One of the defining features that is often given of cultural studies, on which it is proposed that everyone in cultural studies will agree, is that it is a politically committed field.² It was certainly in political terms that Stuart Hall positioned his own activities as a teacher, writer and academic. Speaking at the landmark 1990 conference ‘Cultural Studies Now and In the Future’ of his time at the Birmingham Centre in the 1970s, Hall remarked that ‘Gramsci’s account still seems to me to come closest to expressing what it is I think we were trying to do…  we were trying to find an institutional practice in cultural studies that might produce an organic intellectual’. And this is so even though, as Hall admits, the ‘problem about the concept of an organic intellectual is that it appears to align intellectuals with an emerging historic movement and we couldn’t tell then, and can hardly tell now, where that emerging historical movement was to be found’ (Hall 1992a: 281). Now anyone attempting to translate this kind of politically committed role into the present historical conjuncture is immediately confronted by some rather difficult and challenging questions. Does the hope, for instance, that, in Hall’s words, ‘there could be, sometime, a movement which would be larger than the movement of petit-bourgeois intellectuals’, continue to be one we can actually carrying on ‘living with’, given that we currently occupy a period in which the victory of capitalism’s free-market economy and defeat of any political alternatives to neo-liberalism seem somewhat assured (1992a: 288)?

Even if the rise of such a movement is still considered to be a possibility, is any historical alliance of progressive forces today really going to be discernible as the kind of radical political project with which cultural studies, and the work of Hall and the Birmingham School in particular, has traditionally been associated: that of the British New Left and the ‘new social movements’ (feminism, anti-racism, anti-imperialism, gay liberation and so on)? Or is it more likely to adopt the kind of ‘disorganised’, decentralised, multitudinous form that appears to characterise the new wave of large-scale, ‘anti-capitalist’ and anti-war protests that have emerged over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s? In which case, is the development of a new form of politics and a new political project not required if cultural studies is to retain its sense of political engagement in the twenty-first century - something perhaps more along the lines of that conceived by Agamben (1993), Derrida (1994) and Hardt and Negri (2004) in terms of the ‘coming community’, the ‘new international’ and the ‘multitude’ respectively?  And is cultural studies something that can connect with or otherwise assist such a ‘movement of movements’ anyway? It certainly doesn’t seem to have had much success in this respect so far (as Jeremy Gilbert’s chapter in this volume makes clear). 

Now, for many, the raising of such questions is no doubt challenging enough given the importance of Birmingham School, New Left, new social movements style politics to cultural studies’ sense of its own identity. Yet difficult though they may be, these questions still all have their basis in a fundamental premise which underpins cultural studies but which, despite (or more likely because of) this, too often remains unaddressed. This is the assumption that historical and social movements of some kind, whether organised or disorganised, recognisable by cultural studies as traditionally conceived or not, do indeed continue to be possible or at least desirable. In fact, we would go so far as to argue that the continuing resort on the part of much of the left in general, and cultural studies in particular, to such progressive historical narratives  (even as, like Hall, they often simultaneously express certain reservations about the wisdom of doing so) is actually part of a far larger problem. It is a situation summed up most incisively by Wendy Brown, when she draws attention to the way in which, while many on the left have:

lost confidence in a historiography bound to a notion of progress or to any other purpose, we have coined no political substitute for progressive understandings of where we have come from and where we are going. Similarly, while both sovereignty and right have suffered severe erosions of their naturalistic epistemological and ontological bases in modernity, we have not replaced them as sources of political agency and sites of justice claims. Personal conviction and political truth have lost their moorings in firm and level epistemological ground, but we have not jettisoned them as sources of political motivation or as sites of collective fealty. So we have ceased to believe in many of the constitutive premises undergirding modern personhood, statehood, and constitutions, yet we continue to operate politically as if these premises still held, and as if the political-cultural narratives based on them were intact. (Brown 2001: 3-4)

It is consequently crucial, for Brown, that those of us who still consider ourselves as being of the left think about how we might ‘develop historical political consciousness in terms other than progress, articulate our political investments without notions of teleology and naturalized desire, and affirm political judgement in terms that depart from moralism and conviction’ (2001: 4). Brown gets right to the heart of the problem when she asks:

If the legitimacy of liberal democracy depends on certain narratives and foundational presuppositions, including progress, rights, and sovereignty, what happens when those narratives and assumptions are challenged, or indeed simply exposed in their legitimating function? What kinds of political cultures are produced by this destabilization of founding narratives and signal terms? … How do we live in these broken narratives, when nothing has taken their place? (2001: 14)

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