Cultural studies and the radical left

Notes for my paper in Hong Kong. Very rough at the moment. I'll revise them as I go.

The question it asks is: What would be at stake if we were to consider cultural studies to be an academic arm of the radical left? By radical left I mean that political stream that seeks not just the reform of the current political system or further emancipatory capacities within the current political system but the restructuring of the system.

This question is here treated as a thought experiment: I am not committed to thinking that cultural studies ought to belong to the radical left, I am trying to think what it would like if that were the case.
Indeed I am merely analsysing the conditions for and consequences of posing such a question.

Several reasons pose it:
1. cultural studies emerges from out of the particular forms of revolutionary desire expressed in "1968" (One instance: the importance of Maoism to Althusser and to Tel Quel in the sixties and also to figures like Ranciere.)
2. there are signs that the intersection of global governmentality and global capitalism is unstable, particularily in relation to the environment, in relation to militarization and in relation to unevenness of distribution of wealth.
3. the fact that so little work has been done from the radical-left perspective over the past thirty years, since the collapse in the socialist ideal. One important reason for this has been that post-left radical politics (the new social movements) has been so suspicious of institutionalisation: movements of resistance mobilize around specific events or legislations and then dissolve. A politics without a transmissible collective identity, without formal institutions, which belongs more to the anarchist than to left tradition as I understand the latter. This seems to me related in the failure of radical cultural studies to deal with the question of governmentality, which has been in the hands of the Foucauldians.


To ask this question involves theorising the concept of the left, and to imagine the forms that a restructured political order might take. It could also analyse the possibilities for working towards such an order.
I am here only concerned, and very briefly, with the first.
The radical left cannot be thought of as realist: it is not simply a participant in the 'acutally existing' political scene, but rather as motivated by a mix of fantasy and detachment within a particular psycho-moral and intellectual tradition.

In the broadest terms: the left (whether radical or reformist) is based on the following commitments:
1. to the secularization of the lifeworld and the understanding that private goods and opportunities are socially produced [intellectual framework]
3. to political action which is not simply an expression of given interests or identities [psycho-moral framework]
It usually also involves:
3. a trust in the capacity of political systems to deliver significant social change and a commitment to distributing power, freedom, happiness evenly across society by distributing the capacity to participate in society evenly.
4. a faith that disinterested intersubjective deliberation and knowledge production will help legitimate its project

In our academic context to begin to imagine a radical left cultural studies has various obvious problems:
1. how to legitimate a discipline based on a particular politics within the formally politically neutral academic system, and, if it comes to that, which in social-democratic states is increasingly coming under state control
2. cultural studies, which involves a restricted range of skill and interests, is not capable of imagining a restructured governmentality, not least because of the historical failure of the left project fully to account for cultural agency in social formation.
3. The problematic relation between state bureaucracies and left political project.