The Intellectual Genealogies and Possible Futures of Cultural Studies: An Interview with Tony Bennett

Being deeply engaged with and therefore a leading figure of cultural studies, British and Australian, Tony Bennett, by focusing upon its key concepts – (culture as) a whole way of life, hegemony, cultural capital, and governmentality, etc. – shows how cultural studies was shaped and reshaped especially by Williams, Gramsci, Bourdieu, and Foucault. Taking the concept of governmentality, he distinguishes his position sharply from the dualistic tendency of traditional cultural studies. His revisionist project is to bring our attention to the relations between culture and governmental power, by which the resistance, or the hegemony, and the opposition of low culture and high culture, are not simply discarded but integrated at a higher level. As a result of this revision, Tony Bennett has for years maintained his enthusiasm for the analysis of the makeup, organization, and functioning of distinctive kinds of culture/power complexes, from which a new paradigm of cultural studies may be expected to emerge.