[csaa-forum] attacking culutral studies

Sun Feb 27 17:26:53 CST 2005

Sorry. I didn't mean to imply that Cultural Studies is or should be 'left.' And
I do try very hard to avoid such generalisations I agree with you Ben that
left/right dichotomies aren't always useful or accurate. And I've found plenty
of attacks on Cultural Studies from people who would get very angry if you
described them as 'right-wingers' or 'conservatives.' (see some of the very
interesting conversations about 'Postmodernism and the left' on Znet.org for
one example) My point, nicely summarised by Danny (thanks for that) was that
the main public arguments against Cultural Studies almost always come from
people who have very explicit and obvious right-wing agendas. They often make
very conservative arguments and tend to pine away for the good old days when
intellectuals were all polymaths, mutlilingual and didn't care much about all
the stuff out there in the world that is assumed to be 'trivial.' But I don't
think it is simply because some represent Cultural Studies as a left
discipline. I think it clearly goes much deeper, even to the very heart of the
enterprise. For example, I teach popular music and despite a lot of support
from many of colleagues (for which I am very grateful), I have been confronted
more than once with the idea that my work is inherently 'less than' because my
materials are so 'degraded' as music. There is a new book out from Routledge
called simply 'Bad Music' that is a very interesting exploration of these
ideas.

cheers,
chas.

--------------
Dr Charles Fairchild
Lecturer in Musicology
Conservatorium of Music
University of Sydney
Sydney NSW 2006
Australia

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> Today's Topics:
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>    1. old school new school (kiley gaffney)
>    2. Re: But wait, there's Fuller (Danny Butt)
>    3. FW: csaa-forum Digest, Vol 10, Issue 15 (Jonathan MARSHALL)
>    4. Re: but wait, it just keeps going on and on  (Charles Fairchild)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 15:00:28 +1000
> From: kiley gaffney <kjg at consume.com.au>
> Subject: [csaa-forum] old school new school
> To: CSAA discussion list <csaa-forum at lists.cdu.edu.au>
> Message-ID: <5561F846-87B3-11D9-B3F4-000A95AF2D60 at consume.com.au>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
>
> As Regurgitator summed it up:  "I like your old stuff better than your
> new stuff". This appears to be the ethos of the 'old school' academics
> who think that australia was built on the foundations of a good solid
> liberal education. Unfortunately, thanks to our 'new school' education
> that taught us about ideology and hegemony, we know that latin and
> colonial history do not a culture make.
>
> Seemingly, the need to constantly validate yourself and your academic
> interests is a 'rite of passage' that authenticates your place within
> the academy and indeed within this study-as-real-work- whilst
> -still-being-intellectual-and-elitist attitude that some academics push
> to make themselves feel that one step higher on the academic food
> chain.
>
> I'm a cultural studies phd student who studied both french and spanish
> and have found little need for either of them in our, to quote
> Melleuish,  'internationalised'  country (indeed, I go overseas to use
> my languages).  As we try to assimilate every cultural difference that
> can't slot into retail ventures,  isn't it in fact relevant to ask,
> 'what exactly is 'our' culture?' Or indeed, what 'internationalised'
> world is Melleuish living in?
>
> Coming across this endless stream of shit aimed at the 'new humanities'
> can be disheartening but it should also bolster our belief in what we
> study. Doesn't it indeed represent the conservatism  that we are taught
> to deconstruct?(all that talk about constitution is a little
> frightening, isn't it?)  I'd be interested in hearing Mr Melleuish's
> take on history and politics if he thinks that everyday life is
> irrelevant, wouldn't you?
