Novos meios e novos formatos:

One paradigm less

Underneath the large noisy events lie the small events of silence.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition [O]ne has to seek a term for that which is not fully articulated or not fully comfortable in various silences, although it is usually not very silent. I just don’t know what the term should be.

Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters

More than twenty-five years ago cultural studies was new again for the first time. Although Stuart Hall’s 1980 essay ‘Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms’ presented itself as an evenhanded assessment of the state of cultural studies, it was clear that ‘structuralism’ (the new paradigm in town) would be continuing along its path of ascendance as begun in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Meanwhile, ‘culturalism’ as the founding paradigm of cultural studies – exemplified, for Hall, in the work of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson – was plainly receding.¹

Sharing at best a fairly loose coherence, the so-called culturalists held to the notion that the realm of culture (as found in texts, in history, in lived experience) could not always be determinately fixed to the relations of pro-duction (society’s economic base). Yes, people made history in conditions that were not of their own making, but history’s motor – the capacity for agency, for change, for making history – could not be readily separated out from the ‘whole way of life’ (or, for Thompson, a ‘whole way of struggle’) that serves as history’s ever-present fabric of relations. The structuralists grew itchy at what felt like a certain naivety in this formulation and began to chafe against such an overly woolly (seemingly woolly-headed) fabric.

No longer able to abide the indissolubility of culture as a ‘whole’ expres-sive totality with no apparent emphasis granted to any particular thread (in

either the first or last instance), the structuralists wanted to trace out the threads, to weave a more complex – that is, more specifically determinant (focusing mainly on the ideological effects of political economy) – set of determinations; and, thus, to form concepts that, in Hall’s words, could

‘cut into the complexity of the real, in order precisely to reveal and bring to light relationships and structures which cannot be visible to the naïve naked eye’ (1980: 67). The ‘culturalists’, one might say, had spun a fabric that structuralists could now see straight through, revealing themselves as not quite emperors anymore.

Thus, by the late 1970s, the study of culture was rather far along in the process of aligning its own movements with the latest in continental theory: at that time, a heady amalgamation of structuralism, Marxism and psychoanalysis as forged largely by courtesy of Louis Althusser (although, soon enough, to be rendered slightly more supple through Antonio Gramsci’s writings in general and his concept of ‘hegemony’ in particu-lar). Hall’s 1980 essay merely formalised what was already cultural studies’

stepping into this new set of adventures, trying on a new set of clothes.² What, then, of the potential for an even ‘newer’ set of adventures twenty-five years hence? In a more recent interview with the journal Radical Philosophy, Hall was asked if there might be a ‘new notion of culture regulating the field today, in the way that these two paradigms did in the past? Or has the field become piecemeal, lost its theoretical core?’

(Hall 1997: 25). Reflecting briefly on the initial paradigm shift from culture as ‘a whole way of life’ to culture as ‘signifying practice’, Hall concluded:

If I were writing for students, those are still the two definitions I’d pick out, and I wouldn’t say there is a third one. I suppose you might say that there was a postmodern one, a Deleuzian one, which says that signification is not meaning, it’s a question of affect, but I don’t see a break in the regulative idea of culture there as fundamental as the earlier one. (p. 25)

The current chapter will concur with Hall on this much: there is no need to imagine a new paradigm for cultural studies, or, if so, it should certainly not be called ‘Deleuzian’.³Why not a third paradigm? Because if the work of Gilles Deleuze has a particularly productive entry point into the already existing theory-narrative of cultural studies, it would enter on the side of

‘culturalism’ (that is, as a return to and reinvigoration of many of the dawning premises of cultural studies), and only thereafter might it under-take renegotiation talks with many of the ‘structuralising/signifying’ ten-dencies still actively operating across the field. In sum, the argument here

will focus on a cultural studies that has, after Deleuze, one paradigm less and not one more.

