ABSTRACT
The word crisis is one which appears with alarming regularity in the discourses of cultural studies. In Cultural Studies, the recent (1992) collection edited by Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler, Lidia Curti (1992) uses it to refer not just to the ever-increasing marginality of intellectuals from political life, but to the collapse of many of the intellectual frames of reference which have fuelled the development of cultural studies. From structuralism to post-structuralism, from Marxism to feminism, there has been, she argues, an erosion of belief, a decline in the centrality of ‘strong narratives’, a turning away from binary relations in favour of what Derrida describes as ‘an indefinite series of differences’.
