[csaa-forum] Cultural studies in Australia

[Simon During]

   Gosh! I feel bad about my post since I had no desire at all to say
anything that could risk Graeme¹s or anyone else¹s personal indignation.
What I was trying to do (obviously clumsily) was to contextualise the rather
reductive citation from my book that Mel originally put out on to the list
and which as Graeme rightly notes was polemical.  I was trying to say
(probably under the influence of CHED¹s Œhistory of theory¹ event for which
I have been working on the history of cultural studies) something like this:
³It seems to me that a wider range of approaches had visibility when
cultural studies first emerged in Australia than¹s the case now.² I
mentioned the names of some of those who were most prominent in early
Australian cultural studies in that context.

   But if I am wrong on one count (and, as Graeme hints, I may be wrong on
others too) and if Graeme (and if it comes to that John Hartley) are indeed,
or believe themselves to be, writing in what I called Œmore theoretical (or
philosophical), critical, politically engaged strands of the field¹ then I¹m
happy to take my remarks back.

   But let me try to make my point more clearly and, hopefully without
inviting further misunderstanding: what I meant is that (for what it¹s
worth) none of the original movers and shakers in the field in Australia who
still mainly work in cultural studies and still practice in Australia today
are working in quite the same academic genres or styles as, say, Judith
Butler, Gayatri Spivak, Andrew Ross, Lauren Berlant; David Halperin, Tricia
Rose or Brian Massumi or indeed are doing the kind of work that John Frow
and Meaghan Morris, say, were doing at the time.  Where¹s Marxism? Feminism?
French theory? For instance.

  Those modes still have many practitioners here in Australia obviously,
including widely-read ones but I would still say that people engaged in
these fields are not as visible as they might be, especially insofar as they
are not generally regarded as standing for Australian cultural studies qua
Australian.  (Maybe that¹s wrong? Maybe it looks different from overseas
than it does here?)

 (Bye the bye I don¹t mention Marx to trivialise radicalism: I for one think
that Marxism has a helluva lot to offer us: and would love to see a
recrudescence of Marxian cultural studies and cultural theory in Australia.)

  Anyway, more specifically, I hope that Graeme doesn¹t mind me saying that
I don¹t regard his work (and it¹s true I haven¹t yet read his latest book)
as marxist or as feminist or, if it comes to that, as post-structuralist, or
as queer theory, or as Foucauldian, or as much influenced by the more
philosophical kinds of postcolonial theory, etc.  Which, to say it again, is
not at all a complaint directed at him personally.  It would be strange if
it were intended as one:  I  don¹t do that kind of work myself.  But I want
to work in an environment where lots of other people do do such work, and
where some of those people have real institutional clout.

In fact I would suppose that if one is engaging politicians and senior
bureaucrats etc (as I know Graeme often is) then in that context it¹s harder
(but not impossible?) to write or talk in most of the modes I was thinking
of.   Certainly those modes are too academic and technical and sometimes I
assume too radical to be productive within exchanges of that kind.  Although
of course in another sense Œpolitically engaged¹ is exactly what you are
when you¹re dealing with politicians and Canberra bureaucrats.

(Another bye the bye: One of differences between academic life here and in
some other places is that representative senior academics here are (in all
of our interests) compelled to deal with governmental and
internal-university officials and even politicians who have a great deal of
quite direct control over us. That¹s likely one of the causes of the
phenomenon I am addressing.  I would urge my Australian colleagues to
remember or imagine a university system without external
bureaucratic/political controls (eg. Without performance indicators;
personal appraisals; departmental reviews; restructurings; promotion
committees; measurements of research productivity; the possibility of
autocracy in central administration, Ministers of Education controlling
policy that affects the workplace in quite immediate ways etc). Such systems
(admittedly rare) probably produce different kinds of work than systems,
like the Australian one, which are tightly controlled from the outside, with
relatively little autonomy for individuals or disciplines. Isn¹t that point
of establishing the controls to begin with?)

  It¹s clearly a mistake to mention proper names in these contexts I now
realise.   I did (and do) it in this ambiguously formal setting to give my
quite casual remarks concreteness and vividness.  And after all, in the end,
work is mainly done by particular individuals, and (although to a much
lesser degree) power is held by particular individuals too.

  AnywaysŠ.you live and you learn.. and let me say again I wasn¹t trying to
critique Graeme and John personally or even intellectually by claiming that
specific kinds of cultural studies may be hegemonic or normative or at least
most visible here and mentioning them (in passing and assuming agreement) as
standard bearers for those kinds.

