Abstract
This essay suggests that cultural studies, media studies and communications need to focus on the changes and challenges associated with this particular historical conjuncture, and re-assess the kinds of analysis that can most fruitfully contribute to this critical project. This requires rethinking some conventional assumptions about everyday life, media texts and communications technologies so that a more nuanced understanding of the imbrication between culture, labour and economy in the present moment may be developed.
Notes
[1] Michel Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, and Power,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986), 244.
[2] James W. Carey, Communication as Culture (London: Routledge), 1989.
[3] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 50.
[4] See the papers in the special issue on “Convergence Culture,” Cultural Studies 25 (4–5): 2011.
[5] Christian Fuchs, “Labor in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet,” The Information Society, 26 (2010): 191.
[6] Meaghan Morris, “Banality in Cultural Studies,” in Logics of Television, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 14–43.
[7] Fuchs, 192.
[8] Diane Elson, ed., Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism (London: CSE Books), 1979.
[9] See Colin McCabe, “Interview with Stuart Hall,” Critical Quarterly, 50 (1–2), 2007, 29; Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg et al. (New York: Routledge, 1992), 286.
[10] McKenzie Wark, “The Weird Global Media Event and the Tactical Intellectual [Version 3.0],” in New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, ed. Wendy Chun and Thomas Keenan (New York: Routledge, 2006), 266.
[11] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 143.
[12] See Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 2011.
[13] Meaghan Morris, Too Soon, Too Late: History in Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 19.