On cultural studies

The desire called Cultural Studies is perhaps best approached politically and socially, as the project to constitute a “historic bloc, " rather than theoretically, as the floor plan for a new discipline. The politics in such a project are, to be sure, “academic” politics, the politics within the university, and, beyond it, in intellectual life in general, or in the space of intellectuals as such. At a time, however, when the Right has begun to develop its own cultural politics, focused on the reconquest of the academic institutions, and in particular of the foundations and the universities themselves, it does not seem wise to go on thinking of academic politics, and the politics of intellectuals, as a particularly “academic” matter. In any case, the Right seems to have understood that the project and the slogan of Cultural Studies (whatever that may be) constitutes a ctucial target in its campaign and virtually a synonym for “political correctness” (which may in this context be identified simply as the cultural politics of the various “new social movements”: antiracism, antisexism, antihomophobia, and so forth).

Duke Scholars

Author Fredric Jameson Literature