1 Paper delivered to Third International Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 21-25 June 2000 University of Birmingham, UK

From Cultural Studies to Cultural Politics Max Farrar School of Cultural Studies Leeds Metropolitan University The sub-title for this paper was supposed to be ‘New Routes for Radicals’ but I’ve dumped that. There’s nothing particularly new about the route I’m suggesting for the political work of intellectuals in the Marxist tradition. The sub-title was an inter-textual reference to a book by the North American radical intellectual and activist called Saul Alinsky. First published in 1946, it was called Reveille for Radicals. As some of you will know, Alinsky proposed a method of political work within low income neighbourhoods in which radical intellectuals, usually rooted in the Communist Party, would organise tenants into committees and campaigns against the political machines which ran the city. One of my recommendations today is that left intellectuals should return to political activism in the cities, towns and villages in which we live. Many of us, of course, have never given up, to quote the most excellent Jacky Fleming (1992). There’s nothing new about such a proposal. But I’ve also dropped the sub-title because I don’t want to reduce cultural politics to activism. I want to suggest some directions in which our cultural theory and research might be usefully developed. On this I’m going to make several interrelated points. One is that the ‘return to political economy’ argument in cultural studies is misplaced. I’m going to demonstrate this by referring to three areas of intellectual endeavour in which the economic and the cultural are so clearly inseparable that we should not waste any more words about returning or departing from the economic or the cultural. These areas are youth culture, social movements and ‘race’. These fields, as well as civic culture, are, I believe extremely important sites for intervention, politically and intellectually. In the abstract for this paper, written in haste on a day when angst was particularly potent, I said this paper would be

2 autobiographical and would leak with nostalgia. There won’t be too much of that, you might be relieved to hear. And it really will only take 20 minutes.

Let me start, then, by setting out my theoretical and political stall. For the last thirty years I’ve identified with the libertarian wing of far-left politics. From 1975 to some time in the early 1980s I was heavily committed to an organisation called Big Flame which was so small that many of you will never have heard of it. Our 200 or so members were in perpetual debate about how to keep an equal distance from Leninism, Trotskyism and Anarchism. We called ourselves revolutionary socialists and many of us also called ourselves libertarians, in the days before right wing Thatcherite lunatics tried to appropriate that term. We followed the analysis made by the Italian marxist organisation called Lotta Continua of the social factory, arguing that the struggle against capital was now equally intense in welfare, in the housing estates, in the cities as it was in industry. We added to this an equal commitment to the struggle over gender, sexual orientation and ‘race’, supporting the autonomous organisation of the brothers and sisters fighting on each of those terrains. We dissolved at some indeterminate point in the early 1980s. Indeterminate because we didn’t believe in democratic centralism, so most of us just decided that there was no space for an organisation like ours when the Thatcher government got into its highest gear. No central committee was ever gong to tell us when our time was up.

Since I jacked in a sociology PhD in 1974 and only became a born again sociologist twenty years later, I missed the exciting theoretical debates in universities over Althusserianism, the linguistic turn, structuralism, Lacanianism, post-structuralism and the like. In Big Flame we developed a theory which was rooted in class struggle Marxism, but critical of Marxism’s neglect of ‘race’, gender and sexuality. To fill those gaps we adopted socialist feminist theory, a Jamesian analysis of ‘race’ and a broadly Reichian approach to sexuality. I came to my view about the base-superstructure debate, the issue which seems to have most exercised Marxists in and around cultural studies over the last ten

3 or fifteen years, out of my reading of Italian Marxists like Tronti and Negri, from the work of CLR James, and out of the experience of political activity from the late 1960s to date. None of these authors seem to command much attention in the universities, and my impression is that many leftists who work in universities confine their political activity to research and writing. So I have the not altogether unpleasant feeling of being an outsider in the academy, and even among leftist intellectuals I mainly feel uncomfortable. Reflecting on this discomfort, I realise that one reason is that academics don’t like to share their biographies. Even those female academics, influenced by the consciousness raising of the women’s movement in the 1970s and by the ‘feminist standpoint’ methodologies that emerged in the 1980s, who tell us where they are coming from seem to be covertly scorned for wearing their hearts on their sleeves, and failing to respect the impersonal tone hallowed by conventional academia. Well, I seek to join those scorned women, because I see little or no separation between the personal and the political, because I think we all read and write from a position, and that position should be transparent, and because it is quite unsatisfactory to argue that the position is merely constructed in discourse. In my view, this position is formed in our lived experience, consciously and unconsciously, it is embodied, it is suffused with emotion, and simply to dismiss all that as another type of discourse is to miss a key resource for intellectual and political work. Our work in radical cultural studies should political, intellectual and deeply personal-emotional.

