[csaa-forum] Re: Marginal

[Rob Garbutt]

Brett,

Where the marginal seats are makes sense to me and I wonder about the 
horse and cart when assuming we are analysing complex cultural 
processes following elections. It all seems so flavour of the month. 
Which election was it a few years back -2000? - that we in "Rural and 
Regional Australia" were the flavour? Politicians were all buying 
Akubras and going on Listening Tours of The Bush (not W, that only 
came later). The money flowed into Roads to Recovery, Radio National 
got rid of Arts Today and now bores us stiff with another hour of 
Life Matters and Bush Telegraph, our telephone exchange got a 
software upgrade so we could experience Call Waiting, and strangers 
would call kindly enquiring about my concerns.  Glory days.

Then along comes Mark Latham who seemed to spot the next fishing 
ground - talking-up the aspirational voters and pushing the Third Way 
in "The Enabling State" - when was that, 2001? and before you know 
it, whoosh, everyone has gone Listening in Macarthur. (Latham had the 
jump - when did he drop the batton?)

Movements in cultural analysis are possibly about uncovering complex 
processes of social composition and an ossified geography of 
political representation, but I wonder whether cultural analysis 
driven by who the swinging voters are in marginal seats says anything 
more fundamental than defining the people politicians are now 
targeting using a cultural studies language.

Rob

>If the category 'aspirational' has any analytical grip in the wake of the
>election (and I'm open to the suggestion that we have to invent new
>concepts) it is in the intersection between complex processes of social
>recomposition (based partly, as Melissa notes, in the changing relations
>between work and non-work) and an ossified geography of political
>representation. Where are the marginal seats? That is a key question in
>analysing the election. And, at that point, there is a need to reintroduce
>an argument about the spatial order of the city (recognising the passage of
>that order beyond simple centre/periphery distinctions). Not to isolate the
>processes of class recomposition to certain areas but to understand how
>they intersect the zero-sum game of representative democracy.

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