Slavoj Žižek

Cultural Studies versus the ‘‘Third Culture’’

We are witnessing today the struggle for intel-lectual hegemony (for who will occupy the uni-versal place of the ‘‘public intellectual’’) betweenthe advocates of postmodern-deconstructionistcultural studies and the cognitivist popularizersof ‘‘hard’’ sciences, that is, the proponents ofthe so-called Third Culture. This struggle, whichcaught the attention of the general public firstthrough the so-called de Man affair (whereopponents endeavored to prove the protofas-cist irrationalist tendencies of deconstruction),reached its peak in the Sokal–Social Text affair.In cultural studies, Theory usually refers to lit-erary/cinema criticism, mass culture, ideology,queer studies, and so forth. It is worth quotinghere the surprised reaction of Richard Dawkins:‘‘I noticed, the other day, an article by a literarycritic called ‘Theory: What Is It?’ Would youbelieve it? ‘Theory’ turned out to mean ‘theoryin literary criticism.’ . . . The very word ‘theory’has been hijacked for some extremely narrowparochial literary purpose—as though Einsteindidn’t have theories; as though Darwin didn’thave theories.’’1

Dawkins is here in solidarity with his great

The South Atlantic Quarterly :, Winter .Copyright © by Duke University Press.

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opponent Stephen Jay Gould, who also complains that ‘‘there’s somethingof a conspiracy among literary intellectuals to think they own the intellec-tual landscape and the reviewing sources, when in fact there are a group ofnonfiction writers, largely from sciences, who have a whole host of fascinat-ing ideas that people want to read about.’’2 These quotes clearly stake theterms of the debate as the fight for ideological hegemony in the precise sensethis term acquired in Ernesto Laclau’s writings: the fight over a particularcontent that always ‘‘hegemonizes’’ the apparently neutral universal term.

The Third Culture comprises the vast field that reaches from the debatersof evolutionary theory (Dawkins and Daniel Dennett versus Gould) throughphysicists dealing with quantum physics and cosmology (Stephen Hawk-ing, Steven Weinberg, Fritjof Capra), cognitive scientists (Dennett again,Marvin Minsky), neurologists (Oliver Sacks), and the theorists of chaos (Be-noit Mandelbrot, Ian Stewart)—authors dealing with the cognitive and gen-eral social impact of the digitalization of our daily lives—up to the theo-rists of an autopoetic system who endeavor to develop a universal formalnotion of self-organizing emerging systems that can be applied to ‘‘natu-ral’’ living organisms and species and social ‘‘organisms’’ (the behavior ofmarkets and other large groups of interacting social agents). Three thingsshould be noted here: () as a rule, we are dealing not with scientists them-selves but (although they are often the same individuals) with authors whoaddress a large segment of the public in a way whose success outdoes byfar the public appeal of cultural studies (suffice it to recall the bestsellers ofSacks, Hawking, Dawkins, and Gould); () as in the case of cultural studies,we are dealing not with a homogenized field but with a rhizomatic multitudeconnected through ‘‘family resemblances,’’ within which authors are oftenengaged in violent polemics but where interdisciplinary connections alsoflourish (between evolutionary biology and cognitive sciences, etc.); () asa rule, authors active in this domain are sustained by a missionary zeal, bya shared awareness that they all participate in a unique shift of the globalparadigm of knowledge.

