Cultural Studies.pdf

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n Commentary

Alan O’Connor

WHOS EMMA AND THE LIMITS OF

CULTURAL STUDIES

Abstract

Cultural studies is a response to political crisis: it is the institutional

memory of failed revolutions. Can cultural studies move beyond memory

to action? This article describes the writer’s involvement in a non-pro Ž t,

volunteer-run punk storefront in Toronto.

Keywords

cultural studies; anarchism; punk; gender

S I T P O S S I B L E that cultural studies might do things? Or more exactly that

we in cultural studies might do things as well as teaching and writing? 1 What

would this mean and what could we do? In this article I characterize cultural

studies as the memory of failed revolutions. I don’t mean to be overly critical of

this, because keeping this memory is worthwhile. But what if cultural studies

moved beyond this? I think we would experience very rapidly the limits of what

can be done. Not just the lack of funding and skilled people but very real road-

blocks are put in our way. What we could do is quite limited. This sense of politi-

cal power as a force that makes things dif Ž cult must then return to our work.

What we might learn from trying to do more are the real limits of cultural

studies.

Cultural studies as memory of failed revolution

Since the Second World War, cultural studies and critical thinking about culture

have expanded from a specialized interest to become a central concern. The topic

of culture is unavoidable in everyday life and political discussion. And the study

Cultural Studies ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online © Taylor & Francis Ltd

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Plate 1 Whos Emma

Photo by Alan O’Connor

of culture in university centres has become a major growth industry in the

academy, in some cases incorporating material previously included in literature,

history, sociology, art, Ž lm, media and women’s studies departments. We need

to think about the reasons for this academic success story. It may in fact serve to

divert us from serious and completely unresolved political problems that might

be better addressed directly.

The topic of culture seems to have emerged at moments in which there is a

crisis of democracy. Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1867/1969) was

written against the pressures of the working class in nineteenth-century England.

Demonstrating workers pulled down a fence surrounding a park. A panicked

Arnold saw art and philosophy as a kind of guarantee against the workers’

demands. All that is sweetness and light will preserve England from the anarchy

of the working class. A hundred years later, with the political demands of the

working class which fought in the war from 1938 to 1945 and pressures from the

emerging Third World for political independence, the theme of culture emerges

strongly again. It was this that Raymond Williams picked up on in his famous book

Culture and Society (1958/1963), but the theme of culture and identity is every-

where in the postwar period. It is there in Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew (1946/1965)

in which he puzzles about Jewish identity. It is there in quite a different way in

Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1963/1968), especially in his brilliant

chapter on national culture in a revolutionary African situation. The time frame

is different in Latin America, most of which gained its independence by the 1820s.

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But we may note an important literature on national identity. In Mexico this

occurs especially after the blocked revolution of the 1910s. Octavio Paz’s The

Labyrinth of Solitude (1950/1985) is only the best-known work of a shelf of books

agonizing over questions of Mexican national character.

What we recognize easily as cultural studies, work written in the last thir ty

years, the graduate research centre that grew into an academic industry, is equally

a product of revolution blocked. Cultural studies is clearly a product of the rela-

tive space won after the failed student-worker revolts of 1968. The political

system gave that much: space for a more relevant university curriculum. But the

bodies beaten by the police in Paris, the students demonstrating in London and

those murdered by the army in Mexico City in 1968 had fundamental democratic

demands that were mainly denied. It is the wholly ambivalent role of cultural

studies to keep alive in the academy the memory of failed revolution. Edward

Thompson put it best in his famous words at the beginning of The Making of the

English Working Class that ‘I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite

cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the

deluded followers of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of pos-

terity’ (1968: 13). To successfully write this memory is indeed a bitter reward.

Outside the university and in quite different parts of the globe, people remem-

ber in their own words and actions hopeless revolts and defeated revolutions.

Cultural studies as action

During the academic year of 1996 to 1997, instead of the usual round of uni-

versity classes and meetings, I helped open a storefront in downtown Toronto. It

was named ‘Whos Emma’ after the anarchist Emma Goldman who lived the last

years of her life on a nearby street. We wanted a name that made a reference to

Goldman who lived in this area in the 1930s when it was a working-class Jewish

neighbourhood. Most of the kids didn’t know who she was and often asked,

‘Who’s Emma Goldman?’ We left the apostrophe and question mark off at the

suggestion of the art student who had designed and made our store sign (from

rusted steel and used construction timber). The storefront was in part modelled

on San Francisco’s volunteer-run punk storefront called the Epicenter. There was

also a conscious relationship with the anarchist infoshop movement, which has a

stronger history in Europe than in North America. These are non-pro Ž t coffee

shops, performance spaces and centres for information on events and political

issues. Whos Emma would have a relationship with Toronto anarchists, but its

foundation was in the contemporary punk scene. 2

The ambiguous relationship turned out to be one of the major issues as the

project developed. In cultural studies this is the theoretical question of the

relationship between culture and politics. It requires an analysis of the political

