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Culture, Theory and Critique

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Alterdisciplinarity
Paul Bowman
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Culture, Theory & Critique, 2008, 49(1), 93–110
Alterdisciplinarity
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Paul Bowman
P.Bowman@roehampton.ac.uk
1473-5784
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10.1080/14735780802024281
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Abstract This paper argues that central to the formation and orientation
of politicised academic subjects is the notion of intervention. It examines the
prevailing conceptions of intervention in the case of cultural studies, and
argues that these prevailing notions of how academics and intellectuals can
intervene politically rely on broadly Gramscian and post-Marxist theories.
However, it argues that the way these theories have been assumed has led
to a rather under-theorised faith in the political value of ‘critique’. It
proposes that this under-examined faith in the political power of critique is
under-theoretical, broadly metaphysical, subject-centred and a regression
from poststructuralist-informed theories of the political. By revisiting the
implications of post-structuralist theories for academic work vis-à-vis inter-
vention, the paper proposes that what is required is more thoroughgoing
attention to the place and character of disciplinarity in the pragmatic
mechanics of culture and society’s discourses and hegemonies. It argues that
the conditions of possibility for intervention are indissociable from the insti-
tutional and disciplinary character of (post)modernity. In other words, it
argues, the academic ‘condition’ is one of unavoidably heterogeneous
language games in a web of disciplinary differences, and in the face of (the
constitutive character of) disciplinarity and disciplinary difference, what
has arisen is disciplinary enclaving, mutual unintelligibility and disar-
ticulation. In this situation, it often appears that the only possible form of
ethical and political intervention is ‘critique’ – either within one’s own
discipline or ‘publicly’, journalistically. However, this paper argues that the
interventional effectivity of any ‘critique’ is dubious at best. Instead it
proposes a theory and practice of ‘alterdisciplinarity’. Grounded in post-
structuralism and deconstructive discourse theory, alterdisciplinary prac-
tice is that which seeks to alter other disciplinary discourses and their
productions (knowledges) not by critiquing them but by intervening into
the disciplinary spaces of their production and legitimation.
Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God’s

name is the point of cultural studies? (Stuart Hall)
Culture trek, TNG

First the good news. The legacy is safe. Cultural studies remains ‘a politi-
cally committed field’ (Hall and Birchall 2006: 2). What is more, just as Stuart
Culture, Theory & Critique

ISSN 1473-5784 Print/ISSN 1473-5776 online © 2008 Taylor & Francis
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DOI: 10.1080/14735780802024281
94 Paul Bowman
Hall asserted years ago, in the name of this much declared legacy of political
commitment, there are still ‘no theoretical limits from which cultural studies
can turn back’ (Hall 1992: 282). This is not only because ‘if you are in the
game of hegemony you have to be smarter than “them”’ (Hall 1992: 282).
It is also because the theoretical ‘interrogation of founding ideas and narra-

tives [can] help us to avoid slipping into […] an “anti-political moralism”’
(Hall and Birchall 2006: 13). So, cultural studies remains politically commit-
ted, and a key part of that commitment entails an ineluctable commitment to
theory.
Instead of rehearsing the debate about what those political commitments
are or should be, let us tarry a while with the provocative proposition of the
necessity of theory for a politically committed cultural studies. After that, let
us still postpone diving headlong into the piping hot waters of the debate
about which political commitments to choose, in favour of looking at a
neglected (maybe even marginalised, if not foreclosed) matter: the problem of
how a ‘politically committed field’ might actually be or become politically
consequential. For it seems ironic that so much dispute within cultural studies
(and way beyond) takes the form of arguing about what should be argued
about, with considerably less explicit consideration being given to the ques-
tion of how what is being argued about might come to make a difference.
Indeed, in lieu of explicit consideration of how this or that politicised critique
might make any political difference (however defined), one finds instead a
rather vague investment in the presumed political value of ‘critique’ per se.
But, at least for those who feel it important to make politicised critiques, it
should be at least as important to know whether and in what way these politi-
cised critiques might make any political difference. For just because the politi-
cal value of critique may be a ‘founding idea’ (Hall and Birchall 2006: 12) of
cultural studies, this does not mean it should not be interrogated, on both
theoretical and practical grounds.
But what does this putative distinction between ‘theoretical’ and ‘non-
theoretical’ even mean? According to Gary Hall and Clare Birchall, the two
currently familiar alternatives of either being ‘for’ or being ‘against’ something
called ‘theory’ are themselves the outcome of the introduction of ‘European
thought into the English-speaking academy in the 1970s, 1980s and early
1990s’ (Hall and Birchall 2006: 2). So, whilst ‘for some the so-called “theory
revolution” has now more or less come to an end’, there are ‘a generation
whose whole university education has been shaped by theory [and] who have
never known a time before theory’. This generation ‘continue to see in it a means
of testing and thinking through some of the most important issues and prob-
lems in contemporary culture and society – and, indeed, cultural studies’ (Hall
and Birchall 2006: 2). So, which response to the question of theory is better for
a ‘politically committed’ intellectual? To Gary Hall’s mind, at least, this is a no-
brainer. Theory can be claimed to trump something called non-theory because
if you compare a well-theorised politically committed work with an un- or
under-theorised politically committed work:
it is the theoretical analysis […] which is likely to prove the more