As a kind of manifesto of this orientation, one could quote the intro-duction to The Third Culture, in which the editor (John Brockman) nicelypresents the large narrative that sustains the collective identification of theseauthors.3 In the s and s the idea of a public intellectual was iden-tified with an academic versed in ‘‘soft’’ human (or social) sciences who ad-dressed issues of common interest, taking a stance toward the great issues

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of the day and thus triggering or participating in large and passionate publicdebates. What then occurred, with the onslaught of ‘‘French’’ postmoderndeconstructionist theory, was the passing of the generation of public think-ers and their replacement by ‘‘bloodless academicians,’’ by cultural scien-tists whose pseudoradical stance against ‘‘power’’ or ‘‘hegemonic discourse’’effectively involves the growing disappearance of direct and actual politicalengagements outside the narrow confines of academia, as well as the grow-ing self-enclosure in an elitist jargon that precludes the very possibility offunctioning as an intellectual engaged in public debates. Happily, however,this retreat of the public intellectual was counteracted by the surge of theThird Culture, by the emergence of a new type of public intellectual, theThird Culture author, who in the eyes of the public stands more and morefor the one ‘‘supposed to know,’’ trusted to reveal the keys to the great secretsthat concern us all. The problem is again the gap between effective ‘‘hard’’sciences and their Third Culture ideological proponents who elevate scien-tists into a ‘‘subject supposed to know’’—not only for ordinary people whobuy their volumes, but also for postmodern theorists themselves who areintrigued by it, ‘‘in love with it,’’ and suppose that they ‘‘really know some-thing about the ultimate mystery of being.’’ The encounter here is failed:no, popular Third Culturalists do not possess the solution that would solvethe crisis of cultural studies; they do not have what cultural studies is lack-ing. The love encounter is thus failed: the beloved does not stretch his handback and return love.

It is thus crucial to distinguish between science itself and its inherent ide-ologization, its sometimes subtle transformation into a new holistic ‘‘para-digm’’ (new code name for worldview). Notions such as complementarity oranthropic principle are doubly inscribed, functioning as scientific and ideo-logical terms. It is difficult to estimate effectively the extent to which theThird Culture is infested with ideology. Among its obvious ideological ap-propriations (but are they merely secondary appropriations?), one should,again, note at least two obvious cases: First, there is often a New Age in-scription in which the shift in paradigm is interpreted as the supplantingof the Cartesian mechanic-materialist paradigm by a new holistic approachbringing us back to the wisdom of the old oriental thought (such as the Taoof physics). Sometimes this is even radicalized into the assertion that the

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scientific shift in the predominant paradigm is an epiphenomenon of thefact that humanity is on the verge of the biggest spiritual shift in its his-tory, of entering a new epoch in which egotistic individualism will be re-placed with a transindividual cosmic awareness. Second, there is the ‘‘natu-ralization’’ of certain specific social phenomena clearly discernible in theso-called cyberevolutionism that relies on the notion of cyberspace (or theWorld Wide Web) as a self-evolving natural organism. The ‘‘naturalizationof culture’’ (market and society, for example, are seen as living organisms)overlaps here with the ‘‘culturalization of nature’’ (life itself is conceived ofas a set of self-reproducing informations—‘‘genes are memes’’). This newnotion of Life is thus neutral with respect to the distinction of natural andcultural or ‘‘artificial’’ processes; both the Earth (as Gaia) and the global mar-ket appear as gigantic self-regulated living systems whose basic structure isdefined in terms of the process of coding and decoding, of passing informa-tions, and so on. So while cyberspace ideologists can dream about the nextstep of evolution in which we will no longer be mechanically interactingCartesian individuals, in which each person will cut his or her substantiallink to an individual body and conceive of oneself as part of the new holis-tic Mind that lives and acts through him or her, what is obfuscated in suchdirect naturalization of the World Wide Web or market is the set of powerrelations—of political decisions or institutional conditions—within whichorganisms such as the Internet (or market or capitalism) can only thrive.We are dealing here with an all too fast metaphoric transposition of certainbiological-evolutionist concepts to the study of the history of human civiliza-tion, like the jump from genes to memes—that is, the idea that not only dohuman beings use language to reproduce themselves and to multiply theirpower and knowledge, but also, at perhaps a more fundamental level, lan-guage itself uses human beings to replicate and expand itself, to gain newwealth of meanings.

The standard counterargument of proponents of cultural studies to ThirdCulture critics is that the loss of the public intellectual bemoaned in thesecomplaints is effectively the loss of the traditional (usually white and male)modernist intellectual. In our postmodernist era he was replaced by theo-reticians who operate in a different mode (replacing concern with one BigIssue with a series of localized strategic interventions) and who effectivelyaddress issues that concern a large portion of the public (racism and multi-culturalism, sexism, or how to replace the Eurocentrist curriculum, for ex-

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ample) and thus trigger public debates (such as the ‘‘political correctness’’ orsexual harassment controversies). Although this answer is all too easy, thefact remains that themes addressed by cultural studies do stand in the cen-ter of the public ideologico-political debates (hybrid multiculturalism versusthe need for a close community identification, or abortion and queer rightsversus Moral Majority fundamentalism), while the first thing that strikesthe eye apropos the Third Culture is how its proponents, busy as they areclarifying the ultimate enigmas (‘‘reading the mind of God,’’ as Hawking wasonce designated), silently pass over the burning questions that occupy thecenter stage of current politico-ideological debates.

Finally, one should note that in spite of the necessary distinction betweenscience and ideology, obscurantist New Age ideology is an immanent out-growth of modern science itself. From David Bohm to Fritjof Capra, ex-amples abound of different versions of ‘‘dancing Wu Li masters’’ teachingus about the Tao of physics, the ‘‘end of the Cartesian paradigm,’’ and thesignificance of the anthropic principle and the holistic approach.4 As an old-fashioned dialectical materialist, while I am ferociously opposed to theseobscurantist appropriations of quantum physics and astronomy, all I claimis that these obscurantist sprouts are not simply imposed from outside butfunction as what Louis Althusser would have called a ‘‘spontaneous ideol-ogy’’ of scientists themselves, as a spiritualist supplement to the predomi-nant reductionist-proceduralist attitude of ‘‘only what can be precisely de-fined and measured counts.’’ What is more worrying than the ‘‘excesses’’of cultural studies are the New Age obscurantist appropriations of today’shard sciences that, in order to legitimize their position, invoke the authorityof the science itself (‘‘today’s science has outgrown the mechanistic ma-terialism and points toward a new spiritual holistic stance’’). Significantly,the defenders of scientific realism such as Jean Brichmont and Alan Sokalonly briefly refer to some ‘‘subjectivist’’ formulations of Werner Heisenbergand Niels Bohr that can give rise to relativist/historicist misappropriations,qualifying them as the expression of their author’s philosophy and not partof the scientific edifice of quantum physics itself. Here, however, problemsbegin: Bohr’s and Heisenberg’s subjectivist formulations are not marginalphenomena but were canonized as ‘‘Copenhagen orthodoxy,’’ that is, as theofficial interpretation of the ontological consequences of quantum physics.The fact is that the moment one wants to provide an ontological account ofquantum physics (what notion of reality fits its results), paradoxes emerge

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that undermine the standard commonsense scientistic objectivism. Thisfact is constantly emphasized by scientists themselves, who oscillate be-tween the simple suspension of the ontological question (quantum physics‘‘works,’’ so do not try to understand it; just do the calculations) and dif-ferent ways out of the deadlock (Copenhagen orthodoxy, the Many WorldsInterpretation, or some version of the ‘‘hidden variable’’ theory that wouldsave the notion of a unique objective reality, like the one proposed by DavidBohm, but which nonetheless involves paradoxes of its own, like the notionof causality that runs backward in time).

