31

Unmasking Class and Tradition

Questioning Recuperative History and Affiliation in Cultural Studies

Cameron McCarthy and Jennifer Logue

Introduction

COMBO:	Milk, I have got one question to ask you. Do you consider yourself English or Jamaican?
MILKY:	[long pause] . . . English!
COMBO:	That's what we need. That's what this nation has been built on. Proud men. Proud f. . .ing warriors. Two thousand years this little tiny f. . .ing island has been raped and pillaged by people who have come here and wanted a piece of it. Two f. . .ing world wars, men have laid down their lives for this. And for what? So we can stick our f. . .ing flag in the ground and say: Yes, this is England . . . and this is England . . . and this is England!
	(From Shane Meadows's This is England)

Some Preliminary Points

In a brilliant detour from his central project at hand – an assessment of the significance of the life and work of the great German art collector, caricaturist, and historian Edward Fuchs – Walter Benjamin pointed to an inescapable contradiction that cuts through all modern forms of cultural assertion, affiliation, and intellectual paradigms: “There is no document of culture,” noted Benjamin (2008), “which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (p. 124). There is, as he went on to argue, no proper historical accounting of this kind of opposition. Each intellectual tradition struggles with this tension of bearing forth insight into the stratified world that it tries to apprehend and disclose and the weight of its own blind spots and narrowed parameters of vision. The stream of recuperative history of any intellectual tradition or movement – be it the Frankfurt School or cultural studies, or otherwise – when treated as a cultural artifact is not as Edward Said maintained a “palimpsest” (1985, p. 165), but is instead a fractured parchment revealing tensions, contradictions, unmoored orientations, and lines of flight. This methodological stance is particularly useful when one considers any exemplar of the revisionist neo-Marxist radical traditions. Here, our focus is on British cultural studies viewed from the perspective of postcolonial and transnational critique. Like Benjamin, we are interested in the way cultural studies addresses the past in light of the fractured present. For based upon even the most cursory consideration of the guiding assumptions of proponents, British cultural studies can be challenged in two areas in which this body of scholarship has areas of cultural studies thought contain elements of the blind spots that Benjamin alluded to. We maintain, for instance, that British cultural studies proceeds from a repression or disavowal of the contradictions of tradition, affirming a class-conflicted modernity and a transhistorical universalism against a primordial past. British cultural studies proponents textually construct the working class as defined by an unyielding Britishness. Britishness becomes the organizing principle of class identity. The British working class stands in as proxy for the universal working class, enfolding the periphery in the center of the world. This is a formulation on class that is profoundly nation-bound and, more importantly, is written – as Anoop Nayak (2003) points out – aggressively against postcolonial subjects who enter the waning British scene of labor as immigrants from the colonies; as the metonymic “Pakis” or “Jamaicans” of Paul Willis's Learning to Labor (1981).

In what follows, we address the turbulent relationship that British cultural studies scholars have with the concepts of “class” and “tradition” and the problematic social epistemological status of these key terms within the cultural studies literature. We maintain, in part, that these concepts have been deployed within a center–periphery thesis and a field-bound ethnographic framework by cultural studies scholars pursuing a subcultural studies approach. Within this framework, “Britishness” has been the silent organizing principle defining metropolitan working-class traditions and forms of cultural resistance. British cultural studies proponents have therefore pursued the study of class and culture as a localized, nation-bound set of interests. This has placed cultural studies in tension with postcolonial subjectivities often reduced, as they have been in the classic works of Paul Willis's Learning to Labor (1981) and Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), to the metonymic “Pakis” and “Jamaicans.” We write against the grain of the textual production of the working class within cultural studies scholarship, insisting that recent films – such as This is England (2007), The Full Monty (1997), Billy Elliot, (2000), and Bend It Like Beckham (2002) – and the literary works of George Orwell, George Lamming, Jeanette Winterson, and Kazuo Ishiguro, offer a more complex story of class identities in the age of globalization and transnationalism.

Further, we address these concerns ultimately pointing to the specter of globalization and the way it challenges the relevance and insightfulness of the postwar cultural Marxism of British cultural studies. We first grapple theoretically with the serviceable tradition that cultural studies draws on to authenticate and center the metropolitan working class in the discussion of class relations, understood transhistorically and universally. We point to the incommensurability of this approach in relation to the contextual reality of present-day postindustrial society and the profoundly limiting framework of nationalism which undergirds the British cultural studies subcultural approach to class. We argue further that this ethnocentric approach to class in British cultural studies scholarship cuts at right angles to the postcolonial subjectivities and the presence of the third world in the metropolitan working class. We then go on to call sharp attention to the nation-bound language and claims that attend the discussion of the working class specifically in the writings discussion of the working class specifically in the writings of the great postwar cultural Marxists such as E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and Paul Willis, among others. We then examine examples culled from popular film culture to show the complexity of the characterization of the working class that is found in contemporary film and paradoxically absent in the sociological writing of cultural studies. Complementing this we draw as well on the literature of George Orwell, particularly his essay “Shooting an Elephant” (1981). In this essay, Orwell offers a complex portrayal of a British working-class police officer operating on secondment overseas in the then colony of Burma. We conclude by drawing the outlines of the new global context that has precipitated a crisis of language in the neo-Marxist scholarly efforts to grasp the central dynamics of contemporary societies. The latter has led to a depreciation of the value and insightfulness of neo-Marxist analysis in our time. Old metaphors associated with class, economy, and state (“production,” “reproduction,” “resistance,” “the labor–capital contradiction”) are now all worn down by the transformations of the past decades in which the saturation of economic and political practices in aesthetic mediations has proceeded full scale (Klein, 2001, 2007).

Let us first consider the problem of class and tradition as they are conjoined in cultural studies.

Reading the British Tradition in Cultural Studies

Is it surprising that British writing on the industrial working class (or agrarian working class as Ishiguro alludes to above) asserts and proceeds by marking out an assiduously achieved Britishness, a sense of distinctiveness of the English in the mission even of class revolt? And, from this refusal of ascesis and the wanton affirmation of Britishness can cultural studies proponents and scholars be perceived as lumbering too far behind? This chapter is written to interrogate and to interdict cultural studies on the plane of its own discourse of historical recuperation, the recuperation of texts and textualism – the terrain of its recuperation of the selective radical tradition of the British working class and its deployment of “what counts” for cultural relevance in the consideration of change. We want to challenge the grounds of this presumptive deification of the metropolitan working-class cultural form and the elaborated scenario of transhistorical, neo-Marxist universalism in which Paul Willis's “lads” and their contemporaries overwhelmingly occupy the attention of neo-Marxist cultural studies scholars and stand in for the subject/object of history. This deification operates to the detriment of the third world subject either vanquished to the vast wastes of the colony and empire or displaced by globalization to the metropole.

