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By Bob Gould
Over the past 15 years the rise of postmodernism and cultural
theory
has had a devastating impact on the intellectual life of the left in
Australia. It has drastically affected the humanities, it has
contributed substantially, along with some other factors, to the
elimination of narrative Australian history as an academic discipline
in some universities.
The effect of this sweeping intellectual fashion in the humanities
can only be compared with the impact of the cane toad on Australian
fauna and the prickly pear on the flora. Like those two pests, the high
theory of postmodernism tends to wipe out everything else in the
cultural territory through which it sweeps.
Discussion of this phenomenon presents certain difficulties to
me at
a personal level. Several of the high priests and priestesses of the
new clerisy are old personal friends, or at least, not particularly
unfriendly old acquaintances. I have witnessed this bizarre beast grow
and grow, right from its first landing in Australia via the works of
Althusser, Foucault, Thomas Szas and Roland Barthes in the early 1970s.
For my sins, I sold in my bookshop hundreds of copies of books
by
the above, in the old Paladin and Verso editions, when they were the
new and coming thing. They of course competed in those days with such
writers as Hunter S. Thompson, Carlos Castenada and Zen and the Art
of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.
Surveying the cultural devastation caused by the
structuralists and
postmodernists, I now believe that, by comparison, Hunter S. Thompson,
Castenada and Robert Pirsig, who, after all, don't claim that their
writings are some sort of science or history, are much less damaging to
the cultural landscape than the high theorists. Castenada et al at
least have some virtue as entertainers if your tastes lie in their
direction.
Witnessing the devastation of the intellectual terrain by
postmodernism, structuralism and the high theory, and having played a
part in the wide distribution of many of these texts when they first
hit our shores, I now feel a bit like the people must have felt later,
who, with the best of intentions, introduced the rabbit or the cane
toad to Australia.
I remember when Andre Frankovits (now the companion of Meaghan
Morris) who, with his mate Arthur King, had been battling along making
hammocks for a living, got the quite smart idea that he would reprint
in Australia the works of Baudrillard, one of the early structuralists,
partly as a business venture and partly because he agreed with the
works intellectually.
I never heard that Andre made much out of the books as a
business
venture He priced them a bit too cheaply. But they certainly made a
considerable impact in academe, and other publishers came along
publishing the same and similar books at far higher prices, as the
postmodernist intellectual fashion developed.
I have been a bit amazed to observe the rise and rise of my
old
acquaintance Meaghan Morris, as the Pirate Queen of the new high
theory. When I knew Meaghan a bit in the early 1970s, she was a
warm-hearted, affectionate, rather insecure, slightly neurotic person
(as we all were to some degree in those days), already a considerable
polymath, with an enormous but then rather undirected knowledge of
Western literature.
I have been positively awed by her rise to become the
Australian
megastar of cultural theory of this whole discipline, which has
devastated the humanities rather more effectively than the Nato bombs
devastated the Serbian military machine.
At a human level, I'm impressed and pleased by the worldly
success
of an old friend, but intellectually my reaction is a good deal more
ambivalent. I find Meaghan Morris's writings witty and entertaining
and, thank heaven, a good deal less obscure than most practitioners of
postmodernism, but even in her work I am irritated by the reduction of
many questions that require social and human activity and intervention,
to witty abstractions.
Most Australian postmodernists and high theorists are far more
obscure and pretentious than Morris, and I suspect the popularity of
Morris's work rests in the fact that she at least can be understood
most of the time.
In a similar way I have known John Docker, another significant
Australian postmodernist, and his wife, Anne Curthoys, a respected
academic historian turned fellow traveller with postmodernism, most of
my adult life. They are old friends. It is a bit cruel to be joining a
crusade against a cultural fashion partly created by old friends and
acquaintances, but I suppose that is one of the hazards of political
and cultural life.
Keith Windschuttle and Alan Sokal
In intellectual activity it's usually fraudulent to lay claim
to too
much individuality. In developing ideas we always stand on the
shoulders of those who have gone before us, and we are always
influenced by the books we have read.
We usually proceed, if we've got any common sense, by way of
study,
analysis and, ultimately, criticism of other people's ideas, if we come
to disagree with them or grow beyond them. Knowledge is a spiral. If we
don't proceed like this and claim too much special individual
intellectual discovery, we are usually either (1) plagiarising others
without acknowledgement or (2) mad.
In this spirit, I hereby introduce into this narrative the two
major
recent introductions to and critiques of postmodernism and high theory.
They are both, in their own special ways, indispensible for any serious
person who wants to come to grips with this cultural phenomenon.