The more fundamental problem beneath these perplexities is this: Canwe simply renounce the ontological question and limit ourselves to the merefunctioning of the scientific apparatus, its calculations and measurements?A further impasse concerns the necessity to relate scientific discoveries toeveryday language and to translate them into it. It can be argued that prob-lems emerge only when we try to translate the results of quantum physicsback into our commonsense notions of reality; but is it possible to resistthis temptation? All these topics are widely discussed in the literature onquantum physics, so they have nothing to do with the (mis)appropriationof the sciences by cultural studies. It was Richard Feynman himself who,in his famous statement, claimed that ‘‘nobody really understands quan-tum physics,’’ implying that one can no longer translate its mathematical-theoretical edifice into the terms of our everyday notions of reality. The im-pact of modern physics was the shattering of the traditional naive-realistepistemological edifice. Sciences themselves opened a gap in which obscu-rantist sprouts were able to grow, so instead of putting all the scorn on poorcultural studies, it would be more productive to approach anew the old topicof the precise epistemological and ontological implications of the shifts inthe hard sciences themselves.

On the other hand, the problem with cultural studies is that, at least in itspredominant form, it does involve a cognitive suspension (the abandonmentof the consideration of the inherent truth-value of the theory under con-sideration) characteristic of historicist relativism. When a typical culturaltheorist deals with a philosophical or psychoanalytical edifice, the analysisfocuses exclusively on unearthing a hidden patriarchal, Eurocentrist, iden-titarian ‘‘bias.’’ The theorist does not even ask the naive but nonetheless nec-

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essary question, OK, but what is the structure of the universe? How is thehuman psyche ‘‘really’’ working? Such questions are not even taken seri-ously in cultural studies, since its proponents simply tend to reduce them tothe historicist reflection on conditions in which certain notions emerged asthe result of historically specific power relations. Furthermore, in a typicalrhetorical move, cultural studies denounces the very attempt to draw a clearline of distinction between, say, true science and prescientific mythology, aspart of the Eurocentrist procedure to impose its own hegemony by meansof the exclusionary discursive strategy of devaluating the Other as not-yet-scientific. In this way we end up arranging and analyzing science proper,premodern ‘‘wisdom,’’ and other forms of knowledge as different discur-sive formations evaluated not with regard to their inherent truth-value butwith regard to their sociopolitical status and impact (a native holistic wisdomcan be thus considered more progressive than the mechanistic Western sci-ence responsible for the forms of modern domination). The problem withsuch a procedure of historicist relativism is that it continues to rely on a setof silent (nonthematized) ontological and epistemological presuppositionson the nature of human knowledge and reality, usually a proto-Nietzscheannotion that knowledge is not only embedded in but also generated by a com-plex set of discursive strategies of power (re)production. So it is crucial toemphasize that at this point Jacques Lacan parts with cultural studies his-toricism. For him, modern science is resolutely not one of the ‘‘narratives’’in principle comparable to other modes of ‘‘cognitive mapping’’; modernscience touches the real in a way totally absent from premodern discourses.

Cultural studies has to be put in its proper context. Since the demiseof great philosophical schools in the late s, European academic phi-losophy itself, with its basic hermeneutical-historical stance, paradoxicallyshares with cultural studies the stance of cognitive suspension. Excellentstudies have recently been produced on great past authors, yet they focus onthe correct reading of the author in question while mostly ignoring the naivebut unavoidable question of truth-value—not only ‘‘Is this the right readingof Descartes’s notion of body? Is this what Descartes’s notion of body has torepress in order to retain its consistency?’’ but also ‘‘Which, then, is the truestatus of the body? How do we stand toward Descartes’s notion of body?’’It seems as if these prohibited ontological questions are returning with avengeance in today’s Third Culture. What signals the recent rise of quan-tum physics and cosmology if not a violent and aggressive rehabilitation of

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the most fundamental metaphysical questions (What is the origin and theputative end of the universe?)? The explicit goal of people like Hawking is aversion of TOE (Theory of Everything), that is, to discover the basic formulaof the structure of the universe that one could print and wear on a T-shirt(or, for a human being, the genome that identifies what I objectively am). Soin clear contrast to the strict prohibition of direct ontological questions incultural studies, the proponents of Third Culture unabashedly approach themost fundamental pre-Kantian metaphysical issues (such as the ultimateconstituents of reality, the origins and end of the universe, the nature of con-sciousness, and the emergence of life) as if the old dream, which died withthe demise of Hegelianism, of a large synthesis of metaphysics and science,the dream of a global theory of all grounded in exact scientific insights, iscoming alive again.