We want to argue that British cultural studies, which has in the past few decades generated such emulation in the United States and elsewhere as an unconstrained critical program of analysis is, to the contrary, a deeply localist, particularistic, introspective, nativist, defensive project that from Leavis to Willis and beyond has been engaged in the invention of a national British radical tradition – fighting off the fog of disillusionment with Marxist orthodoxy on the one hand and resisting the ever-persistent deterritorialization of Britishness and British content in the cultural form of the susceptible British working class by US popular culture on the other. We want to argue, in part, that the birthing of the metropolitan working class as flaneurs of the modern is achieved at the point of petrification of the postcolonial subaltern. These are the “other Victorians” – working-class Asians and West Indians and so forth – who are measured at that xenophobic historical moment in Willis's Learning and Hebdige's Subculture in which they are metonymically produced as “Pakis” and “Jamaicans,” the blunt, butt end of the laughing fodder of the lads.

This neo-Marxist cultural studies ethnographic text in its documentary practice is indeed the product of a sensationalist media age and the impact of the cinematic and the culture of the visual on writing and enunciation. Marxist realism is a class realism. But, it is a realism no less. It achieves verisimilitude through the mimetic organization of the world in the text. Herein, the neo-Marxist text becomes socially extended and stratified like the world outside, with ruling and subaltern energies. Here, then, the effect is to use the text against those whom it would abandon. Those voiceless in the world are voiceless in text. The text is the incubator of British traditions. The world is set down according to a hierarchy of discourses and a bureaucratic deployment of subjectivity that Ian Watt and others have noticed in the rise of the nineteenth-century novel (Harris, 1967; Watt, 1957). The third world subject appears immersed on the wrong side of that fatal couplet text/experience – speechless, spoken for, drowning in the concatenation of events that makes experience and squirming before the steely eyes of the lads. Stripped of their texts, their organized meanings, their interpretations, they are without tradition, the hapless witnesses to the shock of the text – reduced to a form of helpless spectatorship. One remembers here the natives of Conrad's Heart of Darkness who are allowed barely four words in the entire novel: “Mistah Kurtz – he dead” (Conrad, 1990, p. 240).

It is not surprising, then, that when Willis (2005) revisits the lads in some of his latest writings, the story of the lads is recounted without a mention of the children of the urban paradise lost – the West Indians jamming to reggae, the Asians desperate to join the “earholes.” We are reminded of that swiftly vanishing scene at the end of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Here the unknowable box-headed monster is let go into the mist – a sublime end after a miserable and mundane tour of duty: “He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance” (Shelley, 1993). The natives counter-posed to the lads come to a mercurial end in the modernizing project of the neo-Marxists.

But our quarrel is not with Willis's book per se. Its critical and utopian dimensions can be securely upheld, if not too overly celebrated, in the fields of humanities and social sciences now punished as they are in the current neoliberal climate of the university by overwhelming paradigms and frames of reference of instrumental research and policy expectations. It should be rightly extolled. That Learning to Labor is both an imperialist as well as a postcolonial text is also difficult to ignore. Learning to Labor announces the arrival of the third world subject on the waning scene of British labor. A fundamentally buried theme in this book is the fact of the dynamic relationship between the working classes across the divide of the third world and the first in the reorganization of capital – the movement of images, bodies, and economic and cultural capital that we now call globalization. The whole disembeddedness of modernization that places the native prostrate at the feet of Albion – a marginal topic that now, in hindsight after The Full Monty, seems to be so deeply prophetic. (“Those are the pearls that were their eyes. Look!” [Eliot, 1954].) And, urban England would become a beachhead for Caribbean and Asian migrant labor. This dynamic would announce the post-Fordist logic that we find acknowledged more readily in films such as This is England (2007), The Full Monty (1997), Billy Elliot (2000), and Bend It Like Beckham (2002). There is a way in which the fates of immigrant labor and the lads and their dads are inextricably connected. It is this fate that is recognized in the work of Wilson Harris's Carnival (1985), in the character of Everyman Masters who leaves the South American country of Guyana to join the British industrial working class some time in the 1960s. It is there in Samuel Selvon's Lonely Londoners (1956), of the Barbadians, the Trinidadians and Jamaicans trying to eke out an existence in the coldness of London that would be their new post-national home. It is there in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981). It is there too, of course, in George Lamming's The Emigrants (1994) in the mass exodus of cooks, maids, carpenters, transportation workers, poets, and novelists traveling to England, leaving behind their folding little nations of the Caribbean Sea. It is with this movement or moveable tableau of the diaspora that the postcolonial subjects find in London an agonizing and antagonistic landing and precarious settlement.

To summarize, then, one of the ironic and unexamined effects of the emergence of the neo-Marxist and neo-Gramscian cultural studies text has been the founding of the metropolitan working-class subject, and the elaboration of the full interiority of its collective subjectivity, entirely at the expense, and with the corresponding deflation, of the postcolonial and subaltern identities in the urban context. This third-world, periphery subjectivity is constructed at the extremes of the semiotic space which the lads inhabit as a point of reference. Third world subjects are constructed outside the working class as petrified spectators. There, they stand beholding a scene not of their own making but much undone by it. And yet, they answer back, as the first stanzas of a high school student's poem entitled “Mixed” will attest:

Let us examine the status of the lads and the fate of their postcolonial other in the elevated discourses of British cultural studies more specifically. Specifically, we look at the status of the concept of tradition as it is textually mediated within British cultural studies and the way in which tradition impoverishes our understanding of the relations of the working classes across the divide of metropole and the periphery We believe that contemporary film and literature point us more adroitly to the dilemmas of modern working-class subjectivity disembedded and impacted by globalization and multiplicity.

Re-Narrating Class and Cultural Studies

UPPER EASTSIDE WOMAN:	Ooooh, did you make these?
ZAINAB:	Yes. I made it.
UPPER EASTSIDE WOMAN:	Oohh, how much?
ZAINAB:	Which one?
UPPER EASTSIDE WOMAN:	Mmmmm, this one.
ZAINAB:	That's thirty-five dollars.
UPPER EASTSIDE WOMAN:	Will you take thirty?
ZAINAB:	No. Thirty-five.
UPPER EASTSIDE WOMAN:	Okay. My daughter will think this is very cool. She hands Zainab money. Where are you from?
ZAINAB:	Senegal.
UPPER EASTSIDE WOMAN:	Ooh I was in Capetown two summers ago. It is SO beautiful!
ZAINAB:	Thank you very much.
UPPER EASTSIDE WOMAN:	What's your name?
ZAINAB:	Uh, Zainab.
UPPER EASTSIDE WOMAN:	Oooh, Zaaynob, so pretty!
ZAINAB:	Your change.
UPPER EASTSIDE WOMAN:	Shrugs nonchalantly, grabs her forgotten change and walks away.
ZEV:	How far is Senegal from Capetown?
ZAINAB:	About 8,000 kilometers.
	(The Visitor, 2007)

Marx's chief work, Lukács told us almost 100 years ago, changes direction just when he was about to sketch out a definition of class. And we are still in need of a conception that captures the fluidity, the fissures, and the complexity of the subjectivities that can be said to belong in this class or that. We claim that we are in need of a complete overhaul of our perceptual, conceptual, and linguistic apparatus if we are to provide insight into the basis on which to imagine and build networks of affiliation across national, local, and global divides and lines of race, class, and gender. We argue further that placing aspects of contemporary popular culture in conversation with the scholarly discourses of cultural Marxism can help us to do just that.

