‘Whoever speaks of culture speaks of administration as well’

Abstract

This essay considers the proposal of a new cultural-theoretical problematic of ‘culture as resource’ from three points of view: (1) its ‘metacultural’ structure, (2) Adorno's account of the relationship between culture and administration, and (3) the relationship between pragmatism and Cultural Studies. ‘Culture as resource’, it suggests, aspires to the status of a new cultural-theoretical paradigm that might transform Cultural Studies into Cultural Policy Studies, in much the same way that, on Mulhern's account in Culture/Metaculture, Cultural Studies critically succeeded Kulturkritik. As such, it represents the political revenge of pragmatism on Cultural Studies for the untheorized presumption of its immediate practicality. With the refunctioning of transnational frameworks as the means for a newfound orientation to policy studies, it is argued, it is time for Cultural Studies to reconsider the presuppositions about use on which it politics has historically been grounded. It is time, in fact, for a Pragmatist Dispute in Cultural Theory.

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