Abstract
This essay considers what the term “critical” means—or could mean—to critical/cultural studies scholars. It does so by engaging with two key texts from the history of cultural studies: Raymond Williams' Keywords, and more specifically the clinical sense of “critical” that he develops there; and Stuart Hall et al.'s Policing the Crisis, which illustrates how a keywords approach can help practitioners of cultural studies to make sense of nascent aspects of social reality. The purpose of this essay is to suggest that critical practice has tended to focus on dominant, or fully manifest, aspects of reality, and therefore that it has tended to downplay the political import of what Williams calls “the emergent.” A focus on the latter, I contend, promises to enlarge the scope of critical practice beyond the realm of the visible and the articulable, while also raising difficult methodological questions that will need to be worked through in this journal's next decade.
“Let us face the future,” said a famous manifesto. But how exactly, at any actual time, are we supposed to do that?
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies: what a cryptic academic locution! It reminds me of those scenarios in which well-intentioned representativeness produces awkward amalgamations. A camel is a horse designed by committee, as it were. In part, what throws me off is the slash separating “critical” from “cultural.” Semantically, I gather its purpose is to hold the two terms in tension. Syntactically, it condenses what would otherwise be the cumbersome construction, Communication and Critical Studies and Cultural Studies. At least, that's what I think is going on. But what really confounds me is the appearance of the word “critical,” which, with the words “cultural studies” also appearing there, seems to me superfluous. I cannot imagine a cultural studies that's not, on some level, critical, however the latter may be defined. Then again, perhaps it's all just a way of indicating that cultural studies does not exhaust all critical practice—only that's a shot across the bow, not an intellectual project.
What is this “critical” in “critical/cultural studies” (or its variant, “critical cultural studies”)? Given all the ambiguities surrounding the term, it seems to me that we ought to devote some portion of the journal's second decade to continuing to work through this question, much as Briankle Change, Ramsay Eric Ramsay, Kent Ono, and Kembrew McLeod did in their 2011 forum on “Being Critical.”Footnote2 How one defines “critical” has important implications for how one imagines the political possibilities of this journal, and of the broader field of cultural studies. The provocation that follows is an attempt to help spark the next phase of that conversation.
I'll begin, as I often do these days, with Raymond Williams, and his compendium Keywords. The book includes an entry for criticism, within which also appear the terms critic and, most important for our purposes, critical. He opens by noting that criticism is “a very difficult word” due to the range of meanings it encompasses: from “fault-finding,” “censure,” and “judgment” to “discrimination” and “appreciation.”Footnote3 He concludes with an argument about critical practice, rejecting the Kantian penchant for “abstraction of [critical] response from its real situation and circumstances.” Williams proposes instead a materialist conception, stressing how “the specificity of response” arises “in active and complex relation with its whole situation and context.”Footnote4 This move makes the entry for criticism somewhat unusual, as the writing in Keywords tends to be more expository than normative.
It's an unusual entry for another reason as well. About a quarter of the way in, there appears a brief aside, in which Williams comments on the usage of critical within the medical profession. There, he observes, it carries the unique sense of “a turning point,” as in the phrase, critical condition.Footnote5 This is an almost rogue meaning of the term, Williams seems to suggest, except for the connotation of “decisiveness” that ties it loosely to the meanings mentioned above. He also draws attention to the fact that this sense of critical has transcended medicine so as to become synonymous with the adjectival form of the word crisis, and by implication its noun form as well. Footnote6
Without dismissing questions of judgment, discrimination, and so forth, it is the clinical sense of the word critical that ought to be on this journal's radar.Footnote7 In fact it describes the general ambit of Williams’ own keywords project, the object of which is not important words per se, but words whose semantic turns are among the first harbingers of a changing social reality. His most famous example is culture, whose use was, until the early nineteenth century, restricted largely to agriculture. The senses and meanings prevalent thereafter—selective tradition, material artifacts, and ways of life—took root “before the decisive effects of a new social and intellectual movement,” i.e., industrial capitalism.Footnote8
Indeed it is important to appreciate the complex temporality at play here, and how this sense of time enlarges the scope of critical practice beyond its usual confines.
Words tend to operate within the realm of “the residual” or “the dominant,” which are concepts Williams develops in an effort to challenge rigid notions of economic determination. The residual refers to aspects of social reality held over from some earlier historical moment.Footnote9 Though ostensibly out of time, they're nonetheless active in the here and now. Indeed language is filled with so-called archaisms, the sum total of which bear witness to how elements of the past persist in, and thus continue to enframe, the present. The dominant, meanwhile, refers to “a central system of practices, meanings, and values”—the de facto touchstone of a society by means of which a majority of its members organize and make sense of their activities.Footnote10 Dictionaries are the most visible exemplars of the dominant, linguistically speaking, insofar as they codify the existence of particular words and sanctify specific uses.Footnote11
Keywords belong to a special class of language, however, and thus relate to a different aspect of time and reality—what Williams calls “the emergent.” Just as the residual refers not to some abstract past but to the effectivity of older elements within a present-day social formation, so, too, does the emergent refer not to some abstract future but to the effectivity of nascent elements within the present. The emergent thus names that which is new or novel, and that which has also begun to exert noticeable bearing on human thought, conduct, and expression. Keywords are emergent phenomena in the sense they're either significant terms newly introduced into the general lexicon (Williams gives the example of the word capitalism in the early nineteenth century) or, more typically, existing words whose meanings have started to turn in ways that anticipate deep and abiding realignments in social reality.Footnote12
But keywords are more than just emergent language, strictly speaking. They're best conceived as junction points between the emergent and a fourth category Williams introduces—“the pre-emergent,” or aspects of social reality that are “active and pressing but not yet fully articulated.”Footnote13 Thus, from a methodological standpoint, keywords are important not only because they're temporally and epistemologically complex, but also because they mediate forms of social experience that exceed the discursive. Put another way, the moment in which a semantic figure starts to turn from word to keyword may be the closest one can come to grasping the ineffable.
