This is a Preface to my book: Joanna Zylinska (2005) (Continuum: London and New York)
Joanna Zylinska
Preface
There has been a great resurgence in debates on ethics outside the strictly delineated discipline of philosophy. Terms such as ‘business ethics’, ‘professional ethics’, ‘medical ethics’ or ‘bioethics’ have now become part of everyday parlance. Ethics is also a burgeoning field within both the humanities and the social sciences – a development some have labelled ‘the ethical turn’.1 However, apart from Jennifer Daryl Slack and Laurie Anne Whitt’s ‘Ethics and Cultural Studies’, which appeared as their contribution to the renowned Cultural Studies collection edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (1992), there has been very little work that directly investigates the relationship between cultural studies and ethics.2
This is not to say that ethics is unimportant for cultural studies. On the contrary, the argument of this book starts from the premise that an ethical sense of duty and responsibility has always constituted an inherent part of the cultural studies project. And yet when declaring the field’s overt political commitment, cultural studies theorists have frequently avoided addressing ethical questions directly, as the problem of ethics, with rare exceptions, has been seen as being more the domain of disciplines such as philosophy, political theory, or deconstruction-oriented literary theory. Nevertheless, I will argue here that the interdisciplinary multinational project of cultural studies has always had ethical underpinnings. In its questioning of inherited traditions and cultural prejudices and its interest in ‘marginal voices’, cultural studies develops precisely from a recognition of, and respect for, specificity, locatedness and what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has called ‘the infinite alterity of the other’ (even if this relationship is not always adequately theorised or reflected on). This will allow me to claim that, if it is to continue with its political agenda, cultural studies needs to address explicitly its relationship to ethics, and that its politics cannot in fact be thought without ethics.3
With this book I thus hope to cast light on the increasing importance of ethics to contemporary humanities and social sciences. At the same time, I want to suggest that ethics needs to become – or even perhaps is already in the process of becoming - another ‘focal point’ of cultural studies debates, situated alongside issues of politics, identity, representation, interdisciplinarity, pedagogy and institutionalisation. In this way, The Ethics of Cultural Studies is intended as a contribution to the ongoing investigation of cultural studies, its duties, tasks and responsibilities. Given the instability of the cultural studies foundations, and the fact that cultural studies itself seems to have been perceived as something of an earthquake within the academic landscape, perhaps I can be excused for hoping that this book might start some new tectonic movements in its the still young geological formation.
The short ‘seismic history’ of cultural studies has already been well documented and goes like this.4 Silently developing in the sedimented layers of traditional academic disciplines such as English, history and philosophy, cultural studies suddenly burst out with great force in the 1970s and 1980s, in a series of eruptions that radically transformed the University with its recognised disciplinary divisions, with the epicentre of the earthquake shifting from the UK to the US, Australia, and other places around the globe. Even though cultural studies has now become an established presence on both sides of the Atlantic – one can think here of numerous undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, research centres and publishers lists – its somewhat concealed murmur of discontent reminds us that the ground beneath our feet is far from secure.
It is precisely in terms of tectonic metaphors, conveying a sense of organic mutation at work not only in the academy but also within some larger social structures, that the cultural studies project has been described by one of its foremost practitioners. Reflecting ‘the rapidly shifting ground of thought and knowledge, argument and debate about a society and about its own culture’, cultural studies is for Stuart Hall ‘the sort of necessary irritant in the shell of academic life that one hopes will, sometimes in the future, produce new pearls of wisdom’. He sees it as ‘a point of disturbance, a place of necessary tension and change’ (1996: 337). But it is not only the disruptive aspect of cultural studies, its shaking up of the traditional foundations of knowledge and its legitimating institutions, that Hall perceives as constitutive of this new-old discipline. The sense of tension, irritation and disruption is accompanied by a radical transformation of the understanding of the notion of ‘culture’ and its relation to the other spheres of life, including art, education, politics and economy. The transformative project of cultural studies, as delineated by Hall and the other members of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham (where the academic foundations of cultural studies first took shape), thus has an explicitly articulated political dimension, one that is activated not just by a commitment to a theoretical understanding of the world but also to the reordering of its social arrangements. Commenting on the complexities of the structures and dynamics of racism at the end of the twentieth century, Hall postulates: ‘the work that cultural studies has to do is to mobilize everything that it can find in terms of intellectual resources in order to understand what keeps making the lives we live, and the societies we live in, profoundly and deeply antihumane in their capacity to live with difference’ (1996: 343).