The first book is The Killing of History by Australian
Keith Windschuttle. This book is extremely valuable because:
(a) it provides an extremely lucid and understandable
introduction to the ideas of the high theorists. In fact, it makes many
things that are almost unintelligible, intelligible to the reasonably
educated reader, no mean feat in this territory.
(b) It provides a very effective deconstruction of these
ideas
from the standpoint of defending the Western cultural tradition, the
enlightenment, and the narrative historical sciences.
I disagree profoundly with Windschuttle's rejection of
Marxism in
the social sciences. In retrospect, his work on this book and the book
itself, took place during a major transition in Windschuttle's outlook.
He has now shifted over totally and spectacularly to the
neoconservative right in politics. (One wonders whether Windschuttle
would now repudiate the explicit defence of the Enlightenment in The
Killing of History, from his new, ultra-neoconservative standpoint.)
Nevertheless, despite his subsequent transition to
neoconservatism, The Killing of History
remains a unique and important book. Its defence of the enlightenment
and narrative history is persuasive and extremely useful. There is no
book quite like Windschuttle's (which has just been reprinted in the
United States) in rebutting the havoc wreaked by postmodernism in the
historical and social sciences.
The second book is Intellectual Impostures by Alan
Sokal and
Jean Bricmont. This is the book that stems from the magnificent,
seriously intended deception perpetrated by Sokal on the postmodernist
journal Social Text in 1996. Sokal, a physicist, submitted to Social
Text a 35-page article, titled Transgressing the boundaries:
Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity.
This piece included many of the most extravagant and mad reworkings of
the physical sciences perpetrated by postmodernists, in one article,
with prodigious authentic footnotes at the end.
One of the conclusions of the article was that material
reality doesn't really exist! Nevertheless, Social Text
did not wake up to the spoof aspect and published the piece seriously
as a contribution to intellectual discourse. The Sokal/Bricmont book is
mainly concerned with the madness of cultural theory applied to the
natural sciences and mathematics. Like Windschuttle, they initially
summarise the views of the high theorists that they intend to critique.
They then reproduce their Social Text article as a
kind of
demolition job, and draw out the lesson that the uncritical acceptance
by the journal of their reductio ad absurdum article underlines the
potential damage to the natural sciences from indiscriminate
application of cultural "theory". One would be very hesitant to fly in
an aircraft built or designed by a postmodernist.
In their epilogue, in summarising their critique of the high
theory
applied to the natural sciences, some of their paragraph headings are,
in themselves, an argument, and almost don't need further explanation,
although they do go on to explain them usefully. Sample headings (to
provide something of the flavour of this book) are:
It's a good idea to know what one is talking about.
Not all that is obscure is necessarily profound.
Science is not a "text".
Be wary of argument from authority.
Specific scepticism should not be confused with radical
scepticism.
Ambiguity as subterfuge.
Neglect of the empirical.
Both the above books, one about postmodernism and the social
sciences and history, and the other about postmodernism and the natural
sciences and mathematics, are necessary reading for anyone who has been
bamboozled, bewildered or infuriated by the high theory, and are very
useful tools for coming to grips with the curious, Alice-in-Wonderland
territory that much academic life has become in recent times.
The devastating effect of postmodernism, in combination
with other
developments, on the humanities, particularly the academic discipline
of history
For the past few years I have conducted a bit of a dialogue
in my
shop whenever people have bought or asked for books on postmodernism or
the high theory, who are obviously undergraduates with a list from
institutions like UTS, the Sydney Fine Arts Department or the
University of Western Sydney.
I don't claim that my research methods behind the counter
are
particularly scientific, but I have formed a very strong impression,
after cautiously starting a discussion with a number of undergraduates,
that a very large number of them hate the high theory that is rammed
down their necks in these institutions. They are thoroughly bewildered
by it, unless they already have the kind of self-confidence that the
products of certain elite private schools have, who often seem to think
that they will soon master the strange new language.
The rest, the majority, thoroughly resent it, particularly,
it is my
impression, second-generation members of migrant families. One
byproduct of this situation, it seems to me, is to sharpen the already
existing gap between the high culture and the popular culture, and
between education in the high culture and "practical education for a
job".
I have encountered many undergraduates in this situation who
have
commenced a humanities course with a vague idea that they will learn
something of use to them, found the high theory impenetrable and its
practitioners condescending, and bounced away to concentrate solely on
some course with perceived utility, such as real estate, hospitality,
engineering, nursing, accountancy or economics.
