Institution, time-lag, globality

It is no secret that academic studies of contemporary culture lag behind the events they analyse. Think about cyberpunk science fiction, which attracted large audiences in the early 1980s, but emerged as an object of critical commentary only later in the decade. Or what about an event like the "Rushdie affair," which generated wide publicity in the global media, but whose scholarly analyses could neither keep pace with its popular reportage nor apprehend its daily unfolding. Such belatedness is endemic to all critical practice, but in this age of increasingly rapid information exchange, it has a special relevance for cultural studies. Not only does it raise important questions about the efficacy of cultural analysis as a mode of political action in the current technological environment, but it relates the internal debates about cultural studies’ "institutionalization" and "professionalization" to wider issues concerning space, time and the transnational circulation of knowledge. Perhaps it is because cultural studies has largely embraced a version of postmodernism that stresses the concreteness and producability of space (as opposed to the modernist and poststructuralist emphasis on time) that there has thus far been no systematic account of this cultural delay. Yet time and space are surely mutually implicated categories, since changes in the experience of time have always involved changes in the experience of space and vice versa. Indeed, it was my own geographical mobility that first drew my attention to the question of time-lag in cultural studies.