After a more than quarter-century-long detour through the dense and twisting theory-thickets of structural Freudo-Marxism and poststructural-ising articulation theory (a detour that has been, by no means, fruitless), there is a sense – call it a pre-emergent structure of feeling – that many of those once presumably old-school, shopworn concerns of ‘culturalism’

have been steadily finding their way back onto the diverse agendas of a widely dispersed cultural studies. Of course, nowhere will one find these concerns presented as a single, united front, and far less should one expect to find any explicitly stated affiliation with the faintest residues of a ‘cul-turalist’ tradition. Still, what might be evidenced by this accidentally ad hoc twenty-first-century re-versioning of culturalism – besides, too, a certain collective exhaustion of structuralist (post- and otherwise) trajectories – can perhaps best be glimpsed in a revived emphasis upon such matters as:

process, sensation and affect, movement and transition, rhythm, creativity, imagination, the connection of ethics and aesthetics, the virtual, expressive totality (the ‘whole’), ‘forces’ of life (vitalism), the lived or experience, bios and non-human materiality, or what might be understood, quasi-collectively, as a renewed attention to ‘empiricism’. Born long before cul-tural studies, this is an empiricism where ‘experience’ and ‘experiment’ are uttered (together, once again) in one and the same voice.

It is the latter – the concept of experience and a renewed sense of the empirical and empiricism – that will be a primary focus of this chapter. Not surprisingly, the quasi-collective features listed above also help to compose whatever might be seen as the present ‘Deleuzian’ boom in cultural studies.

Deleuze declared himself, first and foremost, an ‘empiricist’ of the forgot-ten ‘experiment-meets-experience’ sort: where one ‘is always experiencing, experimenting, not interpreting but experimenting, and what we experience, experiment with, is always actuality; what’s coming into being, what’s new, what’s taking shape’ (1995: 106). The goal is, as it had once been, to open up the concept of experience affectively to the (more-than-human) being of a sensate world, not allowing it to lodge only within the interpretative powers of a being’s knowing sensibility. Much of what might fall under the name of

‘Deleuzian cultural studies’ today takes up this experimentally experiential ambition in one way or another and, thus, for all the right and wrong reasons, Deleuze has become very much of a theoretical darling for many graduate students and postgraduates in cultural studies and elsewhere.

While no longer holding such ‘darling’ status, Williams’ culturalism (or, as he preferred, ‘cultural materialism’) adopted a remarkably similar ontological cast (despite never quite allowing itself to shake off fully, as

Deleuze would, certain remnants of humanism). Perhaps this is why imagining a secret, subterranean history of cultural studies where cultural-ism, circumventing its eclipse, meets up directly with Deleuze’s empiricism – arriving sometime, say, in the mid-1970s and later taking structuralism on board as useful addendum, and not as a necessarily separate path or alter-native paradigm – remains enticing in the possibilities still to be made.

Experience, for Williams, went beyond – perhaps, in a sense, also went below or continually slipped past – ‘culture’ as the regulative idea that has come to define the space of operations for cultural studies (yes, just imagine: cultural studies without culture?). Simply put, experience does not personally belong to a subject (the purported subject of experience), nor does it only arise in the mediating space of subject and object. How might experience be granted a certain relative autonomy, its own dynamic poten-tial as active and changing, travelling farther afield than usually allowed in contemporary understanding? Williams dared to entertain such an idea: to unfix experience, to connect it with ‘all that is present and moving, all that escapes or seems to escape from the fixed and explicit and the known, [from all that] is grasped and defined as the personal’ (1977: 128). His concept of

‘structures of feeling’ was one other way to approach this whole matter of experience, and, not surprisingly, it was also consistently misunderstood.

Because experience was among the most harshly criticised of all the foundational blocks in the culturalist repertoire, bearing witness to some of Williams’ tussles over it can prove tremendously enlightening. A par-ticularly illustrative case in point can be found in the New Left Review interviews that make up Raymond Williams’ career-retrospective volume Politics and Letters(1981). Over the course of the interviews Williams is taken to task, more than once, by his interlocutors, Perry Anderson, Anthony Barnett and Francis Mulhern, for utilising the concept of

‘experience’ in ways that they consider somewhat less than circumspect, and, indeed, even naive. This thoroughgoing interrogation of the status of

‘experience’ – as well as ‘structures of feeling’ – remains instructive for the nuanced parrying of point and counterpoint between Williams and his interviewers. But just as impressive throughout the more than four hundred pages of Politics and Letters is the distinct impression that Williams leaves; here is someone holding fast to the conviction that, like culture, cultural studies is itself ‘a single indissoluble real process’ and cannot too readily become a house divided.