conjuncture. In Gramsci’s terms, are we in a period of a war of movement or a

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war of position? Every analysis we have of the 1990s would say that this is not a

period of rapid revolutionary movement. In this case, Gramsci suggests the strat-

egy of a war of position: in this case not so much digging trenches as building an

oppositional culture. 3 Perhaps participants in Whos Emma would learn political

skills such as facilitating meetings as well as helping to strengthen radical culture

in Toronto. The relation between culture and politics is also the subject of

Bookchin’s (1995) polemic against lifestyle politics. He argues for a political

movement based on opposition to capitalism rather than one based on lifestyle

or subcultural activities. The sharp debate between Bookchin and his opponents

at the Fifth Estate and Anarchy magazines 4 has tended to assume the experience of

an older generation: it is mainly a debate about the generation of 1968. With the

experience of Whos Emma, I would say that Bookchin’s criticisms of lifestyle

politics have some validity. However, he and his critics have very little Ž rsthand

knowledge of contemporary subcultures. The issue of the relation between cul-

tural activism and political organizing has also been debated with direct refer-

ence to autonomous spaces such as Whos Emma. Brad Sigel criticizes the North

American infoshop movement from a Love and Rage position that argues for a

more political strategy of a federation of anarchist collectives. The problems with

the infoshop strategy, he argues, include little participation from the local com-

munity, the dominance of punk-rock culture, the role of arts spaces and infos-

hops in inner-city gentri Ž cation, poor internal dynamics between participants,

and above all the absence of clear goals. The problem according to Sigel is that

infoshops have no strategy for revolutionary social change.

The limits of what can be done

Trying to do something more than research and writing quickly reveals the real

effects of power and resistance to change. The Ž rst set of issues has to do with

funding and starting the project. In fact, most projects stop here, never having

the funds to get going. Related to this is dealing with landlords, with city regu-

lations and legal matters. These issues can be dif Ž cult, complex and cost money.

Is a landlord going to give a two-year commercial lease to 17-year-old punk kids

with a vague non-pro Ž t project? A second set of issues has to do with organiz-

ation and personal disagreements. A new collective project can spend months of

agonizing meetings deciding on its structure, decision-making processes and

organization. Sometimes this can be easier if there are some shared understand-

ings, for example, about non-hierarchical structures. In the course of these pre-

liminary meetings personal con � icts and disagreements are likely to arise. In

many cases these personal issues are dealt with very poorly. This is sometimes

due to a lack of understanding about what is happening and a lack of mediation

skills. Personal con � icts can easily destroy a project even before it gets going and

can remain under the surface for years. A third set of issues has to do with the

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purpose of the project. At the beginning the aims and goals are likely to be fairly

unde Ž ned. People with many different backgrounds and interests arrive at poss-

ibly quite large meetings. It is impossible to satisfy everyone. As the project

becomes more de Ž ned some people lose interest and fall away. Differences in

aims and goals can often be expressed as personal con � icts: ‘you don’t respect

me.’ How these issues are handled will have impor tant consequences for the

future of the whole project. So the limits are real: Ž nances and dealing with legal

matters; creating an organizational culture in which people can work together;

and developing a collective project that of necessity excludes some people and

ideas.

Whos Emma

Meetings to plan the new project started in 1995 and it soon became clear that

people had very different projects in mind. Hardcore kids were looking for a

place to put on all-ages shows because there was no adequate venue in Toronto.

Others saw that as too limiting and wanted a performance space for different

types of music, including hip-hop. One person was interested in selling used

goods as a way of funding an informal performance space and art centre (perhaps

with facilities for pottery making). One person had experience of an anarchist

infoshop in Holland and had that in mind. 5 Another person was interested in

opening a vegan restaurant. One person insisted that the space should be fully

accessible for disabled participants. Some women wanted a feminist space,

perhaps for women only. Many young people came to meetings with a vague

sense of wanting to be part of something cool, without any clear idea of what

that might be. Without a place to meet, often without a facilitator for meetings

and with little shared sense of what the project might become, these meetings

ended in ‘personal’ disagreements that sometimes had consequences for years.

With the project dead, I spent the summer travelling through the USA and visit-

ing venues for shows, punk record stores and infoshops. Many useful ideas came

from this.

With the academic year 1996 to 1997 fast approaching, I decided to get the

project going and then let a collective form around it. This would eliminate the

agonizing meetings we had in 1995 and it would also exclude many of the pro-

jects. I found a small storefront for rent on a side-street in Kensington Market. At

the time it was a tattoo shop. Using my university salary I had no trouble secur-

ing a twelve-month lease. The store was tiny and I did most of the cleaning and

painting myself. With my high school woodworking skills, I made a counter, two

record/CD bins, a bookcase and a rack for zines. A plumber hooked up a small

bar sink and we were ready to serve coffee. With some dif Ž culty I got a fridge on

loan from an iced-tea company so we had somewhere to keep juice and soymilk

cool. The store was so small that there was space for only one restaurant table and

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