Posts tagged: class struggle
If one were to examine, closely, the hegemonic discourses of black American history, one would be surprised to find a long history of militant armed struggle. Slave rebellions, urban “guerilla” insurgencies, rural defense leagues, are all part of a tapestry of black militant rebellion to subjugation. The most recent icon of black armed struggle, the Black Panther Party, is a linchpin in understanding the development of this phenomenon in the late 1960s, which saw its high point in the 1970s. But it was not the only organization that used or opening advocated the use of force against the state. Others did exist. They did not exist in the public or “aboveground” as the Panthers did between the years of 1966 and 1974. Other factions of the organization existed outside the public eye—clandestinely. Not coincidently, this history exists clandestinely. Clandestine is also a fitting way to describe some of the writers of this history. It is fitting because they, like the histories of armed struggle in U.S., don’t exist in the open, but they exist nonetheless.
Many of those who (clandestinely) trace the historical trajectories of armed struggle are (or were) prisoners of the state. Assata Shakur, George Jackson, Kuwasi Balagoon, and Geronimo Ji Jaga Pratt, all participated in armed struggle. Branded by the state as criminals, underground black radicals, as well as white underground radicals were part of a network of militant “paramilitary” insurgencies. By several accounts this movement lasted from the late 1960’s until the beginning of the 1980’s. Today, imprisoned underground activists continue to write of this subjugated history from the cells that hold them.
(via elitc, cyclespoliticsandvegansxe)
…Homo now stands more for homogenous than any type of sexuality aside from buy buy buy.
…In 1998, wealthy gay Castro residents (don’t forget lesbians and straight people!) fought against a queer youth shelter because they feared it would get in the way of “community property values.” They warned that a queer youth shelter would bring prostitution and drug-dealing to the neighborhood. For a moment, let’s leave aside the absurdity of a wealthy gay neighborhood, obviously already a prime destination for prostitutes of a certain gender and drug-dealing of only the best substances, worrying about the wrong kind of prostitutes (the ones in the street!), and the wrong kind of drug dealers (the ones who don’t drive Mercedes!) arriving in their whitewashed gayborhood.
…Their agenda is cultural erasure, and they want the full Monty.
—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore via ewwwitzjojo: kaylee-marie: yellowbeesteward: kimclit: adailyriot
For anyone entering into college who don’t know what they want to study, I suggest cultural studies. It’s not taught everywhere… but you can take a gander around my blog (adailyriot) and a few blogs provides as well as this article to learn what its’ all about.
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Cultural Studies is a relatively new academic phenomenon, having emerged in the 1960s as an ‘anti-disciplinary’ discipline—a project that explicitly sought to bridge gaps between the study of Literature, History, Sociology, Anthropology and Communication. Marxist in its orientation, it was and is an intellectual endeavor aimed at understanding, theorizing, critiquing and otherwise taking seriously the role of culture as a crucial terrain of political and ideological contestation. Cultural Studies is probably best understood as the politically committed, theoretically informed, radically self-reflexive and historical-materialist analysis of cultural processes and practices, where the commitment to imagine a more humane, more democratic societyhas always been a guiding assumption in the field from its early formations in post-war Britain. In this sense, Cultural Studies is not just an academic discipline and a particular approach within the wider of field of the study of culture (one with implicit, but distinctive epistemological assumptions and ways of working); it is also a political project that seeks to construct what Larry Grossberg calls a “radical political history of the present.”
Cultural Studies understands culture in a very broad way, as a way of life and a ‘way of struggle’, including all the practices and phenomena of all kinds—media representations; media and literary texts; consumer culture; youth subcultures; performance and display practices, as well as other aspects of popular culture and everyday life. That is why, it would be impossible to define Cultural Studies by looking at the kind of objects it studies. While it is true that actually existing Cultural Studies work has tended to concern itself with a very limited number of cultural objects and issues, a fact which has contributed to the vagueness of Cultural Studies as a project (as in the conflation of cultural studies with popular culture studies), Cultural Studies cannot be defined by a particular kind of object or set of objects; and as Grossberg puts it, “[Y]ou can do cultural studies of almost anything” (246). In the same way, Cultural Studies cannot be defined by reference to a specific set of methods, despite the fact that certain methods, such as semiotics, have come to be associated with most of actually existing work in cultural studies, a fact that has ultimately limited the scope and range of the whole field. In other words, Cultural Studies is not an object-driven or method-driven discipline. It is driven, instead, by a set of methodological/epistemological moves. Here are five interrelated epistemological assumptions that inform more robust work in Cultural Studies:
The Need for Political Commitment and the Analysis of the “Social Whole”
Because Cultural Studies understands culture politically, the notions of ‘social totality/whole’, and, in more dominant versions, that of ‘articulation’ are central in Cultural Studies. The significance of an event, phenomenon, or practice—be it ideological, political, economic, or cultural—cannot be properly assessed outside a dialectical understanding of its place in society as a whole. Cultural Studies examines cultural phenomena in the context of their social whole (which, here, refers to the concrete unity of all interacting spheres of social life), that is, by pursuing their hidden interactions and interconnections in real life. This way we are in a better position to understand how social, economic, and political forces act on cultural production, distribution, and reception; and how cultural forces, in turn, act on the social, economic, and political.