In the scene depicted above (from Thomas McCarthy's film, The Visitor), we see how the experiences of Zainab and Zev, illegal immigrants in New York City, barely register on the radar of White, Upper-Eastsiders, for whom the world is understood from their own solipsistic perspective alone. In much the same way as we see how the gaze and the discourse of the wealthy white woman is critiqued by Zainab and Zev, we subject the analytic apparatus of cultural Marxism to scrutiny. Reading it contrapuntally (Logue, 2005) through the lenses of cinematic and literary representation we begin to see how the units of analysis in the discourse of cultural/historical materialist revolution are incapable of encapsulating the dynamics of power at work in past and present relations of power. Juxtaposing analysis of the nostalgic and unified nationalist structure of feeling with which the neo-Marxist discourse in postwar Britain is silently aligned to the problematization of tradition we see in cinematic and literary representation provides an opportunity to (re)examine the conceptual tensions and categorical contradictions that exist within this discourse of resistance, the terms of which, as commonly deployed, seem to undermine the possibility of adequately diagnosing the (new but reminiscent of old) dynamics of power and resistance with which it claims to grapple.

Disavowing particularity (at once universalizing and pathologizing it) is an age-old strategy of domination. We see this tendency at work in the way that terms such as “tradition,” “culture,” “class,” “power,” “privilege,” etc. are commonly deployed as though they weren't (each of them) riddled with complexity, contradiction, and antagonistic genealogical formation. The persistent assignment of particularism and atavism to the vast wastes of the third world begins with Karl Marx himself, as well as Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, in their particular staged-model of historical evolution of human societies. It continues in contemporary thinking in the attribution of the same scarlet letter to the new social movements and the rejection of identity politics in the writings of Marxist scholars such as Todd Gitlin (1995). This chapter restores a corrective valence to the whole enterprise of the analysis of culture. We read all of this against the troubling of tradition and the past in recent films on the working-class subject, as well as George Orwell's (1981) discourse on tradition, power, and privilege. In the latter, the “ear-holed” working-class subject now operates on colonial secondment overseas. In reading back and forth between Birmingham and Burma a new light is shed on recombinant particularism (There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack!) that the analytic framework of cultural Marxism seems to have foreclosed. For to understand British cultural studies is in part to understand that Mathew Arnold's project still survives in the hearts and minds of men and women at home, and even overseas in the empire, as C. L. R. James argues in Beyond a Boundary (1983).

In examining the status of tradition and the past within cultural Marxism as a way of clearing a path to the future, looking particularly at the work of historical recuperation within Marxist cultural humanism and its tendencies toward the universalization of the particular, a sharp light of attention is focused on British cultural studies, its anxiety of influence, and its graven desire for plenitude and fullness of understanding of the socially and materially constructed demarcations of the modern world. One is reminded here of the definition of culture and cultural studies advanced by John Fiske (1987): “Cultural Studies is concerned with the generation and circulation of meanings in industrial societies (the study of non-industrial societies may require a different theoretical base [. . .])” (p. 254). Cultural studies' search for the vanishing point, the origins of consciousness and general mythologization and valorization of the industrial working-class subject, is nestled within a peculiar narrative and play of national endowment, affiliation, and ethnic and localist distinctiveness in its founding arguments and concerns. Of course, similar arguments could be made about the nationalist canalization of tradition and the localist focus of the urban sociological ethnographies coming out of the Chicago School inspired by Robert Park and his students, right down to Howard Becker and the deviance research that influenced cultural studies proponents' pathbreaking ethnographies, as Michael Burawoy has argued (Burawoy et al., 2000).

This valorization of the traditions of the industrial working class has had several consequences (beyond the mistaking of spitballs for revolution) not always adequately accessed or diagnosed to date – one being the disavowal of particularism no different in structure and tone than what could be found in the patterned variables and structural functionalism over all in the work of mainstream social scientists such as Talcott Parsons. Of course, an integral feature of the reverence for working-class traditions is the methodological overlay of field-bound ethnographic rules and the visual culture documentary impulses that flow from Bronislaw Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Radcliffe Brown, and Margaret Meade, and monumentalist classical anthropology into the critical sciences in media studies and elsewhere, paralleling the rise of visual culture as a whole in silent and sound film, television and radio broadcasting, and the like. As an aside, it is to be remembered that in the 1920s and 1930s it was naturalistic ethnographic research – not quantitative survey analysis – that was the dominant research paradigm in the social sciences. The dominance of survey and market research would come later when Paul Lazarsfeld crossed the open seas of the Atlantic from Austria and joined Robert Merton at Columbia University in New York. But that is a matter for another time.

Interrogating the foundational assumptions and technical terms deployed in the discourses of cultural Marxism, we foreground the epistemological, ethical, and political implications of not investigating what it is these conceptual tools enable us to open up and what it is they foreclose. Does the concept of “class,” for example, as deployed within cultural studies research properly capture the contradictions experienced by category members in their everyday, lived existence and their class trajectories as they intersect with the new social subjects of the modern world – the diasporic “Pakis” and “West Indians” of British urban ethnographic lore (carriers of class histories of a different order)? How are the class affiliation and performative practices of Willis's “earholes” to be understood within this paradigm, particularly when these putative class members no longer seek to align themselves with the traditions which theorists of the working class describe? Is the working-class concept equipped to theorize the collective formation of agents with shared interests as members of interpretive communities composed of individuals and fractions that may or may not share the same relation to the means of production? Should it be? And what happens to sex/gender/sexuality when class becomes the primary category of analysis? What follows is a critical conversation between foundational texts of cultural Marxism and forms of popular culture to illuminate some of these complexities captured on the big screen and in the ill-fated peregrinations of the working-class subject in modern literature (our example, here, George Orwell's tale of an “uneducated” colonial police officer's fateful encounter with the “native” agroproletariat in the Burmese context as British imperial rule there waits to exhale). An effort at (re)historicizing the “tradition” of cultural Marxism, uncovering its inherent ethnocentricism, provides the framework for a brief discourse analysis of the deployment of terms like “class,” “power,” and “privilege” held together by notions of culture and tradition that are problematically monolingual and monotoned. Reading these discourses, texts, and conceptual tools contrapuntally through the lenses of cinematic and literary representation magnifies the need to reconfigure language, perception, and desire so that the conversation and transnational hybridity that is culture can take place and be grappled with collectively.

Deconstructing Demystification

A central task of this chapter, then, is to demystify the demystifiers on the problem of tradition and particularism which the classical sociologists had assured us would diminish with the advance of capitalism. The tendency to shunt particularism off to the periphery is therefore consistent with this core form of thinking. The ethnographic impulse that underlies cultural Marxism fuses action and interpretation, experience and text, worlding the world from the metropolitan center into its visible hierarchies of class and culture. Standing at the center of this panopticon, the whole social field spreads out before the Marxist observer like a vast unscrolling map. This cartographer of the modern world measures and weighs its social distinctions with the finality of a puritan and with the fervor of what Rey Chow (2002) calls “the protestant ethnic.” In the cultural Marxist's elective epiphany, the third world subject would virtually perish. But in this disavowal, particularism returned like a plague of innocence. Read on its own terms as a quest for scientificity, cultural Marxism divines class from the entrails of the social present and past, and ethnicity disappears. Read against the grain as a reluctant form of autobiography, the root book of cultural Marxism reveals its protagonist dressed in his solipsistic bright suit of ethnic privilege. And here, by this strategy, ethnic particularism appears. It is this deep-bodied ethnocentrism, paradoxically attached to the generalizations and transhistorical statements about the industrial working class and human societies associated with the theorizing of critical social scientists, that Horace Miner satirizes in his classic essay “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema” (Nacirema spelled backwards, of course, is “American”). Here, Miner talks about the mouth rites of the Nacirema, in the process exposing the classic norms underlying the cultural description that constituted the leitmotif of culturalist scholars writing about others:

The everyday practice of brushing the teeth is elevated to the realm of magic. The magician, the social observer and his besotted humanism, are defamiliarized here. And, the anthropological gaze of the West upon the third world subject is turned back on power for an evanescent moment full of illumination.

