Page 267 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

ANGELA MCROBBIE 255

back for a moment and absorb and reflect on the charges now being laid at
the doorstep not just of New Times but of the whole field of cultural
studies.

WHAT IS AT STAKE?
First I would suggest that in all emergent theoretical position-taking there
are margins of provocation, there is an imaginative (perhaps too highly
imaginative) staking out of new terrains. If that counts as being too
‘fashionable’ as McGuigan puts it, then it might be worth reminding that
writer that the trivial pursuits which count for him as too fashionable,
and thus lacking in substance, are precisely what cultural studies insisted
on taking seriously in the first place. If this is too much for the critics then
why do they too spend so much time on cultural studies itself? Are they
somehow in possession of the real political agenda? If so, it might be useful
to have an opportunity to look at it. Meanwhile the profound distrust of
fashion and the charge laid against these writers as being merely
fashionable, betrays the voice of the male critic for whom fashion is
disquieting, uncomfortable, and thus best regarded as superficial and
unimportant.
The same kind of dismissive (bordering on contemptuous) tone creeps
into the language of another recent critic of cultural studies in what in this
case is a defence of political economy. Writing against what he perceives as
an excessive concern for cultural politics in black writing Garnham (1995)
argues ‘it is hard to argue that much dent will be made in domination if
black is recognised as beautiful but nothing is done about processes of
economic development…and exclusions from and marginalisation in
labour markets.’ The same goes, he continues for gender. As though all
that has emerged from the extensive writing on race and ethnicity in
cultural studies by Stuart Hall, Kobena Mercer and Paul Gilroy, can be
condensed into the idea that ‘black is beautiful’. The scale of this
reductionism is as revealing as it is extraordinary.
There is a world of difference between the few wilder voices who see self-
expression and resistance residing in the actions of those who loiter in
shopping malls (something for which Garnham also holds me responsible)
and those who insist that we listen to how people interpret and make sense
of their own experience. And that this experience points to something quite
different from happy capitulation to New Right rhetoric is also interesting
and important. But even where it does articulate a solid embracing of
neoconservative values, that too is something which has to be addressed. It
goes some way in helping us to understand precisely what made
Thatcherism so popular. Phil Cohen’s recent and exhaustive work on the
‘popular’ racism of white working-class children and young people in