The chief accusation levelled at the concept of experience was that it was never as free from ideological determination as Williams (and other cul-turalists) might have wished to believe. With cultural studies at its most fully immersed in the structural Marxist moment, there is even a point in

the interviews where Williams is reminded that, for Louis Althusser, experience serves as ‘simply a synonym for illusion’ (Williams 1981: 168).

In privileging the concept of experience, the culturalists were accused of conjuring up an unrealistic, theoretically insupportable voluntarism.⁴The human subject was – from the structuralist perspective – just too saturated, through and through, by ideological forces and other unavoidable socio-cultural/linguistic constructions.

Over the course of the interviews, perhaps the most illuminating moment comes as Williams replies to a question that attempts to link his concept of experience back to the pre-dawn of his own (and the cultural-ist) emergence. Williams is asked whether his reliance upon ‘experience’

and, by extension, his concept of ‘structures of feeling’, haven’t merely recapitulated a certain ‘Leavisian notion of “life” ’. Unlike F. R. Leavis, Williams, in his own estimation, had not ‘spiritualised’ cultural production by longing for the organicism of a romanticised past; rather he had attempted to materialise it (though, certainly, this materialisation would encompass such relatively ephemeral life-processes as affect and emotion) in a way that was forward looking, orientated towards an emerging future.

So, had this originary ‘culturalist’ paradigm, in the end, really travelled very far from its predecessors?

Until this moment in the interviews, Williams’ immediate responses to even the most pointed questions about the place of experience in his work had been quite gracious, often conceding some amount of ground to his interlocutors (many of his answers begin with: ‘Yes’ or ‘That seems fair’ or

‘I accept’ or ‘I concede’), but here his answer is quite emphatic in its dis-agreement. It is worth quoting at length:

No. That should be very clear. For after all the basic argument of the first chapter of The Long Revolution is precisely that there is no natural seeing and therefore there cannot be a direct and unmediated contact with reality. On the other hand, in much linguistic theory and a certain kind of semiotics, we are in danger of reaching the opposite point in which the epistemological wholly absorbs the ontological: it is only in the ways of knowing that we exist at all. To formalist friends, of whom I have many, who affect to doubt the very possibility of an ‘external’ referent, it is necessary to recall an absolutely founding presumption of materialism: namely that the natural world exists whether anyone signifies it or not . . .

. . . By contrast in the whole process of consciousness – here I would put a lot of stress on phenomena for which there is no easy knowing because there is too easy a name, the too easy name is ‘the unconscious’ – all sorts of occur-rences cut across the established or offered relations between a signifi-cation and a reference. The formalist position that there is no signified without

a signifier amounts to saying that it is only in articulation that we live at all . . . (1981: 167)

Having here set out, rather succinctly, the limitations of the structuralist paradigm as he saw them, Williams then turns to directly address his own initiatives at reshaping the ‘culturalist’ enterprise and, in particular, the sustained attention given to the concept of experience.

While readily acknowledging the inherent (and inherited) difficulties with the term and what it encompasses, William refuses to let ‘experience’

be simply expunged from cultural analysis or to otherwise allow its ready subsumption under the too tidy lines and right angles of signifying articu-lations. ‘Experience’ by whatever name, including structure of feeling, is crucial to grasping what is in the process of change, in the very midst of flux and flow, moving along the cusp of semantic availability, present in ‘all that escapes or seems to escape from the fixed and the explicit and the known’ and, hence, in what has ‘not yet come, often not even coming’

(1977: 128 and 130). As Williams continues in his response to the Politics and Lettersinterviewers’ question:

. . . I have found that areas which I would call structures of feeling as often as not initially form as a certain kind of disturbance or unease, a particular type of tension, for which when you stand back or recall them you can some-times find a referent. To put it another way, the peculiar location of a struc-ture of feeling is the endless comparison that must occur in the process of consciousness between the articulated and the lived. The lived is only another word, if you like, for experience: but we have to find a word for that level. For all that is not fully articulated, all that comes through as disturb-ance, tension, blockage, emotional trouble seems to me precisely a source of major changes in the relation between the signifier and the signified, whether in literary language or conventions. We have to postulate at least the possi-bility of comparison in this process and if it is a comparison, then with what?

