Ramón del Castillo, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid In Spite of Theory: Philosophy’s Resistance to Cultural Studies

Jameson is quite right on one point: whatever cultural studies may be, they have arisen from a deep dissatisfaction with old disciplines. Cultural studies are said to be post-disciplinary, but in spite of this (or maybe just because of this), one fundamental axis that defines them is their relationships with the established disciplines.¹ In the case of philosophy -I guess- these connections- can be particularly strained.

The main question I'd like to raise could be phrased thus: Why does "Theory", in the philosophical sense, seem so reticent to "theory" in the controversial sense this term has acquired in Britain and in the United States? The irony could be that, whereas some philosophical ideas and heroes have become a prominent part of new literary and cultural criticism, professional philosophers themselves mistrust (unconsciously? Secretly?) the unruly style practised by cultural theorists, let alone its potential consequences in academic philosophy itself. "Theory" in its highest sense could, indeed, exert a corporate resistance to cultural theory just because philosophers, in spite of many differences which appear to divide them, could share some common biases and, no matter how much progressive or conservative they are considered, feel an ideological distaste towards some challenges. I'm thinking, above all, of the Spanish academy, where cultural studies still have very little institutional presence, and where professional Philosophy still monopolises the market of "theory". Although it is true that cultural theory has thriven in some Spanish communication and semiotics institutes, or even has made its way into very rare departments² of Literature and Philosophy, yet it doesn't play the same role it does in the Anglo-American scene. "Theory" (with all the ambivalence the term involves) is still administrated to a large extent by tender minded philosophers and high intellectuals, and this is one of the reasons why professional philosophy will show its most dogmatic face if cultural theory (or more accurately, some materialist versions of cultural criticism) force its way through the very philosophical realm.

Pierre Bourdieu's L'Ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger³ always sets me thinking about philosophers attitudes, but not only about Heidegger and his admirers (I should add Adorno's Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, translated into Spanish as "Ideology as Language", made me feel something similar). In his recent Meditations pascalienes (1997)⁴ Bourdieu once more describes some of what I would consider intrinsic philosophical "resistances", although, in my view, we could differentiate more specifically diverse kinds of present-day philosophical scholasticism, describing the particular mise en scène, life-style, physiognomy, behaviour, speech and academic instruments particular to each professional group. Bourdieu, in effect, have described the most disproportionate versions of philosophical megalomania and arrogance, but why could we not consider other versions of only apparently more polite philosophical composure? ⁵.

Nowadays, -I would argueÐ, philosophical attitudes towards cultural studies could exemplify a complex variety of academic blindness. Why do cultural studies trigger in some philosophers, either conservative or progressive, the same reaction (or a very similar one) that sociology, anthropology and history triggered in other times on Heidegger and friends? In our day, however, there is an important difference between sociology and cultural theory: the former seems still professionally confined in its own departments and fields, whereas the latter could develop within Philosophy departments. Criticism of the philosophical field by professional sociologists is just ignored, but What will happen with cultural theorists which have not yet found a regular institutional location? What is the particular go of these entire uncanny people? New theory (whatever it can be) is under much more suspicion than any other established discipline, maybe because some of its followers could be living within the philosophical field itself, helping from within to destroy its precarious and threatened existence. Why are cultural studies seen not only as a symbolic offence to PhilosophyÕs honour, but also as real danger?

This is, however, only one kind of resistance. Unfortunately, we also find more subtle kinds of it among diverse progressive thinkers, and that's the problem. The fear philosophers feel about their identity being dissolved in the convulse tangle of cultural studies (losing their leading role as intellectuals at the top of Humanities) seems to be beyond their many political and academic differences. Moreover, the open-minded pluralism so prevailing nowadays among progressive philosophers could also prove to be not only a cunning strategy to preserve their own professional identity, but also a way of political renunciation.

I'm not claiming cultural studies can be identified with the only sanctuary of radicalism or with a radically novel experiment. On the one hand -as Eagleton observesÐ, many cultural theorists are hardly remarkable for their radicalism; others hold no political views that may prevent anyone from sleeping, and some of them are firmly ensconced in the right wing.⁶ On the other hand, if many of cultural theorist effusively preach the virtues of cross-disciplinarity, post-disciplinarity and even anti-disciplinarity, they can be intransigent and impervious as much as many philosophers. To be sure, cultural theorist will put on airs, preserve some lingua franca and adopt an academic pose and prose (paronomasia according to Wright Mills). Anti-professionalism, in effect, will work just as the very essence and powerhouse of professionalism, within the old Philosophy's kingdom but also within the "rebel" groups made up of cultural theorists.

In any event, let me consider some particular faces of the resistance.
In the United States, for example, resistance to theory has meant resistance exerted by the liberal humanist tradition of literary and cultural criticism (but also, by some of its heretic successors, as Harold Bloom) to a variety of philosophical ideas mixed up with feminist, gay and ethnic studies. But at the same time, I would add, resistance to theory could also mean resistance exerted by both conservative and progressive professional philosophers to the consequences of the uncontrolled and uncensored importation of philosophical products and copyrights by English Departments and courses on cultural studies.

In fact, according to some diagnoses, Anglo-American Philosophy lost its kingdom long time ago. "The teacher of literature now in America, far more than the teacher of history of philosophy or religion, is condemned to teach the presentness of the past, because history, philosophy and religion have withdrawn as agents from the Scene of Instruction."⁷ In his "Professionalized Philosophy and Transcendentalist Culture" Rorty used that passage as supporting his own prognosis: Literary theory has taken over the place of philosophy precisely because in the last decades Anglo-American philosophy has become over-professionalized, while literary criticism has hold open a space for romantic and faded conscience. From this view, un-professionalism has been maintained thanks to literary studies without and against philosophy. But Rorty also thinks that, unfortunately, current literary and cultural criticism has become less and less creative and more and more technical and professional, thanks to the "School of Resentment" (to use Bloom's own jargon), or thanks to pessimistic and unromantic post-modernists as Jameson and friends. ⁸

Lets now consider Eagleton's own diagnosis:

If literary criticism has been so curiously to the fore in English culture, then it is largely because some of the academic disciplines which surround it have disowned their own intellectual responsibilities. For the great speculative questions of truth and justice, of freedom and happiness, have to find a somewhere; and if an aridly technical philosophy, or a drearily positivistic sociology, are no hospitable media for such explorations, then they will be displaced on to a criticism, which is simply not intellectually equipped to take this strain. Cultural TheoryÉ is then to be understood as a response to this historical emergency -as an attempt to take up, from within the literary field itself, the questions which cognate disciplines have largely evaded, but to bring something of their own rigour to bear on them. It is born, then, of a double refusal: on the one hand, of the reduction of such questions to mere pseudo-problems or technical exercises which has so marked English philosophy and social science; on the other hand, of that moralistic displacement of them which has been, on the whole, the most that criticism has been able to offer by way of reaction. To this extent, cultural theory represents a fundamental challenge to our current division of academic labour, which is not least of the reasons why the Establishment finds it such nuisance".⁹

