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Understanding 9/11Politics of Association/Trajectories of Affiliation - Randy Martin
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Politics of Association/Trajectories of Affiliation
Randy Martin
Presidential Address, Cultural Studies Association (U.S.)
Berkeley, CA March 19, 2010
An address of this sort might properly take cultural studies as its object and inquire into its domain and operations. No doubt, much fine work has been done toward what must remain an incomplete project. Equally certain, what keeps cultural studies interesting and interested, is a refusal to take for granted what it is or what it does. What follows here is still more partialâto take the CSA itself as an object to inquire into what it can do, given present conditions. The question itself is meant to be projective, not simply a report to an academy, but a desire that might be tempted to be entangled in one. Organizational wanting is by no means straightforward but calls forward a queasy mix of relying upon something, call it a regime of disciplining institutionality that is at the same time betraying us. What can we ask of an association that might at once stitch us into and unmoor us from this matrix of obligations? Like the droll announcement once the plane has already landed, we too realize you have a choice, that CSA comes without guarantees of return, and that many other attachments make their claim on you. How then, can we think of affiliation given our multiple sites of belonging to institutions, professional practices, and worldly endeavors?
The excitement of this place where we gather is that it lies at the crossroads of manifold crisesâof the university as a self-regulating institution; of knowledge as holding sway over a particular domain; of society itself as an accomplishment of human cooperation. Many voices are being raised in refusal, resistance, reformatting of these crises. Surely we want to know what cultural studies has to say, how its critical traditions might orient us, what spaces it might open. But we here will also want to know how to give value to our work together, how to recognize what it brings together in us, to elaborate the organizational capacities that would make of us more than lockers of hurt. Perhaps it is worth taking stock of cultural studiesâ own conditions of organization and then to see how these articulate with the activisms, interventions, and imaginings of our political surround.
Randy Martin
Presidential Address, Cultural Studies Association (U.S.)
Berkeley, CA March 19, 2010
An address of this sort might properly take cultural studies as its object and inquire into its domain and operations. No doubt, much fine work has been done toward what must remain an incomplete project. Equally certain, what keeps cultural studies interesting and interested, is a refusal to take for granted what it is or what it does. What follows here is still more partialâto take the CSA itself as an object to inquire into what it can do, given present conditions. The question itself is meant to be projective, not simply a report to an academy, but a desire that might be tempted to be entangled in one. Organizational wanting is by no means straightforward but calls forward a queasy mix of relying upon something, call it a regime of disciplining institutionality that is at the same time betraying us. What can we ask of an association that might at once stitch us into and unmoor us from this matrix of obligations? Like the droll announcement once the plane has already landed, we too realize you have a choice, that CSA comes without guarantees of return, and that many other attachments make their claim on you. How then, can we think of affiliation given our multiple sites of belonging to institutions, professional practices, and worldly endeavors?
The excitement of this place where we gather is that it lies at the crossroads of manifold crisesâof the university as a self-regulating institution; of knowledge as holding sway over a particular domain; of society itself as an accomplishment of human cooperation. Many voices are being raised in refusal, resistance, reformatting of these crises. Surely we want to know what cultural studies has to say, how its critical traditions might orient us, what spaces it might open. But we here will also want to know how to give value to our work together, how to recognize what it brings together in us, to elaborate the organizational capacities that would make of us more than lockers of hurt. Perhaps it is worth taking stock of cultural studiesâ own conditions of organization and then to see how these articulate with the activisms, interventions, and imaginings of our political surround.
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