‘politically’ effective, at least to the extent that it will be more self-
consciously aware of the politico-institutional factors which affect its
Alterdisciplinarity 95
operation and development, and therefore less prone to being

blindly shaped and controlled by them. (Hall 2002: 5)
Strike one? This is a neat formulation, even if it presumes a very flattering

understanding of theory as the approach that is most ‘self-consciously aware

of the politico-institutional factors which affect its operation and develop-
ment’. But even for those who may not follow Hall in this assumption, theory
‘in general’ arguably has lots more to recommend it. For as Hall goes on to
explain, even ‘what seems initially to be the most “theoretical” of issues may
eventually turn out to have more practical and political effects than the most
apparently “political” of political actions and debates’ (Hall 2002: 6). Strike
two? Perhaps. But regardless, even if you reverse the values and polarities,
you can clinch the case for theory even more tightly by following Hall’s
subsequent logic according to which theory is still always preferable to its
alternative, because:
to move away from theory because it is apparently not political enough

is to subordinate everything to political ends. It is to imply that
things are only worth doing if it can be established in advance that
they will have a practical, political outcome; an outcome which is
itself decided in advance. (Hall 2002: 5)
Strike three? This actually appears to be a double-whammy: for why should

academia (specifically, cultural studies) always have to ‘subordinate every-
thing to political ends’, especially when doing so presumes in advance that
we know with certainty what a political outcome looks like? But none of this is
certain, and none of it is intellectually or perhaps even politically reliable.
Which is perhaps all good news for those inheritors of the legacy of polit-
ically committed cultural studies who are also into theorising. So, despite the
recent rounds of jubilant announcements of the death of theory or the irrele-
vance of theory for cultural and political debate, it appears that – theoreti-
cally, at least – theory wins. No matter what ‘anti-theorists’ or ‘non-theorists’
may claim, theory can be shown to be necessary, constitutively, both intellectu-
ally and politically. As Judith Butler spells it out, it is demonstrably the case
‘that any effort at empirical description takes place within a theoretically
delimited sphere, and that empirical analysis in general cannot offer a persua-
sive explanation of its own constitution as a field of enquiry’ (Butler 2000:
274). Besides, because we are scholars – remember – we need to be theorising,
thinking and studying anyway. Unless, that is, we presume that we all already
know everything about this ‘politics’ we are committed to, and that the world
is not constantly a world in process. Unless we presume this, there will
always be a need, in changing times, in a changing world, to re-examine and
to be prepared to retheorise politics, in order to try to avoid becoming
dogmatic stalwarts. As Timothy Bahti once put it: ‘knowledge without an
accompanying rationale for its constitution and existence is counterintellec-
tual, and ultimately counterrational’ (Bahti 1992: 73). And the performative
contradiction of anti-intellectual intellectuals or anti-academic academics is
surely too much for anyone to bear. (It is certainly what prompted Jacques
Derrida to appeal to ‘classical protocols’ and to ideals of ‘rigour’ whenever
96 Paul Bowman
critics accused deconstruction of taking things too far – a matter to which we

will return.)
But still, is it necessarily checkmate to theory, even theoretically-speaking?
And would this theoretical victory have practical consequences? On the one
hand, the fact that Hall and Birchall have deemed it necessary to put forward
the case for the uses of theory suggests that its theoretical necessity may not be
enough to save it in practice from other forms of practice. Which brings us to
the other hand. Theory may be necessary, but it is (even theoretically) certainly
not sufficient. For, theory is not politics. It is at best only a supplement. A condi-
tion of possibility, perhaps. But as cultural theory of several stripes has long
suggested, by the same token it may also be or become a condition of impossi-
bility, in any number of ways (becoming-obstacle, deferral, drift, division, alibi,
etc.). So, is this then stalemate, with ‘theorists’ either distinguishing themselves
from or being distinguished from ‘non-theorists’, and with each claiming that
they are more political or more to the left than their polemical others? There is
certainly a lot of this about. But are there really, actually, two discrete millena-
rian camps, the theorists versus the non-theorists? Surely this is not a very
nuanced theoretical or empirical description of any disciplinary terrain. Such
a two-dimensional image lacks depth.
Disciplinary commitment
Derrida once observed that a disciplinary space or terrain is inevitably ‘a field
of battle’. This is because ‘there is no metalanguage, no locus of truth outside
the field’, and this ‘makes the field necessarily subject to multiplicity and
heterogeneity. As a result, those who are inscribed in this field are necessarily
inscribed in a polemos, even if they have no special taste for war’ (Derrida
2003: 12). Hence, what is involved ‘is not an opposition between the legiti-
mate and the illegitimate, but rather a very complicated distribution of the
demands of legitimacy’ (Derrida 2003: 18). As such, there will be more to any
disagreement than one issue. In a consideration of Jacques Rancière’s concep-
tualisation of ‘disagreement’ as the basic aspect of politics, Benjamin Arditi
clarifies this complexity when he observes that:
a disagreement is less a confrontation between two established posi-

tions – as in the case of a debating society – than an engagement
between ‘parties’ that do not antedate their confrontation. A disagree-
ment constructs the object of argumentation and the field of argu-
mentation itself. (Arditi 2007: 115)
This clarifies the point that the very object of argumentation is already a
particular kind of institutional construct. In this case, theory (and theoretical
versus not theoretical approaches to political commitment) is already what
John Mowitt has proposed we term a ‘disciplinary object’ (Mowitt 1992). For
in any ‘versus’, there is a lot more to consider than the two putatively
opposed terms – here political versus not political, or theoretical versus not
theoretical. Rather, there is the issue of the silent, structuring, yet easily over-
looked ‘third’ or ‘middle’ term that is at work in constructing the objects and
the very terms of the debate: namely, the institution, paradigm, institutional
paradigm, or disciplinary object (Mowitt 1992; 2007; Bowman 2007). This

awareness of institutionality points up the often unregarded matter of the
place and the manner of the construction of ‘the object of argumentation and
the field of argumentation itself’ (Arditi 2007: 115).
The significance of this can be clarified by a consideration of disciplinary

