about the neo-liberal compact. ‘The University is the last uneasy and semi-comfortable place that is not yet in 100 per cent total denial of the white supremacist, neo-imperialist, war-mongering social privilege and violence that is, frankly, the general condition of the whole of Western capital, the ‘Suomen Antropologi: Journal ofthe Finnish Anthropological Society 3/2011 71FORUM: CONSTRUCTIVE CRITIQUES OF CULTURAL STUDIES ruling class State, and its many comprador clients, including, of course, the University itself (a sorry fraction do not see it this way, but we still can engage them). Everything is not ok. Everywhere else there is also denial, but perhaps the ongoing complicity of the critic is the most jarring. We are of a discipline, or advocates of an inter-disciplinarity, that promised much. So how does this endeavour fare in interesting times? Directives for research funding bodies to adopt themes of interest to government, with an eye to national economic priority, commercial and vocational application, and issues of national security, amount to knowledge twisted to the service of Empire. Disquiet amongst colleagues and protests in the streets, occupations on the campuses, refusals of regulation, threats, strikes, despair, all suggest a volatility that needs to be cut with a knife, ora pen. That said, I don't think giving up the possibility of teaching a critique of everything is the best next move. Cultural studies, as the generic name for a range of challenges to thinking that operate through innovative practices of inquiry, analysis and investigation, in a wide range of materials, styles and forms, is under threat in the UK, along with much else. I wonder if this follows from forced transformations in other zones. We now recognise complicity, we know we need to think differently, and we know this must entail a built-in opposition to complacency. I also write as the Conservative-Liberal Democratic alliance that governs these Islands is introducing an unprecedented raft of repressive measures alongside marketization and operationalization of higher education, swingeing cuts in most other sectors of society, and geo-strategic war on at least three fronts—Afghanistan and Iraq, of course, and also now in Libya. There has not been a more relevant, or disquieting time, to practise critical theory. ‘My enthusiasm though is charged by new work on identity and subjectivity suspended within institutional structures and border regimes which addresses bodies and affect with, a political sensibility. We write in a war zone, with a siege mentality. The containment of movement in volatile times opens up fissures of feeling and meaning, passionate encounters as well as intractable blockages, New venues for culeural studies One example of recent work that illustrates a challenging venue for cultural studies is the architectural practice of the group Bureau de Mésarchitectures in France. Their body- conforming fight container for deportation (2000) is designed for in-hold air cargo and viciously critiques the exclusion, deportation and repatriation regimes of Fortress Europe. ‘The troubling shape of this container, so familiar from the catering boxes loaded onto planes from the tarmac, recalls the body shape of the Stateless. Can we imagine this body in flight and in stasis, prone, trussed, beaten, and soon to be dumped in who knows which no-man's land from which again and again economic refugees start out for the apparent richer promise across the border? That every step of the way is subject to costing, charging, extortion and loss is only part of the tragedy. That hostile reception awaits, and that cold-hearted calculation has replaced policies of compassion, are the affective indicators of a moribund culture. Many years ago the discipline of the body was made a theme for cultural studies by Michel Foucault. Fruitful work since then has adapted the comportment and affective 2 ‘Suomen Antropologi: Journal ofthe Finnish Anthropological Sociesy 3/2011PORUM: CONSTRUCTIVE CRETIQUES OF CULTURAL STUDIES co-ordinates of contemporary life to be staples of analytic investment. In contemporary Britain government-managed scholarly inquiry troops the colours of social science up the flagpole of anticipation, but then nationalizes the curriculum. Restrictions on visa application, closure of so-called ‘fake’ colleges, privileged export education market for some, declining recruits for others—the UK Border Authority is even demanding that University staff report attendance records for all foreign students. The fall-out here is immense, teaching becomes surveillance, the border enters the classroom. Keeping with the architectural, I have long been inspired by Eyal Weizman’s book Hollow Land which is one of several new appraisals of border-politics that embraces theoretical and political engagement. Weizman takes us right into the landscape and shows usa three-dimensional cartography informed