[csaa-forum] RE: wanting to be effluent

[Mel Campbell]

Jean said: "I have to stick my head up here and object to the conflation that is going on here between (bad/debased) taste patterns, (low) class locations and the replacement of issues-based with aspirational politics, if that is indeed what's going on."
 
In turn I feel I must stick my head up here and say that even though I now hate my MA thesis and never want to revisit its stupid topic ever again, its main contention was that certain concepts (or discourses, as I Foucauldianly branded them) can be represented in the media as "identity categories" in order to smooth over temporarily the potential for political disquiet in Australia.
 
The example I used in the accursed thesis was the concept of the "bogan". I argued that 'bogan' is not a class. It's not a subculture. It's not an aesthetic. It's not a 'real' group of people at all. Instead, it's a technique, most visibly deployed in Australian media, and most clearly so over the last ten or so years, for polarising Australian society while reinforcing the social agenda of the government or ruling social group of the day.
 
In the case of the Howard government, parochial and long-standing 'Australian values' have been re-articulated through the figure of the bogan (and similar undesirable "others") to serve their neo-liberal ideological interests. For example, the "battler" and the "fair go" have become "mutual obligation", "queue-jumpers", economic self-interest, and the systematic shift from public to private sector. And you know, I don't see Mark Latham as being substantially different on many of these issues, particularly his obsessive focus on individualism.
 
But small-l liberals can be just as divisive. For example, the failure of the republican referendum was interpreted by republican supporters at the time as an "attack of the bogans", those ill-informed morons who would be left-leaning if only they were smart enough. That's why I find it patronising when I hear people bemoaning the stupidity of the Australian electorate last weekend.
 
Taste patterns, as Jean points out, are an important way of representing this cultural divide. I actually had a chapter about Kath & Kim in the damn thesis. I argued then (and still believe) that the real issue for us is to analyse how social divisions are constructed through the media, rather than reproducing them in our own thinking.
 
But might I add that I am no longer interested in the specific issue of bogans. I just wanted to draw your attention to a wider social technique that I see operating in Australia. 
 
Cheers,
 
Mel. 



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