‘commitment’ per se. According to René Girard (after Lacan, after Durkheim),
a discipline (an institution) is what it is thanks to its disciples, who are what they
are by virtue of being embroiled in a passionate disagreement about what
they are all differently attached to: namely, their shared declared commit-
ment to some ‘sacred’ object (Girard 1977; Mowitt 1992: 37). Viewed in this
way, an institution or a discipline is something which is constituted funda-
mentally as a rivalrous hegemonic structure congregated around or in the
name of a particular object. But here’s the rub. This institution may well not
have any simple, direct or necessary relation to or connection with its putative
raison d’être. For instance, an institution such as a religion’s sacred object may
be ‘God’. If God is supposed to exist as an ontological property of the
universe, then even though an earthly institutional dispute about God may
well change the institution, it would not actually change God. The same may
be said of more earthly institutions, such as football supporters’ clubs, for
instance, or fan clubs, or, indeed, even academic disciplines. Their connection
with their object need neither be necessary nor even real. At the very least,
any ‘connection’ will depend upon a work of invention or of forging the articu-
lation. So, even though ‘politics’ is rarely theorised as residing in a divine
realm beyond human intervention or in a professional realm entirely divorced
from ‘us’, surely an institutional or disciplinary commitment to politics oper-
ates according to the same logic, wherein the question remains that of the way
that a politically committed field might possibly impact on its object. But
what if it doesn’t at all?
This would be the bad news. It would be bad news not only for cultural
studies but for any who shared the premise that academic production on the
subject of politics might be able to make any political difference, however
conceived. It would be bad news if being politically committed, in this sense,
amounted to nothing more than being committed to fighting for the hegemony
of a particular paradigm within a narcissistic disciplinary space whose funda-
mental activity boiled down to misrecognition and projection. Therefore,
assuming politics to be an ontological property of the world,1 what needs to be
established (or at least theorised) is the relation of the ‘political commitment’
of cultural studies to, with or within the world. Another way to frame this
would be to ask what the most verifiable or reliable theory of politics that
we could start from would be, in order to establish, re-establish, theorise or
retheorise the political place or role of ‘politically committed’ academic or
intellectual work. In other words, how might our politically committed efforts
1
Chantal Mouffe voices something of this prevailing theoretical tendency when
she proposes that ‘we could, borrowing the vocabulary of Heidegger, say that politics
refers to the “ontic” level while “the political” has to do with the “ontological” one.
This means that the ontic has to do with the manifold practices of conventional poli-
tics, while the ontological concerns the very way in which society is instituted’
(Mouffe 2005: 8–9).
98 Paul Bowman
constitute themselves as political interventions in terms of our own theory of

political practice? To answer this, it will be necessary to engage in (or, rather,
with) some more theorising in order to try to work out what else (other than a
‘new generation of cultural studies’ disciples) might also emerge ‘from the
long shadow cast by the Birmingham School’ (Hall and Birchall 2006: 2). For if
this is ‘Cultural Studies, The Next Generation’, then what is the new ‘mission’?
Is it the same as that of the still-influential earlier generation? What, in other
words, was, is and could or should be the main cultural studies’ theory of (its
own) political intervention?
The critique of critique

Richard Johnson proposes that ‘we have to fight against the disconnection
that occurs when cultural studies is inhabited for merely academic purposes
or when enthusiasm for (say) popular cultural forms is divorced from the
analysis of power and of social responsibility’ (Johnson 1996: 79). Tony
Bennett adds that ‘The ambition of cultural studies is to develop ways of
theorizing relations of culture and power that will prove capable of being
utilized by relevant social agents to bring about changes within the operation
of those relations’ (Bennett 1997: 52). These tidy little rationales are fairly
representative of a consensus about what it is that would make cultural stud-
ies political. There are problems with both, however, and these hinge on the
crucial matter of ‘connection’. This is perhaps most clear in the case of
Bennett. As the likes of Paul A. Bové have noted, there is a problem with this
sort of broadly Gramscian assumption that political activists (whatever they
might look like) will or do or should come running to cultural studies for
political advice (Bové 1992). There is both an elitism and a narcissism at play
here. In other words, perhaps this aspect of Gramscian thinking should not
be the paradigmatic organising assumption or orientation of cultural studies
work, even if there nevertheless remains something invaluable in Gramscian
theory. This certain something, according to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal
Mouffe, is ‘the expansion and determination of the social logic implicit in the
concept of “hegemony” [albeit] in a direction that goes far beyond Gramsci’
(Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 3).
The propositions of Johnson and Bennett, like those of Stuart Hall (1992),
convey the bare bones of what a politically committed cultural studies has
been held to be. Bennett, Johnson, Hall, and many more, have always
construed the injunction to seek to intervene in terms of a notion of connection
or, rather, articulation, a concept that has always found its best theoretical
formulation and elaboration in the works of Laclau – even though, according
to Jennifer Daryl Slack, ‘in spite of the importance of Laclau’s formulations,
he has been excluded – as has Mouffe – from most of the popular histories of
cultural studies’ (Daryl Slack 1996: 120–21).
The important point for us is that this discursive formation arguably
exemplifies the dominant cultural studies theory of politics. It also, therefore,
provides the coordinates of the ‘place’ that cultural studies can locate itself
within in the political terrain. However, it does not yet provide a convincing
answer to the question as to what the precise nature of a possible cultural
studies articulation would be if, as post-Gramscian discourse theory has it,
culture and politics are a matter of articulation (see Laclau and Mouffe 1985;
McRobbie 1992; Daryl Slack 1996; Bowman 2007) Or to put it another way,
precisely how can cultural studies intervene in the political?
Historically, the overwhelming answer to this question has been:
academics can intervene culturally and politically by making critiques. This is

