Page 250 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

238 LOOKING BACK AT NEW TIMES AND ITS CRITICS

the research and lobbying ‘think tank’ which sought to take its place is,
with representatives intentionally drawn from right across the political
spectrum, from right to left, much less successful in maintaining the broad
church project which Marxism Today represented. That project was not a
political aim but a publishing idea, one which was novel for the left, and
surprisingly invigorating in the contributions and interviews it carried with
leading, if sometimes maverick Tories. In contrast DEMOS seems like a
rather stuffy gentleman’s club whose doors are shut to those who do not
want to sit down to high table with the ‘radical right’.
The reading of the New Times volume, and the commentary on its critics
which follows, focus on those contributions which belong more
immediately to the field of cultural studies. This requires selection, and a
number of important issues unfortunately must be left out; the whole
question of the new Europe for example, and with it the crisis of
communism and the decline of the party. Neither is it my intention to
present this chapter as a detailed review of the whole New Times work.
The aim is instead to address what now appear as the agenda-setting issues
found in this volume, and to show how a handful of critics have wrongly
conflated these questions with a quite separate and more problematic
strand which has emerged in the new cultural studies. This conflation has
then allowed these critics to denounce New Times for pursuing an
apolitical and ‘celebratory’ mode. The politics, the practice and the jostling
for position inherent in these various critiques will also be considered.
The direction of the chapter is as follows. First there is a consideration of
the main themes and questions raised in New Times. A brief summary
follows of those writers who have challenged the particular configuration of
social forces which the New Times writers designate as ‘post-Fordist’. This
will then entail an assessment of where both New Times and cultural
studies stand in relation to thinking about the connections between the
various levels (in particular the political and the economic) which
constitute the recognizably social field which we currently inhabit. In the
second part of the chapter I will look at those writers who have recently
felt compelled to take cultural studies to task and who have done this
directly or indirectly through the New Times work. Of course some of
these contributions are more useful than others. Most represent an
opportunity to lay some claim to the field of cultural analysis which for a
whole number of reasons has found itself unexpectedly undergoing a
process of expansion and rapid institutionalization. The main protagonists
here are McGuigan (1992), Frith and Savage (1992), and Christopher
Norris (1992). The argument here is not against the expansion of cultural
studies, nor against its institutionalization. Instead it will be suggested that
just as New Times found itself positioned at a crossroads, in a moment of
political, intellectual and social change and transformation, so also was
this a moment in which cultural studies was emerging from the shadows