Imre Szeman

Works in Progress

What is Cultural Theory?

This book poses and answers the question: What is cultural theory? It approaches this question by offering an overview of the most important issues in this emerging area of inquiry, but in a way that gives it a fundamentally new shape and direction. Intended for students interested in the examination of culture across the disciplines, the book will be of interest to researchers and professionals in the field as well. This book will explore major contemporary and historical figures (major touchstones are listed in parentheses below) not as lifeless and static bodies of ideas, but rather mobilized as the component parts of a theory of culture.

So: what is cultural theory? But this is perhaps already the wrong way to start. The 17th-century philosopher Baruch de Spinoza distinguished between two kinds of definition. The first asks what a thing is. This is done easily enough, but because the thing can be considered under various aspects, such a definition always carries with it an element of externality and arbitrariness. The second kind of definition asks what a thing does. This sort of definition would get behind the thing, as it were, and ask why we need it, what makes it necessary for us to invent and use this sort of thing and not another. So rather than assuming our object in advance, as though we already knew what it was and could then explain it like the workings of a mechanical watch or, should things turn out to be more complicated, describe its various genera and species, this book will start from the question of what cultural theory does: What questions can one ask—and perhaps even only ask—through culture? What kinds of theory is produced as a result? And what does it do or fail to do, especially by why of contrast to other approaches and perspectives?

What we see most immediately is then what cultural theory is not. It is not sociology; it does not ask questions directly of society itself. But neither is it aesthetics; the questions it asks of cultural artifacts do not begin and end with matters of culture (e.g. questions of taste or of cultural history in the narrow sense). It is also not a form of philosophy: cultural theory addresses itself, every time, to an object rather than to a system of concepts. It cannot close in on itself, even ideally or asymptotically, as a completed discourse that would account for every object and every effect; rather, it is constituted by an incompleteness, a kind of waiting for something which every time both completes and disturbs it – an incompleteness which shapes its interpretive energy. Cultural theory is a way of producing concepts and ideas which, while originating out of the messy stew of practices and objects identified as culture, produces insights beyond it.

Marxist Cultural Theory: An Anthology

This anthology brings together major texts in late twentieth century Marxist thought, focusing on work written during the past two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It takes as its point of departure the strong sense that—contrary to rumours of its death in conjunction with the end of state socialism—the influence and impact of Marxist theory is today stronger than ever, and has become even more essential for understanding our historical conjuncture than during the Cold War. The crisis-ridden world produced by global capitalism requires theoretically sophisticated and critically sharp analyses of political and economic systems and structures, and of the social and cultural imaginaries which inflect and shape their formation. It is impossible to ignore the fact that the voices dominating critical and cultural theory in the past two decades have belonged to thinkers identified with the ideas of Marxist thought and its intellectual heritage. This book fills a significant gap in the contemporary world of ideas by showcasing an area of scholarly analysis whose impact on intellectual thought and political action will only grow in coming years.

Contemporary Marxist thought has contributed to the world of politics, economics, and culture, but has also had a major impact on the direction of theoretical and philosophical reflection. European philosophers such as Slavoj Zizek, Antonio Negri, and Alain Badiou have seriously challenged the theoretical consensus operative in the West in the decades after the fall of the Soviet Union. Words like “truth,” “totality,” and “capitalism,” encoded for nearly a quarter century in remarkably predictable ways, have been utterly re-calibrated. With the passing of the hegemony of the major poststructuralist figures (with the possible exception of Gilles Deleuze), students are interrogating dominant geneaologies of theoretical truth and finding themselves compelled to work through earlier paradigms-especially Marxism—ostensibly superseded by postmodernity. The emphasis on locality and epistemological scepticism that characterized the cultural theory of the 1990s has been replaced with a sense of planetary emergency, new ecological realities, and a heightened interest in political economy. Contingency and textuality, having left their mark on Marxism itself, have been displaced from their central positions by the desire for genuinely global, critically “universal” solutions (that is, solutions universal in the peculiar sense well-elaborated within Marxism and virtually everywhere misunderstood outside it) to problems that are themselves no longer chained to specific sites or locales.

This turn in continental philosophy parallels what in anglophone circles has long been organized under the sign of “cultural studies” and its critique of consumerism and the capitalist lifeworld more broadly (e.g., the division of labour, the internationalization of production, post-fordism, etc.). Students in Anglo-American contexts have for a long time been exposed to a standardized handful of Marxist thinkers—figures like Antonio Gramsci, Theodor Adorno, and Raymond Williams—but have expressed frustration with the isolated and seemingly arbitrary excision of these thinkers from the broader tradition of Marxist analysis and thought. Verso’s extremely popular Radical Thinkers series (which has re-issued classic texts by Frederic Jameson, Louis Althusser, and many others), as well as its Revolutions series (which publishes foundational essays by the likes of Mao and Lenin with introductions by significant contemporary voices) have tried to fill this gap, but there nevertheless remains nothing in the way of a contemporary anthology of Marxism for students in social and cultural theory. This project will be the first major anthology to capture the newfound dynamism of Marxist thought at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and will include work dealing with topics across the spectrum of work associated with theory and from thinkers around the world.

Contemporary Marxist Theory: An Anthology aspires to be the definitive touchstone for an epistemological adjustment we suspect will become increasingly apparent on the inside of a whole range of disciplines and fields in coming years. As the works of Zizek, Badiou, and others “trickle down” into the operational infrastructure of the social sciences and humanities, many will look for ways to situate or domesticate these oeuvres by placing them into the broader context of contemporary Marxist experimentation and thought. It is with an eye to this curiosity that we include in this anthology not only established but also emergent and neglected theorists, many of whom will be anthologized here for the first time. Our task is to concretize the sense of a singular but never unified concatenation of Marxisms, a primary determination of which is its confrontation with the spectre of its own institutional and epistemological death. In other words, these are Marxisms which have been fully articulated under the weight of a certain conjunctural impossibility, a field traversed not only by the dereliction and defeat of associated political projects, but also by a radical metamorphosis in the conditions of truth. While most of our texts have been published since 1989, one can think of the tradition being articulated here as beginning where the still relevant and inventive tradition of “Western Marxism” ends. We take the turbulent opening years of the 1970s-economic crisis, the buckling of Keynesianism, incipient transformations in the international shape of production and exchange, as well as new social formations and identities-as the point of departure for the articulation of what is common to these projects. Not only are they bound together in the last instance by a shared refusal of liberal capitalism as the final horizon of human flourishing and existence (as well as by a continuing insistence on the preciousness of the “desire called Marx”) these are thinkers who “breathe in” entirely-rather than simply ignore or reject-postmodernity and its coordinates. It is the imprint left on these works by the desire called Marx which separates these texts, even at their most polemical, from the rejectionism (which now, appearing slightly misplaced, shows itself as histrionic) of “post-Marxist” figures like Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard.