[csaa-forum] re: more and more --- my own response to Melleuish

[Jonathan MARSHALL]

Dear colleagues
 
I see debate has moved on, as ever, and we now appear to be into the longue duree of the question of whether, or to what extent, Cultural Studies is "left-wing". Ive already stated my position on this issue, which is: yes, overall, it tends to be, no, however, it is by no means exclusively, and finally, in any case the diversity of "the Left" from Baudrillard to Hegel makes for some pretty fiesty internal divisions.
 
However, after railing in these pages at the suggestion that Melleuish and others in The Australian can or should be ignored, I decided to put my type where my mouth was and send off the following letter to The Australian, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. Chances of publication unsolicited pieces are slim, even in the letters section, but better to try.
 
For the interest of subscribers, I reproduce my (necessarily short) piece here. Please feel free to distribute it to any and all (provided my name and affiliation is acknowledged! ;) ).
 
Cheers
Jonathan Marshall
 

A RESPONSE TO PROFESSOR GREGORY MELLEUISH ON "THE NEW HUMANITIES"

 

For those of us working in the contemporary university, Professor Gregory Melleuish's speech "Out With Thucydides, In With The Barbie Dolls" --- published in The Australian 25 February 2005 --- was only novel in the remarkably retrograde, out-of-date model of Humanities at the university which Melleuish proposed. Melleuish's language and terms of references summoned up an image of wooden-panelled club rooms, overflowing with heavy, ancient tomes filled with words of Greek or Latin, perused over by the sober patrician masters of this country whose vision was to pacify and control all they saw. Melleuish cites as his ideal the University of Sydney's 19th century professor of Classics, Charles Badham. The latter claimed that an education in the Classics would create students who were "full of reverence, refinement and clear-headedness ... by the very conditions of his discipline temperate in opinion, temperate in measures, temperate in demeanour." These graduates would be in tune with "the thought of our permanent humanity and of the ineffaceable identity between the soul of the past and the soul of the present."

 

It is with something of a shock that one discovers Melleuish would like to see these values re-established within contemporary education in the Humanities as a whole. One wonders if reverence, refinement and temperance are really the faculties which one would like to see university graduates possess today. Such qualities would not leave graduates well equipped to respond to the dynamism of contemporary culture, politics and business. Even a cursory analysis of past or recent history would moreover seem to suggest that anyone who might presume to lecture others about the universally "ineffaceable" and commonly shared "human soul" must be extremely cautious. In a world in which different groups, cultures, peoples, races, ethnicities, religions, nations, languages and ideas come into increasing contact with each other, a recognition and accommodation of difference would seem to be imperative now. Those very few early Australian settlers and officials who did attempt to forge such a rapport with the indigenous people of this nation, all those years ago, were soon swept aside by the majority, arguing that the "human soul" of "the native" was underdeveloped and so could only be improved by assimilation or death. This is scarcely, one hopes, an application of Classical rhetoric which Melleuish would like to see revived.

 

Melleuish quotes an unattributed description of a Cultural Studies course at an Australian university, which he does not even bother to attack, suggesting that it is so manifestly incorrect that it deserves no further attention. Culture is here constructed as a "contested and conflictual set of practices of representation bound up with the processes of formation and re-formation of social groups." The idea of culture and politics as a kind of battle is clearly alarming to Melleuish. Nevertheless, within the 19th century academy which he cites as his ideal, this was perhaps even more clearly the case than it is today. The Liberal founding fathers educated at such institutions were more convinced than most that they were born to rule, and that part of this task involved keeping the uneducated, unruly masses at bay. Whitlam's educational reforms may have somewhat punctured these old patterns, but there is no doubt that Australia remains a country divided along class lines both within and without the academy itself. For many of us less fortunate than Melleuish and Badham, life and cultural activity remain a struggle.

Cultural Studies and the New Humanities are therefore designed first and foremost to foster critical thinking in students, to not accept as given many of Melleuish's cherished ideals. What is beauty, what is politics, what constitutes political action, how do political and geopolitical influences become manifest in everyday transactions and objects, and so on? Perhaps Melleuish is most concerned that, rather than creating a new generation of conservative social yes-people, this current approach to the disciplines is far more likely to create graduates who cast a critical eye over all they perceive and whom lobby for social change in those fields where they find injustice. The role models for these graduates are therefore far less likely to be the senior conservative politicians of old whom Melleuish names, such as Edmund Barton or Samuel Griffith, but rather those who attempted to bring about social change in Australia: 19th century First Wave Feminists Rose Scott, Catherine Spence and others, Aboriginal resistance fighter Yagan, the leader of Australia's Freedom Rides Charlie Perkins, early socialist agitators such as Billy Hughes and George Black (both of spent considerable time prior to office lobbying for the validity of workers' concerns in parliament), cultural figures like Germaine Greer and (the younger) Robert Hughes, and so on. The New Humanities, while not unconcerned with the task of passing on the great historic works of literature and arts to new generations, is more concerned with casting a critical eye over the present. As such, it is far more engaged with the realpolitik of today.

 

Melleuish's other main objection appears to be the loss of some kind of universally recognised cultural material which one could expect all Humanities students to have studied. As a historian, I too am sometimes concerned that the historical background which I personally find essential in making any critical judgement is not necessarily factored in to all Humanities courses. This is however an issue about the place of one's favourite discipline --- in my case history --- within the university, and not some kind of apocalyptic indicator of the death of Humanities as a whole. Why, necessarily, should an English Literature major be familiar with the history of Indian colonialism? Indeed, in this regard, the newer approaches to Literary criticism would suggest that this is precisely the kind of information which should inform the discipline. Where history is not brought into the English classroom, it is certainly not for want of prompting by New Humanities scholars such as Edward Said or Gayatri Spivak. Most of Melleuish's other mewling objections are similarly misdirected. He claims that students in the New Humanities do not "need to be able to read a language other than English ... to know about any society other than your own," or "any time except the present," nor to know "anything about religion." This clearly depends on which of the many subjects within the New Humanities one is studying. Many cultural analyses of contemporary Australian Muslim identity currently offered at the University obviously require a knowledge of religion, and other exceptions to Melleuish's spurious claims abound. A colleague of mine is studying the way in which online gaming helps to create a kind of diaspora identity within Asia Pacific region, a project which violates all of the rules listed above yet which lies slap bang within the centre of the rather rubbery new disciplinary creation of Cultural Studies and the New Humanities.

 

The manifestly dated and poorly structured nature of Melleuish's critique can only lead one to conclude that, to paraphrase an author whom Melleuish himself would assuredly approve of, the author doth protest too much, methinks --- much too much.

 

 --- Jonathan Marshall, PhD, MA

 

Research Fellow

WA Academy of Performing Arts

Edith Cowan University

2 Bradford St

Mt Lawley, WA 6050

email: jonathan.marshall at ecu.edu.au