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 16:44:16 +1000
> From: Danny Butt <db at dannybutt.net>
> Subject: Re: [csaa-forum] But wait, there's Fuller
> To: csaa-forum <csaa-forum at lists.cdu.edu.au>
> Message-ID: <BE4657E0.20857%db at dannybutt.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="US-ASCII"
>
> For those not hanging out in the blogosphere, I heartily recommend checking
> out Glen Fuller's post on this topic, written in his inimitable style (I've
> forwarded it to Melleuish as well), which adroitly manages to be both a
> response and non-response:
>
> http://glenfuller.blogspot.com/2005/02/eye-spit-laugh.html
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 15:44:00 +0800
> From: "Jonathan MARSHALL" <jonathan.marshall at ecu.edu.au>
> Subject: [csaa-forum] FW: csaa-forum Digest, Vol 10, Issue 15
> To: <csaa-forum at darlin.cdu.edu.au>
> Message-ID:
> 	<DA1A8ED979ACD74CBC928CE29B4775930326BDFE at adsxchg.ads.ecu.edu.au>
> Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> Re.  But wait, there's more (Dr Melissa GREGG & Danny Butt)
>
> Dear colleagues
>
> It is with some concern I read Danny Butt's response to The Australian
> article --- or rather non-response. I readily concede Butt's point that CS
> can come accross as a defensive group primarily concerned with endless
> aggressive responses to its detractors. I am however rather shocked that, by
> citing the number of subscribers to The Australian vs the national
> population, once can essentially write off the significance of this
> publication. If one compares the number of students who complete Cultural
> Studies majors at Australian universities, one would surely produce an even
> smaller relative fraction, which would, according to this kind of logic,
> suggest CS itself can be largely written off. As a historian and performance
> critic who works under the rubric of what might be broadly called CS, I
> refuse to accept this. I also find Butt's logic mildly offensive, in that I
> am also a journalist and, although Butt may not actually mean this, his
> critique would seem to suggest that popul
>  ar journalism is not worth the paper it is written on in terms of either its
> conceptual sophistication or its potential effects upon the world. This is
> manifestly incorrect. The Australian is indeed an influential document. Many
> government thinktakns and their associated scholars or fellow travellers
> publish here --- and also, it should be pointed out, a not insignificant part
> of the more left wing community. One wonders if the ideas of Professor Stuart
> Macintyre, Henry Renolds, Allan Manne, and others engaged in the ongoing
> history wars would have gained such widespread awareness and cultural capital
> without outlets such as The Australian, The Age and The Sydney Morning
> Herald.
>
> I therefore reject Butt's suggestion that we can more or less ignore the
> ongoing and doubtless neverending assaults on the academy and conclude,
> following the example of those who rose to Keith Windshuttle's manifestly
> poor historical method, that it is in fact a duty of academics to engage with
> such attackes through the popular media. Their are doubtless other methods
> one could do this also, as Butt suggests. I would nevertheless contend that
> he is also mistaken in claiming that, by bringing our dirty laundry into the
> public, we do not also benefit students. School teachers are endlessly
> producing facinating and challenging research projects for their charges
> drawing almost exclusively upon newspaper materials, and, speaking for
> myself, the way in which Renolds so-called "black armband" history was
> consistently invoked within the Mabo deliberations in the popular media
> (including some very good articles in The Australian --- as well as several
> rather bad ones in the same new
>  spaper) made my own undergraduate experience as a student in an entirely new
> and controversial subject, "Aboriginal and Koori History", far richer and
> more exciting.
>
> Overall, I suspect that Butt's objections relate in part to a lack of
> confidence in civil society and/or newspapers within it such as The
> Australian. I see little point in an academy which does not engage with civil
> society through rigorous debate. This is what makes democracy, change, and
> even --- in some cases --- new disciplines like CS, which evolved in the wake
> of the New Left, international 1960s revolts, etc. While I concede The
> Australian is, overall, a very right wing, conservative publication, I would
> remind you that the job of newspaper editors is to find interesting or
> preferably controversial text to fill the spaces between paid advertisements.
> Due to the very needs of outlets to secure readership, they will always
> publish at least some material contrary to the overall editorial slant. With
> these spaces one can build a wedge.
>
> I would therefore conclude that keeping informed of and responding to
> articles such as that in The Australian is an important duty both for list
> members and those practicing in the academy as a whole. Melleuish's article
> is, in any case, relatively easy to construct a firm response to since it is
> so clearly based on a very particular Anglo-Liberal model of early Australian
> citizenship --- one which does not include many of Australian history's more
> radical figures, running from 1st Wave Feminism to the Labour Movement and
> the Unemployed Worker's Movement.
>
> Jonathan Marshall, PhD, MA
>
> Research Fellow,
>
> WAAPA,
>
> Edith Cowan University
>
>
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 22:32:31 +1100
> From: Dr Melissa GREGG <m.gregg at uq.edu.au>
> Subject: [csaa-forum] But wait, there's more
> To: csaa-forum at lists.cdu.edu.au
> Message-ID: <2e94f62e715b.2e715b2e94f6 at uq.edu.au>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
>
> For those who missed it, especially our international readers, this piece ran
> in The Australian today. I would really like to know people's thoughts on it.
> I keep thinking, 'Why now? Who is listening anymore?' But I'm not sure it's
> exactly the same alarmism of an earlier moment in cultural studies'
> institutionalisation/emergence. Will people on this list be ignoring it? (and
> I don't just mean the professors who keep having to take the blows for us, I
> also mean postgrads and ECRs. Many younger academics have been trained in the
> 'New Humanities' from day one, and I guess that means we've never known 'hard
> work' or 'rigour'!) Is it time for a new generation of cult stud graduates to
> start talking back to this tiresome critique?