When we look, too, at the writings and founding motives of cultural studies, we find a similar hidden subject within the text that attaches itself to the working class and hides its own anxieties and its professional updraft. When we look at the work of Richard Hoggart, or Raymond Williams or E. P. Thompson, or later Paul Willis and Dick Hebdige, we find an ethnographic Marxism alloyed to a visceral nationalism, an ethnic particularism and wish fulfillment which it denies. How else can we read the intellectual history of Williams's Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (1966) but as a formidable and unrelenting recuperation of the Leavisian moral sensibility and purpose of British cultural form – the dream of the whole way of life as the encoding and decoding of national ethos in the British industrial novel and literary works? Burke, Cobbett, Southey, Owen, Bentham, Coleridge, Carlyle, Gaskell, Disraeli, Dickens, Arnold, Ruskin, Richards, Leavis, Orwell! If ever there was an assertion of a national canon, a court of appeal, the breaking out of particular cultural sensibility linked to national distinctiveness, this was one. How else is one to read Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957) with its characteristic mourning of the lost of the English working-class way of life (Morley & Robins, 1995) – its rampant nostalgia for a translucent past then in imminent dissolution? How else are we to read the brilliant E. P. Thompson, who at the end of The Making of the English Working Class (1980) makes the disclaimer that he was not competent to speak for any other working class than the English . . . not even the Scots or the Welsh? How else are we to read Paul Willis and his lads of Hammertown Boys who reduce the postcolonial other to the metonymic “Pakis” and “Jamaicans?” This great cauterizing reflex, this severe backward glance, was born in fact in the context of a general crisis of the relevance or irrelevance (depending on your ideological persuasion) of Western Marxism as the Soviets marched into Hungary in the 1950s and then into Czechoslovakia in the 1960s (Dworkin, 1997; Taubman, 2004). In this rude awakening from methodological slumber, British Marxist historians would disconnect from the work of international socialism, the Communist Party, and found their own distinctive theories of the origin of the British working class in the revival of working-class radical traditions (Dworkin, 1997; Hall, 1980). This working-class construct, for the subcultural theorists of resistance at Birmingham, was defined around a militancy of style, distinctive accoutrements and dress, argot and the like. This characteristically muscular construct, as Angela McRobbie (1997) would note, folded the working class into a singular, homogenous structure, powerful against its class adversaries, its semiotic chora set against the “earholes” and contemptuous and disdainful of the periphery. The power within this framework operated like a blunt instrument that was applied to the working classes and applied, in turn, like the clubbed foot of an elephant, by the working class against its ethnic rivals and latecomers from the third world; Sisyphus pushing against his enemies, all costermongers pushing rotten apples, as V. S. Naipaul would say of the donned dwellers of Oxbridge. Geoff Pearson's assessment of “Paki-bashing” in the northern English town of Lancashire underscored the vigorous tendency within cultural studies to subordinate ethnicity and race to class. Indeed, Pearson (1976) maintains “only if we enter into the heart of working-class life can we understand these beliefs and actions. ‘Paki-bashing’ is a primitive form of political and economic struggle. It is an inarticulate and finally potent attempt to act directly on the conditions of the market – whether the exchange value which is contested concerns housing, labor power or girls” (p. 69).

In its radical ethnocentrism, cultural Marxism closed off the White working class from its racially minoritized other, orientalizing the latter whether they were from Asia or the Caribbean as metonymic attachments – the “Pakis” or the “Jamaicans.” A deadly consequence of this is that the working-class subject and the nature of power were not presented in a sufficiently complex or nuanced way. Indeed, it would be left to the filmic culture and the literary culture to present more complicated views of class power and class subjects. The texts we discuss here effectively articulate complex accounts of the enlacement of class with ethnicity in a world transforming into hyper-globalization and transnationalism. But before we turn to the filmic and literary culture for insight, let us try and spell out a little more thoroughly the nature of the conceptual tensions that stem from this radical ethnocentrism.

Revisiting the Operationalization of the Category of Class

The lack of unity and the fluidity found within different lived realities within nations and around the globe are not and cannot be contained in the concepts we have used to articulate them – concepts such as the working class, which have been the animating and organizing categories deployed in much contemporary “neo-Marxist” analysis. Crucial aspects of what it means to be a socio/discursively constructed subject differentially positioned in a nebulous network of power relations are overlooked when definitions of culture, class, and power involve a nationalist monologue at the expense of intercultural dialogue and exchange. Language, here, is of primary importance, for not only does it serve to articulate and delimit a set of criteria for establishing whether or not one belongs to a given tradition, or rather, where they belong in relation to it, but also it often seems to reinforce the very social structures it is invoked to subvert.

Historicizing the concept of class, for example, reveals not only that common contemporary usage of the term too often fails to adequately absorb and embrace crucial distinctions and complex variations found with in “it.” It is also the case that “class” is then disembedded from its proclaimed tradition, thereby eliding paradoxical implications of forms of resistance achieved by revolutionary discourses past and present. How, for example, is the Marxian distinction between Klasse en sich (class in itself) and Klasse fuer sich (class for itself) placed within the work of cultural Marxism? Marx theorized class in itself to signify those who share a common location with regard to their relations to the means of production, while class for itself pertained to members of a group who consciously recognize their shared predicament and common interests, actualizing their needs and desires through networks of communication and resistance by organizing around their shared conflict with the opposing class. The two contending classes here, for contemporary Marxism, included the proletariat, destined to become class for itself, and the bourgeoisie, incapable of formulating class consciousness beyond the pursuit of individual self-interest. What was less spelled out, however, were the dynamics, shifts, and conflicts found within class in itself. For when one tries to work out how factors of race, gender, and sexuality figure into the operationalization of the definition of the proletariat/“working class” in itself, one may be inclined to suggest that there were numerous formations and reformations of class for itself within the “working class” and that these variations on the theme were of less urgency for Marx (and later neo-Marxists) to articulate. Continuing in this vein, early postwar cultural studies theorists failed to track the dynamic patterns of migration, dislocation, and rearticulation that had begun to feed into the class experience of working-class subjects in England and that brought new elements, new potential conscripts, to membership within the industrial working class. They had failed to adequately assess the changing map of spatial relations and the interior realities of British urban life itself as part of a broad-scale set of effects brought on by late capitalism – effects that were now stalking modern industrial societies. It seems that, here, the seeds of an under-theorized dynamic involving the mis(sed)diagnosis of the impact of networks of global communication, movement and migration of economic and cultural capital, and the amplification of representations and images had been effectively sown. What was nurtured instead was an ethnic and nationalist myopia planted firmly in the soil of an agrarian England transcoded onto the urban setting. The nurturing work of much of the historical recuperation of British radical traditions such as that of E. P. Thompson or Raymond Williams always, then, had a backward glance – an eternalist sense of le temps perdu, los pasos perdidos. Time and space essentially stood still. And, for instance, Willis would find in the Hammertown Boys School in Learning to Labor (1981) that the progeny of the working class grew from seedlings that were planted by their fathers on the shop floor. This backward glance – a nostalgia for the past, a nostalgia perplexed by the present – rendered problematic the entire analytical apparatus of the cultural studies discourse on class and change. In affirming the class essence of the industrial proletariat, this nostalgia had a particular methodological effect concerning class analysis as deployed within cultural studies: a tendency to gloss over contradiction, variation, and multiplicity.