Even though I find Hall’s use of the term ‘antihumane’ somewhat problematic (as it rests on the seemingly unquestioned assumption that human beings deserve a certain treatment due to the very nature of their humanness), I do embrace his argument regarding the profound inability of many sectors of contemporary Western societies to live with difference, even if, in their official discourses of democracy and liberalism, ‘difference’ seems to find a propitious breeding ground. While it is ‘other’, pre-modern, less individualised and more tribal societies that are often described as lacking ‘tolerance’ and ability to celebrate cultural difference, pluralism and freedom, I agree with Hall that the Occident is not really able to engage with radical alterity without attempting to annul, squash or domesticate it in one way or another. This does not mean that difference is always first recognised and then violated. Some of the most violent forms of relating to difference involve not noticing it in the first place, or attempting to reduce it to conceptual categories already in our possession. But before the reader dismisses my argument at this point with an impatient sigh: ‘Not another book on cultural difference!’,5 let me propose what on the surface may seem like a preposterous claim: namely that cultural studies itself has not yet really engaged with difference. What I want to argue in The Ethics of Cultural Studies is that, in spite of its interest in postcolonialism, multiculturalism, fluid sexualities and youth subcultures, cultural studies has yet to think its own relationship to alterity. And it is precisely through an engagement with the thinking of alterity in cultural studies, without reducing this alterity to a sequence of already known and concretised others (racial minorities, the working classes, gays and lesbians, women, and so on), that the ethical dimension of cultural studies indicated in my title will be posited. In this way, I hope to somewhat shift the orientation of the cultural studies project from its original, more clearly articulated political grounding (as summed up by Stuart Hall in his article ‘Race, Culture, and Communications: Looking Backward and Forward at Cultural Studies’, from which I quoted earlier).
Significantly, Hall’s remark on cultural studies’ opposition to the inhumane aspects of everyday life is more than a diagnosis of late-capitalist Western societies’ inability to come to terms with any forms of alterity that challenge or undermine their self-image. His description of the cultural studies project also has a normative dimension: it entails a sense of mobilisation and obligation, a call to responsibility and action. This is another point I want to develop in this book – that the cultural studies project, focused on the exploration of our ‘insurmountable allergy’ (Levinas, 1986: 346) towards the forms of difference that we cannot comprehend or master, is, in its very premises, normative; i.e. that it involves an ethical injunction, an obligation and a call to responsibility.
In chapter 1, which I have titled ‘A User’s Guide to Culture, Ethics and Politics’, I set an encounter between cultural studies, continental philosophy and political theory in order to explain the working of this injunction. Referring to the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Ernesto Laclau, I propose there a reflection on cultural studies’ engagement with ethical positions as well as an investigation of its ethical tasks. This point is developed further in chapter 2, in which I explore what we can actually understand by ‘responsibility’ in cultural studies. In chapters 3 to 8, the book’s ethical perspective is foregrounded through a series of interventions (rather than mere illustrations). In these chapters I put the ‘ethical injunction of cultural studies’ to the test by examining a number of everyday events that demand a responsible response from us. I look there at ‘moral panics’ connected with race, rap and hip-hop (chapter 3), ‘9/11’ and its media representations (chapter 4), the current discourses around asylum and immigration in Western multicultural democracies (chapter 5), Polish anti-Semitism in the context of the newly expanded European Union (chapter 6), and technological experiments with the body in art (chapter 7) and medicine (chapter 8). To allow for different points of entry and different uses of the volume, each chapter constitutes an independent entity, drawing on a variety of events from the media, popular culture, art and politics.
There are however a number of thematic threads that connect these chapters. As issues of ‘identity and difference’ have always featured prominently on the cultural studies agenda, it is perhaps unsurprising that they should have come to occupy a significant position in the book, especially since the Levinas- and Derrida-inspired ethical perspective I develop here consists of formulating a response to, and taking responsibility for, difference. (A User’s Guide that follows should make this position clearer.) It should also become clear throughout the course of the book that ethics for me does not amount simply to a logical working out of rules that could then be applied to specific cases; rather, it emerges from the lived experience of corporeal, sexuate beings. This is why the analysis of ‘the body’ and the processes of ‘embodiment’ – another set of key terms in the book - is also necessary for my ethical enquiry, from looking at the abject, emaciated or dead bodies of asylum seekers which do not seem to matter very much at all to the official democratic ‘body politic’, through to the exploration of new forms of corporeal emergence at the crossroads of information sciences and biotechnology. Last but not least, the theme of ‘violence’ – explicitly foregrounded in the title of chapter 4 that deals with representations of the events of death and trauma in the media – plays an important role in my study. This is because, even though ethics might be seen as an attempt to curb or overcome violence (see Freud, 1985), violence is also, as I hope to show here, foundational to ethics (as it is to all processes of identification, interpretation and meaning-making).
One of the driving forces behind this study is my own political commitment to transforming the world according to the principle of justice (even if, for now, the ‘content’ of this principle needs to be put in suspension). But as well as presenting an account of the already established positions in thinking about politics in cultural studies, I intend to query here a number of the more traditional definitions of politics, while also delineating some possible new ways of practising ‘the political’.
NOTES
1. As examples of this 'ethical turn' one can cite the following volumes: Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics, eds David Campbell and Michael J. Shapiro (1999), Ethics After the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses, ed. John K. Roth (1999), The Turn to Ethics, eds Marjorie Garber et al. (2000), What Happens to History: the Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought, ed. Howard Marchitello (2001), or Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory, eds Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack (2001), to name but a few.