Here, I think, Eagleton attributes some faults to sterile formalism of technical analytical philosophy and positivist sociology (as Rorty does), but he is also reproving some Rorty's heroes (as Harold Bloom) their strong resistance to leftist cultural criticism.¹⁰ In other times, Eagleton also criticizes Rorty's own resistance to any leftist political alternative to pragmatic pluralism and social democracy. I don't know, however, how ironic Eagleton wants to be when he says "Éfor the great speculative questions of truth and justice of freedom and happiness, have to find a somewhere", because, as he himself often claims, what eventually should find a somewhere is politics, but not speculative questions. In effect, according to Eagleton, cultural theory arose out of the gradual collapse of the liberal humanist paradigm, but fails to put one in its place. In other words, there is no "theoretical paradigm" and cultural theory is just a porous space opened up by an upheaval in the discursive division of labour in which a whole lot of ways of speaking, with almost nothing in common with each other proceed to argue over a whole lot of subject matters. Cultural theory "is not an academic discipline, but the symptom of a crisis in our current disciplinary carve-up, one which springs from the pressure upon it of momentous new social and political developments".¹¹ In the same way the Humanist Culture, the secular substitute of religion, failed to fulfil the functions which religion and philosophy traditionally performed, cultural theory, similarly, "cannot really be expected to perform the role of history, philosophy, sociology and political science bundled together. If it has made a brave stab at doing so, this is partly because some of those adjacent disciplines have thrown up their hands in the face of certain fundamental questions to which people would appreciate some interesting-sounding answers, and which then -God help us all- get tossed into the basket of the cultural criticÉ Just as culture marks a transitional point between religion and politics, so theory is just holding open a space created by the steady collapse of a certain traditional paradigm. It is just a name for a crisis in the discursive division of labour, and what finally comes of that will be a question of politics, not of theory itself". ¹²

If there is actually nowhere to go but politics, then one can understand better some of the resistance exerted by Theory (Philosophy) against theory (cultural studies). Professional philosophers from very different and opposite schools will boast their consciousness and perceptiveness of that crisis of intellectual division of labour, but only as a defence against any effective disciplinary change and political change (at least, within the walls of the academy). Philosophers, it seems, understand that crisis better than sociologists, historians, literary critics, political analysts or journalists, and of course, better than any new unsystematic cultural theorist. To be sure, philosophers will admit that, of course, what finally should come of that crisis will be a question of politics, but immediately then they will add that they are those who can more soundly perform the role which cultural theorists are claiming.¹³ Before talking plainly on politics, moreover, they will always claim to understand Culture and cultures even better than all-round theorists as Eagleton or Jameson and, of course, very much better than any more specialised theorist which simply is studying some low-culture product.

The irony of this is that current resistances to disciplinary and cultural theory (as well as resistance to technical and drab philosophy) could involve a revival of Theory in all its most outmoded academic and disciplinary forms. As Jameson notices, even Rorty "seems to have forgotten that it was himself who wrote the death certificate of [the philosophical] «field» with his comprehensive demonstration of the way in which «philosophy» construed a spurious and retroactive history and tradition for itself out of its henceforth timeless themes and problems. So it is that «theory»'s dissolution of the old philosophical disciplines now seems to have been but a passing moment. Now philosophy and its branches are back in force."¹⁴ Yes, but exactly how? According to Jameson, just with returns to ethics, political philosophy, religion, philosophical aesthetics and even the old theories of modernity itself in full "postmodernism". ¹⁵ Ethics, in effect, as thought Nietzsche, Marx or Freud had never existed; revival of the "subject" and new individualism as thought advanced capitalism were not in its structure the more collective society that has ever existed. Also a return to the truly serious older texts of a more wholesome past, rebuking the frivolities of the post-modern but being definitely post-modern in the sense in which it offers a newer pastiche of those older texts. In short: "post-modern pastiches of an older ethics and older philosophy, pastiches of the older «political theories», pastiches of the theories of modernity -the blank and non-parodic reprise of older discourse and older conceptuality, the performing of the older philosophical moves as thought they still had a content, the ritual resolution of «problems» that have themselves long since become simulacra, the somnambulistic speech of a subject long since historically extinct. In all this, even repetition itself, in earlier times a vital instinct, is an irrelevant concept, since it is repetition which is here merely represented, rather that being repeated «for the first time»"¹⁶

I could have a lot many more things to say about this particular point, but I would only add that we (philosophers?) were right to extend Jameson's analysis over the whole philosophical field, just considering the professional and political attitudes of different philosophical families and their respective reactions towards the "cultural turn" itself.

1. From Marxism to systematic theorists

Here I would include former followers of Marx, Weber, Manheim, Luckcás, Gramsci, Adorno, Horkheimer or Benjamin who in their good old times did not care too much about professional limits between philosophy, sociology and political sciences. In our day, however, they practice a more professional, academic, specialized style of thinking (in the Spanish case, it has been since Franco's death that those philosophers progressively substituted social democracy for communism and apolitical philosophy for committed cultural criticism). Their new intellectual realm is post-analytic epistemology of social sciences, sophisticated philosophies of language, theories of the mind and rationality, and soft metaphysics with supposed implications in ethics, politics and cultural affairs. That includes, thus, diverse combinations of, lets say, Putnam, Bernard Williams, Davidson, and Brandom with Apel, Habermas, Gadamer, Tugenhadt or Wellmer. That style seems a wishy-washy mixture of aridly technical language and grandiloquent reflection, something between an icily scrupulous but soporific prose à la Davidson and the pompous over-generalizations peculiar to Apel. Or, if you don't like too much transcendental pragmatics, a combination of Dewey's down-to-earth pragmatism and the meticulous and humdrum writing of some post-analytical mind. New thinkers of this kind must be abstract and ambiguous enough to display both the virtues of professional specialization and those of a general critical consciousness. They will try to combine the rigour, the accuracy and the dryness of a technical analysis with the solemnity and abstraction of an elegant prosody.

In any case, new philosophers of this breed could feel themselves as discovering some grounds of cultural and social action. It seems deep theories on relativism, translation, radical interpretation, argumentation, communicative action and the like are decisive to understand cultural affairs. Which means that, in a way, reading Davidson will help you to discover something of what hell happens when you come near to understanding an alien (from North Africa or from Mars, it doesn't matter). And thanks to Habermas's writings you will understand why pacific coexistence with your new neighbour is possible. In some way, theoretical philosophy gives us the key to understand cultural wars, racism, sexism and the like. Knowing something about, let say, political ideas by Dewey, Habermas or Gadamer does not matter, that is, it does not fall into their professional jurisdiction. In other words: thanks to philosophy one can have sophisticated theories about truth, human nature, history, language, value, justice, love, and politics (or about their non-existence), whilst not being capable of noticing the astonishingly infinite variety of forms that all these abstract ideas assume in ordinary and rough experiences.