If one immediately fills the gap with one of these great blockbuster words like experience, it can have very unfortunate effects over the rest of the argu-ment. For it can suggest that this is always a superior instance, or make a god out of an unexamined subjectivity. But since I believe that the process of comparison occurs often in not particularly articulate ways, yet is a source of much of the change that is eventually evident in our articulation, one has to seek a term for that which is not fully articulated or not fully comfortable in various silences, although it is usually not very silent. I just don’t know what the term should be. (1981: 167–8)

This insightful and far-reaching passage usefully highlights many core features in what was Raymond Williams’ evolving project of ‘cultural

materialism’ – with its balance of the ontological with the epistemological, its broader attention to various processes of consciousness (including the unconscious, non-conscious and so on), its elevation of the realm of affect and feeling (with ‘tensions’ and ‘pressures’ in lieu of determinations and linguistic significations), and its reinflection of ‘experience’ towards change/process, emergence, ‘the lived’.

Williams’ Keywords had first been published in the year prior to the Politics and Lettersinterviews and, somewhat curiously, contained no sep-arate entry for the concept of ‘experience’ (an omission that his interview-ers do not fail to point out), although it was added in the book’s next edition. However, in the initial volume, a discussion of experience does appear, rather interestingly, under the headings for ‘science’ and ‘empir-ical’, where special note is made, in both of these entries, of what had once been the interchangeability of ‘experience’ and ‘experiment’ (as both share the common Latin root word experiri) until the latter third of the eight-eenth century. In this splitting of experience and experiment, Williams noted that there followed an interrelated set of unfortunate consequences:

(1) a distinction arises within ‘empirical’ between the practical and the the-oretical (with experience cast as athethe-oretical or anti-thethe-oretical); (2) a div-ision in science occurs between an inner (subjective) knowledge and an external (objective) knowledge; and (3) there is a cultural/everyday delin-eation between ‘experience past (“lessons”) and experience present (full and active “awareness”)’ (1985: 127). Williams’ work in cultural studies is known first and foremost for its appeal to ‘wholeness’, and so the mere fact that the contemporary understanding of ‘experience’ was now based upon a set of exclusions (of theory, of creativity, of the present and future) and upon a subjectively centred model of consciousness presented a serious problem desperately in need of resolution.

While the twists and turns and detours in the history of the concept of experience have been widely explored, most recently and comprehensively by Martin Jay’s Songs of Experience (2005), key here to the project of a revived culturalism will be the insights of Gilles Deleuze, as well as Frankfurt School critical theorist Walter Benjamin. What do they share with each other and with Williams? Mainly, a desire to include the excluded of experience and to find a way out of the false problem of an interiorised subjectivity and an outside world. Not only do Deleuze and Benjamin coincide in their appeals for a reintegration of all of the exclu-sions of experience and overlap in their hostility at self-sufficient models of consciousness, they both point a finger at the work of one highly suspi-cious character in particular: Immanuel Kant. For Benjamin and Deleuze, it was, perhaps more than anything, Kant’s rendering (or rending) of the

concept of ‘experience’ that made him the focus of their enmity. Deleuze called his book on Kant’s critical philosophy an affectionate study of ‘an enemy’ (1995: 6), while Benjamin proclaimed Kant one of his great adver-saries, a ‘despot’ that he was determined to ‘track down’ (1994: 125).⁵

Looking back, like Williams, to transformations taking place in the latter part of the eighteenth century, Walter Benjamin levels the majority of his critique squarely at what he sees as Kant’s (and the subsequent neo-Kantians’) re-routing of experience through a ‘hollow’ epistemology:

where experience is allowed only minimal significance by serving as the

‘possibility’ of knowledge (Benjamin 1996: 102). Benjamin was deter-mined to produce what he considered a ‘superior concept of experience’

(Wolin 1989: 211): one that does not conflate ‘experience’ with ‘knowledge

(Wolin 1989: 211): one that does not conflate ‘experience’ with ‘knowledge