[csaa-forum] Rebecca and the beach

[Jason Jacobs]

I don't buy the story that before the meteor of cultural studies clarified 
everything humanities teaching and research was a theoretical Jurassic 
forest, full of nasty creatures. In fact cultural studies today is every 
bit as ideologically naive as what came before. Today the ideology is 
this: anti-human, anti-Enlightenment, anti-reason, anti-judgement and 
pro-relativist. You see it dripping from every set of scare quotes 
('truth' 'real' etc) and every lame assertion that what we see and hear is 
constructed by social and historical conditions. (What insight!) I'm 
currently teaching a new course which is about cultivating judgement, 
eschewing relativism and actually engaging with artworks (film and 
television); the students find it hard because it does not arrogantly 
claim to have all the answers. It grants that there may be aspects of the 
world that cultural studies has neither the imagination nor the theory to 
grasp, that there are works of excellence whose achievements might take a 
lifetime to account for. I'd rather be teaching that than supplying the 
false idea that everything can be explained (or 'approached' - since I'm 
sure there can be no 'final' 'truthful' explanation...) by a bit of 
Foucault, Adorno, Deleuze or any other theoretically bankrupt mystic. 


Dr Jason Jacobs
Senior Lecturer
School of Arts, Media and Culture
Griffith University
Nathan Campus
Queensland 4111
Australia
Phone: (07) 3875 5164
Fax: (07) 3875 7730
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