As one young Greek student said to me: "I went to UTS. My
parents
sweated to help me go to university. My parents are old communists and
I am interested in politics and history myself, and my parents said
that I should do some history before I studied real estate, which I
thought was a good idea. In the humanities stream at UTS they didn't
teach me much history but they rammed all this incomprehensible
cultural theory down my throat. I dropped the humanities, but went on
with accounting."
I have met many working-class undergraduates who have had
some
variant of this experience. They resent both the waste of time and the
cultural condescention they encounter in the high theory and its
practitioners.
The Sydney University arts handbook
Anyone interested in history as a discipline is fighting a
bit of a
rearguard action at the moment. As the saying goes, "Those who don't
study history are bound to repeat it." History is suffering in a
devastating way at high school level from past changes in the
curriculum. These days not even 20 per cent of students do history for
the HSC. This compares with 60 per cent in the 1950s when I did the
Leaving.
The history we studied was pretty conservative but,
nevertheless, it
was there including,at the Catholic college I went to, the cultural
tension between British imperial history that we studied for the
external exams and the Irish Catholic history we were taught during
religion lessons.
In the 1960s and the 1970s the dramatic radicalisation among
students and the young proceeded by way of sharp political criticism of
the conservative history that we had been taught. But at least we knew
that there had been a French Revolution, a Russian Revolution, an
Easter Rising in Ireland, a Eureka Stockade, a Robertson's Land Act in
Australia, and so on.
We had quite a clear idea who Lenin, Mussolini, Roosevelt,
Churchill, Hitler, John Curtin, Jack Lang, Peter Lalor and Billy Hughes
were. In the 1960s and the 1970s there was a considerable battle to
introduce a more detailed study of Australian history and also a study
of the history of revolutions and social upheavals in the 20th century,
in schools and universities.
However, along came certain barbarians and under the guise
of making
the curriculum more "relevant", history as a discipline was
dramatically downgraded in high school curriculums, to the point where
last year, in the HSC, less than 20 per cent studied history in NSW.
The Sydney University History Department was in the past pretty right
wing, with a heavy concentration on British imperial history, European
history and religious history, dictated by the conservative and
evangelical Protestant beliefs of a number of the senior staff.
In the 1970s Australian history gradually got a bit of a
toehold in
this department, and in the 1980s quite a lot of Australian history and
other social history was taught. In the early 1990s the history
students even published a magazine for a couple of years, which had a
considerable Australian history content, along with other material.
Well, not any more. In relation to Australian history, the
cane toad
function of cultural history has been devastating in the Sydney
University history department. The old European history is still there,
and the British history is still there, but the narrative Australian
history has almost disappeared.
If you take the 1999 Arts Handbook listing for history as an
example, you find 37 discrete units of study. Only five of these in any
way pertain to Australia, and these five are mainly courses in cultural
theory. They are Australia to 1888, a course mainly devoted to
questions of cultural identity, and that ends in 1888 anyway, even, for
instance, before the formation of the Labor Party. There are four other
courses. called Living Memory, Maps and Dreams, Australian
Cultural History and Issues in Australian Cultural History,
which the description in the Arts Handbook suggests are overwhelmingly
courses in "cultural theory" applied to Australia. Very little
straightforward narrative Australian history at all. Very little
political history, and very little social history outside the cultural
framework. Very little urban history. Very little place for a text like
Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore or Manning Clark's works. Very
little on the gold rushes, blackbirding, "the legend of the 1890s", the
Eureka Stockade, or White Australia. No Billy Hughes, Daniel Mannix and
the battle over conscription, no Jack Lang.
The sweep of Australian history completely dominated by
discretely
conceived cultural history which, in practice, often becomes the
cultural history of the British ruling class translated to Australia.
The Sydney University History Department is an extreme case,
but the
situation is similar in the history departments of a lot of other
universities.
Glancing through the Arts Handbook, I was fascinated to
discover the resilience of the discipline called Jewish
Civilization, Thought and Culture.
This discipline substantially outweighs Australian history, and
includes 19 discrete units of study, and is an utterly comprehensive
coverage of Jewish history and culture. Many of the courses are given
by the same lecturer, Suzanne Rutland. She is obviously an enthusiast
and has fought hard for her discipline and has succeeded in preserving
it against the poisonous combination of economic rationalism and
postmodernism. Good luck to her! It's only a pity that there could not
have been such an effective enthusiast for Australian history as
Suzanne Rutland, somewhere in the History Department.
English departments, fine arts departments, journalism,
media and
communications and history departments, the sectors most devastated by
postmodernism. The effect of the high theory on literary magazines and
art magazines
The rise of postmodernism in Australia has coincided in
universities
with the economic rationalism of the 1990s. The combined effect of both
things has been devastating for the humanities in many ways. Many
courses have been cut back in many universities and the cuts have often
been concentrated in the less fashionable, more traditional aspects of
the above disciplines.
The postmodern sections of the courses, being currently
fashionable
have often been cut back less. One effect of these circumstances has
been to sharpen the traditional differences between the "two cultures"
one devoted to "practical education for life and production", and the
other increasingly rarefied and removed from the real material world.
The split between the "two cultures", never a good thing, has
become much worse in the 1990s. In a recent article in the conservative
journal, Quadrant, Windschuttle, who is a former journalist and
teacher of journalism, dissects in a meticulous way the devastating
impact of postmodernism in media studies on practical training for
journalism. He asserts that many media studies and journalism courses
teach students to deconstruct all written or oral statements at length,
but teach them almost no practical journalism.
As a result, journalistic employers are reluctant to employ
graduates from certain journalism courses, not because of their
political opinions, but because they come out of the courses without a
clue about how to research or put together a story. Many editors and
working journalists echo Windschuttle's criticism of the impact of
"deconstruction" on journalism schools.
English departments abound with courses in cultural theory
but at
least here the courses often have some relevance, because most cultural
theory is essentially a literary discourse anyway, and quite a lot of
it is relevant to literary theory and history.
Even in English departments, however, the dominance of this
idiom,
with all its associated ferocious obscurity and ambiguity of language,
tends to have the cane toad effect of crowding out everything else.
Fine arts departments are notoriously overwhelmed by the dense cultural
theory idiom and here, again, the sheer obscurity of the language used
and the whole discourse narrows down the potential students to a very
small group of already well-educated super-sophisticates.
I've discussed the devastating impact on history departments
above.
In the whole area of the humanities the net effect is to deepen and
sharpen the already existing split between the "two cultures" and to
leave the humanities as the preserve of an increasingly rarefied
intellectual elite who can master the obscurity of the current idiom,
and can flourish in it.
One needs only to glance through such literary magazines as Meanjin
or the deceased Scripsi,
or such journals as the magazine of the Sydney University Fine Arts
Department, to appreciate how the banal obscurity of the new wave of
cultural theory has narrowed the audience for these magazines.
One effect of the narrowing of the audience is eventually
that even,
despite subsidies, sometimes such magazines go out of business, as Scripsi
did, because almost no one is willing to spend actual money on them.
The rise and decline of the cultural studies, postmodernism
book boom
I am a mainly secondhand, remainder and specialist
bookseller,
although I sell some new books as well. I'm also a rather determined
book collector, more of books for reading and intellectual inquiry than
books as objects, and I go to many book fairs and other booksellers'
sales with a curious combination of incentives: the pursuit of saleable
books for my shop, combined with collecting books for myself,
particularly in the spheres that I am currently researching, such as
the areas covered by this essay.
I have a good deal of professional respect for the mainly
new
bookseller, Gleebooks. In the 1980s it, in part, established its very
successful business by catching the wave of the new high theory and
catering to it in a very professional way, and I am sometimes even a
little envious, from a business point of view, of the energetic and
successful way it did this.
Gleebooks even sponsors each year a prize for new books in
cultural
theory and manage to keep a straight face while sponsoring this prize.
(I think I would have difficulty keeping the straight face, which is
perhaps one of the reasons why I'm not nearly as successful in business
as Gleebooks.)
I have the utmost respect for their professionalism. For
years I
have frequented their six-monthly sales, where I often also buy books
for myself, which I would not buy anywhere at top money, but at their
very real sale prices, I feel I can afford. I have acquired many
useful, obscure, initially very expensive books of social history,
Australian history and so on, this way.
Over the last couple of years it has become apparent from
Gleebooks
sales that an enormous sales resistance has developed to books on
cultural theory at the conventionally high prices that publishers set.
Gleebooks makes a very creditable effort to carry at least one copy of
everything in the avalanche of books of cultural theory that have come
out in the last few years. But over the last couple of years, the very
large number of such books that end up in their sales, indicates to me
a fairly rapid decline in the actual purchase of these books for
reading purposes.
Even at Gleebooks' quite ruthless sale prices, a lot of the
books
left at the end of their sales seem to me to be high-priced titles of
cultural theory. The same books frequently turn up in the next sale.
This phenomenon suggests to me that the academic fashion for
postmodernism may have reached its peak and be declining a little.