>
>
> Gregory Melleuish: Out with Thucydides, in with the Barbie dolls
>
> 25feb05
>
> IN the late 19th century Charles Badham, professor of classics at the
> University of Sydney, argued that the university man trained in the
> techniques of a liberal education would possess a clear consciousness, "full
> of reverence, refinement and clear-headedness ... by the very conditions of
> his discipline temperate in opinion, temperate in measures, temperate in
> demeanour".
>
> He advocated culture, "the thought of our permanent humanity and of the
> ineffaceable identity between the soul of the past and the soul of the
> present", as the ideal to guide the Australian colonists and save them from
> the superficiality and charlatanism of the modern age.
> Now, compare this with the way in which proponents of cultural studies - the
> New Humanities - describe the role of their discipline: Culture is a
> "contested and conflictual set of practices of representation bound up with
> the processes of formation and re-formation of social groups". The contrast
> between the two ideals of culture could not be starker.
>
> Alas, the New Humanities are now in the ascendancy. Last year, the Australian
> Academy of the Humanities elected Graeme Turner, a well-known cultural
> studies practitioner, as its president. The executive of the academy,
> moreover, is dominated by other figures from the world of the New Humanities:
> Elspeth Probyn, Stuart Cunningham, Anne Freadman.
>
> The New Humanities are now firmly entrenched, in one form or another, in our
> sandstone universities. Cultural studies is touted as something in which
> Australian academe has a world-class reputation.
>
> Many people today think of arts as some sort of soft option. But
> traditionally liberal education involved hard work in the shape of textual
> analysis and emendation. It gave access to the best that had been written.
>
> The men who created the Australian commonwealth were largely products of this
> liberal education. Edmund Barton was reputed to carry a copy of Thucydides
> with him. Samuel Griffith published a translation of Dante.
>
> Traditional liberal education had both rigour and excellence. It also
> encouraged humility as one encountered some of the greatest minds of
> humankind. Thucydides or Shakespeare or Augustine have more to tell us about
> the human condition than the superficial scribblings of yet another
> denunciation of sexism and racism in Australia.
>
> Compare some of the key characteristics of cultural studies and the New
> Humanities.
>
>
> The focus is on popular culture and everyday life.
>
> You don't need to be able to read a language other than English.
>
> You don't need to know about any society other than your own.
>
> You don't need to know anything about any time except the present.
>
> You don't need to know anything about religion.
>
> You don't need to read any works that are more than 30 years old.
> At a time when more and more Australians are engaging with an
> internationalised world, the New Humanities would seem to lock people into a
> very narrow and restricted view of the world.
>
> Let's take some examples from Australian universities of what one can learn
> from the New Humanities:
>
> At the University of Melbourne one can study a unit entitled "Contemporary
> Culture and Everyday Life", which "introduces students to concepts such as
> hegemony, ideology and culture, in order to provide intellectual frameworks
> for the reading of diverse cultural sites such as the family home and
> practices (shopping, fandom)".
>
> At the ANU in "Reading Popular Culture: An Introduction to Cultural Studies"
> one is able to study "how objects such as the Walkman, the Holden and the
> Barbie doll have been represented in advertising and in product promotions".
>
> At UWA in a unit entitled "Sex, Bodies, Spaces: Gender and Pop Culture" the
> question is asked: "How can the practices of everyday life be interrogated to
> yield insights about the relationships between the body, gendered identities
> and prevailing cultural 'norms'?"
>
> One must truly wonder how a person who had spent some three or even four
> years studying Barbie dolls, shopping malls and gendered identities would
> measure up to Badham's ideal of culture. Would they be "temperate in opinion,
> temperate in measures, temperate in demeanour"? Given the opportunity, what
> sort of constitution would they be able to write for this country?
>
> Gregory Melleuish is associate professor of history and politics at
> University of Wollongong. This is an extract from his address to a Quadrant
> dinner on Wednesday.
>
>
> © The Australian
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 12:00:42 +1000
> From: Danny Butt <db at dannybutt.net>
> Subject: Re: [csaa-forum] But wait, there's more
> To: csaa-forum <csaa-forum at lists.cdu.edu.au>
> Message-ID: <BE46156A.20831%db at dannybutt.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain;       charset="ISO-8859-1"
>
> Melissa, I agree with most of your interventions on this list but frankly, I
> couldn't care less about the Australian (or it's NZ nationalist equivalent,
> the Sunday Star Times), and their routine white power diatribes. When I was
> growing up, I read it every week for a decade. What I wouldn't give to have
> traded that time for reading articles from Subcomandante Marcos.
