The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Last Days of London
the journals. But I’m also trying to write in direct engagement with what timewarped
deconstructionists somewhere may still be inclined to dismiss as “the
so-called real world.” I think a lot of theoretical writing about culture has become
very detached, partly due to its retreat into a beleaguered academy and
partly to do with a loss of moral and political purpose which, at my least charitable
moments, I think has been replaced by a machine-minding mentality
with a more or less adequate career structure attached. Twenty years ago, cultural
studies was a nonconformist and partly piratical venture interested in extending
critical value to new forms and constituencies. It had a strong
outward orientation and, while people were always jostling for scarce jobs, its
conferences and publications were motivated by something greater than the
search for points on the Research Assessment Exercise. I wrote A Journey
Through Ruins at a time when the distance between academic thought and
the broader public domain seemed to be increasing, and it was an attempt to
pull things in the other direction. I also wanted to write a book that could be
entered by people who hadn’t necessarily bought into the current curriculum,
and got three degrees to prove it.
Over the years in which Thatcher was shaking up the country, cultural
theory seemed to disappear into self-referring isolation, developing its
own utterly conventional star system and pursuing themes and preoccupations
that often seemed to me unnecessarily marginal, even if they weren’t
entirely disconnected from reality. Partly, I think this was the result of a growing
internationalization of cultural studies. The development of the conference/employment
circuit that reaches into North America and elsewhere has
introduced a curious “placelessness” into its theorizing—one that is too easily
dressed up as “postmodernism” and the rest. I would like to see a younger
generation coming forward to transform and reenergize this way of thinking—but
I have seen too little sign of that over the last fifteen years. Maybe
nowadays your time is up before you have even got to the end of the obligatory
reading list. So, yes, I have found myself increasingly at odds with the
way this whole area of inquiry has become institutionalized within the higher
education system and, as someone with nothing to lose in this regard, I’m
happy not to contribute to peer-reviewed journals.
JK: Presumably one way forward, apart from the radical transformation of
theory, is on a more modest level, simply the application of those ideas to intelligent
subjects.
PW: To start with, we shouldn’t assume that all intellectual activity is of the
academic theoretical kind. Immigrants are often natural philosophers, for
example: their situation obliges them to think things out for themselves. I
can’t claim to have filled my book with encounters with “organic intellectu-