More obviously, many people in the areas of academic life
dominated
by this idiom play the game, so to speak, but I doubt whether they
actually spend much real money any more on the new books in the field,
other than the ones they really have to buy.
The new epoch of the internet and photocopying seem to
satisfy much
of the academic market in this sphere, leading to an increasing spiral
of very high retail prices and consequent overproduction in the
postmodern literature-publishing industry. The Australian postmodernist
publishing industry has for a number of years been dominated by Allen
and Unwin, but in the last couple of years Pluto Press has bustled into
the field with eight or 10 titles.
I have a feeling Pluto has left their run a bit late, but
who knows.
I'll be fascinated to see if the new Pluto books turn up as remainders
quickly or not! In my experience, in my bookshop, undergraduates
frequently ask for the secondhand philosophy section and they are
looking for cheap copies of the big-name postmodernists - the eight or
10 of them, and classical writers like Nietzsche, who bear on the field.
The last thing they want to do is pay top money for these
books,
even the big names. No bookseller can ever have enough inexpensive
secondhand copies of the big-name postmodernists. In my experience
there is very little real market for the secondary figures and academic
commentators in the cultural studies area. For instance, secondhand
cultural studies journals don't sell well at all.
It's my experience that most people buy books most of the
time for
immediate gratification and entertainment, and I know very few people
who find cultural studies either gratifying or particularly
entertaining at the level of immediate personal reading.
Cultural theory and the real world. The work of Wark
Recently the cultural studies area has incorporated a lot of
rhetoric about cyberspace and a whole idiom has emerged that celebrates
the ludicrous abstractness of much cultural theory by identifying this
theory with the abstractness of cyberspace and the web. Ho, hum!
One well-known postmodernist commentator, an academic who
writes a lot in The Australian,
delights everyone by his extraordinary real name, McKenzie Wark. This
bloke is the doyen of postmodernist theorists and babblers about
cyberspace. He has written several books on the theme, the most recent
of which is called Celebrities, culture and cyberspace. The light
on the hill in a postmodern world.
Despite all the cyberspace puff and rhetoric, his basic
political
message is much simpler and more pedestrian. His core argument is
reasonably explicit: the best we can hope for in a postmodern world is
Tony Blair's ultra-right-wing social democratic political project, or
the right-wing policies of the Hawke and Keating governments. He
positively celebrates the shift of the leadership of the labour
movement to the extreme right, surrounding this celebration of
conservative politics with his own special brand of cyberbabble.
He is openly contemptuous of such things as the increasing
popular
resistance to the GST and privatisation, because this resistance is an
obstacle to the desirable "modernisation" of society. Predictably, Wark
is a great fan of Mark Latham, the Blairite contender from the
far-right of the Labor Party, for the Labor Party leadership.
Mckenzie Wark's journalism is postmodernism harnessed to the
project of pushing the labour movement to the right. Happily, the
enormous popular resistance to privatisation and the GST indicate the
possibility that with organisation and agitation the social forces
still exist to thwart this development that Wark promotes.
Post modernists as snobs
Beneath the veneer of interest in popular culture that is
common to
many postmodernist cultural critics, there is a large and unpleasant
vein of the crudest snobbery. The most unpleasant example of this that
I have encountered recently is a book entitled Home/World. Space,
community and marginality in Sydney's West, by Helen Grace, Ghassan
Hage, Lesley Johnson, Julie Langsworth and Michael Symonds (Pluto
Press, 1997).
This book is an almost perfect representation of the
cultural theory
idiom applied to immediate social and political questions. It makes
like sociology, or even like social observation, directed at least at
the idea of some sort of progressive social or political practice. On
reading the book, however, this impression dissolves into the most
unpleasant and abstract "deconstruction" of ordinary working class and
middle class social practices that I have read anywhere in recent times.
It is also an attack on even the idea of social action to
cope with
such problems as urban sprawl. This book is a kind of classic of the
postmodern idiom. We are told at the start:
This book began as a project on the politics of defining
"western Sydney". Four of the authors were at that time employed at the
University of Western Sydney, Nepean. As the introduction to the book
explains, the project fairly quickly became much broader in its
concerns. While the region known as "western Sydney" continues to
provide the empirical grounding for the book, it focuses on questions
of home, belonging, marginality and space in the modern world. As the
various essays that shape this book make clear, the term 'western
Sydney' is a slippery and contested one. But we are not interested in
providing a clear definition of this region; on the contrary, central
to our concerns is the way in which various groups and agencies have
set out to represent this region as marginalised. This book is the
result of an Australian Research Council funded project awarded to
researchers at the University of Western Sydney.