Needless to say this kind of philosophy preaches its own idyllic view on inter-disciplinarity. Its rhetoric will sound as flexibility, open-minded and critical spirit. In fact, they just try to have the best of different worlds and capitalise on different styles of thinking. They can defend the virtues of a rational and sound speculation and thus criticize the narrowness of new philosophy of science (see group 2 above), but always imitating something of it; or criticize the over-generalization and conservatism of the guardians of philosophy (see above my group 6), though occasionally not being able to help avoiding emulating their own gravities. They also find fault with post-Marxist postmodernists (see my group 7) and alleged "anything goes" of cultural studies, mostly by hearsay. They could even say that Cultural Studies transform philosophy into a commodity, an argument to which conservative guardians can give a big hand. As a rule, distinguished thinkers of this kind identify cultural studies just with a new American fashion, an opaque cross of French post-structuralism and narrow-minded and parochial social movements (women, gays, lesbians, blacksÉ), but not with British and American Marxism and with good many new social movements with an internationalist view, material claims and strong political commitments. So, even if this group sound progressive in theory, promising wings of change and a new transformation of philosophy (a linguistic turn? then a pragmatic turn?), on the practical side they are seriously afraid about philosophy inevitably dissolving into the dark sea of cultural studies. This irrational fear, thus impels some of them to adopt arguments particular of liberal humanistic men of letters, or even worse, blind gestures of conservative defenders of the sovereignty, self-sufficiency and irreducible particularity of philosophical discourse. They can, thus, appeal to what Bourdieu calls "founding tautologies" (purples truths as "one must read philosophically the philosophical text") or adopt the pose of a vague radical questioning only to evade concrete political positioning. Conservatives (my group 6) just despise social sciences; progressives, however, speak highly of them but only as another way to evade any true historical or sociological analysis of philosophy's own social determinations, labelling it as simple "reductionism". Moreover, they can act as if they could understand these other disciplines better than these other disciplines can understand themselves. So, it seems that philosophy can explain social sciences in philosophical terms, but social sciences, let alone cultural studies, cannot explain philosophy in any social, historical or political terms.

Some reactions of this group are clearly shared by two next families, so I will not insist more on some of these.

2. From Marxism to digital gospel

As group 1, they were also communists and read Lenin and Marx, later Althusser and Machery, but professionally they work on the philosophy of sciences. Some old logical positivists who claimed fact-value distinction were convinced communist, while current new philosophers of science theorize as conscious post-positivists (claiming seriously fact-value entanglement) and most of them vote liberal social democracy. That digital intelligentsia¹⁷ can talk profusely on the practical dimension of scientific knowledge (experts, axiology, social uses of scienceÉ), thus making use of Merton, Popper, Feyerabend, Kuhn, Laudan Rescher, Latour, Bloor, Durbin or Hickman. Elster's analytical Marxism and Senn's humanized economy could also sound very well and Dewey, once more, could stand as one of the forefathers of this new technological and democratic consciousness.

Probably, -as Hans M. Erzenberger would say- they only manage to understand new social and technological affairs post festum¹⁸, but acting as if they could predict new technological challenges and cultural changes. As opposed to speculative philosophers they can justify their own social utility. The conservative wing of Philosophy is inherently apocalyptic, but progressive high-tech philosophers preach a new redemption and discover for us the secrets and freeing power of the Internet, Artificial Intelligence, or Virtual Reality. The can also predict a future of direct electronic democracy, equal access to information and techno-multiculturalism besides explaining to us how on earth to control experts, multinational corporations and biotechnology (in bio-ethics they can share some market with friends of group 3). This new technocracy which popularises for all of us the deepest mysteries of the future sees itself as the one and only cultural criticism, that is, the empirical, practical, non-speculative one. The rest is also post-modern criticism, made by delirious old Marxists and mad young feminists and gays disrupted by too much French philosophy. In this sense, high-tech philosophers could consider cultural studies speculative (and therefore conservative) as much as metaphysical philosophy. That's because they will emphatically recommend leaning towards competent empirical post-positivist social science as the only secure way to real knowledge.

To be sure, they will occasionally make intensive use of Alan Sokal's arguments against French impostures and their pernicious influence on true progressive politics. But we should also consider that in many cases the rationalist and vehement critic of imposture and pretence in others could hide some other servitude to powers, as well as a lot of corporate composure and restraint. Techno-science philosophers practise their own professional decorum, propriety, politeness or professional correctness; and they can pose as the only down-to-earth administrators of common sense and rationality. Putting aside French intellectuals' arguable abuse of scientific concepts, the true is that philosophers of science can also practise their own professional enclosure.

They claim, moreover, that rational and realist political philosophy is only bound to methodical and rigorous cultural theory as they conceive it. In other words, they are the best technological allies of next group.

3. From Marxism to responsible political philosophy

In contrast with groups 1 and 2, this lineage talks more explicitly on politics, although at this stage the only option they consider workable is prudent social democracy. That group, also made up by former communists and socialists, have replaced well-mannered political philosophy (that is, coherent and systematic theories about rich and liberal democracies) for outmoded dialectics. Or, in other words, they will prefer (in different and sound combinations) John Stuart Mill, Dewey, Rawls, Habermas, McCarthy, Nussbaum, Bernstein, Benhabib, Sandel, Dowrking, Rorty, Walzer, Mackinon, Berlin or Giddens, to any Marxist theorist, old or new, from the early Frankfurt School (too pessimistic and intricate to inspire illusions) to new post-modern interpreters of Adorno as Jameson himself. This political turn might be more understandable (I'm thinking in the Spanish case) if you keep in mind that some intellectuals who visited Paris at 1968 and collaborated actively with communism and socialism against Franco's dictatorship, also came from progressive and cultivated bourgeois families, so after the 68 collapse and, then, after Franco's death, they supported again old life liberal humanistic values and cautious social-democrat politics. That could explain, at least in part, that current political philosophers "speak to the age of big business with a wisdom usefully committed to moderation".¹⁹

As they once criticised the dissolution of the individuals in early structuralism, they now reprove current post-structuralism, deconstruction and post-modernism for similar reasons. Of course, they consider themselves as having just a sound and practical perception of social, cultural and political realities. They don't use (as group 2 do) scientific rhetoric, but they have certainly cultivated their own prose and pose. First of all, they will vindicate the Enlightenment heritage but with a transformation of universal value ethics. That means that struggles of feminism, as well as sexual and ethnic movements (even moderate "cultural" nationalism) can be accepted, but only as reforms of a moderate universalistic creed, that is, only as improvements to a future planetary democratic system.²⁰ Politics of identity -they will repeat over and over- mostly works against politics of redistribution; difference inhibits equality.

