[csaa-forum] bolt, sticks and stones, and a proposal

[Danny Butt]

Yowch. Elspeth, thanks for taking one for the team. I know it's a time when
everyone's winding down, but it seems to me here is a perfect opportunity to
put into practice the list's ideas on transforming public culture that came
out after the election. Bolt has correctly identified that the best way to
avoid competition from academics in agenda setting is to grow the
constituency of people who hate them. Perhaps even the unreality-based
community of readers The Australian constructs (or its NZ equivalent the
DomPost) is so elite as to be marginal to Bolt's strategy.

The institutional response - the one that Bolt's trying to create - is
clear, and we've just seen it in NZ politics: create resentment around the
specific outliers of  government policy to develop self-surveillance within
bureaucratic systems. In NZ, it was the fostering of resentment over
"special treatment" for Maori (sustained through conveniently timed
recurrent examples of "waste and self-interest", involving ridiculously
small amounts of money). This then forced the (Labour!) government to
legislate against title issues that could be seen to further alienate
"Middle New Zealand". So it works a treat. Or you get the Government to
completely disestablish divisions such as the Community Employment Group
which supported too many Pacific Islanders. [Ironic that Scribe can have the
number 1 single and LP in NZ, but hip-hop is not a valid industry; while the
government supports banning of parallel importing or draconian copyright
legislation on behalf of the 'entertainment industry'].

So you want your selection committees for ARC boards to have in the back of
their minds "if I ask this person to review these applications and approve
them, will there be the 5th news story this year on mickey-mouse grants by
the ARC? Should I ask someone with 'a safer pair of hands'?"

One response - the conservative left response - is to try and position our
work in the language Bolt's audience will relate to. For instance, we can
move from issues of gender and ethnicity for their own sake into a
"needs-based" framework, where benefits are claimed for target groups on the
basis of increasing their participation in the economy or health (about the
only two possible outcomes).

But I think I'd like to see a clearer collective response. I'm interested in
the research Timmy's doing and wondering if we could up this a level.
Specifically, it'd be great to find out more about:

1) Bolt's sex life. He trashes Elspeth's work, but is it just because he
isn't any good in bed? Let's get some straight answers from his wife and
previous girlfriends. I'm sure we can find one willing to testify, it
doesn't matter if he at 15 at the time. We can put a team from 60 minutes on
this. "You all know his controversial columns, but what about the man behind
them?"

2) Sources of funding. Who are Bolt's friends in the wealthy elite? A
dossier on Bolt's connections, painting a true picture of his elite
existence, could be a useful resource.

3) Some personal anecdotes about his hate and contempt for others. Perhaps
he voted against a wheelchair accessible toilet at his children's private
school P&C meeting? This much hate can't be confined to the columns.

There are probably other genres of story that journos could identify.

I'm happy to provide off-shore webspace to host all this info if people can
find it and someone can provide legal advice.

Danny


--
http://www.dannybutt.net

#place: location, cultural politics, and social technologies:
http://www.place.net.nz

[ Lilith] laughed bitterly. "I suppose I could think of this as fieldwork -
but how the hell do I get out of the field ?" (Octavia E. Butler, _Dawn_)


On 12/13/04 6:53 AM, "Elspeth Probyn" <elspeth.probyn at arts.usyd.edu.au>
wrote:

> well it's nice to know that bolt doesn't hate us all!
> 
> Print this page
>  A mouthful of tripe
>  By ANDREW BOLT
>  12dec04
> 
>  PROFESSOR Elspeth Probyn shouldn't be so modest. In Wednesday's The
> Australian
> she denounced "Andrew
>  Bolt's annual column in the Herald Sun on how useless academics are."
> 
>  Actually, professor, I have never claimed all academics are useless.
> 
>  In that column last month, I discussed only a few stand-outs -- ones who'd
> had
> work of dubious benefit financed by
>  a $500 million-a-year system of Australian Research Council grants that seems
> unfocussed, wasteful and far too
>  clubby.
> 
>  I wondered, for instance, how members of ARC committees could hand each other
> big grants, including one of
>  $880,000 to study the "the classed, racialised and ethnicised dimensions of
> the
> bodily experience" in Japan.
> 
>  Did such grant-making help explain why the humanities in particular have
> become
> so insular and self-indulgent?
> 
>  Probyn, professor of gender studies at Sydney University and author of Sexy
> Body, tackled none of my arguments
>  in her piece, simply wailing: "Would (Bolt) care that it hurts to be told
> that
> your 50-or 60-hour work week is
>  pointless?"
> 
>  Pointless? Now that I've checked Probyn's own faddish work -- and who has
> paid
> her to do it -- I can understand
>  why she seemed to take my criticisms personally. Or why she sure should.
> 
>  In 2000, she received an $11,000 grant from the ARC to study The Making of
> Mod
> Oz: the roles of the food media
>  in the construction of contemporary identity.
> 
>  In 2001, she won another $137,500 to ruminate over Practices and performances
> of alimentary identities: a
>  comparative analysis of the food media and their audiences. And that same
> year
> she shared a $118,000 ARC
>  grant to study Girl Cultures: the effect of media on young women's
> self-representations.
> 
>  That last study involved such things as quizzing girls on "their reaction to
> Sara-Maria Fedele (de facto star of the
>  first Big Brother series) as a focal point for analysing both young women's
> interest in the Big Brother format and,
>  more broadly, their responses to popular discourses of protection which
> circulate around their media consumption".
> 
>  I suspect, from their bloated titles, you'd understand her other studies even
> less, so I'll let Probyn describe what
>  she's up to in one article, using her best English: "I argue that queer
> theory
> needs to extend its theoretical reach
>  beyond an increasingly over-privileged and narrow use of sexuality."
> 
>  Which has her doodling: "The mouth machine registers experiences and then
> articulates them -- utters them. In
>  eating we may munch into whole chains of previously established connotations,
> just as we may disrupt them.
> 
>  "For instance, an email arrives, leaving traces of its rhizomatic passage
> zapping from one part of the world to
>  another, and then to me.
> 
>  'UNSOLICITED, it sets out a statement from a Dr Johannes Van Vugt, in San
> Francisco, who on October 11, 1999,
>  National Coming Out Day in the US, began an ongoing 'Fast for Equal Rights
> for
> persons who are gay, lesbian and
>  other sexual orientation minorities'."
> 
>  And, no, it doesn't get any more readable -- or meaningful.
> 
>  Several questions zap into my thinking machine as I eat my dinner of
> connotations, leaving traces of their
>  rhizomatic passage on my shirt.
> 
>  What exactly are Probyn's students learning that is of use to them? Or us?
> 
>  Why are we paying for her to write such dismal stuff, and so turgidly?
> 
>  And what does it say about the ARC that Probyn is just one of many academics
> who have received grants of
>  $100,000 or much more to subject us to even more such arid theorising?
> 
>  But let me be as clear as I can so even Probyn understands: I am not
> criticising all academics in asking these
>  questions. This time I've named only her.
> 
> --
> Elspeth Probyn
> Professor & Chair
> Dept of Gender Studies
> The University of Sydney  NSW  2006
> Tel - 9351 7389; Fax - 9351 5336
> Mobile - 0412 548 762
> 
> http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/Arts/departs/gender
> http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/gender/GirlCultures/index.html
> 
> 
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