I figured out how to handle cultural studies. I've spent much time on this blog denouncing its irrelevance to the real world, its obsession with minutiae and its celebration of marginalism.

But this assumes that cultural studies should 'do' something. Marx said it best: "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." Contemporary cultural studies came from Marxism. Culture is a key field for capitalist power. If we want to overturn capitalism, we'd better understand how it uses culture to perpetuate itself.

Yesterday in my cultural studies class, a frustrated radical complained there wasn't much critiquing going on. There were two responses: "There other things besides critique, like analysis," and, "Why do we have to critique? Can't we just understand?"

I went into cultural studies so I could read books!

That, in a nutshell, is cultural studies today. We have no responsibility to struggle (let alone a compulsion, arising from disgust at the gross inequalities of the world.) We can sit back on our pasty, latte-fed asses and pontificate about signs & signifiers, reflection and receptivity. At the end of the day, we feel good about ourselves for having 'understood' a tiny chunk of the world. Conveniently, our post-modern euphoria says the world is in a state of unending flux, so we can go back and keep explaining it forever - or at least until we retire. We can write thick, smug books that rip out bits of systemic thinkers. Gramsci lies gasping on the floor beneath us; we've torn out a lung that says "hegemony" on it. We'll leave the brain that says "ideology" and the heart that says "communism" because they're too messy, and harder to tear out - your hands get stuck. He'll be dead again soon enough, anyway.

A dirty game

This isn't really cultural studies' fault. Postmodernism is to blame. The worst thing about postmodernism is that it denies its own existence. If you make any claim on postmodernism, its adherents respond, "That's one thinker - we've got dozens who all say something different." There's no such thing as postmodernism - there's just many pomos, which we can pick and choose at our leisure. As a Marxist, I have a legacy to defend, a systemic body of work to critically evaluate. The worst thing about postmodernism is not its dishonesty, but its cowardice. It refuses to engage, because its premises might crumble into dust. It just tears down everything else.

I need a career that lets me recycle tired academic concepts...

Let me define a few postmodern premises, since the pomos aren't willing to do it themselves. Postmodernism is:

- a rejection of systemic thinking. Beyond some ever-shifting point, the world is too complex to understand. Pomo retreats to individuals as the basic unit of analysis, and hence individualism: a premise it shares with liberalism.
- a fixation on the ahistorical and abstract. Marxism also says the world is in constant flux, but it grounds it in historical patterns and structures. Postmodernism denies the historical, in any broad sense, because it would lead back to identifiable systems.
- anti-humanism, therefore elitism. For all its claims to 'radical subjectivity', pomo denies history and hence real people acting in history. Social action becomes a matter of analysis - conveniently enough for the academics who have made this their careers.
- inconsistency, eclecticism and intellectual laziness. Systemic thought demands rigour. There are standards outside the body of thought itself. In Marxism, those standards are imposed by history, by social relations, by identifiable processes of struggle. Postmodernism likes to 'play', plucking terms and ideas from different traditions. I've now read a few books in which the authors simultaneously deny class, deny class struggle, deny capital as a commodity-logic - and then use terms like 'global economy' and 'industrialism'. Those words have meaning. If we have a global economy, we have social organization, conflict, labour, objective forces at work upon people - all the things pomos reject.

What happened to capitalists, before they had postmodernists to defend them

In response, a postmodernist would claim none of this relates to 'their' conception of postmodernism. Well, guess again. As soon as theories claim the world is incomprehensible as a system, they're open to all these charges. The proof of the pudding is in the eating: as soon as it gives up critique for 'analysis', pomo is worse than useless. By refusing to acknowledge or describe capitalist power structures, postmodernism justifies their existence. It's the perfect theory for academic careerism, for well-meaning liberals who don't like getting their elegant hands dirty with questions of material power. To handle cultural studies, I just have to ignore the postmodern infection, and pretend the world is a healthy, happy place.

Last word goes to Lenin, from Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. It's 100 years old, I used it in an essay a decade ago, and it's still relevant today:

The infinite stupidity of the philistine, smugly retailing the most hackneyed rubbish under cover of a new "empirio-critical" systemisation and terminology...A pretentious cloak of verbal artifices, clumsy devices of syllogistics, subtle scolasticism - in short, as in epistemology, so in sociology, the same reaction­ary content under the same flamboyant signboard.

Comrades, I'd like to make a truth claim here!