Page 212 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

206 CULTURAL STUDIES

to the fact that [the postmodern] challenges all the procedures, assumptions and
categories of the modern, including those of scholarship, writing and publishing.
Is there still a place in this brave, bloody new world for a kind of critical writing?
If so what kind and where? How can one practice it? I must confess, I really don’t
know?’ (xiv) It is in the acceptance that there may really not be a ready answer
that the seriousness of the book lies.
A similar point might be made about the question of political commitment. In
one of the few directly argumentative passages of the book, Wark enters into a
debate with Greil Marcus over an earlier essay on Tiananmen Square. Marcus is
disturbed by the way Wark treats the event as if it were ‘just a movie’ (145) and
urges a return to the lived experience of those who were actually in Beijing. For
Wark, it is not so much that the latter project would be misguided as that it is not
the one which he set out to undertake. But the injunction against an exploration of
the televisual experience of the event betrays an inability to accept this as another
reality. To be sure, the students and residents on the street experienced the event
in all too physical and material ways. But for millions of others who were hooked
into and implicated in the event, the experience was on another, more mediated
terrain. The politics of this terrain may be more nebulous and indirect, but it is no
less significant in its effects. The exchange is one which touches centrally on the
question of cultural studies’ real faith in its own founding claims about the
specificity and effectivity of cultural mediation.
Wark’s response to other cultural studies approaches is in general a ‘yes, but
also …’. At one point, he sets side by side the various influential approaches to
thinking critically about power—Marx’s analysis of relations of production,
Foucault’s of techniques of discipline and surveillance, de Certeau’s of the tactics
of everyday life, Virilio’s of the power of the vector. The aim is neither to select
one above the others, nor to reconcile them in a cultural studies version of unified
field theory. It is rather to relativize them in relation to the contexts or terrains in
which they are effective, so that they become a flexible resource. In thinking about
the architectural space of Beijing, Foucault has an obvious relevance. But in taking
account of the way in which space is transformed by the presence of international
television crews, he cannot provide the whole story and Virilio has rather more to
say. The result of such an approach is a quite radical theoretical pluralism. While
Virtual Geography is about deterritorialization, it also enacts a deterritorialization
of cultural studies. Instead of appearing as a single field to which one might lay
claim, it becomes an intersection of numerous tracks each heading off in different
directions.
The one cultural studies tradition for which Wark clearly has limited sympathy
is the semiotic ‘reading’ of texts: Theory isn’t the customs department, unpacking
every bag to inspect its contents for immoral smugglings. Theory is the baggage
department, loading images onto and off their vectoral flights’ (159). In a world
where texts and images proliferate, and are routinely dislocated from their
‘original’ contexts, it is futile to believe that the correct reading could get to the
bottom of any one, to determine its ‘true’ political valence. It is better, Wark argues,