because, as culture and society are regarded as contingent, changeable and
hence political formations, the character of which is irreducibly institutional
or contingently instituted, there must be immanent political implications to
everything that is instituted (Derrida 1992; Hall 1992). In such an interpreta-
tion, an inestimably important political significance cannot but be attached to
the matter of knowledge: how knowledge is established, what passes for
knowledge and why, and into what relations with what effects. This is why
the idea of critiquing such important practices and institutions as policy-
making, knowledge-production, journalistic and media texts and so on, easily
comes to appear to be the valid strategy of ethical and political intervention.
But this is precisely where the unanswered, often elided or occluded question
remains: how? How do critiques make a difference to the objects, practices or
realms critiqued? As Martin McQuillan reminds us, to call for change is not to
make a change (McQuillan 2001: 120). There may be no necessary connection
and no necessary consequence. Calls can fall on deaf ears, be drowned out,
unheard, misunderstood, ridiculed or ignored. So, the simultaneously theo-
retical and practical question remains how to make the change proposed or
suggested by any critique. Yet, across the board, and apparently without
irony, the answer keeps returning: critique. But if critique is in question, how
can critique be the answer? More productively, the question can be posed as
one of how, when, where and why might critique come to be politically
consequential.
This is a vital theoretical and practical question for anyone concerned
with the political problem of intervention. Yet it has been largely avoided or
foreclosed by a kind of ‘happy Gramscian’ stance, wherein we seem content
to operate as if it goes without saying that our intellectual critiques have
knock-on effects and/or that we teach political activists to ‘go forth and artic-
ulate’. Other than this narcissistically assumed relation, the precise mecha-
nisms of how critique may constitute an intervention remain an article of
faith. I would suggest that this is so much the case that it has caused some-
thing of a hiatus or blind spot to arise in politicised theory and that this has
occurred right on the core question of politics: intervention itself. This is simi-
lar to what both Geoffrey Bennington and Gary Hall have suggested about
political discussions that do not interrogate the notion of politics that they are
relying on. Hall and Bennington have suggested that there is a real problem
in works organised under the sign of political analysis when the notion of
politics that implicitly organises those works is not also interrogated. It means
that the organising category is transcendentalised (set as the yardstick of eval-
uation) and (thereby) excluded from consideration (Bennington 1998: 106; Hall
2002: 66). When it comes to the question of political intervention, it seems that
the same often goes for ‘critique’. Yet if we think that critique names the way
we can intervene, then we need to clarify precisely how, where and why this
is so. This is something that has been under-considered and under-theorised,
even by theorists who consider theory to be potentially politically vital.
100 Paul Bowman
The alterdisciplinary theory of theory

This does not mean that we must conclude that, therefore, critique does not
do anything. It is just to suggest that we ought to enquire into its presumed
cultural and political relations and effects. So let us have a quick look at
how cultural studies has tried to fulfil its much declared strong ‘will to
connect’ (Hall 1996: 263). For Stuart Hall, this ‘will to connect’ has always
meant that by definition cultural studies ‘tries to make a difference in the
institutional world in which it is located’ (Hall 1996: 271–72). The precision
of the expression ‘the institutional world in which it is located’ is key here, as
it reiterates the (post-)Gramscian character of Hall’s understanding of
culture and politics as institutionally reticulated. Indeed, in Hall’s account,
cultural studies was formed in ‘a discursive formation, in Foucault’s sense’
(Hall 1996: 263), emerging within the ‘milieu’ of the New Left in the UK
(Rojek 2003: 23). It was a university institution that was explicitly ethico-
politically motivated: open to alterity, intent on pushing exclusionary limits,
borders, conventions, boundaries, orientations, hierarchies and so on. In
short, as Hall makes clear, cultural studies was always intent on interven-
ing, on altering. It was never ‘merely academic’, either in the literal or the
pejorative sense of this term. Rather, to employ one of Derrida’s definitions
of deconstruction, although located within the university institution,
cultural studies was always ‘an institutional practice for which […] the institu-
tion remains a problem’ (Derrida 2002: 53, emphasis in original). Indeed, the
concept of ‘institution’ has clearly been a central and defining problematic
for both cultural studies and deconstruction alike. For even though many in
cultural studies have been hostile to (Derridean) deconstruction, cultural
studies is arguably a prime example of what Mowitt has called the ongoing
practical deconstruction of the humanities (Mowitt 2007).
Thus, the basic orientation of cultural studies (and deconstruction)
should be regarded as alterdisciplinary. This is to be understood as something
quite different from work that is simply interdisciplinary. For the aim was
never to inter – or, that is, to bury – cultural studies ever deeper into the struc-
ture of a disciplinary status quo. Rather, the aim was to alter the ‘business as
usual’ production of knowledge – in Derrida’s words, ‘to politicize and
democratize the university scene’, in order, ultimately, to ‘modify’ dominant
discourses (Derrida 1995: 409–10; see also Mowitt 1992: 27). With this ratio-
nale in mind, the original alterdisciplinary strategy of cultural studies was
indeed to intervene by unmasking partiality. And this was largely done
through critiques. As Mieke Bal depicts it:
[along with] women’s studies, cultural studies [was] responsible for

the absolutely indispensable opening up of the disciplinary structure
of the humanities. By challenging methodological dogma, and elitist
prejudice and value judgement, it has been uniquely instrumental in
at least making the academic community aware of the conservative
nature of its endeavours, if not everywhere forcing it to change. It has,
if nothing else, forced the academy to realise its collusion with an elit-
ist white-male politics of exclusion and its subsequent intellectual
closure. (Bal 2003: 30)
Thus, alterdisciplinary critique (rather than mere interdisciplinary work),

often in the form of polemic, was the primary form of cultural studies’ early
interventions. The desired aim of its ethically and politically inflected
critiques was the alteration of other disciplines. And although this may
appear to be a ‘merely academic’ focus, it was always regarded in cultural

studies as (immanently) political because it was based on the post-Gramscian
theory that to change what is produced and legitimated as knowledge will be
discursively consequential. The method or pragmatics of this intervention
took the form of revealing what Derrida called the bias and even the
‘violence’ of the ‘nonconceptual orders’ upon which different conceptual
orders (discourses, ‘knowledges’) are articulated (Derrida 1982: 329). In spite
of this ideological continuity, however, this method has always taken differ-
ent forms, of course. In cultural studies this process of practical deconstruc-
tion largely took the form of directly pointing out political biases such as
Eurocentrism, heteronormativity and so on. The Derridean strategy, on the
other hand, took the form of evoking what Derrida (teleiopoetically) called
‘classical protocols’2 – namely, ‘levering’ at established interpretations and
invoking above all else rigorous, rational, reasonable, incisive questioning
and ‘reading’3 in order to demonstrate the limitations and biases underpin-
ning this or that accepted ‘truth’.
Now, if what it sought to alter (for discursive and hegemonic reasons)
was disciplinarity, then the most important question to ask is: did it work? If
so, to what extent and how and why did it work? With what consequences?
Thereupon, the question becomes: does it still work? Can we still intervene
consequentially in the same way? If not, why not? And what theoretical and
practical strategies of intellectual intervention might remain viable and politi-
cally effective today?
The vanishing intervener