To prepare for this paper I read articles in the edited collection called ‘Cultural Studies in Question’ (Ferguson and Golding, 1997). I was struck by how angry several of the contributors were about the decline they observed in cultural studies into an anti-materialist, apolitical populism. For Todd Gitlin and Jim McGuigan the populism in cultural studies goes hand-in-hand with its excessive concentration on cultural trivia or ‘epi-phenomena’ as that old reactionary Talcott Parsons would say. For Nicholas Garnham, the rejection of political economy invalidates cultural studies, because it ‘exaggerate[s] the freedoms of daily life’

4 (ibid. p. 60). In the last instance, although for Garnham this instance seems to arrive very early, cultural activity is determined by economic activity. But when we get closer to the detailed argument offered by those who call for a return to political economy, we see that they accept many of the contributions made by the so-called populists. McGuigan, too, condemns cultural studies for its emphasis on consumption, rather than production. Then he offers support for the emphasis on language, discourse and hermeneutics, so long as the ‘economic and political determinations’ of cultural commodities are considered (ibid. p. 149). McGuigan even goes so far as to say that John Fiske, the bogeyman populist par excellence ‘is on the side of the angels’ (ibid. p. 141), while Garnham notes the assent offered by Fiske and Larry Grossberg to a materialist, even deterministic, analysis of culture. Since Raymond Williams still seems to command support among a wide range of writers in cultural studies, even including Nicholas Garnham, perhaps we could attend once again to Williams’ formulation of the relationship between the economic base and the cultural superstructure. Williams argued that ‘the base’ refers to ‘specific activities of men [sic] in real social and economic relationships’. These relations are clearly not merely those of the waged work-place relationships. Williams added that ‘determination’ should be interpreted as ‘setting limits’ rather than prefiguring or controlling (Williams, 1980 p. 34).

In my view, this formulation has two major advantages. Firstly, it emphasises, with Marx, that the economy is itself a social sphere, in which relationships between people are necessarily infused with the cultural practices of their time. Not only, therefore, are the economic and the cultural inseparably interlinked, Williams’ formulation has the second advantage of eliminating any residual determinism in the economic base, if the economy is somehow imagined to be an utterly impersonal sphere. The ‘limits’ set by the economic are those which, I think, are accepted even by non-Marxists – the controlling effects of the state of the technology available at any time, and the control exercised by differential access to cash and capital. So called cultural populists are likely to accept this approach, so it is hard to see why the dispute is so furiously carried on by the political economists who support Williams.

5 Douglas Kellner’s approach to overcoming the divide between cultural studies and political economy is also relevant here. Kellner argues for a ‘multiperspectival’ analysis, employing a political economy of the production of culture allied to analysis of texts and audience reception (ibid. p 117). He applauds the Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson model of a continuous circuit of production-distribution-consumption-production in which both the processes of encoding and decoding signs is investigated (ibid. p. 104). This provides a rebuttal of the argument for the primacy of the economic which is just as effective as Williams’. But it is clear that other Marxists are not as convinced as I am by Stuart Hall’s work. Perry Anderson (2000) omits Hall from his hall of fame in the editorial in the first issue of the new series of New Left Review, which implies a view of his work as part of the problem, rather than, as I see him, as a major part of the solution to the problem of radical political and intellectual work in the 21s century.

