.The UKZN Griot. Of Left and Right
Keyan G Tomaselli*
I am often asked, ‘What is cultural studies?’ The phrase sounds like a goof-off touchy-feely set of silly creative practices conducted by arty-farty academics pretending to be culturally relevant. Those who have read into bona fide cultural studies know otherwise, that it developed a highly rigorous and daunting philosophical interrogation of a variety of disciplines in establishing its body of knowledge derived from the study of ways of life in conflict. The outcome was to change the way that the humanities and some social sciences go about their business.
June 2014 saw the end of an era at the University of Birmingham (BU) where the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) originated in 1964, but where it was opportunistically terminated in 2002, with a reoccupation from 2014 as a successor generation tried to recover and codify the Centre’s global impact in an archive, exhibition and conference. These events followed shortly after Stuart Hall’s death. Jamaican-born Hall was the Acting Director for many years and it was under his leadership that most of the top British cultural and media studies scholars graduated. This event was simultaneously conference, tribute and wake, not just in memory of Hall but also the memory of what should be. Hall-the-ancestor was with us all the way, in video, in concepts, in eulogies, in a space that had always been hostile to the Centre and its critique of Thatcherism, and its concern with popular culture and working class issues, read through history.
It quickly became clear what BU had squandered: a global cultural studies (CS) intelligentsia catalyzed by the Centre, successive cohorts of media studies scholars who established the paradigm, community activists who took resistance strategies they had learned at the Centre to the streets and communities, and a unique publishing project and interdisciplinary analyses that anticipated the rise of the neoliberalism wrecking ball where outputs are ranked over inputs; game-changing paradigm shift is eschewed over conveyer belt research, and where creativity, innovation and conceptual risk-taking are now discouraged.
Three themes emerged as historically constituting the CCCS project: a) how academics could work as organic intellectuals in exposing anti-democratic tendencies, b) how to create the New Left (opposing anti-humanist Stalinism and critically interrogating capitalism), and c) cultural studies offered the ‘critical cut that cannot be healed, creating a critical ruin that cannot be reassembled’, observed Iain Chambers, a graduate of the Centre. Pervasive and repressive hegemonies – within and without the academy – would be contested, fractured and exposed, and then replaced with democratic bodies of practice. CS was once a globally collaborative and uniquely energetic space; now, it is largely an undergraduate teaching programme sometimes celebrating, but more usually studying, consumptive aspects of neoliberalism. It has been tamed. Porn Studies, Celebrity Studies, Consumer Culture, and a whole slew of titles on fashion studies, are just some of the new journals that feed the field, often critically it needs to be stated, though many students and their lecturers often, ironically, interpret these critiques as technical manuals enabling their successful entry into neoliberal enterprise.
What has been exposed, thus, is the failure of cultural studies to stem the repressive tide of the kind of unfettered and unregulated neoliberalism whose banking interests nearly destroyed the global economy after 2007. No other field has ever imagined itself as a player in the winning or losing of struggles, as did the Birmingham trajectory and its diasporic variants. Few disciplines take sides, though all do, whether admitted or not. Where some journals do retain the critical cut, the classroom has lost the sharpness, and while tertiary management tolerates abstract political economic critique, it is often intolerant of questions that address the systems and assumptions that manage the contemporary neoliberal academy.
Where the Birmingham Centre was always an unrealised asset at its home institution, CCMS research directions always have had the support of top management here. Where CCCS was on the losing side, CCMS was on the winning side, just until the win was turned into a loss by willful regression into elitist hegemony. CS was part of the South African policy moment of the 1990s: cultural, media, education, and health promotion. UKZN staff and students contributed white papers, strategy documents, policy generation and all manner of initiatives, as did others from elsewhere. But the New Left lost its way, talking left but walking right as Patrick Bond has observed.
The New new left comes and goes, but occupations of Wall Street, protests against the World Cup as the greatest exploitative neoliberal roadshow ever, fail, but keep dissent bubbling. If capital can survive the banking meltdown, and with state connivance still reward the thieving perpetrators for their utter failure and dishonesty, the failure itself becomes lauded as legitimate success. Processes are turned inside-out - all that’s sold melts into air. That’s the contradiction that still needs to be examined (with apologies to Karl Marx).
The conference marked the closure of a heady, never-to-be-repeated era, one that began 50 years ago. At its wake where its ageing CS apostles met, joked, and commiserated with each other, the warmth and collegiality was extraordinary, one borne from a common project that had started in England but which also arose out of Frankfurt School sociologies of Nazism. Out of this last collective gasp emerged the CCCS Archive, a living index to what could have been, hosted by the University that had thought it had laid CCCS to rest. Yet, the cessation of the Centre at Birmingham in 2002 could not impede CS’s growth elsewhere or, indeed, its “pop-up” reinsertion into its old nemesis, as Richard Johnson kep telling delegates. This is the dialectic at work.
Cutting critical thought remains the raison d’être of the academy – though it may take on new forms. Back home, many old organic intellectuals who fought apartheid from the trenches however are now the self-enriched technical intellectuals of the new elitism, though many others are now again popping up as the new organic intellectuals in the post-apartheid era interrogating the new hegemonies. The generation replacing us battered old timers (the once-were-warriors) was present but largely silent: for many of them CS is a syllabus, not revolt, philosophy or reconstruction; for them no new order is even imaginable under current circumstances, though two youngsters from the periphery did interject with appeals about the need to decolonize theory.
All in all, here at UKZN CCMS and many others in many disciplines have been part of a global era and intellectual movement that may be never again repeated. This column is thus testimony to the vision of the staff-student committee whose ceaseless work arising out of the smoke of Soweto ’76 put in place a project that endured well into the post-apartheid era. As my colleague Lauren Dyll-Myklebust observed on reading the draft of this column, ‘We need to find and “train” (in CCMS) the new warriors that can grapple with society today.’
*Keyan G Tomaselli was a speaker at the CCCS50 conference, where he regaled colleagues about life in the trenches and how CS enabled a new democracy to emerge.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this column are the author’s own.