Is this affirmation of traditional essence and the latent but virile proposition of the indivisibility of the working class, in a sense, what Hebdige (1979) accomplishes by writing of reggae and punk as seemingly equivalent subcultures? Rather than emphasizing these formations and modes of resistance as mutually constitutive, reggae figures in as an expression that culminates in the response of the punks. Neither is reggae considered countercultural or as more than an articulation of style, despite the fact that Hebdige cites it as having created its own language, religion, and vision of the future. Are we to understand the white and black factions described herein as manifestations of class for itself contained within the “working class?” How are the lived realities and cultural achievements of the diaspora/Black Britain subsumed by this move? Does it contribute to the idea that tradition and culture can be claimed as the moorings of an ethnically invisible yet distinctive group that remains forever threatened by that which it codes as deviant?

And what happens if we take seriously Michel Foucault's (2002) assertion that the concept of class struggle evolved out of (was extracted/de-historicized from) the discourse of race war/race struggle? Foucault's genealogy of the discourse of history reveals that racism is imbricated in revolutionary thought coming from the moment when the discourse of race struggle was being transformed into revolutionary discourse, where the state functions no longer as an instrument that one group uses against another: the state becomes the protector of the integrity, the superiority, and the purity of the race. Foucault reminds us that the concept of class struggle is found first in the discourse of the French historians – in the works of Augustin Thierry, Guizot, John Wade, and others. Thierry is defined as the father of the “class struggle,” used to replace the notion of “race struggle.” The effort to recode race struggle into class struggle is read as a manifestation of the shift in focus on race as existing whenever one writes the history of two groups that do not have the same language, to the term “race” becoming pinned to a biological meaning. This shift in race as linguistic difference to race as biological is what will become actual racism. This racism, according to Foucault, takes over and reconverts the form and function of the discourse of history, which was hitherto a discourse on race struggle/race war. Racism is born then of the shift in historical discourse, once reporting on the theme of historical war with its battles, invasions, victories, and defeats, to the recording of history with a new post-evolutionist theme of the struggle for existence by that of a society that is biologically monist, but which is (needs to be) threatened by a certain number of heterogeneous elements it deems not essential to it. Racism, then, at its inception, becomes manifest in the idea that foreigners have infiltrated society, which is to be safeguarded from deviants, who serve to foreground class conflict by being coded as factors which complicate it.

Foreclosing examination of its own origins, disembedding the discourse of class conflict from the discourse of race struggle impairs analysis of the complex organization of hierarchical social relations and resistance to them. Not only does the term “class” commonly function as though it were a static, impermeable category with an invisible ethnically particular tradition, but it fails to connote the actual strategies through which social subjects forge collective oppositional identities from the grounded pragmatics of cultural hybridities. Rather than attending to the centrality of sexual orientation, gender, and ethnic affiliation in cultural formations and transformations, in creating networks of communication and association, these categories are too often treated as complications contained within the already established organized relations to the means of production. And while the insights and methodological breakthroughs of cultural Marxism are important, like the emphasis on the popular imaginary, style, and other forms of often-overlooked resistance, might the struggles and forms of active resistance of what cultural Marxism lauds as the “working class” be better described as strategies developed by those differentially positioned in a complex web of power relations? It seems as though some of these overlooked dynamics of power and resistance are better captured in the very popular culture that cultural Marxism sought to interpret. But, while cultural Marxism begins to analyze popular culture, does it really converse with it?

It is both in The Full Monty and Billy Elliot that we see the working class, the “foot soldiers of modernity” as Willis (2005, p. 461) calls them, metamorphosing in the transitional light of globalization, and the tragic programs of deindustrialization and post-Fordism that radically transform the labor market and labor process from hard to soft, from materiality to immateriality, from the decaying manufacture of the metropole to the export processing zones overseas in Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, from hard industry to flexible information, from the working class cast in the center of history to the mass appearance of the proletarianized, temp. working cognitariat (Jencks, 1996; Klein, 2001). Do the terms of the cultural studies working-class discourse on resistance traditions capture such complexity? And, how are these complexities of tradition, class, and power addressed in the filmic and literary culture?

New Frames of Reference and Affiliation in Cinematic and Literary Production

BILLY'S DAD:	Ballet?
BILLY:	What's wrong with ballet?
BILLY'S DAD:	What's wrong with BALLET?
BILLY:	It is perfectly normal. . .
BILLY'S DAD:	Perfectly NORMAL? . . . For girls, not for lads, Billy . . . Lads do football, or boxing or wrestling . . . not frigging ballet!
BILLY:	What lads do? . . . Wrestling? . . . I don't see what's wrong with . . .
BILLY'S DAD:	Yes you do!
BILLY:	No, I don't!
BILLY'S DAD:	Yes you bloody do! . . . Who do you think I am?
BILLY:	What are you trying to say dad . . .
	(From Billy Elliot)

Contemporary filmic representations often offer complex and nuanced accounts of the transforming circumstances of working-class lived and commodified existence, revealing fault lines of contradiction and multiplicity. Indeed, the vaunted traditions and the folkways of the past so celebrated in the cultural studies ethnographic portrayal of the proletariat from Hoggart to Willis and Hebdige now hang like proverbial dead weights upon the new working-class subject. What the British White working class reluctantly has to face is the late-modern context of postindustrialization and the collapse of the material basis of White working-class identities that were grounded in shipbuilding, auto manufacture, and coal mining. Many of these industries moved overseas as England was perhaps the first developed country to feel the full brunt of the reorganization of capitalism and the neoliberal reorientation of its government, under Margaret Thatcher (Nayak, 2003; Willis 2005). Thatcher brutally disrupted working-class organizational collectivities and set in train a social and spatial landscape in which the visible markers of working-class identity situated in the factory would be forever uprooted. This is the world of Shane Meadows's provocative film This is England (2007), about a group of skinheads who are trying to make sense of the postindustrial world of immigrants, chronic unemployment, and constrained futures. England – as the principal skinhead character, Combo (Stephen Graham), notes above – has changed.