In other cases, too abstract universalism can be abandoned for a more concrete and sentimentalist democratic sensibility, but arguing in a similar way against leftist post-modern theory. According to brilliant ironists as Rorty, leftist cultural studies, as academic expression of leftist politics itself, depend too much on just old-fashioned Marxism: "Some socially useful thinkers -for example, Cornel West, Fredric Jameson, and Terry Eagleton- still speaks of themselves, for what seems to me purely sentimental reasons, as «Marxists». Such sentimentality appals Poles and Hungarians who never want to hear Marx's name again. I suspect it would baffle the Chinese dissidents starving in the laogai. Nevertheless, there is little harm in such nostalgic piety. For in the mouths of these people the word «Marxism» signals hardly more than an awareness that the rich are still ripping off the poor, bribing the politicians, and having almost everything their own way"²¹. In short: people like these are only nostalgic fetishists and eventually are wasting useful ideas and efforts which otherwise could benefit social democracy. At other times, however, nostalgic Marxists's ideas can be considered eventually not only as useless, but ideas of rash fools, irresponsible, and dangerous people. Radical cultural theory -Rorty claims- does only not stimulate, but just prevents good feelings, burrowing the affective ground of political commitment. Sympathy and solidarity with other's raw feelings and pains need trust, hope, illusion, rather than suspicion, scepticism, and pessimism. However, nostalgic and pessimistic postmo-Marxists inspire too gothic and apocalyptic views of liberal democracies, catastrophic and sinister views of a late capitalism without any romantic redemption. They are the embittered prophets of doom, whereas social democrats are benefactors of cautious and prudent politics.

Most cultural studies -that's another argument- think too much about stigma and nothing about money, losing interest in the labour unions and in majority or popular politics. In this sense, cultural studies can be identified with "Victim Studies" "Culture of Complaint", or "School of Resentment" (to use some known provocative labels), that, is, with identity groups that, it is supposed, blindly defend identities which have flourished regardless of class difference, material injustice and economical struggle ²² So, cultural studies are the academic expression of the "politically correct", an insidious and pejorative term first used by the right, but very often used by careless social democrats, to name just sexual or ethnic parochialism. Of course, both conservatives and progressives that emphasise that, they don't say one word about other kinds of acquiescence that are commonplace, for example, conformity to economical, technological and political powers. It seems women, gays and blacks are the only who are working for their respective own interests, while autonomous liberal humanists, heartfelt businessmen and honest politicians work independently and selflessly in pursuit of universal happiness.

Edifying liberal pragmatists can also argue against cultural studies claiming that leftist theorists are too abstract to encourage any particular political initiative. The left seems to think -Rorty will add- that the higher your level of abstraction, the more subversive of the established order you can be, or that the more sweeping and novel your jargon is, the more radical your critique. That's true in some instances, but one also should remember the high level of hypocrisy and political ambiguity of conservative humanists, moreover when they argue against theory in the name of common sense.

5. Public liberal humanists and progressive independent essayists

Here I'm thinking on social democrats, who have acquired more public and political relevance. In the Spanish case, we have to consider two versions or models, the one more influenced by German Kultur, the second one by French "civilization".

According to some narratives, Spanish liberal imagination was interrupted by the Civil War and Ortega y Gasset is considered as its leader. One should remember that Ortega, besides all his frustrated political ambitions (before and after Franco's triumph), promoted German Philosophy within the Spanish academy (from neo-kantism to Husserl, Heidegger and Simmel) and, to some extent, intended to embody the role of a distinguished Kulturkritik, combining cosmopolitanism with cultural localism, the solemnity of abstract philosophical discourse with the freshness of popular essay. Through the years, conservative philosophers (see next group) have tried to control Ortega's heritage (in fact, they have some good motives), while progressive liberals have made effort to redeem him as a democrat, showing his best and positive side. Anyway, in our day we have old liberal humanistic philosophers who studied in Germany after the Spanish Civil War and that, to some extent, represent the restoration of that liberal imagination and, thus, the incarnation of the very European sprit of which Spain was deprived through 40 years of dictatorship. Those liberals will defend humanistic universal values all the way through the distinguished institutions of high cultural market or even throw newspapers and cultural reviews. To some extent, the elegiac tone of old Kulturpessimismus reverberates in the sceptical tone of their bitter mass-culture critique. They will put Culture before politics (which is another expression of plain ideology), conceived not only as the very opposite of prosaic and interested politics, but as a solution to political struggles. In this sense, they will defend Great Books of Literature, History and Philosophy as the sanctuary of wisdom and virtue, and the Humanistic Education (Bildung) as the autonomous space where any individual can develop his or her particular potentialities as well as a common moral sensibility.

In opposition to the dryness of conservative saviours of classical and ecumenical Culture, liberals adopt a warm attitude (between romantic and melancholic), writing in a literary prose rather than in an opaque technical jargon, and criticise callously low culture and the technological world, but with a less apocalyptic tone. According to old humanists, once Culture has become the very medium in which political conflicts are fought out, the egalitarian idea of a universal subject has simply been destroyed (as if Culture were the Olympic heaven of consensus). Identity politics social movements engage in, thus, attacks in the middle of an ideal of a dialogue which is said to involve a potential universal human subject, integrating in it cultural idiosyncrasies and differences.

Regarding independent essayist, I will only say a few words. In opposition to liberal humanistic men of letters, this kind of cultural and political critics adopt a, lets say, sophistic pose, rather than a Socratic one, and practice ironic cultural criticism, rather than an elegant one. In old times they adopted the role of moderate anarchist before dogmatic communists and Marxists, and praised the virtues of psychoanalysis and French philosophies before dogmatic analytical philosophers. Nowadays, they still capitalise their fame as the heterodoxy before academic philosophy, but also playing the role of the moderate critical intellectual before public opinion and political classes. If the distinguished men of letters can provide to cultivated middle-high-class bourgeoisies (many of them dedicated to cultural management and policy) with refined readings of Classics (ancient and modern, national and international), perceptive versions of progressive hermeneutics, theories of reading and the like, ironists prefer capitalise philosophical and literary classics in a less solemn way, (besides including the Anglo-American heritage: Melville, Stevenson, London, for example), and providing the same people with amusing interpretations of Aristotle, Voltaire and Kant, civilized versions of Nietzsche, and by no way pedantic readings of French philosophy. In short, whereas great men of letters try to humanize empyrean High-Culture, committed and edifying ironists try to popularise the political benefit of reasonable and civic heterodoxies.