I’ve excavated these arguments from work I’ve discovered in the past few years, now that I’ve retreated from the harsh realities of doing general studies with apprentices, working in a law centre, in adult education and as a freelance writer/photographer. However bad it is inside the academy, it certainly beats working in the outside world. But it was witnessing the brutalities of the everyday that convinced me that political and intellectual work has to be ‘multiperspectival’, to use Douglas Kellner’s inelegant term. I’d prefer to say that, since capitalism works simultaneously on our bodies, our psychology and our language, building technology and discourse at once, engaging us in the unceasing creation and destruction of social relationships, those of us who, on balance, reject the results of this work are compelled to think and struggle on all of these levels. Before I develop this argument in relation to civic space, youth culture, social movements and ‘race’, I offer a little more of my own biography as a form of evidence for my point of view on cultural politics.

6 Now here is the bit that is in danger of sounding nostalgic. Right from the start, in the late 1960s, of what I will overstate as my ‘political career’ I was operating as what would now be called an ‘embodied subject’. That is to say, I was interpellated by ideology, assuming that we understand ideology not only as belief systems but also as psychologically structured desire. Thus positioned, I was attracted to the anarchists because they excited me and made me laugh. I was repulsed by the Trotskyists and Communist Party members because their demagogic certainty reminded me of structures of power operating in the Royal Air Force camps and public school of my childhood. The Labour Party contained only bureaucrats and careerists. I was fascinated by the tiny group that I eventually found out were New Left Reviewers because they were so handsome and so well dressed. In short, the anarchists and the non-aligned contained the sexiest men and women, black and white, that I could see in the University of Leeds. In the early 1970s I read about Marx’s critique of the anarchists and the utopian socialists, and about his machinations in the First International. I concluded that Marx was probably right intellectually and wrong politically.

To cut this story short, I have to say something I can never say about my schooldays: if I add in my long and continuing relationship with my partner and the birth of two children, these days of frenetic political theory and practice from the early 1970s to the early 1980s were the best days of my life. If, like me, you approach the world from the left hand side you’ll see why I might be nostalgic. In the 1970s it was possible to believe our own rhetoric without being thought of as completely insane. Where the Situationists had exhorted us in 1968 to ‘Be Realistic: Demand the Impossible’ many of us now thought that capitalism might be overthrown. Long periods of industrial militancy, networks of tenants associations throughout the country, a massive women’s movement, a plethora of black revolutionary groups, a relatively large number of men and women in far-left organisations, extremely strong Marxist movements in many developing countries, a marxist government coming to power, briefly, in Chile, a revolution in Portugal. For those of us in the libertarian left, the revolution for which we tirelessly worked entailed the restructuring of our psychology, our domestic arrangements, the relationships between people in the neighbourhoods in which

7 we lived, the elimination of racism and sexism, as well as the complete transformation of the economic and political arrangements of the nation state. I hope there are people here who will bear me out when I say that these were days of hope, of invigoration, of political and intellectual work that seemed to be meaningful because it seemed to contribute to making the world a place where joy was available to all. I say these things to those of you who didn’t have this experience because I’d like you to think that these goals – utopian as they sound – are tangible, within living memory, not just to be consumed in old photos, books, TV footage and films. It is the evidence of these years of struggle and pleasure, with their profound mix of work within the cultural, social and domestic spheres, from which I build an argument for a resurgence of politically focussed cultural studies. As I hope to show, there are sites of struggle today in which such work can, and should, be done.

Since then, I have observed that while not many followed precisely the same path as I did, the structural signposts for most of us are the same. Most of us are drawn into political and intellectual camps initially by the complex workings of desire inseparably linked to reason, both being influenced by the peculiar social, economic and political mileux in which we are placed.

It seems to me that this is how people place themselves within the three of the fields that I said I would discuss today: ‘race’, youth culture and the social movements. I’m referring to ‘race’ as a field, even though some might think it does not sit easily alongside youth culture or social movements, because I use the term in Bourdieu’s sense, as a network of relationships and a site of struggle (Drucker 1999 p. 84). Identifications in each of these fields are formed during a process in which desire interacts with its cultural and material context. In the 1960s, my initial affiliations went towards the Beats, but the USA was too far away, and, since I was middle class and living in Liverpool, it’s no surprise my longing turned towards the Mersey Sound and the Mods.

