ABSTRACT
Let me confine my remarks about cultural studies in general to the following observations: that the Marxisms from which it sprang were not explicitly Freudo-Marxisms. But do we detect a certain return of this repressed concern with psycho-politics amongst those works that highlight the pleasures or fantasies of cultural production, reception and mediation? An overt psychoanalytic approach is not entirely alien to cultural studies, especially where it borders with feminist film theory (strongly influenced by Freud and Lacan, especially via Laura Mulvey), or with feminist critiques of culture, science and technology informed by the (American) object-relations school of psychoanalysis (e.g., as represented by Nancy Chodorow). The collection Formations of Fantasy includes works more centrally within a culturalstudies framework, and notably a sample of Valerie Walkerdine’s illuminating investigations into the relations of pleasure, mastery and enculturation (Burgin, Donald and Kaplan, 1986; see also Walkerdine, 1981, 1986, 1990). However, I will argue that the potential value of psychoanalysis for cultural studies is greater than is apparent from the best-known psychoanalytic cultural/critical paradigms.