>
> There are 295,629 copies of the Weekend Australian, in a nation of 20
> million people. Even though The Australian calls themselves the newspaper of
> the nation, I think it's worth remembering that circulation figure and
> trying to put a community of readers next to it. Imagine them all at a
> barbeque. Pretty scary isn't it? That's who's listening. If they don't
> listen to Graeme Turner and Elspeth Probyn, are they going to listen to any
> of us? They won't even look at us!
>
> What it seems is more needed to me - and what places like this list work
> toward, thanks! - is build a sense of shared purpose among those working
> toward a broad set of progressive ideals (with significant internal
> differences) that characterise cultural studies and related disciplines. I
> don't think that's primarily going to happen through the struggle against
> our representation in the Weekend Australian, a) due to the dynamics of
> recognition Fanon outlined clearly; b) to bring our major support base
> (students) into the mix, we first need to convince them to read the
> Australian, and my classroom experience suggests they don't; and c) we
> direct our attention toward representations rather than building
> conversations with each other.
>
> It kind of bugs me that this list spends so much time on these issues. It's
> a very reactive position, one that creates a sense of siege and isolation,
> and directs energy toward benefits that I see as being not particularly high
> or tangible for young academics/graduates. I think there's an important link
> to the "policy moment" debate in CS here, and some lessons to be taken from
> it. For academics, responding to The Australian "feels like" a practical
> intervention, i.e. it is outside the academy, but it is, like policy, an
> environment where the *actual* impact is very hard to assess, and it's
> within a genre that remains deeply disconnected from the bulk of our
> potential political support base.
>
> That's not saying no-one should bother, I just think a better role for we
> youngsters is to be prototyping new ways of working together, and not
> lamenting that the old fogies (or young fogies :7) don't understand.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Danny
>
>
> --
> http://www.dannybutt.net <http://www.dannybutt.net>
> http://weblog.dannybutt.net <http://weblog.dannybutt.net>   <<-- new!
>
> #place: location, cultural politics, and social technologies:
> http://www.place.net.nz <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 2/25/05 9:32 PM, "Dr Melissa GREGG" <m.gregg at uq.edu.au> wrote:
>
> > For those who missed it, especially our international readers, this piece
> ran
> > in The Australian today. I would really like to know people's thoughts on
> it.
> > I keep thinking, 'Why now? Who is listening anymore?' But I'm not sure it's
> > exactly the same alarmism of an earlier moment in cultural studies'
> > institutionalisation/emergence. Will people on this list be ignoring it?
> (and
> > I don't just mean the professors who keep having to take the blows for us,
> I
> > also mean postgrads and ECRs. Many younger academics have been trained in
> the
> > 'New Humanities' from day one, and I guess that means we've never known
> 'hard
> > work' or 'rigour'!) Is it time for a new generation of cult stud graduates
> to
> > start talking back to this tiresome critique?
> >
> >
> > Gregory Melleuish: Out with Thucydides, in with the Barbie dolls
> >
> > 25feb05
> >
> > IN the late 19th century Charles Badham, professor of classics at the
> > University of Sydney, argued that the university man trained in the
> techniques
> > of a liberal education would possess a clear consciousness, "full of
> > reverence, refinement and clear-headedness ... by the very conditions of
> his
> > discipline temperate in opinion, temperate in measures, temperate in
> > demeanour".
> >
> > He advocated culture, "the thought of our permanent humanity and of the
> > ineffaceable identity between the soul of the past and the soul of the
> > present", as the ideal to guide the Australian colonists and save them from
> > the superficiality and charlatanism of the modern age.
> > Now, compare this with the way in which proponents of cultural studies -
> the
> > New Humanities - describe the role of their discipline: Culture is a
> > "contested and conflictual set of practices of representation bound up with
> > the processes of formation and re-formation of social groups". The contrast
> > between the two ideals of culture could not be starker.
> >
> > Alas, the New Humanities are now in the ascendancy. Last year, the
> Australian
> > Academy of the Humanities elected Graeme Turner, a well-known cultural
> studies
> > practitioner, as its president. The executive of the academy, moreover, is
> > dominated by other figures from the world of the New Humanities: Elspeth
> > Probyn, Stuart Cunningham, Anne Freadman.
> >
> > The New Humanities are now firmly entrenched, in one form or another, in
> our
> > sandstone universities. Cultural studies is touted as something in which
> > Australian academe has a world-class reputation.
