ABSTRACT

The cultural studies have tended to become a cult an endlessly self-reproducing series of ungrounded readings not anchored in the framework of an overarching social theory and political practice. When cultural studies lose its political valence it becomes as affirmative as the affirmative culture targeted by Marcuse as the ruination of critique. The main sources of regression on the part of cultural studies people are the academization and methodologization of cultural studies. The version of radical cultural studies not only theorizes the culture industry as literary political economy but intervenes in culture directly, using deconstructive insight about the relative indistinguishability of criticism and culture to best political advantage. Deconstruction can be used to radicalize one's cultural readings and thus implant cultural reading directly in the process of everyday resistance and organization. Cultural studies are so important because through it we can better understand how the processes of depoliticization work, even applying these insights to our own intellectual work.