Cultural Studies is the Crisis: Culturalism and Dynamic Justice

Abstract

The sometimes overrated “crisis in cultural studies” may be to some extent self-inflicted. The authors outline the transformation of the moral or ethical origins of cultural studies as those of what was essentially a research project, into the instrumentalist routines of an academic bureaucracy. Because these developments arise largely from the failure of the political Left to accommodate the collapse of the Cold War ideological stand-off, it is suggested that cultural studies has in many ways become something of an intellectual commodity that informs reactionary agendas equally, as well as those claiming to be Progressive. The article proposes an elaboration of the concept of Dynamic Justice, as developed by Agnes Heller (1987), as the grounds for recovering cultural studies’ earlier research impetus.