Billy (Jamie Bell) of the film Billy Elliot (2000) is also sharply aware of a new, postindustrial world coming into being. For him, the shop floor and the coal mines belong to a distant past and now exist as straitjackets constraining the desires of youth. Billy, instead, chooses a future in the Royal Ballet, in dance, rather than in the Victorian role of male provider of the coal mines and the deunionizing labor of north Durham, England. And in the end, when his latecomer dad attends his performance, he gets to see his son leap and soar, literally and metaphorically, out of the terms of existence that fashioned his life. There is no possibility of return to the past, just the flatlining of traditions and ephemeral revision of hierarchy of cultural distance.

And while Billy's doing ballet demonstrates the falling and collapsing (the ephemerality) of tradition – as well as the ability and desire to leap out of it with passion and grace into creative self-transformation – what does our youthful subject have in common with that weary and worn-out working-class subject featured in the spotlight of much media in the mainstream as well as within the scholarly and political discourses of the radical left? These portray the young White (presumably straight?) “working-class” male as triumphant; the battle scars, struggles, and defeats of the racially and reproductively marginalized others (always present even in their absence) are subsumed in the spotlight of his victory over those forces that constrain and oppress him. We can see here how the construct of the working class constricts those who find themselves in it and casts out those who provide the other side of the boundary line. For it is not just the capitalists that constrain him and over whom he seeks to triumph – there are so many more lines drawn in the sand.

Providing for Billy an unnamed but central aspect of his co-authored identity, Debbie Wilkinson (Nicola Blackwell), the daughter of his dance teacher, his potential friend (or rather girlfriend), could have had a voice and purpose in life beyond becoming his worshipping subject seeking to possess him for herself at all costs. This one visible female counterpart is vanquished in the representation. Rather than being portrayed as a potential ally with agency, she is pitted against Billy, so they remain alienated from each other as well as the structures that define and code them. Moreover, the way Whiteness functions (for anyone possessing it) as property, providing a special but spectacularly hidden ethnic particularity, cultural capital, and symbolic power that translate into material profit, remains unexplored. But the depiction of the “traditional” masculinist working-class subject united against an identifiable enemy with similarly positioned others is indeed challenged here, opening the door for analysis of the underground economies of national identity, sexual orientation, and ethnic affiliation.

In a somewhat different way, but with a similar intensity in the uprooting of the past and tradition, Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham (2002) is a refreshing depiction of the flatlining of tradition, but this time the star of the show is a young Asian girl, Jesminder. Jess is the youngest daughter in a rather orthodox Sikh family living in Britain who struggles to participate in family tradition while at the same time pursuing her dream to “bend it like Beckham.” She is an agile, wily football (soccer) player who feels that she may be destined only to kick the ball around in parks when no one is looking. She nevertheless manages to be spotted by Hounslow Harriers women's team, where she soon becomes a star – until her parents find out and ban her from playing. Her mother scolds her: “Who'd want a girl who plays football all day but can't make chapattis?” Willing to gender bend on some level (but oblivious to the ways in which her sexual orientation has been questioned by her best friend's mother), her father eventually comes around, preferring his daughter's happiness to the confines of “tradition,” and we are presented with wonderful depictions of his daughter's ability to participate with agency in seemingly separate traditions laid out side by side.

Complications of sex/gender/sexuality collide in Deepa Mehta's Fire (1996), where same-sex desire overrides the dictates of tradition for two Indian housewives whose “trial by fire” signals the purity of their new-found love that dares to but cannot speak its name, for “there is no word to describe what we are to each other in our language,” utters Sita (Nandita Das), the more rebellious of the two.

Again we see notions of the past and the “tradition” of the “working class” challenged when the six unemployed steel workers of The Full Monty (1997) form a male striptease act, literally defrocking and leaving nothing but their Poulantzian number plates on their backs. The Full Monties of Sheffield literally search for, and then abandon, their iron-mongering past in the decayed industrial rubble of the once-thriving, manufacturing city of Sheffield – shelving their overalls and dungarees for the regular beat as male strippers.

Going further back in filmic representation, we must not forget the telling sentiment: “We're not English, we're Londoners.” This is expressed by Sammy in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) after numerous depictions of what might have made Hoggart turn in his grave: Sammy is depicted doing seven different things simultaneously – eating fast food, watching the news, listening to the radio, flipping through a porno magazine, sipping beer, and snorting a line or two of cocaine while conversing with his father, trying to unwind. We have here a depiction of the shifting and fragmented nature of co-authored identities and the processes of disidentification with the ethnic particularity of the “Nation.” It is articulated as a refusal of cultural heritage even as Sammy vigorously indulges in what it has to offer. An alternative representation of desire, romantic/domestic partnerships are pursued here, as well as the building of an alliance across class (as conceived or portrayed in its strictly material sense) lines. The confines of compulsory heterosexuality and notions of ethnic purity and distinction are subverted as alliances and love affairs transpire between members who are differentially placed within the categories of race, class, and sexuality. Depictions of interracial and homoerotic desires are indeed a sight for sore eyes in this film and in the depictions of love and desire outside the confines of heteronormativity in My Beautiful Launderette, which is – we can't forget – the space owned by the “Pakis” who are the employers and lovers of White working-class Johnny.

And with an eye to the under-theorized pathologies of imperial domination, we get a glimpse in these films also of the perils of privilege lived out by its perpetrators. Ravi, for example, Sammy's father, whose involvement in British imperialism leads him to commit suicide after he finds that relocating to Britain fails to drive the brutal memories from his mind of how perhaps his own involvement in maintaining his notion of tradition contributed to his complicity with colonial abuse. Notably, the wealth and riches he received from his affiliation with the colonizers provided neither luxury nor peace of mind, alienating him from his family. They cried, but did they mourn his death? The very privilege promised by tradition seems to have driven him to take his own life, not celebrate it. But where is the guilt or the consciousness of the White colonialist? Though not depicted here, the film helps to demonstrate that thinking of class merely in terms of one's relationship to the mode of production does not allow for the building of alliances outside shared relationships to the means of material production (often more a product of the abstract “in itself” formulations of neo-Marxists scholars). Sammy and Rosie Get Laid thus offers an excellent example of what networks of affiliation and interpretive communities could look like.

Oppositely privileged individuals both of whom are alienated from their assigned class/social function are portrayed in film, demonstrating once again the way in which crucial aspects of lived social relations form and reform with those that may or may not share the same relationship to the means of production. As Paulo Freire would be inclined to point out, both “oppressor/oppressed” are alienated, dehumanized in relations that prize hierarchy and cultural/traditional superiority. We see this in the lives of White working-class Rita and her professor (Frank), her fleeting mentor, in Educating Rita (1983). Both are disillusioned by the promises of becoming offered in dominant ideologies – aspiring to cross over the confines of their class distinctions. We get a sense of the ways in which identity is not a finished product one is bestowed with at birth, but a project always in process, an ongoing everchanging conversation and exchange with others.

Filmic representations such as these depict the world of change driven by consumer durables. The logic of mobile privatization that made Hoggart so uncomfortable has followed a relentless line to the disembedding of the lads (all that is left is resentment, as Lois Weis [1990] and Michelle Fine and Weis [1998] so effectively underscore). And, the incursions and the blowback of Empire, cell phones and mobiles, smart TVs and remotes, and the musical language of hip hop or Banghra or dance hall now course through and mark the new constantly disembedding territory of the Hammertown boys, the “lads” – a flower, an orchid, a rhizome blooms viscously in defiance of the grim reaper of urban space.