by militaristic (Israeli) appropriations of post-structuralist theory and twisted exploitations of (Palestinian) lives. His book also reconfigures—like all good books should—the very possibility of thinking about this topic. We must want destabilizations such as this. That the geography of Palestine and the politics of the Israeli military can be rendered three-dimensional shows both the enormity and the stakes of the border as contest. It is the cross-imbrication of interests, polit studies and offers the possibility of relevance. New media and on-line activisms inspired by philosophical commentary and activist mischief creatively re-tool the cultural industries and challenge marketization. Open source in the political field opens up new vistas for the sociology of struggles and trades union herstories. Multimedia and direct-to-camera journalism, albeit co-ordinated on corporate platforms (Web 2.0 FB, YouTube) alongside global news outlets, seek untested, and so fresh, talking heads. This offers geography reconfigured as a time-slot TV schedule as much as geopolitical mapping, Television and screens are pertinent and deserving of close inspection. With Bernard Stiegler, in his epic Technics and Time series, we can debate our often too quick assumptions that alienation and disaffection are the consequence of how corporate media captures youth. When this assumption is challenged, a range of possible, creative, apparent misuses of media become interesting. The social in media sounds out a sonic probe for the non-proximate conviviality of electronic company. We can be together over space, indeed we always have been, even as we value the immediate in a knowing staginess. In so many places nostalgia for the community is challenged by the specificities and distribution of cosmopolitan competence. Empathy across airwaves can be as constitutive as close physical contact—and as violent, destructive or mundane. As half a million people marched in London against budget cuts on March 26" 2011 (this was the Government's own estimate so we might expand the number) and the street level mobilizations increased analytical engagement, all the Government did was to demonize. The irruption of struggles into the public is itself an opportunity for cultural studies, though only in a reworked, re-imagined way. We are all in this together, as the slogan goes. and practices that invigorates cultural Tasks We can call this being together ‘culture’, but that word is looking decidedly worn and usually only appears when the game is bureaucratic deployment of ‘Culture™ for Swomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 3/2011 2BFORUM: CONSTRUCTIVE CRITIQUES OF CULTURAL STUDIES gain. In London today this means the hype and boosterism of the Olympics, with local initiatives promising much but delivering little—early targets for social improvement quietly abandoned, There is a peculiar and hollow aspect in the sound of Stare-endorsed cultural capital—the tragic and useless life of a salesman already at death's door, peddling old wares without enthusiasm, unable to muster a bullet point mention at the annual accounting meeting. Perhaps unknown beyond the shores of this overworked Island, the current conservative Minister for Universities was recently featured in the press as having said that he thinks one of the problems for social mobility for men is a consequence of women working, He did say this on April Fool’s day, but pethaps I can be forgiven for not getting the joke. The conservative defence of the family takes on an absurd form, picking a fight with the gains of feminism and ignoring the Conservative Party's destruction of the manufacturing sector in the first place. A resurgent feminism—for example the popular text of Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman, from Zero Books, makes salient reading in the context of the rabid search for someone to blame for August's riots. That bonus-fat-cat bankers, politicians who abuse expense-accounts and eavesdropping journalists are in league with this family compact is a task for cultural studies to undo. To deny that cuts and repressive policing in a time of illegal war and commercial collapse are the main contradictions of the present conjuncture while whining about family values is mockery. The old parameters of class, race and gender conflict do seem relevant again. But then they did never go away. The point is to take all this together—the cuts, the war, the economy, the struggles. And to then use this resurgent multi-disciplinary enthusiasm for critical work that breaks with the mould of convention. I am reading Amitava Kumar's new book A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, which, pethaps unsurprisingly, examines the new literatures that have emerged in the wake of the war on terror post-September 11, 2001. By new literatures Kumar means ‘War Lit’ reporting, and “Terror Lit’ to which he adds a genre that