CLASS, LIBERAL PLURALISM AND COUNTERHEGEMONY

Abstract

This article focusses two interrelated issues in cultural studies: its increasing institutionalization, and the diminished relevance of class as an organizing principle. It concurs with many who ask what might radicalize cultural studies in the US at a time when the Birmingham legacy - an extra-institutional radicalism linked to Marxism - is no longer an effective guide. It proceeds by discussing the limits of forces which have prevented this radicalization, especially ‘American Exceptionalism’ and liberal pluralism. It then considers the existing reliance on European and British theories which has helped maintain this state, and argues in support of using both different theories and developing new articulations. These concerns are focussed through an evaluation of John Fiske'swork, which has thrived with the rise of neoliberalism, the decline of statism, the return of individualism and ‘freedom,’ and the left's creeping reformism in and outside the institution. Fiske has made significant contributions for rethinking the politics of culture in ways which move beyond‘culture industry’ limits. But he appropriates strands of European poststructuralism to essentialize the national character as hopelessly fragmented. And these imports too closely merge with indigenous myths of individualism and liberal pluralism, failing to provide a substantial intervention into the domestic scene. Fiske ultimately offers an insufficient theorizing of the social formation, revealed in his optimistic gloss on the larger capitalist system. This is closely linked to his limited notion of resistance. It is individualized and privileges culture as it masks the social formation's residual realities: capitalism's new complexities of consumption, and the status of actually-existing ‘democracy’ as a political-economic construction. Fiske's refusal of structure is linked to this lack of articulation, signalling his inability to represent the referent of what once was called'class, 'the glaring absence of Clintonism. The underclass swells as cultural studies maps the strands of crisis. The article appeals for class to be rethought in more complex ways and in relation to the concerns of full socio-economic justice.

Keywords:

• Consumerism Resistance Popular Culture Hegemony Liberal Pluralism Class Popular Culture Radical Democracy