In contrast to these two versions of cognitive suspension, the cognitivistapproach opts for a naive direct inquiry into the nature of things (Whatis perception? How did language emerge?). However, to use the worn-outphrase, by throwing out the dirty water, it loses also the baby, that is, the di-mension of the proper philosophico-transcendental reflection.That is to say,is the historicist relativism (which ultimately leads to an untenable solipsis-tic position) really the only alternative to naive scientific realism (accordingto which, in sciences and in our knowledge in general, we are gradually ap-proaching the proper image of the way things really are out there, indepen-dently of our consciousness of them)? From the standpoint of a proper philo-sophical reflection, it can easily be shown that both these positions miss theproperly transcendental-hermeneutical level. In what does this level reside?Let us take the classical line of realist reasoning that claims that the pas-sage from premodern mythical thought to the modern scientific approach toreality cannot be interpreted simply as the replacement of one with anotherpredominant narrative. The modern scientific approach definitely brings uscloser to what reality (the hard reality existing independently of the scien-tific researcher) effectively is. A hermeneutic philosopher’s basic responseto this stance would be to insist that, with the passage from the premodernmythic universe to the universe of modern science, the very notion of whatreality (or ‘‘effectively to exist’’), of what counts as reality, means has alsochanged, so that we cannot simply presuppose a neutral external measurethat allows us to judge that, with modern science, we came closer to thesame reality as that with which premodern mythology was dealing. As Hegel

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would have put it, with the passage from the premodern mythical universeto the modern scientific universe, the measure, the standard that we im-plicitly use or apply in order to measure how real is what we are dealing with,has itself undergone a fundamental change. The modern scientific outlookinvolves a series of distinctions (between objective reality and subjectiveideas-impressions of it in the subject, and between hard neutral facts andvalues that we, the judging subjects, impose on the facts) that are stricto sensumeaningless in the premodern universe. Of course, a realist can retort thatthat is the whole point, that only with the passage to the modern scientificuniverse do we get an appropriate notion of what objective reality is, in con-trast to the premodern outlook that confused facts and values. Against thisthe transcendental-hermeneutic philosopher would be fully justified to in-sist that, nonetheless, we cannot get out of the vicious circle of presupposingour result: the most fundamental way reality appears to us—the most fun-damental way we experience what really counts as effectively existing—isalways-already presupposed in our judgments regarding what really exists.This transcendental level was nicely indicated by Thomas S. Kuhn himselfwhen, in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he claimed that the shift in ascientific paradigm is more than a mere shift in our (external) perspectiveon/perception of reality but nonetheless less than our effectively ‘‘creating’’another new reality. For that reason the standard distinction between the so-cial or psychological contingent conditions of a scientific invention and itsobjective truth-value is too short here. The least one can say about it is thatthe very distinction between the (empirical, contingent sociopsychological)genesis of a certain scientific formation and its objective truth-value, inde-pendent of the conditions of this genesis, already presupposes a set of dis-tinctions (between genesis and truth-value, etc.) that are by no means self-evident. So again, one should insist that the hermeneutic-transcendentalquestioning of the implicit presuppositions in no way endorses the histori-cist relativism typical of cultural studies.