The above paragraph, and the introductory section of this
book in
general, seem to me excellent examples of what Sokal and Bricmont above
call ambiguity of subterfuge. What seems to me to have clearly happened
is that the group of academics at Western Sydney got a grant under the
general rubric of, as they put it, the politics of defining western
Sydney. In normal, non-postmodernist, parlance, the notion of politics
might have incorporated the notion of some political practice or
activity to resolve such social and political problems as might emerge
in the investigation.
Unless the grant-awarding body is absurdly light minded, it
seems
quite likely it thought it was making a grant for a study of some of
the problems of western Sydney to aid in proposals for their solution.
But along the way this group of happy postmodern academics have
transformed it into something right up their alley: a series of
elegant, difficult discourses, showcasing their ability to
"deconstruct", and in fact ridicule, the social and cultural practices
of many of the inhabitants of western Sydney.
One of the essays is a very systematic attack on all the
previous
attempts at social planning, such as the Cumberland Planning Scheme,
which attempted to address some of the real problems of urban
development. This attack is, in fact, an attack on the very idea of
attempting to address real problems of urban planning.
The weaknesses of the Cumberland scheme are ruthlessly
ridiculed,
but no alternative model for urban development and planning is
advanced. The clear implication is that all efforts at serious social
planning are absurd, and by implication all that can happen is whatever
is dictated by the capitalist market. Nevertheless, these absurdist
Western Sydney academics implicitly present themselves as some kind of
radicals!
There are four major essays in the book. The frontal assault
on the
very notion of any concrete proposals for urban development and the
implicit argument that the attempt to resolve real problems of urban
development are quite hopeless, is the article called Feral
Suburbia? by Lesley Johnson. The article Outside the spaces of
modernity: western Sydney and the logic of the European city,
by Michael Symonds is less offensive, basically because it is so dense
that I, at least, found its argument almost unintelligible. It's very
erudite, but I doubt whether anyone will read it to the end.
The concluding paragraph gives something of the flavour of
the article:
This chapter, written from the University of Western Sydney,
Nepean, has been caught in this very dilemma. In other words, although
mythological, the "westie" depiction has such force that it did link up
to the critical, radical tradition and created the cultural space for a
sceptical gaze back to the origin of the mythmaking (as well as
promoting the desire simply to deny the charges as false). But the
overwhelming logics of the European-western tradition of space will
probably just sweep all this aside. The western Sydney of the future
will almost certainly fit into the Hegelian dialectical pattern of city
and home as surely as is now the case for the rest of Sydney.
I am still trying to work out what the above actually means,
and
what Mike Symonds' conclusions actually are. I used to know Mike
Symonds about 25 years ago. He had a pretty pronounced tendency to
abstract thought and expression even then, and he has not got any
easier to understand as he has risen in status in postmodern academic
circles.
The article At home in the entrails of the west:
multiculturalism, ethnic food and migrant home-building
by Ghassan Hage, is, in my opinion, so bizarre that I subject it to a
lengthy analysis in another essay on the whole corpus of Hage's work.
In essence, his argument boils down to the proposition that
ethnic
cafes are so dominated by the capitalist mode of production, catering
to the tourist market, that they are a bad thing and that the only
acceptable form of ethnic food is home cooking. Blimey!
The last article, Icon House: towards a suburban
topophilia
by Helen Grace, is the mother of them all. To my mind it embodies all
the most unpleasant and offensive aspects of postmodern cultural
criticism as a substitute for any concrete political or social practice
in relation to the things discussed. Ms Grace takes, as her point of
departure, Home World, and the phenomenon of exhibition homes and mass
housing development in western capitalist countries.
She starts with an erudite discussion of past-utopian
proposals or
attempts at solutions of the housing problem, but her real enjoyment
emerges in the middle and the end of the article, when she gets the
opportunity for a "deconstruction" of the social practices of the
unsophisticated working class and middle class people who flocked to
exhibition homes in the 1950s and 1960s, and she has great, malicious
fun with the aspirations and practices by which these implicitly
ridiculous ordinary people were taken in.
This is a very common type of postmodern cultural comment,
and it
must be said that Ms Grace is a very classy practitioner of this arcane
style and wields her pen with a very nasty panache. What I find
gratuitously offensive in this whole method is the extraordinary
assumption of intellectual superiority in much of this cultural
criticism.
