ABSTRACT
It is useful, in the context of the so-called ‘policy debate’ in cultural studies, to call to mind Foucault’s contention that-as Colin Gordon summarizes ita governmental logic of and for the left ought to be possible, ‘involving a way for the governed to work with government, without any assumption of compliance or complicity, on actual and common problems’ (1991:48). For, predictably enough, the mere mention of terms like ‘government’ and ‘policy’ in connection with cultural studies sparks of f in some a yearning for a moment of pure politics-a return to 1968-in whose name any traffic with the domain of government can be written off as a sell-out. Something of this was evident in Helen Grace’s (1991) review of the Australian cultural studies conference held at the University of Western Sydney in December 1990, and especially in the oppositions which organize the discursive strategy of that review in, on the one hand, linking the turn to policy with pragmatically driven research and a yearning for money and power while, on the other, ranging against these an uncontaminated holy trinity of theory, scholarship and textual analysis.