There are many possible evaluations of the cultural studies intervention. The
fact that there are so many of these and that they so often veer off into febrile
condemnations of cultural studies actually helps to strengthen the claim that,
whatever else may be said about it, there is a widespread implicit agreement
that cultural studies did intervene ‘alter-disciplinarily’ and that it had signifi-
cant effects on other disciplines and other cultural discourses (Young 1999: 5;
Hall 2002). This is perhaps nowhere better demonstrated than in the bitter
denials of the significance of cultural studies’ interventions by some critics.
2
In Derrida, ‘classical protocols’ functions as a teleiopoetic term that he regularly
conjures up in order to engender what it would seem to evoke or promise – namely,
more analytical ‘rigour’ through more ‘sensitivity’ in reading; more ‘listening’ for the
voices that have been drowned out, more questioning of the political implications of
interpretive decisions, and so on (see, for instance, Derrida 1992: 11). This is why John
Protevi proposes that ‘deconstruction is democratic justice, responding to the calls
from all others’ (Protevi 2001: 70). (And this is also why many things other than what
Derrida and friends did can be called ‘deconstructive’.)
3
‘[T]he best liberation from violence is a certain putting into question, which
makes the search for an archia tremble’ (Derrida 1978: 141).
102 Paul Bowman
Ž i ž ek’s polemical tirades against cultural studies as a discourse that is at the

Z
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acrn] zc[ao
rn]
forefront of politically correct postmodernist deconstructionist liberal ideol-

ogy typify many of the reactions to cultural studies and, of course, demon-
strate that cultural studies did have ‘wider effects’, however simultaneously
denounced and denied they may be.4 Indeed, the ensemble of Ž i ž ek’s diverse
Z
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acrn] zc[ao
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sweeping statements reveals a kind of ‘kettle logic’ at play in reactions to

cultural studies: a simultaneous admission and denial (plus an accusation)
about its achievements (Bowman 2001: 50–65). Put differently: there is a sense
in which the alterdisciplinary intervention was so successful that, retrospec-
tively, it no longer looks like it ever intervened into anything at all. Indeed, it
could well be that cultural studies’ interventions are the victim of their own
success, having worked so well and effected such fundamental change that
the current state of affairs now completely assimilated into everyday life is
taken for granted to such an extent that it seems always to have been in place.
In this argument, cultural studies is something of a ‘vanishing mediator’,
an agency that blazed a trail; a trail which has now become a standard thor-
oughfare, a required route.5 In other words, what cultural studies once did
(almost) alone, everyone does now. So, the problematics first thoroughly
instituted, disseminated and (shall we say) ‘popularised’ by cultural studies
are now the stock in trade of the vast majority of arts and humanities
academic-intellectual production.6 Or, as Mowitt suggests: ‘just as it has
established itself as something like a new paradigm, it has begun to vanish
into the very effects this paradigm is generating in cognate fields within the
humanities and social sciences’ (Mowitt 2003: 184).
To the extent that it was a trail blazer, cultural studies may come to have
been a vanishing mediator in the sublation of the humanities by the new para-
digm or, in Robert J. C. Young’s words, the new ‘architectonic of knowledge’
that it exemplifies: namely, ‘the contemporary assertion of political truth as
the most comprehensive metalanguage’ (Young 1992: 111–12). Thus, the logic
of its intervention means, in effect, that ‘cultural studies can only succeed by
failing’ (Mowitt 2003: 184). The greater its success in disseminating, circulating
4
I have discussed Ž i ž ek’s problematic relation to cultural studies more fully in
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Bowman (2006).
5
The term is Fredric Jameson’s and refers to ‘an element essential to a historical
and/or intellectual transition that disappears when its work is done’ (Walsh 2002: 396).
6
However, this trail-blazing was obviously far from a smooth transition or subla-
tion. Inevitably, the generalisation or ‘popularisation’ of cultural studies type prob-
lematics moved hand in hand with its simultaneous unpopularity. Lola Young once
accounted for the twin forces of attraction and repulsion attached to cultural studies
by noting the way that cultural studies is ‘vilified along with media studies, amongst
others, as being a “Mickey Mouse” subject’; yet, as she notes, ‘it is somewhat ironic
[…] that there have been repeated attacks on the subject in the media’ because ‘ideas
and analyses which are now firmly embedded in media discourses have increasingly
come to resemble closely the kind of cultural textual analysis that has been nurtured
through cultural studies’. At the same time, ‘critical and theoretical paradigms
derived from, and influenced by cultural studies, have seeped into the study of a wide
range of disciplines: History, English Literature, Geography, Sociology and so on’.
Thus, cultural studies was ‘a key element in the movement of disciplinary boundaries,
and […] of wider shifts in political and intellectual sensibilities’ (Young 1999: 5).
and instituting its problematics, the more its work, as intervention, is done. Of
course, the discipline or field of cultural studies will remain as long as there are
enough students applying to do it to protect departments from the axe. But, if
so many other fields and disciplines now appear to do what was once the
preserve of cultural studies, then surely its work is done. So, is this the end of
the cultural studies intervention?
The end of the intervention