8 This leaning was formed in the context of my close relationship with a young black man. While he and I shared the strange privations of membership of what was easily placed in those days as the middle class, his self-recognition as black, a pigmentation visible to him and his white peers, though not, apparently, to his black father, structured his affiliation to soul music in general and James Brown in particular. Through him, I learned how to lean towards black culture, as he searched out a cultural identification as ‘mixed race’ and I searched for a way of remaining his friend, despite the colour bar that we were, unspokenly, erecting between us. I’ll say a little more in a minute or two about the fundamental importance of a cultural politics of ‘race’. Today it is far less predictable which segment of club culture young people will turn to. If there is a residue of free party/rave scene in their town or city, those who have already positioned themselves as ‘alternative’, and those who have felt a twinge of desire to know what is entailed in that slightly antinomian mileux, will find their way there. Which of the many other sectors of the more commercial club scene a young person ends up in seems to be unrelated to the factors of class, ‘race’ and to a lesser extent gender which so preoccupied the Birmingham School researchers 25 years ago (Hall and Jefferson 1975/1993). On the other hand, huge amounts of cash are disposed of in pursuit of what Sarah Thornton calls the subcultural capital used by young people to mark out their distinctive niches within the club scene. Each of the products they use to signify their various memberships are produced within the social relationships of capitalism. So this field is structured by forces that, for want of more appropriate terms, we call economic, psychological and symbolic. I say this on the basis of limited observation of some of these places, conversations with students who attend them regularly and some of the recent ‘youth culture’ texts (Thornton 1995, Collin 1997, Redhead 1998). There is very little published research in this field and, given the history of cultural studies contribution here, it’s an area crying out for further investigation. Equally, if not more importantly, youth culture remains a potent field for political intervention by those with the particular sets of distinctions that allow for legitimated membership.

9 All this applies even more forcefully when one analyses social movements. My own work as an activist over the past 25 years or more has been mainly within and alongside the black, Asian and multi-ethnic movements of the inner city area of Leeds known as Chapeltown (summarised in a thesis I completed last year (Farrar 1999)). One of the conclusions I have drawn is that everyday life, whether it constitutes itself domestically, at the workplace or in social and political action, is not determined by the particular configurations of the economic base. The material, emotional and cultural conditions of people’s lives operate simultaneously and can only be separated analytically with great difficulty. Only in the most extreme circumstances do these conditions overwhelm an individual’s or a group’s sense of itself as an agent. Another conclusion is that what I call, following bell hooks (1991), yearning for a future marked by social justice, tolerance of difference and equality, was a mainspring of much of the political action that has taken place in this area since the early 1970s.

If we examine the contemporary social movements, many of these observations apply. Here I am relying again on conversations with some participants, media reports and some of the literature (e.g. McKay 1996, Merrick 1996, McKay (ed.) 1998, Jordan and Lent (ed.) 1999, St Clair 1999). What is most striking about these movements is that, as with contemporary youth culture, their style, form and practice cannot be explained simply by reference to concepts of class, ‘race’, gender or even age. We would depart too far from precise analysis if we attempted to reduce them to a mirror of the dispersals, fragmentations, flows and symbols that are supposed to characterise today’s globalised, information-based capitalist production. Several points stand out for those of us who want to return cultural studies to its radical political foundations. One is that the objection made a few years ago that these movements are too fragmented and unfocussed to have any potential to initiate fundamental change has lost its force. Without wanting to make any grandiose claim that we are witnessing the revival of mass, revolutionary action it is extremely significant that the most recent protests name capitalism as their enemy, have operated at an international level, have used direct action as their key tactic and have brought parts of major cities to

10 a standstill, in much the same way that the mass movements of the 1960s did. As we know, those movements fell short of achieving revolutionary change. One of their legacies, particularly now that the so-called socialist revolutions of this century have had such ignominious fates, is that the language of revolution might now be inappropriate. What these movements are demonstrating is their profound commitment to struggle on all aspects of oppression and exploitation, whether this be in the waged workplace, in personal and sexual life, in rural or urban areas, whether it occurs in developing or overdeveloped countries – a commitment which is so comprehensive that it cannot be bought off by piecemeal reforms. Where could we find a better example of a cultural politics which is simultaneously economic, psychological, ecological and social, in which all the classic loci for radical politics – class, gender, age, sexual orientation, ‘race’ and internationalism – are all represented? This, surely, is a prime field for cultural politicians and researchers to enter.

