Gary Hall (2002) Culture in Bits: the Monstrous Future of Theory (Continuum: London and New York)
Book description- Where is Cultural Studies today? Does it have anything left to say? Where is theory and where is politics? Can contemporary cultural practice negotiate the contradictory and ambivalent logic of capitalism in our globalised age? Certainly, cultural studies seems to have lost its way somewhere between today's preoccupation with the empirical and the theory revolutions of the 1980s and 90s. Assessing the work of key theorists across the history of cultural studies - Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Meaghan Morris and Angela McRobbie - Culture In Bits argues that the trend towards a more politicised practice is in fact not political enough; theory, and deconstruction in particular, can offer a more radical and a more political engagement. Pinpointing the ambiguities that both constitute and disturb cultural studies and outlining a radical agenda for its future, Culture in Bits is vital reading for all interested in cultural practice and theory.
Praise for Culture in Bits- "Culture in Bits addresses one of the key issues in the Humanities and Social Sciences today: the relation of cultural studies and poststructuralism. Approaching the topic with a broad and deep understanding of both cultural studies and poststructuralist writing, the book illuminates the relation of theory to empirical work, politics to scholarship and technology to the University. Highly recommended." Mark Poster, University of California at Irvine.
Contents- Preface [available online]
- 1.
Some Frequently Asked Questions [available online]
- The One About a 'Deconstructive Cultural Studies'
- The One About Deconstruction as Critique
- The One About Theory
- The One About the Language
- The One About Textuality
- The One About the Social Sciences
- The One About Reconceptualizing Cultural Studies
- The One About Why Cultural Studies
- The One About 'Paradoxical' Discourses
- The One About Other Examples
- The One About the Future
- The One About History
- 2. 'It's a Thin Line
Between Love and Hate': Why Cultural Studies is So 'Naff'
- Cultural Studies and Popular Culture
- Hate and War: Cultural Critique Versus Cultural Populism
- 'WE ARE NOT YOU'
- At the Crossroads of Magic and Positivism
- 3.
'Something Else Besides': The Third Way of Angela McRobbie [pre-print
available online]
- I: The Third Way
- Possibilities
- 'A New Kind of Materialism'
- (Ir)reconciling the Irreconcilable
- II: 'Something Else Besides'
- More 'New Questions for Feminism and Cultural Studies
- Cultural Studies (Angela McRobbie/Jacques Derrida Mix)
- 4.
Monstrous The Future of Cultural Studies [pre-print
available online]
- One More Time: The Politics of Cultural Studies
- The Politics of 'The Politics of Cultural Studies'
- Cultural Studies and the Politics of Deconstruction
- Cultural Studies to Come
- '… A Theoretical Point…'
- The Future of Cultural Studies Revisited
- The Future is Bright, the Future is Monstrous
- 5.
Beyond Marxism and Psychoanalysis
[pre-print available online]
- The Subject in Question
- The Paradoxes of Cultural Criticism
- Subject Boundaries
- The End of Analysis: Hypnosis
- Post-Psychoanalysis?
- 6
. www.culturalstudies.ac.uk [pre-print
available online]
- Cultural Studies of Cultural Studies
- There is Nothing Outside the University
- From Disciplinarity …
- To Interdisciplinarity…
- … And Beyond
- This is Excellent
- The University in Bits
- What if Hoggart had had email?