In one sense, I think, yes. This is the end of that intervention. It ‘worked’
because the questions posed by cultural studies precipitated crises in the
established disciplines that were its contiguous ‘cognate fields’. But that was
then. This is now. And surely one must historicise – at least often, if not
always. In this case, one need only historicise a little bit to grasp that inevita-
bly the interruptive and disruptive power of a particular strategy of interven-
tion will dissipate. Politicised critiques will cease to shock. They will cease to
interrupt, cease to disrupt, cease to alter anything. This – and indeed what
might be called the cunning of disciplinary reason – can be seen in the way
that the end of the initial cultural studies intervention took the form of a
generalised ‘theoretical fluency’ which Hall suggests has ‘formalized out of
existence the critical questions of power, history, and politics’ that we all now
seem both eminently able and contractually obliged ‘extensively and without
end, to theorize’ (Hall 1992: 287). Or, as McQuillan puts it, even though today
cultural theoretical analyses abound, nevertheless ‘one cannot “do” cultural
studies simply by borrowing its thematics’ (McQuillan 2003: 50). For one may
well be studying, theorising, or diagnosing ‘the political’ in this or that aspect
of culture, but one is not necessarily intervening in any consequential sense.
Thus, argues McQuillan, at this moment in disciplinary time, ‘the endless arti-
cles on Foucault and football are not “doing” cultural studies anymore’: no
matter how ‘political’ their vocabulary and their organising thematics, such
works are nevertheless something of a ‘conservative force’ nowadays
(McQuillan 2003: 49), as this has become straightforwardly disciplinary work,
rather than alterdisciplinary intervention. Such work is then not a disruption,
interruption, or irruption of anything but, rather, the reiterative consolidation
of a new disciplinary order in which making politicised critiques is the order
of the day. In short, this may signal the end of that intervention.
So, is politicised critique to be rejected because it is now just what Stuart
Hall calls a kind of ‘ventriloquism’, a compulsion to repeat, full of sound and
fury, but signifying nothing: a merely disciplinary gesture? To borrow an
image from Slavoj Ž i ž ek, perhaps the search for an effective, interventional,
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‘transformative critique’ in this context is a bit like the proverbial man search-
ing for a lost key in the pool of light cast by a lamppost: he sees no sense in
looking outside the pool of light because he won’t be able to find his key in
the surrounding darkness ( Ž i ž ek 2001: 208). Thus, although it may seem
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untenable to look for our own lost political effectiveness anywhere other than
in ‘critique’ – because that is what we believe intellectual work ‘is’ – we may
perhaps be flogging a dead horse in looking there. Perhaps ‘critique’ is a polit-
ical relic. Yet, on the other hand, rejecting ‘critique’ tout court would seem to
be tantamount to throwing the baby out with the bathwater – a regression
104 Paul Bowman
from the post-Gramscian insights of the institutional and fundamentally

contingent (articulated, reticulated and discursive) basis of culture and soci-
ety and the crucial role that ‘knowledge’ surely plays within it.
Yet some have argued that the problem is that the terrain within which
(and the way in which) the arts, humanities and social sciences can intervene
is in a very real sense now ‘irrelevant’. For Bill Readings, culture becomes
contestable precisely when power has moved on (Readings 1996). For
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, ‘power itself’ today chants along with all
supposed radicals ‘Long live difference! Down with essentialist binaries!’
(Hardt and Negri 2000: 139). They argue that ‘Power has evacuated the
bastion [that most “radicals”] are attacking and has circled round to their rear
to join them in the assault in the name of difference’ (Hardt and Negri 2000:
138). Or, as Jean-François Lyotard crushingly puts it: ‘radical’ politicised
critique ‘is not thrust aside today because it is dangerous or upsetting, but
simply because it is a waste of time. It is “good for nothing”, it is not good for
gaining time. For success is gaining time’ (Lyotard 1988: xv). With this,
Lyotard brilliantly makes the argument that today ‘we’ are simply not where
the ‘action’ is. What matters, what determines, what dominates is what Lyotard
calls ‘techno-science’, what Martin Heidegger called the ‘modern technical-
ization and industrialization of every continent’ (Heidegger 1971: 3), or what
Deleuze called ‘the 3 Ms’ which rule ‘the New International order’: ‘Money,
Media and Military’ (Peters 2001: 107). In such representations of the contem-
porary world, then, it would not seem to matter what ‘we’ say, precisely
because our voices are not the voices that matter. The voices that do matter are
those that produce, legitimate and institute techno-scientific knowledge,
knowledge that is performative and articulated with, as or at centres of
power: state, governmental, military, media, corporate, educational, policy-
making and so on.
Altering alterdisciplinarity
However, because academic contexts that ‘matter’ in a macro-political sense
include the disciplines that inform, supplement, confirm and legitimate vari-
ous forms of policy, I am not going to reiterate the old proposal that ‘there-
fore’ cultural studies should become ‘cultural policy studies’ (Bennett 1996:
307–21). For such a step remains ensnared in what I propose we think of as
the prior alterdisciplinary strategy, which was characterised by critique from
afar. Rather than critique from a distance (‘we here’ critiquing ‘them there’),
perhaps it would be better to move in, close the gap and join with the other.
For, to use one of Rorty’s favourite terms, in the face of critics, anyone can
reply: ‘who cares what such “know nothings” think about us! What do they
know about what we do?’ The point here is that, whether carried out in the
pages of cultural studies journals or in broadsheets or on high-brow talk
shows, critique does not change the status of those involved from simply
being dismissible as busy-bodies, from elsewhere, busy-bodies that do not
matter. Instead of this, my suggestion is that what ‘we’ now need to overcome
is precisely the compulsion to repeat the gesture of critiquing the other (as
other) – and that we need to do this with the aim of inventing a kind of
critique that might (again) work as effective intervention.
In the quest to establish the alchemy of intervention, the philosopher’s

stone to be discovered is the answer to the question of how. The answer
I would proffer is inseparable from the sustained consideration of contin-
gency, articulation and disciplinarity. A first proposition is that, in a terrain
characterised by contingency, there is no necessary reason why the cognate