I now want to pick up the last theme I mentioned at the start of this presentation, the field of the city. A provocative clash of words, I think. I suggested that we should reinvigorate our contribution to the civic cultures of the cities and towns in which we live, and I tacked ‘villages’ on at the end because I’m aware that a certain gentrification has taken place among my generation, known with varying levels of distaste as the 60s generation. Quite a few live in villages, even though their hearts might remain in cities. It’s so much quieter there, and the garden seems to grow better, doesn’t it? So I’m stretching the point when I refer to civic culture; what I’m getting at is the increasingly vibrant public space in all of these habitats. Last time I visited the sleepy market town of Grassington in the Yorkshire Dales I was amazed to see national names appearing at their arts festival. Most amazing of all was that Benjamin Zephaniah was, apparently, one of the most successful acts they put on. Burnley’s Blues festival, in Lancashire, is a major event, and Mid Pennine Arts commissioned major original works of art to accompany it, as well as staging a small exhibition of my own jazz photos. I once visited Des Moines in the Mid West of the USA, and I went there with some trepidation having read The Lost Continent, the work of its least favourite son, Bill

11 Bryson. On the opening page, Bryson imagines a sign which reads ‘Welcome to Des Moines. This is What Death is Like’ (Bryson 1989 p. 3). Two days later I’m in a heaving night club where farm boys pay money to go on stage to kiss transexuals, in a fund-raiser for the other local boys who want to have the operation. I’ve just picked up a card for the Hebden Bridge Arts Festival, a small Yorkshire town so heavily populated with refugees from the city that bus station graffiti reads “Hippies Out!” In a city like Leeds, where I live, these activities are supplemented by an endless stream of meetings and events organised by the Civic Trust, the Victorian Society, the council’s Arts Strategy team, the West Yorkshire Playhouse, the association of café-bar operators and now, at the brasserie in my part of the town, run by the former lecturer in art history at the FE college, we have regular meetings on the political implications of science, soon to be supplemented by cultural debates. I am currently a member of the Board of a local, independent charity called the Chapeltown and Harehills Regeneration Trust, whose object is to facilitate the work of cultural workers in reinvigorating the social and economic life of these neighbourhoods. These are exciting examples of spaces in which many of the key issues that shape the life of the city are quietly fought out. They will soon be supplemented by the forums being set up by the city council, in response to the government’s so-called democratising agenda, known as ‘community involvement panels’. In these, councillors are supposed to be held accountable to local people who will raise the matters that concern them in their own neighbourhoods. If the former spaces are unlikely to lead to militant political activity, it is quite possible that, with an infusion of left activists, the community involvement panels would become places in which serious opposition to the Blairite city council could be mobilised. No doubt similar spaces are opening up in cities, towns and villages all over the country – and those of us with a cultural agenda, where culture is not set against economics, would both learn a great deal and potentially contribute much to the radicalising project.

Finally, a word on the status of ‘race’ within cultural studies and cultural activism. Given the status of Stuart Hall within cultural studies, and of his former student Paul Gilroy within a related field, given the role of Homi

12 Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak in stimulating so much work under the heading of postcolonial studies, another related field, I am astonished at how few white academics there are researching and publishing in this area. Even more worrying is the absence of political activity by whites, with the notable exception of members of the Socialist Workers Party, even on issues of racist attacks and fascist mobilisation, let alone on the more important area of dayto-day political work in multi-cultural areas on the bread and butter issues of housing, policing and cultural issues. The sinews of racialised thinking and practice now pull every segment of the body politic into shapes which only those who have paid close attention to Hall and Gilroy would have been able to predict. In the news over the past two weeks we’ve seen the violence launched in Holland and Belgium of the English men whom the media label as football hooligans. The inadequacy of this label is manifested each time their racism and their nationalism is documented. These are men whose masculinity is performed in the most tortured form we know, men who are living out the cultural history of a nation forged in the violent domination of other nations, and the forced occupation and expropriation of those nations where the population was not white. Yet no-one is able to command much media attention with such an analysis, and the only solution on offer is more surveillance, more interception and more restriction. This is merely one example of the absence of a cultural politics of ‘race’ in the public sphere. It is impossible, I want to suggest, to work effectively in any area of political and intellectual endeavour today without taking up the issue of ‘race’ in dialogue with Hall and Gilroy. It goes without saying that research and intervention in the other fields I have discussed today – youth culture, social movements and civic culture – cannot properly take place without this dialogue. So, brothers and sisters, let’s do politics, let’s walk the walk, as well as talking the talk.

