<quote> However, in a move that is foundational for some versions of cultural studies, Chambers immediately retreats from extending the complexity principle to analysis of relations between the (global) "machinery of capital" and (local) cultural machinations. Instead of entering the "field" constructed "mutually" by industry and culture, the former simply drops out of play. Put baldly, the result is that "the immediate mishmash of the everyday" in this account does not include rapidly changing experiences of the workplace, the home, family life, or mechanisms of statebecause it does not include these as "everyday" at all. Nor does it extend to the relations between high-tech culture and the increasingly globalized division of labor that Richard Gordon has called the "homework economy."
Instead, as an account based on the emblematic street experience of un- or underemployed males in European or American cities (or what then becomes its echoes elsewhere), it restricts the scope of inquiry to what may well be, in a grim sense, one of the "growth" areas of that economy, but which does not necessarily thereby serve as a useful synecdoche from which general principles of "culture" in "the modern world" may be composed. Perhaps this is one reason why women, in postsubcultural accounts, still appear in apologetic parentheses or as "catching up" on the streets when they're not left looking out the window. The ways in which the economic and technological changes of "the 1980s" (in Chambers's phrase) transformed women's lives simply cannot be considered-leaving women not so much neglected as anachronistically misplaced.
Left as a restricted account of local developments, Chambers's "possible guide" would have a different, more "modest" force. It is the allegorical expansion that gives the lie, like the myth of the Metropolis, to the rhetoric of the local in Chambers's text, and to accounts of popular culture that take the collapse of old dichotomies (production/consumption, industry/culture) as an occasion for simply effacing the first term and expanding the second along with most of its traditional content - pleasure, leisure, play, resistance. Yet it is a difficult reading to argue against, because the imaginary figure of the Enlightenment Intellectual-prophet of Truth, poet of Totality, priest of General Theory, and so on-is still so powerful in debate about culture.... </quote>