The Need for a Multiplicity of Methods and Interdisciplinarity
In most Cultural Studies, there is a realization that traditional disciplinary methods have their merits and limits, but that they work better when they are deployed together in the analysis of cultural phenomena and processes. No single method is complete; and to get as close as possible to a better and more complex understanding of cultural practices and processes, combining methods becomes indispensable. As Johnson and company put it, “a multiplicity of methods is necessary because no one method is intrinsically superior to the rest and each provides a more or less appropriate way of exploring some different aspect of cultural process” (Johnson et al. 42). And it is in this nuanced sense that Cultural Studies is also interdisciplinary. But while Cultural Studies understands culture in a broad way, as a way of life and encourages interdisciplinary perspectives and strategies, it, at the same time, demands a rigorous engagement with cultural texts, practices, and forms of all kind.
The Need for Self-Reflexivity
As Cultural researchers, we are ‘inside’ our object of study. We approach our topics with a particular cultural biography. Gramsci notes somewhere that the starting point of critical reflection—in this case, research—is the consciousness of who one is. Far from being a negative source of research bias, knowing our partialities enables us to correct our biases. Self-reflexivity puts our work in perspective, highlighting its merits, as well as its limits.
The Need and Commitment to Theory
As Larry Grossberg puts it, “Cultural Studies is always theoretical. It is absolutely committed to the necessity of theoretical work, to what Karl Marx called the detour through theory.” It is not committed to theory for theory’s sake; it is rather interested in how theory and theoretical work can be deployed to better understand and transform specific historical conjunctures, contexts, and formations.
The Need to Think Historically and Spatially
Cultural research activity is also always temporally located; it takes place at a certain historical moment/conjuncture. The time dimension is an essential perspective in cultural theory and practice. It not only greatly enhances the subtlety with which cultural phenomena is explored, but helps us to recognize the historical content and specificity of our work (including the theoretical categories we work with), as well. Cultural research activity is also always spatially located: It takes place somewhere. Issues of space and place are inherent in every research project, and recognizing the particularities of the places we study and where we study them could be enlightening.
“You host a margarita party for your friends; each one must bring a recent fashion magazine. You tear out the most offensive ads and articles, with the skinniest models and most backassward advice and, felt-tip marker in hand, decorate them with sassy, righteous comebacks. Then, take them to public restrooms in restaurants, bars, academic buildings, women’s dorms, and tape them up inside the stall doors. Repeat once a month.”
-Enlightened Sexism, Susan J. Douglas
I’m going to do this. I have a couple of body image projects in the works.
Some poor misguided soul got my sister an unwanted subscription to Cosmo for her birthday - maybe I’ll suggest this to her?
I’m totally doin this with the friends at some point
Toronto: Opposition Protests G20 Summit (via feminally) (via therecipe) (via ihatethismess)(via aprilspolitics) (via chicanainchoos) (via gettingover)
(via curate)
Moreover, all the features we today identify with freedom and liberal democracy […] were won through a long and difficult struggle on the part of the lower classes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries- in other words, they were anything but the ‘natural’ consequences of capitalist relations. Recall the list of demands with which ‘The Communist Manifesto’ concludes: most of them […] are today widely accepted in ‘bourgeois’ democracies, but only as the result of popular struggles. It is worth underlining another often ignored fact: today, equality between whites and blacks is often celebrated as part of the American Dream, and treated as a self-evident politico-ethical axiom; but in the 1920s and 1930s, the US Communists were the ONLY political force to argue for complete racial equality.
Those who claim a natural link between capitalism and democracy are cheating with the facts in the same way the Catholic Church cheats when it presents itself as the ‘natural’ advocate of democracy and human rights against the threat of totalitarianism- as if it were not the case that the Church accepted democracy only at the end of the nineteenth century, and even then with clenched teeth, as a desperate compromise, making it clear that it preferred monarchy, and that it was making a reluctant concession to new times.
-Slavoj Zizek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
I kept adding more and more to the front-end of this quote, because I think he really is on a roll here.
(via ghostorballoon)
Toni Negri, in Domination and Sabotage, verbosely formulating how we always seem to be starting over again. But why “virgin”?
Seems related to eternal return, “to really begin”.
(via nomajesty)
Mexico has waded into a legal challenge to a new immigration law in the US state of Arizona. In papers submitted to a US federal court, the Mexican government argues that the law is unconstitutional and would damage bilateral relations. It says it is concerned that it could lead to unlawful discrimination against Mexican citizens.
global capitalism at its finest.
If you understand what caused our economy to plummet, then this shouldn’t be surprising to you. If you don’t quite understand because of how ridiculous economics is, then this should be somewhat of a surprise. Either way, you should be angry.
(Zizek) Today’s liberal-democratic hegemony is sustained by a kind of unwritten Denkverbot similar to the infamous Berufsverbot in Germany of the late 1960’s: the moment one shows any sign of engaging in political projects that aim seriously to challenge the existing order, the answer is immediately: “Benevolent as it is, this will necessarily end in a new Gulag!”
There is a point on which we cannot concede: today, actual freedom of thought, means the freedom to question the predominant, liberal-democratic, “post-ideological” consensus - or it means nothing.
