Their focus on power mistheorizes how power operates and trades off with a Marxist approach to politics.

Postmodern cultural studies also rewrites the category of materiality to refer to local practices and, ultimately, the body. For example, postmodern cultural studies theorist John Fiske, while defining the material in terms of economic constraints, at the same time argues for an understanding of materiality as the absence of any possibility for abstraction, of any distancing from the products of culture. “­Culture,” he says, “is inescapably material: distantiation is an unattainable luxury. The culture of everyday life is concrete, contextualized, and lived, just as deprivation is concrete, contextualized and lived” (1992, 155). Since he identifies the material with the lived experience of everyday life in the face of oppression and with the construction of an individualized environment that makes survival and resistance possible, ­he goes on to locate materiality in the body: “The body and its specific behavior is where the power system stops being abstract and becomes material” (162). For this reason, he considers it important to develop a “bottom-up” (165) notion of subjectivity, as op­posed to those theories in which contradictions in subjectivity “are traced back to the complex elaborations of late capitalist societies” (161). ­This, I argue, excludes the possibility of understanding materiality in terms of the systemic connections between specific practices. It reduces subjectivity to the local contexts in which individualized modes of life are constructed, and it refuses any theory that does not involve “the development of the ability to experience as far as possible from the inside other people’s ways of living” (159). In this case, of course, it becomes impossible to theorize the world market or capitalist class domination, since these would be considered abstract categories that cannot be inside anyone’s way of living.­