Undoubtedly, a shining emblem common to ironist humanists both and solemn humanists is "ethics", but not in the professional sense in which group 3 interpret it, but as existential engagement. That's because they also try to embody the ideal of un-professionalism (or even of creative amateurism), which in some cases lead to a sound, and positive self-criticism of philosophy. In other cases, however, the very fear to being caught by the philosophical bureaucracy or by the academic scholasticism lead to an aristocratic nonconformist or patrician dissidence which force them to keep their distance from any politically collective initiative within the University.²³

Liberal ironists do not see in cultural studies anything really new. They associate Cultural Studies with a new type of academic corporatism, or with parochial politics of identity. Women, homosexual, lesbian and migrant rights, cultural idiosyncrasy and political autonomy (in opposition to feminism, gay movement, cultural secessionism and nationalism) can flourish within the context of piecemeal reformism. Identities and differences can rise up (in a reasonable sense) by means of a common culture of participative citizenship and the permanent safeguard civil rights within a more civilized welfare-state liberalism.

In same cases, European ironists also will associate cultural studies with a new American fashion due, in some great extent, to the euphoria and yearning for novelty as peculiar to both American educative institutions as to American culture in general. Cultural studies, however, will not be associated with British cultural materialism (which is the particular name Williams applied to a inherently political project) or with the American leftist tradition, premeditatedly suppressed and misrepresented by European and American social democrats.

6. Guardians of Philosophy and ambivalent alternatives

This is the most dangerous of all families. No matter how one can critique groups 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, their faults are nothing compared with conservative philosophy's resistance. In fact, guardians, custodians and paranoid saviours of Philosophy despise any other philosophical professional group as mere "professional", monopolising the illusion of philosophy as a radical style of life, an expression of existential authenticity and the highest form of political commitment. Here I would include a range from bad imitators of old Kulturpessimismus to conservative readers of Derrida; from right-wing devotees to Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricoeur to alleged alternative feminists; from subversive new interpreters of Nietzsche to believers in pensiero debole or prophets of new paganism; from revivals of philosophy of religion to grandiloquent ontology of the presentness. Conservatism means, at least in my sense, that one can still use Derrida and Deleuze to separate high philosophy from "low" literary and cultural theory or, ironically, talk about Foucault just to evade an open discussion on power, bodies, sex and politics; or theorizing about Literature just not to read any literary work nor any literary critic, let alone a Marxist one. It means, indeed, to invest philosophical discourse with colossal powers and effects and to take the academic prosody for a great political action. It means, thus, being able to consider revolution in the realm of language order as revolution in the realm of things, publicising philosophical discourse as a resistance to gigantic powers, when in fact that discourse is the very resistance to lose institutional and cultural powers.²⁴

Of course, conservative philosophers practice the most arrogant and proud intellectual wisdom since a long time ago. They show up both as the only guardians of Tradition (preserving Great Books, Ideas and Authors from misreading by other professional philosophers, as well as misinterpretation of philistines, vulgar amateurs and idiot students), and, at the same time, as the true radical or even revolutionary interpreters of that very Tradition. That aristocracy of Spirit, thus, will demonstrate both a rigorous and respectful knowledge of Sacred Books of History of Philosophy (from Ancient Greeks to German idealists) but they will also be proud of more than an intimate acquaintance with Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Jünger, Ricoeur, Levinas, Blanchot, Gadamer, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and Vattimo. To some extent, they try to capitalise, mostly in a ridiculous way, on virtues of professional approach to texts (for example, philological accuracy and historical data) with gestures and poses characteristic of heretic interpretation of texts. Thus, they publicise their task at large describing it as a radical enterprise of critical questioning, but also as an academically respectable one, the potential contradiction between this two ambitions being presented itself as the very sign of their intellectual distinction and ethical responsibility. By a double-guessing game, they themselves promote and invite over-interpretation of great texts, "while still reserving the right to repudiate this in the name of the essential inexhaustibility of the work, which may incite just as well to accept or reject any interpretation, through the transcendent power of its creative force, which is also established as a critical and self-critical power".²⁵ As Bourdieu also says (resting in Weber's ideas) they act as defectors from a priestly caste, investing a considerable specific capital in subversion of the priestly order and forging from a renewed reading of the most sacred authorities the weapons of a conservative revolution just designed to restore tradition to its original, authentic form.²⁶

Some present-day results of that old rhetoric are: dryness, seriousness, lack of any sense of humour, severity, empty and overstated gravity, peremptory claims, alleged integrity, Olympian looks, solemnity, esoteric elitism, intellectual boast, opaque prosody (instituted to intimidate non-initiated), oracle prophecies, apocalyptic tone and a immoderate proclivity to prosopopoeia, Present-day Kathedrepropheten, thus, invent new professional tricks and tics to reproduce routinely the illusion of being above routine.²⁷ They will offer their poetic, dramatic or tragic vision as the only living testimony of cultural and political crisis, while most of their intellectual production and political action operate as crude strategies of self-advertisement and self-conservation. No matter how disruptive new versions of das wesentliche Denken could seem, they operate as accommodating instruments to avoid or neutralise open and shut academic and political challenges, making up by this way its own poverty and weakness. Pretentious self-questioning, in particular, reduces to nothing but another mean Philosophy uses to preserve its awakened academic power and social influence. New forms of conservatism, in effect, will preach the very impotence of thought, but only to sustain the same philosophical illusio of the omnipotence of the thought of great master as Heidegger.

Present-day new conservative are always proclaiming the self-contradictory condition of Philosophy, which sometimes is seen as a fine expression of post-metaphysical spirit. However, the very force and conviction with which that intrinsic weakness and fragility of thought are announced prove that what is true metaphysical is the very firmness. Apparent radical self-questioning combines very well with political ambivalence and, in consequence, can operate as a negation of politics and history. Conservative radicals have too refined a sense of philosophical distinction for even his political writings to yield "naïvely" political theses. As their thoughts and questionings must be einfach und wesentlich, they are unable to think and speak politics without using mental and verbal patterns borrowed from metaphysics and ontology. It follows that they will talk profusely and solemnly about language and power, violence, discrimination, horror, genocide and the like but only to reproduce their own intellectual arrogance.

An inordinate example of that arrogance consists in taking all horrors on philosophy itself, as if philosophers will be more responsible of disasters and hecatombs than anyone on this world. Sociologist, historians, psychologists, and political scientist have too naive understandings of crime, while philosophers live and assume massacres with all its consequences, that is: supreme consciousness of horror falls essentially within philosophical jurisdictionÉ Obviously, in this theorisation of crime there is too much philosophical pride, a philosophical totalitarianism which explains not only the perverse and morbid fascination about the political ambivalence of great philosophers, but also the hypocritical interest conservatives say to have in present-day social struggles and injustices. That is a paradoxical situation: conservative talk all over on social world, but only to avoid it better and make others to avoid it better. In this sense, new conservatives will show off within the academic theatre their perceptive understanding of violence, racism and sexism, but talking in terms enough abstract to ignore the astonishingly infinite variety of forms that sexism, racism and exploitation have assumed in our days (including the everyday abuse and submission within the academic world, comparable to some extent with "admitted" domestic violence).

