Page 157 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

Movements as entirely replacing class politics, conflict since the 1960s has been
somewhat displaced from the opposition of manager and worker to a wider struggle
for control over the direction of social, economic and cultural development. In
134 particular, the axis of conflict for NSMs has shifted to questions of identity, self-
actualization and ‘post-materialist’ values.
New Social Movements tend to be more preoccupied with direct democracy and
member participation than with representative democracy. Though the
achievement of specific instrumental goals does form a part of their agenda, NSMs
are more concerned with their own autonomy and the value orientation of wider
social developments. Indeed, they can be understood as having a ‘spiritual’
component centred on the body and the ‘natural’ world that acts as a source of
moral authority.
NSMs are commonly marked out by their anti-authoritarian, anti-bureaucratic
and even anti-industrial stance alongside their loose, democratic and activist-
oriented organizational modes. Consequently, the boundaries between particular
movements are often blurred in terms of value-orientation, specific goals and
overlapping flexible and shifting ‘membership’. Though New Social Movements
often engage in ‘direct action’ this is not usually aimed at the authority and
personnel of orthodox representative politics (for example, Members of
Parliament or Congress) in the first instance. Rather, the initial symbolic protest
commonly revolves around other actors or institutions in civil society such as
corporations, research establishments, military bases, oil rigs, road building projects
and so forth.
The politics of NSMs challenge the cultural codes of institutionalized power
relations through symbolic events and evocative language that lend them coherent
form as an ‘imagined community’. Hence the images generated by New Social
Movements are core to their activities and act to blur the boundaries between their
form and content. Indeed, many of the activities of NSMs are media events designed
to give themselves popular appeal. Here, the symbolic languages of these
movements are polysemic and thus broad enough to suit the imprecision of their
aims while forming the basis of an alliance constituted by a range of otherwise
disparate people. In this sense, more than traditional modern party politics, NSMs
are expressly a form of cultural politics with which most cultural studies writers
have felt an affinity. For example, Greenpeace is one of the most successful of
today’s social and political organizations and whatever the merits of their
arguments, their tactics are often exemplary in their use of media imagery,
consumer campaigns and direct action.

Links Cultural politics, identity, imagined community, life-politics, postmaterialism

New Times The idea of ‘New Times’ was proposed by Stuart Hall, Martin Jacques and
others in a book of the same name (published in 1989) and was a significant
moment in the development of post-Marxism. In its themes and approach the book
departed from the orthodox Marxist view of the day and can be read as part of the
turn of cultural studies towards postmodernism in that it suggested there had been