The key demand: a cost-of-living adjustment to our wages that would bring us out of the rent burden and financial precarity that are the basic conditions of employment for the vast majority of us. Totality, culture, Karl Marx, Allan Sekula, Ellen GallagherĪs we write, tens of thousands of graduate workers across the University of California system are on strike. What binds the articles together is, in effect, a shared working method, which involves thinking through the relationship between a specific cultural object (or set of objects) and the social whole in and through which it emerged. The special issue covers a lot of ground in terms of subject matter, theoretical milieu, disciplinary framework, and style. The introduction concludes with summaries of the seven articles included herein. The third part briefly surveys recent theoretical work that aims to put a revitalized concept of totality at the center of cultural critique. The second part consists of an analysis of two works of art-by the American visual artists Allan Sekula and Ellen Gallagher, respectively-which we take to be exemplary of the affordances of art, literature, and other forms of cultural expression for accessing totality anew. The first examines a midcentury crisis of Marxism that, concomitant with major shifts in global capitalism, set the scene for subsequent scholarly accounts of culture that have privileged the fragment, the supplement, the remainder, the site, the margins, and the like over against the totality.
The introduction proceeds in three parts. This special-issue introduction historicizes and seeks to move beyond the antinomy between totality and culture that is today a mainstay of much contemporary critical theory.
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