Another example of arrogance of old and new radical conservatives is how they transform literature in an object of devotion or in a fetish, neutralising any true academic and political consequence of literary works and literary criticism in the philosophical field. According to the refined sensibility of philosophical minds, Literature (with capitals, of course) does mean a magical and ubiquitous force that subvert any genre limit, an energy against the very process of discipline formation. In other words: just as they the keep their distance from the "naïve" politico-moral stance, they also look down upon "naïve" aesthetic stance. Like historians, sociologist and anthropologist, they have ingénue views about power, language, genocide, pain, love, violence, and culture, etc. É, Literary critics ignore what is at stake in reading some texts. But radical philosophers do know what literary critics are really doing when they are doing what they think are doing. In both cases, the philosophical rhetoric has a dual character designed to resist any real change just in the name of a particular perception and production of subversive knowledge. A game also designed to evade any political and sociological analysis of its own formation and conditions, given in advance philosophy ascribes to itself all the capabilities needed to explain its own existence, functions and failures. Philosophy, it seems, can deconstruct social sciences, but social sciences cannot dismantle philosophy. Philosophers can discover the blind spots of naïve sociology, but sociologists are not able to detect philosopher's biases. That is the reason why, if cultural studies are understood as something related with sociology or with any genetic and historical analysis, philosophy works actively against them. In other cases, cultural studies just reproduce the very illusion of omnipotence that invades philosophical world, inspiring other kinds of reactions. Specifically, some cultural theorists which make use of Heidegger and hermeneutics could received approval by the philosophical court, but even in that case, most of their opinions will be considered as simple misunderstandings, or worse: as low-cost imitations of philosophical ideas which cultural studies put on sale throughout the American University market.

Conservative philosophy -one should add- is not ideological in the same sense political right is. Serious thinkers will always keep an ambivalent distance from the right, but this does not mean that their thought is not a homologue, in the philosophical order, of a broader political stance (of which right University and cultural powers represent another examples) produced according to other laws of formation and thus not quite acceptable to those, the philosophers, who "cannot recognise it in the sublimated form given it by the alchemy of philosophy".²⁸ This ambiguity is crucial to understand the alliances between old life conservatives and new alleged radicals. In the Spanish scene, for instance, old cultivated fascists and new "alternatives" can enjoy together the solemn celebration of Great Philosophers anniversaries (Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Gadamer and Heidegger). Depending on the audience, both reactionary conservatives and ambivalent alternatives can even imitate attitudes peculiar to groups 3 and 4, and defend, under the guise of a civilised and democratic liberalism, the merits of philosophers as safeguard of cultural heritage against barbarians and philistines.²⁹

(A particular field in which alliances between old conservatives and new alternatives are particularly interesting is that of the "Aesthetics". Had I more space, I could explain some Spanish cases but, in general terms, I would subscribe Jameson's assessments about the new uses of philosophical aesthetics in his "Transformations of the Image in Postmodernity").

7. Anomalies of Postmodernism.

In this group I would include two different kinds of philosophers. "Postmodernism" is a quite ambivalent term used by "alternatives" which act in complicity with conservatives but also by one-time Marxists which, in opposition to groups 1, 2 and 3, did not devoted themselves to social democracy after the wake of 1968 (or, in the Spain after Franco's death). Leftist post-modernists combine, in diverse ways, Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Adorno, Benjamin, Sartre, Beauvoir, Althusser, Machery, Lacan, Blanchot, Williams, Eagleton, Jameson, Baudrillard Virilo, Kristeva, Lyotard, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Bourdieu, Hillis-Miller, Hartmman, Butler, Eagleton, Laclau, Mouffe or HarawayÉ Some of them, besides, can join his or her philosophical background with sporadic analyses of low-culture. On the contrary, the "alternative" wing sell its own refined and philosophical versions of post-modernity made mostly of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Vattimo's languid prophecies, obviously without any reference to literary criticism, politicians or sociologists, let alone one which sounds of Marxism. Unfortunately, even post-modern philosophers of the left wing can act as what they are, as philosophers, and practise a tender-minded style of postmodernism that can be expressed, ironically, by means of "populism". Even when some philosopher (I'm thinking, again, of Spanish examples) talks about science-fiction movies, TV commercials, video, cyborgs, game-plays, pornography and the like, they cannot avoid a slight touch of philosophical distinction. Undoubtedly, popular culture can be another alibi philosophers use to justify his or her intellectual prestige and superiority. That is why mass-culture is not considered to be a matter of hard political discussion, but reduced to a "subject of study" which can provide as many academic and professional rewards as "high-culture" products. Low culture, thus, might turn out to be useful and profitable enough to perpetuate the myth of the philosopher as a privileged guide through the cultural novelty, but actually working as the very negation of the political consequences involved in the most apparently insignificant affairs of capitalist cultural market. In other words: the fictitious and frivolous celebration of blurring frontiers between high and low can work precisely as an useless inversion of the very high-intellectual attitudes which reduces popular practices to vulgarity or barbarism. In other words: post-modern insolence towards traditional culture does not necessarily "prevent the university world of the humanities from deteriorating into a sandbox operation devoted to harmless and decorative eternal values and formalisms".³⁰

As Terry Eagleton has argued, much postmodernist cultural theory could be treating individuals as capitalism actually treats them but pretends it does not, and so endorses its logic while unmasking its ideology. The playful, populist bent of much cultural theory is a timely rebuke to the aloof elitism of its liberal humanistic fathers, but it can also mark a final surrender to the commodity form. Post-modern capitalist means the collapse of the liberal humanistic duality of an autonomous space for cultural production and the world of economical transaction, political struggle and cultural differences. Nowadays culture and those other spheres, however, are more integrated, but there is no automatic virtue in integration, any more than there is in autonomy. If the critical force of liberal humanist theory was deflected by its distance from social and political life, that of many post-modern theory is blunted by its complicity with it.³¹

Postmodernism also sets out to subvert high-culture values and metaphysical foundations, but frequently fails to notice that difference, decentralisation, pleasure, desire, discontinuity, or multiplicity are values congenital to a high-capitalism cultural market which requires authoritarian, repressive and monolithic political order. "What goes on in the supermarket is nothing at all like what happens in the chapel or the crèche"³². If, on the one hand, capitalism needs the decentered and dishevelled subject in the media or in the marketplace, on the other hand, "it also needs the unified subject and the absolute values in the class room or law court".³³ In other words: post-modern cult to difference, plurality and marginality as inherently good, and its subsequent negation of any kind unity as inherently negative, can also be read as another symptom of the left's confusion, and not as a solution to it.

