[csaa-forum] Cultural studies in Australia

Mon Aug 29 08:46:41 CST 2005

I've only just rejoined this list, so forgive me if I have failed to 
grasp the full pathos. So it seems that Simon, from the heart of the 
razor-wire Empire, is telling us we are not political enough, which 
means doing old theory or having Spivak in the office next door.  
Graeme and John are at least fortunate to have been recognised from 
Olympus as visible enough to attract the During scorn. But, while not 
even apologising for the insults to the hard work and achievement of 
these guys, he has dug himself even deeper into blind arrogance by 
telling us what wonderful conditions he has over at JHU. As for the 
rest of us from that original list he cited, well, we may as well be 
retired or dead.  As if that was it for Oz cultural studies! During 
would see what a terrific bunch of earlier career people we have if he 
dropped in on CSAA in Sydney in November.  I am not going to be 
indignant and tell him how some of our scholarship or theory might have 
made efforts to go beyond the familiar Northern hemisphere theoretical 
canon, he can find out for himself if he is interested.
Stephen Muecke

On 29/08/2005, at 7:06 AM, Simon During wrote:

>    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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Stephen Muecke
Humanities and Social Sciences
University of Technology, Sydney
Box 123 BROADWAY NSW 2007 Australia
Ph: +61 2 9514 1960
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