> Are we to take it that *all* cultural studies is
> compatible with liberal democracy and capitalism?
Speaking for myself, that seems a bit of an exaggeration. But it would seem that there are many places besides the analyst's couch where it's the exaggerations that are true.
I recall a thread on the Spoons Frankfurt School list quite some time back where someone went through the brief history of cultural studies in the UK and found a sharp turn away from Marxian analysis that, if memory serves, coincided with Maggie T.'s rise to power. And as far as the secondary literature on the SI goes, with a few (too few) exceptions, it seems to be a cottage industry in (a) draining that embarrassing Marxism from the SI's thought; (b) deploring that Debord expelled all the artists who wanted to use it as a publicity service for their careers; (c) both of the above. That Nietzsche and his French progeny are the master philosophers for these pierced and tatoo'd scholarly oxen would seem to be an obstacle for them to address Hegelian-Marxist thinkers, but their ahistorical bent (which, flattering themselves, they call a rejection of teleology) enables them to pick and choose from the history of the situationists and create "situationism," a term the SI detested for the precise reason that it would be a reification of their thought and activity.
So yes, reification is a forgetting. It would seem to fall to those who'd combat it to remember -- and what's exaggeration but an emphatic expression of what's forgotten? -- Curtiss __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com