There is, however, another post-modernist contradiction which is more illustrative: the linguistic fetishism peculiar to professional philosophers, or what Bourdieu calls the cult of professors to texts, an habit by means of which text are equated to climacteric and self-sufficient realities, or simply identified with reality itself. That illusion drives even leftist post-modernists to 1) take subversion in the order of words as instantaneous and radical subversion in the order of realities and 2) to confer the status of texts to all cultural artefacts and actions, or, in general, to the whole of social world. By that trick, for example, deconstruction of "texts" is said to involve, automatically, resistance to great powers and political effectiveness, although you can have serious doubts -in Bourdieu's words- about the very reality of a resistance which ignores the resistance which "reality" exerts when we try to change it or to destroy it only by mean of linguistics operations (most of them only performed within the walls of academy).

That fetishism of texts, which leads to veneration of disruptive lexical fashions does not imply, however, that the world, would be the same without postmodernist philosophers. Postmodernist theory has the merit of being dialectically contradictory, involving both evasion and enrichment of politics. Thanks to post-modern philosophers questions long time excluded by the own traditional Left as much as by the "system" have entered the theoretical scenario. Thanks to more and less happy or unhappy marriages of Marxism with deconstruction, feminism, ethnic and gay studies, for example, our conceptions of the relation between power, language, desire, identity and political action have changed in a positive form. Thanks to post-modern theoretical marriages concepts as "class", "ideology", "history", "totality", and "material production" have been revised and transformed. However purist "political correctness" might be, however puritanical and parochial versions of identity politics might be, questions of language and identity are seen nowadays, fortunately, as real as anything else. And however contradictory identity politics might be, it is not half as dangerous as the overall political correction dealing with economical affairs, as well as with much racism and sexism still socially accepted, which right-wing critics of "political correctness" always forget to mention (a point on which even Rorty and Hughes seem to agree with people as Said and Eagleton³⁴

In a sense, then, post-modern alliances of this kind provide the only way academic left should take if it does want to fail in advance. But, at the same time, some post-modern alliances can emphasise that new and vital questions, because (unconsciously?) they kiss other kind of political questions goodbye. There is a sense, in effect, in which post-modern theory and radical politics can also be at odds. Post-modern theory is the continuation of radical politics into all of those vital areas of everyday culture which both liberal humanistic tradition and old left had shut out, but one reason for this was that the political revolution proved too hard to pull off. Postmodernism alliances can also be seen as the offspring of a political failure:

it got off the ground in the wake of 1968... and did so among other things as a way of keeping warm at the level of discourse what had gone off the boil in the streets of Paris and Berlin. What happened, then was at one a deepening and a displacement, as theory opened up new political areas because others had closed down on it.³⁵

Structuralism, psychoanalysis and subsequently post-structuralism and deconstruction, could be seen as ways to conserve at the level of discourse a political culture which has been displaced in streets, sublimating former political energies into the signifier, at a moment in which precisely valuable micro-subversions seemed to be much more viable. Political paralysis forced it to direct to signs what it couldn't realise in reality and that is just because the very disproportionate refusal of the distinction between language and reality could be seen as a rationalisation of that condition. In the 1970's -Eagleton adds- Anglo-American theorist talked about socialism, signifiers and sexuality. By the 1980's, as Thatcherism and Reaganism ran its course and the left was inexorably rolled back, talked about signifiers and sexuality. At the end of 1980, on sexuality: "The current North-American fetishism of the body, all the way from Jane Fonda to Michael Foucault, is at once a precious advance on fleshless politics", but also "in that manner of the Freudian fetish, a standing-in for something elusively absent". ³⁶

The theoretical emphasis on questions of language, ethnicity and sexuality did not mean any neglect of politics (because language and bodies are political, they are their own basis), but eventually involved a displacement of political questions as afar as feminism, sexual movements and ethnicity also obtain popular forms not necessarily anti-capitalist and enough politically ambivalent as to operate within the economical and political context of rich liberal democracies, for instance, in the guise of courteous and polite feminism, boutique multiculturalism or homosexuality and lesbianism as something exotic. What in our day is broadly called "cultural politics" could also be seen as another enough vague, abstract and euphemistic label used by the moderate centre and the right to depoliticise new social movements and capitalise on their own achievements.

Nevertheless all these problems, I would add that cultural theory's astonishment reveals, at least, the (dialectical?) contradictions of some professionals, while leftist post-modern philosophy takes cover in its own veiled abstractness keeping as a mere spectator its distance from concrete cultural affairs and struggles. Only with some exceptions, post-modern philosophers elude any open theoretical argument which could involve a lose of his or her alleged intellectual prestige, as if self-consciousness of a contradiction were not enough a conspicuous and rational response.

The irony with leftist post-modern philosophers is that they keep unconsciously their distance from cultural studies while, at the same time, they are hardly criticised by colleagues within the very philosophical realm, being imputed to them the same failures often imputed to cultural theorists. The cultivated and systematic thinkers (group 1), indeed, consider leftist postmodernists too chaotic and dark; the digital preachers (group 2), in turn, will only see them as a troupe of lost misfits, the last examples of old-fashioned nostalgic Left. According to moderate leftists, social democrats, liberal humanists and independent essayists (groups 3 and 4), postmodernists are too pessimistic, discouraging and politically useless (or even pernicious). Paranoid guardians and ambivalent alternatives can adopt different attitudes towards leftist post-modern philosophers, sometimes scorning their political insolence, sometimes clapping their scholar and erudite knowledge of classical philosophical texts.

Things to Think About (conclusions)

Obviously, I should explain many things I have said here.³⁷ When I've argued, using Eagleton's words, that "cultural theory" is a symptom of a crisis and that what finally comes out of that crisis should be a question of politics, not of theory itself, I was not arguing against theory (as if it were something optional or superfluous). What I'm saying is that discomfort should be in the heart of theory, though much present-day philosophy ("Theory" by excellence) try to fight it down. Maybe, theoretical and academic discomposure is a pale image of dialectic contradiction, but occasionally some cultural theorists testimony, at least, their own limits and impotence, while philosophers repress uncanny impulses and observe the spectacle as angels (if we want to use Ripalda's allegory)³⁸. The irony of it is that present-day new conformists (above all, from group 6 and 7) know that, if they wish to capitalise intellectual market, they have to adopt just the mirror image of the angel, disguising himself or herself by adopting the appearance of strange and disruptive creatures, but in fact acting as traditional and metaphysical subjects.

Probably, much of the current cultural theory could be seen as the achievement of a new professional class running after its lucky chance, but the fact is that, at the same time, many cultural theorists are seriously committed with a split in our discursive labour division and afford the risk to be criticized by accommodated professionals settled in other traditional fields and disciplines. In my own case, I'm afraid that professional philosophy will contribute nothing to holding open that conflictive split, insulating itself in its sumptuary ivory tower. Cultural theory means, at least, as a temporary and rough-and-ready intellectual agency by means of which certain kinds of questions are forced to be raised within (and beyond) settled disciplines, questions that, in the spite of well-intentioned and progressive philosophical minds, are not still raised in any engaging way within the philosophical realm, questions that -as Jameson says- do not seem particularly accessible to philosophical and disciplinary classification of the older sort.

