| richard barbrook on 21 Feb 2001 02:28:09 -0000 |
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| Re: <nettime> In Defence of Cultural Studies |
Hiya, As someone who was educated by fans of the Birmingham School in the late-1970s, my feelings about these pioneers of Cultural Studies are quite ambivalent. At the time, it was very exciting to read people who didn't just regurgitate the tired analyses of the Stalinist and Trotskyist sects. Okay, they never matched the theoretical wonders of Guy Debord, but at least they did talk about the new possibilities being opened up as England was transformed by popular culture, social movements, immigration and labour unrest. However, this enthusiasm to ditch the supposed "economism" of the previous generation soon seemed like a big mistake after the defeat of the Labour government in 1979. While we were happily ignoring the dismal science, the Right had been revitalising its own morbid form of "economism". So, when the Thatcher monster claimed that "there is no alternative" to her neo-liberal economic policies, large chunks of the Left intelligentsia were incapable of arguing against this absurd assertion because they hadn't even read 'Das Kapital' - let alone thought about how to remix its insights for the particular conditions of the 1980s. The later collapse into post-modern nihilism and/or corporate cheer-leading was only the culmination of this fatal error... Later, Richard ------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Richard Barbrook Hypermedia Research Centre School of Communications and Creative Industries University of Westminster Watford Road Northwick Park HARROW HA1 3TP <www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk> +44 (0)20 7911 5000 x 4590 ------------------------------------------------------------------- "While there is irony, we are still living in the prehistoric age. And we are not out of it yet..." - Henri Lefebvre ------------------------------------------------------------------- The HRC is involved in running regular cybersalons at the ICA in London. If you would like to be informed about forthcoming events, you can subscribe to a listserver on our website: <www.cybersalon.org>. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [email protected] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]