Of what, then, consists the ultimate difference between cognitivism andcultural studies? On one hand, there is neutral objective knowledge, that is,the patient empirical examination of reality. Cognitivists like to emphasizethat, politically, they are not against the Left; their aim is precisely to liberatethe Left from the irrationalist-relativist-elitist postmodern fake. Nonethe-

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less they accept the distinction between the neutral theoretical (scientific)insight and the eventual ideologico-political bias of its author. In contrast,cultural studies involves the properly dialectical paradox of a truth that relieson an engaged subjective position. This distinction between, on one hand,knowledge inherent to the academic institution, defined by the standards ofprofessionalism, and, on the other hand, the truth of a (collective) subjectengaged in a struggle (elaborated on by philosophers from Theodor Adornoto Alain Badiou, among others) enables us to explain how the difference be-tween cognitivists and cultural studies theorists functions as a shibboleth.It is properly visible only from the side of cultural studies. So on one hand,one should fully acknowledge the solid scholarly status of much of the cog-nitivist endeavor; often it is academia at its best. On the other hand, there isa dimension that simply eludes its grasp. Let me elaborate on this relation-ship between truth and the accuracy of knowledge by means of a marvelousthought experiment evoked by Dennett in his Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Youand your best friend are about to be captured by hostile forces who knowEnglish but do not know much about your world. Both you and your friendknow Morse code and hit on the following impromptu encryption scheme:for a dash, speak a truth; for a dot, speak a falsehood.Your captors, of course,listen to you two speak: ‘‘Birds lay eggs, and toads fly. Chicago is a city, andmy feet are not made of tin, and baseball is played in August,’’ you say, an-swering ‘‘No’’ (dash-dot, dash-dash-dash) to whatever your friend has justasked. Even if your captors know Morse code, unless they can determinethe truth and falsity of these sentences, they cannot detect the propertiesthat stand for dot and dash.5 Dennett himself uses this example to make thepoint that meaning cannot be accounted for in purely syntactic terms. Theonly way ultimately to gain access to the meaning of a statement is to situateit in its life-world context, that is, to take into account its semantic dimen-sion, the objects and processes to which it refers. My point is rather differ-ent: as Dennett himself puts it, in this case the two prisoners use the worlditself as a ‘‘one-time pad.’’ Although the truth-value of their statements is notindifferent but crucial, it is not this truth-value as such that matters; whatmatters is the translation of truth-value into a differential series of plusesand minuses (dashes and dots) that delivers the true message in the Morsecode. And is something similar not going on in the psychoanalytic process?Although the truth-value of the patient’s statements is not indifferent, whatreally matters is not this truth-value as such but the way the very alternationof truths and lies discloses the patient’s desire. A patient also uses reality

Cultural Studies versus the ‘‘Third Culture’’ 29

itself (the way he or she relates to it) as a one-time pad to encrypt his orher desire. In the same way, theory uses the very truth-value (accuracy) ofposttheoretical knowledge as a medium to articulate its own truth-message.

On the other hand, the politically correct cultural studies theorists oftenpay for their arrogance and lack of a serious approach by confusing truth(the engaged subjective position) and knowledge—that is, by disavowing thegap that separates them, by directly subordinating knowledge to truth (say,a quick sociocritical dismissal of a specific science such as quantum physicsor biology without proper acquaintance with the inherent conceptual struc-ture of this field). The problem of cultural studies effectively is often thelack of specific disciplinary skills. A literary theorist without proper knowl-edge of philosophy can write disparaging remarks about Hegel’s phallocen-trism. We are dealing with a kind of false universal critical capacity to passjudgment on everything, without proper knowledge. With all its criticismof traditional philosophical universalism, cultural studies effectively func-tions as an ersatz philosophy. Notions are thus transformed into ideologi-cal universals. In postcolonial studies the notion of colonization starts tofunction as a hegemonic notion; it is elevated into a universal paradigm sothat male sex colonizes female sex and upper classes colonize lower classes.Especially with some ‘‘progressive’’ interpreters of contemporary biology,it is popular to focus on how the opposing positions are overdeterminedby the politico-ideological stance of their authors. Does Dawkins’s ‘‘Chicagogangster theory of life,’’ this reductionist determinist theory about ‘‘selfishgenes’’ caught in the deadly struggle for survival, not express the stance ofa bourgeois individualist competitive society? Is Gould’s emphasis on sud-den genetic change and ex-aptation not a sign of a more supple, dialectical,and revolutionary leftist stance of its author? Do not those (like Lynn Mar-gulis) who emphasize spontaneous cooperation and emerging order expressthe longing for a stable organic order, for society as a ‘‘corporate body’’? Dowe thus not have the scientific expression of the basic triad of Right, Cen-ter, and Left; of the organicist conservative notion of society as a whole; ofthe bourgeois individualist notion of society as the space of competition be-tween individuals; and of the revolutionary theorist of sudden change? (Ofcourse, the insistence on holistic approach and emerging order can be givena different accent: it can display the conservative longing for a stable orderor the progressive utopian belief in a new society of solidaristic coopera-tion in which order grows spontaneously from below and is not imposedfrom above.) The standard form of the opposition is the one between the