Some of it is quite funny, in the same brutal way that Barry
Humphries is funny. But, nevertheless, it leaves very little space for
the ordinary preoccupations of the ordinary people who engage in such
"backward" cultural practices. Applied to the mass explosion of home
building and acquisition by ordinary working class and middle class
people, and the social contradictions and problems that were embodied
in or produced by housing development after World War II, this approach
of "cultural criticism" is quite useless for the development of any
kind of real political or social practice in relation to mass housing.
The fact that peoples' aspirations in relation to housing
were
dominated, in the 1950s and the 1960s by the existing bourgeois
cultural norms of the time, is hardly surprising. From any progressive
or socialist or even humane point of view, however, the desire of the
vast mass of people for their own home, expressed in these
developments, is entirely normal, human and to be celebrated.
Amusement at some of the odd cultural features of the
Australian
suburban house is really quite secondary to all the material problems
associated with the urban sprawl in Sydney and other Australian cities.
Such amusement and satire is hardly new anyway. Robin Boyd
did it much better in the early sixties in the The Great Australian
Ugliness.
The real problems are not the quite secondary cultural
practices of
ordinary people, but more mundane and brutal questions such as access
to transport, provision of services, reorganisation of urban
development to provide access to employment, and the question of all
questions in relation to housing: access for all to affordable housing.
What is indicated by any serious study of the problems of
western
Sydney is the need for concrete and effective policies and practices
for accessable mass housing, and for solutions to all the problems of
urban planning. The cultural criticism in this book has absolutely
nothing to say on these concrete questions, and provides no useful
solutions at all, but it is an object lesson in the uselessness of
postmodernism and cultural theory to any project of overcoming any of
the problems of urban Sydney.
In defence of the Enlightenment
In the face of the havoc wrought by postmodernism and
cultural
theory in intellectual life in Australia and, in particular, the
destructive effect it has had on mobilising academics and students for
meaningful political activity, I often feel like starting a society for
the defence of the Enlightnement, or some such body modelled on the
Evatt Foundation or the Sydney Institute.
I am particularly angered by the way the cultural theory
has, for
the moment, pretty well killed off Marxism as an intellectual stream in
educational institutions. I don't believe this will be permanent but
right now the territory is pretty bleak. I am also angered at the rapid
devaluation of serious political and philosophical argument, conflict
and discourse.
The intellectual effect of reducing all questions to matters
of
language or representation is devastating. For the moment we have a
generation of students in the humanities, the majority of whom have
been persuaded to believe that all differences of opinion in the past
over the big questions facing the human race have been total
misunderstandings, and just a matter of different "narratives".
The cumulative effect of this reduction of all philosophical
and
historical questions to "representation", "narrative" and language, has
combined with the impact of a rather degraded curriculum in history in
high schools, to reverse for the moment the steady rise in the cultural
level of students studying the humanities that has taken place for most
of this century up until the last 10 years or so.
This intellectual decline won't be permanent either. Such
declines
rarely are, but we have to start a war for the revival of serious
argument and debate in the social sciences, history and philosophy if
we are to reverse this trend.
When I was a young bloke in the 1950s, I went to Sydney
University
as an undergraduate briefly, and I got involved in politics and
intellectual activity. I made the personal transition from a sort of
adolescent Thomism acquired from my Catholic secondary education, to a
rather autodidactic kind of practical Marxism. I made this transition
by way of argument and conflict between different schools of thought
and practice.
I was dominated, in the healthy way that the young often
are, by a
crude adolescent desire and attempt to understand all things. I didn't
do it particularly well, but it was certainly possible to get caught up
in this wonderful world of conflict over beliefs, practices and ideas,
in the 1950s and even more so in the 1960s and 1970s. Big questions
were treated as such, and the great philosophical and political
conflicts of the 20th century raged in my mind and day-to-day political
and social life, as they did in the minds and lives of many thousands
of others who were lucky enough to be young in this period.
I remember being greatly taken by a little Collier McMillan
paperback that contained arguments for or against the existence of god,
from such people as Jacques Maritain and Fr Martindale S.J., on the
side of the existence of god, and A.J. Ayer and Bertrand Russell on the
other side. I was ultimately persuaded by Ayer and Russell and I
subsequently fell in love with Marxism as an intellectual system that
worked well for me as a part of what seemed to me the basic human
project of achieving equality and fairness in the world.
I got involved in political and social and cultural battles
on all
these matters. While my own political life and practice developed in a
Marxist framework, nevertheless, I continued to investigate the history
of the ideas and traditions and philosophies and political practices of
civilisation up to that time, in a rather eclectic way. I remained
conscious of, and still interested in, the enormous contribution of
thinkers and belief systems that I considered had been transcended by
my new outlook, but that had contributed to the development of humanity.