Narrating Class and Tradition in the Literary Imagination

Like cinematic representations, the literary imagination troubles notions of tradition, power, and privilege, revealing those dynamics of power and privilege that seem to be foreclosed in scholarly discourses of working-class resistance. Here again, as Benjamin (2006a, 2006b) argues, the critical challenge of the subaltern scholar is to read aesthetic form back into the social relations of material production and the fractured nature of contemporary social life. Orwell, for example, presents the working-class “earhole” or lower-middle-class actor “divided to the vein,” conflicted to the bone (a point that Derek Walcott makes in his famous poem “Far Cry from Africa” [1986, p. 17]). As Uma Kothari (2005) has told us, many of the colonial bureaucrats who went out to the colonies were often of working-class or “earholed” backgrounds, sponsored up to the public school – Eton or Harrow or whatever – and deployed to the imperial periphery with all their hang ups. Read against this phalanx of national assertion, George Orwell (1981) presents a picture of the lower-middle-class subject operating overseas, confronting the periphery inhabitant on his native soil, in a different light – more internally divided, more complexly linked to England and Empire, more uncertain about self and role in the elaboration of Britishness. The ethnographic lens now puts the Western actor under the microscope. Orwell portrays the everyday negotiation of class and power in the imperial outpost of Burma through the mediation of modernizing energies and subaltern subversions (“weapons of the weak”), the anticipation of the waning of Empire and the dubiousness of civilizing missions abroad.

Orwell's story draws on his experience as a colonial officer. It concerns the angst of an environmentally conscious, uncertain British police officer who, egged on by a crowd of natives to shoot a rogue elephant, compromises his own agency and his hegemonic subjectivity. The narrator/police officer does not want to shoot the elephant, but he feels compelled by the Burmese agro-proletarians and peasants, before whom he does not wish to appear indecisive or cowardly. The situation and events that Orwell describes underscore the hostility between the administrators of the British Empire and their “native” subjects. However, at another level, it is a deep examination of power. It also foregrounds what the anthropologist James Scott calls the “weapons of the weak” (Scott, 1985). Here the native is not the butt of Paki jokes for the lads or the source of a Black cultural economy of symbols for the Punks.

Orwell problematizes power and the agency of so-called dominant subjects, carefully depicting the colonial situation as one in which the “subjection of the ruled also involves the subjugation of the ruler,” showing us how “subjects of colonies controlled rulers as much as they were controlled by them” (Nandy, 1983. p. 39). Plagued by divided consciousness, unable to act in accordance with his own intuition, the protagonist is tormented by guilt, hatred, and fear, and forced to suffer the felt contradictions of his precarious position “in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East” (Orwell, 1981, pp. 148–149). Having decided long ago that “imperialism is an evil thing,” this colonial official claims to be on the side of the Burmese population but feels “stuck between the hatred of the empire” and “rage against” the villagers who try to make his job so utterly impossible. One part of the official, we are told, views British rule as “an unbreakable tyranny” clamping him down, while the other part of him feels that the “greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts” (Orwell, 1981, p. 149). These feelings, we are told, are the “normal byproducts of imperialism” (p. 149). And, while it is certain that the torment and suffering of those on the other side of the foul-smelling “lock-ups” could never be equivocated, the dominant subject in Orwell's narration is clearly not enjoying the promise his “privilege” provides.

Challenging simplistic notions of the ways in which power operates and who creates and belongs to the “British” tradition, on the most telling event of the day in question we learn that the colonial official is far from being decisive, all-powerful, fully authoritarian, or in control. Rather, he feels like an “absurd puppet,” a “hollow posing dummy” unable to do that which he most desires. Having been ordered to find a work elephant that was wreaking havoc about the town in which he was posted, he follows his orders, armed and ready to serve and protect. He sets off in pursuit of the rogue elephant but is met with sly resistance from the villagers, who claim neither to have seen the elephant nor even to have heard of its havoc, though clearly standing right there in its midst. This non-cooperation on the part of the “helpless,” unarmed Burmese population was yet another “normal” element of daily life one counted on as a colonial official, he adds. After almost giving up on his search, thinking the whole thing to be “a pack of lies” (p. 150), the narrator finally stumbles upon the large beast's most recent victim. The official spots the elephant in the distance and halts momentarily: “As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him” (p. 151). “Moreover,” he adds, “I did not in the least want to shoot him” (p. 152). He decides that the best thing to do is to keep an eye out for a while to ensure the elephant does not turn savage again, then go home for the day. But then he sees the crowd:

This is no simple matter for the official, who repeatedly insists, “I did not want to shoot the elephant” (p. 153). Knowing with perfect certainty what he ought to do, he looks again at the crowd and he reflects that there “was only one alternative” (p. 154). He loads the cartridges into the rifle and fires. A slow and agonizing death tortures the struggling, gasping elephant. The official is tormented by the sight and the need to keep shooting, continually failing to put the beautiful living being out of the misery he has inflicted upon it.

The privileged subject here cast is condemned to conform to a tightly scripted code of conduct which he does not fully understand. Three metaphors from the story – the gun, the gaze, and the mask (Logue, 2004) – serve as useful devices with which to depict what Aimé Césaire (1972) termed the “boomerang effects of domination.” The gun symbolizes the moment of usurpation as one in which the police officer's imposed superiority coerces him to be what he has forced the other to see him as. Paradoxically, the instrument through which he performs his fantasy of superiority becomes the vehicle through which he suffers his own agentic demise. Unable to affirm his freedom, the dominant subject finds himself sentenced to an unending struggle for status and justification symbolized through the inescapable look of the Other. This gaze represents the instability and precariousness of his usurpation, his becoming a victim of his own unconscious – riddled with guilt, internal fears, and anxieties. In the desperate attempt to shield against this hideous onslaught of unruly emotion and external threat, he projects them onto the other, who now constitutes that which he most needs to defend himself against. The mask signifies the onset of his own dehumanization, for in wearing it, he can only reach for the gun. A self-destructive vicious circle is begun. The “posture of absolute domination” (Theweleit, 1989) adopted by Orwell's (1981) “hollow, posing dummy” (p. 152) and the processes through which he brings about his own destruction, help to illuminate the way in which culture is a conversation and not the final property of an ethnically superior tradition. How are these tensions grappled with in neo-Marxist cultural analysis?

What do the imminent deaths of the elephant, Sammy's father (Sammy and Rosie Get Laid), and the hopes “traditional” parents (Billy Elliot) have for their children signify? Could it be that with the death of the subject lies the death of tradition, an imperial tradition on the wane? And isn't it the case that Billy Elliot's Alzheimer's grandma stands in her dream-like silence as the scrambled riddle of past attachments, past associations and feeling? Do our perceptual and linguistic apparatuses allow for the articulation of the complexities of lived social relations and networks of affiliation?