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cold mechanicist probing into causality, displaying the attitude of the scien-tific manipulator in the service of the exploitative domination over nature,and the new holistic approach focused on the spontaneously emerging orderand cooperation, pointing to what Andrew Ross called a ‘‘kindler, gentlerscience.’’ The mistake here is the same as that of Stalinist Marxism, whichopposed ‘‘bourgeois’’ to ‘‘proletarian’’ science, or that of the pseudoradicalfeminism that opposes ‘‘masculine’’ to ‘‘feminine’’ discourse as two self-enclosed wholes engaged in warfare. We do not have two sciences, but oneuniversal science split from within, caught in the battle for hegemony.6

The academically recognized radical thought in the liberal West does notoperate in a void but is part of the social relations of power. Apropos of criti-cal studies, one has to ask again the old Benjaminian question not about howit explicitly relates to power but about how it is situated within the predomi-nant power relations. Does cultural studies not also function as a discoursethat pretends to be critically self-reflective and to render visible the predomi-nant power relations while it effectively obfuscates its own mode of partici-pating in them? So it would be productive to apply to cultural studies theFoucauldian notion of the productive ‘‘bio-power’’ as opposed to the ‘‘repres-sive’’/prohibitory legal power. What if the field of cultural studies, far fromeffectively threatening today’s global relations of domination, fits perfectlytheir framework, in the same way sexuality and the repressive discoursethat regulates it are fully complementary? What if the criticism of patriar-chal/identitarian ideology betrays an ambiguous fascination with it ratherthan an effective will to undermine it? There is a way to avoid responsibilityand/or guilt by emphasizing in an exaggerated way one’s responsibility ortoo readily assuming guilt, as in the case of the white male politically cor-rect academic who emphasizes the guilt of racist phallocentrism and usesthis admission of guilt as a stratagem not to confront the way he as a radicalintellectual perfectly fits the existing power relations of which he pretendsto be thoroughly critical. Crucial here is the shift from English to Americancultural studies. Even if we find in the two the same themes and notions,the socio-ideological functioning is thoroughly different, and we shift fromthe engagement with effective working-class culture to the academic radi-cal chic.

However, in spite of these critical remarks, the very fact of resistanceagainst cultural studies proves that it remains a foreign body unable to fit