In short: if, as Williams said, the central theoretical point which is at the heart of cultural studies is that we cannot understand any intellectual production without understanding as well its social formation (both taken as different ways of materializing a common disposition of energy and direction), and that, if we want to be coherent, we have to apply just this to the very project of cultural studies, then much current philosophy is, at least, a not confessed enemy of cultural studies.

That is why "in spite of theory" still means to me politics in spite of Philosophy, although unfortunately, we all know it also could mean politics in spite of cultural theory itself.

Notes

¹ Jameson, F.: "On Cultural Studies", Social Text 34, vol., 11, n¼ 1, 1993.

² I'm thinking in the collaboration between Semiotics and Communication Institute, some Valencia University departments (Languages Theory, Philosophy and Contemporary History) and Vasque Assotiation of Semiotics.

³ Les éditions de Minuit, 1988.

⁴ éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1997. See in chapters 1 y 2, his critique of scholastic reason and the three types of scholastic fault.

⁵ In Meditations pascalienes Bordieu describes some attitudes towards history both common to followers of Kant, Hegel and Heidegger. He also suggests, though only in general terns, that this type of resistance could be also applied to "postmodern" thinkers.

⁶ Eagleton, Terry, The Politics of Theory (Lecture presented at the Conference on the political status of theory, International University Menéndez y Pelayo, Valencia, Spain, July 18-22, 1994, published in Eutopías, Working Papers, Vol. 57, 1994, p. 2. (Centro de semiótica y Teoría del espectáculo de la Universitat de Valencia y Asociación Vasca de Semiótica).

⁷ Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading. New York, Oxford University Press, 1975, p. 39.

⁸ See "The Inspirational value of Great Works of Literature" in Achieving Our Country.

⁹ Eagleton, T.: "The Crisis of Contemporary Culture", New Left Review, 196, 1992. Now in The Terry Eagleton Reader, edited by Stephen Regan, Oxford, Blackwell, 1998, p. 153.

¹⁰ Observe that, as Rorty would say, Bloom actually represents both resistance against leftist cultural criticism but also against Paul de Man's speculative style.

¹¹ Eagleton, The Politics of Theory, p. 6.

¹² Ibidem, pp. 12-13

¹³ I'm thinking particularly on Spanish examples because I don't know if someday Spanish Literature Departments will assume the same role that English departments in Great Britain and in the United States, but what I know is some Spanish Philosophy is just claiming to assume that function, and that is part of its falsehood and hypocrisy.

¹⁴ Jameson, "Transformations of the Image of Postmodernity", The Cultural Turn, London, Verso, 1998, pg. 94.

¹⁵ Ibidem, p. 102. See all the sound argument from pp. 93 to 102.

¹⁶ Ibidem, p. 99. Compare, by the way, Jameson's own view about how Theory emerged from the aesthetic itself ("«End of Art» or «End of History»", also in The Cultural Turn, pp. 84 and f.) with earlier mentioned Eagleton's view about Theory emerging from Culture.

¹⁷ I think in Enzerberger's recent article translated into Spanih ("El evangelio digital"), but I recall Lyotard's reference to "professional intelligentsia" and "technical intelligenstia" in his The Posmodern Condition (chapter 12).

¹⁸ I use, again, Enzenberger's words.

¹⁹ Jameson, "Transformations of the Image of Postmodernity", op. cit., p. 96.

²⁰ I should add that, in the recent Spanish history, current "enlightened" feminism has promoted, much more than "difference" feminism a valuable debate about differences and contradictions within the own "movement".

²¹ Rorty, R., Achieving Our Country. Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 46.

²² I exaggerate on purpose. Rorty also insist on the good side of politics of difference, but he also exaggerates when he reproves cultural left for its alleged lack of responsibility in respect of political affairs. Robert Hughes, on other hand, make use of Eward Said's sound arguments againts some distortions of social movements, but sometimes satirize over and above that distorsions, something the Right could acclaim.

²³ If I had more space I would enlarge on the Spanish counterpart of the story which Terry Eagleton has offered in his last book, The Idea of Culture.

²⁴ Maybe I should remark that In the Spanish case, analytical philosophy and Marxism worked together against metaphysics, but before and after Franco's death some leftist independent intellectuals critiqued analytical and Marxist orthodoxy and excesses, vindicating a more free style of thought. Thanks to this kind of attitudes, leftist philosophy found another ways of expression through Nietzsche and French philosophy, but at the same time, old conservatives with new airs and new alternatives with old ideas also began to vindicate their own space using Nietzsche and French philosophy in their own way.

²⁵ Bourdieu, P., The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, English translation by Peter Collier, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1991, pp. 91-92.

²⁶ Ibidem, p. 46.

²⁷ "Katederproheten" [ex-catedra prophets] is a Max Weber's expression. See Bourdieu, op.cit.

²⁸ Bourdieu, op. cit., p. 104.

²⁹ I should remark that since long time ago History of Philosophy has played an important role in Spanish senior secondary school (as in French lycée). Recently, however, History of Philosophy has been doomed to marginality (in part, because of the lack of flexibility on the very professional Philosophy) and new disciplines such as "Science, Technique and Society" have benn favoured. Obviously, this technological turn is agreeable to new philosophers of science (my group 2) but unfortunately, manages to bind liberal humanists, hard conservatives and politically ambiguous radicals against the demoniac powers of technological culture and powers.

³⁰ Jameson, "Transformations of the Image in Postmodernity", op. cit., p. 117. Jameson attributes that critique of traditional values to cultural studies but I try to see the conservative uses of that very critique.

³¹ Eagleton, op. cit., pp. 7-8.

³² Eagleton, op. cit., p. 7.

³³ Ibid., p. 9.

³⁴ See, by the way, Saïd, E.: "The Political of Knowledge", Raritan, summer of 1991. Also, Representations of the Intellectual, Vintage, London, 1994.

³⁵ Eagleton, op.cit., p. 2.

³⁶ Ibid., p. 3. In those passages I'm also using similar arguments by Eagleton in his The Illusions of Postmodernism, 1996, chapter 2 ("Ambivalences").

³⁷ To begin: Why do I myself feel so inclined to general theorists as Eagleton, neverthelees my own serious reservations about some of his ideas?

³⁸ See, De Angelis. Filosofía, mercado y postmodernidad. (1996). See, in particular, his own story about the decadence of intellectuals (chapter 10). See also chapter 2 (specially from pg. 33) on the paradoxical condition of philosophy and some articles now included in his Políticas postmodernas (1999). Although I've some doubts about Ripalda's arguments, I could imagine some Ripalda's doubts about my own arguments in this paper.