Cultural Studies Revisited: Determinate Conditions and the Depressive Position

This essay reflects on the well-established debates between critique and the various modalities of “post-critique” via a pairing of Stuart Hall’s seminal essay “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms,” and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s equally influential piece on “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading.” Juxtaposing the structuralist to the culturalist paradigms in cultural studies, Hall’s essays argue for the necessity of a continuous critical movement between attending to the structures that subject us and attending to the terrain of concrete, tenacious, and improvised historical struggle. While Sedgwick’s essay is routinely cited for its endorsement of reparative reading practices, I argue that her call is not to abandon suspicion, but to engage in a similar movement, or “oscillation,” between the exhaustive alertness of paranoia and the small, but sustaining, world-building practices she associates with the “depressive” position. In the second part of the essay, I turn to Ling Ma’s debut novel Severance (2018) as a literary text that hones this critical movement and, more particularly, invites us to think the value of routine, repetition, and drifting as something other and more complex than the erasure of agency.