But that is not, of course, to deny that I personally think it would be good
if more ambitious theory and more radical position-taking were associated
more routinely with Australian cultural studies these days‹at least as
Australian cultural studies look from overseas, where the range of prominent
work seems wider.  And as I implied in the section of Cultural Studies a
critical introduction that Mel took the quote from, the reasons that
Australian cultural studies have the particular weightings of content, and
the particular image that they do (if they do), are probably largely
structural, and more specifically are related 1) to quite recent (laudable)
governmental efforts to extend tertiary education further across the
population; and 2) to (not so laudable but understandable)
funding/bureaucratic mechanisms designed to maximise the university-sector¹s
contributions to national productivity.

Simon

On 8/28/05 12:51 AM, "Professor Graeme Turner" <graeme.turner at uq.edu.au>
wrote:

> I wasn't planning to get involved in this; I regard Simon's dismissive
> comment about Australian cultural studies as a polemical move, really,
> more to do with positioning than analysis. For what it's worth, it is
> not an entirely new account and I have never accepted it as completely
> convincing -- even during the mid-1990s, which is when it was first
> articulated and when there was more reason to assent to it than now.
> 
> But, reading Simon's own post has dragged me in. I am afraid I can't
> let this personal comment go without responding:
> 
> 'neither of them [Hartley and Turner] (I think they'd agree)are
> involved in the more theoretical...critical, politically engaged
> strands of the rield'.
> 
> Que? Makes me wonder, just what I have been doing lately? For the
> record, (and I'm sure John Hartley can answer for himself) I most
> emphatically (perhaps even indignantly) do not agree. Indeed, I think
> the last four or five years have been among my most critically and
> politically engaged. Maybe because much of that engagement has been
> face to face with politicians, bureaucrats etc -- in addition to the
> normal academic channels--it doesn't count. Maybe Simon just hasn't
> read any of my published work in recent years; personally
> disappointing, but not necessarily surprising. Whatever the reason,
> this characterisation of my activities in our field is simply wrong.
> Graeme Turner
>  
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Simon During <simond at jhu.edu>
> Date: Saturday, August 27, 2005 8:30 am
> Subject: [csaa-forum] Cultural studies in Australia
>> Hi y'all:
>> Could I just say that as far as I am concerned it's great to see
>> that quote
>> from my book serve as the beginning of a discussion about creative
>> industries and cultural studies etc.. But if anyone wants to get a
>> realsense of where it stands on issues like populism,  Hartley,
>> creativeindustries, the cultural studies discipline etc they
>> probably need to read
>> the whole thing through. And I don't think people will find it
>> coming from
>> where they'd anticipate if all they've read is those few sentences
>> (whichisn't all it gets to say about cultural studies in Australia
>> either?andwhile I am at it let me give a plug here and now for The
>> Cultural Studies
>> Review which obviously belongs to a whole other world than the one
>> gesturedat in those remarks.).  By the by: Cultural Studies: a
>> critical introduction
>> was written as a textbook, not an introductory one, with a very
>> strict word
>> limit and it's a bit unusual in that it doesn't so much try
>> neutrally to
>> explain stuff to students and readers as to engage them head on.
>> But maybe I can try to move the discussion forward in a slightly
>> differentdirection.  I remember going to the first CSAA meeting, I
>> don't recall the
>> exact year (1991?) but I think it was held at the campus of
>> Western Sydney.
>> Pretty much everyone who had been involved in getting the field
>> going in
>> Australia were there, and at its centre was the group of people
>> who had done
>> most to get it off the ground and who were recognised as having
>> made the
>> strongest intellectual contributions up to that point: people like
>> MeaghanMorris, John Frow, Tony Bennett, Graeme Turner, Stephen
>> Muecke, John
>> Hartley....  And as soon as I recall that event I begin to wonder
>> about what
>> has happened to all those people and about the kinds of work they
>> do now. Am
>> I right in saying that, while all are still academically active,
>> only John
>> and Graeme work today in anything like mainstream cultural studies in
>> Australia, and neither of them (I think they'd agree) are involved
>> in the
>> more theoretical (or philisophical), critical, politically engaged
>> strandsof the field?  Does that matter?  Is it a sign of anything?
>>  If so, what's
>> it a sign of?
>> Simon
>> 
>> 
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