The Figure of Subalternity and the Neoliberal Future

I began my research in cultural studies by focusing on issues of popular music and postmodernity, but the transversal paths that I mapped led me someplace else, to the intersection of three questions: The constitution and limits of philosophical modernity, the growing political and experiential dominance of a (contradictory) new conservatism in the United States (as well as other advanced industrial nations), and the project of neoliberal capitalist globalization.^{1 Perhaps this was predictable from the outset of my career. After all, for me, cultural studies, although it is not alone here, seeks better knowledge of the changing configurations of the systems of domination, and the organizations of acceptance, intimidation, apathy, and resistance, in order to offer new and better ways of understanding, responding to, and transforming them.}

^{The Neoliberal Project: One View}

^{I am trying to analyze the changing balance of forces and the leading trajectories and logics pointing into our collective futures in order to ask why “we” (here I mean primarily progressives in the United States) are “losing.” While I want to hold on to a certain “optimism of the will,” I think we need to spend more time appreciating how deeply pessimistic we must be as progressive intellectuals. It seems to me that, in the contemporary context, Antonio Gramsci’s war of positions has become a relentless assault. Try keeping a list of all that happens—or at least all that you hear about—that you think should outrage and perhaps even mobilize a significant public response, but apparently does not. You will be quickly overwhelmed. Consequently, I think it is time we got to know our enemies better—both neoliberal and neoconservative—for I am sure that they know us better than we know them and that they have used that knowledge to theorize the struggle for power in the contemporary world. Moreover, there is a history that has to be told about how the United States—led by the Left and the Right—got here if we are to figure out how to get out of this place. On the one hand, it might begin with the defeat of Barry Goldwater, and on the other, with the Left’s abandonment of Lyndon B. Johnson over the issue of Vietnam, despite his strong commitment to civil rights and antipoverty programs.}

^{In my previous work (Grossberg 1992), I have tried to talk about the strategies by which a new and shifting conservative alliance has attempted to construct the acceptance of (or surrender to) a radical reorganization of social, political, and economic spaces. I have argued that this has involved a strategic and affective political struggle to restructure and transform the lived geographies of everyday life.2 Obviously, the simultaneity of the two projects also transforms the articulated relations among such spaces and geographies. Yet this diagnosis is inseparable from the broader analysis of the apparatuses and technologies of power that both constitute and characterize the structure and lived reality of modernity, where modernity itself is always a differentially articulated and lived conjuncture of capitalism, the nation/state, colonialism, and modernism (and where each is seen as a complex and even contradictory set of practices). Recognizing that modernity has multiple and different trajectories, formations, histories, and possibilities, I will follow Paul Gilroy (1993) in talking about the formation of North Atlantic modernity.}

^{I am hypothesizing that we are witnessing a serious transformation of modernity as a historical and geographical invention, an edifice or assemblage of reality, discourse, subjectivity, and power. Ironically, North Atlantic modernity is being challenged most significantly, I think, not by its explicit critics on the Left, but by neoliberal and neoconservative apparatuses attempting to restructure the forces of domination and exploitation themselves. Consequently, I think it is necessary that the cultural Left think beyond its current project of deconstructing the modern liberal subject within a theory of difference. I will argue, given my preliminary analysis of the current vectors of...}