fields of cultural studies should remain those of the arts and humanities.
(Anyway, these are now quite tied up in the processes of altering in light of
having their ‘collusion with an elitist white-male politics of exclusion’ –
among other things – firmly impressed upon them [Bal 2003: 30].) Indeed,
why not embrace other, more ‘otherwise-influential’ disciplines? One might
wish to consider such influential fields as economics, econometrics, manage-
ment, IT, informatics, international relations, education, law, government
policy … (this list is not exhaustive). Such disciplinary constellations have
academic centres that are firmly articulated (indeed intimately reticulated,
imbricated) with determinant centres of power. As disciplinary spaces, they
are surely not immune to alterdisciplinary intervention. So the issue is ulti-
mately one of establishing the conditions of possibility for intervention into
them. As for how to do this, the answer is in the question: intervention must
be into them, and not just about them.7 But I would like to go further and to
suggest that such intervention will be all the better the further it is from
appearing to be polemical denunciation, and the less it is apparently launched
either ‘from here’ (from ‘our own’ disciplinary academic contexts) or aired in
the so-called ‘public realm’ (whatever or wherever such a mystical sphere is
supposed to be), or media. The aim, rather, is to intervene directly, ‘there’ –
namely, within the very academic contexts wherein ‘that’ knowledge is
produced and legitimated.
In short, the objective remains alterdisciplinary, but the targets and
languages must be transformed. For today, the problematic object of attention
is no longer simply, solely, or necessarily the exclusionary effects of the hege-
mony of white male patriarchy or its canons in culture. Hence, the subjects,
languages and contexts of critique are no longer necessarily those of the arts
and humanities disciplines. Therefore, if one’s object of concern is with, say,
the deleterious ethical or cultural consequences of, say, managerialism or
economic or educational policy, then one’s preliminary task would be to
ascertain the disciplinary and institutional sites of the production and legiti-
mation of the knowledge and rationales to which reference and appeal is
made in the organisation of micro- or macro-policy implementation.
Certainly this will never be easy. This is because the contemporary
academic condition is defined by heterogeneous language games in a disci-
plined/dislocated web of disciplinary differences and intensified disciplinary
enclaving. The unavoidable proliferation of disciplinarily-specific technical
languages (Lyotardian ‘paralogies’) leads to mutual unintelligibility and the
disarticulation of different subjects and disciplinary realms. This is precisely
7
I made a similar argument to what follows in Bowman (2004). Indeed, this
present paper is a development upon Bowman (2004) and of some of the points made
in the conclusion of Bowman (2007).
106 Paul Bowman
why ‘critique’ from ‘our perspective’ will either be unintelligible to the other
or unacceptable/ignorable/dismissible according to the other(’s) criteria.
This linguistic and conceptual abyss can be bridged only through mastery of
the other(’s) criteria, the other(’s) language, the other(’s) logic, in the other(’s)
‘context’. Thus, the point is precisely to intervene into and to alter other disci-
plinary discourses and their productions (knowledges) not by critiquing them
but by intervening into the disciplinary spaces of their production and legiti-
mation – that is: getting inside knowledge, undoing methodologies and argu-
ing in the other’s language for other conclusions.
Altering conclusions
Ž i ž ek suggests that to intervene, to act, one must change the ‘co-ordinates’ of
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a situation ( Ž i ž ek 2000a: 122). As Oliver Marchart has pointed out, this ulti-
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mately refers to a kind of suicide (Marchart 2007: 109). In Ž i ž ek’s argument,Z

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an act requires ‘striking at one’s self’ ( Ž i ž ek 2000a: 122–23). Translated into

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alterdisciplinary practice, this means, first and foremost, acknowledging what

Derrida called the ‘monolingualism of the other’ (Derrida 1998). Thus, it
means necessarily using the other’s language, in the other’s context. It does not
mean shouting about how terrible capitalism or managerialism or bureau-
cracy or militarism or nanotechnology or genetics or legislation or govern-
ment policy is solely in our own disciplinary sites and scenes, books, journals
and conferences (again, perhaps, à la Ž i ž ek). It means, rather, engaging with
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the other in their journals. For, frankly, which scientists or policy makers have
even heard of never mind read cultural studies or arts and humanities journals
or, even if so, given the slightest bit of a shit about what is said about genetics
or ‘geopolitics’ therein? My point here is not to disparage disciplinary work.8
It is simply to suggest that talking about something ‘here’ is not to make any
difference to it ‘there’. To publish within one’s own well-institutionalised
field is not to have intervened into anything other than that field. Of course, if
that’s what you want to alter or contribute to, then fine (as here). But all faux-
radical pseudo-political tub-thumping and soap-box pontificating should be
recognised for what it is. Rather than this, what is required is to move with
the other’s moves, to analyse, read, ‘connect’ with and deconstruct their
connections in their language in order to make critiques that ‘make sense’
there, where making new sense might reorient that.
In a very practical sense, this would be to strike at oneself – to relin-
quish one’s comfortable disciplinary identity, to stop ‘being disciplined’.
Rather than disciplined repetition, alterdisciplinary intervention requires
yielding to the other discourse, the other protocols, the other language, the
other scene, through a renewed emphasis on listening to, engaging with,
connecting with the other, on other terms, in order to ‘deconstruct’ it where
that deconstruction could count. (I am not suggesting ‘doing a Sokal’ [Sokal
and Bricmont 1998] by sneaking Trojan Horses into other disciplines in
order to discredit them [although you could]. Rather, I am proposing taking
8
Nor is it to forget the value of the deconstructive ‘perhaps’. Rather, my point is
that blind faith in ‘the perhaps’ is itself perhaps a particular kind of refusal to think, a
particular kind of irresponsibility.
the notion of interdisciplinary dialogue seriously, rather than relying either

on the enclave comfort of ‘our spaces’ or the easy alternative of holding onto
some rather nebulous faith in the ‘general’ power of critique and journalistic
‘public debate’.) For the point is to change it and without changing the co-
ordinates by striking at oneself in this way and fully accepting the other’s
terms (in what Žižek calls a strategy of ‘overidentification’ [Žižek 2000b:
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acr[n] Z
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220]), we remain in the face-off characterised by Lugwig Wittgenstein in