Max Farrar Leeds 21st June 2000 Email: [email protected]

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Bibliography Alinsky, Saul (1946) Reveille for Radicals Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Anderson, Perry (2000) ‘Renewals’, Editorial in New Left Review 2.1 Jan/Feb 2000 pp.5-24 Bryson, Bill (1990) The Lost Continent – Travels in Small Town America, London: Abacus Collin, Mathew (1997) Altered State – The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House, London: Serpent’s Tail. Drucker, Peter (1999) A Concise Glossary of Cultural Theory, London: Arnold Farrar, Max (1999) Constructing and de-constructing ‘community’. A case study of a multi-cultural inner city area: Chapeltown, Leeds, 1972-1997. PhD thesis, Leeds Metropolitan University. To be published in December 2000 as The Struggle for Paradise by Edwin Mellen Press. Ferguson, Marjorie and Peter Golding (eds.) (1997) Cultural Studies in Question, London: Sage Publications Fleming, Jacky (1992) Never Give Up – More Cartoons by the Author of Be a Bloody Train Driver, London: Penguin Hall, Stuart and Tony Jefferson (1975/1993) Resistance through Rituals, London: Routledge hooks bell (1991) Yearning – Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, London: Turnaround Jordan, Tim and Adam Lent (eds.) (1999) Storming the Millennium – The New Politics of Change. London: Lawrence and Wishart McKay, George (1996) Senseless Acts of Beauty – Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties, London: Verso McKay, George (ed.) (1998) DiY Culture - Party and Protests in Nineties Britain London and New York: Verso Merrick (1996) Battle for the Tress - Three months of Responsible Ancestry Leeds: Goldhaven Ink Redhead, Steve (ed.) (1998) The Clubcultures Reader, Oxford: Blackwell Thornton, Sarah (1995) Club Cultures – Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, Cambridge: Polity St Clair, Jeffrey (1999) ‘Seattle Diary: It’s a Gas, Gas, Gas’ in New Left Review, 238, November/December 1999 Williams, Raymond (1980) ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’, in R. Williams Problems in Materialism and Culture, London: Verso. Originally published in New Left Review 82, November-December 1973. 4889 words including Bibliography

CULTURAL STUDIES: GETTING PERSONAL, GETTING POLITICAL ‘Matters arising’ from my paper at the Crossroads conference in Birmingham, June 2000. Max Farrar, School of Cultural Studies, Leeds Metropolitan University I’m circulating these notes to people who were kind enough to ask for a copy of my paper, in the hope that they stimulate replies. I’m thinking of trying to work the paper into a journal article (though I can’t really think of any journal that will want it!), and any help you can offer will be much appreciated.