might be called ‘detainee lit’ —seeking out and interviewing a number of those unjustly or disproportionately incarcerated or persecuted in America and elsewhere by the legal and covert war administration. Among the heart-wrenching cases he reports is a range of photographic interventions curated in galleries that document the lives of detainees using photography as a research tool. Photography here is implicated in multiple ways in the production of terror, but sometimes documentary practices can turn that around. For example, Trever Paglin’s book Torture Taxi seeks out and exposes, thorough a range of media and investigative techniques, the ‘dark sites’ of special rendition and the kidnapping of citizens of sovereign countries for transport to off-shore torture and disappearance. To turn to photography as a tool challenges earlier assumptions. The mug shot, the exposé, the front page scoop—photography as evidence has been through the truth test of exploding indexicality. The picture must lie, the editing, cropping and perspectival conditions of partial view are almost so commonplace now they are again obscured. Documentary evidence turns out to be a question of ratings. And didn’t the paparazzi at Abu Ghraib know that, as did the military who hung the hapless Lynndie England out to dry but left the detention system intact? To have mentioned the torture photos of Abu Ghraib does raise the question of specific responsibility on the part of cultural studies. Responsibility to the situation and the circumstances which we can work to know and redress. There remains a felt, but only 74 ‘Suomen Antropologi: Journal ofthe Finnish Anthropological Society 3/2011FORUM: CONSTRUGIIVE CRITIQUES OF CULTURAL STUDIES sometimes explicitly articulated, need to attend to the counter stories of the war on terror without making them a publishing curiosity. I am not keen on conspiracy tales, but | am interested in the efforts of those who would caution and err on the side of proportion by insisting that the excesses of the war are a political strategy on the part of a paranoid capitalism. No need to overplay this drama, the numbers of the dead in the equation have their own tragic eloquence. We do have to look at the photographs and count the killings. There is possibly nothing more important than the injunction to have a look for yourself. ‘This is the heart of the investigative impulse behind all study of culture. Interpretation and analysis require working with those who practice, and although of course research can be practice (and indeed there is not one without the other), the imperative to look to local meanings and articulate the detailed significance of always complicated predicaments is the beginning of informed and collective participation. I have in mind the careful work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the patient effort to rearrange desire and inculeate a lexicon-consulting responsibility in those who would choose, as if any other choice was viable, to fight and write against injustice. Her essay ‘Righting Wrongs’ is most salutary in this regatd (in her book Osher Asias). The narrative that attends to the displacements of desire is a wake-up call, If we are to take seriously the way cultural studies sometimes proffers proposals for a renewed democratic culture, it must mean something more than a celebrity-popularity contest every four years that abdicates responsibility for governance toa bunch of barely accountable apparatchiks. The participatory democracy on the cards now, the only one that would challenge the war machine, the bureaucracy machine, the celebrity machine and the television screen, must be a truly militant and informed cultural studies, for all. Everything must be studied, occupied, and debated. From all perspectives, and untelentingly. For this we do need a critical questioning of everything, as Marxists had said, Wichout a rampant intellectual embrace, Governance is ordering, disorder is control, thought is a box and life is dead. The bombs that are falling and the cuts that are cutting are no way to live, and the collective project of exploring how else to organise things is the only, multiple, extravagant, voracious and viable option. REFERENCES Kumas, A. 2010. A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb. Dutham NC: Duke University Press. Paglin, T. 2006. Tarsure Taxi: On the Trail of he CIA’ Rendition Flights. London: Verso. Power, N. 2010 One Dimensional Woman. London: Zero Books 2010. Spivak, G. C. 2008. Osher Asias. Oxford: Blackwell Stiegler, B. 1998, 2009, 2010. Technics and Time (3 vols). Stanford: Stanford University Press, “Weizman, E. 2007. Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso. PROFESSOR JOHN HUTNYK ACADEMIC DIRECTOR CENTRE FOR CULTURAL STUDIES GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE John. Hurnyk@gold.ac.uk ‘Suomen Anttopologi Journal ofthe Finnish Anthropological Sociery 3/2011 75