Cultural studies examines how power operates through cultural practices, technologies and institutions. It draws on philosophy, sociology, political economy and psychology to analyse contemporary forms of domination and possibility for resistance.
This section focuses on critical analysis of neoliberal capitalism and its distinctive modes of power. Where earlier capitalism controlled workers through bodily discipline, contemporary capitalism exploits consciousness, emotions and subjective capacities. Understanding these transformations requires moving beyond traditional Marxist frameworks whilst retaining critical engagement with political economy.
Core themes
The content here engages several interconnected questions. How does power function under conditions of apparent freedom? What mechanisms enable exploitation without visible coercion? How do digital technologies transform possibilities for surveillance and control? What forms of subjectivity does neoliberal capitalism produce and require?
These questions demand interdisciplinary analysis. Philosophy provides conceptual frameworks for understanding freedom, power and subjectivity. Psychology illuminates affective and cognitive dimensions of contemporary experience. Sociology traces institutional transformations and class recomposition. Political economy examines material conditions and capital accumulation.
Psychopolitics and neoliberal power
Psychopolitics names the central problematic. This concept identifies how contemporary power operates by exploiting rather than suppressing subjective capacities. Freedom itself becomes the mechanism of domination. Subjects willingly optimise themselves whilst believing they are autonomous.
This represents fundamental mutation from disciplinary society. Foucault analysed how discipline produced docile bodies through surveillance and normalisation. Neoliberalism produces achievement subjects through voluntary self-exploitation. The shift from biopolitics to psychopolitics marks this transformation.
Understanding psychopolitics requires examining its concrete mechanisms. Auto-exploitation describes how subjects work on themselves without external masters. Smart power operates through seduction rather than prohibition. Emotional capitalism mobilises feelings as productive resources. Gamification converts labour into play whilst intensifying exploitation.
Digital technologies and control
Digital systems enable unprecedented forms of psychopolitical steering. The digital unconscious names patterns in behaviour rendered visible and exploitable through Big Data analytics. Algorithmic prediction and micro-targeting operate below conscious awareness.
This creates challenges for democratic politics and individual autonomy. When systems predict and shape behaviour before conscious deliberation, the conditions for free choice potentially collapse. Traditional privacy frameworks prove inadequate for voluntary exposure through social media and digital platforms.
The temporal dimension proves crucial. Computational systems operate faster than human consciousness. This asymmetry enables preemptive intervention that bypasses rational capacities. Resistance requires confronting not only what technologies do but the temporalities through which they function.
Connections to philosophy
The analysis here engages philosophical traditions whilst adapting them to contemporary conditions. Foucault’s genealogies of power provide foundational frameworks. His concepts of biopolitics, discipline and technologies of the self structure the analysis.
Deleuze’s work on control societies, the society without organs, and philosophical idiotism offers resources for thinking beyond disciplinary paradigms. His emphasis on immanence and becoming illuminates possibilities outside subjectivation.
Heidegger’s later philosophy contributes concepts of releasement, play and the critique of technology. His analysis of calculation and enframing helps diagnose digital systems whilst his notion of authentic dwelling points toward alternatives.
Marx remains essential despite neoliberalism’s mutation beyond industrial capitalism. The critique of commodity fetishism, analysis of exploitation, and vision of freedom beyond necessity continue to structure critical engagement with political economy.
Connections to psychology
Psychopolitics operates through mechanisms that psychology helps illuminate. Depression and burnout emerge as signature pathologies of neoliberal subjectivity. These conditions indicate systemic contradictions rather than individual dysfunctions.
The analysis draws on psychoanalytic concepts whilst critiquing therapeutic appropriation. Freud’s unconscious, drives and symptom-formation provide frameworks for understanding subjective dimensions of power. However, contemporary wellness industries deploy psychological knowledge for optimisation rather than liberation.
Affective and emotional dimensions of experience prove central. Distinguishing feelings, emotions and affects enables precision about how capitalism exploits different registers of subjectivity. The colonisation of emotional life by productive imperatives marks distinctive feature of contemporary domination.
Political stakes
This analysis serves political purposes beyond academic description. Identifying mechanisms of psychopolitical control provides resources for resistance. Understanding how freedom becomes domination illuminates why traditional oppositional strategies prove inadequate.
The dissolution of traditional working class eliminates basis for conventional socialist politics. When everyone functions as entrepreneur, class consciousness becomes structurally difficult. New forms of collective organisation must emerge from different conditions than those that generated twentieth-century labour movements.
Digital technologies create both intensified control and potential emancipatory possibilities. The same systems enabling surveillance could serve different purposes under alternative social arrangements. The question is not whether to use technologies but how to develop them outside capitalist imperatives.
Practices of freedom
Resistance cannot rely on simply opposing power from outside. Psychopolitics operates through co-opting opposition and absorbing critique. Alternative practices must develop within existing conditions whilst pointing beyond them.
De-psychologisation names one possible strategy. This means refusing therapeutic subjectivation and developing modes of existence outside optimisation imperatives. Foucault’s late work on care of the self suggests such possibilities.