14 I tried not to display the worries I had about talking personally on doing politics within cultural studies when I was delivering the paper in Birmingham. I’d done a similar paper a month previously in Sheffield, at the Marxist Cultural Network conference. The MCN is organised as a mail-group and its conference is quite small (this year I think there were about 40-50 participants. Its size makes it easy to gauge the reaction to a paper, and my paper went down pretty badly, it seemed. That’s what I had expected, since Marxism has always been uncomfortable with public displays of the personal, but, since many in the MCN are specialists in literature and film, I thought that it would provide a forum in which some of the more subjective areas could be explored. But it didn’t. My contribution met, mainly, with polite silence. How does one read silence? Indifference? Hostility? It’s usually hard to tell what silence means, but it provokes in me one of two reactions. If I’m feeling reasonably confident, I say to anyone I half-way like “What did you think of my paper?” If I’m nervous, I meet silence with silence. At the MCN, I kept quiet. In Birmingham I felt less anxious, because I knew that some people would like the paper. I knew this, because I knew that some women would like it, since, in my experience, women are always more willing to entertain the personal aspects of work and politics (let alone the personal side of other parts of their lives). I also knew that, within cultural studies, there are now quite a few men who are willing to engage with the interface between their personal and their public lives. I thought that there would be people younger than those at the MCN, and I guessed that they would be more open to this stuff, male or female. So it was with some relief that several people, mainly female, but including some males, said that they enjoyed the paper, and I pleased, and flattered, when I received e-mails either asking for a copy or saying that the paper heartened them, or both. On the other hand, my friend said that his friends had heard the paper and had told him that it was “too subjective, not analytical”. I think that a lot of people would agree with that criticism, and would say that the paper was trivial. I’m sensitive to that criticism because I accept that there is a very real set of problems around the interface of biography and theory that I’m trying to develop. I don’t actually think that the problem is that subjective work and sociologically inspired theoretical-empirical work are paradigmatically irreconcilable, which I think is the view taken by some Marxists. Nor do I accept the related view that disciplinary boundaries (between, say, literature and sociology) should be maintained (but no-one in cultural studies would make that argument anyway). But I do accept that these problems arise: 1. The problem of ‘voice’. If you move into a subjective mode when writing academically you position yourself quite deliberately outside the traditional mode of enunciating your argument. As I said in the paper, I am happy to take that position, alongside the scorned feminists and the soft men, but I do think our critics do have a point when they say that this personal voice is manipulative, in the sense that it might be thought to be attempting to attract support for a poor argument by emotional seduction, rather than by

15 cool logic. There are of course some good replies: What’s so great about cool logic? Doesn’t the voice of reason also emotionally seduce the devotees of reason? But I think it’s important to be clear about whether or not the argument being put forward, using this personal voice, is a good one, and to counter the accusation of illicit manipulation. So this brings up the next point. 2. The problem of evidence. In the paper, I claimed to be using my biography as a form of evidence. I stand by that aspiration, but I don’t think I achieved that goal, because I didn’t follow the rules of evidence that apply to my discipline area (critical/cultural sociology). An argument is only as good as the theory that drives it and the evidence that supports it. In the paper, my argument was for a return to political work within cultural studies. My own experience is rather poor evidence for a general argument and, although I did cite other evidence (from youth culture and the new social movements), I think I implied that ‘the personal’, on its own, is good evidence. 3. The problem of generalisation. I do think that those of us who want to write a politically relevant cultural studies, and who want to utilise our understanding in wider political forums, have to be able to claim that we are making statements and proposals which are in a certain sense true and generalisable, not merely relative and personal. This is partly a question of the quality of the evidence that we provide, but it is also a question of the underlying theory we are working with. Since I still see myself as being within the Marxist tradition, I am disposed to structural theories. At the Crossroads conference, I didn’t read the part of the paper which briefly debated the base-superstructure issue, which would have indicated my allegiance to structural theories, but my rejection of the primacy of economic structures. But I did read that part at the MCN conference, but I don’t think it cut any ice. I think my position was heard to be completely anti-structure. This is the likely reading by most structuralists whenever they encounter a personalised paper, and I should have tried to meet their objection. One move would be to stress that one’s personal life is itself deeply structured (a point I made in passing), not only in terms of class, ‘race’ and gender but also by the unconscious and by language. Thus, one’s personal experience can be related as general experience, at least in so far as others have also been structured by similar forces. But I think a better version of my paper would have examined in more detail the structures underlying the fields in which I think we should be intervening: urban cultures, youth and social movements, and racialised cultures. To marry those with the ‘personal’ analysis, I think I should have stressed that effective intervention (to use an old-fashioned term much loved by the Leninists) is only likely to result when the person/ group who is ‘intervening’ has a profoundly reflexive and structural theory of their own personal life/lives. 4. I’m sure that there are other problems that deserve discussion, and I’d be grateful for your suggestions of potential problems – and your ideas of how to solve them!

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13 July, 2000