Introducing Cultural Politics

CULTURAL POLITICS 1 REPRINTS AVAILABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHERS. PHOTOCOPYING PERMITTED BY LICENSE ONLY© BERG 2005 PRINTED IN THE UK CULTURAL POLITICS INTRODUCING CULTURAL POLITICS JOHN ARMITAGE, RYAN BISHOP AND DOUGLAS KELLNER Welcome to the first issue of Cultural Politics,a new international and interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal, co-edited by the authors of this editorial and assisted in its aims and scope both by an Editorial Board and an Editorial Advisory Board composed of internationally recognized and active scholars in cultural and political studies. The journal publishes cutting-edge work triannually, exploring new forms and meanings of the cultural and the political from the mainstream to the marginal and presents innovative conceptions of cultural politics whilst contributing to contemporary and future debates. Cultural Politics was born out of our frustration with the traditionally limited definition of and space accorded to cultural politics, understood as a subdiscipline of cultural studies. The central aim of Cultural Politics is then to question these delimitations through an exploration of precisely what is cultural about politics and what is political about culture. The journal is therefore committed to opening an international forum for discussion, from a variety of critical methodological perspectives, of alternatives to a limited comprehension of cultural politics. Rethinking cultural politics and cultural studies is intentional and significant. Explicitly addressing the emergent VOLUME 1, ISSUE 1 PP 1–4 > CULTURAL POLITICS 2 JOHN ARMITAGE, RYAN BISHOP AND DOUGLAS KELLNER discipline of cultural politics denotes a healthy skepticism of suggestions that cultural and political theories and interpretations can easily be wholly incorporated within cultural studies. Alternatively,the journal aims to support the examination and discussion of interdisciplinary understandings, developments, potentialities and alternatives that may constitute the contemporary nature and future of cultural politics. Consequently, Cultural Politics embraces the study of local, national and transnational cultural identities and processes in addition to the analysis of political problems as well as examining the character and agency of cultural and political explanations. To facilitate this range of global possibilities, the journal actively solicits transnational and interdisciplinary fields of knowledge production . These include cultural studies, the humanities and the social sciences: from media and performance studies to literature, anthropology,sociology and politics. Cultural Politics considers papers from any related disciplinary setting, but particularly encourages interdisciplinary research conducted by contributors from all parts of the globe. Cultural Politics intends to play a key part in the construction and development of the growing field of critical cultural politics,in the quest for newly globalized forms of cultural and political production, education, exchange, debate and action. Accordingly, in this inaugural issue of Cultural Politics, we present nine original contributions, by ten interdisciplinary authors, among them cultural critics and sociologists,anthropologists,political philosophers and activists, media theorists, artists and communications specialists. The contributors include Cultural Politics Editorial and Editorial Advisory Board members such as Andrew Ross, Paul Virilio, George E. Marcus,Douglas Kellner and Mark Poster,and internationally renowned writers and artists Jean Baudrillard,Jodi Dean,Richard Kahn, Joy Garnett and Joss Hands. As a result, this issue is replete with innovative contributions and distinguished contributors, a condition we aim to sustain in all future editions as Cultural Politics maps new-found borderlands of theory and practice. In this issue, for example, contributors deliberate and discuss imaginative and contemporary conceptions of cultural politics that range over Maoism and war, terrorism, the anthropology of witnessing, communicative capitalism, the Internet and oppositional politics, Hardt and Negri’s Empire, mass media imagery and electronic or “e-democracy.” Hence, in the first contribution of this collection, “Mao Zedong’s Impact on Cultural Politics in the West,” Andrew Ross argues that whereas the heritage of Maoism is selectively recalled in China, in the West there remains an inadequate comprehension of the effect of Maoism on its cultural politics. Ross’s article thus chronicles the multifaceted influence of Maoism in the West on everything from education and legislation to notions of self-criticism, consciousness raising, cultural justice and, above all, on the Culture Wars. Jean Baudrillard’s “Pornography of War,” in contrast,begins with the ruins of the World Trade Center following the “electric shock” imposed on the CULTURAL POLITICS 3 INTRODUCING CULTURAL POLITICS...