A more modest cultural studies for more desperate times

Abstract

Cultural studies is a set of contextually determined ways of doing rigorous intellectual work in the service of social and political change.  It can and has taken many shapes, but given the challenges posed by the rise of increasingly authoritarian, illiberal, and extremely vitriolic and polarizing political formations, I argue for the usefulness of conjunctural analysis. I present cultural studies as an articulation of seven scenes, a composition of seven practices, an orchestra of seven voices.  Many of these scenes will be part of other critical-intellectual efforts, which are neighbors and comrades of cultural studies.  But it is not only the totality of the seven scenes that defines the specificity of cultural studies, but the unity forged by the particular relations among the scenes, which will always be determined contextually.  The seven scenes composing the orchestra of cultural studies are:  Conceptual thinking, constituting relations and simultaneously, levels of abstraction; Theoretical or critical thinking establishing the contingency of concepts and the givenness of reality; Critique (or genealogy) introducing the problem of constructionism and conditions of possibility; Radical contextuality of every relation; Conjuncture as an analytical and political choice of a particular level of abstraction;  Conjuncture as a problem space defined by a struggle over an organic crisis; and finally, Conjunctural analysis.