Conclusion: The New Imperatives of Globalization and the Predicament of Cultural Studies

As a consequence of the new driving logics of globalization and the information age articulated most profoundly in the workings of “flexible capitalism” (Bauman, 2008; Hortiguera & Rocha, 2007; McCarthy, Pitton, Kim, & Monje, 2009; Nayak, 2003; Schiller, 2003, 2010; Sennett, 2006, 2008), all late-modern institutions, all late-modern forms of association and affiliation are coming under the banner of new identities. These dynamics associated with globalization (the rapid and constant dispersal of cultural and economic capital across national boundaries, the intensification and rapidity of movement and migration of people across borders, the amplification of electronic mediation and the work of the imagination of the great masses of the people) reveal themselves in what Zygmunt Bauman and Richard Sennett describe as a general lightness of being or liquidity of all social relations and social arrangements of late modernity. Whether one is talking about the general trend of multinational corporations such as Addidas, Nike, Rebok, and Microsoft toward what Naomi Klein (2001, 2007) calls “immateriality,” as advertising, branding, and R&D displace the emphasis on inventories of products as the primary orientation of these juggernaut commercial institutions; whether we are talking about the new international division of labor in which the production, distribution, and circulation of goods and services are being coordinated over enormous distances, numerous nations and markets; whether we are considering the new terms of circumscription of the role of the state redefined by the new expansive encroachments of supranational organizations such as the World Trade Organization, World Health Organization, and the barrage of accountability instruments such as the Programme for International Student Assessment now bearing down on national systems across the world; whether we are talking about new synchronicities of culture, the disembedding of forms of life and meanings of style from one setting and their transplantation into another; whether we are talking about the decline of theodicy, meaning, and the control over craft in all forms of late-modern labor processes (intellectual labor and the organization of knowledge not excepted) – the relentless logic of the recasting of the modern world is proceeding and accelerating at a blinding pace.

It is these developments that have thrown social science research off its collective bearings as contemporary scholars struggle to make sense of the rapid changes fueled by transnationalism and globalization (Beck, 2008). In this respect, the emergent field of cultural studies is also decentered. Cultural studies analysis in its treatment of class and tradition has been overtaken by events. It seems the perceptual/conceptual/linguistic apparatus of sociocultural analysis on the whole is now unable to diagnose the global predicament we are in, seemingly reinforcing the very structures we seek to subvert. Our entire perceptual, conceptual, and linguistic apparatus is in need of overhaul as we come to recognize the rise of networked societies in which traditions, affiliations, “cultures” (subcultural or not) are now cast off from the moorings of the final property of any group. There has been a flattening out of cultures and traditions, as these are now more integrated into the global expansion of markets and flexible models of production of capital pursuing new sites of value in ever-increasing alienated contexts.

We have reached a stage in this new millennium where the old “conflict” versus “consensus” metaphors, “your traditions versus mine” do not seem to apply. Instead of models based on conflict and resistance, increasingly, social groups are being defined by overwhelming patterns of transnational hybridities; new forms of association and affiliation that seem to flash on the surface of life rather than to plunge deeper into some kind of neo-Marxist substructure. This new model of power could now be called “integration.” It does not have a negative pole. It is what Foucault describes as a “productive” not “repressive” model of power. It articulates difference into ever-more extensive systems of association, flatlining the edges of culture into a pastiche of marketable identities, tastes, neuroses, and needs processed through the universalization of the enterprise ethic. It lays traditions down side by side, layering them in ever new ephemeral patterns and intensities - whole elements and associations given in one place can be now instantaneously found in another. Paul Willis's nationally and geographically inscribed “l ads” are now being replaced by Jenny Kelly's (2004) Afro-Canadian youth who are patching together their identities from the surfeit of signs and symbols crossing the border in the electronic relays of US television, popular music, and cyber culture. Post-apartheid South African youth now assign more value to markers of taste – Levi's and Gap jeans, Nikes or Adidas, rap or rave – than ancestry and place in their elaboration of the new criteria of ethnic affiliation (Dolby, 2001).

All these developments are turning the old materialism versus idealism debate on its head. It is the frenetic application of forms of existence, forms of life, the dynamic circulation and strategic deployment of style, the application of social aesthetics that now govern political rationalities and corporate mobilization in our times. The new representational technologies are the new centers of public instruction providing the forum for the work of the imagination of the great masses of the people to order their pasts and present and plot their futures. They are creating instant traditions and nostalgias of the present in which our pasts are disembedded and separated out as abstract value into new semiotic systems and techniques of persuasion, new forms of ecumenical clothing that quote Che, Mao, Fidel, and Marx, and “revolution” in the banality of commodified life – the publicity of one brand of dish-washing liquid as having “revolutionary” effects is just one good example of the brazen rearticulation of terms and traditions in the brave new world in which we live. Who now owns the terms that define the authentic traditions of radicalism that inform our works? Who now has final purchase on the terms “resistance,” “revolution,” “democracy,” “participation,” and “empowerment?” The massive work of textual production is blooming in a crucible of opposites – socially extended projects producing the cultural citizen in the new international division of labor, in which the state may not be a first or the final referent.

Naomi Klein (2001) reminds us ultimately of this radical disembedding. Spadina Avenue, the garment district of Toronto in the 1930s, is now in postindustrial limbo and a center of a masquerading consumerist heaven. Its transformation to its new millennial identity of stylish high consumption owes its genesis to the cruel juxtaposition with Jakarta and the flight of its garment industry to Indonesia. And while there is not much need for overcoats on the equator, “increasingly,” according to Klein (2001), “Canadians get through their cold winters not with clothing manufactured by the tenacious seamstresses on Spadina Avenue but by young Asian women working in hot climates [. . . making] anoraks and ski jackets from Indonesia” (p. xvi).

The outlines of this new global context have precipitated a crisis of language in neo-Marxist scholarly efforts to grasp the central dynamics of contemporary societies, bearing on the question of “tradition” and the centering term “class.” The latter developments have led to a depreciation of the value and insightfulness of neo-Marxist analysis in our time – old metaphors associated with class, economy, and state (“production,” “reproduction,” “resistance,” “the labor–capital contradiction”) are all worn down by the transformations of the past decades in which the saturation of economic and political practices in aesthetic mediations has proceeded full scale (Klein, 2001). The scale and referent for almost all of these organizing terms of analysis had been set and bounded at the nation, defined in the localist anthropological/ethnographic terms of “tradition,” “ritual,” and “culture” understood on the localizing plain of community, ethnic group, society, and so forth. The new circumstances associated with post-Fordist capital – the new international division of labor, movement and migration, and the amplification of images and the work of the imagination of the great masses of the people, the great masses of our times, driven forward by computerization, the Internet, popular culture, etc. – have cut open particular traditions, spilling their entrails around the world.

These logics have unsettled the processes of the social integration of modern subjects into late-modern institutions. The modern working-class subject is being remade and reproduced in a context in which the relations between government, society, the individual, and market forces have undergone profound transformations and reorganization on a global scale. What is working class in itself and for itself in the new millennium is now splintered across a wide global arena of export processing zones in the third world and the temp. working and the chronically unemployed in the soft sectors of the postindustrial service economies in the metropolitan centers. A wide framework of “graduated sovereignty” (Ong, 2006, p. 7) therefore defines this new condition of the international division of labor, demanding new terms of analysis that require cultural studies proponents to grasp the rise of transnational circumstances in the new postindustrial condition of alienated labor, hyperconsumption, and prosumerism.

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