Profanation offers another framework. This means stripping commodities and technologies of fetishised meanings and returning them to common use. Children playing with money exemplifies the practice.
Idiotism names practices of thought outside systematic intelligence. The idiot maintains contact with what exceeds communicative networks and computational processing. This vertical dimension resists horizontal circulation of information.
These strategies remain underdeveloped and face severe structural obstacles. Whether adequate forms of resistance can emerge from psychopolitical conditions remains an open question requiring practical experimentation rather than theoretical resolution.
War, cinema and technologies of perception
War and cinema examines the co-evolution of visual technologies and military strategy in the twentieth century. Cinema did not simply document warfare. Visual technologies became weapons systems, and military requirements shaped cinematic form. Understanding modern conflict requires grasping how cinema and war function according to shared logics.
The logistics of perception names systematic organisation of visual information for military purposes. Just as armies require ammunition supplies, modern warfare demands continuous flows of images. Aerial reconnaissance during the First World War established this paradigm. The infrastructure developed for managing military vision parallels material supply chains.
Derealization describes how technological systems progressively distance combatants from direct experience. Industrial warfare created sensory environments exceeding human perceptual capacities. Pilots experienced spatial disorientation. Combatants felt alienated from their own bodies. Electronic warfare extends this to logical extreme, with operators killing through screen interfaces from continental distances.
The camera obscura as military architecture reveals how fortifications, bunkers and command centres function as optical instruments. Medieval fortress design positioned defenders to observe whilst remaining concealed. Modern command centres receive information from distributed sensors, radiating commands back into operational theatres. Both operate through asymmetric visibility creating power.
These analyses illuminate connections between military and civilian domains. Surveillance technologies developed for warfare migrate into policing and commercial applications. The capacity to see whilst remaining unseen proves decisive across contexts. Cinema trains populations to accept mediated vision, preparing them psychologically for technological warfare’s abstracted character.
Understanding war cinema proves essential for grasping contemporary power. The techniques developed for military purposes inform psychopolitical control mechanisms. Both operate through managing perception rather than controlling physical spaces. Both depend on infrastructure rendering subjects visible whilst concealing systems of observation.
Connections to Critical Indigenous Studies
Critical engagement with power requires recognising settler colonialism as ongoing structure rather than historical event. Critical Indigenous Studies examines how whiteness operates through possession and entitlement in contexts founded on Indigenous dispossession.
Psychopolitical analysis risks reproducing colonial knowledge production when it fails to interrogate its own situatedness within settler colonial societies. Indigenous sovereignty challenges the legitimacy of institutions psychopolitics critiques. Neoliberal self-optimisation operates on lands stolen through violence.
Indigenous perspectives transform how we understand resistance and futurity. Where psychopolitics identifies challenges to freedom under neoliberalism, Indigenous scholars demonstrate how colonisation constitutes more fundamental unfreedom. Decolonisation requires transformation beyond what frameworks centring neoliberal capitalism typically envision.
The intersection demands attention to how different populations experience domination differently. Indigenous peoples face specific forms of dispossession, cultural erasure and violence that cannot be adequately theorised through psychopolitical frameworks alone. Genuine critical work requires centring rather than supplementing Indigenous analyses.
Future directions
The field continues developing through engagement with emerging technologies and social transformations. Artificial intelligence, algorithmic governance and biotechnology create new forms of power requiring analysis.
Climate crisis and ecological breakdown pose questions about capitalism’s sustainability. Psychopolitical analysis must engage with how environmental catastrophe gets managed through individual optimisation whilst structural conditions remain unchanged.
The resurgence of authoritarian politics alongside neoliberal economics demands attention. Understanding how psychopolitical subjection relates to overt repression and how democratic forms mask oligarchic content prove urgent tasks.
Settler colonialism and Indigenous resurgence require cultural studies to interrogate its own foundations. Knowledge production on stolen lands carries responsibilities that cannot be evaded through technical analysis or theoretical sophistication.
These developments require ongoing critical work. The analysis provided here offers diagnostic frameworks and conceptual resources. Political application depends on concrete struggles developing in specific contexts.
Connections to Indigenous Studies
Critical theory and cultural studies must engage seriously with Critical Indigenous Studies rather than appropriating Indigenous struggles as metaphors for other liberatory projects. Settler-colonialism operates through distinct logics of elimination that differ from classical colonialism or other forms of oppression.
Decolonisation is not metaphor for institutional reform or curriculum diversification. It centrally concerns land repatriation and Indigenous-sovereignty. Using decolonisation language for projects that do not address Indigenous relationships to land dilutes its specific meaning whilst enabling settler moves to innocence.
Indigenous-feminisms demonstrate how heteropatriarchy functions as colonial tool whilst offering radical relationality as alternative framework. Temporal-sovereignty challenges Western standardised time as form of colonial control. Epistemologies-of-crisis reveal how urgency rhetoric justifies ongoing dispossession.
These frameworks complement psychopolitical analysis whilst remaining grounded in Indigenous peoples’ particular struggles. The challenge involves building solidarity without collapsing distinct forms of domination or appropriating Indigenous concepts for settler purposes.