Why does all this matter, critically and politically? First, Williams has given us an “expanded empiricism,”Footnote14 or a way of talking about lived relations unconstrained by the reductive tenets of realism; no longer need we be slaves in our research to that which is unmistakably manifest. “No mode of production and therefore no dominant social order and therefore no dominant culture ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practice, human energy, and human intention,” writes Williams.Footnote15 Critical practice must of course be vigilant about the dominant, and about the residual (elements of which are often subsumed by the former), but equally it must eschew the conclusion that “it is only in articulation that we live at all.”Footnote16Critical thus refers to a specific—often oppositional—mode of engaging with social facts, but it also refers to a clinical mode of speculating rigorously about the incipient directions of a society. Critical/cultural studies must, on some level, aspire to be cultural studies in the future tense.Footnote17
Moreover, it's a mistake to assume that politics happens exclusively within the realm of the dominant or, for that matter, the residual. Take, for instance, the example of Stuart Hall et al.'s Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, published in 1978. Nominally, the book focuses on a rash of muggings that beset Britain between 1972 and 1973, which were widely reported on by media in the UK. The authors, however, place the word mugging in quotation marks throughout the text to signal its troubled object status—and, though they never identify it as such, its status as a keyword. In the introduction they assert their reason for doing so: “‘mugging’ … cannot be allowed to stand in all its common-sense immediacy.”Footnote18 They want to avoid reducing mugging to matter of tangible occurrences, that is to say, and to conceive of it instead as a diffuse, mediate principle. Later, Hall and his colleagues shift the focus to “the critical forces which produce ‘mugging’ in the specific form in which it appears, and push it along the path it took from 1972–3 through to [1978].”Footnote19 Notice the change of register here—from the apparent facticity of mugging to the more elusive presence of “forces” operating in Hall et al.'s present. These forces, which prompted mugging to turn, we now know in hindsight as Thatcherism: a chilling admixture of neoliberal economic reforms, racist conceptions of national belonging, and retrograde notions of morality that were just starting to emerge at the time Hall et al. were writing.Footnote20
I don't believe it's a coincidence that the word crisis appears in the title of their book. Crises are turning points, after all—condition critical.Footnote21 What Policing the Crisis shows us, vis-à-vis Williams’ work, is that whatever goes by the name critical ought to display a strong measure of predictive insight. Having said that, I want to emphasize that keywords are but one way in which to perform this type of work; if anything, they're best thought of as a way—albeit highly powerful—of opening up the kinds of questions critical/cultural studies scholars ought to be asking when crisis is upon us … or on the horizon.
Notes
[1] Raymond Williams, “Walking Backwards Into the Future,” in Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, ed. Robin Gale (London: Verso, 1989), 281.
[2] Briankle G. Chang, “Introduction: Sixteen and a Half Questions on ‘Being Critical,’” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8, no. 1 (2011): 85–87, doi:10.1080/14791420.2011.544122; Ramsey Eric Ramsey, “Somehow, Learning to Live: On Being Critical,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8, no. 1 (2011): 88–92, doi:10.1080/14791420.2011.544120; Kent A. Ono, “Critical: A Finer Edge,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8, no. 1 (2011): 93–96, doi:10.1080/14791420.2011.543332; Kembrew McLeod, “On Pranks,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8, no. 1 (2011): 97–102, doi:10.1080/14791420.2011.544118.
[3] Raymond Williams, Keywords : A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 84–85.
[4] Williams, Keywords, 86.
[5] Williams, Keywords, 85.
[6] Williams, Keywords, 85.
[7] While it's beyond the scope of this essay to develop this connection, there are nonetheless striking resemblances between Williams’ discussion of criticism and Gilles Deleuze's “critical and clinical” project. Williams’ sense of critical as “turning” also shares some similarity with Deleuze's use of the term “clinamen,” as well as to his concept of “the event.” See Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 63, 83, 269.
[8] Williams, Keywords, 88, emphasis added; see also Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958); Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2001 [1961]), 57.
[9] Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford [Eng.]: Oxford University Press, 1977), 122.
[10] Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” New Left Review 82 (1973): 9.
[11] On the authoritative uses of dictionaries, see Williams, Keywords, 15, 17, 26.
[12] Williams, Keywords, 22, 50–52.
[13] Williams, Marxism and Literature, 126. See also Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (London: Verso, 1979), 167.
[14] Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 208–56.
[15] Williams, Marxism and Literature, 125. I have eliminated the italics from this quotation.
[16] Williams, Politics and Letters, 167. On the incorporation of the residual into the dominant, see Williams, Marxism and Literature, 123.
[17] Lawrence Grossberg, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
[18] Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978), ix.
[19] Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, 185; emphasis in original.
[20] Thatcher was elected Prime Minister on May 4, 1979.
[21] Cf.: J. Robert Cox, “Nature's Crisis Disciplines: Does Environmental Communication Have an Ethical Duty?,” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 1, no. 1 (2007): 5–20.