which: ‘Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled
with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic’
(Wittgenstein 1979 [1975]: 611–12). This too can be read as part of the prob-
lem of altering disciplinarity. Different discursive language games produce
different institutions. And ‘institution’, says Derrida, does not refer to ‘a few
walls or some outer structures surrounding, protecting, guaranteeing or
restricting the freedom of our work; it is also and already the structure of
our interpretation’ (Derrida 1992: 22–23).
So, alterdisciplinarity specifies the logic and opens up, as a topic of reflec-
tion and analysis, a certain possible practice, one organised by the aim of
intervening into the other. Its ‘next generation’ incarnation – indeed, its
regeneration – requires a renewed theoretical and practical attention to and
awareness of the rivalrous structure of disciplinarity as well as the disciplin-
ary structure of the micro and macro hegemonies that constitute the political
terrain, just as much as it obliges an attentiveness to the potentially conse-
quential link between institutions and interpretations and between interpreta-
tions and institutions (Weber 1987). In this elaboration, alterdisciplinarity
names the aim of opening up to analysis a crucial yet underdeveloped aspect
of the notion that cultural and political intervention consists of acts of articula-
tion. That is, alterdisciplinarity not only concurs with but deepens and intensi-
fies the dominant theory underpinning cultural studies, that culture and
politics are constituted through contingent articulation within an institutional
discursive terrain. It thereby enables us to conceptualise a key way that ‘artic-
ulation’ (and indeed ‘discourse’) need not simply mean ‘speech’ or ‘conversa-
tion’. Rather, these terms refer us to relationality, institutional reticulation,
connection, hinging.
In this light, the problem of intervention, of how to intervene, can be
recast as a problem of disarticulation – the disarticulation of the realms of
‘public debate’ and ‘academic critique’ from, so to speak, the forces and the
contexts that could be said to count. For the contexts that are thought of as
‘counting’ – macropolitical sites and scenes associated with the state, corpo-
rations, media and so on – are not simply involved in any causal relationship
with academic cultural critiques or even with journalistic public debate.
However, they are articulated or reticulated with the institutional production
of the knowledges that underpin and that legitimate the practices and policies
of macropolitical scenes. Hence, even when we remain ‘politically commit-
ted’ to ‘external’ (social, cultural, political) issues ‘outside the university’, the
primary site of academic or intellectual intervention needs to be into the
academic and intellectual scenes that are most closely connected to the rele-
vant power. As such, perhaps the best way to proceed – according to what
Derrida once proposed as an ethics of the lesser violence (Derrida 1977) – is
not to critique the other from afar, from/in our own disciplinary sites and
108 Paul Bowman
scenes, but to engage with the other ‘there’, from/in their disciplinary sites
and scenes. Moreover, because no one will ever be able to agree on what
rationality, logic or rigour should look like, it would seem rational, logical
and rigorous to aspire to make an intervention which, in Derrida’s words,
would not seem ‘eccentric or strange, incomprehensible or exotic (which

would allow [others] to dispose of it easily)’, but to produce work that those
others should, according to their own declared standards, values and
protocols, find ‘competent, rigorously argued, and carrying conviction’, such
that it may oblige a ‘re-examination of the fundamental norms and premises
of […] dominant discourses [and] the principles underlying many of their
evaluations’. Derrida concludes: ‘What this kind of questioning [seeks to do]
is to modify the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and
democratize the university scene’ (Derrida 1995: 409–10). I would add that
engagement in the other field must necessarily take place in its language,
according to its protocols and proprieties, otherwise our efforts will look like
those of ‘a fool and a heretic’. And fools and heretics are laughed at,
or burned.
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Culture, Theory and Critique

Online Publication Date: 01 April 2008

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Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God’s

Culture trek, TNG

Culture, Theory & Critique

It is also because the theoretical ‘interrogation of founding ideas and narra-

it is the theoretical analysis […] which is likely to prove the more

operation and development, and therefore less prone to being

Strike one? This is a neat formulation, even if it presumes a very flattering

understanding of theory as the approach that is most ‘self-consciously aware

to move away from theory because it is apparently not political enough

Strike three? This actually appears to be a double-whammy: for why should

critics accused deconstruction of taking things too far – a matter to which we

a disagreement is less a confrontation between two established posi-

paradigm, or disciplinary object (Mowitt 1992; 2007; Bowman 2007). This

The significance of this can be clarified by a consideration of disciplinary

constitute themselves as political interventions in terms of our own theory of

The critique of critique

academics can intervene culturally and politically by making critiques. This is

The alterdisciplinary theory of theory

[along with] women’s studies, cultural studies [was] responsible for

Thus, alterdisciplinary critique (rather than mere interdisciplinary work),

appear to be a ‘merely academic’ focus, it was always regarded in cultural

The vanishing intervener

Ž i ž ek’s polemical tirades against cultural studies as a discourse that is at the

forefront of politically correct postmodernist deconstructionist liberal ideol-

sweeping statements reveals a kind of ‘kettle logic’ at play in reactions to

The end of the intervention

from the post-Gramscian insights of the institutional and fundamentally

In the quest to establish the alchemy of intervention, the philosopher’s

characterised by contingency, there is no necessary reason why the cognate

mately refers to a kind of suicide (Marchart 2007: 109). In Ž i ž ek’s argument,Z

an act requires ‘striking at one’s self’ ( Ž i ž ek 2000a: 122–23). Translated into

alterdisciplinary practice, this means, first and foremost, acknowledging what

the notion of interdisciplinary dialogue seriously, rather than relying either

220]), we remain in the face-off characterised by Lugwig Wittgenstein in

would not seem ‘eccentric or strange, incomprehensible or exotic (which

(eds), New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

London: Verso, 263–280.

Derrida, J. 1977. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Derrida, J. 1982. ‘Signature Event Context’. In Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy.

Peters, M. A. 2001. Poststructuralism, Marxism and Neoliberalism: Between Theory and

Modern Criticism and Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 390–98.

Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary

Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso, 90–135.

Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left.

London: Verso, 213–262.

Notion. London: Verso.

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