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fully into the existing academia. Cognitivism is ultimately the attempt ofthe standard functioning of academic knowledge—professional, rational,empiric, and problem-solving theory—to reoccupy the terrain, to get ridof this intruder. The distinction between cognitivism and cultural studiesis thus not simply the distinction between two doctrines or two theoreti-cal approaches; it is ultimately a much more radical distinction betweentwo totally different modalities or, rather, practices of knowledge, inclusiveof two different institutional apparatuses of knowledge. This dimension of‘‘theoretical state apparatuses,’’ to use the Althusserian formulation, is cru-cial. If we do not take it into account, we simply miss the point of the an-tagonism between cognitivism and cultural studies. No wonder cognitivistslike to emphasize their opposition to psychoanalysis. Two exemplary casesof such nonacademic knowledge are, of course, Marxism and psychoanaly-sis. Psychoanalysis differs from cognitivist psychology and psychotherapyin at least three crucial features: () since it does not present itself as em-pirically tested objective knowledge, there is the perennial problem (in thestates where psychiatric care is covered by medical insurance) of the ex-tent to which the state or insurance will reimburse the patient; () for thesame reason, psychoanalysis has inherent difficulties integrating itself intothe academic edifice of psychology or medical psychiatry departments, so itusually functions as a parasitic entity that wanders around, attaching itselfeither to psychology departments or to cultural studies or comparative lit-erature departments; () as to their inherent organization, psychoanalyticcommunities do not function as normal academic societies (like sociologi-cal or mathematical societies). They function in a way that, from the stand-point of normal academic societies, cannot but appear as a dogmatic disci-pline engaged in eternal factional struggles between subgroups dominatedby a strong authoritarian or charismatic leader. Conflicts are not resolvedthrough rational arguments and empirical testing but resemble sectarianreligious struggles. In short, the phenomenon of (personal) transferencefunctions here in a way wholly different from that of the standard academiccommunity. (In a slightly different way, the same goes for Marxism.) Justas Marxism interprets resistance to its insights as the ‘‘result of the classstruggle in theory,’’ as accounted for by its very object, psychoanalysis alsointerprets resistance to itself as the result of the very unconscious processesthat are its topic. In both cases, theory is caught in a self-referential loop; itis in a way the theory about the resistance to itself. Concerning this crucialpoint, the situation today is entirely different from, almost the opposite of,

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that of the s and early s, when marginal disciplines (like the cul-tural studies version of psychoanalysis) were perceived as anarchic, as liber-ating us from the repressive authoritarian regime of the standard academicdiscipline. What cognitivist critics of cultural studies play on is the com-mon perception that today (what remains of ) the cultural studies versionof psychoanalysis is perceived as sectarian, Stalinist, authoritarian, and en-gaged in ridiculous pseudotheological factional struggles in which the prob-lems of the party line prevail over open empirical research and rational argu-ment while they present themselves as the fresh air that does away with thisclose and stuffy atmosphere. Finally, one is free to formulate and test differ-ent hypotheses and is no longer terrorized by some dogmatically imposedglobal party line.We are thus far from the anti-academic-establishment logicof the s. Today academia presents itself as the place of open free dis-cussion, as liberating us from the stuffy constraints of subversive criticalstudies. Although, of course, the regression into authoritarian prophetic dis-course is one of the dangers that threatens cultural studies, its inherenttemptation, one should nonetheless focus on how the cognitivist stance suc-ceeds in unproblematically presenting the framework of the institutionalacademic university discourse as the very locus of intellectual freedom.

Notes

John Brockman, ‘‘Introduction: The Emerging Third Culture,’’ in The Third Culture, ed.Brockman (New York: Simon and Schuster, ), .

Ibid., . See ibid. See, as one among the thousands of paradigmatic passages, ‘‘Is there, as David Bohm says,

an ‘implicate order’ to matter that is beyond our present comprehension and presumes a‘wholeness’ to all things? Can we conceive of a ‘tao of physics’, as Fritjof Capra’s million-selling book terms it, in which Eastern philosophies parallel the mind-wrenching para-doxes of the quantum world?’’ (Pat Kane, ‘‘There’s Method in the Magic,’’ in The Politicsof Risk Society, ed. Jane Franklin [Oxford: Polity, ], –).

See Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (New York: Simon and Schuster, ), . It is interesting to note how the opposition of hard science, whose conceptual struc-

ture embodies the stance of domination, and gentle science, which is bent on collabora-tion, for example, comes dangerously close to the New Age ideology of two mental uni-verses—masculine and feminine, competitive and cooperative, rational/dissecting andintuitive/encompassing—in short, to the premodern sexualization of the universe con-ceived of as the tension between two principles, Masculine and Feminine.