When I was an adolescent, in my last years at St Patricks,
Strathfield, I became aware of the idea of different "narratives" in
relation to modern history. We were thoroughly and effectively
programmed by the Christian Brothers to regurgitate the Protestant
liberal ascendancy historical view of Roberts' "History" for the
external exams, and as a result of this thorough preparation, we did
pretty well in those external exams, one of the factors that gave rise
to the great resentment among the establishment about the considerable
success of kids from Catholic schools in the Leaving Certificate.
We were also taught, however, equally systematically in
religion
lessons, that the alternative Catholic Medievalist anti-capitalist kind
of history of people like Christopher Hollis, Chesterton and Belloc,
was the true version and we should not be beguiled at all by the
version we had learned for the external examiners.
We were thus made aware of different "narratives" but we
were also
thoroughly imbued by the Brothers with the idea of pursuing knowledge
of a true history, which was, for them, the Catholic version. My idea
of what is the true history of modern civilisation changed rather
dramatically, in a Marxist direction, after I left St Patricks, but I
am still grateful to the Brothers both for the seriousness about
history that they encouraged in us and for the very sensible idea that
they held that, while there were different stories it was pretty
important to strive after the true story.
In retrospect, some aspects of the Catholic Medievalist
critique of
the development of modern capitalism seems to me of greater intrinsic
value than it did when I was going through the necessary personal
trauma of transcending Catholic religious belief.
The history of the 20th century, with all its pain and
torment,
triumph and tragedy, has included gigantic struggles over big and
important questions of religion, politics, national self-determination,
capitalism versus socialism, colonialism, poverty and wealth and
enormous scientific and material and social changes.
It has been shot through with battles that have involved
different
philosophical and ethical conceptions. All these conflicts have
involved enormously broader issues and realities than mere "narrative"
and "representation". The temporarily triumphant, banal globalisation
and capitalist neoliberalism much prefers to reduce all intellectual
life to these pedestrian questions of "narrative" and "representation".
Nevertheless, the big social, political and philosophical
questions
will erupt again, inevitably, and this generation will have to work out
for itself which synthesis of ideas and practices is true, good and
useful. To do this, they will have to work on and take into account the
whole body of knowledge, struggle and development of civilisation up to
this point.
In this necessary intellectual and educational project, they
will
find useful many thinkers, such as Plato and Aristotle, Heraclitus,
Herodotus and Pliny, Plotinus, Jesus Christ and Spartacus, St Augustine
and Julian the Apostate, Gautama Buddha, Mohammed, St Thomas Acquinas,
Chuang Tzu, Wycliffe, Gerard Winstanley, Thomas Munzer, Jan Hus,
Gutenberg, Erasmus, Thomas More, Martin Luther, Zwingli, William
Tyndale, John Calvin, Bartolomeo De La Casas, Spinoza, Blaise Pascal,
Machiavelli, Voltaire, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Paine, Grachus
Babeuf, Immanuel Kant, Wolfe Tone, Mary Wolstencraft, Thomas Jefferson
and Toussaint L'Ouverture, William Thompson, Hegel, Marx, Engels,
William Morris, James Connolly, Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman, Lenin,
Trotsky, Che Guevara, J.M. Keynes, Jacques Maritain, Bertrand Russell,
John Anderson, Manning Clark, Edmund Wilson, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean
Paul Sartre, George Orwell, Simone Weil, E.P. Thompson, Noam Chomsky,
Roy Medvedev, Robert Conquest, Isaac Deutcher, Stephen J. Gould,
Barbara Thiering, Ernest Mandel, Mary McCarthy, Paolo Freire, Wilhelm
Reich, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, as just a representative
sample of the many giants who fought, inquired and struggled about big
ideas and over the enormous questions of philosophy and life.
They will have to find a useful synthesis of all this world
culture
that has gone before and build on it. In the course of finding this
necessary synthesis, they will discover that all these important
battles, on the back of which our civilisation is built, have been
battles about real questions, involving a very considerable interaction
between theory and practice.
They have been battles between holders of many different
views and
people who have engaged in different practices, who have passionately
striven to achieve that which they believed to be true, accurate,
useful and morally right.
To reduce these past struggles to banal, pedestrian, petty
bourgeois
mindgames about "narrative" and "representation" is to totally devalue
the development of civilisation up to now. This curious interlude of
postmodernism must speedily be pushed aside for any further useful
development of human civilisation.
May 4, 1999
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