Introduction: Cultural studies, marxism and the exile of aesthetics

Abstract

To reflect on the relationship between "cultural studies" and "aesthetics" is to master the art of holding two opposing insights in mind at once. In theory, at least as set out by some of cultural studies' leading lights, the aesthetic is bound up with forms of privilege, mysticism and elitism that are anathema to the key critical currents in the field. In practice, however, aesthetic engagement and aesthetic evaluation remain popular tools of the critical trade. Cultural studies, it seems, does not "do" aesthetics-except, of course, when it always does.1 And this constitutive inconsistency has deep (inter)disciplinary roots. While clearly a function of cultural studies' repudiation of philosophical aesthetics and received notions of high culture, cultural studies' fraught relationship with the aesthetic is also a legacy of the field's fraught relationship with Marxist cultural theory, a diverse body of scholarship with a long history of politically-and historicallyengaged forms of aesthetic analysis. The theme of 'capitalist aesthetics' that frames this issue, then, is dual in its critical affordances. On the one hand, it points forward, providing a glimpse of what cultural studies might look like if it more explicitly embraced aesthetic attention and aesthetic discrimination. On the other, it points backward, inviting us to trace existing histories of contact and divergence between cultural studies and an array of critical practices that have acknowledged the significance of form, sensation and judgment in shaping the political and social meaning of everyday cultural experiences.