2. As an exception, I should mention here Rey Chow's Ethics After Idealism (1998), which is an attempt to stage an encounter between cultural studies and cultural theory (with a particular emphasis on deconstruction) under the aegis of ethics. For Chow ethics is a reading practice which 'must carry with it a willingness to take risks, … to destroy the submission to widely accepted, predictable and safe conclusions' (1998: xxii), but her ethical perspective is not conceptually developed throughout the book (although it is interestingly 'performed' in a number of her textual analyses). Chow's eponymous 'ethics after idealism' is presented as arising from an encounter between Slavoj Zizek's 'ethics of limits' and Gayatri Spivak's 'affirmative ethics' (33-54); however, its philosophical foundations remain unexplored.
3. Some of the ideas included in this paragraph come from an introduction to the special issue of Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture & Politics on the subject of 'Cultural Studies: Between Politics and Ethics' (2001), which I co-edited with Mark Devenney.
4. Of course, any attempt to tell a linear 'story of origin' falls prey to the narrative tactics of the story-teller, to his/her conclusions, generalisations and omissions. My own brief account of cultural studies' birth out of the tectonic movements that took place in academia in the 1970s is no exception. Indeed, I am aware that a fixed point of cultural studies' origin cannot be unequivocally located. For example, as Raymond Williams suggests, we should perhaps go beyond the 'Birmingham story' and look at adult education in the UK in the 1930s and '40s as the site of cultural studies' birth (quoted in Gary Hall, 2002: 78). Bearing these reservations in mind, I would like to refer those readers who are interested in hearing other such stories of cultural studies' emergence to Tom Steele's The Emergence of Cultural Studies 1945-65 (1997), Graeme Turner's British Cultural Studies (2002) and Adrian Rifkin's 'Inventing Recollection' (2003).
5. This weariness with the
exploration of difference seems to a growing sentiment among a number of
thinkers 'on the left'. Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou have both recently
called for a return to 'oneness', which they see as a necessary condition
of political action. Badiou, for example, claims that in the universe
there are only differences. He says, 'Infinite alterity is quite simply
what there is. Any experience at all is the infinite deployment of
infinite differences. … There are as many differences, say, between a
Chinese peasant and a young Norwegian professional as between myself and
anybody at all, including myself'. And then he adds, 'As many, but also,
then, neither more nor less' (2001: 25-6). What Badiou seems to be doing
here is emptying the philosophy of difference of its meaningfulness, i.e.
reducing it to the absurd, to banality, to vacuity. As it is such an
obvious and commonplace thing to notice that people are different from
each other, it is really a waste of time (and of political energy) to go
on about these differences - it is boring, facile and counter-productive.
And yet, I want to postulate in this book that the philosophy of
difference has a lot to offer. A sometimes all-too-easy turn to
'multiplicities', out of which political unity will nevertheless emerge,
seems to happen at the expense of the ethics of incalculable alterity, but
the cost of this turn does not seem to have always been thought through.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Badiou, Alain (2001) Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward (London and New York: Verso)
Campbell, David and Shapiro, Michael J. (eds) (1999) Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press)
Chow, Rey (1998) Ethics After Idealism: Theory – Culture – Ethnicity – Reading (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press)
Davis, Todd F. and Womack, Kenneth (eds) (2001) Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory (Charlotesville: University of Virginia Press)
Devenney, Mark and Zylinska, Joanna (eds) (2001) Cultural Studies: Between Politics and Ethics. Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture and Politics. 14: 2 (November)
Freud, Sigmund (1985) ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’. In: The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 12: Civilization, Society and Religion. Trans. J. Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin)
Garber, Marjorie, Hanssen, Beatrice and Walkowitz, Rebecca L. (eds) (2000) The Turn to Ethics (New York and London: Routledge)
Hall, Gary (2002) Culture in Bits: The Monstrous Future of Theory (London and New York: Continuum)
Hall, Stuart (1996) ‘Race, Culture, and Communications: Looking Backward and Forward at Cultural Studies’. In: John Storey (ed.) What Is Cultural Studies? (London: Arnold)
Levinas, Emmanuel (1986) ‘The Trace of the Other’. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. In:. Mark C. Taylor (ed.) Deconstruction in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)
Marchitello, Howard (ed.) (2001) What Happens to History: the Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought (New York and London: Routledge)
Rifkin, Adrian (2003) ‘Inventing Recollection’. In: Paul Bowman (ed.) Interrogating Cultural Studies: Theory, Politics and Practice (London and Sterling: Pluto Press)
Roth, John K. (ed.) (1999) Ethics After the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses (St. Paul: Paragon House)
Slack, Jennifer Daryl and Whitt, Laurie Anne (1992) ‘Ethics and Cultural Studies’. In: Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (eds) Cultural Studies (New York and London: Routledge)
Steele, Tom (1997) The Emergence of Cultural Studies 1945-65: Cultural Politics, Adult Education and the English Question (London: Lawrence & Wishart)
Turner, Graeme (2002) British Cultural Studies: An Introduction.
Third edition (London and New York: Routledge)