In the second half of the twentieth century cultural theorists of modernity and practitioners of cultural studies tended to see their intellectual endeavour as being fundamentally political in nature. Marxist and neo-Marxist left criticism of culture and society until relatively recently, has been the traditional mainstay of analysis addressing the ‘post-WW2 order’, the ‘end of empire’, the fate of the communist project and the numerous crises of globalisation. Over the last twenty years, however, we have witnessed an ‘ethical turn’ in the theorising of culture, society and politics, as well as of the arts and creative enterprise, which has coincided with and drawn upon the full diversity of postmodern theory. As the modern notion of universality has lost credibility, the concern with ‘the ethical’ has proliferated and territorialised both the academic disciplines and popular culture. Rather than ethics being confined as sub-branch of philosophy, viewed as the ‘queen of the sciences’ whose job it has been to guard and preserve the idea of the universality in the temple of pure theory, it has now leaked back out into the wider world of cultural inquiry in general. Philosophical ethics in its traditional forms can no longer exclusively provide the measure for the ethical evaluation of situations, events, and social and political phenomena making up the content of cultural life in general, and ethicality, however it is to be understood, has come to be read off of the surfaces of culture itself. Philosophy, no more or less than any other intellectual enterprise, it has to be acknowledged, is just one of the surfaces of culture.