Hartley, John
2008
The Future is an Open Future: Cultural Studies at the End of the ‘Long Twentieth Century’ and the Beginning of the ‘Chinese Century’

“cultural studies is a ‘philosophy of plenty’; a way of understanding the creation of cultural values among large populations, in times of economic growth, democratisation and consumerism.”

“[Cultural studies] is a mode of intellectual inquiry that insists on what is called ‘conjunctural’ (context-specific) analysis rather than ‘scientific’ universalism, where a ‘problem situation’ (or ‘problematic’) requires its own ‘conceptual framework.'”

“Cultural studies was born out of an attempt to understand social change. More to point, it was an intellectual attempt to show how to provoke social change in certain areas while resisting it in others.”

“what have culture, individual identity, and the pursuit of values associated with consumption, leisure and entertainment, got to do with social change?”

“if culture (as well as economics and politics) is implicated in social change, can it be construed as progressive (self-realisation; the emancipation of the ordinary) as well as regressive (ideological manipulation by media and corporate interests)?”

“how can social change be understood by its own agents?”

“cultural studies is seen as a pain in the neck, foisted on unsuspecting undergraduates by postmodern theorists in second-rate colleges.” Interesting!

“the future is an open future (rather than a predictable Newtonian one)” Richard E. Lee

“The better business plan henceforth was not the one devoted to origination and unique creative invention but the one dedicated to information and knowledge sharing and management – the search engine, the editor, the filter, the synthesiser.”

“cultural studies was kitted out to deal with the representational productivity of an essentially industrial system. Now, it is faced with a new kind of productivity – that of the open network”

“The distinctions between expert and amateur, producer and consumer, power and subjectivity have all been thrown into crisis.”

“user-led innovation and consumer co-creation are little more than a further step in capitalist exploitation, by normalising casual employment”

“‘do it with others’ (DIWO), is modelled on the ‘hubs’ and ‘nodes’ of network theory and complexity studies (Beinhocker 2006) rather than on the structural antagonism of classes.”

“creative innovation [is] on a par with other ‘enabling social technologies’ like the law, science, and markets.”

“If emergent creative innovation is itself an ‘enabling social technology,’ then analysts will need to focus on local-global instances of popular creativity, the productivity of consumption, and the
propagation (especially via the internet and other technologically enabled social networks) of the ‘means of semiotic production’ across whole populations, coordinated in hybrid ‘social network markets’ (Potts et al 2008) that allow commercial and community enterprises, corporate giants and micro-businesses, to co-exist and co-create values.”