> >
> > Many people today think of arts as some sort of soft option. But
> traditionally
> > liberal education involved hard work in the shape of textual analysis and
> > emendation. It gave access to the best that had been written.
> >
> > The men who created the Australian commonwealth were largely products of
> this
> > liberal education. Edmund Barton was reputed to carry a copy of Thucydides
> > with him. Samuel Griffith published a translation of Dante.
> >
> > Traditional liberal education had both rigour and excellence. It also
> > encouraged humility as one encountered some of the greatest minds of
> > humankind. Thucydides or Shakespeare or Augustine have more to tell us
> about
> > the human condition than the superficial scribblings of yet another
> > denunciation of sexism and racism in Australia.
> >
> > Compare some of the key characteristics of cultural studies and the New
> > Humanities.
> >
> >
> > The focus is on popular culture and everyday life.
> >
> > You don't need to be able to read a language other than English.
> >
> > You don't need to know about any society other than your own.
> >
> > You don't need to know anything about any time except the present.
> >
> > You don't need to know anything about religion.
> >
> > You don't need to read any works that are more than 30 years old.
> > At a time when more and more Australians are engaging with an
> > internationalised world, the New Humanities would seem to lock people into
> a
> > very narrow and restricted view of the world.
> >
> > Let's take some examples from Australian universities of what one can learn
> > from the New Humanities:
> >
> > At the University of Melbourne one can study a unit entitled "Contemporary
> > Culture and Everyday Life", which "introduces students to concepts such as
> > hegemony, ideology and culture, in order to provide intellectual frameworks
> > for the reading of diverse cultural sites such as the family home and
> > practices (shopping, fandom)".
> >
> > At the ANU in "Reading Popular Culture: An Introduction to Cultural
> Studies"
> > one is able to study "how objects such as the Walkman, the Holden and the
> > Barbie doll have been represented in advertising and in product
> promotions".
> >
> > At UWA in a unit entitled "Sex, Bodies, Spaces: Gender and Pop Culture" the
> > question is asked: "How can the practices of everyday life be interrogated
> to
> > yield insights about the relationships between the body, gendered
> identities
> > and prevailing cultural 'norms'?"
> >
> > One must truly wonder how a person who had spent some three or even four
> years
> > studying Barbie dolls, shopping malls and gendered identities would measure
> up
> > to Badham's ideal of culture. Would they be "temperate in opinion,
> temperate
> > in measures, temperate in demeanour"? Given the opportunity, what sort of
> > constitution would they be able to write for this country?
> >
> > Gregory Melleuish is associate professor of history and politics at
> University
> > of Wollongong. This is an extract from his address to a Quadrant dinner on
> > Wednesday.
> >
> >
> > © The Australian
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________
> >
> > csaa-forum
> > discussion list of the cultural studies association of australasia
> >
> > www.csaa.asn.au
> >
> > change your subscription details at
> > http://lists.cdu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/csaa-forum
> <http://lists.cdu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/csaa-forum>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________
>
> csaa-forum
> discussion list of the cultural studies association of australasia
>
> www.csaa.asn.au
>
> change your subscription details at
> http://lists.cdu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/csaa-forum
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> End of csaa-forum Digest, Vol 10, Issue 15
> ******************************************
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 12:59:02 +1100
> From: Charles Fairchild <charles.fairchild at arts.usyd.edu.au>
> Subject: [csaa-forum] Re: but wait, it just keeps going on and on
> To: csaa-forum at lists.cdu.edu.au
> Message-ID: <1109469542.4221296670e44 at admin.arts.usyd.edu.au>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> I think it would be interesting for the more public amongst the cultural
> studies
> people to produce a public argument about the kinds of critiques rags like
> the
> Australian produce. The problem is, what forum could possibly be regarded as
> even remotely fair? The Aus. has a pretty explicit agenda: smash all
> opponents
> unreservedly. Would any counter argument that might even find space in such a
> canary-cage-ready publication receive anything that might ever resemble a
> fair
> hearing? The right is all for fairness and liberal education, when their
> compatriots are on the soapbox or at the lectern. After they are done
> bleating,
> they like to take their sturdy box or ear-splitting megaphone and go home.
> (Big
> babies.)
>
>
> --------------
> Dr Charles Fairchild
> Lecturer in Musicology
> Conservatorium of Music
> University of Sydney
> Sydney NSW 2006
> Australia
>
>
>
>
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> ------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________
>
> csaa-forum
> discussion list of the cultural studies association of australasia
>
> www.csaa.asn.au
>
> change your subscription details at
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