Editors’ Introduction: Marxism and Cultural Studies

Si Griffiths, 2005

Cultural studies as a discipline and intellectual practice is deeply indebted to Marx, even as the field of cultural studies has contested, revisited, and updated Marx’s work. This issue points to a number of resonant threads currently active under the umbrella of cultural studies and opens possibilities for historical mapping of the many and varied aspects of marxist thought, in and out of the academy. The authors in this issue direct us toward and augment our understanding of the multi-faceted and inextricable links between questions of capital and questions of race, class, and gender power that have been the focus of US research in cultural studies especially within the past thirty years. In this issue, we continue and expand our editorial emphasis on the role of cultural studies in explaining and challenging the ongoing, intersectional significance of material power relations.

Decommodified Labor: Conceptualizing Work After the Wage

A way to think labor after finanancialization, decommodifed labor refers to an emptying out of the same wage relation that nonetheless continues to structure our lives. “Working hard or hardly working” needs a new conjunction: in an age of decommodifed labor, one finds oneself working hard and hardly working. I suggest that decommodified labor offers cultural critics a form for isolating labor today that takes account of its relation to the wage, that may assist in periodizing the capital-labor relation, and that also highlights financial change alongside labor’s durational necessity under capitalism.

Imagined Immunities: Abjection, Contagion and the Neoliberal Debt Economy

MERS Coronavirus Particles by NIAID

This paper addresses the pervasiveness of contagion as a structure of feeling by putting Maurizio Lazzarato’s biopolitics of indebtedness in dialogue with Roberto Esposito’s insight that debt is the very condition of both community and its dialectical opposite, immunity. Where Esposito does not sufficiently engage the role of financialized or neoliberal capitalism within the contemporary crisis, Lazzarato develops a Marxian account of debt that complements Esposito’s “immunitarian biopolitics,” revealing it as an intrinsically capitalist one, and allows us to ground it in contemporary power structures through Marx’s figure of M-M’.

Vital Forces: Marx and the Tension of Capitalist Affect

This article juxtaposes Marx’s critique of capitalism with recent developments in affect theory. My central argument is that a critique of the tension of capitalist affect is fundamental to a Marxian account of capital: on the one hand, capitalism amplifies the potential affective capacity of bodies through its development and organization of productive forces; on the other, it captures this increase to enrich the bourgeoisie, immiserate the proletariat, and reproduce capitalism. I also sketch the ways that an affective interpretation can provide insight into anti-capitalism resistance and post-capitalist life within Marx’s theoretical and philosophical project. Ultimately, reading Marx’s critique of capitalism for its resonances with Deleuzean-Spinozan affect theory not only generates a newfound apprehension of the affective register of that critique, but also adds to the critical repertoire of affect theory.

Marxism, Cultural Studies, and the “Principle Of Historical Specification”: On The Form of Historical Time in Conjunctural Analysis

Karl Korsch identifies in Marx’s work what he calls “the principle of historical specification,” the way in which “Marx comprehends all things social in terms of a definite historical epoch.” This work is concerned with this idea and its instantiation in contemporary social theory. With this paper I hope to show how the principle of historical specification has been interpreted within the Birmingham tradition of cultural studies, paying specific attention to (1) the form of historical time implicit in the concept of a “conjuncture,” and (2) the logic of historical periodization that follows from a “conjuncturalist” approach to historical research. I argue that a conception of plural temporality is central to the mode of historical analysis associated with the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

Debord in Watts: Race and Class Antagonisms Under Spectacle

Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles. (New York World-Telegram, August 1965)

In this paper, I explore Guy Debord’s analysis of race and racializing processes by closely examining the use of footage of the Watts rebellion in Debord’s film The Society of the Spectacle (1973), along with a close reading of Debord’s 1965 text on the uprising, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy.” Debord’s Marxist perspective on Watts understands the insurgents as potential revolutionary actors, primed for a “second proletarian assault against class society” (SotS, Thesis 47). To complicate Debord’s position, I look at the similarities and differences between his stance and the emergent theoretical paradigm of Afropessimism, which understands anti-black violence not as contingent upon capitalist alienation but instead as gratuitous violence required to uphold the figure of Humanity within civil society.

“Who is this man who is distinct from this citizen?” Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberal Rights

Marx was right! We know now Occupy Amsterdam, 15 oktober 2011 Foto Jacques van Gerwen

Steven Lukes argues that Karl Marx underestimated the importance of human rights. For Lukes, Marx treated human rights only as expressions of the egoism and individualism of bourgeois society and, in doing so, underestimated both the danger of arbitrary political power and the protection afforded by individual rights. My first aim in this essay is to show four substantial problems with Lukes’ reading of “On the Jewish Question,” the text that Lukes finds to contain the “roots” of Marx’s view. My second aim is to argue that—a hundred and fifty years after the publication of Capital—a re-assessment of the marginality of rights in Marx’s thought is overdue. There is nothing in Marx’s thought that should discourage socialists from demanding such rights and this essay finds that this is not a connection between Marxism and socialism that needs severing.

The Best of All Possible Ends of the World: An Interview with Andrew Culp

Dark Deleuze (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) appears as an anomaly in English Deleuze scholarship. Andrew Culp contrasts Deleuze as a thinker of positivity who constantly demands we find “reasons to believe in this world” with a Deleuze of dark negativity. In doing so, Culp offers an alternative Deleuze in a time where powerful forces from Buzzfeed to the IDF seek to appropriate Deleuze’s thought. The Dark Deleuze speaks of destructive negativity, hatred for this world, and the shame of being human. All of these ideas are pit against “the canon of joy” that would have us relentlessly celebrate the new, affirm the present, and give in to compulsory positivity. Culp makes a powerful case that, contrary to what one might expect, it is precisely the positivity that lies at the heart of both liberal and accelerationist readings of Deleuze.

2017 Randy Martin Prize


Doing What You Love in the Age of Mass Debt

This paper examines the relationship between student debt and the changing terrain of work in U.S. culture, while attending to how these shifts mark a specifically gendered, racialized phenomenon. Drawing on the AAUW’s 2017 report on student debt, this paper examines the figure of the fashion intern in order to think about how the gender and racial inequities in student debt collude with what Angela McRobbie terms ‘the feminization of work’ to effect a gendered, racialized form of indebtedness. I assert that the ‘do what you love’ ethos described by Miya Tokumitsu contributes to the proliferation of feminized work in the culture industries, such as fashion, and the perpetuation of racial exclusivity within the industry.


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